All right.
Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction.
Well, I can think Alison, Karen, and all the wonderful workers
at the Worker Bees and at the Poetry Center
for the hard work on my behalf.
And I have to begin with a self-introduction of sorts.
And it's called "How I Got That Name," an essay on assimilation.
"How I Got That Name."
I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin.
Oh, how I love the resoluteness of that first person singular
followed by that stalwart indicative of B
without the uncertain I and G of becoming.
Of course, the name had been changed somewhere between Angel
Island and the sea.
When my father, the paperson in the late 1950s,
obsessed with the bombshell blonde,
transliterated Mei Ling to Marilyn.
And nobody dared question his initial impulse
for we all know lust drove young men to greatness, not goodness,
not decency.
And there I was, a wayward pink baby
named after some tragic white woman
swollen with gin and nembutal.
My mother couldn't pronounce the R.
She dubbed me number one female offshoot for brevity.
Henceforth, she will live and die
in sublime ignorance flanked by loving children and the kitchen
deity.
While my father dithers, a tomcat
in Hong Kong trash, a gambler, a petty thug,
who bought a chain of chop suey joints in Piss River, Oregon,
with bootleg Gucci cash.
Nobody dared question his integrity
given his nice devout daughters and his bright industrious sons,
as if filial piety were the standard by which
all earthly men were measured.
Oh, how trustworthy our daughters, how thrifty our sons.
Have we managed to fool the experts in education statistics
and demography?
We're not very creative, but not adverse to rote learning.
Indeed, they can use us.
But the model minority is a tease.
We know you are watching now.
So we refuse to give you any.
Old bamboo shoots, bamboo shoots.
The further west we go, we'll hit east.
The deeper down we dig, we'll find China.
History has turned its stomach on a black polluted beach,
where life doesn't hinge on that red, red wheelbarrow,
but whether or not our new lover in that final episode of Santa
Barbara will lean over a scented candle and call us a bitch.
Oh, God.
Where have we gone wrong?
We have no inner resources.
Then one redolent spring morning,
the great patriarch Chin peered down from his kiosk in heaven,
and saw that his descendants were ugly.
One had a squarish head and a nose without a bridge.
Another's profile, long and knobbed as a gourd.
A third, the sad brutish one, may never, never marry.
And I, his least favorite, not quite boiled,
not quite cooked, a plump pomfret simmering in my juices.
Too listless to fight for my people's destiny.
To kill without resistance is not slaughter, says the proverb.
So I wait for imminent death.
The fact that this death is also metaphorical
is testament to my lethargy.
So here lies Marilyn Mei Ling Chin, married once,
twice to so and so, a Lee and a Wong,
granddaughter of Jack, the patriarch, and the brooding
Suilin Fong, daughter of the virtuous Yuet Kuen Wong
and G.G. Chin the infamous.
Sister of a dozen, cousin of a million, survived by everybody,
and forgotten by all.
She was neither black, nor white, neither cherished,
nor vanquished.
Just another squatter on her own bamboo grove minding her poetry.
When one day, heaven was unmerciful
and a chasm opened where she stood.
Like the jowls of a mighty white whale,
or the maw of a metaphysical Godzilla,
it swallowed her whole.
She did not flinch nor writhe, nor fret about the afterlife,
but stayed!
Solid as wood, happily a little gnawed, tattered,
mesmerized by all that was lavished upon her
and all that was taken away.
Thank you.