Issue 113, Fall 2018
Putty
And when the detainees penciled their calligraphy of sorrow
upon the barrack walls, brushed in with
hair of the meek rabbit,
the powers-that-be painted the scribblings over,
redacted, boards erased to the plain
cream of nothingness.
And when again they charted in imitation
of Wang Wei’s outrage against T’ang betrayal,
an emperor’s unjust, covered again
by building maintenance.
So with kitchen table knives they cut,
traced an outline of strokes, deeper
slit into tiny valleys, ridges,
culverts of meaning for verse coursing
protest until the partitions became a relief of
nights bled away from loved ones in San Francisco
Chinatown or the ancestral village.
The officials’ response: putty the words,
each wound thickened flat, pack clay like a poultice,
a mudcake seal above the scar.
But ninety years later, when that plaster compact
crumbles to dust, as eventually it must,
a truth so long concealed,
revealed,
even sharper than before.
Diaspora
(dī-ăs’pər-ə) n.
1. a dispersion of a people from their homeland.
2. the community formed by such a people.
— American Heritage Dictionary
At the Marin Lunar New Year’s celebration, my daughter sticks
a pastel plastic pin into a wall map of China,
like the other girl adoptees marking origin
in clustered points.
Her press solo, Taizhou, Jiangsu,
inches from any other,
though I’m surprised by proximity, just north of
Shanghai and East China Sea, to a draw of dots emptying into shape.
And too, the tiny nubs across the vast rub that’s Inner Mongolia,
spaced so perfect, evenly,
as if nomadic trails were
gaps between settle and settle.
All of this press in and pull out for placement,
my desire to discern pattern
in diaspora,
the word for being spread wide and thin, a living skin,
so that when layered thicker still,
its shadow might become
evidence of
her body.
Eight-Course Chinese Banquet
So easily they are swallowed like shark’s fin soup.
One year chatting across a round table like
clods of rehydrated scallops,
then next, an empty porcelain spoon.
Where’s Tyler, my gay Chinese cousin,
devoured by disease, his name never wetting
his parents lips even after three years?
They slip chopsticks into the next dish,
rich mayonnaise curled prawns,
or meaty sweet-sour pork chops with pineapple chunks.
And too, Aunt Alice squared away at home,
her Chinese year of wifely grief begun last January,
and though unmarried, her attorney youngest beside me,
chit-chats, eyes fixed on a hefty chunk of
Chilean sea bass, pungent,
its oily flesh masked only by black bean.
Every relative set at table for this eight-course Chinese
banquet, even the missing flavors,
my father gone 7 years, mother even more,
and my wife’s grandmother too.
Some fortunes already played,
before we split to see
the lucky lotto numbers on reverse.
In this ritual sumptuousness,
eldest cousin serves red egg and ginger for another birth,
her first grandson, also named Tyler,
as memory begins anew.
It’s what I must eat, and more of,
not a first name redux, restaurant label, nor even the lost space
where I parked, but that taste of roast squab,
its slightly bitter salt,
served at meal’s end like a flayed-open earth.
Issue 110, Spring 2017
“No Dogs or Chinese Allowed”
Mythic sign in the Public Garden, Foreign Concessions, 1920s Shanghai,
famously smashed by Bruce Lee in Fist of Fury (1972).
Capturing that mongrel pup
who laid tail about all the village routes, alleys, main streets,
to lick the boots, limped across a porch begging,
a pooch, to eat one day more.
In 1928, the Angel Island official interrogator repeats,
“Did you have one? A dog?”
Not the family pet but a mutt, secured on rice leavenings,
fahn jiu, scorched pot bottom and salt fish scraps,
a kind of canine garbage disposal.
Not man’s bestie on its leash, a nightly stroll,
eater of nuggets in a bowl,
of oat gruel pressed into little wholes,
not that kind at all.
“Did you have a dog?” he insists,
as if an animal control officer, warden of the want,
decider of caged or uncaged,
who, or which, will meet their fate in the asking oven’s perfect heat.
“Your alleged brother said Yes, but you said No. Then which is it?”
His pursuit designed to trip, exclude and restrict,
to push your lies to absurdity,
then out the Golden Gate, past Honolulu,
back into the old village.
Though now, you think, this is the one true
four-legged fact, though long in tooth
yet close to path
that you can relate honestly, kennel-free and without mewling.
Say, “Yes, now I remember…
when I left Siu Yuan village, we feasted
with my bound-feet grandmother who prepared a special treat
of snout and jaw, toes and paws, its last trot and waggle.
We leapt not wept, when she stir-fried then steamed…
of that house cur, no more.
We ate it.”
Issue 106, Spring 2015
Sale
I was sold in the seven shadows.
China 1916, poor, without hope,
the sky turned brown.
My birth father made do with metal tins which held preserved black bean,
cut into toy birds that flew but ten feet.
I was the middle son of five.
Not a landed number one, or number two,
fiefdom of the field,
but the scraggly weed, flat prickly leaf,
expendable.
There, in a near village, hushed voices,
red paper with sage couplets hung juxtaposed at the sides of a door.
Any child could count the coins exchanged.
Simple circles with holes to hold,
a rectangular within that circle.
When I knew what I came to know,
I cried, some say they should drown kittens
unneeded or unwanted,
but better alive.
You could eat them.
I wept and wept until I didn’t know
what the crying was for.
Until it was done.
And I would sit still until they combed my hair,
until I put on new trousers.
I should wear the fineries of the ones who bought me.
An identity: Our jewel! Our precious son!
That day, they served juicy chunks of roast pig,
the emptied sack of dowry feeding
the newly filled.
At seventeen, I grew normal, my adoptive father sailed with me
from Guangzhou to San Francisco.
At Angel Island but a few bad ones.
The city’s sewer dank swept over me,
scared me, but I kept sniffing its scent,
loving it, sensing the regenerate life.
Then, in my 80’s, every happy memory stripped away,
dementia-wrapped,
of what returned: packing the one mistake toy
my birth father threw at me, a useless commodity.
Now I see, I am hugging the chickens, saying good-bye to the cat
that walks away petulantly.
I am so exhausted,
voices admonishing “Hurry, hurry.”
She peers from the doorway, my sad mother.
And so the welcoming four, enveloping like a baby’s fist.
Every night, that raw recalled
returns for me,
as if I were yet a three-year old,
waiting to be received.
Issue 100, Spring 2012
Five Star Baby Palace
for the Nanjing Grand Hotel
Not her regular duty as deluxe headquarters for the Party elite
nor even as five star spa for China’s new entrepreneurs,
bringing Wal-Mart to city center.
But on a mid-winter Monday, hostel for the China Adoption Bureau,
whisked up twin round towers to the 10th floor,
we pop into a sleek rosewood nurture.
In a parallel near, down a tube of new Taizhou-Nanjing highway
an egg of a daughter, burst from the ovary of orphanage.
Pulsed through traffic tie-ups, cuddled by Auntie nannies,
who speed press xiao xin, “little new,”
directly to our attach.
A call down to “Conf. Roam 703,” and we first see
writ upon whiteboard, her temporary given: Maile.
In a womb lit fluorescent, to our shock, a Her!
bundled under red sweater, turtleneck lime green,
and blue puppy booties, dazed as any cellular
drifting dangled before amniotic rest.
Flash! a snapshot, the blind of instant union,
Congrats! and back to our womb-like private nursery,
where, when stripped of wrap, she revels,
joking, kicking.
Then a gestation, for next five days,
of something altogether new. Parents learn to baby care,
intuition splitting and replicating, acquire how-to’s with speed:
each gesture, shitting or not shitting,
the constituencies of it,
to initiate a bottle, chopstick-stir local formula.
her tepid bath’s first swirl.
In jook and hash browns Western-style,
we clique hungrily for clues,
comforted in familiar cues of Kenny G’s sonorous White Christmas.
When, at week’s full term, something emerges,
sleepy-eyed, like the slime-impaired sight of primeval sludgers,
coming into light, a new to be spanked south
to the U.S. Consulate Guangzhou, then further across borders.
Tzai jian! plush, superior stork hotel, a new family wails,
breached from its harried rooms,
and, as usual, handed off
to dwell in a house more foreign.
Issue 94, Fall 2009
House of Jai
In the yellowed kitchen with pristine white trim,
my mother says, “Now, watch. This is how you do it!”
pulls a fistful of black from cellophane,
presses fat choy’s propitious wad into lukewarm
of porcelain, one day before the Wood Rat Year opens.
This is how her New Year’s house is kept,
her hearth swept, lucked upon
dimmed arcs of fish-drawn plates:
foo jook, cut stalks of curdled continuity,
a soak of hoong jow into red replumped fortune,
and in stretchy drench, fun see noodle’s long-life translucence.
An uncle said: A recipe cannot support a roof,
a boy cannot be a girl. But in this version of Chinese
American-born, masculine able as a feminine
to spill restorative herbal soups or offer food.
She instructs: “Here, the angle to slice,” pushing her flat steel,
precise, 45 degrees through the ginger’s knob,
releasing a pungent chi.
“But doong goo, don’t cut!” she declares,
a woman to maintain whole shiitake’s fleshy round,
even in sacrificing her parts.
In this dish, a family can recycle without dying
and vegetarian …
No meat at the launch of things, no ends for the begin,
just grasses, our roots in animal nature.
And like my chef Uncle Harry, or roommate Creighton,
men learning from women, each perfection necessary,
as if shaving chance into the wok’s dark bowl,
a measure of redemption:
clusters of hou see dried oysters, like sea-bound testicles,
homonyms for happenstance, bow-tied lily blossoms
to unbind a given gold.
Soon I’ll graduate, receive the gleaming brass and bamboo strainer,
stir-fry my own shrimp grains into hazy sizzle.
“Popo likes it that way,” she secrets, and I’m plunged
as acolyte, into a ten thousand year stream
of earthly renewal, where winter’s yin
curries budded spring,
each blossom’s fate nudged from an ancestor teacher’s.
“Practice!” she nods, “you’ll get it. The light see yau,
not too much. Or too salty!”
That thin savory, her final bless
against a forgetfulness of male history,
completes her kiss,
eases a boy into the house of jai.