What is the difference
between singing and screaming,
when the foreign lands we sing of
push us out and leave us
drowning and screaming in the water?
What is the difference
between screaming and singing,
when the words of our mother tongue
become inseparable from the words of English?
What is the difference
between silence and singing,
when we start to speak their language,
yet, don’t acknowledge that we are citizens
of their country because the colour
of our skin is not the colour of paper,
but the colour of soybeans,
and the colour of noodles,
and the colour of wontons,
but not the colour of snow?
What is the difference
between singing and silence,
when we slowly become confused
about the origins of our bodies
removed from the origins of our minds?
What is the difference
between silence and screaming,
when our tongues find foreign
the language our ancestors spoke,
the practices that strange to us, but familiar
to our grandparents and those before them?
What is the difference
between screaming and silence,
when there are discussions and debates
about the country that we inhabit,
yet don’t inhabit, because we can never
truly be one of their citizens, or can we?
What is the difference
between silence and silence,
when our home is not our home
and our country is not our country,
but only a silent host for our bodies,
waiting for us to give in to or get out
of the lull of its culture and language
instead of celebrating what we know,
or at least what we should know, but
no longer know since we had forgotten
what it is like to remember?
***
Ai Jiang is a Chinese-Canadian writer and poet who graduated with a BA in English Literature from The University of Toronto and a current student at Humber School for Writers. Her work has appeared in Maudlin House and Neuro Logical and is forthcoming in Haunted Waters Press, Beyond Words Magazine, among others. More at aijiang.ca.
***
image: Elaine Wang
Rejection Letters 