Token Exceptional Asian in Liberal Multiculturalism

Sliver of gold

chink-narrow

swimming in a rainbow stream.

Are you the shiniest of the school

or are you bait?

At Dinner

In Vietnamese:

They put salt from the sea on chocolate now!

Sudden as a dip in a wave,

tones in the language

all hats and heavy dots and slashes up or down,

intuitively rising and falling,

how the Americans,

keeping track,

dropped their clipboards once the mortar shells started raining.

In the chaos,

who slipped onto the planes,

who got left behind.

Laughter about almost dying.

Small pauses,

a breath of empty space

for those who did.

Any one of my family

could walk down the street,

and suddenly

ching chong ching chong wah wah go back to where you came from,

or some sudden fist,

seeking a jaw

taught to sing our words

to make sense.

English slurs straightforward as bullets

that pierce, that leave

smoke and holes,

without once even considering

what we have survived.

Our language like a bubbling brook,

they say

you, Bao—you were three months old, but you were the least scared—

you didn’t cry, didn’t make a single noise.

The world exploding all around a quiet baby,

grown up to be a man afraid of everything.

April 30, 2014

Second birthday

for our people

both sides:

loss started

long before.

One side can say

we were left alive,

but with nothing that made us us.

The other side says

they bombed us

to the beat of the sexiest music.

a girl running, on fire:

this didn’t happen to you

but you can still feel the skin peeling

from your back.

(Others see history. You see a facsimile of your daughter.)

To say the past is past is bloodless privilege.

Malls now,

maybe bowling alleys,

maybe KFC.

High-rise hotels’ lights pockmark the night

an electric rash.

Modernization is a clueless boyfriend.

Shells that speak in tones of “almost.” Bombs leave craters that become tiny rice paddies. Machetes flash from the taxis. Post-traumatic stress muscles out in domestic violence, rape. Death shaking and choking in sleep. Too many mopeds going too fast, and not enough traffic, lights blink the colors of law.

And here you thought you were just a symbol of war.

You were a collection of near misses all along.

Apple-Red Pathfinder

He finally gets in and first thinks he’s gone blind.

Sees nothing but a blanket of white.

A sign: maybe he should stop doing this.

The screwdriver in his hand,

a threat to the neck

of the steering column.

The Pathfinder

red in the snow,

an apple

dropped out of season.

His dad told him that everyone eats apples in this country.

They even have a rhyming slogan about it in their language.

So Dad tried to keep apples on the table,

to remind them who they should be.

This boy is from Vietnam, or Laos, or Cambodia,

does not speak the language most assume is his home tongue.

He imagines being a superhero who can see the future,