‘Rites’

“I am calling up the dead—the dead of my family,” writes Wendy Chen in her debut poetry collection, Unearthings. “I pull them out of the earth by their hair, by the fistful.”

In crystalline verse, Chen unearths her own family history as well as broader cultural histories 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, she uses the work of Song dynasty poet Li Qingzhao as a frame to explore the themes of memory and forgetting. Throughout, the poems become sieves that “catch our ghosts, collect / our lives from the dead.”

Read a poem from the collection below, and then check out Chen’s recent translations of Li Qingzhao’s poetry.

–Sarah Fleming

Grandma wondered as I cut her hair
if I would mourn her when she died.

On the television, a discordant chorus
of weeping girls
crowded around a white,
maternal sheet.

She doesn’t believe in the afterlife,
only the proper rites.

Mother thinks we will be born again.
She does not wish to linger
in ceremonies, the grave.
She says that we will
meet again.

But Yama, receiving souls of the dead
in his judgment hall,
says we must forget
our past lives.

He measures out
the punishment that is our due:
twenty, forty, maybe
a hundred years
of weeping
is needed before we can be
colorless and new.

Grandma emerges from the shower.
By now the girls have quieted. A man
is selling scissors.

I dry her with the towel. First her hair,
dove grey with strands of white.
Her neck, her shoulders and their brown
diabetic patches. Her spine,
its milky yellow curve and, at the base,
one faded purple mole.

She lifts one breast and then the other
for me to dry. They have stretched over the years
to her stomach, the skin thinner
than rice paper.

The long veins
in each breast
are blue,
a surfacing blue
so clear it will take more
than a hundred years to forget.

♦

From Unearthings by Wendy Chen. Reprinted by permission of the author.