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after Eleanor Goodman, "Boston's Chinatown" It’s easy to slam the Chinatowns of America. They’re just a lot of red lanterns. Yeah, there are Chinese people around, But it’s all for tourists. Their dirty alleyways remind me Of that strange beast called American culture. The peculiar smell of fish (how Chinese!)— I’ve eaten hundreds of meals there. So I move on to mock the shantytowns of Asia. They’re just a lot of plywood and scrap metal. Sure, I know there are poor people around. I’ve seen Slumdog Millionaire. I know the area pretty well. I’ve hung out in “bad” neighborhoods before Where the old men run their sketchy basement stores But they have mostly disappeared. And it’s all too tempting to denigrate The postindustrial towns of the dull Midwest. Of course I know there are unemployed people there. I heard it on NPR. Once I had to spend three hours In the Detroit airport, with its vendors peddling Chewing gum and soda. But people don’t really live there. Just don’t ask me to smash the glittering cities Of cultural imperialism. They teach English language skills And how to adjust to life in the States. Nobody really lives here. As someone involved in translation I’ve eaten hundreds of meals here. Nobody speaks Chinese.

To make a Chinese poem in English we must allow the silence to creep in around the edges, to define the words the way the sky’s negative space in a painting defines the mountains. —Tony Barnstone, “The Poem Behind the Poem” To make a Japanese poem in English we must allow the silence to creep up upon us the way the ninja stalks and strangles his unsuspecting victim. To make an Indian poem in English we must allow the waters of language to rise and drown us like the Ganges until we are reborn in a more accessible form. To make a French poem in English we must impale ourselves upon the Tour Eiffel until our bloodcurdling screams evoke that sublime je ne sais quoi. To make a Spanish poem in English we must let ourselves be gored by the charging bull of poesy as we run like idiots through the streets waving to our friends' cameras. To make an American poem in English we must level the mountains of language with dynamite and in the rubble build an ethnic theme park of charming accents and seething quiet. To make an American poem Chinese we must silence its creepy edges and raise an iron-built mountain that mirrors our own negation to us as if it were gold.

And in a little while we broke under the strain: suppurations ad nauseam, the wanting to be taller, though it‘s simply about being mysterious, i.e., not taller, like any tree in any forest. Mute, the pancake describes you. It had tiny roman numerals embedded in its rim. It was a pancake clock. They had ’em in those days, always getting smaller, which is why they finally became extinct. It was a hundred years before anyone noticed. The governor general called it “sinuous.” But we, we had other names for it, knew it was going to be around for a long time, even though extinct. And sure as shillelaghs fall from trees onto frozen doorsteps, it came round again when all memory of it had been expunged from the common brain. Everybody wants to try one of those new pancake clocks. A boyfriend in the next town had one but conveniently forgot to bring it over each time we invited him. Finally the rumors grew more fabulous than the real thing: I hear they are encrusted with tangles of briar rose, so dense not even a prince seeking the Sleeping Beauty could get inside. What’s more, there are more of them than when they were extinct, yet the prices keep on rising. They have them in the Hesperides and in shantytowns on the edge of the known world, blue with cold. All downtowns used to feature them. Camera obscuras, too, were big that year. But why is it that with so many people who want to know what a shout is about, nobody can find the original recipe? All too soon, no one cares. We go back to doing little things for each other, pasting stamps together to form a tiny train track, and other, less noticeable things. And the past is forgotten till next time. How to describe the years? Some were like blocks of the palest halvah, careless of being touched. Some took each others’ trash out, put each other’s eyes out. So many got thrown out before anyone noticed, that it was like a chiaroscuro of collapsing clouds. How I longed to visit you again in that old house! But you were deaf, or dead. Our letters crossed. A motorboat was ferrying me out past the reef, people on shore looked like dolls fingering stuffs. More keeps coming out, about the dogs I mean. Surely a simple embrace from an itinerant fish would have been spurned at certain periods. Not now. There is a famine of years in the land, the women are beautiful, but prematurely old and worn. It doesn’t get better. Rocks half-buried in bands of sand, and spontaneous execrations. I yell to the ship’s front door, wanting to be taller, and somewhere in the middle all this gets lost. I was a phantom for a day. My friends carried me around with them. It always turns out that much is salvageable. Chicken coops haven’t floated away on the flood. Lacemakers are back in business with a vengeance. All the locksmiths had left town during the night. It happened to be a beautiful time of season, spring or fall, the air was digestible, the fish tied in love-knots on their gurneys. Yes, and journeys were palpable too: Someone had spoken of saving appearances and the walls were just a little too blue in mid-morning. Was there ever such a time? I’d like to handle you, bruise you with kisses for it, yet something always stops me short: the knowledge that this isn‘t history, no matter how many times we keep mistaking it for the present, that headlines trumpet each day. But behind the unsightly school building, now a pickle warehouse, the true nature of things is known, is not overrided: Yours is a vote like any other. And there is fraud at the ballot boxes, stuffed with lace valentines and fortunes from automatic scales, dispensed with a lofty kind of charity, as though this could matter to us, these tunes carried by the wind from a barrel organ several leagues away. No, this is not the time to reveal your deception to us. Wait till rain and old age have softened us up a little more. Then we’ll see how extinct the various races have become, how the years stand up to their descriptions, no matter how misleading, and how long the disbanded armies stay around. I must congratulate you on your detective work, for I am a connoisseur of close embroidery, though I don’t have a diploma to show for it. The trees, the barren trees, have been described more than once. Always they are taller, it seems, and the river passes them without noticing. We, too, are taller, our ceilings higher, our walls more tinctured with telling frescoes, our dooryards both airier and vaguer, according as time passes and weaves its minute deceptions in and out, a secret thread. Peace is a full stop. And though we had some chance of slipping past the blockade, now only time will consent to have anything to do with us, for what purposes we do not know.

À La Mode, 1976, by Asco (photographer: Harry Gamboa, Jr.) I dare you to hear me tell just which and what sort of girl I was, always had been, and why. You may as well yes-yes me. You’ll get no chance to cut in. This is No Movie and I’m the leading gal, the femme fatale in cork platform sandals, mis- taking Woolworth’s plastic earrings for glam, mis-american, which and what sort? The kind who never introduces the top six buttons of  her dress to their holes, whose legs always cross when she sits on a table, who pats vanilla pancake over her rich, theatrical skin to lift dark hair, dark eyes, dark lips from the level of   East Los Common to revelation, and you’re all in my made-up fairy tale now, you & these suave muchachos, we’re all queasy in the where is it 40s  50s  60s 70s brown beautiful people pronouncing our perfect English, accorded zero-to-slivers of silver screen glory. I dare you, looking in from the tangled reel of the future, say out loud what I’m sitting on. Kitten-posed on a table top in Philippe’s Original Sandwich Shop, Los Angeles, ’76, next to the napkins and sugar shaker, I’m not afraid of the cleaning rag wiping me out of the frame, I take in the unedited numbers that tumble in one continuous shot from my Now to yours, and there’s a mestiza born every minute, I know where I sit: right on top of a pretty warm piece of sweet American pie.

The olla knocked with steam. The masa cooked. She said her eyes are china. The vowel switched on an aura, a shine that sheens the threshold. The vowel was spell: an i that might we, an i that echoes how we’re seen and see. Eye dentity. Ay Dios, she exclaimed surrounded by photos — niños and nietos — where I’m the only chino. How might I see through my family’s eyes — an owl’s eyes in ojos and one in its lid turned sideways 目 — I wondered with her at the table where we placed one olive — ojo negro — in each hoja, that worn folio for field corn’s field notes. What does that dark eye in the ear’s husk see?

My mother in her dress of red Viyella, teetering like a tiny idol on three-inch lacquered spikes, chignon dressed with little gold- throated bells that chirped more sweetly than the cricket, held her small, perfect hands to the torrent pouring from the slots. Money went like water through our fingers: was dammed by budgets, released, then abruptly gone at the China Starr, that grotto, festooned with red and vivid lanterns. Dark as the inside of a limousine, that saloon was where our lives, dulled by the copper barons, were cleansed, where we bade good-bye to the limp and stutter of bad goods, to the wince of the creaky rocker, to the vast grandmother dying in its clutch, to the dirty, wrinkled ones and tens pieced together to cover the week. Hello, we said, to the beautiful dark starlit bar and the luxury therein: the runcible spoons with their slippery cargo: the snarled silk of tinned bean sprout, the wrinkled flame of the dried lily. Hunched over our beakers of jasmine tea, we let the exotic rinse over us—impractical and non-negotiable.

Heraldry and all its lovely language; I chose my time there learning elsewhere, where else than land, Landscape, and how to live, in it is not like, nothing is like, the colors or the snow, it is not like pearl and it is not like the glitter of rainwater that darkens the bark against which the occasional bloom-laden branch might be seen shedding petals. No. Here is the past: One was once a boy and read books and could not pronounce the most engaging words and read in silence under blankets. Here one was not like oneself or was quiet and wrong and did not know the words nor how to ask, who to ask. Nor why. Boy’s books with flags. Everyone’s born to the language; anyone can say something. For instance, knight banneret, that’s what she called him, having no use for him after history, she thrust him into the operatic night: A woman’s hand rose above the surface of the lake and caught the glistering sword, and slowly descended into the boy’s refuge, his astonishment, so foreign, so little like home Knights Baronets— inferior barons formed by James I in 1611, the titles were sold and the funds went toward the plantation of Ulster. For this one would receive the right to a Field argent, a sinister hand couped the wrist gules. How foreign she was when God still cared. This is like a life, like a history built fluently, as if on the innocent, Boy-books and children’s crusades: The Reading (al-Korân) versus The Writing (Scripture). Isn’t it interesting, east / west, us / them? Everyone’s born to something. You should have feared the flick of my uncle’s thick wrist and the boat rides when he took me in those days, salt water in the bay and hard slaps against the hull, back from a day of horizons, of shrimp nets, I would lie on the bow feeling anger against my whole boy’s body as the engines uttered their single syllable for twenty miles back to land, a whine more terrible than laughter. The oral tradition, a voice hard and horrifying. One might have been a chevalier. Like someone from the books, was she beautiful? Was your mother lovely and a kind of landscape herself, like snow in dark woods, not like anything else?

Blindfold I should to Myra run, And swear to love her ever; Yet when the bandage was undone, Should only think her clever. With the full usage of my eyes, I Chloe should decide for; But when she talks, I her despise, Whom, dumb, I could have died for!

Days of the ferret, a sweet fever. Someone is walking through the sun With my tongue on a leash. Say “Ahhh.” Thank goodness, It’s not diabetes or the Bolivian Rot. This morning I am a cross Between lefthandedness And pointblank rage. The sun leaks like soft ice. The infection deepens . . . My eyes dissolve In a closet of heat. I become 4,000 Yellow flowers, chirruping. O the cliché of a trek into the bowels of China. O the night that zings like a harpsichord factory! O gorgeous sun limping in the frozen dusk. O candy wrappers stacked like bricks! Snow growls on my roof. The infection deepens . . . A day on fire Placing real rabbits Where my mouth should be. I am several kinds of tigers. I am a confectionary treat. This fever fills my sleeves With pearls of honey drops. Am I too strange to bleed? I’m behind myself With a knife and fork, Revolving on a skewer. I am wild with grief As greasy children Reach deep into my fever To scoop out their revenge In double-dips . . . Come off it, kids. Next week, I’ll be raining On the iron road to Malta And perfect health, melting Like sugar in the mouth of the Orinoco.

For my parents, Choi Inyeong & Nam Songeun in the first grade i asked my mother permission to go by frances at school. at seven years old, i already knew the exhaustion of hearing my name butchered by hammerhead tongues. already knew to let my salty gook name drag behind me in the sand, safely out of sight. in fourth grade i wanted to be a writer & worried about how to escape my surname — choi is nothing if not korean, if not garlic breath, if not seaweed & sesame & food stamps during the lean years — could i go by f.j.c.? could i be paper thin & raceless? dust jacket & coffee stain, boneless rumor smoldering behind the curtain & speaking through an ink-stained puppet? my father ran through all his possible rechristenings — ian, isaac, ivan — and we laughed at each one, knowing his accent would always give him away. you can hear the pride in my mother’s voice when she answers the phone this is grace, & it is some kind of strange grace she’s spun herself, some lightning made of chain mail. grace is not her pseudonym, though everyone in my family is a poet. these are the shields for the names we speak in the dark to remember our darkness. savage death rites we still practice in the new world. myths we whisper to each other to keep warm. my korean name is the star my mother cooks into the jjigae to follow home when i am lost, which is always in this gray country, this violent foster home whose streets are paved with shame, this factory yard riddled with bullies ready to steal your skin & sell it back to your mother for profit, land where they stuff our throats with soil & accuse us of gluttony when we learn to swallow it. i confess. i am greedy. i think i deserve to be seen for what i am: a boundless, burning wick. a minor chord. i confess: if someone has looked at my crooked spine and called it elmwood, i’ve accepted. if someone has loved me more for my gook name, for my saint name, for my good vocabulary & bad joints, i’ve welcomed them into this house. i’ve cooked them each a meal with a star singing at the bottom of the bowl, a secret ingredient to follow home when we are lost: sunflower oil, blood sausage, a name given by your dead grandfather who eventually forgot everything he’d touched. i promise: i’ll never stop stealing back what’s mine. i promise: i won’t forget again.