Christine H. Chen
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Name Your World In San Francisco, you learn a new expression: “You’re special” and it sounds like a good thing, until every teacher in each class stops in the middle of a roll call, squints their eyes, re-adjusts their eyeglasses, and stumbles on the sounds of your name, when you hear it creeping up in alphabetical order, your insides curl, you peek up expectantly, your throat dries, and finally, your teacher’s lips burble something that could be your name, you quickly raise your hand, then fold yourself real small while half of the class’s curious eyes search around for who you might be; when you’re sick of hearing your name chewed up into spittle sounds that don’t exist in your mother tongue, when you dream that one day you’ll choose your own name, abandon the one your parents gave you at birth, ignore your father’s disappointed frown because you rejected the unique name he gave you, discard your mother’s explanation of your name that translate to “Colour of Sunrise” because it sounds so tacky in English yet rolls out like rhymes in a poem from your mother’s lips, and still one day, you’ll pick a not-so-special name, and you’ll proudly tell the Immigration officer, Mr. Gomez, that now your name is Melanie with an “M” and ends with “e” you might feel a sense of relief because then, none of the teachers would hesitate when calling your name, none of your classmates would even care who you are, busy chit-chatting with their friends even when you have none because you’re too ashamed of having to repeat your name to them when they ask “What? How you say that again?” you don’t understand their jokes, or what a “date” is, you’ve never been to a prom, and then worse, when they stare at you with curiosity and ask, “Where are you from” and now you’re the one who stumbles because you don’t even know where to begin, and how to end, because everyone else is from some place, Cleveland in Ohio, Eureka in California, but you really have no country, no city you could hail home, born in Hong Kong, transplanted across the continent to Africa where you wouldn’t even know how to say Antananarivo in English because which syllable would you put the accent on, and then people have more questions, like “Is that in Indonesia” and then you’ll have to disappoint them, but they’re confused because your face features your mother’s eyes, your father’s nose, but your skin tanned coffee brown under the African sun disavows you as Chinese even to your own Mandarin-speaking colleagues who shun you from eating at their table because you don’t even speak Mandarin, only broken Cantonese with your mother, you’ve never lived in China, never learned how to pen characters, but you’re not African or Malagasy to be precise even though you grew up on the Red Island, learned the language of their colonizer, played with a ring-tailed lemur, once saw Famadihana, image of bones in your head made you throw up the chow fun your mother made for supper, and now that you live in New England, you think back of the years spent in that island, you lust after fresh mango juice and masatika, achard sandwich, and mofo gasy, once craving for McDonald’s fish burger and warm apple tart wrapped smartly in a tiny cardboard box because you thought it so exotic, now years later, you still don’t understand how to be “American” even if you want to, you’ve spent most of your life trying to mimic their accent, feel their essence in your flesh, in your head, in your heart, yet you still don’t get why Americans like so much ice in their coffee at 8 am in the morning, no ice tea for you, you’re always so cold because the AC in the office is blasting air from Antarctica while the summer sun is scorching roofs and streets outside, why American football is not football as you knew it and how crazed they are about their Super Bowl even though the rest of the world isn’t aware of it, and what all this means is that you’re indeed “special”, you are the specimen, encased in a glass cube for all to stare but none to hear you, or you to hear them in their sonic waves, yours clashing theirs into infinite amplitude, you standing on shifting tectonic plates about to break apart, volcanoes erupting, tsunami engulfing cities, and no place to call home. ** This poem was first published in The Pinch. ** Mother, Daughter There was a time your eyes glowed crimson with anger, your mouth spitting spiteful shouts at me, your body burning with rancor, your arms unloving, shoving me away. You were a bulldog that wouldn't let go of its bite, you pulled and pulled until cloth tore, flesh mangled, teeth scarlet. You shoved and jabbed and hurt. You were a hawk, your eyes sharp and cold, your beak hard and unforgiving. You dove from above, never missed your prey. Me. There was a time I wondered, why me, why you. My skin scarred, my soul shredded. And yet, we’re tied by blood. I didn't understand what tormented you, until you grew old and weak, your fire dimmed. The doctor shook his head, threw his hands in the air. I had to know. You can't die on me like this, I said to you, me hating you, you hating me. The fire in your belly continued to smolder, your eyes turned cloudy. I took a kitchen knife, plunged into your entrails, and found all the pain in the world leaking into your organs, your nodes, running in your veins, seeping into your bones. The tumor you carried hidden in the cave of your soul, the metastasis of old wounds, sacrifice and grief encrypted into generational genes, inherited mutations hidden from you and me. You let your past hurt and fester into the demon you couldn’t expunge from the hollow of your throat even when you screamed incendiary insults. You couldn’t excise that beast in you, or you'd have lost all the story of your life and all of you and me with you. ** This poem was first published in The Ocotillo Review. ** The Weight on Her Shoulders after Marck Schlossman’s photograph, blue bag on a scale Ah Poh said, Ah Ma carried me on her back in a blue bag tied over her shoulders like a sling. She cut out two holes to pull my legs through, and off she went, balancing the whole 15 pounds of six-month-old me, a light bounce on her gait while my feet dangled and knocked her hips like a drum. Ah Ma walked unpaved roads, crossed fields of grass with mooing cows and shrieking birds; miles of soil pounded under her thinning soles before reaching the orchard like others like her, mothers, sisters, wives picking apples for $5 an hour in the cooling wind of Fall. Ah Ma’s large, brimmed hat shielded me from the sun. My weight on her back, she ascended the ladder and standing on a rail, she moved her hands in tandem, grasping one fruit after another and twisting its stem until it snapped, and dropping them in the pail on the ladder shelf. Ah Ma said, I would fall asleep, drooling on her neck, then wake up to wail hunger. She sat me on her lap, fed me with apple puree from a glass container she pulled from her pocket, gave me a fallen apple to play with. By the end of the shift, her bags filled with Jonagold, Honeycrisp, and McIntosh were weighted, money placed in Ah Ma’s palm. At sunset, she secured me in her makeshift sling, and bounced off with her pockets jiggling with coins and crinkling American dollars, the flashlight in her right hand casting a yellow triangle. Sometimes, a family picked us up from the side of the road. Sometimes, I dreamed I was swimming in a sea of red apples. ** This poem was first published in Visual Verse: An Anthology of Art and Words. ** What’s in a Name You know girls born in the year of the Rooster are bossy, feisty, and mean, what shame. You know boys can be bossy, feisty, and mean, with no shame. You know men don’t like girls with big feet, club feet, flat feet. Shame, you were born a girl with a mean beak, flat feet, and a sour face. You kicked your Ma’s womb like a soccer ball, you pierced and tore your Ma’s flesh, shame! You know you were lucky your Nai Nai was a kind and modern woman. Other Nai Nai would drop the cover on the chamber pot, wheel you out, dump you in a pit, you know baby girls were left to die in a hole of shit, piss, blood, and shame. You know baby girls' future girls and boys can't carry their father's name, what shame. You know your beak, your feet, your face are stained with shame. Soap, lye, bleach won't clean the stain you put on your Ba’s name. Shame! Losing your Ba's name when you marry, carrying another man’s name, shame! Letting your Ba die with no male heir, shame! Breaking your Ma's heart for not wanting to marry, choosing to live in shame! You know, you can’t take your Ba’s ashes home because you live with another man, even if you Ma knows you'll never take another last name but your Ba’s name. You know, you have no right to your Ba’s ashes because you are female, you are shame! You know, you're bossy, feisty, and mean, but you lose all to shame. You know, you could never feign to hide your pain to know your Ba’s name will expire with you, what's in the handed-down name you carry, but shame! ** Love Letter after Olga Nayda’s photograph, a woman in a leather jacket with a basketball hoop on her head You said, no one goes to the beach in a leather coat, yet you did, because it was February, the sky a light minty green, cool air stuck to your copper hair, and you said, I'm freakin' bored, and here's what we're going to do, because always you were the one moving, rushing forward while I followed, you said, watch this, and I watched you like always I was the one watching you, you picked up nests of driftwood, a snorkel and a strange goggle someone left behind, and you said, turn around, don't look, and I turned around looking not at you but the horizon, the waves crashing on my soggy shoes, pebbles smoothed by the ocean, and you said, don't look are you looking, and I shook my head, and heard you giggling, heard you shredding, breaking and cracking wood and even a joke, and you said, now turn around, and there you were, all goggled up, pieces of driftwood sprouting from the tube, your eyes glazed, and you said, what if none of this were real, what if you and I are memories implanted, what if our happy moments are artifacts of an algorithm gone wrong, and then you said, what are you doing, when I laughed at your silly thoughts and snapped a photo of you looking pensive behind the funky diving mask, and you said, why d'you do that, I hate when you do that, not asking, and you said nothing more, stomped away, and I let you go, watched your back receding, a speck in the infinity of remembrance. ** This poem was first published in Visual Verse: An Anthology of Art and Words. ** Eternal Night after Omar Musa’s A Leopard Made of Midnight Clouds Think of a leopard roaming the fearful sky, treading amongst jittery stars and pearly moons, watch the leopard's spots dancing to the rhythms of his movements, trapezius, deltoid, triceps, contracting and relaxing to the murmur of the wind teasing palm leaves, think of the beginning of all things where red earth, yellow sun and blue ocean combined to black, black like Leopard's charcoal rosettes imprisoned in his fur, dreaming of their future escape when Leopard no longer has need of their camouflage when hunting grounds are receding, when his prey dies of disease before his jaw snaps on its neck, when the world is turned upside down. Come midnight, Leopard dips his paw into rising waters, and with a relieved sigh, releases his obsidian specks into the floods where they dissolved into molecules of carbon, carried away by angry currents. Torrents spread black like runaway ink on your page, a painter’s careless splash of charcoal stain on his canvas, carps, perch, catfish, striped bass coated in black like warped asphalt roads, blowholes of whales and dolphins exhale soot from exploded oil drilling rigs, capsized by hurricanes, palm trees uprooted and twisted into blackened skies. Black is the mold on walls after a flood, black is the mood of a country divided by ideology, black is death of soldiers in an unwanted war, black is mushroom cloud, black is darkness. Imagine Leopard wandering in his spot-less fur in a star-less, moon-less, never-ending gloom, listen to its painful cry as its soul lifts into the raven sky, his shape melts into the night as he gazes one last time upon everything that existed before the world is plunged into oblivion. ** This poem was first published in Visual Verse: An Anthology of Art and Words. ** Christine H. Chen was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Madagascar before settling in Boston where she worked as a research chemist. Her fiction has appeared or forthcoming in The Pinch, Fractured Lit., SmokeLong Quarterly, The Ekphrastic Review, Pithead Chapel, Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2023, Best Microfiction 2024, and other journals and anthologies. A lover of thriller and dystopian novels, she has started to dabble in mystery writing. Her first mystery short story was published in Wolfsbane: Best New England Crime Stories 2023 (Crime Spell Books, 2023). Read more at www.christinehchen.com |
