you can feel it when the cork stopper pops.

if you press the

lips of your flask to the gaping hole,

memories trickle in; tenuous argent streams.

you tell me to never let them go

but i've sealed the flask with gauze for your memories to breathe.

slowly, your past oozes from the sieve

in mercury droplets, clinging to the bottle rim.

your thoughts trace sinuous rivulets down the sides;

bead and burst as they land upon

damp midsummer grass.

i am five again,

barefoot in that cool wet lawn

with a firefly jar and a head full of dreams,

trying to understand those

golden blinks past sunset.

i can cup one in my hands,

its fire ephemeral as passion.

and i think your passion is

nothing more than the memory of

two wings thrashing against cruel glass until the

coals turn cold.

but i think i have waited too long for you.

your past has evaporated, a thin film of

dust clothing your naked dreams.

that creature no longer twitches its segmented leg.

so i let the jar fall,

let your wilted bud bloom with jagged glass petals.

the dust scatters in the air,

a shower overhead like dull glitter,

shimmers that dissolve yet sit suspended in that still night.

i think i have set you free,

but you can feel it,

the tension in your

lingering wake of untold tales.

I used to think my Chinese culture held an exotic allure in America,

when my white friends spoke in awe of Chinatown

with its rows of old-fashioned fans and floral bracelets in the shops

and street vendors selling skewered sausages.

When we went out together they’d beg for Chinese food

and I’d ask why, tell them please no, that I

ate Chinese food every day and didn’t even like it

because my palate is the product of McDonaldization,

of the salty comfort of medium fries

and the gum-numbing first sip of an Oreo milkshake.

I used to think that being Chinese made me special.

People ran their fingers through my straight black hair

saying that they wanted darker hair and no more curls.

Was I not the perfect China doll,

small in stature and with eyes they told me were

“big for an Asian”?

I was proud of my Caucasian eyes-

only now do I realize that there’s something wrong

with priding myself in being different from what

ten thousand years of evolution have given us.

Only now do I realize that there’s something wrong in the way that

You thought you could sum up our culture

with sugar-soaked soy sauce and chewy noodles.

Now my eyes are too swollen with stress and insufficient sleep

and I’m not liking being Asian quite so much anymore;

in a half-Asian vocational high school where

freshmen self-study five AP courses and

strive to take calculus by sophomore year,

the horrifying thought is not that

we are pushing ourselves to the limit with no avail.

The horrifying thought is that in an agonizingly short amount of time

we will be forced to haggle with a system that is rigged against us,

and who can be proud of chow mein and

rolled-up ice cream- which we don’t even

have back in Beijing-

when Asians pay to have companies like Asian Advantage tell them

not to write about our “immigrant family coming to America

in a rickety boat with $2 while sailing away from sharks”?

When counselors tell us to “de-emphasize the Asian-ness”

and to denounce our culture and who we are,

simply for the sake of a college application,

that is when we lose our identity.

With the highest GDP and GPAs,

we become nothing more than numbers,

dirty numbers that must be scrubbed raw until they are

pure, white, “clean.”

America is a salad bowl of cultures

but we Asians are the dressing,

and when they think we’re becoming too heavy,

too dense,

that’s when they toss the salad bowl

until we lose our color and our meaning.

My culture has left me screaming my throat raw in my bedroom at night,

crying Why am I Asian? Why am I Chinese?

and hitting my tennis racket across the piano keys

because I can’t play racket sports and I can’t play Beethoven.

You know there’s something wrong when

I hesitate to write these words in a society that claims to be free;

Harvard will reject me for this poem because

if it isn’t already clear enough by my last name and my math competition awards,

I am intolerably, unforgivably Chinese.

It’s ironic that

our culture seems an exotic paradise,

the lilting accents of our immigrant girls a sexual fantasy,

yet we are forced to strip away our ethnicity,

cast aside our identities and our abilities and our interests

for the sake of receiving that coveted thick envelope,

when our only sins have been

learning physics under the covers in dim flashlight

and toiling for near-free wages to join our country together in 1869:

the country we helped build yet are systematically discriminated in.

scattered and disorganized

I am,

but I like to call it

poetic,

the likes of e.e. cummings and William Faulkner,

I remember when I screamed and got sent to timeout

because I wasn’t allowed to end my story with a cliffhanger

but instead was forced to write

“And that was what I did over the weekend”

in big ugly reluctant letters

at the bottom of the wide-ruled notebook page.

Writing a story

is like making a wrap.

You need a conclusion

to roll it all up.

but what if I want

an open-faced burrito

with all the fillings

spilling out from over the sides?

and what if I want

to pick out the shredded-lettuce transition words

of “therefore” and “in conclusion”

and the diced-tomato topic sentences

and must-be-three-paragraph rules,

because I don’t like my vegetables,

especially not the stale and soggy ones

that we must use in every wrap?

There’s only one way

to make a wrap.

If you look at the rubric,

it tells you what to write,

and how to write it.

but the rubric says to “express myself,”

and how do I do that,

how do I become Dickens and Tolstoy

with their two-hundred-word-long sentences

when run-on phrases are the equivalents

of rotten chicken and moldy cheese?

They can break the rules

because they’re very good.

but what if I want

to be just like them,

do I have to fold my burritos

by the only recipe that the

writing rubric gives me?

Yes. Because you’re just learning and

you’re not very good yet.

but when can I be

good enough to

try a different flavor?

I don’t know, but it’s

certainly not today.

and the little wooden craft stick

with my name on it

gets moved from the green jar to the yellow jar

for bad behavior.

I keep quiet, because

even eating the same stale burrito

every day of second grade

is better than the red jar.

it’s a familiar smell,

the sharp sobering scent

of mucus and tears

mingling like lost friends,

an amalgam of agony.

it’s a familiar taste,

the brackish bitterness

of each tear as it

traces its zigzag

path down my cheek.

it’s a familiar sound,

the gasping and the choking,

the strangled, mournful cries,

desperate palpitating of

my frantic heaving heart.

it’s a familiar thought,

tell myself it doesn’t matter,

tell myself to calm down.

slow quivering breaths;

succumb to the silence.

it’s a familiar feeling,

the hollowness, the emptiness,

the comfort of nothing,

that when it isn’t barren,

when a touch of

perceivable emotion is there,

it doesn’t feel right.

it’s too full,

too big,

brimming at the edges

and threatening to spill over.

so I push it away,

relish in the

biting hollowness

as it eats away at me,

eroding what

little is left.

it’s a familiar feeling…

she stood barefoot;

flexing her pygmy toes in

her mother's

winter slippers-

smooth, young,

pearl-white skin

peeking through tufts of

pink faux-down fur.

(chin up, close

her eyes, because

what wouldn't she

do to grow up.)

she stood barefoot,

flexing her calloused feet atop

her daughter's battered

fifth-grade sneakers-

rough, stiffened,

mildew grey skin

nestled in the knots of

frayed purple shoelaces.

(chin tucked, close

her eyes, because

she'd do anything

to go back.)

we were

supposed to

intertwine, fall

into each

other like

the north and

south magnetic poles.

you were

supposed to

wrap your

arms around me,

slowly draw me

close, like two

curlicues of

charred wood,

coiling and

interlacing and

melting into

one.

i was

supposed to

lean into your

tender touch,

close my

eyes and

tilt just to

the right,

inhale your

gentle scent,

crisp white linen.

it was

supposed to

be flawless,

breathless, life-

changing, spark

an instant and

eternal connection,

why didn’t you

rest your

lips on mine,

steal the

breath from the

tip of my

tongue, expel

the old

life from me?

we were

supposed to

taste each

other, devour the

moment like a

delicacy. but

instead, our

first kiss

was nothing but

a touch of two

misshapen nodules of

swollen pink flesh

and the hot

stickiness of

sour coffee breath.

I still remember

the taste of his lips,

chapped as

white birch bark

and tainted

with regret.

crimson.

she was bright carmine,

burning scarlet,

the kind that makes

you stop and look and

turn and think-

this is pure,

this is vibrant,

this is emotion;

the color of

her heart, all

the rich

passion bleeding through.

crimson.

red.

maybe it wasn’t

crimson, but it

was red,

deep and true and

real and right.

the color of

her heart- not

the crimson inside but

just the outside,

the shell of

who she was.

red.

magenta.

she was slowly

fading into labels of

pink and flowery and

fragile and girl;

she took her crimson and

her carmine and

her red and

made it what

they wanted to see,

sliding into the

niche they had

set for her.

magenta.

carnation.

she changed not

only her color but

her title too; sacrificed

her identity for

a crayon color,

the kind that comes

in every Crayola

twelve-box.

carnation.

rose.

she couldn’t be

exquisite carnation, so

she chose the commoners’

bouquet, beautiful

but pale and limp and

wilted at the edges;

let her petals

peel away-

he loves me, he

loves me not.

rose.

grey.

she was eroding away

at what little

was left of

her color, as if

pale rose

just wasn’t

blanched enough.

she was cool

grey now, wispy

ghost-like wraiths of

feeble life.

grey.

white.

bleached like a

wedding dress,

with a kind of

faded, dusty elegance,

like a jewel, tarnished

with time, a

girl who had

lost her luster

long ago,

vacant,

barren,

empty,

colorless,

white.

nothing.

nothing.

we’re just sailboats, aren’t we,

two rickety brown dots

lost in the vast blue,

drifting

ever further

apart,

no matter

how far

we reach,

lean over

the edge and

yearn for

the touch

of the

other.

our love is just

a message in a bottle, isn’t it,

one bobbing speck

that rides

the waves

like the birds do,

the only one

that doesn’t

soar but

sinks instead,

water seeping

through the

cracks; broken

glass blossoms,

petals that

unfurl and

wilt,

twist and

flutter away

into the

deep,

deep blue.

in the end, we

were just pollution, weren’t we,

salt-tainted spatters of parchment,

floating far

beneath the

waves, where

no light illuminates

the ribbon

I tied

round the

rolled-up scroll

before sending

the bottle

to sea,

or the

way I

crossed

my O

when I wrote,

Love.

all that’s

left of

us is

the ink

of my

fountain pen,

bleeding into

the murky

depths,

black text

billowing in

wisps

off the

sea-soaked page,

curling like

smoke and

ebbing with

the Atlantic

drift.