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Homepage»Lives»Fingerbites
FINGERBITES
Lives
By Jane Shi on October 5, 2017 0 Comments
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a love story about chosen family
This pride I went to zero pride events. No dances, no parties, & certainly no
parades¹. Instead, I took my queer sobriety and life-exhaustion, and spilled it
into night-writing, chatting with beloved friends giddy at a good 3am discourse
session. Instead, I made spam musubi with Japanese Canadian elders at Powell’s
Street Festival² & cried wondering if communities that deserve to work together
so much will ever recognize the hurt we sometimes do to one another. Wondering
when we are ready to heal each other with our respective gifts. Wondering about
worth, queer intergenerational loss, and belonging. Instead, I wrote this letter
to you.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is a lovesong and lullabystory for the brilliant Black, Indigenous, Muslim,
Latinx, mixed, people of colour dreamers and reality-makers in my life. For Sick
and Disabled Femmes who do more for each other than what the able-bodied and
neurotypical could ever imagine. For survivors holding our tongues, shaking in
the silence, punished for our murmurings. For the futches finding traces of
familiar skin in shifting clouds. For the Gaysians who love wrestling and sports
and Binding of Isaac. For the ones slowly finding themselves between stifling
tower-walls, between short-term contracts, between shorter hours of reprieve.
For the ones demanding for more than scraps. For the queer and trans Chinese
women written out of family histories. For the yīnyáng rén and the lālāduì. For
the loving ones healing their communities day in and day out. For spirits erased
and discarded in places where longing is most sought. For the bodies aching to
rest. Finally. finally. For you. for me.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I know it isn’t simple. The way we might long for glimmers of ourselves—and
really, what others cannot give us—in each other. There is a system of thought
that dictates how these longings might be called “obsessions,” “projections,”
“delusions”, etc. But they forget how together we are cumulonimbus swallowing
weathervanes, unfathomable to the nets cast upon our oceans. When you are from
mountains and coastal ranges and remember, in the distance, a blanketing sea and
the glitter of summer in each of its breaths.
Mhm, it is possible to imagine “sea” and “summer” without the ships, cruises,
jets, yachts. One day.
I have lost the ability to speak to my family. Not just in one way but in a
thousand. I know there is family beyond family, recoverable, but the longing
that family always gives us is as big and vast as the mountain ranges in our
dreams. Each corner of stone, there, is crisper than the heaviest camera.
Steaming dragon’s tongue, charcoal campfire weather. I wonder how I will ever
make it up to you. The kind of secrets I keep about myself in my tightly crossed
fingers. The kind of promises to demons who swish the fabrics lining our skies
whenever we stir in our sleep.
One day there will be.
Darlingsweet, they want us to be minor. They want us to be the minor keys when
we are the entire orchestra and the stage beneath it. We are so many flavours of
wrong, fiery inappropriate, and they want us to be sad and somber and
stammering. Tough luck when you’re with me. Tough luck when we are bound to each
other by a history they are destroying the earth trying to bury. Well, you don’t
have to. You don’t have to come along if you’re not ready. The kind of coercion
that brings us to this point in conversation—well, it would be awful to repeat.
No more police at pride parades, no more drones.
Can you hear that? Just over the hill of apartment complexes there is a sparrow
darting about like a badminton birdie, flirting with the leaves. I guess I
wonder if I could be like that sparrow all the time, not too far away from home
but easily amused with my surroundings. Enough to love you like this. Just like
this.
No more abuse, no more pillaging of land.
Sometimes I worry I’ve repeated history too many times. That I’ve hurt you too
many times. But I am sitting here hurting, and never finding a single reason to
blame you. Well, sometimes I am angry. Sometimes I am furious. Being so close,
it’s easy to be a tiny tiny teeny teeny bit angry. Maybe even a wee bit bitter.
But I am not blaming you, never you, and I guess I can try to imagine you aren’t
blaming me, either.
No more overdoses. Not a single more.
Interwoven histories. I’m thinking about that. I’m thinking about the bombs that
fell³. I am thinking about the rape of the city⁴ in which I was born, the one
astrology websites don’t recognize. I am thinking about how we benefit from
occupation. I am thinking about how I occupy your homelands. About how your
ancestors might have refused to occupy mine. I am thinking about the fruits that
travelled across the world and the million different ways of mian. The
eighty-eight steps to mi. The unknowing ways we have taken. The soft ways we
have given.
No more scarcity.
Jianmian. To meet. To meet each other where we are.
No more genocide.
Also: noodles. Delicious.
Ni chi fan le ma?
I am obsessed with seeing us—beautiful in silk and tulle and linen—getting
married. Imagining beauty at our weddings. I want to see us carrying feasts to
each other when we are eighty, some of us still picky (never not picky), others
ravenous, hardly able to contain excitement. And others of us cooking, dishes,
cleaning. Shared and interwoven and peppery. Marriage is, in this society, a
legal concept. But for many, it is a spiritual and religious ceremony. While
growing up I thought only beautiful people could get married.
Hai mei you.
I knew I wasn’t beautiful. But what is marriage but family beyond family? More
than recoverable. How did they manage to ruin spirit, to ruin ceremonies of
trust and belonging and life, too?
More than recoverable.
For all our anger, for all our skepticism. But what if we promised each other a
fierce ocean of blameless secret married and unabiding love. Family while we are
together.
Lai chi fan ba.
Family while we are apart.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
¹ After repeated requests from Black Lives Matter Vancouver and other community
organizations, Vancouver Pride Society did not remove armed and uniformed police
offers from their annual parade. In lieu of participating in Pride, Black Lives
Matter Vancouver organized a March on Pride in June.
² The annual Powell’s Street Festival is a Japanese Canadian community festival
taking place on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral homelands of the
Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish peoples in Oppenheimer Park, Downtown
Eastside. Powell’s street was home to a community of Japanese settlers before
being forcibly displaced and incarcerated seventy-five years ago during the
Second World War. Each year, the festival overlaps with major Pride events,
including the pride parade.
³ August 6th, the second day of the Powell’s Street Festival this year, is the
anniversary for the bombing of Hiroshima.
⁴ I was born in Nanjing, Jiangsu, where the Nanjing Massacre of December 13th,
1937 took place. The province of Ontario is currently considering passing Bill
79, Nanjing Massacre Commemorative Day Act. The National Association of Japanese
Canadians, citing concerns for community division, has opposed the bill.
ABOUT
Jane Shi is a Han Chinese settler currently living on the traditional,
ancestral, and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish
peoples. She wants to live in a world where love is not a limited resource, land
is not mined, hearts are not filched, and bodies are not violated. In the mean
time she will fold dumplings, trace poetry out of the shadows of the english
language, and dance the unknown rage within.
RECOMMENDED
SAME BUT DIFFERENT
SEED SONGS: GROWING THE SACRED FEMININE
AUNT MIRIAM
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