Liminal Blue
I wheel my baggage through an empty airport, echo
melancholy like a dream I forgot upon waking.
My grandfather died two years after my mother.
At 22, all I think is dying. But now I’m flying
to visit Nai Nai. I read about Mao cresting a wave
of forty million ghosts. Do not save them, he said
after suicides, he said through famine, forced
labor, feared baseless executions.
China is such a populous nation—it is not
as if we cannot do without a few people.
Forty million deaths as Mao ascended—
if a body falls in the forest, and no one hears,
did it make a sound? If a woman among millions
dies, and no one remembers, did she matter?
I keep trying to remember whom history forgot,
feel their pressure at my temple like a silenced gun.
My grandfather on his deathbed weeping
for the daughter he lost—my father’s sister, turned
factory worker for the revolution—at 22
a morsel of idealism ripe for consumption.
He came home to her coat hanging, pockets flush
with questions. Later, body fished from a muddy river.
Silence hangs heavy like grapes grown in shade,
black clusters that sour but will not break free.
Before, I’d heard of her only from my mother.
On his death, one less person to carry both.
Now the house is gone, the river is gone, the town empty
of family, scattered like memories unwritten.
The summer after my mother died,
traveling with my father beneath heavy skies,
endless planes and trains and buses transporting us
away from the last moment of her alive.
The last trip: a water park near Huang Shan—
rides delayed, angry tourists demanding answers.
A raft had caught. A worker dove in, tried to fix it.
I imagine she must have been a strong
swimmer, like my dead mother’s dead brother.
Foolish peasant girl, someone spat. No life
jacket. Another asked me, Did you see the body?
No more rides today. Our money wasted.
I watched a butterfly, its wings an uncanny iridescent
blue, the only color I remember all summer.
Jenny Qi is the author of Focal Point, winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award. Her essays and poems appear in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Poetry Northwest, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. In conversation with her late mother’s writings, she is working on a hybrid collection titled Liminal Bodies and a memoir of Las Vegas.
Header photo by Matthias, courtesy Pixabay. Photo of Jenny Qi by Marc Olivier Le Blanc.
