Thousand Star Hotel

Also by Bao Phi

Sông I Sing

Copyright © 2017 by Bao Phi

Cover photograph and design by Karl Engebretson

Book design by Rachel Holscher

Author photograph © Anna Min

Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to [email protected].

Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Phi, Bao, 1975– author.

Title: Thousand star hotel / Bao Phi.

Description: Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016051821 | ISBN 9781566894708 (paperback) | ISBN 9781566894814 (eBook)

Subjects: | BISAC: POETRY / American / Asian American. | POETRY / Asian.

Classification: LCC PS3566.H467 A6 2017 | DDC 811/.54—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016051821

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Say WHAT?

I.

1. Vocabulary
2. Cookies
3. Shell
4. Go to Where the Love Is
5. Lead
6. The Reveal
7. Kids
8. Want to Want
9. When My Daughter Asks Me to Check and Make Sure Racists Can’t Come In and Kill Us
10. Our Minnesota
11. Peeking through the Back Door of the Commodore
12. Refugees from the Prom Center, the Eighties
13. The Why
14. To Combust
15. Knockoff
16. The Measure
17. Poem for Ahmed Al-Jumaili
18. List of Notable Asian American Poets
19. 467 / 500
20. Frank’s Nursery and Crafts
21. “Allies” Who Think They’re the Chosen Ones
22. Are People of Color as Bad or Who’s Bad or Bad Meaning Good
23. Bad Driver, or Asian American Activists Who Talk about Their Own People Like They Are “Other”
24. It Was Flame
25. Oriental Flavor
26. Token Exceptional Asian in Liberal Multiculturalism
27. At Dinner
28. April 30, 2014
29. Apple-Red Pathfinder
30. No Question
31. Villain/elle: Shimomura Cross Over in the Flat of the Night
32. Rolling through a Four-Way
33. Bu Cua Cá Cọp

II.

1. Future Letter to Daughter Apologizing for When I Caved to Her Request and Brought Her to Barbie’s Dreamhouse at Mall of America
2. Broken Things
3. Document
4. Lights
5. In the Dark
6. Careful What You Wish For
7. Tourist with Daughter
8. Contour
9. Full Contact
10. Geek Triptych
11. Balsa Wood Free Association
12. For All Heartbroken Pizza Delivery Boys
13. Theresa, I Think
14. Incomplete / Abridged
15. Therapist 4
16. Chess Pride, Waverly Style
17. Night of the Living
18. Mouse
19. For Brandon Lacy Campos
20. Well Then
21. In Harbor

III.

1. Ego-Tripping as Self-Defense Mechanism for Refugee Kids Who Got Their Names Clowned On
2. Not a Silverfish
3. Being Asian in America
4. Untitled / Fathers
5. Thousand Star Hotel
6. Refugerequiem

• Acknowledgments

Say WHAT?

—The word “ma” means six different things in Vietnamese, depending on the tone

Ma—ghost—even with no tone to fetter, it lives

Mà—but—say this like you’re laying it down

M—tomb or grave—curl it like a question mark

Mã—horse—start from the bottom, then go up, like ghetto dreams

Má—momma—the one I didn’t have to look up

Mạ—to plate—heavy, a stone too large for your hands, dropped in water

Vietnamese people have always been spoken word poets.

How you say it

is as important to the life of the word

as the word itself.

I.

Vocabulary

—With thanks to Guante

Maintenance, they called it.

Minimum wage to guide shopping carts

from parking lot to corral.

We lined those silver metal buggies

with red plastic-flap seats for infants

into rows of ten to twelve,

up to thirty if you were a team of two.

Keep at the push long enough,

those stacked trains would roll—

the hardest part was steering.

One winter, a fellow cart pusher confided in me during a lull

as we stood near the weak warmth of the rattling heat vent in the cart corral.

Like me, he was a nonwhite boy from a poor family.

Like me, his face was limestone and granite pressed tight together.

His eyes distant, he spoke of how much he missed his girlfriend,

how they had been reunited the night before.

Yesterday night, we got back together, and I fucked the shit out of her,

I missed her so much.

He said it like their love

saturated every atom of his being

and shook him,

as if all his veins were laid bare

to weep at the memory of her,

as if his ache for her was a chasm

he could never hope to cross,

only tumble into headlong.

Timid virgin that I was,

my eyes wide open as if he had just tried to convince me

of a God I didn’t think could exist,

I nodded sympathetically.

Sobbing, he wiped his eyes

stormed away from me

into the slush,

ashamed

of laying his emotions so bare,

and never talked to me about her again.

Now, over twenty years later

I make my living with words.

But all I can say about the bombs that sought my family

is: they missed us.

I still can’t reach out to my friends,

especially my fellow straight boys,

their eyes the size of stop signs.

I find myself wanting to tell my mother and father I love them and

I just

can’t.

I think about that boy,

in that cold cart corral,

how he found

the only words he could—

perhaps more importantly—

the vocabulary to overcome himself.

And I wonder

if I ever will find a language

to speak of the things

that haunt me the most.

Cookies

For the holidays, our Lutheran sponsors used to give us a blue cookie tin. Within lay two layers of small hard cookies separated by little white paper cups with frilly edges. My five siblings and I, we’d fight over the round ones with sugar sprinkles. For Christmas my sister gave my daughter a box of shortbread cookies shaped like Scottish terriers. She wanted to share them with me, and they tasted so much like those cookies from our childhood I had to close my eyes and look away. Her five-year-old eyes track some commercial in which white men are playing at battle and she asks me about war. I want to tell her that her grandpa once told me how one of his friends on the front lines got hit in the side with a rocket while crawling out of a foxhole, and he had to pick up smoking pieces of him and put him into a cookie tin to send the remains to his family. I want to say that one of the few things my father showed me from Vietnam was a black-and-white photo of him and his brother; one day I will have to find a way to tell her how he was killed. Or my father will tell her, if he can bear to tell it in English. I want to say I am made of war and that means so are you. I want to say I was born inside a halo of gunpowder. No—a silhouette of a circle left by an exploding bomb. No—a snake eating itself. But instead I take a deep breath and begin to tell her, Your Ông ni, he fought in a war, along with many others, and like many others he didn’t want to. And that’s why I am here and you are here. And that is why sometimes other people look at us and they don’t know why we are here and sometimes that makes us feel like we don’t know, either. And like so many other times, I don’t know how to end these truest of stories. At the end I say nothing; I just look into her eyes, wishing I could say surviving all of this makes you tough.

Shell

Brown people getting bombed—

how can you

even think

about

love?

But you do.

You don’t want to be

thankful it’s not you—

you want to

wrap your arms around all of it.

You can’t.

The news crackles

drones drop

blossoms

empty

the heads of children

no science fiction

to save them.

You’d settle for a tattoo of a heart

an empty outline

an approximation

of a thing.

You can’t control the beating.

Go to Where the Love Is

Now there is a high fence

around mom’s garden and the sidewalk.

Wood and chain link.

Thunderdome of the ghetto.

A dope boy had run in,

ditched something,

police with their dogs spent two days

turning it all over,

dirt to ditch

in search of proof—

these things that have nothing to do with her.

More than two decades ago she was squatting,

fixing up damage

someone had inflicted on the easiest of targets:

the gooks in the hood.

Across the alley,

a multiculti rainbow of boys

shouted insults at her,

Asian and Woman

forged in translation into slurs

cutting and rusted,

tearing and worn,

needing no translator in order to wound,

they were endlessly full of youthful breath:

a hurricane never grows tired.

It destroys until it doesn’t.

She won’t call the police:

Vietnamese people know

people in uniforms

make things worse.

I stood there and could say nothing.

Not even that I’d write a poem about it twenty years later.

The worst powerlessness

is when wicked men and boys

come for your family

and you can do nothing.

Now behind her high fence

she gives cucumbers to my daughter,

asks me to fix her Vietnamese cable channels.

I don’t know how.

She says she’ll die in Vietnam.

She has always said this.

It is quiet all around.

She opens the heavy gate,

nothing on the other side

kept out.

Stretching both ways the sidewalk is gray and smooth,

perfect even where it is cracked.

She smiles,

does not even look

beyond the fence.

I don’t ask

if she remembers.

She sends me home

with bags of food

she made herself.

Love is not neutral.

Never.

Lead

Dad squats under the sun

patching with trowel and wet cement,

gray swaths in the shapes of leaping dolphin backs

before being blurred into the chink.

This is not the first time he has had to fix

vandalism against us,

the ones in the hood who everyone can agree

are to blame for some war that left everyone here

smoking and threadbare.

I’d rather be at the Franklin Library, learning the difference

between basilisk and cockatrice,

Theseus and Perseus,

heroes with names we want to pronounce.

Dad complains about mosquitoes.

He swats.

I wish I were somewhere else.

I fancy myself Luke Skywalker of the hood,

in lieu of white skin and blue eyes,

a towel for a cape and a flashlight,

instruments that make me a good guy.

He jerks in the heat,

curses in Vietnamese,

hollers for me to look around

for a shooter

like it’s the DMZ

claims someone is shooting a BB gun at his back.

I am ashamed. Why does my dad

see the enemy hiding

everywhere.

Why does he insist the Communist bullets have found him

here,

finally,

in Phillips,

home of the AIM patrol

and a park called Cockroach

kids clowning each other

for accepting free cheese

when we know

all our families do.

I want my dad to be normal

not yell in his foreign tongue

that everyone is out to get him.

I am sure they’re just mosquitoes

but I am too scared of him

to tell him.

I am sure they are just mosquitoes

even when I see dull lead fragments sticking

into his brown skin.

I didn’t want to believe him,

even as I helped him wash his wounds.

You need someone to care for your life,

or at least your dignity.

My dad had a son who believed in invisible mosquitoes

more than the evil of men.

Darth Vader had a son who could not understand

his father had been corrupted into killing the best version

of himself.

My dad had a son who thought he was just another gook

who didn’t know what caused him pain.

They say we’re all equal, but we are the ones standing here

with the history of our fathers’ blood on our hands.

The Reveal

On a slow night, two Chinese boys in hoodies

kick a hacky sack under the lights

in the parking lot outside their family’s restaurant,

the asphalt a black and blacker ocean

stretching past neon signs now turned off

save for the promise of an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Haloed in light, they could be anything:

overworked, bullied, heartsick, in love.

What can you do but guess?

Asking would ruin their moment.

They are not about you anyway—

what passes between them is in slow arcs

ignoring thick, painted lines beneath them

they will negotiate, enforce their own rules.

When you were a boy, this parking lot

was vast, littered by tall white buckets

and punctured Lysol cans.

That’s how the homeless got high,

your friends told you.

Inside, you wait for your mom to get off work.

An elderly white man asks you questions as you shift

from foot to foot,

then offers you a dollar

to come home with him.

You say nothing,

except no.

Your mom’s coworkers from the fabric store come out later.

They wished you’d told them earlier, they say,

hands on your shoulders,

their eyes turning back and forth to scan

the brick horizon,

clutching at you like a boat almost lost to sea.

I’m okay, you want to say to them.

I’ll be okay.

Years from that moment you step into a parking lot

and the flat land reveals the entire sky to you.

Immense, total, blue,

the cars and concrete

a tiny fraction lining the bottom

of your vision.

Condos now,

and a Chinese restaurant,

the night falling

and never righting itself

two boys playing hacky sack

stuffing their hands into their pockets,

laughing into the dark

as if they can’t believe

what they are doing,

bored already,

heads tilted back,

faces eclipsed by the edges

of their hoods.

Kids

—I know there is a greater chance that someone will call my daughter a chink than she has a chance of finding true love. —David Mura

In a dark back corner of me I didn’t want to have kids.

How much blood and history can one last name hold.

Others in my family tell me what they did to survive to come here,

and who didn’t.

You should be glad to be in America, it’s better for your kind here