I Wish I Could Tell Her
to the girl who let words tear her apart,
to the girl who let words destroy her culture,
to the girl who let words take away her identity,
to the girl who let words rip a trench
between people she loved most.
I wish I could tell you.
I wish I could tell you
that you were misled
those words you heard
shouldn’t be said.
I am young.
on the playground,
the kids take their hands
around me, abound.
They stretch their eyes like bands
and call me “ching-chong”.
yet I stand and giggle
so I can belong.
I wish I could tell you
you shouldn’t laugh along
those words you heard
those words are wrong.
behind me in class I hear some chat
two girls ask me
“Where is your straw hat?”
my cheeks turn red which I try to mask
but I wonder why they ask me that?
I wish I could tell you
you shouldn’t stay silent
those words you heard
those words are violent.
the boys say mean things too
they laugh at me in the hallway
and follow me in a crew.
they wave and say “hey”
yell “your chest is too small”
“She’s an Asian anyway!
It’s a fact after all.”

my eyes fill with tears
and I start to bawl.
I wish I could tell you
you shouldn’t start to cry
those words you heard
all of them are lies.
but still,
I start to look at myself differently.
in my reflection, I see my eyes
and wonder why
I don’t look like other girls I glamorize?
“Chink”. “Ugly”. “Yellow”.
that’s what they call me.
Chink: a word that came from the sound of the hammers from chinese slaves who built
railroads to connect this country.
Chink as in monolids.
Chink as in slanted.
Chink as in the slits they call my eyes.
Ugly as in white being the epitome of beauty.
ugly as in the envy of blue eyes and blonde hair.
Ugly as in demeaning the physical features I've been trying to love all my life.
Ugly as in being portrayed as the awkward math genius but never the leading lady
Ugly as in hoping one day, I’d wake up white.
yellow as in a far east asian stereotype.
yellow as in xenophobia.
yellow as in anti-chinese sentiment.
as in the racist cartoons that portrayed us as rat tailed demons and savages
an idea so heavily propagated we were barred from immigrating to this country “land of
the free”
yellow as in the chinese exclusion act
Yellow as in criminalizing an entire race
Yellow as in dehumanization.
Chink, ugly, yellow. I feel ashamed.
I change the way I treat people.
I stop talking to my own family
ignore them, for speaking my language

is now shameful to me.
soon, I start to forget.
forget my own language.
an ingrained alphabet
I now start to disparage.
maybe now I’m normal
maybe now I fit in
because the roots that once defined me
were finally out of my skin.
The roots that were my mother tongue, the roots that bore me and my chinese.
The roots that pumped the fire of dragon’s blood, so fierce that it weaved the silk of an
brilliant language.
The roots that tied me to long lines of ancestry painted shades of red and gold.
The roots that I so violently ripped from the ground-- ripped while I was trying to
assimilate
assimilate into a country that I thought was better than the broken remnants of my
chinese.
the roots that once flowered something beautiful now lay dead.
I wish I could tell you
You were misled.
I wish I could tell you
You shouldn't laugh along.
I wish I could tell you
You shouldn’t stay silent.
I wish I could tell you
You shouldn’t start to cry.
I wish I could tell you.
and there I was, and I stood.
surrounded by laughter,
which wasn’t any silly chatter.
besieged by violence,
incapacitated in compliance.
shrouded by the lies,
That led to my cultural demise.
No matter how many times I wish I could tell you,
I never get that part of me back.