Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility

after Som-Nai Nguyen

There is an impulse —
			 to,
				perhaps because of my anime eyes that seemed to be gazing
				into another, better world, because they look as if they were carved
				on a jack-o’-lantern with two swift cuts of a short knife,

			 begin my poems with:

							In Chinese, the world for joyful,
							开心, literally means to open the heart.

							[Something about the illegibility 
							of my ancestor’s bones.]

							[Bones as metaphor.] 
							[Ancestors as metaphor.]

	I’m not a poet	of a Western tradition
	because I can’t	reference Greek myth in my poems — 

I know nothing	of Persephone, 
have to Google	the one who looked back greek 

	to jog my memory

of the particular	permutation of syllables
in the names	Orpheus and Eurydice 

In English, the prefix pen-
	comes from the Latin paene, 
		which means almost. 
	A peninsula is almost an island, 
a penumbra is almost in shadow. 
	And yet the word pen comes from pinna, 
		the Latin word for feather, 
	and the word pencil
from Latin peniculus, a brush, 
	though literally it translated to a little tail, 
		meaning it was a diminutive form of pēnis, 
	meaning tail, of which penis, 
one of the mainstream organs 
	of copulation, also derives. 

In Chinese, the word for blunt force 
is 钝⼒, which literally means "blunt" "force." 

Panda		and 		chest hair, 
xiongmao		and		xiongmao, 
sound the same but for their tones.
It's a tonal language, this happens all the time.
	How homonymous, how harmonious. 

In 1992, my father 	— the white one, yes — 
was an HSK 5 		living in China 
where he met 		my mother — 
on social media,  	you may see 
her contemporaries 	referred to 
as my Asian		immigrant mother. 

The instinct to self exoticize matched by the instinct to belong — 
				I, with something to prove, 
bragged to my mother about having the highest spice tolerance 
				of anyone in my family. 
Visiting relatives in 重庆, home of the hottest of hot pots 
				transcendently so, 
going 串⼉ for 串⼉ with the best of them. An ability leagues ahead 
				of my cousin, Sichuanese, 
born and bred, full and wholly. She could not have cared less, told me, 
				you'll ruin your stomach.

					United States of America, 
				country of my birth, for better 
			and for worse, land my memes are from. 
Oh, you're a fan of America? Name five of the coups it funded.

I am of both and neither. Who cares.			          Kim, there's people that are dying.

At an open mic, the poet whose reading followed mine applauded me for my bravery in sharing a poem in English that contained one line of Chinese in it, for smashing norms, and challenging the  status quo, disrupting the dominant culture. It's so important for people like us to reclaim our languages and bring them onto stages, the poet said, before reading a poem in English, save for abuela. Just two poets and between us some words in three languages three billion other people know. 

One of my favourite Chinese characters is 串 
it means kebab		&		looks like a kebab 

Annina Zheng-Hardy is a poet from New York and Sichuan, whose work has appeared in bath magg and The Willowherb Review, among other publications.