In honor of Lunar New Year, which was celebrated on Wednesday, January 29th in China and various other Asian countries, I have found a couple of poems on the subject to share in this column. Question: what is everybody’s favorite Chinese dish? I’m a big fan of jiaozi dumplings, myself.
Chinese New Year, Lynda Hull
The dragon is in the street dancing beneath windows pasted with colored squares, past the man who leans into the phone booth’s red pagoda, past crates of doves and roosters veiled until dawn. Fireworks complicate the streets with sulphur as people exchange gold and silver foil, money to appease ghosts who linger, needy even in death. I am almost invisible. Hands could pass through me effortlessly. This is how it is to be so alien that my name falls from me, grows untranslatable as the shop signs, the odors of ginseng and black fungus that idle in the stairwell, the corridor where the doors are blue months ajar. Hands gesture in the smoke, the partial moon of a face. For hours the soft numeric click of mah-jongg tiles drifts down the hallway where languid Mai trails her musk of sex and narcotics.
There is no grief in this, only the old year consuming itself, the door knob blazing in my hand beneath the lightbulb’s electric jewel.
Between voices and fireworks wind works bricks to dust—hush, hush— no language I want to learn. I can touch the sill worn by hands I’ll never know in this room with its low table where I brew chrysanthemum tea. The sign for Jade Palace sheds green corollas on the floor. It’s dangerous to stand here in the chastening glow, darkening my eyes in the mirror with the gulf of the rest of my life widening away from me, waiting for the man I married to pass beneath the sign of the building, to climb the five flights and say his Chinese name for me.
He’ll rise up out of the puzzling streets where men pass bottles of rice liquor, where the new year is liquor, the black bottle the whole district is waiting for, like some benevolent arrest—the moment when men and women turn to each other and dissolve each bad bet, every sly mischance, the dalliance of hands. They turn in lamplight the way I turn now. Wai Min is in the doorway.
He brings fish. He brings lotus root.
He brings me ghost money.
Eating Together, Li-Young Lee
In the steamer is the trout seasoned with slivers of ginger, two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil. We shall eat it with rice for lunch, brothers, sister, my mother who will taste the sweetest meat of the head, holding it between her fingers deftly, the way my father did weeks ago. Then he lay down to sleep like a snow-covered road winding through pines older than him, without any travelers, and lonely for no one.
New Year. Bei Dao
a child carrying flowers walks toward the new year a conductor tattooing darkness listens to the shortest pause hurry a lion into the cage of music hurry stone to masquerade as a recluse moving in parallel nights who’s the visitor? when the days all tip from nests and fly down roads the book of failure grows boundless and deep each and every moment’s a shortcut I follow it through the meaning of the East returning home, closing death’s door
Instructions on Not Giving Up, Ada Limón
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
Andrea Gutierrez is the managing editor of the Bryan County News. Poems sourced from poetryfoundation.org and poets.org.