on a tuesday evening in brooklyn
they burned my grandmother alive
struck her across the face
and set her clothes ablaze
their footsteps and their laughter
rang out through the city streets
as the flames licked at her skin
and her hair
and in immolation
she became holy symbol
alight in protest of the indignities of the world
on a sunny afternoon in santa cruz
my sister came back to her car
to find a bottle of urine on the windshield
“ die chink ”
scrawled across it
in ugly black sharpie
calligraphy we had all grown up learning
each brush stroke another leering face in the cafeteria
another mocking laugh on the playground
the ink from those hateful words
drying in the california sun
and cementing the legacy
of our culture
the struggles of our parents
our existence in this society
and on a spring day in atlanta
in the shadows of stone mountain
he shot:
my sisters
my aunts
and my mother
his eyes were full of fury as he did it
white hot rage in each rivulet of sweat
that ran down his trembling face
but his hands were steady
as he pulled the trigger
again
and again
and again and again and
again
and so a hundred years of cultural humiliation
of docile wives and mail order brides
and happy endings
and “me love you long time”s
came to bear in the barrel of that 9mm
in the mind of robert aaron long
and thousands just like him
and after all, who could resist those tidal waves?
his hatred was a torrential hurricane
a tsunami making landfall
and in the slipstream lay the debris
the shattered remnants of family
randy and eric park
wading through the empty hallways of their house
the streets of their korean enclave
a neighborhood that was once home, now foreign
their mother
translator and guide
taken from them
and suddenly
the faces strangers again
the words muddled again
grieving in the pages of korean recipe books
and old photo albums
trying to reconstruct a childhood
in scrapbook collage pieces
young boys in shorts and graphic t’s
raised in the dirty south
suddenly cast adrift into the city lights of seoul
in simmering seas of gochujang
and bright flowing hanboks
they raise three million on the gofundme
but each dollar is like sand on a yawning shore
it is an ocean of grief
and they are grains
buried in the storm
they ruled it wasn’t a hate crime
as if his hatred didn’t thunder through the halls of those massage parlors
shatter lives and families
end
in gravestones
on hilltops
overlooking the freeways of atl
each one etched with another story
postcards from the far east
tales of foreign lives
worth no more than
a crosstie on a railroad track
or a cheap takeout dinner
stories of the dead
and the ones who remained
stories of my people
stories of my
family
Herie Sun is a writer and child of immigrants who grew up in Canada and now lives in New York City. He loves a nice bowl of fruit for dessert, the smell of fresh coffee grounds and the Toronto Raptors. This is his debut publication.
