- The women didn’t make it
- onto my family tree,
- the dreams they birthed
- or didn’t,
- and so I cling to my great-grandmother’s story,
- shape the details of her life
- like clumps of damp soil in my hands,
- to understand
- where my defiant nature comes from.
- She wasn’t supposed to live,
- so the family story goes:
- dropped into the river as a newborn,
- cast outside the house as a child,
- tossed into the pond by her father.
- I feel pride
- that she was the rare woman in her village
- who knew how to swim.
- But while I swim to shed the day’s layers,
- to float for a moment under blue sky,
- I can feel her muscles pumping to get ashore,
- lungs gasping,
- swimming across time.
- My great-grandmother grew rice
- and sugarcane
- to keep the family alive.
- Her fingers may never have lingered
- by choice
- in the soil,
- I can’t know, and yet,
- when I grow chrysanthemum from seed,
- recognize the flowers
- and lay eyes on the stems,
- an echo ripples somewhere
- inside my body.
- When I walk,
- I search for her steadiness in my step,
- my feet in her unbound feet.
- They said no one would marry her
- because she resisted binding.
- But her future husband wanted someone strong,
- and she gave birth to eleven children.
- She was the one who taught the family to farm,
- who made the best soy sauce in the village,
- who loved brandy,
- who broke the rules.
- I don’t want to force meaning,
- harvest only the ripest parts of her story,
- clumsily,
- for my use,
- but learning about her fortifies something in me,
- unearths my hidden geography.
- Is that not legacy?
- We grew in different times and places:
- she in our homeland,
- me in this nextland,
- the sweat tracing
- distinct patterns across our skin,
- but the water is the same,
- and somehow, she continues to feed me,
- and I her.
Nicole Wong (she/her) is a poet, singer, and lover of food and plants studying City Planning at MIT.