the most Taiwanese thing about me
after katie mansfield
not the tub of bean curd in my freezer.
not the Lao Gan Ma chili oil
I drink by the spoonful like my Ba.
not how I fish pork blood out of my soup
to drop into my brother’s bowl,
not any acre of my mouth, really.
not my two passports
or my two names.
not the yearbook photo retake
that made twins of me in 2nd grade,
Ting Wei and Juliana printed out
side by side. not the time I made Kevin cry
telling him Chang is a better last name
than Zhang.
not my 9th Halloween.
not when I asked my Ma for jack-o’-lanterns
and she scratched smiley faces into the pumpkins
with a butter knife.
not the way my Ma pronounces butter, or knife,
or library—not the li-barry, the Ikea bag of books,
the sofa cushions that ate a paperback each month.
instead, just the way my Ma hugs at airports.
last time I saw her, she squeezed so hard
I thought she was trying to seal me
back inside my body.
I didn’t know I was an island
until then.
San Francisco Sonnet
in July, I have little sense of the lifespan
of things: yellow sink sponge, egg, the indomitable fruit fly.
we wake up damp and gorge ourselves on old hummus.
the issue with every summer like this—
I insist on leaving nothing behind. so, small living it is:
the same green jacket most nights; weekly bananas,
purchased one at a time. I find a single park I love
and spend two months marching to and from Alta Vista.
I want it to be seamless when I go, even if I don’t know
when. but life only bursts if full. consider the ice cream sandwich,
passing from front to middle seat. you visit our cafe
and call me when they ask you, where’s your friend?
the best way to see a shooting star is to look at everything
and nothing in the sky at once. I wake up, laugh,
dig glitter out of your ear. we link arms and walk the boardwalk.
we surprise ourselves with how much we live.
Taipei
Ma Ma’s city is all 4th floor walkup,
all mahjong tiles and cigarette smoke,
all Tai Yu at the wet market
because the vendors don’t listen
if you haggle in Mandarin,
all bus, always bus—we don’t spend money on taxis
like that—all Danshui, Nai Nai’s house in the fields
all bing lang stands and bowl cuts.
when we first moved back to Taipei,
I know she barely recognized it then,
how the city sits so different on my skin.
if you ask me about my hometown,
I’ll say my city is red MRT line and soup dumplings,
is declaring there isn’t a spot in the precinct
I can’t get to by subway,
is English in school and Mandarin everywhere else,
tucking the foreign away at the night markets
(even when our eyeliner and accents make it a moot point)
is honey toast and lu wei by the pound, cat villages,
pork chop bentos on every train.
and of course there are things never change too:
August typhoons, mango ice stands;
Ma Ma’s been going to the same dumpling shop
for 37 years.
I don’t visit home much these days,
but she looks a little different every time I do:
what can I say I know about her
except how she used to be?
she’s moving body, all starts and stops,
all the ways we harden
loving a thing as long as that.
First time
Before loss, but after memory begins.
One tender year, I learn my name
and all the ways that I am wrong.
Afternoons in an empty office,
classes with my island of a desk,
each lunch, left to stand and stare
into the corner of the room.
The lesson was not hard to learn:
to pass into personhood, to be loved,
I had to become the opposite of myself.
So long this wound stayed open,
I mistook it for a door.
Migration Story
I.
When my grandfather is diagnosed with Parkinson’s,
my family moves back to Taiwan.
The night we arrive from the airport,
Yeye prepares hand-pulled noodles,
pork ribs simmered in black bean sauce,
eight treasure rice. His hands shake as he
carries the pot of soup to the table,
and everyone pretends not to notice, even him.
For five years we watch Yeye grow smaller,
the fluttering of his hands across a kitchen cutting board
slow to a silence.
In the days before he passes,
we sit around his bedside and tell stories:
from when he and Nai Nai first met,
from when my father went to college, from when I was born.
Tongues curl and uncurl,
and every doorway in the house holds its breath.
II.
Years and years before I am born,
a mother’s life savings
are a clinking pouch in the back of wooden cupboards.
The day Mao Zedong declares himself Chairman,
she trades it all for a single boat ticket to Taiwan.
The oldest son in a family of eight,
my grandfather, a boy, becomes the only one
to escape the revolution.
III.
Nai Nai is my age when she marries Yeye.
She says he wore his raspberry heart on her sleeve,
went years without buying shoes so that they could pay for the wedding.
In the photos, Yeye wears a suit and bushy eyebrows, and he is laughing with his
jaw dancing, a boy dancing.
My father learns to walk in a house with stovetops that don’t stop burning,
says all his first memories smell like food.
He loses twenty pounds when he goes to college.
IV.
In college, my father meets my mother. He falls in love with
the cactus barbs on her tongue, the chili oil in her spit.
They bicker all the way through college, through my father’s first two jobs,
through the green card applications and the first apartment in San Jose.
By the time I am five, I can spit international phone area codes like
lychee seeds. I make dumplings with Mama,
chase the antelope behind our house,
grow up thinking family is meant to be
far away.
V.
After my grandfather passes, no one goes near the kitchen.
Mama brings home take out. We keep the wooden cupboards closed.
We sit around, feed each other with stories,
let them migrate from mouth to mind.
VI.
My first memory of love goes like this:
my grandparents visit from Taiwan,
and Yeye makes my favorite garlic chicken.
I am four, and no one is taking any of the chicken but me,
and everyone says yes when I ask for more.
I wonder out loud why they cook chicken
if none of them like it,
and my grandfather tugs on my ear,
says we all like it, we just like you more.
That same year, China allows visitors from Taiwan
for the first time in forty years, and a boy
returns home.
Juliana Chang is a Taiwanese American poet. Juliana’s work appears or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, The Chestnut Review, diode poetry journal, Burningword Literary Magazine, Best New Poets 2023, and other publications. Her first full-length collection, So Long This Wound Stayed Open, is forthcoming with ELJ Editions in 2024. She grew up in the Bay Area and Taipei, Taiwan, and is a student at Harvard Law School, where she is a Presidential Public Service Fellow and a National Asian Pacific American Bar Association Presidential Scholar.
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