Shanghai, July 2013

This poem was written by Alice Liang in a 12-Month Poetry Collection Generator taught by Angel Nafis

It was the hottest July in 140 years.
A hundred degrees for ten days straight.

Sticky claimed the new clean. Gasping
from the sweat of the day. The streets swallowed
us in its black unswept sparkle. We brushed,
on accident, on rushing morning commutes,
breaking quickly from the dew between us.

Never slowing to say sorry
in the shuffle of the summer.

In the humid length of breathing
only the filtered air of modern living,
Ma FaceTimes me with her zip-up jacket on.
The room shivers the color stark.
Antiseptic skulking in the distance.

The heartbeat of a faceless machine
governs the passage of day.

On the corner, the dumpling man sits
selling six for a dollar. Even the air
is no match against his homemade steam.
The sauce bleeds sweet into my brows,
glasses fogging to the soup in surrender.

Somewhere overseas, my almost-face bloats
and shrinks with the schedule of surgery.

It’s serious, Ma says. I shrug off the severity
and angle to sun to stave off the screen.

In the summer’s evenings, the city sets loose
on the Bund. The blast of fans dim to a dull roar
by contrast. Kids and peddlers fly by
on light-up skates, pleading with the sun
to set upon us some relief. The river waits.

Ma calls asking for good news
from the motherland.

I answer backlit by the wrinkle-rusted bridges
she once walked on and had then called new.
Ma, what a spectacle the skyline has become.
Saturating her another photo to see, light
streaks handing her no hint of the heat.

Isn’t it funny,
how we’ve switched countries?

The year I was born, the city too was an infant,
the sky vast in its kingdom. The Pearl Tower
and I, twin promise-jewels of our time, bets taken
on some kind of hyperbole. Me and the city,
racing over twenty years of concrete.

Our reaching for a place in the sun: a plunder
only more untouchable in the heat.

On the river, old men’s bones stretch and push
away the dust in unison, ushering in a sunrise
much too bright for mourning. That summer,
I stepped as far as I could from the face of death,
all the way to the other side of the sea.

It’s not time to come home yet, Ma says,
and I’m not sure who she means.

*

Alice Liang’s collection, Beforelife, is a reflection on migration as a sort of death, and death as a sort of migration. The book navigates the fog of assimilation, and the drowning of xenophobia in a world we can’t forget. Neighboring stanzas live on different sides of the ocean, on different sides of death, to interrogate both my countries and my own histories. Adjacent couplets collapse a world in which human rights abuses in China and racism in America meet. In the face of distance, racism, illness, and death, what does belonging to a country, and to a body, mean?