by Jenny Chu
My aunt was always terrified I would die
before I could get married. She would tell me
to date whichever boys could speak Mandarin,
the clumsy ones who fidgeted with their keyboards
and made little electricities every night. I pictured
them, future engineers, kissing, elbows flush against
yellowing wood glue. Some would end up in New York City
and become the antagonist of an old woman’s memoir.
She would describe their fingers as swanlike,
shedding her inherited cash like snow-colored feathers.
There would be me, too, veil bleeding into a marble floor.
All gone in the flap of two curled fans and unread emails.
I broke up with the first one the summer before
our sophomore year of college, in Los Angeles. He confessed:
I don’t know you anymore. I had never known him to be so unsalted
with a weak Shanghainese accent. The brain I’m dating now doesn’t
really cry in kitchens like me. What I really mean is there’s
no reason to argue about what’s for dinner. In her memoir,
Amy Tan says: I have not died yet and so my cousins
still hope. He and I go to our garden sometimes and
unearth scallions with mason jars, dreaming of a greener dish.
Jenny Chu is a Chinese-American poet from Dallas, Texas. Her work previously appeared in Pithead Chapel, BRAWL Lit, and Turning Leaf Journal. She really loves Swedish Fish and her friends.
January House Literary Journal 
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