BROWSING THE WALLS AT THE ANGEL ISLAND IMMIGRATION STATION, I SEEK THE LOST TONES OF THE HEUNGSHAN DIALECT
And search for Hoishan hippy wah, the bumpkin knobs
of Namhoi village,
or hoity toity timbres of Shekki City.
But on the Google Translate program, unwaveringly
read in “Mandarin” tenor,
set in romanized Hanyu Pinyin text,
its standard computerese, a pulverizing digital.
I know it’s there, what carved characters
cannot say in peruse of
that silent, bitten score of wood,
though plainly held, hurt inflection, a young men’s anger
and sorrowful tune, dripping sarcasm, or
a kind of wisdom set into grain.
Yet more what I want, to hear my father,
a would-be ah baahk, elder village uncle,
again demonstrate how he could take on nuance,
his mockingbird rend of where another’s lived
or gone, from the slur and aspirant
held inside a tongue.
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PUTTY
And when detainees penciled their calligraphy of sorrow
upon barrack walls, brushed in with
the hair of the meek rabbit,
the powers-that-be covered these scribblings over,
redacted, boards erased to an off-white
nothingness.
And when again they scripted in unison
Wang Wei’s outrage against Tang betrayal,
the emperor’s unjust,
overlaid by building maintenance.
So with kitchen table knives they cut,
traced an outline of strokes, slit
deeper into micro-valleys, ridges,
culverts of meaning for verse coursing
protest until partitions became a relief of
nights bled away from dear ones in San Francisco
Chinatown or an ancestral village.
The official response: putty the words,
each wound thickened flat, clay packed like a poultice,
a mudcake seal for the scar.
But ninety years later, when that plaster compact
crumbles to dust, as all things must,
its truth so long concealed,
revealed, even sharper than before.
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LA BELLE DAME AVEC MERCI: A BALLAD
for Soto Shee
What worries a Chinese wife, all alone,
before the pale California dawn?
Husband Lee, as American citizen,
landed straight to Chinatown,
while she detained months at Angel Island,
pregnant, a girl kicking within,
having nursed the ailing seven-month old
until the gastrointestinal succumb.
See her pain of nausea and creased brow
wiping loose stools to no avail,
Western medicine could not stay
her frail boy’s fast fail.
In moonless midnight, no bright fell upon
a mother’s milky skin,
yet through the barrack’s mullioned panes
Tong Yahn Foh, can’t be seen.
Captive, quarantined with every
dream stuck, she petitioned habeas corpus,
but yesterday, her writ turned down,
in 1924, Chinese wives untrusted.
So wherever she turned, a water surround,
(no safe swim across Raccoon Straits)
tide and quarter, quick current set against
chance, luck can’t find its way.
Her Shinyo Maru, crowded in steerage
forgot, and to forget further became her,
as strips of bedsheet pulled then rolled,
knotted like a noose, looser at first
but designed to tighten, every breath
to be taken, her toes poised on edge
of toilet seat, one foot lifting as if to step
purposeful towards an infant
still suckling, and then back to a village
over trough and wave.
With sad swells chopping through,
white Matron McKeener finds her,
cuts her down before the cold begins,
with blade unties and lets in
that rush of breath so necessary
for the heirs to give thanks and praise.
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