the most Taiwanese thing about me
HFR Inaugural Poetry Contest Honorable Mention
after Katie Mansfield
not the tub of bean curd in my freezer.
not the Lao Gan Ma chili oil
I drink by the spoonful like my Ba.
not how I fish pork blood out of my soup
to drop into my brother’s bowl,
not any acre of my mouth, really.
not my two passports
or my two names.
not the yearbook photo retake
that made twins of me in 2nd grade,
Ting Wei and Juliana printed out
side by side. not the time I made Kevin cry
telling him Chang is a better last name
than Zhang.
not my 9th Halloween.
not when I asked my Ma for jack-o’-lanterns
and she scratched smiley faces into the pumpkins
with a butter knife.
not the way my Ma pronounces butter, or knife,
or library—not the li-barry, the Ikea bag of books,
the sofa cushions that ate a paperback each month.
instead, just the way my Ma hugs at airports.
last time, she squeezed so hard
I thought she was trying to seal me
back inside my body.
I didn’t know I was an island
until then.
Janelle Cordero, Fall Figure 4
JULIANA CHANG is a Taiwanese American poet. She is the 2019 recipient of the Urmy/Hardy Poetry Prize, the 2017 recipient of the Wiley Birkhofer Poetry Prize, and a 2015 Scholastic Art & Writing Gold Medalist in Poetry. She received a BA in Linguistics and a MA in Sociology from Stanford University in 2019. Her debut chapbook INHERITANCE was the winner of the 2020 Vella Contest and published with Paper Nautilus Press in 2021.