WEBVTT

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And this is a poem
for my father.

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It's called "The Remains."

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Wuxi, China.

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Walking out of the new
cemetery, my father

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takes my hand, having
just reinterred

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the remains of his own
father and his father's two

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wives, his mother dead from
TB by the time he was 10.

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He takes my hand
and says, "now I

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can die in peace, even if we
didn't get the actual bones."

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Village thugs hired by my
uncle made sure the burial

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mounds behind the
house my father grew up

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in would not feel a
single shovel blade go in,

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as they stood there,
sentinel, with arms crossed.

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My uncle's wife had a dream that
out of the grave's opened gash,

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demons rushed, ancestral ghosts
not wanting to be disturbed.

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In less than a
decade, bulldozers

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will come to take
the Liu village down.

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My grandfather's
ashes, my grandmother's

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bones, my own father walking
away with two fistfuls of dirt

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and saying, "this
will have to do.

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So many others have
died who left nothing.

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I'll never come back
to this place again."

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My father kisses
my hand, I, who've

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flown across 12 time zones
to be here at his side,

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in a borrowed van.

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Me, looking out the
window at a countryside

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once overrun with Japs marching
West along the railroad

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tracks, my father and his
siblings hiding in an outhouse,

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a dead horse found
in the schoolyard

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soon after the
soldiers had gone.

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Your hands are so soft,
I say to my father.

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"So are yours," he says.

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"Remember when it was
we last held hands?"

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I must have been a kid.

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I say, maybe eight or 10?

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"You were six."

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And I'm still your son, I say,
leaning into his shoulder,

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our hands the same size.

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"And I will always
be your father,"

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my father says, before
I have the chance

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to say another word, my
80-year-old father nodding off

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into sleep.

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[BELL CHIMING]

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