I read G questions from a how-to handout on oral history, relishing the excuse to pry. The assignment was to interview relatives and retell a “family legend.” G’s tale, which she repeated often, hinted at a strange, wondrous chapter of our past, before our parents immigrated to the United States and had me. I wrote my own essay about the chick many years later, for a high-school English class. In a school essay, my sister described this experience as her “first confrontation with death.” But he soon grew into a rooster, shedding feathers and shitting on the furniture, so our grandfather had a housekeeper take him home to kill for dinner. G would place him on her shoulder and listen to him cheep into her ear. The bird had a pale-yellow coat and tiny, vigilant eyes.
When my older sister, G, was a child, she bought a pet chick from a street vender near our family’s home in Ankara, Turkey.
