Things Chinese
Once, I tried to banish them all from my writing.
This was America, after all, where everyone’ s at liberty
To remake her person, her place, or her poetry,
And I lived in a town a long way from everything —
Where discussions of “diversity”
Centered mainly on sexuality.
My policy, born of exhaustion with talk about race
And the quintessentially American wish for antecedents,
Eliminated most of my family, starting with the grandparents,