feeds their bodies to the ocean’s aching blue mouth.
A pirate leads my mother from the boat to the shore.
He strips her down to her soiled cotton underwear,
feeds her aching body to the ocean’s blue mouth.
She swears he did not rape her.
When he strips me down to my cotton underwear,
my father sets me on his lap like a Barbie doll.
My mother swears he did not rape me.
She tells me to stop making things up.
My father sets me on his lap. Like a Barbie doll,
I obey when he commands me to open, to keep it a secret.
He warns me not to make things up.
His touch leaves a stain I cannot scrub clean.
I obey. Every time he commands me to open, I keep it a secret.
Even now, years later, long after he disappeared like a ghost,
his touch remains a stain I cannot scrub clean.
I am not asking for you to believe me.
Even now, years later, long after he disappeared like a ghost,
my mother still sees the pirate in her dreams, the ocean’s infinite hunger.
She is not asking, but I believe her.
Truth finds a way to exact its obscene measures.
My mother still sees the pirate in her dreams. The ocean’s infinite hunger
swallows her in its waves. She wakes and pretends it never happened.
But truth finds a way to exact its obscene measures,
even when denial appears to be our only choice to survive.
Rising from the waves, I refuse to pretend it never happened.
My father rapes me while my mother is asleep in the other room.
Even when denial appears to be our only choice, to survive
we know how the story goes.
JULIE THI UNDERHILL is a poet, essayist, fiction writer, artist, photographer, filmmaker, performer, and historian. In 1976 she was born in the United States to a mother from Viet Nam, a Cham-French war widow who had evacuated during the Fall of Saigon. During the war in Viet Nam, her American father was a civilian contractor, and her American stepfather flew combat helicopters. She has published in Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace (2006), Embodying Asian/American Sexualities (2009), Troubling Borders (2014), and elsewhere. She received a Rockefeller Fellowship from the William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences (UMass-Boston). Underhill obtained her MA from University of California Berkeley. She is currently a lecturer at California College of the Arts.
THE SILENT OPENING
Despite the rust of ocean winds burnishing
that bright metallic nip of blood
of the same waters we swallow at birth
we came north by boat two thousand years ago
and flourished in kingdom, built master Indic temples
two by two, alone in pairs, or simply alone
is that right?
How were we supposed to learn our culture
when we had to struggle in war to survive
you think it’s so easy to know?!
my mother chokes upon the lullabies
losing history, legend, literature, and song
in plenitudes of nightmares.
Yet I live an unsettling night, mother, just like you
my good blood commingled with the enemy, just like you
I’ve lost my family, displaced by war, just like you
I return with hesitation and tangled words
to speak vocabularies imposed during 600 years
of conquest, containment, and conversion of our people
collapsing our borders and eroding our knowledge
by the frictions of extermination and fear.
And neither my nor your name will inscribe a map of losses
masquerading in paper calm, eulogizing our possible pasts
while lighting candles and offering fruit to our ancestors
who may still recognize us, after all. Perhaps.
I’ve searched dream rooms for our dead, regardless,
sometimes finding the gate to my dream locked, a hush
held back, the silent opening of locks illuminated
by a small search light revealing hidden vocabularies
translating loss as home, departure for arrival,
now and again.
WAR DREAMS
i am crossing water on a boat
with refugees when it capsizes
close to shore. i dive beneath
the water to save two children,
both under the age of six. one at a time.
yet even after bringing them to a pier
& expelling water from their lungs
they each died. almost everyone
sank to ocean’s bottom.
then fast forward
to years later, when i get
a letter from someone
whom i’d thought had drowned
that day.
i read it
uncomprehending.
*
i am working in a country
in central Africa that suffers
famine, ethnic cleansing, disease
& civil war, when i am assigned
by my supervisors to dig
a mass grave on the outskirts
of town. i go to the town’s edge
to assess the area.
yet when i begin to dig,
i hit skulls, only to realize
that i am digging
into a preexisting mass grave.
i move & discover more of the same.
nearly every scrap of dirt
was stretched thin over piles of bodies;
i never find a place to begin
again.
MAI DER VANG is the author of Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), which received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. She will serve as a 2017–18 Visiting Writer in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her writing has appeared in Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. As an editorial member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle, she is co-editor of How Do I Begin: A Hmong American Literary Anthology.
LIGHT FROM A BURNING CITADEL
Once this highland was our birthplace. Once
we were children of kings.
Now I am a Siamese rosewood on fire.
I am a skin of sagging curtain.
I am locked in the ash oven of a forest.
Peb yog and we will be.
The sky sleeps quilted in a militia of stars.
Someone has folded
gold and silver spirit
money into a thousand tiny boats.
Peb yog
hmoob and we will be.
I am hungry as the beggar who cracked
open a coconut to find
the heart of a wild gaur.
Hmoob and we
will be.
The tree is more ancient
than its homeland,
shedding its annual citrine
as hourglass dripping honey.
Peb yeej ib txwm yog
hmoob.
I dig and dig for no more roots to dig.
I soldier with my severed
legs, my fallen ear.
I’ve become the shrill
air in a bamboo pipe—the breath
of an army of bells.
**
Peb yog: “We are.”
Peb yog hmoob: “We are Hmong.”
Peb yeej ib txwm yog hmoob: “We have always been Hmong.”
I THE BODY OF LAOS AND ALL MY UXOS
It’s been forty years of debris
turning stale, and submunitions
still hunt inside the patina of my mud.
I’m stumbling with ankles steeped
in my little wrecked chimneys.
A foot wedged insi
de a sandal.
The bandage wraps my chest and I
sense the new branches of a cypress
within me, waiting to tear open
the gauze. Where are the high verandas
that once guarded elephants.
What ends the deepening numbers,
resounding into night, a planeload
releases every eight minutes forever.
Left only with cistern walls dismantled
in this era of widows, this is no way
to be lived, clawed and de-veined by
steel splinters concealed. The ground
knows more than a child will ever.
No way to seal the gaps, when a smuggled
with cobwebs spun from overseas.
WHEN THE MOUNTAINS ROSE BENEATH US, WE BECAME THE VALLEY
I won’t ask why the saola came
To you, father, or of the poacher who
Followed, but I ask of the country
You lost, the one I never had, unlike
The midwife who sketched birth
Maps on a girl’s body and found
A rainforest in her belly. I ask why
A body is born to save money
But can’t pay to cross hell’s ferry,
Or why snow tells us heaven
Is cold. A sunken missile maddens
Radiant as firework to the eyes
Of a tribesman, witnessing for
The first time. How did an ancient
Boy drown in a homeless river. I ask
Why the warsick warrior who hunts
With claws is hiding a poem. A piece
Of paper hides a garden. What
Harrowed you most arriving at the last
Minute to catch your brother’s
Final breath on the hospital bed.
Can a unicorn kindle the night,
Haloed by its flame, torches jutting
From its head. Live on. Ask me how I’ve
Saved us. Ask me to build our temples
So rooted, so stone, we won’t ever die out.
CHI VU was born in Vietnam and came to Australia in 1979. After studying at the University of Melbourne, she worked as a theater maker, dramaturg, writer, and artistic director. Chi Vu’s plays, which include the critically acclaimed and widely studied A Story of Soil, The Dead Twin, and Vietnam: A Psychic Guide, have been performed in Melbourne and Sydney, and her short stories have appeared in various publications, including the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. Her novella, Anguli Ma: A Gothic Tale, is published by Giramondo.
THE UNCANNY
I
One of the tasks of a migrant is to move from a sense of alienation in the new country to a sense of being comfortable with that alienation. One of the tasks of a writer is to move between thinking about content and form, in order to heighten the “what” of the story by selecting the best genre for the piece. An author who writes of migration faces the twin task of addressing alienation and form.
Imagine you are a migrant who had been a member of the main ethnic, cultural and linguistic group in your old country. Then after migrating, you are suddenly part of a minority in a new country. There is no shared cultural context between you and the majority of the people around you. Perhaps the only thing that most people know about where you came from is the name of a distant war. Little else outside of that frame is understood by the people in your street, at your school or workplace. As though overnight, you find yourself viewed through a small frame that is not of your choosing. This limited view amputates you: it narrows how you are understood, and therefore what you can communicate.
And vice versa.
II
My family arrived in our new country in the middle of winter, 1979. In the morning, steam came out of our mouths and there was dew on the grass. We spent the first days settling into the migrant hostel in Maribyrnong, in the western suburbs of Melbourne. All food was served at the canteen as cooking was not allowed in our living quarters. Breakfast was cereal and milk and lunch consisted of prepackaged sandwiches, which I quickly got used to. But dinner was always a big adjustment: you would collect your own plastic tray, put a plate on it and get served a large hunk of meat flavored with salt and pepper—no other flavors. The vegetables had been boiled and came without any dipping sauces. No matter how much salt you added, the food did not become more flavorsome; it merely became saltier.
After several days we ventured out of the hostel to explore this new world. We were waiting for a bus when we saw a sign that read: NO STANDING ANY TIME. My father must have read it several times, perplexed, before he called my oldest sister over. She was considered the authority as she had actually applied herself to learn English from the private tutor while we were still in Vietnam, while the rest of us kids had only followed her around making foreign-sounding, silly noises at each other. My sixteen-year-old sister stepped forward and read it carefully. Then she turned around and confirmed: “Yes, it’s true—it says we’re not allowed to stand here—at any time.” My father’s mouth turned grim and his whole bearing seemed to drop, for perhaps we’d made a terrible mistake. Could it be that we had risked our lives on the open seas to arrive at an even more repressive regime than the one we had just escaped from? The bus stop was right here, and yet we were not permitted to stand. In this impossible predicament, we each then tried to find some pose that could be interpreted, if it came down to an unfair prosecution, that was not in fact standing: slouching, leaning against a pole, poised about to dash away; I think one or two of us children may have even squatted by the side of the road, Vietnamese-style.
Before the end of the day, we realized that everyone ignored these signs, and in fact stood shamelessly, blatantly, next to or in front of the NO STANDING ANY TIME sign. I made a mental note: the word “standing” had been used in a peculiar way and only applied to cars, which could neither stand not sit nor squat.
As we settled in, we needed to find a way to taste our own food again. One of my parents, probably my mother, took things in her own hands and discovered a Chinese grocery somewhere in the city. She came home with provisions: jars of fermented pastes and sauces that warmed our nostrils. We bought a little electric cooker and began cooking food in our living quarters in the migrant hostel. I vaguely recall the boiling of vermicelli and the scent of a hot pot emanating from the electric cooker. Perhaps someone kept a lookout at the slightly open window for anyone official who might have been walking the grounds that evening, and to fan the plumes of pungent steam out the window.
We ate this delicious, welcoming food. It was like our innards unclenched and smiled for the first time in this new country. We are able to relax and take in our situation better. My mother and sisters started cleaning up, putting away our contraband cooking utensils. There was some stock spilt on the floor, which I slipped on as I went past. I fell, and hit my head on the pointy corner of the wall.
The next day at the migrant hostel school (a learning center to help us adjust) the female teacher was yelling at me, but I didn’t want to answer her. She wanted to know what had happened, why did I have this big cut on my head, why was there dried blood sticking down my black hair where this lump had formed. I started to stammer and quiver. I told her in my best English, calling on all my efforts to make some sense.
“My mother cooking . . . water on the ground, I falling.” Then I would have brought my hands up to my wound to indicate the impact with the pointy corner of the wall. The teacher’s anger seemed to subside and she left me alone. I remained mortified at what I had revealed under pressure. I had to use the word “ground” instead of “floor,” so now she probably thought we lived in a mud hut in Vietnam.
After my earliest chance, I ran back to our hostel and told my father what happened: how the teacher screamed at me about the cut on my head; how I told her that we had been cooking illegally in our rooms.
“We’re going to be in so much trou
ble, aren’t we?”
I started to think that they would send my family away to whatever this country’s equivalent of the New Economic Zone was—to scratch out a life in dense virgin jungle, to die from dirty water, malnutrition and mosquito bites. I started to plan how we’d pack all our belongings, again, before they came to get us. Unbelievable, my father was smiling gently and looking above me, as though he was imagining the teacher who had shown this concern. “It’s okay,” he reassured, “you didn’t say anything wrong. It’s okay, my daughter.”
III
From the time I knew any language at all, I had dreamt and thought and spoken in Vietnamese. The music of it all was like rain dropping on tropical leaves growing at different angles, making variously pitched staccatos and then tinkling down into rivulets. My first contact with English was exposure to the strange resonances it made inside my mouth; the adding of “s” on the end of everything, so it seemed at the time; the collapsing of all social relationships into the single pronoun “you” and its mirror “I.”
Before we knew enough English to understand everything we were hearing, we learnt the shape of the words from television jingles—singing them loudly, with each of the words made up of similar-sounding Vietnamese words. The word xe đạp (bicycle) was close enough to “shut up” for us kids to use. Words like this became a tool of subversion, for if we were caught saying it, we would look nonchalant and say, “What? Bicycle . . . ”
Less than a year after my family’s arrival in Australia, I experienced that moment of unconsciously thinking in the adopted language. I was standing on the wooden steps in my public Primary School when this foreign thought arrived. The mind—my mind—had thought directly in English without my willing it, without having put any effort into my memory, for it was as surprising as suddenly growing a third arm and watching it wave back at me for the first time.