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Talking Story |
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From The Asian Reporter, V17, #8 (February 20, 2007), page 7.
When we go back
Everything is different when I go back. Back home.
Living things — like scrappy aunties at morning market, like precious boys pedalling bright blue bikes and rice sparrows swaying their slender branches — are different, from here. Un-living things are different too. A sandalwood breeze rouses; our turquoise sea arches with an infinite sigh; broken white coral sings a delicate song when I pass them hand to hand to hand. Like elegant glass bones. Indeed, we have no un-living things, back home.
Our old folks say we have no things — no random objects on the strand, nothing inanimate under heaven. They say all we see, is lively. Back home. Creation is crowded. Fish-scent explodes from their hawkers’ iced stalls, handlebar bells ring high above morning’s din, those jeweled little birds ornament their eucalyptus trees like Christmas. They say, we know, morning is lovely chaos, back there.
I am different when I go back. Back there.
I have to say this quietly in America. Advisedly. You know many Yanks and many Asians, too, will dismiss it as immigrant nostalgia. As an exile’s excesses. So you mutter these differences in empty stairwells, in neatly tiled office restrooms, where echoes will certainly affirm you. You mention it, just a little, among others like you, even though you know you’ll bring them to tears. Our loss. You do it because joy’s in there too. So good we feel when we feel so alive — Oh al’hamdu’lilah. Thank God for this life.
Living like we do, in so much love, with so much loss, is hard. Living in America is hard.
I am different when I go. Home.
This difference starts at my feet. Simple happiness, our elders teach, starts with your feet. Where you and bumi ibu, sweet mother earth, touch each other. That’s where we first and most know each other. Or not. That’s why we go first and most urgently, down to our ocean when we go home. Your shoes stay under a palm.
Our sea and me startle when we meet. Cool salty surf on hot salty skin. Our ocean wants more than my ankles and calves. And this urge in me, here below my belly, as compelling as this swelling sea, wants her too. I know I am home when deep water envelopes this longing, when our generous sea embraces me as if we never parted.
When we return
America calls. This continent’s ambition is irresistible too. We make good money, we save a lot. We make a good future, we care less for today.
Monday morning, a load of us damp MAX riders rock our sleepy way to Portland’s tidy downtown. We run on smooth steel rails beside Banfield Freeway’s commuter crawl — one man or one woman per ton of Titan or Explorer or Voyager.
I struggle against sleep on our rhythmic ride into our city’s high-rise eastside. You don’t want to show up groggy or grumpy, not in your little cubicle. No boss would like it. And I’m looking, looking carefully at my Yiu Mien and Mexican, Cambod and Carib neighbors swaying in a railroad melody, and I’m wondering how we can keep awake our humanity in America. Bundled against this cold.
I’m thinking we need to keep alive our loss, that deepest expression of our love for our generous earth and our sensual sea, for our persistent elders and our raucous morning birds. Love hurts. So does staying open hearted in this huge nation. Stressed day in and day out with kids, over mortgage, about lay-offs.
I’m deciding, as our train’s crossing over our swollen, silent Willamette, that it’s up to us, us newcomers, to keep America tender. Together we make true. All the rest — smart money and cool science, hot movies and jumbo jets — the U.S. does well. And for these hungry machines, for the intense demands of their maintenance, for the cold dread of their failure, and for our nascent nation’s fear of losing control over our unruly world: surely Americans suffer even more than we.
So maybe it’s all okay. Everything is different, when we go home, when we go back. We are different, when we’re there, different too when we return here. And these, our differences, mean so much. Indeed, maybe our difference means everything.