Every time our kind are addressed, we are either an egg roll: stuffed with pork and shrimp and deep fried; or a bowl of rice noodles, decorated with carrots and greens and drenched in soy and fish sauce, taken to church picnics, bingo and office socials. But even among our kind we are the ones whose industry is unfailing. Always smiling, always deferential, unassuming. Book publishers tell us: your people don't read so what are you writing? Who are you even writing for? Your poor country built a university 400 years before Harvard but they'll keep looking for faults in grammar and spelling. They don't believe you when you say lightening is not the same as lightning. When it rains, every hurricane is named calamity. Every child with light eyes and skin must come from a musical where a bar girl is fucked by a blue- eyed soldier and then is abandoned. Every time I step into an elevator I can feel when someone's gaze sweeps over me from head to toe. I don't know them but that never keeps them from appraising.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.