I.
我好想回家,
I want to go home,
但是… 我的家在哪裡?
But where is home?

I have lost all fluency.
我的流利不留.
The jagged edges of grammars,
fragmented vocabularies,
Jostle in the jigsaw puzzle
Of possible expressions.

Mouth sounds grappling to describe
The perfect fractal immensity,
These jumbled, bubbling impressions, boiling up From the cauldron, Life.

I may have grown here, but
I am always non-native now.
我從不本地人.
(Yes, I know I didn’t say exactly what I seem to have said that I said. It’s what I meant.)

To call us “Third Culture”
Implies a physical space
In which the venn diagram of they and they
Overlap and we
Snuggle cozy and warm
There in between.

I have not encountered that space,
If it exists.
All is familiar.
All is 意外，精彩,
defamiliarized.

II.
Can I sink into the soil somewhere?
土地公公’s realm, Jorð’s body beneath us,
Sand, sea, mycelial mat.

Not yet
Do I deliver this treasure hoard to Hel.

In the meantime
I have questions:

Have you ever seen the snow
Sliding sideways over the frozen rice paddies
Carved between Korea’s mountains?
Do you know the blue-tile temples, the gray tunics,
cloth sandals?

The pears of 평택?

Can you smell the tan dirt trails that wind through the paddies?
Taste the flat, dry persimmons and fat, autumn grapes?

Lychee in a 北京 June？

Can you feel the September evening
Rolling down your skin across the yellow fields
South of Київ, north of Одеса?

Do you know the old Soviet bakery perched at the cusp of the Black Sea?
They used to sell cheese.

Hungarian trains bearing black-haired women
wrapped up in color to the border
Romanian horse carts,
The discarded children of Bucureşti,
Ceaușescu’s hubris.

By all of this I mean to ask,
Do you know me?

For the verb, I, is all this – and so much more.
Fitting together, awkward and dense as the 10,000 Daily denizens of Hong Kong’s
Chungking “Mansions.”

III.
So home must be like Whitman’s I
Space for multitudes.

我好想回家
哪家大夠嗎
What home could accommodate me now?
I am large as Hyrrokkin
And teeming with the maggots of my memories.

Only I.
Only whole.

This poem and many more are in the collection Ten Thousand Yous, available on Lulu.com and nowhere else, because, ya know, capitalism.