AMY LIU
Daughter / Nǚ’ér
In a small apartment, an expecting mother sits
at a cheap dining table and asks how not to be defined
by the quietly-swelling curve of her abdomen.
She speaks to an empty audience. Her husband
gazes at her stomach and from its roundness
he thinks only of a son that will rise from her
flesh, white and slick like a pulsating heart. He
has no Mandarin for her. He speaks English, only
English, and his lips flap like a fish and balk.
An English monologue is playing on the phone: her mother
in-law insists there is nothing sweeter than American motherhood;
she hangs up and lets the phone drop; it bounces uselessly on
a taut rubber wire, curled up like a child in the fetal position,
tethered by an uncut umbilical cord, slowly swaying to a stop.
At night, she sits in the little bedroom and whispers
English words; they drip slowly from her tongue like
coagulating honey. Mother, mother, mother—she
hates the word for its flatness. She rolls the syllables
under her teeth and prays that what lies beneath
her parabolic stomach will say, just once, 妈妈.
Her husband works at a paint factory
and he brings home a can of brilliant blue
for our son’s nursery, he says. She asks
him about a daughter, and he turns away.
She is standing at a subway station when she hears
the song she fears most: woman calling to her son,
only for him to shake his head. Speak English, he
whispers under the burning sunlight. Speak English.
She tries to bring hot tears to her eyes
so that she will know what it feels like.
In the hospital at dawn, a girl lets out a lusty cry
and she looks down at the black eyes and sees her
own instead. She wraps the baby in a red blanket
and calls her nǚ’ér, daughter, and wonders if this girl
will remember what it means. The duality of Mandarin
and English slides off the roof of her mouth. She closes
her eyes; the rising sun warms her eyelids, and the
soft heartbeat of her daughter charts a new path forward.
Amy Liu is a high school student from Long Island, New York. Her work has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and the National Council of Teachers of English. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in The Rising Phoenix Review, Small Leaf Press, Eunoia Review, and more.