Paint by Number 1 (Outside Songshan Airport, 1969)
1. Top of the head, eye, neck, heart, gut, solar plexus, base of the spine.
2. The moment of departure. Before she crosses the gate: the threshold, the ocean. A one
second pause.
3. The Emperor forbade the Daughter to cross the sea. She only wanted to know what was
on the other side. She was presumed dead, and transformed into Jīng Wèi, the bird that
spends the rest of its life filling the sea, rock by rock, branch by branch, so no other child
will meet the Daughter’s fate.
4. Did you fly through a typhoon? Did you make it through the storm?
5. What she left behind: grief. A hole. When her father died, she was birthed a temporary
freedom.
6. In her hands: a parting gift. A pair of calligraphy scrolls, a painted poem from a friend of
her father.
7. I never learned the word for grief in Mandarin. Maybe my mother hoped that I would
have no use for it. Selected entries for the English word grief that I found in a Mandarin
Chinese dictionary: 吃亏†(not quite right, means a more bittered loss), 忧伤†(almost,
maybe heartbroken.) or 杜鹃啼血†(“literally, the cuckoo, after its tears are exhausted,
continues by weeping blood (idiom) / fig. extreme grief”)
8. The clouds in the upper stratosphere in which the Daughter transforms into a new bird,
with a new song. Jīng Wèi! Jīng Wèi! Jīng Wèi!
9. In the family album, each of the brothers and sisters have a portrait in turn with the ones
who stay, the leaver marked with plumage in pink, red, green, blue petals. The plastic lei
she is wearing is a code: this is the day she left. She was the first. The rest would follow.
Soon there would be no one left but a father in a grave.
10. The plants in her sister in law’s herbal apothecary in West Berkeley, on the other shore.
Downstairs, lemon balm and damiana for sale. Upstairs, in the attic she lived in for the
first months in this new country, are the plants she is instructed to hide when the plumber
comes to fix the sink. They grew wild in the ancestral village, too wild here to be legal.
11. Two sisters who have never been apart from each other.
12. The other shore: Old Gold Mountain.
13. The Daughter, alive and well on the other side of the sea. There is an other side to the sea.
14. The poem: As the bright moon rises over the sea / On the other edge of the sky thinking of
those I love.
15. We seem to be people who are always leaving.
16. Some things to consider: if you disobey the Emperor on the immortal plane, and arrive
on the other shore in the mortal world, the Jīng Wèi bird could return home to take your
place so as to not cause too much discomfort for the Immortals. Or, if you are mortal,
have died and come back as the immortal Jīng Wèi bird, well, then your mortal soul
would be tethered to the work you must do for an eternity. And you will be revered.
17. There is too much we don’t talk about, much of it evaporates as soon as we open our
mouths. My fleshy tongue can’t make the tones anymore.
18. If you were mortal and simply found a home on the other side of the sea and by some
luck, a bird just happened to return to your home just as you were declared lost, then
chance and mystery could still exist. I would rather believe this version.
19. The stucco wall in the living room of the suburban house she would buy with her white
American husband upon which she finally hangs up the scrolls. She has American
children asleep in each of the downstairs bedrooms, to whom she never explains the
poem. They have no need for it.
20. Now, we are birds.
Is This Your Mother?
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Jenne Hsien Patrick is a writer and artist based in Seattle, WA. She writes poetry, comics and text/image works. She was a scholarship recipient to the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference and is an alum of the Tin House Winter Workshop. Jenne's work has appeared in publications such as wildness/Platypus Press, and Honey Literary among others.