Go Home!

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  What do we do now?

  I wash my mother’s body with a sea sponge. I can see every vertebra of her spine like this, curled over, her head down. She holds her shins close to her chest as if to give the water more room. There are no more wounds to clean, nothing I missed, but I can tell the sponge is comforting to her. It’s a quiet touch. I dab it across her shoulders, wring it over her midnight clumps of hair.

  Please don’t cry anymore, I say. We don’t have to do anything.

  Has he ever hurt you? she wants to know.

  He hasn’t. He has never touched either one of us before today. Not like this.

  Once, when I was younger, he was in such a spell that he came after me and my mother with a wooden baseball bat. He said he would kill us. I think he thought we were somebody else, some other people who had hurt him. I think he hoped we were.

  We ran into the bedroom and locked the door. My mother screamed, held me to her chest. He beat the door with the bat until the entire thing splintered into toothpicks. He fell asleep on the tile floor outside the bedroom, the handle still in his hand. He woke up and yelled, Who broke this bat? I paid for this!

  That night, I asked my mother why he even owned a bat—he doesn’t play baseball.

  He bought it to protect us, she said.

  I don’t bring up this incident.

  WHEN MY MOTHER gets out of the bath I wrap a towel around her from behind. I dip Q-tips into the mouths of ointment bottles and make her wounds look glossy. I pull a T-shirt over her head, lift rose-patterned pants up and over her body. Her face is still, staring. I help her into bed, right foot, then the left, walk to the freezer, little fistfuls of ice in a grocery bag. I spin the bag, knot it, pass my father’s body on the way back to her room.

  I press the cool bag to her cheeks, her eyes.

  I say, It’s okay, MomMom.

  This is a habit of mine. When I love somebody more than I’ve ever loved them, I repeat their name, double and triple it. I say it till it’s somebody else’s name. Years later, when my father dies, Daddy Daddy Daddy My Daddy is the only thing I will say.

  My mother holds my hands against the ice against her face. She says, You want to get out of here?

  MY MOTHER PACKS her bag, and I go into my room, pack my own. I don’t have much to take: my diary, a book on witchcraft, a book on Drew Barrymore, my stuffed tiger, Tia, a pair of riding boots and spurs. I spill out a drawer full of underwear, silk pajamas. I drop all of my things into a black garbage bag. I have always wanted to run away. I have always wanted this rush, the swing of my arms around objects that I will pack to remind myself of the way things used to be. More than anything, though, I have always ached for the runaway’s return home, like in the movies—parents with their outstretched hands, heavy blankets with which to wrap you, the home-cooked meal with plates warmed in the oven, the tired, grateful faces. I have always wanted the reunion.

  My mother carries our bags to the car. She does not even look into the living room as she passes.

  I walk to the couch, scoot my father’s body over. The back of his neck looks like roast beef, hot to the touch. I run my fingers through his sandy hair. I say, You made a really big mess this time. We gotta go.

  My mother honks Big Beau three times. I kiss my father on the back of his skull, set the alarm, and run.

  MY MOTHER SAYS little in the car. She looks strong, her temples bulging, her chin up. She gets like this when things are at their worst: upturned, dignified. She looks the facts in the face, my mother. She hands me a map and a new highlighter from the dash, says, Find the best route out of here.

  An hour later, she calls up my half brothers, the other boys, leaves a message: You’re on your own for the intervention. I’m gone. I have never heard this word—intervention—and I ask her what she means. It is something that could save my father, she says, something they were planning for this week. My brothers were going to fly all the way to Boca Raton for this. They wrote parting speeches about missed T-ball games, flute recitals. They have what she calls Bottom Lines to offer. She repeats herself, over and over, like she is trying to believe it herself, This will save his life, it will save him, it will. This explanation shocks me because I never knew he was dying.

  We make one stop on our drive to Seven Devils, North Carolina, where we will hide out on a mountain for one month. My mother feels too tired to go on, but I am awake. Somewhere near Jacksonville she pulls into a motel. She tells me to hush. She finds a metal gate to the swimming pool, lifts the peg from its hole. My mother says, Go ahead, jump in, you have more clothes in the car. Tire yourself out, she says. We have a long way to go.

  Everyone knows I don’t know how to swim but I have always loved the water. I like it here in the shallow end with my T-shirt bubbling up in a tie-dye dome. In the water, I can be a ballerina, a gymnast, anybody else. I can do things like balance on my toes. I swish around and flick the surface until my mother falls asleep on a lawn chair. She looks like she is sunbathing even though it is still dark out. Ripples of aqua light flick across her bare legs, her bruises.

  I wonder if my father has woken up by now. If he has checked the bedrooms, the car.

  I kick my legs as hard as I can in the water. Take a breath. There is nothing I love more than to sink to the bottom of a pool. See how long my body can keep itself from rising.

  For Mitsuye Yamada on Her 90th Birthday

  Marilyn Chin

  They say we bitch revolutionaries never go out of fashion

  Wearing floppy hats and huge wedgy shoes

  A feather bandolera and a lethal python

  Sometimes we wear a fro perm cause we hate our straight

  hair

  Sometimes we wear it straight to the ankles like Murasaki

  I bleached mine purple to look like Kwannon Psylocke

  Maxine’s beaming, like the Goddess of Nainai temple

  A cross between Storm, the X-girl and Ahsoka Tano

  We love our laser eyes, our Yoko granny glasses are dizzy!

  Short women poets unite! Revolution ain’t just style

  It’s destiny!

  We will make a comeback, we always do

  You and Nellie and Meryl making a rad film

  Janice in a miniskirt testifying at Glide Church

  Hisaye still svelte with her bluesy magpie clarinet

  Wakako dancing to a Taiko drum and Sheila E

  Rats! The FBI’s rifling through your garbage again

  Bastards are after your studded bell-bottoms and a raison

  d’etre!

  Boys, you can have them, even my embroidered hot pants!

  We’ll all drag it with Cher, sporting black bangs of

  resistance

  We’ll emolliate our bras at the Atlantic City Boardwalk

  Listening to Buffy Sainte-Marie and fusionist Jazz bash

  Angela Davis and Ché, spinning revolution in our brain

  When an album was a symphony

  Not a blip on a Spotify Lumumba

  We’ll lip-sync to Marvin Gaye and mash to Soul Train

  And stage a sing-along-sit-in with Odetta!

  Forget about Dylan, he’s a whiner

  Where’s Jamie Baldwin, where’s Dick Gregory?

  Soak our gall with bell hooks and Barbara Christian

  Oh sweet Jesus! Allen G’s chasing your nephew around

  the Bodega

  Imagine the long march with Mao or MLK or Harvey

  Milk

  Study the physiognomy of foreheads of twisted fate

  I was a naïve girl-poet wearing wet nappies

  While you were fighting the WRA

  And Executive order 9066

  Where is Manzanar, where is Topaz, where is Tule Lake?

  Wherefore, Gila River and Heart Mountain?

  Sound like vacation hotbeds

  Where rich white retirees play bingo and waltz!

  They whisked your father away deep into the night

  Auctioned your house off to
some sleazy Hollywood exec

  Hell, nobody knew

  We were sucking on the tithes of the early Renaissance

  Drove a pink Buick to a poetry camp called Woodstock

  Ate hashish with Sylvia Plath’s ghost at an Irvine bus stop

  Binged on Neruda’s psilocybin odes at Bullfrog

  (Meanwhile, let’s mock a Whitmanesque praise poem at

  the Iowa workshop)

  They say don’t write political, girl, just hang yourself with

  abjection!

  Let’s bum rush a haiku party with conceptual artists

  How long can you stare at a Urinal, for god’s sake!

  What’s the difference between the old regime and the

  new regime?

  The new one has lightsabers and a bona fide Wookiee

  I confess, I was faking it, I was a revolutionary freak!

  Did a hunger strike with Cesar Chavez cause he’s sexy

  Mao was a new crush, Marx whetted the yoni,

  I was just a horny girl poet, please forgive me

  I binged on duck noodles on Clement Street after sucking

  down a bong

  Wrote ten thousand letters for Amnesty International

  high on shrooms

  But I confess that on the second day of a relapse

  I threw up alphabet soup all over my slutty girlfriend’s

  Austin Healey

  She thought she was a dykey James Bond, oh really!

  I lied that the dog did it!

  For your 90th birthday, my dear Auntie Mitsuye

  I write you this silly poem

  not counting syllables, accentuals or diphthongs

  not making it sing or pulling a long conceit

  out of a colonialist’ ass-

  anine simulacra, or trying to rap with the youngsters

  wearing a Compton cap. Or break-dancing

  for an endstop

  Jeremiad

  Not trying to make a hybridity lipidity sonnet

  the volta is loving my vulva lapping vodka on the

  Volga!

  not a long religious rant about a pussy Jeoffry,

  nor dogging the doggy dogma dharma

  who left her yellow mark all over the doggity diaspora

  not lifting a hind leg but squatting in the morning

  glory

  like a real Asian Diva

  They paid you

  20,000 for your civil liberties

  A mule and ten acres of scorched paddy apotheosis

  They slapped a cruel judgment on the new century

  There will always be another brown girl to hate

  Rape her village, burn her wedding veil, shoot her in the

  face

  Plant a black flag on her sweet soul

  Strap her down with a ticking heart-bomb and show no

  mercy

  Auntie Mitsuye

  No more redress, no more reparations, no worries about

  legacy

  Let’s live raunchily and have the last laugh

  Somewhere in a faraway kingdom

  We shall eat that magical pill of immortality

  You and me and Emily D.

  Gnawing ganja cookies, dreaming on our backs

  And Bessie’s crooning her heart out on a crappy 8-track!

  The Faintest Echo of Our Language

  Chang-Rae Lee

  My mother died on a bare January morning in our family room, the room all of us favored. She died upon the floor-bed I had made up for her, on the old twin mattress from the basement that I slept on during my childhood. She died with her husband kneeling like a penitent boy at her ear, her daughter tightly grasping the soles of her feet, and her son vacantly kissing the narrow, brittle fingers of her hand. She died with her best friend weeping quietly above her, and with her doctor unmoving and silent. She died with no accompaniment of music or poetry or prayer. She died with her eyes and mouth open. She died blind and speechless. She died, as I knew she would, hearing the faintest echo of our language at the last moment of her mind.

  That, I think, must be the most ardent of moments.

  I keep considering it, her almost-ending time, ruminating the nameless, impossible mood of its ground, toiling over it like some desperate topographer whose final charge is to survey only the very earth beneath his own shifting feet. It is an improbable task. But I am continually traveling through that terrible province, into its dark region where I see again and again the strangely vast scene of her demise.

  I see.

  Here before me (as I now enter my narrative moment), the dying-room, our family room. It has changed all of a sudden—it is as if there has been a shift in its proportion, the scale horribly off. The room seems to open up too fast, as though the walls were shrinking back and giving way to the wood flooring that seems to unfurl before us like runway carpet. And there, perched on this crest somehow high above us, her body so flat and quiet in the bed, so resident, so immovable, caught beneath the somber light of these unwinking lamps, deep among the rolls of thick blankets, her furniture pushed to the walls without scheme, crowded in by the medicines, syringes, clear tubing, machines, shot through with the full false hopes of the living and the fearsome calls of the dead, my mother resides at an unfathomable center where the time of my family will commence once again.

  No one is speaking. Except for the babble of her machines the will of silence reigns in this house. There is no sound, no word or noise, that we might offer up to fill this place. She sleeps for a period, then reveals her live eyes. For twelve or eighteen hours we have watched her like this, our legs and feet deadened from our squatting, going numb with tired blood. We sometimes move fitfully about, sighing and breathing low, but no one strays too far. The living room seems too far, the upstairs impossible. There is nothing, nothing at all outside of the house. I think perhaps it is snowing but it is already night and there is nothing left but this room and its light and its life.

  People are here earlier (when?), a group from the church, the minister and some others. I leave her only then, going through the hallway to the kitchen. They say prayers and sing hymns. I do not know the high Korean words (I do not know many at all), and the music of their songs does not comfort me. Their one broad voice seems to be calling, beckoning something, bared in some kind of sad invitation. It is an acknowledgment. These people, some of them complete strangers, have come in from the outside to sing and pray over my mother, their overcoats still bearing the chill of the world.

  I am glad when they are finished. They seem to sing too loud; I think they are hurting her ears—at least, disturbing her fragile state. I keep thinking, as if in her mind: I’m finally going to get my sleep, my sleep after all this raw and painful waking, but I’m not meant to have it. But sing, sing.

  When the singers finally leave the room and quickly put on their coats I see that the minister’s wife has tears in her eyes: so it is that clear. She looks at me; she wants to say something to me but I can see from her stunted expression that the words will not come. Though I wanted them earlier to cease I know already how quiet and empty it will feel when they are gone. But we are all close together now in the foyer, touching hands and hugging each other, our faces flushed, not talking but assenting to what we know, moving our lips in a silent, communal speech. For what we know, at least individually, is still unutterable, dwelling peacefully in the next room as the unnameable, lying there and waiting beside her, and yet the feeling among us is somehow so formidable and full of hope, and I think if I could hear our thoughts going round the room they would speak like the distant report of ten thousand monks droning the song of the long life of the earth.

  LONG, LONG LIFE. Sure life. It had always seemed that way with us, with our square family of four, our destiny clear to me and my sister when we would sometimes speak of ourselves, not unlucky like those friends of ours whose families were wracked with ruinous divorce or drinking or disease—we were untouched, maybe untouchable, we’d been saf
e so far in our isolation in this country, in the country of our own house smelling so thickly of crushed garlic and seaweed and red chili pepper, as if that piquant wreath of scent from our mother’s kitchen protected us and our house, kept at bay the persistent ghosts of the land who seemed to visit everyone else.

  Of course, we weren’t perfectly happy or healthy. Eunei and I were sometimes trouble to my parents, we were a little lazy and spoiled (myself more than my sister), we didn’t study hard enough in school (though we always received the highest marks), we chose questionable friends, some from broken families, and my father, who worked fourteen hour days as a young psychiatrist, already suffered from mild hypertension and high cholesterol.

  If something happened to him, my mother would warn me, if he were to die, we’d lose everything and have to move back to Korea where the living was hard and crowded and where all young men spent long years in the military. Besides, our family in Korea—the whole rest of it still there (for we were the lone émigrés)—so longed for us, missed us terribly, and the one day each year when we phoned they would plead for our return. What we could do, my mother said, to aid our father and his struggle in this country, was to relieve his worry over us, release him from that awful burden through our own hard work which would give him ease of mind and help him not to die.

  My mother’s given name was Inja, although I never once called her that, nor ever heard my sister or even my father address her so. I knew from a young age that her name was Japanese in style and origin, from the time of Japan’s military occupation of Korea, and I’ve wondered since why she chose never to change it to an authentic Korean name, why her mother or father didn’t change the names of all their daughters after the liberation. My mother often showed open enmity for the Japanese, her face seeming to ash over when she spoke of her memories, that picture of the platoon of lean-faced soldiers burning books and scrolls in the center of her village still aglow in my head (but from her or where else I don’t know), and how they tried to erase what was Korean by criminalizing the home language and history by shipping slave labor, draftees, and young Korean women back to Japan and its other Pacific colonies. How they taught her to speak in Japanese. And as she would speak of her childhood, of the pretty, stern-lipped girl (that I only now see in tattered rust-edged photos) who could only whisper to her sisters in the midnight safety of their house the Korean words folding inside her all day like mortal secrets, I felt the same burning, troubling lode of utter pride and utter shame still jabbing at the sweet belly of her life, that awful gem, about who she was and where her mother tongue and her land had gone.