Vol. 19, No. 2 (Summer/Fall 2014)
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.
At the Makai Market Food Court
I choose the laulau plate, lomi lomi and haupia,
each dish set in its separate well
of styrofoam, paid the Mandarin-speaking lady,
new owners of the old Poi Bowl
where 40 years ago I first ate the deep
green of taro leaf wrapped around a heart, salt fish or fatty pork.
Back then, Ala Moana’s food court, smaller, more intimate,
like that twenty-year-old on break from
begging the stubborn look that’s first love
to be true to some pure rule.
Today, all upscale, huge, but for my 8-year-old
and wife of 10 years sitting across.
There are things I’ve wanted again my whole life:
a first steamed laulau, or an ice-cold guava nectar gulped
at the pineapple cannery cafeteria, on break
from tin cans screaming overhead,
acidy slop souring leather
boots for good.
I saw it simple then, faithfulness or want of skin,
an inflection of nasal Chinese in a
girl’s Nu’uana Valley.
Absence glimmered, scattered these many years.
Yet, here I am in it another,
though that long again will never be here, I am.
A new mat of luau leaf, sea salt’s wealth,
sweet coconut yet slithers down the throat at end of meal,
truths I feared never once more
to swallow,
back in a form both square and jiggly,
and still, it tastes good.
Vol. 14, No. 2 (Summer/Fall 2009)
The Pure Products of Parenting
At Safeway, that little old lady inquires
of her provenance, this infant you’ve adopted from Taizhou,
who so resembles you, the father,
sprouted roots of sleek black, thickening,
nut brown skin, (though you felt, grayed and rougher).
“Who is her mother?” she poses. Your wife
standing by, olive-tones, sharp-ridged nose,
ash blond betray her.
Her mother? What other? you consider,
embarrassed for your spouse, watch her shrink
into an awful elf, felt alien,
a ‘foreign ghost,’ and not belonging.
You’ve readied for this query, braced for it,
in the twenty-five lines, the I-600A of claim and proof,
a myriad of insinuations, boxes a social worker
ticks for Abandonment, Abuse, or Cruelty.
All those checks for children who refuse
a ripeness unto rot, a loss you want unmarked
from a girl’s past. What child, still raw,
could have originally sinned (no lustful reach,
windfallen)? You two didn’t exactly steal her away,
but in fact you did, plucked from vacant air.
Both of you, now, charged with fraud,
pressed for authenticity, brands like Chiquita bananas
and genuine Best Food’s mayo. What agency endorses
this? A babe laid down by a village gate,
her birth date unknown, or the bureaucrat who lists
her to the international scrum of parents?
What’s most pure in the DNA of giving and getting?
You two, twice divorced. No, not a 2 x 2,
but distinctly, then married Mendelian into a reverse
split, coiled into admirable bliss, with an
unexpected bless to add a third, a kind of mitosis,
a parsing which multiplies in layers: two, four,
then eight, to replicate a whole in
the form of a babe.
This braided ancestry, though unbiologic, produces
a new old form: family, familiar and famished.
Hunger steels in this gird of grocery cart,
must now speak: There is no other mother.
Vol. 11, No. 2 (Summer/Fall 2006)
Approaching Hong Wan Village Gate, Taizhou
What I most need to know about those last moments,
blood stroke of future years, is your
bend beside a gate, to place
down a cry as if offered at an open temple,
intersect of passageway and place
where things are left each day:
thoughts, hurry, pushing towards a home.
You (whom I will never know) drop all that
behind, not going anywhere you,
but perhaps, leaving a self behind, at a juncture
visited only sporadically, unlike the returnees
whose commute to factory or garden regular
mouths opened to an everyday rice,
yours was final, fixed.
Though, you will never pass it again without a shudder…
a small uttered “oh,” pain of letting in
omission, the less of loss.
That voice (baby’s cry) heard no more except in
your thoughts (always in thoughts, farther away than here).
You must carry what you’ve unburdened:
her, and too, these drippings of
why you went there,
a there that continues and will,
at least, in what you think each hour.
Not the idea of a 9-month old carried in foreign arms,
nor of a me you cannot begin to imagine,
no, dare not imagine for the opaqueness of eyes
shadows that me thinking, of transfer,
where at an opening still, if motioned through,
we inadvertently brush elbows,
stuck in a middle
beneath the weight of ancient columns.