Versione Italiana | Nota biografica | Versione lettura |
EXILE’S LETTER (Or: An Essay on Assimilation)
from a distant cousin, circa 1964
We are in Louisiana now
planting soy for an aristocrat
with a French surname,
I think Prevert; and no,
he’s not what his name suggests,
but rather, a stoic, truthful man,
a professed de Gaulian
devoted to Mother France
and understands, so he says,
the plight of the races.
Too bad that his wife, mad
and dying of cancer,
has offered him no children,
an unjust retribution
for a man so sure of his creed.
One cool summer evening,
and the field alight with flies,
she came to us, whispering
“There were dogs here
who vanished in the deep of night,
prized setters and pointers,
well-groomed and with papers.
I don’t believe you have erred
and have eaten ours as your own.”
Grandmother touched her arm.
“Let us speak the truth, Madame,
It was your dogs, remember,
who crossed the fence,
who delighted in our cabbage.”
The woman nodded and cried,
“Oh my little children,”
then, drove off into the sunset
in her station wagon filled
with sees for fodder.
“The dying are not unwise,
even the most dessicated cactus
issues a flower before death.”
Grandmother said this, gazing
at the vast, cultivated wasteland.
Life goes on, Mei Ling,
Even I’ve bloomed lovelier, I think,
resembling you a little,
but rounder where profitable.
And behind that briared fence
the boys are watching, even now,
the white boys
Identity Poem (#99)
Are you the sky – or the allegory for loneliness?
Are you the only Chinese restaurant in Roseburg, Oregon?
A half-breed war orphan – adopted by proper Christians?
A heathen poidog, a creamy half-and-half?
Are you a dingy vinyl address book? A wrist
Without a corsage? Are you baby’s breath
Faced down on a teenage road in America?
Are you earphones – detached
Left dangling on an airplane jack to diaspora?
Are you doomed to a childhood without music?
Weary of your granny’s one string, woe-be-gone erhu
Mewling about the past
Are you hate speech or are you a lullaby?
Anecdotes requiring footnotes
An ethnic joke rehashed
How many Chinamen does it take – to screw
How many Chinamen does it take – to screw
A lightbulb?
Are you so poor that you cannot call your mother?
You have less than two dollars on your phonecard
And it’s a long cable to Nirvana
Are you a skylight through which the busgirl sees heaven?
A chopping block stained by the blood of ten thousand innocents
Which daily, the same busgirl must wipe off
Does existence preempt essence?
I “being” what my ancestors were not
Suddenly, you’re a vegan vegetarian!
Restaurant is a facticity and
Getting the hell out – is transcendence
Was the punch line “incandescent”?
Was a nosebleed your last tender memory of her?
Did he say no dog and Chinawomen?
Are you a rose – or a tattoo of fire?
That Half is Almost Gone That half is almost gone, the Chinese half, the fair side of a peach, darkened by the knife of time, fades like a cruel sun. In my thirtieth year I wrote a letter to my mother. I had forgotten the character for “love.” I remember vaguely the radical “heart.” The ancestors won’t fail to remind you the vital and vestigial organs where the emotions come from. But the rest is fading. A slash dissects in midair, ai, ai, ai, more of a cry than a sigh (and no help from the phoneticist). You are a Chinese! My mother was adamant. You are a Chinese? My mother less convinced. Are you not Chinese? My mother now accepting. As a cataract clouds her vision, and her third daughter marries a Protestant West Virginian who is “very handsome and very kind.” The mystery is still unsolved – the landscape looms over man. And the gaffer-hatted fishmonger – sings to his cormorant. And the maiden behind the curtain is somebody’s courtesan. Or, merely Rose Wong’s aging daughter Pondering the blue void. You are a Chinese – said my mother who once walked the fields of her dead – Today, on the 36th anniversary of my birth, I have problems now even with the salutation.