Triple Sonnet for Sad Asian Girls
I’m watching a video about sad Asian girls
who reenact scenes from their Asian families:
one girl plays the other girl’s mother,
saying to her, “Why are you eating so much?”
the bowl of rice and kimchi dish
on the dinner table, and “I want to go back
to Korea next year, so lose some weight,”
and I want to cry, because sometimes,
I too, am a sad Asian girl with demanding
parents who want to go back to Hong Kong
every year, and sure, everyone’s got
family drama, but my mother ran off
with my father in her twenties—marriage,
coming to America, away from her parents.
And I know my mother misses her sisters
every day, separated by an ocean,
or a flashback to when I was born:
snowy Albany, my mother crying,
begging my father to move back to Hong Kong,
she missed her pajama stalls and medicine shops
and taro desserts and family celebrations
gathered around a mango cake—she didn’t understand
America, and I don’t understand Hong Kong—
her Hong Kong, the way she grew up
with two sisters, giggling after dinner,
running down to buy shrimp crackers and British
chocolates once the meal was over,
and I’m watching a video about sad Asian girls,
thinking about my mother and I fighting
at one of those cheap cafes by my grandparents’,
tasting my own tears as I swallowed my toast
with condensed milk, and I never cry,
but deep down I am a sad Asian girl
watching her parents fight in their homeland,
and I think about my mother at nineteen
falling in love with my father at thirty-three
and moving to America at twenty-five,
and I won’t ever understand her Hong Kong
or her America, and I think back to me
at five, my mother telling me a story
about her favorite doll, how she held it like a daughter.
A daughter was all she ever wanted.
—
This selection comes from Dorothy Chan’s full-length book, Revenge of the Asian Woman, available from Diode Editions. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Danielle Hanson.
Dorothy Chan is the author of Attack of the Fiy-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018) and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017). She was a 2014 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Academy of American Poets, e Cincinnati Review, e Common, Diode Poetry Journal, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. Chan is the Editor of e Southeast Review and Poetry Editor of Hobart.
