/.rumah/.
rumah/
tempat teduh/
suaka/
tanah air
The shadows move without me –
these are people my age
tossing Molotovs like basketballs
screaming lullabies into
speakerphones
forming chain-linked fences
lying facedown on tear-gassed streets
Stones build inside them all
and I watch through a screen
as they tattoo the words
this is home for us
on statues of old, cobalt men.
//
My grandfather comes from a Chinese village
near the mountains.
When I think of the place I
think of a soft light
kissing his shoulder before
forming stones
and tanks and walls that
break the sky.
He arrives by boat to this archipelago
and the war and the fleeing
and the freedom
dwindle into the hands
on his watches that still
hold on to the village.
Sometimes he hears them tick
and closes his eyes
to watch the sun rise.
你从哪里来的?
Where are you from and with it
Who are you
Why are you here
But he merely answers:
Here. I am from here.
Over time the watches lose meaning;
he tells his son
to get a less Chinese name
and he forgets
that home is anywhere but
here.
//
Decades later my father
joins his neighbours
as they grip
cooking knives
and airsoft guns, poised at
gates like children
guarding treehouses
The orange flames, the smell of
burning rubber
wakes him up
every time another protest
sours
and the messages come
more clearly
That he is half this and half that –
Chinese and Indonesian, part of both
but belonging to neither.
That he is on the other side
of the equation –
the part protested against,
not for.
//
I was given a broken watch
when my grandfather died.
In preschool they teach you
to submerge your hands in ink
and translate an identity onto paper.
Those lines that mark your birth,
your relationships, your death.
And how, if you don’t press hard enough,
your palm comes up empty.
I have never known
my grandfather’s village.
The crowded streets in Jakarta point me out
like a fly on a window.
The watch, with its confused hands,
tells me
jumbled ideas of home.
there’s no Indonesian word for a place where you belong