"Poem for a Vietnamese Student."
Where I teach in San Diego, we have
a lot of Vietnamese students, and sometimes, we're
taunting even though you don't know what's happening.
A punji stake is a piece of bamboo that's sharpened,
dipped in feces, put in grass so it's hidden at about a
45 degree angle so somebody can step into it and get infected.
And so the Vietnamese or the Viet Cong
rather would put out an American soldier without any money.
So that's one word, and the other word
is sin loi, which means I'm sorry in Vietnamese or sorry.
So I have an exercise that I do with students
so they can learn the dictionary.
And this student came up, and I choose the word, put it up,
et cetera.
And she chose what I would think is an interesting word
as you'll see in the poem.
"Some words have tongues sharp as punji stakes.
They lie awake and ambush as long as necessary.
Sometimes in the shadows of other words--
gobbledygook."
I need to explain that gook was a term
that American military personnel used for the Vietnamese.
"They know the future because they
have no regret for the past.
They are ill-mannered, pretend to be deaf as clocks,
in love with the sound of their names.
They lie awake and ambush as long as necessary
sometimes in the shadow of other words--
gobbledygook.
They find their way into our life, into our blood,
and haunt us.
We pay with our lives.
All our lives.
Welcome to America, sin loi.
Get your dictionary, go to the board,
look up a new word, write down guide words,
entry word, phonetic spelling, learn
how to pronounce the word.
Which syllable is stressed?
Repeat after me, gobbledygook, gobbledygook, gobbledygook."