“I call upon the dead—the dead of my family,” writes Wendy Chen in her debut poetry collection. Excavations. “I pull them out of the ground with my fists by their hair.”
In crystalline verse, Chen explores her own family history as well as the broader cultural history of exile, immigration, and the complexities of identity. The resulting collection is haunted by ancestors, ghosts, and stories long ignored or forgotten. In one series of poems, Chen examines the history of sexual violence during the Nanjing Massacre; in another, he uses the work of Song Dynasty poet Li Qingzhao as a framework to explore themes of memory and forgetting. Throughout, the poems become sieves that “catch our spirits, gather / our life from the dead.”
Read a poem from the collection below, then watch Chen’s poem latest translations of Li Qingzhao’s poetry.
—Sarah Fleming
Rites
Grandma wondered as I cut her hair
if I mourned when he died.
A discordant chorus on television
about crying girls
crowded around a white
mother board.
He doesn’t believe in the afterlife.
only the proper ceremonies.
Mother thinks we are reborn.
He doesn’t want to linger
ceremonies at the grave.
He says we will
to meet again.
But Yama, receive the souls of the dead
in the courtroom,
he says we must forget
our past lives.
He’s tired
our punishment:
twenty, forty, maybe
a hundred years
from crying
it is needed before we can be
colorless and new.
Grandma steps out of the shower.
By now the girls had quieted down. A man
sells scissors.
I dry it with the towel. First the hair,
dove gray with white threads.
His neck, his shoulders and his tan
diabetic patches. Your spine,
milky yellow arch and bottom
a faded purple birthmark.
She lifts one breast, then the other
to dry off. They have stretched over the years
to the stomach, the skin is thinner
like rice paper.
The long veins
in each breast
blue ones
a surfacing blue
so it is clear that there will be more
like forgetting a hundred years.
♦
From Excavations written by Wendy Chen. Reprinted with permission of the author.
