Poem for Ha Jin

Ha Jin is an award-winning Chinese writer now living in the United States who publishes only in English.  I read an interview last weekend he gave at Powell's Bookstore a few years ago and was inspired to write this poem about the immigrant experience.  He and his wife decided after Tiannamin Square never to return to China.

Immigrant Story

a final leave-taking,

no return;

never to smell again the sweet-sour odor

that is all you now remember

of that place

where time holds you its captive.

only in her remembrance

does your past live.

only she holds your memories

like fragrant loaves of cooling bread

in your shared past.

if she would go,

what pole could attract those memories

and make them coalesce

into solid things

whose meaning is revealed only

when you conjure them up together?

how many of your memories threaten to slip into oblivion without

the daily reenactment of this ritual?

who will you be when she is no more?

what is the past, a man’s life even,

when it consists only of

uncheckable filaments of memory—

changeable, uprooted, corrupted,

like a fine wool cloth

whose exquisite design has disintegrated

in the mouths of unseen destroyers,

until only nostalgia

recreates the past as

stories she would never recognize?