And this is a poem for my father.
It's called "The Remains."
Wuxi, China.
Walking out of the new cemetery, my father
takes my hand, having just reinterred
the remains of his own father and his father's two
wives, his mother dead from TB by the time he was 10.
He takes my hand and says, "now I
can die in peace, even if we didn't get the actual bones."
Village thugs hired by my uncle made sure the burial
mounds behind the house my father grew up
in would not feel a single shovel blade go in,
as they stood there, sentinel, with arms crossed.
My uncle's wife had a dream that out of the grave's opened gash,
demons rushed, ancestral ghosts not wanting to be disturbed.
In less than a decade, bulldozers
will come to take the Liu village down.
My grandfather's ashes, my grandmother's
bones, my own father walking away with two fistfuls of dirt
and saying, "this will have to do.
So many others have died who left nothing.
I'll never come back to this place again."
My father kisses my hand, I, who've
flown across 12 time zones to be here at his side,
in a borrowed van.
Me, looking out the window at a countryside
once overrun with Japs marching West along the railroad
tracks, my father and his siblings hiding in an outhouse,
a dead horse found in the schoolyard
soon after the soldiers had gone.
Your hands are so soft, I say to my father.
"So are yours," he says.
"Remember when it was we last held hands?"
I must have been a kid.
I say, maybe eight or 10?
"You were six."
And I'm still your son, I say, leaning into his shoulder,
our hands the same size.
"And I will always be your father,"
my father says, before I have the chance
to say another word, my 80-year-old father nodding off
into sleep.
[BELL CHIMING]