Shanghai, July 2013

It was the hottest July in 140 years. A hundred degrees for ten days straight.

Sticky claimed the new clean. Gasping from the sweat of the day. The streets swallowed us in its black unswept sparkle. We brushed, on accident, on rushing morning commutes, breaking quickly from the dew between us.

Never slowing to say sorry in the shuffle of the summer.

In the humid length of breathing only the filtered air of modern living, Ma FaceTimes me with her zip-up jacket on. The room shivers the color stark. Antiseptic skulking in the distance.

The heartbeat of a faceless machine governs the passage of day.

On the corner, the dumpling man sits selling six for a dollar. Even the air is no match against his homemade steam. The sauce bleeds sweet into my brows, glasses fogging to the soup in surrender.

Somewhere overseas, my almost-face bloats and shrinks with the schedule of surgery.

It’s serious, Ma says. I shrug off the severity and angle to sun to stave off the screen.

In the summer’s evenings, the city sets loose on the Bund. The blast of fans dim to a dull roar by contrast. Kids and peddlers fly by on light-up skates, pleading with the sun to set upon us some relief. The river waits.

Ma calls asking for good news from the motherland.

I answer backlit by the wrinkle-rusted bridges she once walked on and had then called new. Ma, what a spectacle the skyline has become. Saturating her another photo to see, light streaks handing her no hint of the heat.

Isn’t it funny,
how we’ve switched countries?

The year I was born, the city too was an infant, the sky vast in its kingdom. The Pearl Tower and I, twin promise-jewels of our time, bets taken on some kind of hyperbole. Me and the city, racing over twenty years of concrete.

Our reaching for a place in the sun: a plunder only more untouchable in the heat.

On the river, old men’s bones stretch and push away the dust in unison, ushering in a sunrise much too bright for mourning. That summer, I stepped as far as I could from the face of death, all the way to the other side of the sea.

It’s not time to come home yet, Ma says, and I’m not sure who she means.

*

Alice Liang’s collection, Beforelife, is a reflection on migration as a sort of death, and death as a sort of migration. The book navigates the fog of assimilation, and the drowning of xenophobia in a world we can’t forget. Neighboring stanzas live on different sides of the ocean, on different sides of death, to interrogate both my countries and my own histories. Adjacent couplets collapse a world in which human rights abuses in China and racism in America meet. In the face of distance, racism, illness, and death, what does belonging to a country, and to a body, mean?

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