Ink Knows No Borders Read online

  acceptance, as people do under martial law.

  Days prior to the date, things disappeared

  in the house: the display cabinet taken away by an aunt,

  the wedding gift china wares in it sold, except for the blue plates

  and swan-shaped bowls that would not survive the journey.

  The rice bin was given to a family friend; knives

  to Uncle Leo; school uniforms, cousins; roosters divided

  among the men; floral fabrics for the women; dried

  mangoes and stale squid candies for the neighborhood

  children; a twin bed transported upstairs

  for my sister staying to complete college.

  That late July morning, the jeepney arrived,

  as hired, the sun held dominion over the blinding sky,

  a zephyr funneled through the narrowing streets

  of Manila. The steady procession of

  well-wishers in our house did not halt,

  my father handing out pesos

  as if he was paying for our safe passage.

  Surrounded by luggage and boxes huge

  as baby elephants, we were each given

  a dollar bill, our firsts, as the jeepney drove off

  to take us to the airport, leaving behind a throng

  of onlookers waving violently, and a tearful, older sister

  who, years later, would reenact this disappearing act,

  this fading scene of a rooster-lined road of this

  cockfighting, banana tree-lush town speeding away,

  lost in the kinetic gray cement and dark smoke of exhaust.

  Joseph O. Legaspi

  Immigrant

  I am not buckled safely into my seat

  I am watching the road unravel

  behind us like a ribbon of dust.

  Through the back window of my uncle’s Datsun

  Amman looks like a tender little place

  the color of my teddy bear’s fur.

  Its houses crowded into one another

  on its seven parched hills

  are the shades of my family’s skin—

  almond of my mother’s brow,

  wheat of my father’s arms,

  tea-with-cream of my grandmother’s palms.

  We are driving away on the only road to the airport.

  We are driving away from this dollhouse town

  and my storybook childhood of tree-climbing

  and laughter of too many cousins to count.

  We are driving away from impending war.

  We are driving away

  because we can leave

  on the magic carpet of our navy blue

  US passports that carry us

  to safety and no bomb drills

  to the place where the planes are made

  and the place where the president

  will make the call to send the planes

  into my storybook childhood

  over the seven hills

  next door to neighbors who will now

  become refugees.

  We are driving and I

  am not safe

  driving away from

  myself and everything I know

  into the great miracle of

  a country so large

  wars are kept thousands of miles at bay.

  My young life is coming undone

  on the road behind me

  where I know all the names of

  the trees in Arabic

  rumman saru zayzafoon

  and I know the spot on each hilltop

  where the crimson poppies return every spring

  and I know the best bakery to line up for

  Ramadan pancakes before breaking the fast.

  In the backseat of my uncle’s Datsun

  I want to float through the window

  and into yesterday

  when August was just late-afternoon ice cream

  and late-night card games

  and the crinkle of brown paper and tape

  covering copybooks,

  fresh as this morning’s bread,

  ready to receive the school year ahead—

  math equations,

  poems,

  histories of battle.

  Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

  First Light

  I like to say we left at first light

  with Chairman Mao himself chasing us in a police car,

  my father fighting him off with firecrackers,

  even though Mao was already over a decade

  dead, & my mother says all my father did

  during the Cultural Revolution was teach math,

  which he was not qualified to teach, & swim & sunbathe

  around Piano Island, a place I never read about

  in my American textbooks, a place everybody in the family

  says they took me to, & that I loved.

  What is it, to remember nothing, of what one loved?

  To have forgotten the faces one first kissed?

  They ask if I remember them, the aunts, the uncles,

  & I say Yes it’s coming back, I say Of course,

  when it’s No not at all, because when I last saw them

  I was three, & the China of my first three years

  is largely make-believe, my vast invented country,

  my dream before I knew the word “dream,”

  my father’s martial arts films plus a teaspoon-taste

  of history. I like to say we left at first light,

  we had to, my parents had been unmasked as the famous

  kung fu crime-fighting couple of the Southern provinces,

  & the Hong Kong mafia was after us. I like to say

  we were helped by a handsome mysterious Northerner,

  who turned out himself to be a kung fu master.

  I don’t like to say, I don’t remember crying.

  No embracing in the airport, sobbing. I don’t remember

  feeling bad, leaving China.

  I like to say we left at first light, we snuck off

  on some secret adventure, while the others were

  still sleeping, still blanketed, warm

  in their memories of us.

  What do I remember of crying? When my mother slapped me

  for being dirty, diseased, led astray by Western devils,

  a dirty, bad son, I cried, thirteen, already too old,

  too male for crying. When my father said Get out,

  never come back, I cried & ran, threw myself into night.

  Then returned, at first light, I don’t remember exactly

  why, or what exactly came next. One memory claims

  my mother rushed into the pink dawn bright

  to see what had happened, reaching toward me with her hands,

  & I wanted to say No. Don’t touch me.

  Another memory insists the front door had simply been left

  unlocked, & I slipped right through, found my room,

  my bed, which felt somehow smaller, & fell asleep, for hours,

  before my mother (anybody) seemed to notice.

  I’m not certain which is the correct version, but what stays with me

  is the leaving, the cry, the country splintering.

  It’s been another five years since my mother has seen her sisters,

  her own mother, who recently had a stroke, who has trouble

  recalling who, why. I feel awful, my mother says,

  not going back at once to see her. But too much is happening here.

  Here, she says, as though it’s the most difficult,

  least forgivable English word.

  What would my mother say, if she were the one writing?

  How would her voice sound? Which is really to ask, what is

  my best guess, my invented, translated (Chinese-to-English,

  English-to-English) mother’s voice? She might say:

  We left at first light, we had to, the flight was early,

  in ear
ly spring. Go, my mother urged, what are you doing,

  waving at me, crying? Get on that plane before it leaves without you.

  It was spring & I could smell it, despite the sterile glass

  & metal of the airport—scent of my mother’s just-washed hair,

  of the just-born flowers of fields we passed on the car ride over,

  how I did not know those flowers were already

  memory, how I thought I could smell them, boarding the plane,

  the strange tunnel full of their aroma, their names

  I once knew, & my mother’s long black hair—so impossible now.

  Why did I never consider how different spring could smell, feel,

  elsewhere? First light, last scent, lost

  country. First & deepest severance that should have

  prepared me for all others.

  Chen Chen

  Origin / Adoption

  My first mother placed inside my mouth

  a thick tongue / a curled tongue

  prone to quick rolling music

  and bramble-berried consonants

  I would never speak to her.

  These days, on this other hemisphere

  I twist my second mother’s words

  from my tongue as I do

  the fruit from my neighbor’s tree:

  geu-rhim / cham-eh / / fig and yellow

  melon arching over the sidewalk,

  ripening into dark hills / deep sun.

  These days, I peel this craving

  already budded with discomfort,

  recover utterances too long untouched,

  as if I could know the correct

  taste of each vowel / inflections

  sweet on my fingers and chin.

  Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

  Dear America

  You used to creep into my room,

  remember?

  I was eleven and you kept coming,

  night after night, in Tehran, slid in

  from inside the old radio on my desk, past

  the stack of geometry homework, across

  the faded Persian carpet, and thrust

  into me, with rock and roll thumps.

  I loved you more than bubble gum,

  more than the imported bananas

  street vendors sold for a fortune.

  I thought you were azure, America,

  and orange, like the sky, and poppies,

  like mother’s new dress, and kumquats.

  I dreamed of you America, I dreamed

  you every single night with the ferocity

  of a lost child until you became true like flesh.

  And when I arrived at you, you punched

  yourself into me like a laugh.

  Sholeh Wolpé

  Second Attempt Crossing

  In the middle of that desert that didn’t look like sand

  and sand only,

  in the middle of those acacias, whiptails, and coyotes, someone yelled

  “¡La Migra!” and everyone ran.

  In that dried creek where forty of us slept, we turned to each other,

  and you flew from my side in the dirt.

  Black-throated sparrows and dawn

  hitting the tops of mesquites.

  Against the herd of legs,

  you sprinted back toward me,

  I jumped on your shoulders,

  and we ran from the white trucks, then their guns.

  I said, “freeze Chino, ¡pará por favor!”

  So I wouldn’t touch their legs that kicked you,

  you pushed me under your chest,

  and I’ve never thanked you.

  Beautiful Chino—

  the only name I know to call you by—

  farewell your tattooed chest: the M,

  the S, the 13. Farewell

  the phone number you gave me

  when you went east to Virginia,

  and I went west to San Francisco.

  for Chino

  You called twice a month,

  then your cousin said the gang you ran from

  in San Salvador

  found you in Alexandria. Farewell

  your brown arms that shielded me then,

  that shield me now, from La Migra.

  Javier Zamora

  Bent to the Earth

  They had hit Ruben

  with the high beams, had blinded

  him so that the van

  he was driving, full of Mexicans

  going to pick tomatoes,

  would have to stop. Ruben spun

  the van into an irrigation ditch,

  spun the five-year-old me awake

  to immigration officers,

  their batons already out,

  already looking for the soft spots on the body,

  to my mother being handcuffed

  and dragged to a van, to my father

  trying to show them our green cards.

  They let us go. But Alvaro

  was going back.

  So was his brother Fernando.

  So was their sister Sonia. Their mother

  did not escape,

  and so was going back. Their father

  was somewhere in the field,

  and was free. There were no great truths

  revealed to me then. No wisdom

  given to me by anyone. I was a child

  who had seen what a piece of polished wood

  could do to a face, who had seen his father

  about to lose the one he loved, who had lost

  some friends who would never return,

  who, later that morning, bent

  to the earth and went to work.

  Blas Manuel De Luna

  A Hymn to Childhood

  Childhood? Which childhood?

  The one that didn’t last?

  The one in which you learned to be afraid

  of the boarded-up well in the backyard

  and the ladder to the attic?

  The one presided over by armed men

  in ill-fitting uniforms

  strolling the streets and alleys,

  while loudspeakers declared a new era,

  and the house around you grew bigger,

  the rooms farther apart, with more and more

  people missing?

  The photographs whispered to each other

  from their frames in the hallway.

  The cooking pots said your name

  each time you walked past the kitchen.

  And you pretended to be dead with your sister

  in games of rescue and abandonment.

  You learned to lie still so long

  the world seemed a play you viewed from the muffled

  safety of a wing. Look! In

  run the servants screaming, the soldiers shouting,

  turning over the furniture,

  smashing your mother’s china.

  Don’t fall asleep.

  Each act opens with your mother

  reading a letter that makes her weep.

  Each act closes with your father fallen

  into the hands of Pharaoh.

  Which childhood? The one that never ends? O you,

  still a child, and slow to grow.

  Still talking to God and thinking the snow

  falling is the sound of God listening,

  and winter is the high-ceilinged house

  where God measures with one eye

  an ocean wave in octaves and minutes,

  and counts on many fingers

  all the ways a child learns to say Me.

  Which childhood?

  The one from which you’ll never escape? You,

  so slow to know

  what you know and don’t know.

  Still thinking you hear low song

  in the wind in the eaves,

  story in your breathing,

  grief in the heard dove at evening,

  and plentitude in the unseen bird

  tolling a
t morning. Still slow to tell

  memory from imagination, heaven

  from here and now,

  hell from here and now,

  death from childhood, and both of them

  from dreaming.

  Li-Young Lee

  Immigrant Aria

  there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of the sea!

  —D. H. Lawrence

  To swallow new names like krill, dive.

  You have few tides before you

  return to motion. Once this shrine

  was the abyssal plain. Once Empire

  shackled you. Once you answered to monster,

  to dragon, spewing steam, fire

  bellowing in the furnace of your hide,

  a migrant captured for brown skin’s

  labor. Somewhere inside the darkness

  where brews flame, a spirit hovers

  over the deep. Once before Adam named

  you illegal you snaked, breaking

  into air. Spit out his poison, jaw-clap

  the sea. With your aft-fin’s trailing edge

  churn surface to milk. In the beginning,

  you were formed with great light.

  Rajiv Mohabir

  On Being American

  You are seven years old when a grown man screams at you, spitting knives from crooked purple lips: Go home, fucking Paki.

  You are confused because the ethnic slur is inaccurate.

  You realize, too young, that racists fail geography but that their epithets and perverted patriotism can still shatter moments of your childhood.

  You are the last to know that everyone else sees you as Other.

  You keep your eyes on your paper and study and do well and stay quiet and obey.

  You get patted on the head and told you’re one of the good ones.

  You are a model.

  Until you aren’t.

  Because those manners you once minded and that tongue you once bit won’t be held back anymore.

  Can’t be.

  And what they think is rebellion is, in truth, survival. Because if you stay silent one second longer, the anger surging through your blood will engulf you in flames.

  So you snatch their words from the air:

  Terrorist

  Rag head

  Sand nigger

  And burn them like kindling and rub the embers onto your skin, a sacrilege, a benediction, a qurbani.

  For the girl you once were.

  For the girl you are becoming.

  The one who doesn’t ask to be recognized,

  But demands to be known.

  The one who presses into her fears to speak out. To stand up. To live. Anything else is death.