Once a year
Or three or seven years,
I come back to you,
Like the waves being pulled back to sea
On the shadowy Shandong beaches You took me to when I was a kid.
Now you speak a foreign language.
It’s all garbled to me, like foam,
Or the racket of washing machines back home.
My skin is as yellow as the tattered papers,
You hold like a baby in your hands. Your father’s letters from the Vietnamese frontline, When he was a soldier in the Liberation Army.
I don’t know anything else about the Liberation Army.
The characters are like forgotten treasure maps to me.
Long lost friends of mine.
I need to talk to you.
There must be some way to make you understand:
I’m your granddaughter, I’m no stranger,
Eating your handmade jianbing in your hand-built kitchen.
But maybe I am.
You see, I had a crush on JFK when I was a kid,
And I can sing every word to Bowie.
But I can only guess, for the life of me,
What you’re saying when you’ve got tears in your eyes.
I can’t speak your language,
My traitorous tongue betrays me.
I don’t know how to bake jianbing the way you can.
The sheets never stick, they fall apart in my hands.
I’m not friends with the fields or rivers or the land.
I don’t know the stories woven into this soil,
Of Chinese tales and Chinese tears and Chinese strife and Chinese toil.
I cried when my father first told me,
How during the 60’s dark ages,
When you staggered out to find your baby brother
Something to eat,
You realized all the bark from the trees
Was already gone.
But at least I have
Your slanted Asian eyes,
Your straight, weedy hair,
Your stubborn yellow skin no amount of California sun could make golden,
As bright yellow as an imperial Japanese lamp.
It’s funny, because when I was younger,
I tried to bleach my skin so I could be
Like Britney or Marilyn.
I hated how yellow it was.
But now it’s my one feeble bridge to you.
I’m glad I didn’t burn it down.
Nainai, I wish to call you that so badly,
But I sound like a pretender,
My accent slipping out,
Like a trespasser caught in the act.
A colonizer standing on land that isn’t hers.
There’s an unbridgeable divide between us.
You are the earth,
And I the carnations my mother dug from the ground,
In our Boston home after one of those 17’ droughts,
Roots and all.
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