Ma, I begin writing your origin story after another white
classmate asks me where I am from. I know the 1-bedroom in Dalian,
valedictorian of your all-male class, sneaking Ba into your
dormitory at night. Still don’t know how to trace the suffering
back to you. We wear loss better than lineage in this family.
If we could outrun our ancestry, wouldn’t we have done it by now?
Ma, what tongue of yours does love insist on residing in?
I spend eighteen years brainstorming hypotheses for why
you cannot find the words for I love you, share them with
the white hookups who never ask. Intergenerational trauma, check.
Illegal second child, check. Quitting piano lessons, C in Geometry,
forgetting how to write my name in Mandarin, check. After you refuse
the divorce from Ba again, you tell me that losing my virginity means cutting
off parts of myself that I’ll never get back. So I burn the red
marring cotton underwear. I bury pregnancy tests in the trash,
hide the bill for the birth control, anything to minimize
the womanhood. What other alternatives exist, Ma?
What does it mean to have our bodies in this
country? How will I ever look at it, and know to call it
mine? All I ever wanted was for this body to
hyphenate. Perhaps we are not much different after all.
Teach me embodiment, Ma. Teach me the body that stands
amidst the rubble of skin & borders,
declaring, I will build myself out of this.