Can bridge of magpies span divisions in U.S.?

Years ago, when my friends were planning their summer wedding, they discovered that the Qixi Festival fell upon one of the dates they’d been considering. They didn’t know much about it, other than it was nicknamed the “Chinese Valentine’s Day.” “That sounds romantic!” they said. Their parents weren’t pleased. As it turns out, the legend behind the festival is bleaker than the American conceptions of Valentine’s Day that many of us grew up with, with its chubby Cupid, bouquets of roses and boxes of chocolates.

In the Chinese tale, two lovers — a humble cow herder and a weaver girl, a fairy in disguise — were torn apart when the Goddess of Heaven, the fairy’s mother, scratched her hairpin into the night sky, welling up a river of stars to separate them.

On the seventh night of the seventh month of the lunar calendar, magpies soar to the heavens, hovering wing to wing. The lovers cross the Milky Way on this quivering bridge of feathers and reunite for a kiss. The mythology may have arisen to explain why the star Deneb forms a bridge of sorts between the Vega and Altair.

This year, the festival was celebrated on Wednesday, Aug. 7.

My friends, who kept the date, remain happily married. The legend — romantic as it is tragic — lingered in my imagination and became the central metaphor of my debut novel, “A River of Stars” (out in paperback this week). In my telling, the river of stars stands in for the vast distances for immigrants between their adopted and ancestral homelands, and the divide that can widen between lovers, and between mothers and daughters.

It also represents the threat of children getting separated from their parents, a threat made real under the “zerotolerance policy” across the U.S.Mexico border. Though it has officially ended, in some cases, immigration authorities have continued to separate children from their families. Scores of them, some so young that they may not know their address or their phone number, and forced to stay for a time in migrant detention centers under unsanitary, inhumane conditions, suffering a trauma so deep it may last a lifetime.

Now the president’s antiimmigrant policies and rhetoric has incited even greater violence. Last weekend in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart, a white supremacist gunman killed 22, after he railed against what he called the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

Andre Anchondo and his wife, Jordan, were among the victims, and their 2monthold boy, Paul, was found under his mother’s body, covered in her blood. A baby. All summer, I’ve dreaded the possibility of deadly wildfires in California, the choking clouds of smoke and ash raining down on a wide radius. That danger remains ever present. For now, though, summer 2019 has been marked by mass shootings from El Paso to Dayton, Ohio, to Gilroy’s Garlic Festival, whose teenage shooter is now the focus of a domestic terrorism investigation.

Even as I write this column, I know there may soon be another gun massacre, and the cycle of despair, anger, and pledges of “thoughts and prayers” will begin again — as long as Congress and the president fail to take action on gun violence, ban assault weapons and institute universal background checks, and stop fomenting hate.

Didi and Gege are about to turn 8, and it’s difficult but necessary to explain in more complex ways about what’s happening: how immigrants and the children of immigrants are under attack, and the dangers of gun violence, wheth

er at school or out in public.

After waking up to last weekend’s tragic news, I was preoccupied and heavyhearted. My family headed to Lake Merritt, where my sons rode their scooters, my husband got onto his skateboard, and I strapped on my skates. We cruised down the paths busy with a diverse crowd of joggers, strollers, and families pushing baby carriages.

Popup tents proliferated over picnics and the air grew heavy with the savory scent of cookout after cookout. Most of us were probably on alert for the poppop of gunfire from a mass shooter that would send us fleeing.

It was a routine Sunday that never felt more precious, that made me want to call out to each person to wish them well and strengthened my determination to protect my family and my neighbors.

In the Qixi legend, the lovers make their way back to each other. As impossibly deep and wide as our country’s problems now seem — deep and wide as the Milky Way — we must fight for a bridge that endures long past one night a year.

Magpies soar to the heavens, hovering wing to wing. The lovers cross the Milky Way on this quivering bridge of feathers and reunite for a kiss.