Elvira > Recent Status Updates

"Você indo embora. Eu me perdendo então desamparado entre cinzeiros cheios e garrafas vazias. Você indo embora. Eu indeciso entre beber um pouco mais ou procurar uma beata em plena devastação ou lavar copos bater sofás guardar discos mastigar algum verso adoçando o inevitável amargo despertar para depois deitar partir morrer dormir sonhar quem sabe. Você indo embora. Acordar na manhã seguinte com gosto de corrimão de

"Frequentemente as verdadeiras tragédias da vida acontecem de maneira tão inartísticas que elas nos machucam por sua rude violência, sua incoerência absoluta, sua falta absurda de significado, sua completa ausência de estilo. Elas nos afetam, assim como a vulgaridade nos afeta. Elas nos dão uma impressão de pura força bruta, e nós nos revoltamos contra isso."

"Frequentemente as verdadeiras tragédias da vida acontecem de maneira tão inartísticas que elas nos machucam por sua rude violência, sua incoerência absoluta, sua falta absurda de significado, sua completa ausência de estilo. Elas nos afetam, assim como a vulgaridade nos afeta. Elas nos dão uma impressão de pura força bruta, e nós nos revoltamos contra isso."

"That I once called a Black woman the name of the woman sitting next to her. I was certain I was nervous. Certain I was new to the job. Certain there were twenty-five new people in the room. Certain that I had snuffed them out, erased them, exiled them. That I had harmed them, that I needed to do better... B, each confusion is a decapitation."

"I went back to my hotel room and wanted to pound my fists on something, but when I looked down, my hands had turned into flowers. I spent the rest of the night alone, watching them die."

"You can tell when someone has suffered deeply. Their heart is smaller and it no longer smokes. I want my heart to be smaller, too, more used up. When I look down at my heart, it is no longer there. I find it kneeling in the corner and shaking. I tell it in Chinese to stand up, but it doesn’t understand me. When I command it in English, it only gets larger."

"Diane was diagnosed with cancer when she was eighteen and was given three weeks to live. Diane is fifty-five. She was told she would never have children. She has a thirty-three-year-old son. I now know more about Diane’s history than Mother’s history, than your history. Diane held my hand in the ER like a mother would. Like Mother never did"

"Secretly I was happy to hear that the other man also had a bruise on his face. This means you at least got one punch in. This means you fought back. This means I am not a good person. They won’t tell me who the man is, but today I will find the man with the bruise on his face. I will smile at the bruise. The bruise will not smile back.
I learned later that shortly after your fight, the man died."

"When someone has dementia, or any brain disease, grief is multidimensional. You grieve them while you are wiping their nose or cutting their food into small limbs. Part of them is dead, part of them is dying. But so much of them is still alive... I have had so many funerals for you, Father. I hide my hands in my pockets because they are always covered with dirt."

"I agree that I am American, but don’t believe it. I agree that I am Chinese, but don’t believe it. I agree that I’m a writer, but whether I believe it or not often doesn’t depend on me. I agree that the man in the wheelchair is my father, but I no longer believe it. I agree that my mother is dead, but I don’t believe it."

"I’ve since realized that it was the art this woman made that resonated with the poet. Not her suffering. Once I could see that, I never envied anyone’s sufering again. As time went on, I realized that I wanted to write poems so I could make someone feel something. I wanted something I had written, or how I had written it, to compel someone to want to find me, so badly that they were willing to disappear."

Once when I was at a writer’s conference, a well-known poet came up to a few of us on a porch and joined our conversation. This startled me. His eyes fixed on one particular woman, making a cathedral of her, and all the surrounding buildings simply disappeared.

"In the great room, a frail man with white hair lay on the couch chewing the blanket’s corner. Another woman sat with her mouth open, body curled in a way that seemed permanent. This is how I imagined executed bodies underground, freshly tossed, frozen in various positions.
Another woman saw me and leaned in, You wouldn’t believe what they’re doing to me here."

"Now I imagine all the times she must have sliced extra meat and tofu to save a container for me. All the times she had rung the button in front of Betsy Barbour, the all-girls dorm at the University of Michigan. All the times I went downstairs, and she stood there a few steps below me and handed me the containers. All the times I took the containers without any words. My mother did so much for me."

"Dear Teacher, I hope I have found ways to deepen and enlarge my writing. I have tried to look closely at the world around me. I have cared about and deeply for other people. I try and read with real hunger, have had setbacks, have aged, and have encountered illness and death. I hope life has not been lost on me. And I hope my grammar has improved in the process."

"It took me a long time to find my people: writers, creatives, and artists. My people didn’t sit in cubicles and calculate sales forecasts for fruit snacks. It took me a long time to know my people existed, and even longer for me to seek them out."

"Dearest Daughters, in your life, you will sometimes be the glove and sometimes the hand. But on some cold nights, you won’t be able to see your hands at all. On some nights, you might feel like the last person who shook your hand took your hand with them."

"Sometimes writing can feel like digging holes, planting and replanting things that might never turn into anything. My eyes point down when I’m planting, but the breath of something else is always in my ears. Sometimes that breath is mortality. Other times, that breath is history. Sometimes memory. Sometimes the moon. Oftentimes, silence."

"And the more I read, the more I realized how hard writing well really was. The more I read, the better I wanted to write.
Each book isn’t just a book, but a period of a life, a period of learning how to write. Each book has its own hair color, its own glasses, its own favorite mug, its own computer, its own shirt and pants, its own tears."

"Growing up, I had never thought much about whether my parents experienced trauma or that my parents’, particularly my mother’s trauma impacted me. She was her own person. Her experiences didn’t have anything to do with my experiences. Research and reflection now show otherwise. That while my parents may have maintained silence as a form of survival, silence had a heartbeat, grew up, and became the third sibling."

"Maybe genetics are more fluid than I had imagined. Maybe we inherit generations of shame. Of trauma. Of silence. Even of joy. Recently, I began learning of transgenerational trauma and the conspiracy of silence, although I have mixed feelings about the word conspiracy, its implication of intent."

"The ball was harder than I had thought. The ground was harder than I had thought. The girls were harder than I had thought. My heart, though, was just as soft as I had thought.
My mother drove me back and forth to tryouts. She never said much. Silence was her second language. Her looks throbbed more than the bruises on my forearms."

"What I learned from you was to forget the sun, that the moon burned more, to cling to things that didn’t seem to leave a trace, such as memory or silence or cruelty or beauty. I couldn’t fully understand any of this then."

"I wonder whether memory is different for immigrants, for people who leave so much behind. Memory isn’t something that blooms but something that bleeds internally, something to be stopped. Memory hides because it isn’t useful. Not money, a car, a diploma, a job. I wonder if memory for you was a color."

"I was fine. I had language. And it would be the one thing that would keep returning, like light. Language felt like wanting to drown but being able to experience drowning by standing on a pier."

"I didn’t know what was happening at the time, but I see it now. The language of poetry reminded me to stay alive. It reminded me that, when it felt like I had nothing, I was nothing, I still had words. I could ride language as if on horseback, and it could take me anywhere, including more deeply into myself."

"You never know when you might confront it, so to survive, you live your life in stillness, in self-perpetuated invisibility. And then there’s the aftermath of shame."

"A month before Mother died, she was so frail. She had lost all the weight of seventy-four years. I don’t think she was finally happy. She looked small and beautiful in a baggy old dress with blue flowers that she could finally fit into. I was secretly happy that she would never have to worry about her body again. That the weight of caring for Father was gone, that the weight of her countries was gone"

"He didn’t mean any harm, just as Father never meant any harm. But harm is rarely about intention."

The things that didn’t matter at the time are often the most urgent questions after someone has died.