A Discourse

I burnt my dumplings writing a letter for you.

"Tell him I cried a lot after reading his email," my mother demanded in a tongue I was vaguely familiar with. I had translated the latter half of a fractured relationship for her and she leaned over my shoulder as her eyes narrowed into an inane squint. "Tell him my heart is broken."

My fingers scattered across the plastic black keys in an agitated gait as they tried their best to convey crude fragments into a recognizable structure. 

"What else?" 

"Ni gah ssuh." 


You write it.

There is an exchange of words - stumbling, strained, and newborn to this kind of world. Our dialogue comes as if they had been sifted through a cultural sieve and the words left behind feed into the tension between myself and the screen. 

She wants to say more and I can sense a distant longing to make amends with a guilt ridden bloodline. But I can only imagine how heavy her mouth may feel - she struggles with the dialect of her motherland and the lingo of our mother tongue. 

You and I, we are colloquial. This letter we composed together through taut talk is vernacular.




With her standing beside me, arms akimbo, dye-stained tank top, a persistent show of her underbelly (the second child did this, she once joked), dark sweatpants always pulled up to her knees. I am sitting, crouched, hunched, I am curling over the keyboard, my despise and burden shaping my form, the clatter of a line forming, the raising of our voices, the deafening silence she offers me in reply. The silence she offers her kin to which I translate into "I miss you's". I resent you.


We are done. I sprang from the chair and retreated into my room. Hours passed with little contact between us and it isn't long before she reaches for me again. 

I heard dull thuds of ungraceful needs hitting the floor and the familiar crinkling of pages to which she draws out salvation. She is praying. I hear my name and immediately, I am drawn and forced into a dejected descent... 

But I thank you.