{"id":3543,"date":"2015-01-04T14:10:31","date_gmt":"2015-01-04T14:10:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/?p=3543"},"modified":"2015-08-24T00:26:33","modified_gmt":"2015-08-24T00:26:33","slug":"things-stuck-in-other-things-where-they-dont-belong-chen-chen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/?p=3543","title":{"rendered":"Things Stuck in Other Things Where They Don\u2019t Belong — Chen Chen"},"content":{"rendered":"

My mother one afternoon in a cowboy hat, sitting on a Texan bench of hay.
\nMe in the same configuration of time, space, & cowboy hat.
\nThe memory in my brain like a boulder in a haystack, like a bad joke.
\nThe sun in our faces.
\nThe year we spent in Fort Worth, Texas, our first year in America.
\nThe fluent Not-English I spoke in kindergarten.
\nThe blond boy from Germany in the same sandbox with me, laughing at my jokes.
\nHis name, Eammon, pronounced like Amen<\/em>, unlike any Chinese
\nor American name I\u2019d ever heard, a funny humming
\nin my ears.
\nThe soy sauce + Tabasco sauce + mud in my \u201csoups.\u201d
\nThe exact same ingredients + sugar in my \u201cpies.\u201d
\nMe in the biggest kitchen I\u2019d ever seen, running around the \u201cisland,\u201d
\nchased by an elderly white man my father said to call
\nmy \u201cTexas grandpa.\u201d
\nMy father with his full head of black hair & British-inflected English
\nin the graduate religion program at Texas Christian University.
\nThe grease-tang of kung pao chicken in my mother\u2019s clothes,
\nalways in my mother\u2019s clothes, after long shifts at a dimly lit Chinese restaurant.
\nThe hyper-sweet of strawberry candies
\nin my mouth\u2014the best treat my mother would let me thieve from the buffet bar.
\nThe Legos & little plastic trucks filling a metal barrel of caramel popcorn
\nmy mother received as a Christmas gift, & after the popcorn was finished,
\nemptied out.
\nThe Bengal tigers in the tightly fenced forest habitat in the zoo Eammon & I visited.
\nThe sand from the sandbox in Eammon\u2019s shoes, in mine.
\nThe sun in our faces
\nas we sweated over castle construction & fortification, all afternoon.
\nThe goodbye<\/em> I placed in Eammon\u2019s ear.
\nThe motels & motels my parents & I found ourselves in, moving, leaving Texas
\nfor Massachusetts, because my father was promised a scholarship.
\nThe persistent idea in my head that a scholarship was an actual ship
\n& we\u2019d soon board it & get to Massachusetts,
\nwhich was surely an island,
\nclose to Iceland.
\nThe Christmas card from Eammon, once cherished, now stuffed
\nin a box, some closet, along with my promise to write back.
\nThe torn-out magazine grin of a young Ewan McGregor,
\nhidden between the 9th<\/sup> grade pages
\nof The Catcher in the Rye. \u00a0<\/em>
\nThen in pivotal 10th<\/sup> grade, the incident
\nof an accidental strand of my mother\u2019s black hair
\nappearing between the golden pieces of fried tofu
\nin a dish we were serving to our French exchange student, Nicolas.
\nNicolas, who was cute
\nbut aggressively straight, & who three weeks into the experience
\nhad begun to call everything in this foreign country
\n(except its college-aged women studying French)
\nalmost unbearably \u201cmoche\u201d\u2014\u201cugly.\u201d
\n& some time during this lively cultural sharing, I learned the French word
\nfor \u201cscar\u201d\u2014saw it over & over
\nin the French edition of the first Harry Potter <\/em>book,
\nwhich Nicolas had given me when I stayed with him in Paris, & which
\nreminded me of the small bald spot
\non the left hemisphere of my head
\nwhich I received one afternoon in Texas, when I was the skinniest,
\nsincerest Superman
\n& flew into the kitchen
\nwhere my mother was removing from the stove
\n(because she didn\u2019t know she didn\u2019t have to boil the milk anymore)
\na saucepan of milk, still boiling
\n& we bumped into each other\u2014\u201ccicatrice.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 
\n\"nn,Chen Chen is the author of the chapbooks, Set the Garden on Fire<\/em> (Porkbelly Press, 2015) and Kissing the Sphinx<\/em> (Two of Cups Press, 2016). A Kundiman Fellow, his poems have appeared\/are forthcoming in Poetry, Narrative, Drunken Boat, Ostrich Review, The Best American Poetry 2015<\/em>, among others. He holds an MFA from Syracuse University and is currently a PhD candidate in English & Creative Writing at Texas Tech University. Visit him at chenchenwrites.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My mother one afternoon in a cowboy hat, sitting on a Texan bench of hay. Me in the same configuration of time, space, & cowboy hat. The memory in my brain like a boulder in a haystack, like a bad joke. The sun in our faces. The year we spent in Fort Worth, Texas, our [&hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3550,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[174],"class_list":["post-3543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","tag-photograph-gerard-houllier-from-interior-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3543"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3543\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3583,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3543\/revisions\/3583"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}