We eat the tongue before we know it is a tongue, because we are still young enough to have courage, identifying every wad of unknown by sticking it into our mouths. The tongue wriggles like a fish, slick with our spit, until we crush it between blunted teeth, chewing it dead. We debate whether it tastes more like chicken or pig or cow. When Popo tells us it is beef tongue plucked from a slaughtered bull, we shriek with joy, proud that we can recognize a creature by shape and flavor alone, all of us celebrating—all except for Pak Chi-ming, the neighbor boy, who we call Melon Pak, because his head is big and swollen and orange like a cantaloupe. Melon Pak says we shouldn't eat tongues, because everyone deserves to speak, even dead cows, and how will this one speak when his tongue is withering in our bellies. We laugh at this, at this boy whose heart is soft as melon too, and turn back to Popo, begging her to fry up another tongue. But when she peels back the plastic film, Melon Pak lunges at her, steals the whole packet and takes off running. We don't follow. We're busy steadying our grandmother, who sways like a tree, and we have more parts to eat—kidneys and gizzards and livers, and all the other things that won't upset the melon boy. The next day, after school, we find Melon Pak sitting on our stoop. Come to my house, he says, because he is sorry for stealing our tongues, and we go, because we have already forgiven him. Melon Pak's house is like an indoor forest, with bamboo stalks of old cans and scraps of wind whistling through the torn walls. He climbs on a stool and slicks a pan with oil and says he'll cook us pig ears as an apology, because he knows the shortest route to our hearts cuts through the stomach. Stay in the living room, Melon Pak says, but we don't listen, because we never listen, and we wander the length of his home, stomping up and down and up the stairs again, until we open a door and find another boy looking back at us. His head is small and thin and fragile, nothing like a melon, and he doesn't say a word to us, just stares through marbled eyes. He doesn't talk anymore, Melon Pak says, after we ask about the boy who doesn't resemble a melon. Melon Pak tells us his brother hasn't said a word since he got home from the front, that no one knows whether he hears a single word either, that they all thought he went deaf from the gunfire until the doctors said his ears weren't the problem. We forget about lunch, because none of us are hungry, because how can we eat pig ears now. What did you do with our tongues, we ask Melon Pak, who takes us to the yard, where he parts a mound of soil like a mouth, revealing a shriveled pink tongue. I'm growing a tree, he says, and then he starts to cry, and we pinch our arms until we cry too, adding our own tears to the soil, watering the buried tongues, like they aren't tongues at all, like they're cantaloupes and honeydews and even bitter melons—anything at all, so long as it will grow.
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