Hunger

Sunday at the Laundromat
October 15, 1999
By Chath pierSath

The washer spins as I bury myself in a book
Not understanding what I read of empty glances
From Cambodian youth bigger and taller, twice my size
I ache with twisting, convulsing envy of their freedom and beauty
How distance they seem from the suffering my generation endures

Their Cambodian faces Americanized, washed and bleached
With Speck and Span, their brownish hair redden in the florescent light
Their baggy jeans pulled from a time the Khmer Rouge destroyed
Their Khmer in gibberish convergence with the English that doesn't describe
Who they are, with misinterpreted phrases and labels Whites have of them

The gangsters roll up their pants, jive-striking the air with their hands as if
They are always in a state of break dancing, still behind time
Moving slowly against conventionality and the dominant culture
That rejects the color of their existence

Their identity fractured by the need to fit in and to deny their very being
To make their parents' Khmer Rouge disappeared from their impoverished
Lives, from their Lowell ghetto of rap songs describing their lives of neglect
And desperate search for a place of belonging and love, wanting blue cat eyes
For their black cow ones in order to be American in fake contact lenses
To see their reality in multiple colors and shades


The Crying Dream
By Chath pierSath
October 10, 1999

I ran, panting in a field of death
Mud sticking to my feet felt like rotten flesh
I swam the river where dead bodies came floating up
Eyeballs of people being grenade to feed the fish
There was a shore where I thought safety was reached
But I could only breathe air of danger
I saw Pol Pot's face as Mao Tse Tung
His slanted Chinese eyed opened the Red Book as my death sentence
The two million spirits were protesting, gobbling Pol Pot to his eternal curse
And they wanted his family members to pay for all the lives he owes
And the miseries he had caused
But I went on carrying dirt to irrigate the rice fields
Digging canals for a famished meal of porridge in my swollen belly

At the end, everyone was gone, but me, among the silent river,
The flood full of bodies, like dead blowfish surfacing on the muddy Mekong
I found a child and picked her up, and as I cradled her in my arm
She died like a little unfed bird in its abandoned nest
This is why in this dream I cried for the lives that were lost
For the horror I had seen and the deprivation I had felt
Until now, it haunts me, as if to live is to remember in my sleep
And waking to the bird-less sky as a sign of a human hell