Chinatown, 1975

by Brett Rutherford

Gossip among
young Asian men,
with whom I dine,
    a guest, a stranger,
yet somehow as in
    as they are out.

Outsiders always,
     some seldom stray
     North of Canal Street,
employment limited
to under-the-radar
exploited jobs, unless

the overseas mother,
the rich uncle,
paid one’s way
to a good school,
escape into
the melting pot.

Slowly, I learn
the pecking order:

the ABCs
(American-born Chinese),

rich Asians
     on monthly checks
     from anxious parents,
well-off Taiwan
    or Singapore families;

“jump ships,” the
mainland arrivals
     from Mao’s horrors,
cardless, furtive,
evading questions.

Americans see none of this,
each bowing waiter,
     each unseen worker
in kitchen or sweatshop,
a Charlie Chan cipher.

Outcast among
a colony of outcasts,
I am at home here
at this round table whose
lazy susan rotates
a casserole of friendship.

From here, we head out
for the Chinese opera.

 

The Orphaned Vase

by Brett Rutherford

Two decades or more I have studied it:
that double-dragon-handled vase
from my New York hauntings.
Bought from a Chinese store
about to shut down forever,
its unsold vases stacked,
dust-covered orphans
that had never found a home.

Today I regard it with new eyes
and undertake to learn its origins,
and what the wriggling floral shapes
and tangled leaves can tell me.

Amid the leaves are Treasures:
a thick square book in a silken cord,
a checker board awaiting two players,
two rice-paper scrolls tied up
blank for calligraphy to come,
and two rhinoceros horns
predicting happiness
for the vase’s owner.

It was intended, no doubt,
to be a young scholar’s first vase,
its carmine glaze the blush
of a young man’s ardor,
its unknown, ardent flowers
all petals open to the sun.

It is all good omens, but no one came
to the old shop on Mott Street
to carry it off; no scholar sipped
his oolong tea and wrote poems
in the cheer of its good karma.

Close scrutiny reveals
some hint of the reasons why:
one of the dragon handles
is missing the monster’s snout.
Some accident — a fall, a ricochet
of a bandit’s bullet, broke off
this beast’s ability
to snort a blowtorch back
at a would-be attacker.

One also sees
the whole vase is a-tilt.
It leans some five degrees
off vertical, so doomed to sit
like someone whose leg
is shorter than the other,
a tipsy vase just ready
to take a tumble.

It is a century old, I guess.
It is lonely for its maker,
for the fine-haired brush
that painted it, for the wheel
on which it was cast lopsided.

It comes from a kiln
that exists no more. One day,
a Japanese bomber took sight
at the Wude Sheng factory
and all was blown
to smithereens.

Thou, sad vase,
thou, snoutless dragon,
thou, limping, tilted vessel,
orphan of war and history.

Arabesques on the Statue of Liberty

A rapist on the Staten Island Ferry lusts after the Statue of Liberty. On Canal Street, a Chinese wife makes a break for freedom. And then King Kong and the Statue of Liberty switch places. A new revision of an old New York poem.

1

Bad Dingo rides

the Staten Island ferry

dusk till dawn,

clinging to rail,

nestling an all-night

tumescence,

hard at the sight

of the robed lady,

vast,

unapproachable.

He’s stalking her,

biding his time.

Some night

there’d be a fog,

a power failure.

He’d come up behind her,

prodding the small

of her spine

with his imperious knife,

jostling her bronze buttocks

with his ardent flesh prod.

She’d drop the tablet;

the torch would sputter.

He’d push her off her pedestal.

Bad Dingo would give it to her good

the way he did to all the white ladies

in parks and stairwells and subway cars.

This would be the rape of all rapes,

the pinnacle of his career,

the ultimate boast

“See that toppled goddess

in the harbor--

she ain’t so proud now

since someone had her,

made her moan.

Bad Dingo had her,

stuck it to the Statue,

white-lady Liberty!”

2

In Chinatown,

Mrs. Wang mounts

a quiet rebellion

against the ways of the elders.

She has done all

her mother asked her:

married the boy

the matchmaker ordained,

bore sons and daughters

in regular order

burned joss and incense

at every altar,

sending ghost gold and peaches,

phantom cars and televisions

Hong Kong Hell dollars

to the teeming, greedy dead.

Now her husband travels,

has mistresses, won’t talk

about his gambling.

Her children are gone,

married to foreign devils

Her round-eyed grandchildren

won’t learn Mandarin,

will never send joss riches

to her when she is dead.

Now she becomes a whirlwind:

She sells her jade and porcelain,

cleans out her savings account,

buys an airline ticket

for San Francisco —

from there, who knows?

She pawns the statuette

of pearly white Kuan-Yin,

the Goddess of Mercy

whose only blessing

was endless childbirth

and washing and ironing,

On a whim she buys another

to take its place at her bedside:

a foot-high Statue of Liberty

with batteries and glowing torch.

She leaves it for her husband,

her wedding ring

on its spiky crown.

3

Today two New York titans

switch places.

A grumpy Green Liberty

strides up Fifth Avenue,

crushing pedestrians in verdigris.

Her sandalled feet

send buses flying,

kiosks shattering.

Her great head turns

among the office towers.

She reaches in,

pulls screaming executives

through razor edge panes,

undresses them

with her copper fingers,

discards them one by one

to the pavement

twenty stories below.

The man she wants

is not among them. He’s got

to be a real American,

one of those Arrow short models,

blond, and a screamer,

a yielding but unwilling male

under her stern metallic nails.

The more he cries out, Put me down,

the more she likes him.

Uptown, she finds him:

a tousle-headed messenger,

scooped up from his bicycle.

She cups him in one palm,

drops her tablet,

rolls up her sleeves,

and starts the painful ascent

of the Empire State Building.

Downtown

on Liberty Island,

King Kong wields a torch,

incinerates all passing freighters,

capsizes the passenger ships.

He hurls great boulders skyward,

picks off incoming airplanes one by one.

He is guarding the harbor now.

He is a real American

and he shouts his slogans:

America First.

Stay out.

Go home.

No foreigners allowed.