“seek your fortune.” A generation
had learned the language from fairy tales broad-
cast by loudspeakers across the commune
agricultural zone, across orchards,
furrows, paddies, dairies. “Farewell,
dear Father. Farewell, dear Mother.
The open road beckons me.” “Farewell,
my child. Go forth. Win your fortune.
Make money, my son. Find love.
Marry the princess.” The widow spoke addressing
her husband, telling him his own story.
“Following the waterways, you walked and swam,
swam and walked from duck pond and streams
and rivers to the Mouth of the Tiger. You had no
Permit To Settle. All through nights,
lights beckon Hong Kong Hong Kong
red red green green. Liang
liang. Ho liang. You swam
for those lights, and came to the ten thousand
sampans, the floating town gone now.
Free and safe for a night and a morning. Boat
people fed you and let you sleep, gave you
bed on the water, fed you twice, supper
and breakfast. JAWK!” She hit the box, caged
it with fingers and arms. “They CAUGHT him.”
Wittman jumped. She laughed; everybody
laughed. “Don’t be scared, foreign
Chinese person. They did not
torture my husband to death. He got
hit a few times was all. You know
the Chinese, they hit to teach you a lesson.
I saved him out of I.I. I got
out of jail because China and Viet Nam
became normal. Han and Viet same-same.”
“Hai, law. Hai, law.” Her American
listener chimed in: “Hola! Hola!
In California, we, Chinese and
Vietnamese, together celebrate Tet.”
Sing dawn. Tet nguyen dâ
.
“I took you, my Chinese husband, by the hand,
and we left prison. I’m the one,
freed you, you Old Rooster. Woman
is better at living than man is. We
went to live in public housing just
like everybody else, the sampan
people, everybody. I made
money. All I do, each meal,
I cook enough for more than 2—
2 people eat very little.
The extra, I sell on the street. A hungry man
always comes along; he’ll buy
breakfast or lunch or dinner or suey yeah.
Life is easier on a woman. Your abilities,
my good Old Rooster, were to swim and to farm.
In the city, you had to sell your
lick
.
Ladies and gentlemen fellow travelers, he
sold his kung.” His strength, his labor. “You
rode a water-soldier boat out
to one of the warships from all over
the world. I watched you be lifted and lowered
by ropes. You hung from ropes down the side
of the ship’s mountainface. Using rags,
you painted the gray ship gray,
ashes, ashes, gray on top of gray.
Fields of gray above you and behind you, you
and the cadre of painters—many women—women,
who adore flowers—oozed gray everywhere
you touched. Metal doubled the sun’s heat,
and baked you, baked lead paint into
your skin. You could’ve let yourself
fall backward into air and water. But you,
everyday you went to Pun Shan Shek
and toiled for me. For me, you caught yang
fever. You breathed poison. Skin and lungs
breathed poison, sweated poison. We
could not wash the gray paint out of you.
It was painting warships killed you. That work
so dangerous, the foreign nations don’t order
their own water soldiers to do it. Old One,
I thank you for your care of me. You are / were
a good hardworking husband to me.
I’m sorry / I can’t face you, my gray
Old Rooster, we never had a son.
Okay. We’re each other’s child.
I take care of you, and you take care of me.
I bring you home. I’m sorry / I can’t
face you, I have taken too long
to bring you home. Stacks and stacks of caskets
and urns wait to get out of Hong Kong.
I pulled you out of the pile-up. We’re on
our way home. You’re a good man.
You worked hard. Jeah jeah jeah.
Daw jeah. Thanks thanks thanks.
Big thanks.” No verb tenses,
what is still happening? What is over?
Yet refugee camps? Yet piles
of unburied dead? Yet coolies painting
ships with lead? All that’s happened always
happening? “I too am walking mountain,”
said a man dressed Hong Kong