had my grandfather been an ex-guerrilla
of the Malayan Communist Party
1.
To get rid of acne, apply a pea-sized amount to your face,
rub, then rinse.
For you, the pus was pea-sized:
its white-yellow or yellow-brown hue
around a cut in Bornean heat.
Don’t scratch it, you thought.
You’d seen it grow worse:
an itchy, scratched wound,
left unattended,
became the feast of maggots.
You’d seen death:
counting heads after
each battle,
you scratched off the names
from your notebook,
every stroke
a tapering sorrow
you weaned yourself from,
pressing a pencil into the page.
And your commissar,
assembling a line,
spoke:
It’s fine, comrades!
There’s still hope!
We are winning
by strategic retreat!
2.
At night, the rainforest was silent.
The commissar
a snoring machine;
the sound of a creek
soared in your mouth.
You were hungry, and dreamed
of a soy bean, an adzuki—
pea-sized luxuries
after enlistment,
replaced by slugs, or crickets.
At eighteen, everything
was edible:
the sound of coconut leaves,
of magnolias shedding,
kissing the salt stain on your khaki.
The photo of someone’s sister
in a crumbled family letter.
She was to get married,
he announced,
as if marriage were a marker
blotting out all questions.
And you, flustered, saddened,
walked deeper into the woods
for a smoke,
rummaging for matches,
hoping they were still dry.
3.
What did it feel like
being married to an idea?
When you were fifteen,
your commissar,
whose regular job
was teacher of Chinese,
approached you,
flashing a book
full of terse, glaring lines.
Soon you were on board,
devouring class struggle
in after-class study groups.
Your face,
acned,
scarred,
adrenalized
by a brighter future,
was red under the sun.
It was 1963,
the insurgency was waning
calling for blood.
You snuck out at night
to enlist.
Receiving green khakis
from senior students,
you hoped to turn the tide,
save the Chinese
from the Malaysian puppet regime, and
the Malays
from the Malaysian puppet regime.
4.
No. This is not a story
about revolutions,
not about girls
or the love of anti-imperialism.
After major defeats,
the headquarters were abandoned.
Your commissar,
whose hair grayed overnight,
no longer asked you
to grow a Marxist’s balls of steel.
After major defeats
you abandoned your notebook—
hiding out would be hard
with secrets.
Was it about fighting back,
or survival?
Bewildered,
with a still cracking voice,
you avoided encirclement
only to be captured two days later.
What they did after that
I can only imagine:
No, you were not important
as an apparatchik,
carried no radios
nor penicillin;
No, you knew nothing
about the “codebook,”
nothing about where-to,
what-for,
or who-against.
Maybe you were energetic
at first,
chanting Mao quotes
as you did at school,
but they jeered
and strapped you down,
greeted your face
with a lash of rattan.
Did that explain
your scarred face?
Scarred, acned,
camouflaged
with blood, your quotes tumbled
and melted
in your empty belly:
dreams too acidic to be remembered,
too crumbled to be read.
5.
They gave you
a light sentence
and deported you.
In 1971, you went back to China,
to the ancestral village
your grandfather abandoned
for a better living.
How does a nation face
its compatriots?
Diasporaed beyond the sea,
imagining survival
to be able to return,
doubly nostalgic
for the abandoned past
and the unforeseeable future,
doubly suspected
by the colonized motherland
and the colonized fatherland . . .
Where should I face?
What expression should I put on?
But I see you again,
a disgraced, forgotten rebel.
After Mao’s death,
the villagers
put you to better use:
teaching first grade.
In this position you were
fervent:
teaching first Math
then Chinese, you
gave every kid
the foundation
you didn’t enjoy.
Did the students laugh
at your scarred face?
It was sweaty and glinting—
a joyful sadness, chalk-stained,
clothed in a new-found
responsibility. A responsibility
I strive to find
when I look into the mirror
at my face,
when I sit at my desk
wondering if my students
would ever adore me.
6.
So maybe I need to dig
deeper into our faces:
faces real or imagined.
I’ll make you
retired and demented,
howling a line
from the little
red book,
then waltzing
along with it,
jubilant,
italicized.
The family will
tie you down
to the bed, fearing
that a respected teacher
would bring shame
to the household.
But I’ll release you
at night,
clean your face
after you stick it
into a sand hole
then look up at the stars:
those spiral arms,
beaming energetically
on the other faces
in the world,
a hearty, impassioned kiss
across our scars:
a wet consolation, a
river, gushing
fervently out of sight.
