ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

 
THREE LONGER POEMS
by Wang Ping


I Curse because

You say the streets are paved with gold.
You say even the maids have maids.
If we work hard, our dreams will be fulfilled.
So we come--on foot
by boats, ships, planes.

New York: heart of America, gateway to paradise.

"Do me a favor, and get a new name," said my boss. "Something American, like us."

In the alleys and back streets are job agencies, where opium dens and brothels used to be. We gather behind the barred windows and iron gates, waiting to be dispatched as cooks, dishwashers, delivery boys, waiters, as secretaries, receptionists, waitresses, nannies, housekeepers, cleaning ladies, button sewers, caretakers for the dying. We take below minimum wage. We work under the table.

Cultural shocks
        · 1st bite of pizza--throw up on the boss' shoes
        · Dirty streets littered with the homeless
        · No public toilets on streets
        · Can't understand a word, despite my English major from Beijing University
        · Armani suit man spits on the sidewalk
        · Pork tastes like woodchips, tomatoes like mud
        · Hoo's this UPS man? What he want?
        · Lost in the subway maze
        · So high the skyscrapers, so low my basement
        · Vast shopping malls, my empty wallet

To keep my job, to avoid being called Ting, Tin, Pin, Pink, Pig, I changed my name to Penelope, then Penny. For ten years, I was known as Penny Wan.

Through the barred windows of Ellis Island, we gazed at Manhattan's silhouette. Paradise was only a river away. Around us were the names of the deportees--the sick, low wits, anarchists, criminals, potential prostitutes--names carved into the walls with pens, brushes, nails, knives.

This is how you bus a table, she stacked dirty plates on her arm.
This is how your serve clients, she grinned, exposing her wrinkles and yellowed teeth.
If they spit on your face, offer the other side.
If they forget to leave a tip, smile and say "Welcome back."
Forget about your PhD, having taught Beijing University.
You start from here, she stamped the ground, hard.

We know the hardships in a ship's hold, its stink, hunger, lack of air. We know the unforgiveness of the desert, its cactus, scorching sand. We may be raped, drowned, dehydrated, caught, deported. May never pay off the loans to the snakeheads. May end up dead in a sealed truck, in the sea, become stray ghosts in deserts, foreign streets, wandering in hunger and thirst. We know. We know it all. From rumors, stories, eyewitnesses, media. But nothing stops us. We're coming, like marching ants, locus, tidal waves. The moon guides us, pulling us to the other shore, by the heart.

The boy sank his knees into the sand, and kissed the soil of America.

Eight moves within eight months: Flushing, Brooklyn, Elmhurst, Harlem, Elmhurst, Rego Park, Flushing, Flushing. Finally a steady income from a law office--$5 an hour, cash, and moved into a house on Farrington Street, Flushing. $200 a month, heat and electricity. Across the street, a Korean brothel. Sharing kitchen and bathroom with a Vietnamese, a Malaysian, two Fujian ship jumpers. Our Hong Kong landlady believed in energy saving, believed two hours of heat a day was enough to keep us warm. Taped our windows with plastic sheets, wore sweaters, coats, hats and gloves to bed. Fought over the toilet and stove, over who ate what in the refrigerator. But we had no complaint. This was our home. Our dream.

Restaurants and gift shops line Chinatown streets like crows.
I constantly got lost in the maze, even though the Twin Towers
stood a few blocks away as my compass.

Last stop Flushing. Run up the subway steps. Do not look around. Do not glance sideways at the car purring along Farrington Street. Do not panic at his open fly, pale hand up and down under the wheel, ring gleaming in the moonlight. Do not hear the whispered beckoning: Hey pigtailed China doll, won't you come with me?

You have nothing to fear now, nothing at all, said my sponsor at the airport.

5:00 am. The old man arrives at Confucius Plaza. Feet apart. Knees bent. Hands before the chest. A ball of fire. 60 years of Taichi. Under the statue. Never missed a day. Never a beat. Since the ship's arrival. No wife. No children to inherit his savings. He's an American, an overseas Chinese, venerable Laundromat Wong on East Broadway.

We've been deloused, tagged, marked with chalk.
We've answered questions like "How many legs does a horse have?"
We've been stripped, poked in the eyes, ears, private parts.
When the officer called our names loud,
we ran down the steps, screaming, into the gate of paradise,
into the arms of our estranged fathers, husbands, friends.

I sent home $400 dollars, my first month earning as a waitress, along with a photo of myself at JFK, grinning from behind a trunk, two fingers heavenwards in the shape of V.

He inches his van down Mott Street, through fish and vegetable stands, through underwear, bras, slippers, perfumes, through baseball hats, dragon T-shirts, Chanel bags, through throngs of shoppers and gawking tourists. "Too many Chinese, too many fucking Chinese!" he mutters as he enters the heart of Chinatown.

--Can you say whatever you want in your own country?
--Can you afford a car? a house? three children? two jobs?
--Do you have your own toilet? bath? hot water?
--Have you ever seen a color TV? VCR? Computer?
--Where do you go when you get sick there? fired? evicted? run out of food?
--What more do you want?
--Why are you still cursing such horseshit, you ungrateful beast?

Go to Ellis Island. Go find your ancestor on the Wall of Honor. Trace it. Trace with a pencil. On paper. Our ancestors. 500,000 names. More to come. Inscribed. Steeled.

I curse, my dear, my heart and liver,
I curse because I still believe.
Still love.

Mixed Blood

We greet our neighbors with
"You ate?" or "Where are you going?"
When we meet a stranger, we say,
"Where are you from?"

It is believed
influenzas come from
Asia, where animals and birds
live with humans.

At fifteen, my father ran away from his widowed mother to fight the Japanese, and had been trying to return home ever since.

"I'll come back
with a Ph.D
and serve my country
with better English and knowledge,"
I pledged at the farewell party in Beijing.

He lost his left ear in a bayonet fight with a Japanese soldier. Two years later, the National Army cracked his eardrums with American cannons.

The night I arrived in JFK, the Mets won the World Series and the noise on the street went on till three. I got up at six and went to work in my sponsor's antique shop in Manhattan.

He never lost his Weihai accent, never learned Mandarin or the island dialect.

"Did you jump or fly?" asked my Fuzhou landlady from her mahjong table. Seeing my puzzled face, she laughed and told me her husband jumped ship ten years ago. When he opened his fifth Chinese takeout, he bought her a passport and flew her to Queens.

The only thing he liked to talk about was Weihai, its plump sea cucumbers and sweet apples, men with broad shoulders, stubborn thighs, and girls with long braids making steamed bread.

"Please, please become an American citizen,"
my brother begged me over the phone,
his voice severed by the long distant wire.
"This is     the only     way     I can     come     to America."

"I don't know why," she said, shivering from behind her fruit stand. "Back at home, I could go for days without a penny in my pocket, and I didn't feel poor. Now, if my money goes down below four figures, I panic." She scanned the snow-covered street of
Chinatown. "I guess I really don't want to be homeless here."

Playing back the message,
I was shocked by the heavy accent
in my voice.

On her sixtieth birthday, my grandma went home to die. The trip involved two ships, one from the island to Shanghai, then from Shanghai to Yantai. From there, she would take two more buses to reach Weihai. I carried her onto the big ship at the Shanghai Port, down to the bottom, where she'd spend three days on a mattress, on the floor, with hundreds of fellow passengers. "How are you going to make it, grandma," I asked. She pulled out a pair of embroidered shoes from her parcel and placed them between my feet. "My sweetheart and liver, promise you'll come to see your old home soon, before it's too late."

A person without an ancestral home
is a kite with a broken string.

The U.S. Consulate in Shanghai rejected my brother's visa applications three times. He talks about borrowing thirty thousand dollars from snakeheads and jumping ship.

I hired my babysitter when I heard her hometown was fifty miles away from Weihai.

The president visited the rice paddies in Vietnam where a pilot was downed thirty-three years ago. He vowed to bring every bone of the fallen hero back to America.

When asked where I'm from,
I say "Weihai," even though
nobody knows where it is,
even though I've never been there.

My father tried to return home after his demotion from the Navy. With his rank, he could only get into a coalmine town five hundred miles away. No one in the family wanted to go. He went alone, and was soon hospitalized with TB. My mother sold her furniture to bribe the county administrator and ordered me to go out with his son so that my father could come back to the island.

The bag lady stopped her cart
on the busy street and urinated
into a subway grate.

They swore, before boarding the ship, that they'd send money home to bring more relatives over; in return, they were promised that if they died, their bodies would be sent back home for burial.

The bus stopped suddenly. The woman behind me bumped her head against the baby pack. "Go back to Laos," she shouted angrily, "and breed in your own place." "Ma'am," I turned to her, "I'm Chinese. We breed only one child for each family." "I don't care," she roared. "Just go back."

"No, I'm not sad."
The street child shook her head.
"How can I miss
something I've never had?"

My mother buried her husband on the island, where he lived for forty years.

"Don't tell me it's impossible. I'm willing to wait, five, ten years. I'm willing to work, restaurants, Laundromats. I just want my daughter to have a good education and freedom to choose where she wants to live, like you, Sister."

My friends call me "banana"--waxed yellow skin, but white and mushy inside.

Back from America, my mother furnished her home on the island, bought an apartment in the suburb of Shanghai, and is considering a third one in Beijing. "A cunning rabbit needs three holes," she wrote to her daughters, demanding their contributions.

For fifteen years,
I drink American milk--
            a few drops in tea,
and eat American rice-
            Japanese brand.

I speak and write
in American English,
often catch myself
swearing
in American slang.

Chinese comes to me only
           in dreams,
           in black and white pictures.

                                         Weihai, a small city
                                         in Shandong Province,
                                         on the coast of North China Sea,
                                         a home, where my grandfather
                                         and his father were born,
                                         where my grandma married,
                                         raised her children, and
                                         was buried, nameless, in the yam
                                         fields, next to her husband,
                                         an old frontier to fend off Japanese pirates,
                                         a place I come from, have never seen.

             Jia--a roof with animals underneath
             Fang--door and a square
             wu--a body unnamed and homeless until it finds a destination

--the tangled

The Magic Whip

It is the mark of
a virgin,
the yellow blossom girl
men would bid
to deflower-the black pigtail
that brushes its path
along the waist, hips, backs
of the knees, tied with
a ribbon or red yarn.

Hearing that the Manchurian horsemen had crossed the Great Wall, the last emperor of Ming went to his garden and hung himself on a tree. The Manchu warriors took over the Forbidden City. "No woman is allowed to bind her feet and every Chinaman must wear a queue," ordered the first emperor of Qing.

I saw the black down on my shins,
thought I was turning into a man.

She trades her voice for human legs, rises naked from the sea to meet the prince on the beach. She wraps her shame with a cloak of brown hair that drapes to the ankles. I cried over the book stolen from a sealed library, and vowed to keep my hair long.

I poured the kerosene into a wooden basin, and let go of my braids. "Are you sure you want to do this?" asked the old village woman who gave me the folk recipe. "Another way to get rid of those bugs, once for all, is to shave your hair." I nodded, bent my head, and slid the black cascade into the kerosene. Fumes smarted my eyes and pricked the scalp like needles. Count to three hundred and all the lice and the eggs will be dead, I muttered through clenched teeth. I was fifteen, had just left home to work on the village farm. I was determined to save my hair, at any cost.

She greased her daughter's hair
one more time
with her wooden comb,
coiled it into a bun, crisscrossed
with strings of pearl, velvet flowers,
a golden hairpin of the phoenix
to hold it tight.
The husband came to fetch her.
Kneeling on the bed, she licked
a hole through the paper window,
watched him carry her youngest girl
into a bridal sedan, face wet behind
a scarf. She wanted to join
the wailing to wish her good luck.
But she had no more tears.

When they caught the adulterers, the villagers broke the man's legs and plucked the woman's pubic hair clean.

After midnight
the only lights are from the beauty
salons along DeKalb Avenue
of Brooklyn where they braid
each other's kinky hair
laughing, slapping their thighs

In Hong Kong, she cut the braids she'd kept for fifteen years. She arrived in JFK the next day, the new C-bob perched on her scalp like a battered helmet.

The Boxers braided talismans into their queues.
We have magic whips, they sang in unison.
No bullets from the Western ghosts
can ever touch us.

A woman without pubic hair is called a "white tiger"--a man killer.

Hair curling up over his shirt
buttons, hair running down the back
of his neck, hair rolling out of his sleeves,
hair on his legs when he comes
dripping from the ocean.
And he's my "honey," my "sweet heart,"
my "daddy."

She caught him again with a woman in their bedroom. "I can't go on like this. You keep the son and I'll take care of this one," she pointed to her swollen womb, and left. Within a week, her hair became matted and the braids formed into the shape of a cobra with a raised hood, lice in the locks like worms. And no man would go near her.

Tough hair on a girl equals stubbornness equals disobedience equals bad luck.

His advice to women friends:
Keep your hair long
if you want to find a man.

"I'm so tired of my hair. I'm ready to cut it," I whined to a friend. "If you cut it," she said sternly, "you'll have nothing left."

Another outbreak of lice in the nursery. Teachers pulled her out to examine her head. They always started with her, for some reason. They didn't know that lice hated kinky hair. Its nappy jungle made it too difficult to reach the scalp for blood.

The laws of the Great Qing: removing a man's queue is punishable by decapitation.

My boy friend caught me in the bathtub shaving with his razor at 3:00 a.m.
"I thought Chinese were hairless," was all he could say.

The nurse shaved her, told her to relax. The doctor walked in, face behind a mask. He injected anesthesia into the naked armpits, then cut along the marks drawn on the skin. He peeled. She felt the tugging and pulling, her arms jerked up and down like a puppet. He finished the last stitch. "All gone. No more sweat, no more fox stink," he said cheerfully. "Are you really eighteen?" he examined her face. She looked up at his sparse eyebrows, couldn't tell him she was fifteen, but had already smelled so bad that nobody could come close, couldn't tell him she had to sell her pet chickens to pay for this. "I know it's none of my business," he said. "But if you are younger, the sweat glands may grow back and you'll need another operation."

I grew up hearing this every day:
A man without a mustache
is a man without a brain.

Names for haircuts: crimp, bangs, snake mane wave, curly cue, buzz cut, spike, coif, upsweep with attitude, brow-tossing, ringlet-topped, shoulder-brushing, tousled-finish, wind-blown, dred-like, razor-cut, luscious body, hip with a flip, down-to-there.

When the Last Emperor was dethroned, the New Republicans forced men to cut off their queues on the street.

A treatment for hysteria: depilation of pubic hair. When blood rushes to the pulled roots, the "heated" head will cool down.

She got a perm in Midtown Hair. Her lover opened the door and laughed. "Where did you get this Afro cut?" The next day, she found a Korean salon in Flushing, and straightened all the curls. She ate ramen, ten cents a package, for the rest of the month.

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The body dies, but the hair continues to grow.

Women constantly stop her
on the street and say,
"I love your braid.
Don't ever cut it."