Love Song for Kien
An Asian boy in my poetry class wrote about his broken heart as a bird in a cage. The poetry professor was an old, terrifying genius with an onion-white bob, who talked fervently of trope, image, mythology. She ranked our poems from first to last. The Asian boy’s poem about the bird in the cage was ranked near the bottom, for he had used a familiar image, we’d seen it all before: a broken heart, clipped and desirous of freedom.
Walking down the stairs after class, I approached the boy and asked him where his family was from, because our names both began with “Only,” and truly, we were the only Asian people writing poems in our class.
“I’m Vietnamese and Chinese,” he said.
And I told him I was Filipino and Chinese, and hearing this, he rushed down the stairs away from me, slamming against the crash bar of the door, and escaping into the blue-gray Michigan day.
Only, only.
Later, we became friends, and we’d eat together at a restaurant called Udon. We slurped noodles and ranked everything on a scale from one to twenty, including people, including types of Asians, the Filipinos and Vietnamese being at the bottom, because we were cruel and we wanted to be punished, our hearts broken as wing-clipped birds, and our poems with familiar beginnings and endings.
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I did not hate the Asian boy whose heart was a bird in a cage. Even if I’d seen that bird before, its feathers made a mosaic pattern of bright colors against its frame.
Marianne Chan grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan. She is the author ofAll Heathens (Sarabande Books, 2020), which was the winner of the 2021 GLCA New Writers Award, the 2021 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry, and the 2022 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Outstanding Achievement. Her second collection, Leaving Biddle City, will be published from Sarabande Books in July of this year. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Best American Poetry, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Old Dominion University and teaches poetry in the Warren Wilson College MFA program for Writers.