Adrienne Su

Once, I tried to banish them all from my writing. This was America, after all, where everyone’s at liberty To remake her person, her place, or her poetry, And I lived in a town a long way from everything— Where discussions of “diversity” Centered mainly on sexuality. My policy, born of exhaustion with talk about race And the quintessentially American wish for antecedents, Eliminated most of my family, starting with the grandparents, Two of whom stayed Chinese to their final days, Two of whom were all but defined by their expertise On the food of the country I was trying to excise. It canceled out the expensive center Of an intense undergraduate curriculum And excluded the only foreign language I could talk in. It wiped out my parents’ earliest years And converted them to 1950s Georgians Who’d always attended church and school, like anyone. My father had never paused at two water fountains And asked a white man which he should drink from, And never told his children what the answer had been. My mother had never arranged a migration, Solo at seventeen, from Taipei to wherever, But had simply appeared in Gainesville out of ether, And nothing about their original languages Had brought them together. Their children Had never needed to explain to anyone Why distinctness and mystery were not advantages When they were not optional, and never wondered If particular features had caused particular failures. For months I couldn’t write anything decent Because banned information kept trying to enter Like bungled idioms in the speech of a foreigner. I was my own totalitarian government, An HMO that wouldn’t pay for a specialist, And I was the dissident or patient who perished. The hope was to transcend the profanity of being Through the dissolution of description and story, Which I thought might turn out to be secondary To a semi-mystical state of unseeing, But everywhere I went there was circumstance, All of it strangely tainted by my very presence.

I never had to make one, no sickening weeks by ocean, no waiting for the aerogrammes that gradually ceased to come. Spent the babysitting money on novels, shoes, and movies, yet the neighborhood stayed empty. It had nothing to do with a journey not undertaken, not with dialect, nor with a land that waited to be rediscovered, then rejected. As acid rain collected above the suburban hills, I tried to imagine being nothing, tried to be able to claim, “I have no culture,” and be believed. Yet the land occupies the person even as the semblance of freedom invites a kind of recklessness. Tradition, unobserved, unasked, hangs on tight; ancestors roam into reverie, interfering at the most awkward moments, first flirtations, in doorways and dressing rooms— But of course. Here in America, no one escapes. In the end, each traveler returns to the town where, everyone knew, she hadn’t even been born.

It is too much a part of things, even though the source is not within. In small American cities with and without universities, it keeps a constant presence in the Confucian sense, the inner arriving to match the outer, spirit not separate from matter (the latter illusion left by the missions the people have made such fine use of). There are times when you have to pretend to embrace an idea or befriend your adversaries. If constantly misinterpreted, use the mystery as currency. You have to start somewhere. Be wise: depart from where they’ve already put you. A country itself can’t betray you.

Dropping napkins, corks, and non-compostables into the trash, I see that friends have mistaken my everyday chopsticks for disposables, helpfully discarding them alongside inedibles: pork bones, shrimp shells, bitter melon. Among napkins and corks, they do look compostable: off-white, wooden, warped from continual washing — no lacquer, no ornament. But anyone who thinks these chopsticks are disposable doesn’t live with chopsticks in the comfortable way of a favorite robe, oversized, a bit broken. Thin paper napkins, plastic forks, and non-compostable takeout boxes constitute the chopstick’s natural habitat to many I hold dear. With family or alone, I’ll maintain that chopsticks aren’t disposable, but if I can make peace with the loss of utensils when breaking bao with guests, I’ll be one of them, not digging in the napkins and corks. Compostable chopsticks are the answer: everyday and disposable.

The trouble was not about finding acceptance. Acceptance was available in the depths of the mind And among like people. The trouble was the look into the canyon Which had come a long time earlier And spent many years being forgotten. The fine garments and rows of strong shoes, The pantry stocked with good grains and butter— Everything could be earned by producing right answers. Answers were important, the canyon said, But the answers were not the solution. A glimpse into the future had shown the prairie On which houses stood sturdily. The earth was moist and generous, the sunlight benevolent. The homesteaders dreamed up palaces and descendants, And the animals slept soundly as stones. It was a hard-earned heaven, the self-making Of travelers, and often, out on the plains, Mirages rose of waterfalls, moose, and rows of fresh-plowed soil, But nobody stopped to drink the false water. Real water being plentiful, they were not thirsty. A few made their fortunes from native beauty, Others from native strength, but most from knowledge, As uncertainties in science could be written off to faith. Faith was religious and ordinary life physical, And spiritual was a song that had not yet arrived.