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BooksSeptember 29, 2022

The Thursday Poem: Bad example

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A poem for NZ Chinese Language Week 2022 and Chris Tse.

Chinese Language Week
should change its name to
Mandarin Language Week because
I like Mandarin.

Lucid, clear tones – my favourite

beer is Asahi Super Dry
it tastes of nothing and my favourite perfume
smells just like sweet water, in fact it is called
‘Water’. If I could I would
wear the same black clothes every day.

Haiyaoshuo, Mandarin has only four tones
Yunnanhua alone can beat it with
almost three. You could say I’m a minimalist
(I want a simple life of revolution)
and Yunnan has only one season, springtime
why, I could wear the same black clothes there every day
if I went back to Baoshan

if I could ever go back to China again.
If I hadn’t joined the Blacklist Club.

Some days I try to learn Cantonese, just a few phrases.
Ten minutes later I think I am having an aneurysm.
Cantonese is trying to kill me.

*

I am a bad example

of what you are trying to say.
When ma first arrived here, the Old Gen Cantos would refuse
to take her order in restaurants
when she tried to speak with them
in Mandarin.

NO FOOD FOR YOU

Cantonese tried to starve us.

Who were you to us, us to you?
We weren’t woven into your histories of gold or
poll tax or laundries or racism or fruit-shops or
indenture or sports (good god, so much sports)

While we emerged from the jungle with stethoscopes
chests swelled from kicking out the British
then deflated from the race riots
well-balanced you might say
(smug, you might say)

you laohuaqiao kept your secrets sealed
behind English names and unreal hyphenates,
doors shut so tight, who the fuck knew.

Although my father and my family name

were Cantonese,
that name meant
Nothing.

No, literally.

This is not a poetry thing.

It means not
Don’t.
Absence of.
Nothing
No-one.
Mò.

*

My Malaysian Canto-dad didn’t teach us any
of the half-dozen languages he spoke so perfectly
like a fucking genius. Languages are too natural for teaching,
he said, you just open your mouth, it falls out

He would mock his own wife, my mother for speaking
her Southwest-accented Mandarin to me when young,
the shame of her open mouth, covered
it all just fell away.

My Language-Loss Story is a bad example,
regional snobberies and patriarchal dickishness to blame,
not colonisation or racism.
It even kept me mad about the Cantonese,
inside their nine-tone fortress,
their Tongrenjie bulldozed before we were here,
and I didn’t even care (I’m sorry I set a bad example)
I never believed in the One Chinatown Principle
the Chinatown Dream

There is no community behind me
just obscure strands of leftover empires, twisting, burning.
My name dug from the razed grounds
of a Tang Dynasty vs Ming Dynasty grudge-match

Tze Ming is ‘bright aspirations’ in
Southwest Mandarin;
joined with the Cantonese ‘not’,
my name means low expectations

just like those I have always had
of ‘NZ Chinese Language Week’.
This is gonna be cringe’, I said to Eda
An instant headline, and a chord struck
with so many Cantos.

And yet, I like Mandarin.
I am always a bad example
of resistance to CCP-enforced putonghua hegemony
other than my Mandarin being bad
and me resisting CCP-enforced every-other-hegemony,
with the power of bad Mandarin

*

Guangfu Xianggang!
Guangfu Xinjiang!
Guangfu Xizang!
Guangfu Zhongguo!
SHIDAI GEMIN

I want to speak only the banned Mandarin
and badly enough for it to stay free
always badly, pass it badly on.
Empires don’t make oral cultures, so
what can we do but eat knives daily
speaking to our family,
it’s as bad as actual poetry,
that is – the absolute worst –

to fumble feelings out of your face with

halting, self conscious
breaks and silence to
create tension, the tension appropriate
to the feelings, the feelings
to the meaning,
‘What is the use of talking,

and there is no end of talking’
(said the fascist Ezra Pound)
But ma yells the line eternally
WHAT IS THE USE OF TALKING
ZUIBUTING, JIANGHUASILE
yes talk me to death again yes

make it the same,
I’m a bad copy, I am shanzai to fuck
a scanned photo of a scanned photo with
a handwritten date on the edge
‘In the Thirteenth Year of the Republic’
like our lives were the Star Wars Prequels

Let the resolution degrade until
the nothing is the whole
And the no-one is the perimeter, and the
not is the shape of your mother’s hands
and the empire has no power here.

I smooth qi through my boy as I sing him to sleep
under a blank sky-blue banner
he feels the force tickle and lull and pull
him through the half-lives of generations

Lan-lan tian kou yingheli,

All together if you know the words

youzi xiao bai chuan,

in which case you will know these aren’t the right words

Chuan shang you ke guihua shu,

Twinkle twinkle little bat,

bai tu zai you wanr

how I wonder where you’re at

Piao-a piao-a wang qian piao,

Did you journey to the west

piaozi xiao bai chuan

Or south or east, to nowhere’s best

Piao-yaaaa, piaaaao-ya,

ALL TOGETHER NOW

PIAAAOO DAO XIIIIIFAAAAANG

My ma sang it wrong to me, I sing it wrong to him, and
he will sing it wrong to his, and eventually some smug spouse will say
while the straits fill with black fire, and our islands fall
and all of us cousins run and run, towards or away
from each other
‘That’s not how it goes, your Mandarin is bad’ and
we will finish this war
that the centuries started.

 

 

Keep going!
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BooksSeptember 27, 2022

A woman with a voice is catnip for dickheads

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Michèle A’Court reviews Emily Writes’ third book, Needs Adult Supervision. 

Every parent knows this moment – gazing into the eyes of your newborn and wondering when the grown-ups are going to arrive and take charge, and the panic of realising, oh fark, that’s you now. 

But there is another flash of understanding in the years that follow when you might think, if not “Nailed it!”, that at least you have muddled your way into being a comfortably imperfect parent, and maybe you are also becoming you

Emily Writes’ third book, Needs Adult Supervision, honours both these moments. In essays written over the past three years – often on her phone at night while her two children sleep in snatches – you see her blossom and flourish. This is a māmā who knows – really knows, hasn’t just been told – that a baby who never sleeps in his own bed will one day sleep in his own bed. That one day your kids will be at school and the house will be empty and you will be “staggered by the silence of it all”. And that what you feel simultaneously is grief and relief, and that’s OK.

A self-described “late bloomer” and “functioning mess”, Emily is arguably the most-loved, most-relatable of The People Who Write About Being A Parent. She is also the one who gets the most hate. This is not down to Emily, it’s just how we do things with women who have voices. See also Jacinda and Meghan and anyone else who dares to do more than wear a nice hat. Women like Emily are catnip for dickheads called Steve who have a lot of opinions about how the ladies should behave. For a full catalogue of those opinions, see Emily’s gloriously rage-fuelled chapter dedicated to the Steves we’ve all met.

It is one of about a hundred pieces in here – all different sizes, arranged like a mosaic between the covers. There are longer essays, comedic ones like the chapter on the five stages of toilet training grief, satirical ones (“You Are A Bad Parent With Fat Horrible Children”) and serious ones, like how to spot if a “parenting expert” is really a grifter, and how much you can learn from your kids about courage and connection and how to be in the world.

We get quick snapshots of Emily’s life: poignant recollections, like watching her husband on their first journey home with their first baby, two people now moving together as three; and the hilarious, like being encouraged to drink from a cup that her older son Eddie then reveals he has farted in, which had seemed a fun idea but now he is very sorry. 

There are pictures painted in more detail: how you can remember the exact moment in your first pregnancy when you stopped feeling like a sexual being; a beautiful cluster of essays about her whānau dealing with deaths; about long nights in hospital; life in the time of Covid; and about boys wearing pink. 

Emily treats her readers as close friends, so there are three-wines-in confessions, too. There’s that time she thought she was about to deliver her own baby in the elevator but it turned out to be a poo, which was disappointing not only for her, and her husband, but also for the random man in the lift with them. It is a perfect story because if you’ve never pooed in a lift, you immediately feel better about yourself; and if you have pooed in a lift you feel less bad because you are no longer alone. Plus there’s all the exquisitely observed detail of each player’s reaction, and – cherry on the top – the midwife asking years later, “Are you the one who pooed in the lift?”

Sprinkled among these are tiny “Meditations”, brief fantasies (it’s all a mother has time for) some of which are sexual and involve a Chris (Hemsworth, Pine, Evans) and others that are simply comforting and delicious thoughts to focus your brain on like the one about imagining yourself an amoeba who is just there and has no need for therapy. Ah, the peace.

‘Media is under threat. Help save The Spinoff with an ongoing commitment to support our work.’
Duncan Greive
— Founder

At times you detect the tension Emily feels between maintaining privacy for her family while usefully sharing experiences with people who face similar challenges. From maybe halfway through the book, Emily gets specific about Eddie’s diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes which means he needs to be checked every two hours. They also learn their younger son, Ham, has a beautifully neurodivergent brain which means he is smarter than most of us about many things, and also does not like to sleep alone. So Eddie sleeps with his father so he can be monitored and have injections through the night, and Ham sleeps with his māmā. Which makes perfect sense. Except that this is technically called “co-sleeping” and popularly regarded as a Parenting Crime.

I am relieved that when I had my child – I have mokopuna now the same age as Emily’s kids – I was oblivious to all this stuff. Honestly, I barely read a thing about parenting and there was no Facebook, that’s how old I am. Someone asked me once about my parenting style – had I been a tiger, helicopter, snowplough, or free-range? I snort-laughed and explained “style” was too fancy a word for the kind of mothering I did. I just tried to keep my daughter fed and let her know that she was endlessly loved.

The isolation might have been tough back in the 90s (I was new to Auckland and did not take to my Plunket coffee group) but from where I’m sitting now, this constant judging of parents on social media looks brutal. The third parenting option (not isolation, not judgement) is community, and this is what Emily has created in recent times. Far away from social media she has a Substack newsletter with comment threads filled with positivity and encouragement between writer and readers. You should have a look – it can throw a lot of sunshine on a bleak day.

There is a chapter at the centre (in both senses) of Needs Adult Supervision that feels like a turning point. It talks about how she got her name, and who Emily Writes is now. She says this: “Becoming a mother has been redemptive for me. Every time I mop up tears or offer cuddles or kiss away little hurts, I am doing it in turn to the old me. The child who couldn’t cope. The lost teenager … People often talk of losing themselves in motherhood but it’s here I was found.”

As I am reading, I write notes on my phone. One of them says, “Pg 184 – the dog, ffs!” This is where an already busy household dealing with complex challenges adopts a 30kg greyhound who is the size of a pony and terrified of everything. Emily does not make life easy for herself, I think, and then remember it is not an easy life that she wants.

This is not superwoman parenting bullshit where you get the house and family sorted and running with military precision (“corporate parenting”, is that a style? It probably is). Emily doesn’t want to get her family tidied away, she wants to relish every messy, sticky moment. Her cup runneth over. Sometimes with farts. 

Needs Adult Supervision by Emily Writes (Penguin Random House, $35) can be ordered from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington. Emily and Michele both appear at Verb Readers & Writers Festival in Wellington in November.