USA

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Dim Sum & Then Some

At the Eight Immortals--where the Lee kids are known
to sprawl in front of dim sum carts, checking out
the shark fin dumplings & ham ha ngau yuk chow fun--
the owner prefers to seat us in the banquet room upstairs.
Grandma loves her grandchildren, doesn't want us to marry
& move out of state! The boys pat her head, sputtering
Chinglish & adjusting tones until they hit the mark.
On special occasions, when Canadian half-relatives visit,
second uncle's lanky second son, Ellison, tapes styrofoam
cups to his chest, piles waist-length hair on top of his head,
& grooves like a drag queen waitress in heat. If our blind
Grandpa were alive, his one blue eye would try to stare
down our antics. Last year I married & now I'm chewing
the fat at the grown-up table, talking about my 401K.
I miss the steamed bun fights, the 11-kid stadium wave
around our table, & the puppet show--chicken & duck heads
stuck on chopsticks, pecking at each other, their pink napkin
dresses trailing in the soy sauce.

George, My Husband, 
Didn't Expect to 
Live in San Francisco

The full moon beams as if it had eaten
blue cheese & burped into the sky.
The pasta trucks rumble down
the Great Highway. Our cat, petite
in her black sealskin coat, claws at the ghost
of a mouse in our dark wood kitchen.
I can almost taste the pappardelle con
il ragu di fegatini as my husband, the refugee
from Mattawamkeag, Maine, sways
in his plaid boxer shorts, stirring
his chicken-liver sauce. The evening smells
the way the cheese felt when it melted.
It's in the mood for love. George laughs
since he didn't expect to live in San Francisco,
ten years after seeing the bridge collapse.
The moon won't eat cheese. Tom Waits,
who keeps an eye on life, chokes up
a melody--outside, another yellow
moon has punched a hole in the nighttime.
The black ink of my life keeps writing
on the right squid of my brain.
The cat screams in Cantonese,
telepathically, again Big Pris, unsettled
by her migraine, stands on her head.
She'll have quintuplets by Cesarean section
when she's 41, & they'll frolic in red
rain slickers & tiny duck shoes. These hip babies
will love asparagus spiced Eritrean &
George'll have to feed them milkshakes
to make them hungry. Mutt-ye ho? M-goi, tai ha.
What's good? Let me have a look.
Baby Cat slurps the sauce,
twirling the angel hair in her paws.
The moon blows a raspberry at the comets
as they somersault through the night.
George & Pris turn off the light
& pull the blankets for bed. The fog horns
groan & the cat wants to build
a bonfire & sauté her littleneck clams.

Note: The line, "outside, another yellow moon has punched a hole in the
nighttime" is from Downtown Train by Tom Waits.

1522 Mason Street, 
San Francisco, 1969

Years later, I still hear the continuous
steel cable, vibrating in the groove
under Mason Street, Uncle Gary sobbing
because someone at the Laundromat stole
my diapers, his room pulsing with nervous music.
No one told me he left home until the day
I scuttled from the smack of my mother's slipper,
& she dragged me from under his empty bed.

I think of Grandma praying faster,
me looking under her skirt while she lit
offerings to our ancestors, her thick legs
rough with veins, the beige stockings sagging
under the pull of garters. She always loved me best.
Uncle Gary had hitchhiked East to study teeth.
Sometimes, when no one was home & you could hear
the crackling of mah jong tiles shuffled next door,
Grandma, Grandpa, & I watched strippers on TV.
I remembered Grandpa saying, "American women
will do anything" while the melon-breasted blonde
with a face like Kim Novak, pulled a feather boa
back & forth across her bottom.

I can remember the night Uncle Gary choked
on a fishbone because he didn't learn to eat
his fish heads right, Auntie Joyce poured vinegar
down his throat to make him throw up,
& Uncle Lealand hurled his chopsticks, chipping a plate
because the baby wouldn't stop wailing.
No one told the landlady we had ten people
crammed into three rooms or that Great Grandma
smoked & slept in the hall closet.
That night, Grandpa, blind & bulging with irritation,
flung the radio into the clanging cold.

Of Soup and Love

In the winter when a young woman invites a young man for chowder,
he packs a bag. I had my knapsack ready. I worked as a museum guide.
Nadine was a guard telling people, Don't touch. I loved soup.
Two months later she was pregnant. I didn't want the baby, but fed her
bread and broth, held her head when she couldn¹t keep food down.
Her housemate told me Nadine planned the pregnancy. One morning,
I sat up in bed, my breath warming the air. Nadine was by the bathroom
door on her hands and knees. Moaning, hair stuck to her face, she scrubbed
blood off the white rug. She was hemorrhaging and scrubbing. I pulled
a long shirt over her. A tubal pregnancy, her doctor told me later.
A dark mass, bone and tissue, blocked the fallopian tube. That spring,
I held her and kissed the scar on her stomach, my strange little signature.

China

On our dining table, every dish is a dime-store pattern:
blue dandelions, red nasturtiums, the entire stack,
a small legacy won in a 1959 coin toss
by Lealand, the uncle with the long arms
and legs, who pitched penny after penny
at a parking lot carnival until his pockets
were emptied of everything, but lint and luck.

My family wouldn't buy Emporium bowls
thick like heads of cabbage or soup spoons
holding hand-painted water lilies;
our plates, chipped and resounding,
clatter at every feast. In America,
we acquired what was necessary:
some English to earn a living, cotton
for dull work, enough noodles for a long life.

My father and uncle fled China
with a black leather trunk, four wool sweaters,
and proud photographs of their two-story mansion.
They rented on Mason, Alfred's Steakhouse clanging
all night below.  Great-Uncle's wife
donated a lazy susan, mini Bora Bora
pitchforks, and wooden bowls, rancid
from salad oil‹whatever she couldn't unload
at her yard sale. Sundays, she invited
her nephews to hang coats, change diapers,
and serve finger sandwiches, told guests,
ignore those farmboys, too stupid to say yes or no.

The boys didn¹t tell her about the jars of jade
or the big house, its pond
swimming with yolk-eating carp.
They studied calculus and chemistry
and worked after school, eighty-five cents an hour,
pouring coffee at Mee Heung Bakery
and ironing pleats in sweat shops
towards a new life: chicken and fresh fish
every day, wonton noodle soup and television
at midnight, Grace Kelly on weekends. When I get off the boat,
America is a beautiful country, my father says
as he watches Uncle Lealand, the organoleptic specialist, dish up
the leftover black bean lobster for his cats.

These poems appear in Wishbone, Priscilla Lee's first book recently
published by The Roundhouse Press, a Heyday Books imprint.

© All Copyright, 2000, Priscilla Lee.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.