At the wet market

I used to find it barbaric
and would look for my excuses
but you'd bring me along, a small girl then,
to the market: a theatre of blood.
It pained me to imagine
the shuffling of thin webbed feet,
the croaking pleas,
their feathered wings struggling
against their impending fates.

I used to find it hard to face
that kind, red-faced man in the shop.
A number tag. His clammy hand.
Forty minutes. We’d look away
from what happened
under the red lamps
in that squalid cage-house.

I used to find it barbaric
to taste the tender meat
of ching yuan chicken served with
ginger and spring onion
in the family meal, a dish
so delicious and common
in that city of high-rise flats.
An almost-past life now, contained  
in small, distant cubes of light.



The unbearably light words on San Huan Lu

So tell me about your language. Your words are pictures aren’t they? I took out a pen and drew on the table napkin: three downward curves: a river. A dot in a circle: the sun. See how four little water drops slide down a windowpane: the arrival of rain. And the crescent shape is the same moon that Li Bai gazed at when he thought of home, one thousand three hundred years ago. The picture of home: a secure place where cattle is kept. It’s so beautiful I could spend the rest of my life learning this. I even taught you 愛, the character for love. But it has too many strokes. I won’t remember.

That was five years ago. We had Dan Dan Mian in a local noodle shop on Bei 北 Jing 京 San 三 Huan 环 Lu 路. It was the year when I worked in Sanlitun, a district for foreigners, full of embassies and wine bars. You were in love with me, and my language, and my body. The city was never itself again after the Olympics. I wonder where are you now?