My father’s side dials from landlines:
when you are on our end of the Pacific,
get on a train and come to New York
and in summer I fly across the ocean
like a star, stealthy and mute.
Hurricane Henri is at the window,
tropical depression setting in from the east.
My grandmother has A/C but keeps the apartment warm,
slouches on the couch until she stares at the ceiling.
She handles the heat, a Californian three generations in,
and begins to tell me history. In San Francisco
her grandfather was a Chinatown bigshot
hardcore Catholic convert in silk robe
and her grandmother had tiny bound feet,
spent days in lounge chairs unable to walk.
But you want a true immigrant story: take her husband
village-born, did the boat, did Ellis Island, came to Queens.
He was eighteen and green in Europe,
Chinese laundry boy cutting wires in the German minefields,
ready for Japan when Truman ordered the bomb.
As a child, he was afraid of tunnels in basements
where he delivered fresh clothes.
My grandmother has the best memory of anyone I know
besides my father. At thirteen, I couldn’t remember the difference
between Normandy and the Ardennes or the dates of the Bulge.
In my grandfather’s last days, he forgot everything.
I am meeting with five strangers in Koreatown on 35th St.
We are all Chinese and none from this city,
eating bean curd stew and talking of that old war and Japan.
An American loyalty test, the terms of condition:
- Do you renounce the emperor?
- Will you serve our military?
Can you believe it? Then we talk of our childhoods
in Dallas, Sydney and Cupertino.
Said the LA Times of the Japanese:
A viper is nonetheless a viper
wherever the egg is hatched.
At school, my grandmother had a friend called Kay
whose father sold a brand new Chrysler to a white man
for nothing when they went into the camps.
My grandmother calls them nisei and calls me hapa,
she’s a San Francisco girl but Yankees devotee
and wore a badge in 1943 that said: I AM CHINESE. There are
so many words for half and first daughters and first sons
but none for her kind of assimilant.