Diana Cao's Rupture: 1969 | 2021 | 1984 | 1996 | —

In my mother’s mind there is purpose
to turning over dirt to her body
dragging across the border from Siberia
slicing wheat hungry over the limbs
of the girl who trips & doesn’t get up
she is tossed into the chasm
My mother is fifteen eating frozen buns
under a gaping sky dreaming of Shanghai
her mother & littlest brother crying
in private She dreams of war against bad men
the Soviets or Japanese
or so I imagine any chance to fill
the maw of her potential She wards off dreams
tap tapping on wood until it splinters inside her

“农村也是⼤学”
“The countryside is also a university”
— PRC propaganda slogan

In total, approximately 17 million youth were sent to rural areas in the 60s and 70s as a result of the Down to the Countryside movement.

April 2021

In China, family members gathered to celebrate what should have been Xiaojie Tan's 50th birthday two days after she was murdered in Atlanta. Tan’s mother had not been told of her daughter’s death because family members were worried it would make her sick.

Inside her dendritic branches reach
into the recesses of her mind misfiring It is all neurofibrillary tangle
the past flaring up into the present symptom of disease On her phone
my mother learns everything is rumor
hate is racially motivated or not
even as she loses the thread
I am trying to fill in the gaps
who was the girl who fell in the cracked
earth it slides into the present into cracked volcanic plaque underneath
my sister My mother still remembers
her eldest lives on an island an ocean away

Oceans away I do not exist yet
My mother is used to losing faces
no longer young but young enough to carry
water across the 弄堂 the last time
she sees her father-in-law says goodbye
to her mother brothers uncles aunties
neighbors teachers It is the last time
she sees her baby brother alive
She checks her pocket for what she’s forgetting
papers passport twenty American dollars
the face of her small daughter getting smaller
One year later my sister follows
flying alone with a plastic tea set sticky
towards a memory of her mother

After supper, the Master dismissed all except Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie, and Sha the Monk. He took them out with him and said,

Look at that wonderful moonlight. It makes me long for the time when I can return home.”
— Wu Cheng'en, Journey to the West

“Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

I’m getting smaller my mother’s disease makes me a child again practicing handwriting
in the back of her store chirping in English
Video Wonderland how can I help you
hiding from adults so they can rent pornos though
one regular calls me China doll says I look just like
the Playboy bunny in my third grade Halloween costume grins at my mother tell me
do all Asians sound the same in bed On a slow day glass splinters over the register
just cash handed over just ten years
away from her mother fading alone in Shanghai
My mother alone opens 9am the next day
the memory of the gun gaping fresh in her mind