Between Languages

Taking my shelter in the castle of the Chinese

Characters, I gaze at their solitary images

There line up, passing through me, with shivering bodies

In a monotone rhythm of continuous fusillades

After the genocide, the characters are simplified

Leaving behind a pile of arms, legs and eyes

But the language can still walk

Mystery nurtures a famine, as well as

A future incapable of feeding our growing appetite

I share, and make choices with my own race

With my own accent, in a dialect

United by violence.  In the chaos of the ancient

And the modern, my month turns into crater ruins

My teeth fall to the emptiness

Such a scene, such a banquet! Chinese are

Spreading to the world. I have eaten up my share, then

I steal my ancestor’s, until

One evening, I was in the street, I saw

A group of Chinese chasing an American. I guess

They want to immigrate to the English territory

But English is only a class, a manner, a TV program

A department in our University, exams and paper

On the paper I find the resemblance of Chinese to a pencil

Scratching through a surface, worn out slowly

With ink, glasses, typewriter, keyboard

English is gliding through the China sky, making some noise

Here and there. We are already accustomed to abbreviation

And diplomacy, hamburger, forks, aspirin

These changes do not touch our skin or bones. English

Walks on the teeth, whitens Chinese. Therefore,

I brush my teeth everyday, as I am concerned with

Germs, hygiene, and comparison. I thus derive

Some oral pleasure, some bitter taste, and

Awareness of the subtle difference of every fleeting word 

This also affects my hand: It sticks into English

With two fingers apart, mimicking a letter

A victory of democracy, a Nazi experience of superego

A crack in a piece of history. History is all about

Stammering wars.  Opium war, uprising of the heavenly

Kingdom, the Boxers, the Republic, and finally, the communists

I don’t know whether they ever heard about

Shakespere or Yeats, but they knew how dangerous

A language could be. Its metaphor, it substance,

Its destructive aesthetics, exploded in Hiroshima, Saigon, and Belgrade.

But outside the language China has to ally with the West

This is such a dubious part of the history

I won’t know who is more absurd, history or me

A hundred years has gone. What really has happened?

Why do all these Chinese migrate into English

Managing to become foreigners, discarding Chinese

As a divorced wife, and a forgotten home in the broken mirror?

Why do I become a hermit in a Chinese lantern

Surrounded by the paper ghosts, with the disillusion of the English

While witnessing more Chinese metamorphosed

From hieroglyph into alphabets