Searching for Being and Belonging

Cathy Song is my choice Poet for the quarter because she is a woman who, at once, shares a since of longing -for history, for truths, and a woman who want to follow the journey for ancestors and relatives past to define her place and her direction, that I posses.Yet we are so different.

Cathy Song and I do not share similar ethnicity or upbringing. I am a 20 year old girl of mixed heritage, with a large family. Cathy is Hawaiian, but of Chinese and Korean ancestory, from a small family. Her father was a pilot, mine a track coach. Her husband, a doctor. I do not have a husband. She drives a Volvo, and I am on a poetic and literal journey to get my licence. However, Cathy, like myself, finds truth in stories told around a dinner table, in a Pall-Mall-Red-smoke-filled den, or in pictures, silent but pulsing with stories and insights waiting to be excavated.

I will focus on "Lost Sister" from her collection of Poetry entitled "Picture Bride" (1982)
1
In China,
even the peasants
named their first daughters
Jade―
the stone that in the far fields
could moisten the dry season,
could make men move mountains
for the healing green of the inner hills
glistening like slices of winter melon.
And the daughters were grateful:
They never left home.
To move freely was a luxury
stolen from them at birth.
Instead, they gathered patience;
learning to walk in shoes
the size of teacups,
without breaking―
the arc of their movements
as dormant as the rooted willow,
as redundant as the farmyard hens.
But they traveled far
in surviving,
learning to stretch the family rice,
to quiet the demons,
the noisy stomachs.

2
There is a sister
across the ocean,
who relinquished her name,
diluting jade green
with the blue of the Pacific.
Rising with a tide of locusts,
she swarmed with others
to inundate another shore.
In America,
there are many roads
and women can stride along with men.
But in another wilderness,
the possibilities,
the loneliness,
can strangulate like jungle vines.
The meager provisions and sentiments
of once belonging―
fermented roots, Mah-Jong tiles and firecrackers―set but
a flimsy household
in a forest of nightless cities.
A giant snake rattles above,
spewing black clouds into your kitchen.
Dough-faced landlords
slip in and out of your keyholes,
making claims you don't understand,
tapping into your communication systems
of laundry lines and restaurant chains.
You find you need China:
your one fragile identification,
a jade link
handcuffed to your wrist.
You remember your mother
who walked for centuries,
footless―
and like her,
you have left no footprints,
but only because
there is an ocean in between,
the unremitting space of your rebellion.


Lost sister stood out to me because of it's title. I have a lost sister. I lost her in 2001. Her life was interesting. She graduated from HS at 16, attended UCLA. On the surface she lived a normal life. But her soul was experimental and adventurous. She broke the rules of our raising, and set out her own trail. Traveled by herself, married a very much older man. Was the first sister to leave the nest and chose her path rather than following what our parents prescribed as appropriate and acceptable. She journied fast, and left us with photos, letters and questions of who she was when she was blazing the trail that led her away from tradition and acceptable eldest daughter ideals of marriage, education and occupation. I am sure, Like in "Lost Sister" in her sheltered raising she sought freedom and exploration and in her liberation she clung to fragments of a familial rock, static-laden phone calls and sleepless nights -up staring at pictures of a family she barely knew. In her liberation she sought a middle ground.