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Writing Global Hong Kong

Two poems: Paper Birds, Dim Sum

Deux poèmes : Les oiseaux en papier, Dim Sum
Ethan Yu

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Paper Birds

1My grandmother once taught me
how to make paper birds.
Not the kind you fold in half,
but the kind you can make
with a single stroke,
with a single hand.

(Pen or pencil,
or even calligraphy brush,
it doesn’t matter.)

It goes like this:
two round, little mountains
kiss each other upon the feet
and greet each other
as dawn does to dusk.
They cut their wings
from the tips
of widow’s peak,
where the sun has left them both
(after all,
somewhere,
the sun is always setting,
the sun never belongs any more to day
than it does
to the middle of the night).

This is all it takes, she says.
Make three or more,
and you can have
a flock.

I still find these birds
migrating-in-the-distance-of-my-memory.
There is a child sitting alone
in the back
of the kitchen
facing the white vastness
of the empty page.

Dim Sum

2Marooned on a island
I call English

I misheard my parents
when they said they were going
to get Dim Sum.

I thought they said,
“We are going to meet Tsimtsum.”

The legend from Kabbalah
that before Ein Sof,
that Nothing that can be grasped,
created the world,
it was not a fan
of Aristotle’s 
horror vacui,
so left the Self in Time
before we could be.

I find it beautiful that 
dim sum means:
“to lightly touch the heart,”
as in,
“to barely fill the stomach.”

I also find it beautiful that 
tsimtsum
can mean
that a being can never exist
until its creator leaves its creation.

I’m still not sure
whether they said
dim sum or tsimtsum
before they left the house.

Before I got the chance to ask.

Maybe to leave a world
is to fill a Soul with Tea.

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Référence électronique

Ethan Yu, « Two poems: Paper Birds, Dim Sum »Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化 [En ligne], 18 | 2023, mis en ligne le 30 décembre 2023, consulté le 11 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/2317 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12u1u

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Auteur

Ethan Yu

Ethan Yu lives in Chicago, Illinois, and is studying psychoanalysis and divinity. He was born into a family of Hong Kong heritage in 2000 in Sacramento, California, where his parents ran a Chinese restaurant. His poems have appeared in Liminal Transit Review, a biannual magazine of diaspora, decolonial and postcolonial writing and Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology (Verve, 2023) co-edited by Jennifer Wong, Jason EH Lee and Tim Tim Cheng. His prose writing has been featured in State of Play: Poets of East & Southeast Asian Heritage in Conversation (Outspoken Press, 2023) edited by Eddie Tay and Jennifer Wong.

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