My Family Tree Sits in a Vietnamese Village

My name sits in the far right corner

squeezed in and written in pencil

buried under blood bonds so easily broken by fickle memory

A single line connects me to my parents.

A 0.5 mm lead’s width

and just like that, seems like it could splinter into pieces at any moment.

I wish I could somehow go back and paint some pictures into those thin lines

to add some shading and depth.

Suddenly the line between my parents

and me does splinter,

if only to disrupt the linear narrative

that smoothly bridges their lives to mine.

The gaps would speak of running to the sea under the light of the moon

of a severing- crack- separation-

One shard fixed in place, imprisoned in their own home

Waiting.

The other free in places they were not meant to wander

through the ocean to Malaysia to Texas to California

a journey some could call a vacation

If only desperation were not its fuel.

And yet this motion is not new to my family

for if you go up a few names above mine

You’ll find my grandparents never thought

They would leave the land their ancestors

had Cultivated, had Cried upon, had Laughed upon,

had Loved upon.

But they too moved

from North to South

then from an East to a West

Crossing borders some men thought it would be fun to draw

Not thinking that if you rip out a plant

You need to put it back in soil, not leave it to die on the cement.

I understand now why dance is so familiar to me,

because movement has been etched

into my body and my brain

since before I could breathe.

I am still searching for the dirt to anchor my roots in.

I wrote this for Stanford University’s Listen to the Silence 2018 Conference on “Immigration Narratives: Advancing Our Movement.” We organized our first zine as part of the LTS conference, and this is the first time I drafted and shared a poem to be published in a zine, so it’ll always have a special place in my heart.