The Merlion

"I wish it had paws," you said,
"It's quite grotesque the way it is,
you know, limbless; can you
imagine it writhing in the water,
like some post-Chernobyl nightmare?
I mean, how does it move? Like a
torpedo? Or does it shoulder itself
against the currents, gnashing with frustration,
its furious mane bleached
the colour of a drowned sun?
But take a second look at it,
how it is poised so terrestrially,
marooned on this rough shore,
as if unsure of its rightful
harbour. Could it be that,
having taken to this unaccustomed limpidity,
it has decided to abandon the seaweed-haunted
depths for land? Perhaps it is even ashamed
(But what a bold front!)
to have been a creature of the sea; look at how
it tries to purge itself of its aquatic ancestry,
in this ceaseless torrent of denial, draining
the body of rivers of histories, lymphatic memories.
What a riddle, this lesser brother of the Sphinx.
What sibling polarity, how its sister's lips are sealed
with self-knowledge and how its own jaws
clamp open in self-doubt, still
surprised after all these years."

"Yet...what brand new sun can dry
the iridescent slime from the scales
and what fresh rain wash the sting of salt
from those chalk-blind eyes?"

A pause.

"And why does it keep spewing that way?
I mean, you know, I mean..."

"I know exactly what you mean," I said,
Eyeing the blond highlights in your black hair
And your blue lenses the shadow of a foreign sky.
It spews continually if only to ruffle
its own reflection in the water; such reminders
will only scare a creature so eager to reinvent itself."

Another pause.

"Yes," you finally replied, in that acquired accent of yours,
"Well, yes, but I still do wish it had paws."

Plum Blossom or Quong Tart at the QVB

Stroke by labored stroke my daughter

is discovering the sound of her name,

the new old country revealed under

her tiny preschool tentative hand.

She prints the pictogram mu,

a solid vertical stroke like a tree trunk,

a horizontal across for the arms, and a sinuous

downward branch on either side. That is

the radical for wood or tree. And on its right

she prints mei, meaning every, made up from a roof

over the pictogram for mother, mu,

with its nourishing embrace. Grafted on

the tree, it adds up to the talismanic

plum, tree and blossom.

It has been years since I have written

my true name. Watching

it appear in my daughter’s wavery hand

I am rooted, the calligraphy

performing strange magic.

No longer emigrant, foreign

but recalled home, and not to the country

left behind, but further back

beyond the South Sea.

Vague lost connections

somewhere south of the Yangtze.

Karst country, paddies

and mountains the color of jade

My daughter asks why the English

transliteration is Boey and not

Mei. I am stumped.

Many Chinese names

became strange or lost

in the crossing.

How did the first Mei, arriving

with his mother tongue in the colony,

find himself rechristened

Boey? How long did it take

him to grow into the name?

Did he shed it like his queue?

Did he roll it in his mouth, taste

its foreign plosive, swallow it

whole like a ball of rice,

and spit it out Boey,

the pig-tailed coolie in the new colony?

In a few years my daughter will press

for her family history and tree

and I will have nothing more to show

than the withered branch that is

her dead grandfather. So much

buried, irretrievable. It is too late

to ask my father about his father and the father

before. Broken branches. So little history

to go on. One of the homonyms

for mei is nothing. Mei as predicate

to another character erases

that character. The same rising tone

spells bad luck

which runs in the family, it seems.

Perhaps the plum will flourish

on this soil, like the white plum

in our yard, and transplanted,

my daughter can recover

what is lost in translation.

Perhaps she already has.

Last week, at the Queen Victoria Building,

we stumbled on an exhibition

of the life of Quong Tart, the Chinese

pioneer who made it good in White

Australia. A tea merchant,

he married a Scotswoman, sang

Border ballads and wore tartan kilts;

he fed the Aborigines

and played cricket with the whites.

The catalogue printed his original

name Mei, our clan. His face,

a replica of my father’s,

high cheekbones and well-shaped jaw,

had the same charming look. It was my father

made Mandarin of the Fifth Order,

costumed in silk tunic and plumed hat.

Somewhere in south-east China

the clan lived in the same village,

and broadcast rice seed

into paddies of broken skies.

Straw-hatted, they bowed

over plough and mattock,

planted in their reflections

like their name. Then news

came of richer harvests over

the South Sea, the white devils

and their burgeoning empire.

Perhaps great-grandfather sallied forth

with Quong Tart on the same junk,

and disembarked in Malaya, while Quong Tart

continued south. Perhaps they were brothers.

I see the other life my father could have had

staring out from the sepia shots,

if our forbear had travelled on

down-under. I could not explain

to my daughter the déjà vu, but her hand

was already pointing out the Mei

below Quong Tart’s portrait,

the tap of the finger

wiring us, connecting us

in a tremble of recognition.

She has finally learned

the character of her name.

On Turning Ten

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light--
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

I know why the caged bird sings by Maya Angelou

A free bird leaps on the back
Of the wind and floats downstream
Till the current ends and dips his wing
In the orange suns rays
And dares to claim the sky.

But a BIRD that stalks down his narrow cage
Can seldom see through his bars of rage
His wings are clipped and his feet are tied
So he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
Of things unknown but longed for still
And his tune is heard on the distant hill for
The caged bird sings of freedom.

The free bird thinks of another breeze
And the trade winds soft through
The sighing trees
And the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright
Lawn and he names the sky his own.

But a caged BIRD stands on the grave of dreams
His shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
His wings are clipped and his feet are tied
So he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings with
A fearful trill of things unknown
But longed for still and his
Tune is heard on the distant hill
For the caged bird sings of freedom.

The Planners

The Planners by Boey Kim Cheng

They plan. They build. All spaces are gridded,
filled with permutations of possibilities.
The buildings are in alignment with the roads
which meet at desired points
linked by bridges all hang
in the grace of mathematics.
They build and will not stop.
Even the sea draws back
and the skies surrender.

They erase the flaws,
the blemishes of the past, knock off
useless blocks with dental dexterity.
All gaps are plugged
with gleaming gold.
The country wears perfect rows of shining teeth.
Anaesthesia, amnesia, hypnosis.
They have the means
They have it all so it will not hurt,
so history is new again.
The piling will not stop.
The drilling goes right through
the fossils of last century.

But my heart would not bleed
poetry. Not a single drop
to stain the blueprint
of our past's tomorrow.

Void Deck

Where the neighbourhood wives,
After a morning at the wet market,
Sit facing the breeze
To trade snatches of gossip
About leery shopkeepers,
The local louts,
(Like that fella who's always drilling his walls –
Gives me migraine)
And that mad woman
Who throws things from her window.
With careful put-downs they
Fashion boasts, about stubborn sons,
Lazy daughters, who by some miracle or mistake
Always score well in class.
When words falter,
Gestures take over: pursed lips, rolling eyes,
Animated hands adorned by bangles of
Gold, jade, steel, string.

And children orbit around them
Laugh without diction –
Their games of tag a reassurance
That there has been no hothousing
Of who is unclean, unwashed,
Untouchable. When they break out
Into some kindergarten song,
One almost believes in a generation
Cleansed of skin-deep suspicions,
And free from the superstitions of the tongue –

And old folks sit like sages
To deploy chess pieces with ancient strategies.
In a corner, a caged bird bursts
With the song of its master's pride
And wrinkled women breathe, through
Tai-chi-tuned windpipes, the operatic melody of the air...

All a wanton fantasy.

Eyes reveal a meeting-point
For loners and loiterers:
A sense of things reduced-
Conversations that trickle through
Brief noddings at lift landings,
Teenage rhetoric scrawled, in liquid paper,
On the stone-table chessboard,
(Where the king used to sit)
The grandiose house-selling dreams of residents
Compacted in anonymous letterboxes;
As an afterthought, an old man pees
Under a public phone.

A place to be avoided, this,
How in its vastness it devours hours.
Little wonder then,
Why residents rush through void decks
Back to the cramped comforts of home
As if in fear of what such open space might do
To cosy minds.