"Yet what's there in a life to do, but reprise our ancestors' mistakes."                                                                 Tomb-Sweeping Day

Ghost Country Playlist:

  • Appointment (pg. 43)
  • Poem for Er Bao (pg. 37, scroll down here for text)
  • The Acrobats of Dali (pg.89)
  • The Emissaries (pg. 68)
  • The Master Comments on the Century (pg. 99)
  • Tomb-Sweeping Day (pg. 25)


Poem for Er Bao


Once in Beijing I loved your aunt -- this gives
me a unique purchase on fondness
for you, blinking in the imminence of tears,
defiant locust-craving dumpling of a kid
abandoned for months in the beleaguered care
of your grandmother, waddling around
the courtyard looking for filth. Your snotty nose.
Your sulks. All a kind of  glamorous
clamour for attention. Your squeals at my face-- 
"Auntie has picked up a ghost person!" --
as I peek-a-booed you to giggle you
free of your misery when told you were rude.
But it doubly served: you were one 
of them, and got what indulgence you could.

I have not seen you since you were four.
You make your way, a young woman 
in a Hello Kitty sweatshirt, out of the alleys
biking past the grey soviet blocks of Haidian
into wider streets, gleaming modernity, to join
the current flowing into constructed fact.
A person formed  no less by chanted claps
of the Tang classics as by Hong Kong pop
and universal rap; having only glimpsed 
you briefly at the nub of your progess,
I will pass you in the crowd. When small

in your mother's lap,  eyes red with smoke,
your parents protested how much they loved 
you,  showing up once in three months
to dandle you and brag your winsomeness --
your mom's embrace did not put out
your hunger for her, never once.
How should I advise you about love, lest
you believe that everything is done for you
and lose your local mask of indifference
in a world where everything costs the eyes?
Of your memories, my consequenceless presence
shall be last. Perplexed, I overheard by chance 


teenagers vie and tease  each other
in flipsharp Mandarin in a parking lot.
I long to be alien again,  Er Bao.
The stares, the thrill of lostness
in the looming dark, a language I must 
wickedly think to utter.  I have lost
my bearing on your world, will never have
identity in it, its maze of chat-rooms, suffering
 of riches, its kites, its defaced Buddhas, its bicycles.
The first rule of mortality is praise 
the young: your post-sugar tantrums,
your exploration of the knife as toy,  and
your first shower, when, after initial fear
you stomped around, with squeals more feasible
from animals. Your stubby body for the first time
soaked, you splashed the bathroom to a shine.

You will make your own world,
with its stamp of anguish, 
its delight, its discontent, 
and one day will grow older
in a face that watches you
with its clean 
rage to be next.