How It Began

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GRATITUDE

“It’s too, too, too beautiful.”
—Jun Lin’s last Facebook post, accompanying a photograph of a park,
days before he was murdered, and his body dismembered,
allegedly by Luka Magnotta

We don’t yet know how it began.
Perhaps he posted as a potential friend,
invited you for Starbucks and biscotti
after class, or Labatts and chicken wings
on the weekend, hockey on TV.
Perhaps you looked forward to the visit,
bounding up the stairs bearing some small gift
like a good guest, some small token
to appease the gods of hospitality
at the front door. That was
the sort of man you were—
on time every day, hoping to find in Canada
not money or status, like your classmates,
but love. A romantic. This painful light

shines in your face in photographs,
moon-bright, a little shy, eager
to please. An A student, studying computers
and engineering, a decade older
than your classmates, old enough that in China,
you wrote, they would respectfully
call you “uncle”—
what you wanted were peers.
Friends, lovers. You were lonely,
vulnerable in your loneliness.
Wanted someone to ride with you
on the midnight subway train in Montreal,
its flickering hospital-green half-light
you captured on film, deserted snowscapes
you posted to friends in China—
you were the only figure in all that ground.

But then there was that day in the park.
It was too, too, too beautiful—
a park others rushed through every day,
heads bowed over texts and tweets
while you stood gaping in awe, in a daze
of wonder, craning your neck
to see the sky swimming with green,
the drowsy parasols of the maples
sprinkling your delighted face
with sap, silent gust of wind swelling
through the stately willows, the vegetable whiff
of mown grass, too much, you thought,
it’s too much, days before it was taken
from you in a blaze of rage. Montreal,
released from the frozen grip of winter,
leafing out in the spring.
You had worked and saved,
worked and saved for years
to arrive at this place.


JANNY

I remember my cousin Janny
hunched over the kitchen sink
scrubbing the household dishes at dawn
that summer we visited Grandma
in California. Treated like a slave
in feudal China, brunt of Grandma’s wrath—
piece of trash, monkey on her back,
good-for-nothing bastard daughter
of her own fourth child, Auntie No. 4
who had Janny out of wedlock—

still a shocker for a Chinese family
in the ’70s. It was rumoured
my aunt never knew the father, or that
he rightly washed his hands of her,
this tired baggy-eyed woman
who trudged home from work
at the fast food restaurant, reeking
of grease, ripping the brown-and-yellow
paper hat off her head as she sat down
to dinner in her stained uniform.
Auntie No. 4, who decades later would die
in a homeless shelter for battered women…

Janny barely spoke during our visit—
scrawny-shouldered, shaking
with shyness, beaten down by the daily
hail of Grandma’s hatred. I remember
the way she flinched at loud noises
or sudden movements, with a look
of such tense, whimpering terror in her eye
it made you want to hit her—

yet somehow she escaped. The news
of her life filtered through to me, over the years:
Your cousin Janny’s going to school.
Janny’s getting married, moving to Texas.
Janny has children now.
How? I always wondered. It was a puzzle,
the laws of the universe upended,
the sky swimming with fish and the sea
crammed with clouds. Maybe
there was an escape route, a hidden exit,
a trap door I hadn’t found in all
these years of wild searching.
Maybe my cousin had stumbled upon it
in her despair, crawled her way out
into a normal life. I pictured her
in some sun-soaked small town—
white picket fence, toys in the yard—
waving to her kids on the school bus,
folding herself into the tanned arms
of a man who loved her.

The call came this weekend:
Your cousin Janny passed away.
She killed herself. Her fifteen-year-old son
(a straight-A student, my aunt hastened
to add) came home from class to find her
overdosed on the living room sofa.
I thought she had escaped
her fate, and maybe there were days
she thought so too, living out a normal life
like someone else’s dream.
Living a life like it was rightfully hers.


NOTHING HAPPENED

This was the house on the corner, the one
I passed to and from school each day.
He would have seen me twice
a day, from an upstairs window
or bent over his weeds in the garden—
an ugly girl, clad in scratchy plaid,
moping past. One fist dug deep
into my satchel, searching for day-old
shortbread hidden in a greased bag.
Sweaty bangs, furtive eyes behind
lenses as thick as goggles—
some adults said I was shy.
She’s sly, my mother declared, up to no good.
She won’t look me in the eye, a teacher complained,
and my father whipped round in his seat
at the parent-teacher conference:
What’s wrong with you?
What are you trying to hide?

One afternoon, the man asked me in—
past the stone lions, pots of lavender,
into the tiled foyer. The tiles were painted
with lemons, oranges, clusters of olives.
Nothing happened. Or something did—
the threat of something, creeping in the air
between us. It thickened my throat,
stuffed my sinuses like pollen.
He fetched his violin, the old man
with his nut-brown bald head,
played it for me like a suitor
in a sunny square, slicing note
after note into the air. His hand on my knee
a shy spider. (Am I making this up now,
digging diligently as an archaeologist,
searching for where it all went wrong?)

But nothing happened. Dust in the corners,
a brass umbrella stand, the bulky Nikes
belonging to his teenage grandsons.
The bow sawing the violin,
horsehair fraying.
The air so thick it seemed fibrous,
knotting around me like a mesh net,
like pantyhose yanked over the face.
His dark thoughts pouring into me
like motor oil. Maybe I wanted something
to happen, anything at all—
a way out, even this way.

But then he opened the front door.


DEAR DOCTOR

In dreams, it takes all night to reach you—
blind driving down unfamiliar roads,
twisty mountain passes, suburban cul-de-sacs
not on any map. Then at last,

the mirrors in the green stairwell.
The mirrors so close to the entrance
I could have walked straight into myself.
For years this was the shape of the world.

The plain room and its myriad dimensions,
radiating outward like meaning
from the bound lines of a poem—
the meaning in the space, the breath.

The silence. Clouds of curry rising
from the Indian restaurant below,
the shuffle of mail through your meaty hands,
the worn patch on the seat of the leather armchair,

duct-taped together. Last night I dreamt
I rode a boat through choppy water to see you.
You lived on a high cliff above wintry seas.
It was a paradise of pastoral beauty,

drenched in the syrupy light of summer.
Cottages with paned windows,
gardens overgrown with roses, wildflowers.
Bees bumbling through brambles,

furry as tiny bears, freighted with honey.
Butterflies like lofted petals
tearing through the sappy air.
How I longed to live there too!

Only the ocean lay between us.