Girl / Guāi 乖
In Lisbon I bought boba from a girl who looked twelve, maybe
a small fifteen. We speak Mandarin and I hear her obedience.
乖 we praise the child who does what she is told / works
the family business / fills out forms her parents can’t read /
earns her keep / makes herself useful / dutiful / demure.
乖 we praise the child who follows rules / anticipates needs /
keeps quiet / keeps to herself / keeps secrets / keeps unseen
and unheard / respectful / well-behaved / docile / obedient.
Google translates 乖 to “good.”
Only an obedient daughter is good.
My father said I was a bad daughter
when I did not obey absolutely.
The girl in the boba shop is maybe still good / a pleasure
to have in class / does what’s expected / doesn't ask why /
feels indebted to her parents for keeping her alive.
乖 we praise the girl who will make a good wife / good
daughter / good carer / good maid / good server / good
worker / good breeder / good ant / good lamb / good corpse.
乖 we praise the woman who lets everyone else eat first /
supports her husband / supports her child / supports her parents / supports her
in-laws / saves nothing for herself.
In high school I asked my mother why she was deferential
to an old man who insulted her / why she sent money to her
brothers / why she felt guilty / why she did not leave.
I don’t remember her answer or if she was silent.
乖 we praise a woman who is silent.
乖 we praise a woman who complies.
A dead woman is silent.
Is a dead woman good?
乖 I was praised only
when I did something I did not want to.
Obedience is to bury yourself.
Cockroach
At 9 I went to a school in a rough neighborhood in Las Vegas.
It was called Paradise. My first day a 7-year-old said
fuck you ching chong bitch. You can tell a rough neighborhood
in Las Vegas by people walking. No one walks in the heat
unless they have to. You can tell by how run-down and
low to the ground houses are, like they're embarrassed to be
there, too. Windows have bars like prison cells. The
low cell houses sit beside apartments that look like roach
motels. I lived in one and it was the first time I saw a
cockroach—
a big brown shining thing scuttling
across yellowed linoleum, not cute like the kids’
sheet music for La Cucaracha would have you believe.
A college professor studied cockroach intelligence.
What an aggro word, cockroach.
A man must have coined it.
As if it's not bad enough he wants me
barefoot in the kitchen, he sends a cockroach my way
like a dirty martini.
My father once said I should learn to cook
because I was a girl. Now all I make are smoothies
sweetened with honey.
Maybe if Kafka had been a woman
he would have turned
into a bee
and flown
far away.
Origin Story : Triptych
1. Infant
I don’t remember the first time I lost my mother.
I can only imagine: infant wheeled
through airports infant crying
in grandmother’s lap infant diaper change
in economy class bathroom.
Birthed from Latin infant
means not speaking unable to speak.
In other words I cannot ask her
what it was like: each separation a loss.
In other words the past is a kind of infancy.
After returning I’d sit in mother’s lap
staring at photos of myself
who could not speak: infant in blue
stroller infant in yellow
sweater infant in blood-red
coat.
Now grown I scan photos of my mother
from when she was younger than me.
Is death a kind of infancy?
The dead cannot speak either.
In dreams we babble a nonsense language
infants together cradled by stars.
2. Kid
In the first dream I’m a little kid
on my first yellow school bus.
A man with a greasy ponytail snatches
my mother from the sidewalk pushes her
into a dirty blue car. He looks like a shadow
of Disney’s Gaston. I watch them disappear
from the bus window wake from naptime
gasp-sobbing so I can't speak.
My animal panic scares my bullies
into patting my shoulders with kid gloves.
Kid was once a crude word for children
sold into labor in British colonies—children
bought and worked like livestock—little goats
born to be seized and consumed. Kid
nabbed. Kidnapped.
Now I am old enough that my friends have children.
The babies scream when their mothers turn
away for a moment—primal fear of loss.
In the second dream I follow my mother
up the long spiral of a crumbling stone castle.
In one version she stands outside
helpless as a tower collapses around me.
In the other I am frozen watching her
buried beneath gray stones.
3. Stone
Like stones I skipped a grade and then another.
When a skipped stone slows it quickly sinks.
Does the stone feel itself slowing?
Does it know when it sinks?
Did my mother skip me because she knew
how soon she would die?
When I stopped I thought I might die too
stoned and moss-sunken.
The sea by San Francisco is filled with worn
headstones of the forgotten.
Stone comes from an old Germanic word
meaning to stiffen.
My father accuses me of being stiff
which is to say he does not like me with boundaries.
After he remarried he kept my mother’s red
urn in the attic for years.
I thought of stealing ashes to wear around my neck
in a precious stone like a neighbor
who made her Siamese cats into a string
of diamonds one after another.
One day I was away he buried her
in my garden beneath a mound
of small white stones. He only told me
after the large cactus yellowed and died.
I avoided thinking about it for months.
Is it okay to replace the dead with living?
A Way to Look Away
There’s a certain
vision of the American
dream. Tell me if it looks familiar:
a man and woman meet after the Revolution.
The man works hard for a golden ticket to Anywhere, America /
works hard in grad school / works hard to keep quiet / keep to
himself / works hard to pass muster / let pass indignities / pass
off as a man born with gold in his step / pass on someday /
pass down something / pass by ghosts of his old life / old home
turned unfamiliar. If he succeeds someday he will be a man
who grants passage to younger men luckier than him. All the while
the woman works hard to support his dream / now their dream /
accepts his ambitions are more reachable than hers. In her old life
she was a teacher doctor daughter / adopted her father’s
ambitions mother’s laments / dreamed she might be a writer
singer dancer / see a world she could not imagine / its vastness. In
their new life she is a wife waitress cleaner mother
settler / kicks her old wants aside to play
sidekick to the main character / the man. If he succeeds /
they succeed. If hisses and rattles like a snake. Inside a
baby kicks and wakes her from a dream. A
dream is a kind of vision tunneling toward the future / a kind
of blindness. Envision: headlights barreling through
a pitch-black tunnel. The place they come from
fades into pins of light. The place they go to
expands into light / so much light / all
light and nothing else. At the end
of the tunnel is a final stage.
When the curtains close
the shadows keep
dancing.
Ovine Triptych
1. Sheep
I don't eat lamb because I am one. As a kid it felt special to be
the same in both zodiacs—Chinese sheep, Western ram.
I could never get the ovine language straight.
In Chinese all ovine are 羊, a kind of sheep:
Goats were mountain sheep.
Rams were horned sheep.
I just learned rams are male, as if only males
have knives in their heads. I preferred to be a ram
because their violence felt like strength.
In China no one wants to bear a sheep—the unluckiest animal
of the zodiac. Every twelve years birth rates decline.
Even in the West we feel sheepish.
In Mandarin, sheep is a homophone for sun.
Every ovine has a sun inside, but sheep shine
their light unfiltered. Is that why we are unlucky?
So bright we burn in our own fire.
Look at me. Close your eyes against the light.
Watch it dance against the dark.
2. Horns
My mom was so proud the first time I grew horns at 10. I read it in her novel a decade after she died. After I hit a boy who was mean, she marveled that I'd learned to stand up for myself. Two years earlier I’d given all my things, even my mother’s opal necklace, to the neighbor girl, because I couldn’t say no when she asked Can I have that? I hadn't yet learned how to weld words into a tool. My mother never knew how to help me, she wrote. She was inspired by my adaptation because she never learned herself. Bighorn sheep grew large horns as a protective adaptation, absorbing the impact of clashes. I adapted like the lamb I was, young enough that my horns would grow. There's a disease where bone grows in the place of the slightest injury. Over time the bone hardens into a cage. Watch my horns curl all around me. I forged them out of the whitest flame.
3. Bighorn Sheep
When I was five we moved where all horns curled outward.
Bighorns roam sparse rocky mountains, graze city parks—
a charismatic sheep seemingly at home anywhere.
I once said I wanted to be more charismatic.
What I meant was I wanted to feel at home anywhere.
If home is anywhere, is home also nowhere?
I still remember all the words to the state song:
Home means Nevada, home means the hills
home means the sage and the pines.
Is home a place you belong to or a place that belongs to you?
All four years of college I refused to call my dorm room home.
I wasn't homesick, just petty. I didn't belong
in the rich named houses of that grand green campus,
or the beige desert where my hands got so dry
each winter they cracked and bled,
or even California where I stayed so long people forgot
I hadn’t always lived in fog.
All my life I longed for home and came up short.
What I'm saying is I belong nowhere, so maybe I can belong
anywhere. My horns grow outward toward infinity.
