Best American Poetry 2018 by David Lehman & Dana Gioia

Author:David Lehman & Dana Gioia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

from Seneca Review

WANG PING

* * *

老家—Lao Jia

At fifteen, my father ran away from his widowed mother to fight the Japanese.

“I’ll come back with a Ph.D. and serve my country with better English and knowledge,”

I pledged at the farewell party in Beijing, 1986.

家 : jia—home: a roof under which animals live.

老家 : lao jia—old home that ties us to ancestors, land, and sea.

When asked where I’m from,

I say “Weihai,” even though

nobody knows where it is,

even though I’ve never been to the place.

He lost his left ear in a bayonet fight with a Japanese soldier. Two years later, American cannons split his eardrums.

The night I arrived at JFK, the Mets won the World Series and the noise on the street went on till three. I got up at six and went to work in my sponsor’s antique shop in Manhattan.

The bag lady stopped her cart on the busy street and peed onto a subway grate.

“Did you jump or fly?” asked my landlady from her mah-jongg table. Then she laughed and told me that her husband had jumped ship ten years ago, in Brooklyn. When he opened his fifth Chinese take-out, he bought her a passport and flew her to Queens.

The only thing he liked to talk about was his old home, Weihai, its plump sea cucumbers and sweet apples, men with broad shoulders, stubborn thighs, and girls with long braids making steamed bread.

“I don’t know why,” she said, shivering behind her fruit stand. “Back home, I could go for days without a penny in my pocket, and I didn’t feel poor. Now, if my money goes down below four figures, I panic.” She scanned the snow-covered streets of Chinatown. “I guess I really don’t want to be homeless here.”

I hired the babysitter when she mentioned her hometown—Weihai.

The president visited the rice paddies in Vietnam where a pilot had been downed thirty-three years ago, before he brought his bones back home.

My father tried to return to Weihai after his discharge from the Navy. With his rank, he could find work only in a coal-mine town nearby. My mother refused to go. He went alone, and soon contracted TB. Mother ordered me to date the county administrator’s son so my father could come home.

“No, I’m not sad.” The street kid shook her head.

“How can I miss something I’ve never had?”

On her sixtieth birthday, my grandma went home to die. She would take two ships, one from the island to Shanghai, then from Shanghai to Yantai. From there, she would take two buses to reach Weihai. I carried her onto the big ship at the Shanghai Port, down to the bottom, where she’d spend three days on a mattress, on the floor, with hundreds of fellow passengers. “How are you going to make it, Grandma?” I asked. She pulled out a pair of embroidered shoes from her parcel and placed them between my feet. “My sweetheart and liver, come to see your old home soon, before it’s too late.”

House—房—fang: a door over a square, a place, a direction.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.