by Chan Lai-kuen, translated from the Chinese by Jennifer Feeley

WE SCATTER THE EARTH

We are every stone strewn on the ground
we are walls, are windows
we are iron fences, tents, bicycles
glass bottles, white cloth strips, wooden carts
we are plastic eyeglasses crushed to pieces, shoes that have fallen off
we are bullet holes, we
are tanks 
crushing forward, crushing backward.
We are lights suddenly switched off
we are hospitals
are morgues
we are journalists keeping watch on the roof of a public toilet
we are mothers who’ve lost their children
we are songs, rolls of film, videotapes, television sets throughout the world
we scatter the earth
we leave, we don’t leave
we are in hiding, we are imprisoned 
even though we are only white chrysanthemums hidden in the palms of our mothers’ hands

Even though we only bow our heads on the grass 
sometimes doing accounting
sometimes doing construction, transportation, retail
sometimes falling in love
sometimes cooking
some of us tell the story again
some of us tell lies
some people teach children to tell lies
our children have just started secondary school
we have just started secondary school
we have just lost our hair
we have just grown our hair
we are
all
present

May 2009

我們散落大地

我們是每一塊鋪在地上的石頭
我們是牆，是窗戶
我們是鐵欄、帳篷、自行車
玻璃瓶、白布條、木板手推車
我們是壓碎了的膠眼鏡、掉落的鞋子
我們是子彈孔，我們
是坦克車
壓過去，壓回來。
我們是突然關掉的燈
我們是醫院
是停屍間
我們是守在公廁樓頂的記者
我們是失去孩子的母親
我們是歌曲、膠卷、錄像帶、全世界的電視機
我們散落大地
我們走，我們不走
我們躲藏，我們坐牢
即然我們只是藏在母親手心裡的白菊花

即然我們只是在草地上低著頭
有時在做會計
有時做建築、運輸、零售
有時戀愛
有時做菜
我們有人把故事再說一遍
我們有人說謊
有人教孩子說謊
我們的孩子剛上中學
我們剛上中學
我們剛掉光了頭髮
我們剛長出頭髮
我們
都
在

5/2009

[Editors’ note: Thank you to The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation for supporting the English translation of this poem, which will be published in a booklet for the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in Fall 2019.]

Chan Lai-kuen was born and raised in Hong Kong. She graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University (taken in Hong Kong) with BAs in English and Fine Art respectively. Her book of poetry Were the Singing Cats (2010) was awarded Recommendation Prize of the 11th Hong Kong Biennial Awards for Chinese Literature. Her bilingual poetry selection City of Dead Stars was published by Association of Stories in Macao and Cerberus Press of Australia in 2014  and her prose collection Kyoto that Cannot be Reached was published in 2015.

Jennifer Feeley (translator) is the translator of Not Written Words: Selected Poetry of Xi Xi, which won the 2017 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and a 2017 Hong Kong Publishing Biennial Award in Literature and Fiction. With Sarah Ann Wells, she is the coeditor of Simultaneous Worlds: Global Science Fiction Cinema. Currently, she is translating a short story collection by Shi Tiesheng and the first two books in Chen Jiatong’s White Fox Dilah series. She is the recipient of a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship to translate Xi Xi’s semi-autobiographical novel Mourning a Breast (Photograph of Jennifer by Shi Lessner.)