West by Paisley Rekdal

Author:Paisley Rekdal [Rekdal, Paisley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press

Return: The Chinese believe the living possess two souls: hun, the light, male, active spirit that gives us our spark of life; and po, the dark, female, passive spirit which animates our flesh. In death, the male spirit ascends to heaven; the female part remains on earth. Falling leaves return to roots: a Cantonese saying about the return of the dead to their homeland. But not everyone cares which leaves fall. Women, children, those who died a violent death were buried without ceremony, remaining where they died. I think of the Angel Island suicide. I think of Gung Gung and our family’s July firecrackers, the sparklers he nudged into my fists. It was a point of pride for him that all three of his sons joined the US military, though one, Kingsley, nearly died. Once I asked Po Po what she considered the best day of her life and she told me, “The day your uncle King returned home from Vietnam.” If my uncle had died in that war, his body would have been closer to his parents’ ancestral homeland, but not his own. It is possible he might never have been recovered. We treat the elegy as a pathological mode, the mourner incapable of resolving loss. But what if the point of grief is not its resolution but the extension of memory, the insistence that the listener, too, carry our history into the future? Po Po bowed her head as she wept in front of me, her body not making a single sound. “What about the women?” I ask Lee on the phone when I interview her about her installation. “I drew a face,” she says, “in one window. You can just see her if you look.” The video pans by the houses. On the white screen, a blur of ash.

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