papío is dead, and the world is worse, O we wanted more, hungry for justice papío is dead, and the world is worse, Pobre papío. Qué vale más wey, her life or tuyas? O we wanted more, hungry for justice Qué vale más wey, her life or tuyas? Pobre papío. He’s as dead as a fly on the windowsill O we wanted more, hungry for justice He’s as dead as a fly on the windowsill Pobre papío. He won’t come killing us no mo’ O we wanted more, hungry for justice He won’t come killing us no mo’ Pobre papío.
Julián David Bañuelos is a Mexican-American poet and translator from Lubbock, Tx. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. You can find his work at juliandavidbanuelos.com.
after Hokusai, “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” (1814)
First of all, I’m not a fisherman’s wife, so stop calling me that. I’m not even married.
Second, it wasn’t a dream. But I’ll get to that in a minute.
Hokusai-san didn’t name his image, but we call it “Tako to ama.”
Tako: octopus. Or octopuses, octopi—take your pick. We are less hung up on distinguishing between one and more than one of something.
Ama: diver. For thousands of years, we’ve dived, my mother and grandmothers and their mothers and grandmothers. On a good day, we return with buckets lined with oysters and abalone and sea cucumber, enough to exchange for rice and wine, maybe fabric, a packet of needles. On less good days, which happens more often as the world and its oceans grow tired, we return with only enough to feed ourselves.
What we really want, of course, are pearls.
That’s the dream: to steam or force open an oyster and find, resting on that quivering muscular bed, one—or more than one!—lustrous, nacreous, valuable sphere.
Today the women who dive for the entertainment of tourists wear modest white uniforms. In my day, we wore just headscarves and loincloths. Both of which I seem to have lost during this encounter. Tch tch.
Anyway, there’s nothing about marriage or fishermen. That’s some Western invention. Art “critics” who couldn’t read the text assumed the picture depicted a rape. Some even surmised that the two cephalopods were messing with a drowned woman. Then called it “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife.” I mean—what?
And like I said: It wasn’t a dream.
One morning, I swam away from my mother and aunts toward an oyster bed they forbade me from visiting because, they said, it was guarded by a giant octopus. And they were right. I’d collected ten lovely, promising specimens when suddenly the octopus was before me, crimson with fury, tentacles flaring. I launched myself up and away, only to surface on a roiling gray sea, quite alone, no sign of our boat or the other women. A squall had blown through while I was underwater. Even my bamboo bucket was gone.
Everyone assumes the octopus was male. Even Hokusai-san. He thought the smaller creature, the one that’s kissing me, was its son—which, you know, is a little weird. I think it might have been a different kind of mollusk altogether. Or they might have been a pair, these two, but not father and son. A mating pair, the smaller male and outsized female, exhibiting the remarkable sexual size dimorphism some species are known for—and perhaps a desire to spice up an old partnership?
I wasn’t thinking about any of this at the time, of course.
I had been treading water, hopelessly scanning the horizon, when the giant octopus appeared beside me and curled a tentacle around my hands. I surrendered my oysters and expected to die. But the creature pushed me gently toward shore, supporting me with its many arms when I grew tired, and helped me up onto a rocky beach, soft and slick with sea grass. As I lay there catching my breath, amazed to be alive, the octopus pried open my oysters one by one and slurped down the meat, sharing a few with its wingman. But first it held out each breached bivalve for me to see, as if showing me there were no pearls inside for me to regret.
Hokusai-san was a marvelous artist, but a bad erotica writer. He scrawled all this noisy, silly dialogue around us. I’m not going to translate for you, but—here, just listen: the octopus says, Are are, naka ga fukure agatte, yu no yō na ai-eki, nura nura doku doku, and I supposedly go, Korya dō suru no da… yō yō are are ii ii, mō mō dōshite, ee, zu zu zu…
Zu zu zu? Come on, Hokusai-san. Who sounds like that in a moment of esctasy? We’re supposed to be masters of onomatopoeia.
It’s all right. The artist can’t know everything. Here’s something else he didn’t know: How the octopus reached up inside me until I thought I might break open, then withdrew its miraculous tentacle, shooed the little guy away from my mouth, teased open my lips, and dropped a large, perfect pearl between my teeth. It tasted of the sea, it tasted of desire, and I could have sold it and lived in comfort the rest of my life. But I didn’t. I kept diving, and I kept the pearl, a reminder that the finer treasures lie within, and the finest lovers know how to bring out the best in you.
Naomi Williams is the author of Landfalls (FSG 2015), long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including One Story, Electric Literature, Zoetrope All-Story, The Rumpus, and LitHub. A five-time Pushcart nominee and one-time winner, Naomi has also been the recipient of residencies at Hedgebrook, Djerassi, Willapa Bay AiR, and VCCA. A biracial Japanese-American, she was born in Japan and spoke only Japanese until she was six years old. Today, she lives in Sacramento, California, and teaches with the low-residency MFA program at Ashland University.
Grandma Inang was nine going on ten when her mother Inay went completely blind. That first morning when Inay saw only darkness, Inang took her hand to use the outhouse. Along the bathroom’s bamboo slats, she washed Inay’s hands and face, and changed her sleepwear to a daytime saya and kamisa. Gently she talked to her mother and eased her into the dining table head chair. Patiently, she took her younger siblings’ hands and faces and washed them one by one, changed them to school clothes, and sat them at their respective places around her Inay’s table. Without missing a beat, she also doused her own hands and face and dressed not for school but for the labors ahead. In open kitchen pots, she warmed yesterday’s supper: leftovers stored in a wooden aparador afloat water bowls that served as “moats” to keep ants at bay overnight. At breakfast’s hurried end, Inang shooed her siblings to the local public school. Her young hands were forced to take over everything the only adult could no longer manage, though she could not manage a cry to wash away her young girl’s fears and sadness.
At the crack of dawn on the second morning, before her household awakened, Inang headed to market basket in hand to replenish the family’s supply of fresh food. She carried a kerchief bundled with only a few pesos and centavos her mother had given her. She knew when she counted she had to hard-bargain for rice, kangkong, guavas, fish and kalamansi. At the market, she learned to speak louder to convey her sincerity and get the goods she wanted to take home. Once home, she lit the fires and filled the pots with water to cook the rice and boil the sour sinigang soup, and doused the pan with lard to sauté a stew with garlic and onions.
Every morning thereafter, Inang made meals for her mother and younger siblings. When they were almost running out of pesos and centavos, she dashed out before dawn to stand in line with vendors waiting on the karetelas trotting in from the farm fields. She bought fruit and vegetables in bulk; hurried home to make breakfast; then rushed back to the marketplace to sell the remaining fruit and vegetables, at a profit. Her siblings headed to school, but Inang had to drop out at second grade.
When Inang’s mother became more and more sick, and her younger siblings outgrew school clothes, Inang took on more and more odd jobs. Eventually, she started her own business. She rented a karetela and journeyed to the big Divisoria wholesale market, bringing back merchandise she sold at her own stall at the local market.
At age nine going on 10, the day her Inay turned blind, my grandma Inang completely stopped being a child.
*
I was 11 on the day the endless rains let up,and I braved the floodwaters outside my wooden birth home in search of a red delicious apple. Mom could not keep anything down, vomiting relentlessly as if her insides could not stomach the foreign creature within. “Giving birth to another life is excruciating!” she’d say, a teacherly emphasis on that word, excruciating.
Shhhhh, I repeatedly whispered, as I caressed her emaciated hand and arms, giving her sips of water, measured ever so carefully as I gently lifted her head, and pressing cool compresses on her dripping forehead and cheeks. She was wretched, retching and moaning to no one in particular. Her frame had shriveled to skin and bone, her beauty-pageant face twisted in pain. I thought how she must have been pampered as an only child;first to be served at the table, dressed and tresses combed by a maid. Over hill and valley, through the raging river at times, Mom was escorted to and from school, excursions she endured during bad weather with the aid of a beautiful red parasol gifted her by my Lola. In Lola’s mind, and mine, red carried Mom through hard times.
I felt water on my knees as I exited the back gate of our house. The heavy rain had left in its wake tributaries that connected our San Juan street to the wet market. One unsteady wooden plank overlaid into another, over the floodwaters that flowed further out into the main street of N. Domingo, where young men hand-paddled boards to take townspeople from house to house, house to church, house to hospital.
Over the market entrance gutters, past squatting mothers and daughters tending baskets of sour kalamansi and devil-hot sili, beyond the makeshift bamboo stands heaped with sineguelas and guayabano, eggplant and cabbages, my slippery rubber slippers navigated the watery labyrinth of tiled stalls, dripping chopped goat and pig and gutted river fish at the market’s deep interior. There, on an elevated platform, stood the well-lit international store, its wooden shelves stocked with corned beef and spam, by-the-ganta white rice hand-cleaned of errant brown husks, red grapes and apples. I tucked in my belly upon ascending, very much in need of a taste of hope.
Shhhhh, I repeatedly whispered, thinking of my mother’s dark fight; alone without me at her side.
Back in our small kitchen, I unpeeled the apple’s delicate wrap and pressed it to my nose to inhale its richness. Upstairs was Dad in bed, in his usual drunken stupor. My Inang was summoned away to care for another grandchild. Each day I had turned instead to the stony likeness of the Virgin Mary whose once-blue cape draped ashen like Mom’s face. I knelt and laid my questioning heart at her immaculate feet. Why would my mother with child be suffering so? Hail Mary full of grace. Knife on plate I carefully dissected the precious fruit, scooped out the seeds and proceeded with my fractions—one quarter, one eighth, one sixteenth—estimating my ward’s mouthfuls. I decided to leave the skin. Mom loves red.
She pushed and screamed, pushed and screamed, for hours long after a sudden gush of water soaked the banig mat. I recalled Mom telling me how shehad pushed and screamed, pushed and screamed until I had cut through her, and she dropped the bloody mass of me into a pail. Her eyes closed, shaking uncontrollably, I held my mother until the midwife arrived to clip the umbilical cord. No one, not even Mom, has told me who cuddled me upon arrival. But at 11, I felt alone to catch the emptiness of my mother’s stillborn child.
*
When my daughter was 11 going on 12, she drowned in daily crying fits.
Shhhhh. I quietly held on to her, closely to my chest.
She was sad because she had to miss a midtown concert with her middle-school friends. She was sad because she had to say no to impromptu pizza after school. Because she dreaded the longer commute from the Upper West Side to our new home. Because she had none of her old friends to talk to. Because her New York City home became the less desirable outer borough of Queens. Because her mother had abruptly decided to pack up and leave the family’s Manhattan apartment, and separate from her father.
Shhhhh, I whispered, throughout her each day, my focus on her dark fight within.
Only many years of silence later would my daughter share how worried she was. For me. For her mother. And how hard she had tried to gather strength. To stop the fuzzy feeling of helplessness; at being unable to prevent my imminent collapse from deep pain.
Shhhhh. Each night, each day I reach out to my children—to my daughter and to her young daughter—on FaceTime, by phone, holding on to them. Tightly. To be my children’s anchor. To be each other’s anchor.
Rosario Rosario carves (her)stories shaped by swerves of uprooting and second chances, which move the historically-suppressed female experience towards a magically sanctioned reality of empowerment—a creative quest necessitating exploration and expansion of storytelling voices to bridge meaning across the author’s culturally lived experiences as an American immigrant spiritually nurtured and influenced by her Filipino ancestral teachings. Rosario is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and Goddard College (MFA, Creative Writing), and Founder of Writing on Water (WoW), an international creative cultural travel company. Rosario Rosario resides on Munsee Lenape land, also known as New York City.
At the flash of the red light, Baohan cut the engine short, firing the tiny black sports car into the crosswalk.
“Ta ma de,” he sighed, cursing the wait, and let a mouthful of smoke dissolve against the tinted windows. He turned to Yueming in the passenger seat, picking up as if they were mid-conversation.
“And what do you do after you kidnap them?” he asked. “Force them to work in your brothel and wait on you hand and foot?”
Yueming plucked a cigarette from her purse and lit up too. From the backseat, I stole glances at her in the rearview mirror. Her black hair, parted slightly, framed a slim oval face, faint age marks tastefully touched with makeup. She clenched the cigarette with her lips as though she was close to biting clean through.
“I don’t run a brothel,” Yueming said, trying to keep a level tone. She had her arms folded neatly over her pleated pants but wore her distaste clearly on her face.
“Not a traditional brothel,” Baohan countered, “not one of those pleasure dens for men. No, this is different. You find them online, chatrooms mostly, and then—.” He paused and leaned in close to Yueming. His belly butted up against the steering wheel, his gold watch cinched tight against his wrist. “Your friend, he— he doesn’t know yet, does he?”
The end of Yueming’s cigarette smoldered in the mirror.
“Know what?” I asked, guileless, craning my neck from the backseat.
“Poor thing,” Baohan mouthed in between puffs. And then to Yueming: “So when were you going to tell him?”
We arrived at a Thai restaurant in Wangjing. It was late, but on the drive over, I could still make out our surroundings. Identical blocks of red high-rise apartment buildings. Town square obscured by pollution. A hotel that looked like a melting ice cream sundae. Wangjing contained the characters “expectant” and “capital,” and I imagined it meant something superlative, like “capital of hope.”
It was out past the fourth ring road, farther than I’d ever been in Beijing, but that wasn’t too surprising. I was new to the city and, aside from speaking the language, didn’t know a thing.
Yueming was a colleague. We worked together at a poverty alleviation organization that provided microloans to people who lacked access to financial services. Nearly all our clients were women: farmers, small business owners, entrepreneurs. Conventional wisdom went that women were far more credible lenders than men. You couldn’t trust a man not to gamble away any windfall, but a woman would know how to budget, how to make monthly interest payments, how to pull her family out of poverty.
Yueming handled accounts and collections. I wrote press releases in English to attract foreign investment. We sat in neighboring cubicles, and at noon, we joined most of the rest of our colleagues in a series of light exercises meant to aid digestion. After work one day, she invited me out for dinner with Baohan. She described him as an old friend who was in town visiting his family in Beijing.
“A classmate?” I asked.
“Cha bu duo,” she said, and asked me where they could pick me up. Aside from my two roommates from Australia, I barely knew a soul. I figured Yueming must have known this and felt sorry for me—this American far from home—and invited me to come along, too.
When we sat down at the restaurant to order, Yueming announced that she’d recently given up eating sentient beings.
“I’m trying to be a better Buddhist,” she said.
“Do you eat fish?” Baohan asked.
“Didn’t you hear what I just said?”
“Well does your friend eat fish?” That was the way he posed every question to me: “your friend” this or “your friend” that. He never addressed me directly. Yueming nodded, and Baohan called over the waitress.
“And two orders of curry shrimp,” he boomed, his pudgy cheeks curdling to reveal a grin. His gaze settled back on the table. “After all your transgressions, it’ll take more than being a vegetarian to earn your forgiveness.”
At the front of the restaurant was a small stage, and every evening a group of Thai women in silk sarongs danced for the crowd. The music was upbeat, their movements daring and lively, but their faces looked drained of emotion. After the first song, they split up and cased the restaurant, recruiting other women to come up and join them. They spotted Yueming right away.
“I tried to warn her,” Baohan muttered wryly, as the other women guided her up the stairs, though he’d never mentioned a thing. Yueming followed along with the steps, catching herself through the chorus, repeated the movements as best she could. It seemed clear that, had it been up to her, she wouldn’t have been up there. But she also looked like she was trying, that she didn’t want to let the other women down, as if they were the ones who had put her up to this task and she was doing them a favor by seeing it through.
Baohan sat smoking a cigarette, his eyes transfixed on the raised platform. I imagined the managers of the restaurant, the men who paid the dancers’ salaries, pulling up a stool and doing the same. How many women had Baohan brought here just so he could watch them dance?
The waitress brought the dishes to the table all at once: scallops in cream sauce, raw beef and wasabi, tom yum soup, pork fried rice. When Yueming got back to her seat, there was a small mound of vegetables that Baohan had scooped onto her plate, as if he was feeding a teething child. After a few bites, he started up again.
“How much does your friend know about you?” he asked.
“Please,” Yueming said, her eyes staring into the clear broth of her soup.
“Does he know why you invited him here?”
“We’re having dinner and—”
“This is how it starts,” he said, “what she does with every new guy she meets.” He glanced over at me for the first time. I couldn’t tell what he was after, but I saw Yueming’s expression tense. “A woman like that will never get married,” he continued, nearly rising to his feet, “and no man will have her outright, so she—”
“Stop!”
“So she sweettalks them, abducts them into her filthy brothel, and then forces them to fuck her.” He said it with so much conviction that I had no reason to believe it wasn’t true. For a moment everything was still. And then, from his mouth spewed a laugh so deep and odious that it nearly ruptured the table. I looked over at Yueming, her eyes red and puffy, and quieted my dismay in the food.
It wasn’t until later that I learned he and Yueming had met online. They corresponded over email for months before even speaking on the phone. I tried to imagine their first real life encounter: she flying halfway across the country to Fujian to see him, he recognizing her from the dog-eared photo he’d exhausted on all his friends. Three years of nervous anticipation. And then: the disappointment he felt at being turned down, the resentment he’d harbored ever since.
Slowly, Baohan regained his composure. “Does your friend want to go to karaoke?” he asked.
“My friend can do what he wants,” Yueming said, incensed. “I’m going home.”
The car ride back was silent, save for the occasional sound of screeching tires. Now and then, a horn would ring out from behind us as we cut off another driver. I didn’t know whether to will us home faster or hope to burn up in a wreck. We got to Yueming’s apartment first, a tall high-rise on the outskirts of the city and opposite a small playground. Baohan put a hand on her thigh.
“I’m just concerned,” he said in a stern voice. “You have so many men in your life right now, so for your own safety—”
“Keep driving like that and you’ll get in another accident,” she told him before getting out and slamming the door. Only then did it occur to me that this wasn’t the first time Yueming had seen Baohan since meeting him in-person. That, perhaps, she might have had her own reasons for inviting me to dinner. But by then it was too late. It was just Baohan and me, and the car slowly filling with smoke.
Even now, I don’t know why I never said anything. I left the job in microfinance and Beijing not long after that. The premise no longer spoke to me in the same way. How many people were truly breaking the cycle of poverty? And what did that even mean? Many of the same clients kept borrowing for years, and it seemed like a better life was always frustratingly out of reach.
I asked Yueming before I left about the women that she collected loans from.
“How many pay their loans back on time?”
“Nearly all of them.” It seemed impractical to me just how many of their businesses could remain profitable.
“Don’t you ever find that strange?” I asked, but Yueming shook her head.
“They want to believe in change,” she said. “They’ll do whatever it takes. Even if it kills them.”
I wondered how many of those women had to weather bad harvests, or borrow from loan sharks, or had to turn away their husbands when they came home, drunk, asking for money. That they might routinely have to talk down threats or put up with violence. That some knew they would not be better for it. And yet, for weeks and months they would persist, hoping that, this time, it might be different.
Daniel Tam-Claiborne is a multiracial essayist, multimedia producer, and author of the short story collection What Never Leaves. His writing has appeared in Catapult, Literary Hub, Off Assignment, The Rumpus, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere. A 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, he has also received support from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Kundiman, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and others. Daniel holds degrees from Oberlin College, Yale University, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and his debut novel-in-progress, Transplants, was a finalist for the 2023 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.
We lay recycled cardboard on the dirt of our little plots of land, a cheap way to block weeds from growing, organic, if the cardboard doesn’t have anything poisonous hidden in its folds, ready to kill the life we are growing. We argue over dry taro, ulu, sweet potatoes. Our need for fresh produce of our own, a constant, fighting worms, snails, blights, diseases, brought from foreign lands. We till the dirt, red and fertile from ancient lava flows. We discuss growing wet taro for poi but we know that will take more water than we can afford, rain caught and stored, not enough to flood even one crop. We gnaw fingernails and broken skin, our anxiety at surviving on our homeland, our ʻāina, a struggle. We share our ebts to gather groceries and necessities brought on shipping containers, grateful we even have land to work even if we can’t earn enough money working at the resorts, restaurants, construction sites to pay for a single bedroom apartment, to keep a roof over our head, forcing us to camp next to the cardboard we pulled from dumpsters behind the Wal-Mart.
Melissa Llanes Brownlee (she/her), a native Hawaiian writer, living in Japan, has work published or forthcoming in The Rumpus, Fractured Lit, Flash Frog, Gigantic Sequins, Cream City Review, Indiana Review, and Craft. She is in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf Top 50. Read Hard Skin from Juventud Press and Kahi and Lua from Alien Buddha. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story at melissallanesbrownlee.com.
On returning to that lonely mountain, you will again find moss so green and so vibrant you would think it were made by a god. The moss is provided for by a bit of sun that returns day after day to penetrate the forest canopy and somehow sustain this shade of green that at first you recognize, but at second glance is otherworldly. Not a soul up on that mountain, none besides you to witness this miracle and yet the faint sound of a human voice endures, all the way up there.
鹿砦
空山不見人 但聞人語響 返景入深林 復照青苔上
Aaron Fai / 費頌倫 is a graduate of the creative writing programs at UCLA, UC Davis, and the University of Oregon, and he serves as associate editor of Grand Journal.
Wang Wei was a Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty, and this poem was the subject of Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei by Eliot Weinberger.
My tongue is geographic now. Segmented and floating with dark crevices and divides between floating islands coated lightly with white. It has not returned to its prior state, of smoother pinkness. Permanently altered during my pregnancy. I avoid staring too much at it, like the ridges on the sides of my belly that will forever have tiger stripes of skin that had once gotten almost purple with irritation at the stretch they were forced to perform, wrinkled and paler than the skin next to it. My body and mind, the same yet forever altered.
When my daughter was a year and a half, her tongue pulled her forward. Her need for texture and taste overwhelmed her, driving her to her goals.
At that age, there was no filter. When she saw something, thought something, she had to do it. No ego to the id.
She was mobile, alternating between crawling and toppling around like a drunken sailor with her attempts to stand up and propel. Unlike her twin brother, who cautiously stood, searching for his center of gravity, then slowly lowering himself back to the ground; she would instead hoist herself up and fling herself forward, taking two or three steps, ending in a crash to the ground. This normally ended with a scream of frustration at the inefficiency of the world.
I will always remember the one day when her eyes fixated. She wanted something badly. Walking was out, it was too slow. Back to the crawl she went, which she could do with ferocious speed. She zipped across the floor. Glancing down, I noticed her determination, but her goal had not dawned on me. Across the room from her, I watched her and was dumbstruck when I realized her goal.
Finding her father’s shoes across the room, her eyes focused, her tongue dripping with desire. She reached it, her tiny fingers grasping onto something that she yanked with determination. A few yanks and it was off and in her mouth. Chewing with satisfaction, like a truck driver with beef jerky. My brain raced like turkeys running in a circle of panic, trying to understand what had happened.
Then, I shouted to my husband, “Oh good lord. Can you pull that out of her mouth, it’s a dried worm.”
We all sat watching her in wonder and horror. She seemed so pleased with herself. A smacking sound as she chomped away at it.
Before any of us could reach her, the worm was long gone.
The tongue wants what it wants.
*
My third date with my husband was at a ribs place. I neatly polished off a pile of ribs, managing not to get any sauce on me, each bone, white and smooth with no trace of meat. They laid in a neat pyramid next to his, that were mildly bitten, meat all over them.
“My father would be impressed by how clean your bones are,” he said. His father grew up in Texas during the Great Depression and gave him a lot of crap for not cleaning his bones enough. A unique bridge between the divide of my side, a child of Chinese immigrants and his with a multi-generational white Texan.
His father and I agreed, the meat right next to the bone had the most flavor.
Throughout my life, my mom and I would sit on the couch watching Chinese soap operas while gnawing away at marinated duck wings and chicken feet. Clean bones would pile up on a plate in front of us, as we chewed at the gristle on each end. It was a lot of effort for little content, but exceptionally satisfying.
My grandmother would often poach chicken, dunking it in boiling water and plunging it into cold, to get that perfect texture. Armed with a cleaver and no regard for where the bones were in the chicken, she could be heard all through the house, whacking away at it, until it laid in pieces perfect to be picked up by chopsticks.
Once in high school, a blond-haired girl said to me with disdain, “Oh, I don’t eat any meat with bones in it.”
I remember thinking, if you grew up in my house, you would have starved.
The horror in my teenage years of liking something that others did not was palpable. The comments that meat in Chinese food was cut small so you couldn’t identify the source. The judgement was vivid, painful, insidious. The association of poverty and race all mixed together. A mass of complex emotions and judgment formed around the deeply embedded parts of myself that were taught to hate myself, and it would take decades to untwine.
In response, I learned how to be very presentable. Depending on your generational reference, Pygmallion’d, My Fair Lady’d, Pretty Woman’d myself. Thank goodness the newest generation seems to be breaking from this. I learned how to cut meat flawlessly off a bone without ever having to lift it. For proper etiquette, I learned what fork to use, how to sit properly, how to appear perfectly. Though honestly it always left me feeling uncomfortable, a bit out of place, regardless of how good I could pull it off. It took much later in life to learn to embrace the part of me that was lost in the process. To return to the part of me that found such joy and happiness in cleaning a bone thoroughly while sitting next to my mom. The shift is a continual process, but on good days, it leaves me feeling more comfortable anywhere I am, as who I am, not trying to contort myself into meeting someone else’s expectation.
*
When my daughter was two, shortly after she had a taste of worm, she would glare at me as I ate ribs or drumsticks in front of her. Her eyes would get that same glint of determination she had when she went after that worm.
Finally, relenting, I searched out a rib that had no end cap and handed it to her. She quickly and efficiently polished the entire thing off, leaving a perfectly clean bone. Her brother was wholly uninterested, more content to keep chewing on bread and fruit.
My daughter now sits with me, as we watch tv, eating marinated duck wings that I acquired from the Chinese grocery store. Our pile of bones in front of us.
*
I asked my dentist about my tongue. She said it is called “geographic tongue” and there isn’t much that can be done about it. Its fissures permanently in place, its outward appearance forever changed. It has not affected my ability to taste. She asked me if it bothers me and I don’t know how to answer. It’s different. Less aesthetically attractive to some, it feels uniquely mine. It feels earned. A post pregnancy complication, but also a badge of honor. Like eating the bones with my mother and daughter, it is mine in a way that nothing else is. The shift is deep and internal, yet also shallow and external. The future shines a light where all these things are integrated.
Alice Fong-Yi Liu is a Chinese-American author whose writing focuses on identity, growing up with immigrant parents, parenting, caretaking, and a career in cybersecurity. Her writing explores vulnerability, trauma, and healing, often through food, family, and technology. alice-liu.com.
昔々、or in other words, once upon a time, or something like that, there was a young boy. He lived not on a farm, but also not too far from many farms, mostly corn. The thing about corn is that unlike, for example, Shibuya Crossing, corn stays dark and quiet at night, making the details of various celestial bodies much harder to ignore. On some nights, the boy looked up and saw a friendly semicircle, or even a smiling crescent. On other nights, the boy looked up and saw himself looking back, which disturbed him greatly. You see, on those nights, a round looking-glass, probably much like those that were revered in ancient times, would amble across this corner of the cosmos, causing the boy to be afflicted with a gruesome transformation that exposed his true nature. As any casual viewer of the reflection in the sky on those nights will tell you, sometimes a man could be seen more clearly, while other times, a rabbit prevailed. Yet, as those who know the true story will tell you, the physical form back on Earth was usually somewhere in between. Unfortunately, corn is extremely dangerous for rabbits to consume, due to both its nutritional content and its physical shape. So, when the boy looked in the mirror in the moon for a man, but instead some sort of half rabbit thing looked back, he was very disappointed. After some time, the boy found himself too distracted by earthly obligations to spend so much time gazing at the sky, and whenever he did catch a moment to look up, he rarely saw much more than craters. Eventually, he made his peace with all the corn around him that he couldn’t eat when some new friends gave him some nice big radishes and he even learned how to prepare a few dishes using them. But every now and then, on particularly clear nights, the two heavenly figures return to peer down on the boy, and the Were-Rabbit resurfaces. He’s much friendlier now, but still that same blended being who had trouble eating corn. おしまい、or in other words, the end, or something like that.
Noah Kawaguchi is a musician, writer, and researcher. Born in Tennessee and raised in Ohio, he is a mixed Shin-Nisei Japanese American. He holds a Bachelor of Music degree from Oberlin Conservatory, where he majored in Jazz Studies and minored in East Asian Studies. He is currently an MA student in Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. Recent work, up-to-date information, and social media links are available at noahkawaguchi.com. Photo by Mido Lee, art by Noah Kawaguchi.
One new comment on, “what are you thinking? are you well? 3 hr lofi beats to study/relax to”
Don’t worry, you are still sixteen years old. Even if life has escorted you well beyond your college years, don’t worry, in your body you are still sixteen. Yes, you can still love life. Or: are able to. Your hand curls around an ambition in the shape of a Keroppi gel pen. And your gaze admires your desk set-up: covered in manga-style sketches and cheap Hello Kitty accessories, it is so far untainted by responsibility. You are bad at studying. You are good at dreaming. Out of Keroppi flows out an incredible number of adjectives — daunting, towering, loud, orgasmic, titillating. You want to share this list with your friends, giggling. No one has ever seen this group of words together, in this order, before. You are the first one. In the comments section of this lo-fi playlist, someone is writing a story. Something encouraging, something that anyone might read and feel heartened by, as chill beats pluck a hum inside their calm. Something like, you are in a safe place, not everything is about the here and now, sometimes it is about what we can’t yet see. Mom knocks on your door; you ignore her because you are in a fight with her. Arguments about college, about those insufferably gilded Ivies, or why can’t I just go to state school, I don’t have the grades. I am not some holy foundation of genius, I am barely holy. I am barely keeping it together. When I’m in class I want to cry. I don’t know what’s happening on the board. The teacher’s voice is a drone, so I try my best to discreetly look out the window and fly, fly away. I am good at dreaming. I am sixteen, and yet I cannot fathom what it would be like to be eighteen. Already I am stressed about money. Will I be able to support myself, I have no skills, I was never good at anything. How does one even go about finding a job, maintaining a job. There are already countless movies and TV shows about how everyone hates their job, so how will you survive one. It’ll be about ten years before someone lets you in on the secret that we don’tlive to work, and in retrospect, you think it’s a little sad how early on you were inducted into the frantic lies of endless labor. Mom knocks on your door, says, “Is it okay to come in?” At least she asks. You grumble, sure, and the portal squeaks open. In that shadowed rectangle Mom is the only thing with a face. Her eyes are thin and weary. She doesn’t smile. But she does say, “Little one, I did everything wrong.” Ah, the impossible words. So this is a dream. You were always good at dreaming. She continues, “I did everything the wrong way, I realize this now. You don’t deserve this. One day you will be free. From me, binding my fate to yours, from burdening you before your birth. I didn’t know any better. I came from somewhere else, I came with very little—” Two hundred dollars and the clothes on your back, you interrupt, for how many times have you heard this story— “Yes, that, and my motorcycle too, my Black Betty, I named it after an American song I had only heard once, because I thought it would make me more American. But this country was cruel to me and carved its scars into my back. Its rage invaded me until I mistook it for myself. So instead of inventing no, I came up with new weapons for my rancor. My tongue into a whip. My fear into a razorblade. My artillery became ingenious in their poisons, but at what cost. You know the cost. Better than anyone. You share the shape of my scars, born of that burrowing, parasitic anger that had transformed me beyond your recognition. By my own hand, I fractured your innocence. Your vulnerability. Your willingness to open doors, especially in my direction. Years from now, when our bodies turn frail, the ensuing silence between us stretches for so long it becomes its own river. So I must tell you what I know, while you’re here, while I still can. Little one, I think one day you will be free. You have always been good at dreaming. Your life, though difficult, will not hinder you the way it has hindered me. Because of simply who you are. The word I know for freedom is 自由, made up of the words for ‘self’ and ‘reason.’ Isn’t that beautiful. You, my child, are the only thing in my life that’s ever determined its own truth. And, one day, when you’ve finally broken that ugly curse I myself laid across your back, you will come to love life, truly, openly, without compunction, and without conditions.”
You stand up. Keroppi rolls to the floor, beaming his happy grin in all directions. He, too, is dreaming of a free life. Reaching forward, you take your mother’s hand, which is so much smaller than you remember. Don’t worry, Mom, you tell her, I am doing okay now. I’m really doing okay. I am thinking of the future where we can be together again and laugh. I am thinking of brightness, and how to get you free too. My mom’s smile is a rarity, but it’s hers. It robs the room of all remaining shadow, and you are still sixteen years old in your body, you still have so much life to love.
jonah wu is a queer, non-binary Chinese American writer and filmmaker currently residing in Los Angeles, CA. Their work can be found in Longleaf Review, beestung, Jellyfish Review, Bright Wall/Dark Room, The Seventh Wave, smoke and mold, and the Los Suelos anthology. They are a three-time Pushcart nominee and winner of Brave New Weird: The Best New Weird Horror of 2022. You can follow them on Twitter or Instagram @rabblerouses.
God made funeral homes so that we could get together. Parlor rooms filled with us, the friends, the family, the foes, and the strangers alike, elbow to elbow, so that if one sneezed from the door, the droplets could land like ricocheting rubber bullets onto a window several feet away on someone’s sleeve. When God made Paradise, no one knew there’d be funeral homes. “The dead gotta live somewhere,” Amah said while smoking a rolled-up cigarette made of dried tobacco leaves on top of Angkong’s coffin and staring at his face made strangely alive with make-up. Amah’s black teeth showed through her smile and said, “I’m a widow now.” Uncle Chin said nothing but picked at his nose with his pinkie finger, fishing for a booger then he spat at the spittoon next to him and then he suddenly lifted his left bum cheek and broke wind. Amah looked at Uncle Chin and yelled, “You coulda done that away from me!” Uncle Chin just smiled and said, “Go on and finish the story, Ma.” Uncle Chin licked his long incisor teeth with his tongue.
The wake just started, and we were all there because we were hungry and full of our tears. So Amah took a paring knife and an imported apple while the sun through the window panes beat down on her brow, the sweat dripping down from her neck to the hollow between her breasts. She pared the skin off the red fruit, discarding the peel on the floor and the flies came promptly to eat. Amah sliced the white apple flesh section by section, ignoring the sun that shone through the windowpane, ignoring the drip of sweat between her breasts, ignoring the rest of us while our saliva dripped from our mouths. “I’m gonna tell you about my funeral,” she said while Uncle Chin scratched behind his ear. He tried to grab an apple slice, but Amah was too fast and swallowed all the cut pieces whole. “Not yet,” Amah said. Uncle Chin, agitated, rubbed his belly. We all followed suit and rubbed our bellies too.
“There will be a casket and in that casket a body. Around that casket will be lined with white and red flowers because I will have reached eighty by then.”
Uncle Chin’s long tooth started growing, each strand of his bushy eyebrows twitching.
“Long white candles and sandalwood incense will burn. From wall-to-wall, a paper compound all for me! Paper houses and paper cars and paper servants. Gold-covered Hell money with red cinnabar-paste stamps. A white ceramic bowl will be filled with burned paper so I can live a good life in the other side!”
Uncle Chin’s hairs started growing, the roots getting thicker and coarser from a cat’s whisker to a horse’s tail.
“The room will be lined with gladiola flower bouquets and garlands of marigold and gardenias and sampaguitas and jasmine.”
Uncle Chin’s eyes changed colors, almost amber-yellow with slits for irises.
“People will be sitting on folding chairs; the air conditioners will be blasting so high they won’t need paper fans to cool themselves.”
Uncle Chin’s voice changed and a low growl emitted from his throat.
“White walls.”
The walls of the funeral home, as if hearing themselves called forth, came into being. In a blink, twenty years passed. Amah’s white skin, devoid of blood, looked supple from the thick smears of light foundation the funeral director laid on it. Her white hair was fine like the silkiest of silks. She smelled faintly of chloroform and perfume. She wore a red qipao that she looked like an apple. The qipao hid the incisions in her body from years of surgeries and the last post-mortem examination, the autopsy, to determine whether seeds grew into forests in her body from too much sun, too much cold, too much smoke, too much life after death.
The monks came, said sutras over her small body. The priest came and read from the Bible, a verse from Corinthians, a verse from Psalms.
It was as Amah said – the white-walled room was filled from ceiling to floor with flowers and incense and wall-to-wall paper houses and hell money to burn and accompany her in the afterlife.
We turned to Uncle Chin who had never worn a suit and tie before, not even at Angkong’s funeral. All the hair fell off from his skin he even had no eyebrows left. He cried over Amah’s body. All of us, the mourners, were around him, elbow-to-elbow, sneezing and crying, our teeth as long as Uncle Chin’s ready to devour the dead.
Cherry Lou Sy is playwright & writer originally from the Philippines of Chinese & Filipino heritage. She is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. A graduate of NYU’s Gallatin School for her BA & the MA English Lit & MFA Playwriting program at Brooklyn College where she is also an Adjunct Lecturer. Her debut novel LOVE CAN’T FEED YOU about a fractured immigrant family is coming out in Fall ’24 published by Dutton Press. She is an alum of Tin House & VONA. She is published or will be published by JMWW, HAD, Cheap Pop, Hybrid Harpy, Shenandoah, and Massachusetts Review.
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