Of Beetles and Angels Read Online Free PDF

God, just don’t let them use their knives.
    I guess God must have heard my brother, because He sent some friends down to help him. A van pulled up, carrying four tall black guys. They looked like high-school students, maybe older. They strutted toward Jake with dangerous confidence.
    “What’s going on here? Does someone have a problem with our brother?”
    No answer. Confronted with someone larger than himself, the school bully became the school coward.
    “Why are you so quiet now, you little punk? Yeah, you. Don’t look around like I’m talking to somebody else. I’m talking to you. If you touch this kid today or any other day, you’re dead meat. You got that? Good. Now get the heck outta here.”
    Jake and his friends slunk away, never to be heard from again. They understood violence and they understood threats.
    Those four rescuers? They were the older brothers of Tewolde’s friend Kawaun. Kawaun had told his brothers that all the white burnouts were getting together to gang up on his black friend, and his brothers had come down to help the black kid out.
    When we were still in elementary school, my brother told me the most hilarious stories at night. They usually starred these five Chinese brothers who had moved to the United States. Each brother had his head shaved in the front and long hair in the back, sometimes braided. All five brothers lived together.
    Tewolde spun his stories from the top bunk and I heard them in the bottom. They always featured the same plot: The five Chinese brothers craved peace and usually tried to mind their own business. But some ill-willed Americans would always mistreat them.
    Like all Chinese people, the Chinese brothers had mastered kung fu, karate, and every other martial art. My brother and I believed this about Chinese people because of a TV show called
Samurai Sunday
that came on right after church. All the Chinese people in that show could really fight.
    Tewolde’s Chinese brothers would be doing something innocent, such as watering their garden, and then, out of nowhere, their neighbors would insult them or hurl a rock through their window. Having no choice, the Chinese brothers would use their kung fu to beat up the Americans.
    Eventually, it got so bad that the brothers had to whoop the whole town; every last citizen, five citizens at a time. It was a lot of work, but the brothers had no choice.
    Sometimes I wonder why my brother and I loved the Chinese brother stories. I used to think it was because they were funny. Lately, though, I have come to believe that the brothers were more than stories. They were our kid way of dealing with our unfriendly world.
    Even if we couldn’t beat up all of the cruel kids at school, the five Chinese brothers could. They could whip the kids, they could whip their parents, they could whip the entire town.

Celebrating Hntsa’s birthday the American Way. From left to right: A family friend, Tsege, Hntsa, Mehret, Tewolde, and Haileab.

D AYS OF M ISCHIEF
    B ack in Sudan, on a day each year that every kid looked forward to, our little village erupted into a sea of flames.
    We built a huge bonfire in the middle of the village. We gathered thick sticks and dipped them into the fire, pulling them out only after they had blazed into torches. Then we raced together from adobe to adobe.
    Muslims and Christians, Eritreans and Ethiopians, bullies and prey — on this night, all of us forgot our differences and united. We ran from adobe to adobe, waving our torches fearlessly, chanting out our ancestors’ cry:
    Hoyo Hoyo, Hoyo
    Hoyo Hoyo, Hoyo
    Akho akhokay, Berhan geday
    Berhan neibel, Hoyo,
    Himaq wisa, Hoyo,
    Quincha wisa, Hoyo,
    Tekwon ito, Hoyo.
    Oh, new year, let it be a good one, all the evil leave us, let peace join us, let harvest come.
    Our parents waited for us at their adobes and chimed in enthusiastically when we approached,
“Hoyo Hoyo, Hoyo! Hoyo Hoyo, Hoyo!
”
    They told us that in the old days, in the old country, before the