Dumplings from living.room by jason chu

Russell Jeung says
Chinese people can speak two love languages fluently:
food
and
sacrifice.

Every time I visit her apartment,
my grandma does two things:
she cooks pan fried dumplings
and she presses a new $100 bill into my hand,
Benjamin Franklin wrapped in a red envelope
like a robe.

She lives across from the Montgomery Mall,
where we walk after lunch,
bellies straining,
to search up and down the aisles of K*B Toys.
I lie on her carpet through the late afternoon
playing with my new LEGOs
as she watches the Chinese news on her old TV.

Grandma is an immigrant -
worked to support three sons -
knows how to leave everything behind -
knows these dollars
are nothing more than a nursery of fading green,
a paper thin cocoon
transforming labor
into
life.

What idiot
collects
shed skin
and
dead hair
and calls that
life?

I do.

For two months,
my friend David
hid every mirror in his house,
turning frames and taping up newspaper
until he was living in a perpetual state of tornado readiness.
He said:
the more he looked at himself,
the less he saw others.

I’m afraid to accept
that I’ve forgotten how to see
you,
grown used to seeing
what I need
from you;

Terrified to confess
that I care more about
what I’m saying
than
who I’m saying it to.

That’s not language.
It’s a mirror.

And isn’t our world filled with mirrors,
kisses like cold glass
and
songs clear and clean like the air in a bank?

Maybe the answer
is learn from grandma:
I'll cook you your favorite food,
press into your hand my stored labors
which you will spend on late afternoons with me.

If I'm gonna live in a world where
kisses taste like summer
and
songs sing like two palms warm against each other,
I will need to speak
In a language I haven’t yet mastered,
but need to.

We speak two love languages fluently:
food
and
sacrifice.

• Asian-American
• Chinese hip-hop
• Hip-Hop
• Hip-Hop/Rap
• Spoken Word
• poetry
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• spoken word poetry
• underground hip-hop
• Los Angeles