This Could Be a Poem or Just a Series of Scenes I’m Inviting You Into
This could be a poem about the Viet Nam war and about agent orange to signal to you that as a Vietnamese person I’ve done my research. That here is my act of refusal to belong or to have a white person know more than me about myself. This could be a poem about knowing where my people are from that involves the exact coordinates of their villages when the bombs started raining. And this could be a poem where raining comes with a number. And also for the toxins and the deformations and include the descriptors of the children born, the ones who keep coming. This could be a poem about the death and the dying. And this could be a poem where there is some resilience and some resistance and maybe some joy. This could be a poem about the Viet Nam war or about me.
About how often I am scared. Worried sick, gut twistingly so that our people aren’t ready and yet we are always preparing. This is a poem about how often I feel small and it is not my weight or my bones or even my body I am saying.
I am saying I am obligated to write something. And it could be a poem about the war.
And it could be
I worry.
I want to be held.
Take me home tonight.
And please hold my hand as I write.
Scene 1
My parents live down the street from an Amazon fulfillment center where the lot is full of cars while the grass dies. The traffic circles are obnoxious ornaments that 18 wheelers drag themselves around, followed by a not so small army of sprinter vans, all decked with Amazon logos. My dad’s friends ask him why he doesn’t work at the Amazon fulfillment center, it’s so close to your house, they tell him. That’s exactly the point. What a prime location.
Scene 2
My mother bought her friend a sewing machine a few months back and now we come over for dinner during thanksgiving. It takes us 45 minutes to get from my parents’ house to theirs. It’s worth the drive for a hot bowl of beef noodles. And it’s a necessary one because her friend is getting ready to go back to Viet Nam and her machine won’t run its lines right. If she wants to make money, the machine has to work. My mother sits down and says to her friend, “you can’t just look. You have to touch. And as soon as I did, I knew what was wrong.”
Scene 3
I have lived in more places than I can remember at this point. To my parents, I imagine the U.S. is all of those different places all at once. They do keep it moving, they take flight often. They are ready upon the buzzing of a new war or new condo or new warehouse to pack up and leave. Each time with fewer things to attach to them. The purple clock that had been a staple of my childhood is now gone. It had been on the wall for almost a decade so the shadow remains. I can almost still hear the birds chirping inside. The VHS tapes I grew up with that served as after school remedial Vietnamese language and culture classes had been tossed. And I kept thinking to myself over the years that I’d bring them with me. I thought too much, I still think too much and then everything changes and there are no more tapes for me to bring.
Scene 4
At one point we lived in a trailer parker where everything was crumbling, including the ceiling, as the airport behind us kept rising. There wasn’t a working stove in the house and my mother cooked with a propane grill and a deep fryer. My father was in and out of jail and they slept on the floor at the foot of my bed every night. My mother woke up every morning at 4am to start sewing. The room we slept in was technically an addition. Imagine your room as a screened-in front porch. My mother could look out of the window at me as she worked. Some mornings I would wake up from the buzzing of her machine, it felt like she was in a totally different room in a totally different house where maybe life didn’t exist this way.
This could be a poem about migration — about how far a people — my people — your people have possibly walked and ran or swam and sailed. This could be a poem that goes on for miles to match the list of names to bodies we find or lose at the border and in all of the in between. This could be a poem about the in between. I throw in the word liminal. It is a dressed up word for grief. And this could be a poem about my mourning, every mourning — what is the first thought you have when you wake up? I think about my grandmother, and the cost of migration — not in dollars and cents but in burden and duty and shame. The cost of being from somewhere and the cost of being from nowhere and the cost of daring to think I have anywhere to belong — that isn’t just drawn neatly on a map or printed a territory. The cost of audacity. The audacity to move freely.
This could be a poem about what I believe migrants teach the rest of the world: yes, we can go anywhere, everywhere, so long as we have each other.
This could be a poem about that truth which we are so scared of, which gives the U.S. military its defense budget and its GDP. This could be a poem of expense — of every kind, in every sense. Sometimes I forget about this poem, what it is, what it is about, what you were expecting — if anything. And if yes, you were, are you satisfied? I’m often not.
Because this is also a poem about me and my grandmother who I mentioned.
I saw her last in a dream — wearing all linen. We were walking by the open water near her small village of Tra Vinh. Where the boats have eyes. We didn’t speak much, I think we had ran out of words. It had been so long.
A few years before I had asked her to wait for me. And she said she would. I never made it back in time but I’ve written this poem.
And in its final testament, is a poem about a war and a home and the borders which slice, which migrants, which people, which grandmothers and granddaughters, dream of something beyond. Now we come walking, out of our sleep, wondering who will meet us. Who is ready for the words which seem to spill over and over?
This is a poem where I dredged up my desperation to match my conviction to match the most human of longings: we’d like to go where we want, to be with the people we love, and those people who love us.
*
At the 31-Minute, 53-Second Marker of Ken Burns Documentary Series Called “The Viet Nam War”…
A body moves across the field. One foot. Two foot. Pause. Three foot. Four foot. Pause. Heel over toe, toe over heel. But do it fast. Hair loose in the wind. This is the only chance she has, for this is the end and this is how it will end. Imagine being brave enough to carry the victory flag; to start running before it’s all over. To be the woman wearing white grazing the eye. I wonder about her, the woman in white. I wonder if she counts to herself the steps she must take. I wonder if she practices. I wonder if she stays up by the glow of the fire, tending to this plan to be free, tending to her dance yet to be seen. I wonder how hard she grips the flag, if it is heavy for her. I wonder what else her hands have touched, what she has done with her fingers, over and over and over again. I wonder how hard she squints her eyes or scrunches her brow. I wonder if her skin is naturally goldenrod brown, or if that is new life on her face. I wonder who she kisses. I wonder if she would kiss someone like me. I wonder if she kisses as if there was no war.
