i. New England 

the snow cover waxed and waned in degrees of
lucidity, its garish blue canvas softened by blurred
edges, the susurrus of an impatient bus. ahead
was the eastern stretch of concrete, the featureless pathways
of a pilgrim’s imagination, the circulatory system
of another life. hands grasp for unmoored, lexical swaps,
the harsher brushstrokes of colonial tongues: newness
brings conifers into being. the mind bristles, fights
the unfair mental jolts, the inadequate metaphor of
concentric cultures. the landscape is less a palimpsest,
more an acid wash; the importation of a faraway history,
a harsher rebirth in rugged hues. these are the spectres
of coloniality, of ivy dreams rendered in early modern
snobbery, arbitrating between a cambridged doubleness.
the lips curl in tropical notes, retained in pockets of
British weather; they quiver in recognition – how easy
to nestle in Asian American textures! regret feels unseemly:
these tattered prayers now three years old. 

ii. New York 

held away in the grounds of a Greenwich household, only
thirty minutes away from New York, the apex of a commuter’s
paradise, held in abeyance by the currency swap of a tropic
modernity. this was the haven of low-tax suburbia,
the ballast of private equity: rovers and helicopter moms and
good public schools and the monotony of finance husbands.
there is space for ornate bookshelves, volumes of Korean
history and Russian novels, pool tables and flute recitals.
this was the trade-off to juggled hybridities and fissured
families, a life without harsher orange gleams and wider emerald
fronds, a life with different disgruntlements. would the melancholia
have crept into knowingness on the trains to the city? would
those poems have been about Chinatown hawkers
and K-Town noraebangs? would they have roosted deep
within? beneath the folds of private school reticence? flickering
by the shimmer of Rockefeller ice? wrap them in forkfuls
of mentaiko pasta; package and ship them to
divine alterities. 

iii. Houston 

here is the languor of the hot, flat city: highways curve
into conspicuous avoidance, the scalding dashboard a community
space. the ecstasy of space. the ribaldry of space. the space
of gated McMansion enclaves, of sprawling retail neighbourhoods,
of megachurch residencies, of bottomless Texan plates. the space
for vision to telescope into nothingness, only the clouds peaking
over a horizon of roadways and the anticipation of arrival
for an auto-commuter economy. here was the space for frothy notes
to reverberate, fingers curling over organ and accordion.
here was the space for the holy ghost to take his place
next to the wuxia swords and between the English and Cantonese
services for the lone star Chinese. here is the space to know
that this was an other life, never another life, never a life imagined
in the marinade of road rage and southern baptism, tomahawk
steaks and oil money and strip-mall Chinatowns. this was their life.
this is their life. this is every winter’s transit, emerging with the quiet
forbearance of Mah Mah in tow.