my mother tells me when she first came to australia
she ate an avocado with its skin because she had never seen it before so now
everytime I weigh an avocado with its rigid bumpy green-black surface in
the palm of my hand I think of my mother
alone. my mother once a girl tells me sharply to live
in a way she couldn’t and when we go back to guangzhou and
stay in her fleeting past what lies between us when I meet her
wide eyes in old photographs makes me forget her anger and
my jagged teenage years. when she walks me one red evening
to the brick and flowers she once called home
I tilt my head to the sky guiltily
for I cannot imagine what it might have looked like
forty years ago. she laughs when I call the apartments
a jail cell with their heavy metal bars across her past and
when we head back to her father’s place she refuses to tell me what lies
behind those bars so I wait—
I’m good at that. the grainy childhood behind glass skips and evades
my eyes the mess of adolescence in between lost to me
a foreign existence that wells in the pits
of a dizzying city and in the meantime I sort through what I know
in her cookie tins and threaded needles sewing together scraps of a little girl
that escapes me. preparing food for her busy parents soaking rice and vegetables and bike rides and falling into lakes and climbing mountains just to see the sun rise her motherland will always chide my ignorance
but I deserve it. sometimes in the dark I
think I inherited all of my mother’s sorrow because I never met nǎinai who is actually wàipó but it was easier for my
tongue to say the wrong words without a mother how can
a little girl exist? so I string together all these
memories of mothers where the silence in my throat
echoes and echoes and echoes
with my mother’s mother tongue mangled
with razor sharp
biting english words
and wonder if
my mother once a girl is me, just a little bit.
