yellow peril theory
CONTENT WARNINGS: use of a racial slur, mentions of sexual assault & war
yellow peril theory
May 6, 1882. President Chester A. Arthur signs into effect the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers amidst rampant propaganda-fueled racism and a psycho-cultural xenophobic perception of the East.
1
Chinaman leaves behind his body to learn how to breathe.
It sounds enough like poetry if it rhymes.
Like how the sun rises so the people looking upon the earth
don’t forget to look up. Like how Chinaman dresses
in his best fuzhuang to die under a half-lit railroad. Like
how his bones splinter into tracks.
2
My mother makes her accent an apology. 1999. She mistakes
god for country and sky for home. She is young like clay,
my sister soft in her belly: the only thing
she carries with her to the new world.
In this country her maiden name means sun, and my father
lives in the dark, but she does not know
how to say irony in English.
3
My grandmother carries my father too long into the winter. 1962.
In Nanjing
he bends out of her body and my grandfather never forgives him.
Nai nai still remembers the hurt in her womb. Twenty-five years earlier
her womb also bloody but this is a different type of hurt.
The soldiers leave but the war moves into her body. She prays
to old gods but has never gone to church.
4
I spend four years in Shijiazhuang, fill my body with the wrong words.
My broken English a scar that never healed, the boys
on the bus pick at the scabs.
5
At the grocery store with my mother I say apple instead of pingguo.
The word down my throat like surrender. Forget
guo means fruit blossom, or the past,
or country. Make my English an armor to prove something
to the sky. Still, the vowels drop sour
my Achilles heel, hole in my armor: chink.
6
My last name means to go back. 回/Hui. The stranger tells me this
like he is doing me a favor. Did you know that?
He smiles, teeth white
so you can see him in the dark.
I do not tell him my mother tongue comes easily to me,
that sunday Chinese school has not failed me, that every February
I bleed the colors of my wayward country.
(It sounds enough like poetry if it rhymes).
Like how my mother taught my father that hands make softer things
than just fists, like how she taught him to hold the width of
American vowels like her body, like how they
taught each other to love
in a new language.
Like how I do not tell the stranger I know the words
he hasn’t said either, see them manifest like smoke,
like destiny
violent-bright and heavy: go back.
7
But there is so much I do not say
and it is choking me
like the two tongues that fit inside my mouth so that
sometimes I think one might swallow the other
sometimes I think I might swallow the world.
8
The Yellow Terror in All His Glory! with last breath
Chinaman prays. Gold sounds a lot like god. Fifty years
later his granddaughter dies surrounded by enemies in the homeland.
They take her body before her life: the blood to remember both.
(In the same city, my grandmother lives).
But now, here, shadow-soft and poor
Chinaman rests. No one to mourn him.
by KELLY HUI