My generation is that of Asian performers
trying to understand their parents
through music and song, not conversation.

This is about my parents, or the sketches of my parents I draw on stage.
And we all do the same,
raised to express our unique individuality
by phrase-long descriptions. Parents
reduced to cliché. The quick stares
and hands when we misbehaved. The superstitions
that stemmed from times when rice, sanity, everything was more scarce,
except superstitions. The toothbrush
and bottle of hairdye in the kitchen because
while her face says early 40s, the white hair
gives her away.

We all have variations on the
same theme, and if you lived only in poetry,
you would believe we all had the same father
and mother.

And if I lived only in poetry, we all
would be brothers and sisters in a more
literal sense than we’re used to.

But this isn’t about us, this is about my parents.

We’re writing each others parental poems
over and over. All we change is the opening line
like:

my father lived one ocean and 3 heartbeats away
in the next room

like

my mother used the light of daybreak
as warpaint

and even though it never gets old, it never
gets new either. And we share family photo
albums simply by mentioning them.

Of course they always have their own stories.
But even they seem familiar somehow.

When my father was a kid, he boiled his hat to kill the lice, and

My mother decided against marrying the first man who proposed
and moved to Canada instead, and

My dad spent five years in prison, and when he got out,
he was still younger than I am now, and

Because my mom lost all her possessions when she fled,
now she’s morally opposed to throwing anything away -
even coupons that expired last year, just in case

she can trick a cashier into taking it.

This is about my parents,

but this is not about my parents. This is about two people.
Two people who found their way to each other
too late in life to have three kids. About
the two people who split a small pizza on their
first date, the couple who saw “The Godfather”
every time out because he couldn’t fathom doing anything else.

And when he proposed after three months,
she said, “No.
I barely know you.”
and he said - on one knee,
“OK, then ask me. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

While cleaning up around the apartment,
I found a stamp collector’s book from my mother’s childhood
in Hong Kong. Stamps from Turkey, Nigeria,
Uruguay. I wonder where her imagination took her then, and
I wonder if it ever took her to where she is now.

To my mother, the stamp collection means almost nothing,
but to me it’s everything, because it’s the thing she loved
before she didn’t have options,
when her imagination could still take her wherever she wanted to go.

When my father visited the village where he grew up
40 years after he left, his mother told him
he was able to get to America because his ancestors were buried in peaceful soil.
He dismissed it as poor countryfolk mythology.

His family, without formal education, and
what would his mother think if she were still here,
that her American grandson writes poetry for a living?
I want to write the poem that will save the world, but I still don’t know
what kind of soil will cradle my body when I die.

My parents clawed their way to a real life
just for the possibility of one day providing opportunities to children
they might never have.

This is not about my parents, this is about the two people
who were dreamers like me once.
And those dreams didn’t include me, my sister, or each other.

And what can I do for them
besides write poetry
that says the things I can’t say,
tells the stories I can’t tell,
stories I don’t even know are real.
Maybe they’re fact, or maybe embellished,
or maybe my own false memories
of past lives.
Stories I’ve never heard
but still know the endings because they
all end in the same place:

here. The present.
With two children, a daughter and a son who writes poetry.
A daughter and a son
who are grown, but have the luxury
of never growing up.
And them, my parents, who will have to wait
before they ever have a chance to live their childhoods.

copyright Giles Li, 2004