Letter to My Motherland
Motherland I am sorry
for I have found home
in a white man’s heart
and I call him love
when he tells me i love you
my throat closes up.
My voice shatters
into pieces of China.
Motherland, there is a crater
the shape of you
on my tongue.
When my lover asks me
"Where are you from?"
I say his name,
when it was always your name
I could not say.
Motherland, I severed
our umbilical cord
with my own teeth
the day I learned
the white man’s tongue.
My Motherland writes back
Daughter, of my sea glass
diaspora: You are already
Chinese. One of million
pieces of porcelain washing
upon distant shores. Your skin –
forged in the kiln with all the
yellow & brown mud
your ancestors saved
that the white man
has not yet burned.
China is reborn
not in it’s firing
but in it’s shattering.
Jess X. Chen (@jessxsnow) is a queer Asian American artist/activist, filmmaker and nationally-touring poet and performer. Her work exposes narratives of diasporic time travel, intimacy and collective protest by connecting the traumas between the queer and colored body and the body of the Earth. Her artwork has appeared in the The LA Times, The Huffington Post, The UN Human Rights Council and on indoor and outdoor walls throughout the US. She has performed her poetry on stages, TEDx conferences, backyards and rooftops nationwide. Through film, mural-making, youth education, she is working toward a future where migrant and indigenous youth of color see themselves whole and heroic, on the big screen and the city walls & then grow up to create their own. (www.jessxchen.com)