Shui-yin Sharon Yam

Making Babies

autocrats and billionaires keep telling us to have (white) kids while they kill and let die 

as if sepsis measles and ruination are our preferred forms of foreplay 

I.

I never wanted children

until Hong Kong burned

and I was watching it from halfway across the world 

like a movie with popcorn

my white American boyfriend asked with a frown: 

“are you always going to be this sad and heavy?” 

I fantasized about being pregnant 

a fetus would assuage my diasporic guilt 

for feeling so intact, too unscathed

uterus undisturbed by CS gas 

pregnancy the only justifiable excuse

that would ease my conscience

for not having been teargassed 

for a while Hongkongers 

told each other to have kids 

so that we could defy erasure 

and en/forced amnesia 

the government may take books out of library 

paste gold and red papers over

our love notes to each other 

but our children would know 

612 721 811 831

and they would sing the tune of light back to Hong Kong 

they would know of 

the professor the student the writer

the journalist the nurse the organizer 

the revolutionaries

II.

I would want my child to know

the scent of dried seafood and yawning store cats  

lining the hills of Sheung Wan 

the cool breeze that 

for a second 

halts the humid heat 

on the top deck of the tram 

going ding ding    ding ding 

across cluttered toy stores 

neighborhood bakeries with cases of egg tarts 

dingy salons for grannies 

hole-in-the-wall eateries with horribly efficient service and 

the warmest bowl of congee

I dreamed of my uterus as a portal

for a child to know the small joy 

of rounding a corner 

stumbling down an alleyway 

and   finding 

another world 

another diasporic Hong Kong woman

told me about her guilt 

and her uterus: 

“I was teargassed once

right before I flew back to Chicago 

I started cramping 

and having diarrhea 

on the plane 

I bled black blood for months”

She was haunted by the shame

of being teargassed only once 

by “the good stuff” no less

not the expired more dangerous chemicals 

the cops used after their British stock ran out 

III.

a frontline journalist contemplated freezing her egg 

in case she got a 10-year sentence

for doing her job

televising the revolution 

only to find out that in Hong Kong 

a single fertile woman like her 

cannot legally use her own eggs in IVF

well-behaved women may not make history

but they get to make babies 

a childhood friend who never talked

of wanting children 

told me she was pregnant

a year after emigrating to Australia

she said she only realized she wanted children 

once she felt safe

once she felt 

her child would be too

Alien

There are many ways to become an alien. 

            You could walk or crawl or fly or swim until 

                                    your voice becomes strange to your mother. 

My mother wept for 121 days for her alien 

daughter. For I have yet to carve out my bones 

for my father and return the flesh to my mother.

Is your marriage bona fide–he asked the alien, who buys 

the toilet paper, what’s his mother's maiden name, and when          

    was he last inside you? 

I smiled at the pink man with a stamp. A good alien 

                        would always smile at pink men with stamps. 

                                    They were too proud to see the ocean in you.

I rejoiced–in tears, almost–when they gifted me an alien 

            number. A supposed antidote to mis/displacement. My people 

have always shapeshifted because no land is our land. 

That summer and all summers after, I became an affect alien. 

            I did not smile when the children sang. The children under

                        boots and rubbles hum strange songs that cannot land. 

Citizenship is an egg, and I walk on eggshells. The alien 

body is always at risk and of interest. I string shards into chains, 

            put them around my neck like a goose that lays golden eggs.

I dream of typhoons, of skyscrapers that tremble so they could stand, of alien

kin who form boundless seas. If I knew we were water, I would not fear

                        drowning. For our ocean carries the most fertile shell-less eggs. 

Note: Sara Ahmed coined the term “affect alien” in The Promise of Happiness. The analogy of citizenship and egg borrows from Linda Bosniak’s The Citizen and Alien, in which she argues that citizenship is “hard on the outside, and soft on the inside.” 

Summertime Sadness 

I asked Dr. Google if it was possible to be struck by SAD in the summer, since sadness is 

so out of fashion this season, which makes being a killjoy very inconvenient. 

One friend said they are going to France, to wine country under the sun. I imagined them wearing a wide-brimmed hat, eyes closed, lips upturned in a slight satiated smile. I said, I am afraid to leave the country. Which is to say, I am afraid to lose this life. 

[cue deep sympathetic sighs, scrunched brows, & “I am so sorry”s] 

My American boyfriend did not know why I turned into a feral cat the night of June 3. 

On June 4, I watched people in Hong Kong: 

• chew gum

• eat a banana for 36 minutes 

• walk a black dog in a black outfit 

• take a stroll with a single white flower 

• take a stroll in school uniform with a bouquet of white flowers 

• stand solemnly in a Palestinadelica jersey 

• draw still life on a park bench

• sit on a bench cupping two candles 

One by one (dog included), they were accosted & escorted away by police for failing 

to partake in sanctioned summertime festivities.  

An oft melancholic friend advised me to try reading in a hammock while stoned. 

“I have found that it helps with building a healthier constitution,” she said.  

The neighbors revel in fireworks for far too long, which makes my dog, and hence me, sad. 

After the revolution, which was televised but it didn’t matter, I walked down the street one July night and realized I could not tell flimsy fireworks apart from the bangs of tear gas canisters and shotgun rounds. 

I recited Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem all month long. 

 Note: The poem I am referring to in the last line is “No Explosions.”

Mimosa Pudica 

after Saeed Jones’s “Kudzu” 

I thirst for                                                                              the nostalgia                                 

    the tenderness                                                           of the migrant 

        of a child’s fingertip                         returned with trepidation 

                                        in search of awe 

Drown me in your secrets                                  

    I am not ashamed of                

my porousness  

to burning skin  

Don’t be shy   confide in me   see me

     recoil   leaf by leaf    each flinch     

          a cloister  enveloping

                 a delight or a

         longing 

You think I bend 

            to your will 

                        that I succumb 

                                    so readily 

                                                to your prowess 

But my sensitivity and propensity to 

quiver is not 

a defense but

                                    an offering 

I know 

      each one of your touch 

                     is a question 

                        Yes, yes

                    You are home