It was a raining evening
“Someone wrote a letter to you from Africa,”
Mother was flapping a puce envelope in front of you, “Gold Coast?
Who on earth should mail you from such a place?”
Pulling back your glasses in place, you recognized its handwriting
It was from her, not from any Mum-Terrifying-Black-Continent
But from a bourgeois beachfront next to Brisbane, Australia,
“A Holy Land of Surfing and Spring Break Party,”
That’s what you learned from her in a phone
When you told her Brisbane would be the capital of the future Earth
According to Yoshiki Tanaka’s Sci-fi novel
She scorned you, from another Hemisphere, “What a nerd you are!”
And you protested, in a proper geeky way, and you both laughed
It was when cell-phone was still a Sci-fi like luxury
That evening, at a phone booth, you squatted side by side
Not with her, but with a Filipino housemaid
Pacifying her left-behind son over an unstable phone cable:
“Patawad mga anak
Sa pasya kong kayo ay iwanan
Upang ako’y magtrabaho
dito sa Taiwan.
Labag man sa loob,
subalit kailangan,
Na ako’y mapalayo
at sa inyo ay mawalay.
Kinabukasan ninyo sa akin nakasalalay.
Kaya’t dasal ko, sana’y makamit
ang tagumpay,
At nang sa inyo maibigay, pangarap
na ginhawa sa buhay.”
(Forgive me, child
Making the decision to leave you
and come to Taiwan
was against my will.
Even though it is necessary,
I am away
and separated from you.
The future depends on me
So I prayed, hope that I will be
Successful,
And you can, at that time, dream
A comfortable life)
--Quoted from: Lorna M. Ruanto, “Patawad Mga Anak,” Lorna Kung, ed.,
Taipei, Listen to Me!, Taipei: Taipei Bureau of Labor Affairs, 2002,
pp.63-67.)
It’s hard to explain, you started to tell her your family saga:
“My mother’s mother was an accoucheuse
You know, a fancy name for midwife that she prefered
She graduated from Taipei Medical Special School in the colonial period
In late 1930s, she went to Manchuria and worked in a clinic
And you know what, my father’s mother was born in Manchuria”
“How funny the term midwife is,” she said, “It’s like
Someone’s wife in the middle of sometime, in between somewhere”
“If both of us are still be single at 35, let’s elope and get married!”
Who jumped to that conclusion? You already forgot
But in the following years, it became you two’s catching phrase
Never thought you had crossed the boundary that leads to
Abuse of friendship and mutual ostracism
At that rainy night, you read her letter
Like some fingered words on a foggy window
Her message was vaguely reminiscent
A perfect fragment, ruined to such an exquisite degree
All the lines of thoughts were
Amputated, beheaded, and sawed at the waist
Like a knightless equestrian, a finless bust of a mermaid
Or a worm’s eye view of huge shins and toes
Left by a torsoless, limbless colossal…
A buoyant lavender scent from the stationary captured your sensation
Yes, you remembered, it was her birthday, a December 8th
Tears made everything a curvy pulchritude
You got lost in her kaleidoscope--
“Many years ago, we walked side by side
In the campus of the Taiwan University
Talking about how I thought of popular literature
The Italian food we ate that afternoon was still leavening
Warmly in our stomach, we talked and talked till the sky went dark
And we took bus home unwillingly! I missed those days!
Like the night of that Dragon Boat Festival, we talked about
Our daily life trivia in an international phone call
Wasn’t that exactly the spirit of popular literature?
Sharing common daily feelings in common colloquial language
Sharing one’s loneliness, helplessness with a person
Thousands miles away and you barely know him!
Once you said, if there are ten people like your poems,
Then, at least, you will have ten readers in your life
Ten anonymous best friends. What a wonderful thing!”
“Maybe we make friends with each other now and
Will probably all forget tomorrow:
You are good to me, exceeding the necessary percentage
The wind is rubbing, patting as herbs
I nevertheless will like then again
Recognize you, but on this moment
I shall believe this small terrace
Is the World, even the fringe of the World.”
--E. Du Perron (1899-1940), “Somewhere”
--
http://blog.roodo.com/kamadevas
--
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※ 編輯: kamadevas (98.206.162.66), 03/01/2016 11:43:22