I want you all, for a moment, just to close your eyes.
I want you to picture yourself in your childhood kitchen.
What do you hear, see, and smell?
Do you see your siblings waving their forks around
like hailing a taxi?
Maybe stabbing each other.
Do you see fresh basil?
Smell it?
Do you feel your toes warming from the oven?
You can open your eyes now.
I want to share a little bit about my own sensory experience
in my own childhood kitchen
since my kitchen was a restaurant.
When I close my eyes,
I see frozen shrimp spooning each other;
I see lacquered pork shining like a jewel;
I see broccoli like miniature trees.
The sound of oil hitting the wok like a snake sighing.
All of these visceral details I’m sharing with you
come from my unique background,
growing up in a Chinese-American takeout restaurant on the Jersey Shore.
My bus stop was actually the restaurant,
which is slightly embarrassing as a child to be dropped off at a strip mall.
But this was my experience, and these memories still to this day,
despite many years passing by, remain so real and so visceral for me.
How do these memories stay so alive?
The answer, language.
And of course, imagination.
And all of us here today can sense the world around us
in a multitude of different ways.
We can see steam rising from a pot of boiling water;
we could smell the ripening bananas;
we could see the color of them browning as well;
we can hear the crackle of the fryer;
we can feel the scales of a fish;
we can taste that bitterness in coffee grinds.
Language is all around us.
And as such, we are all writers.
And I want you to be the author of your own story;
of your own sensory details
that are already within you and all around you.
The poet and activist Audre Lorde
writes that our poems are carved
from the daily rock experiences of our lives.
In other words, language is from our lives,
it’s not out there;
it’s already a part of who we are.
And language, as a result, connects us with people.
Sensory details are required ingredients for the art of a writer.
I want to make sure that I get across the idea
that writing is not learned in school.
Actually, I was just introduced as getting an MFA
from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,
but I got my degree at that Chinese takeout restaurant.
And I learned how to write there, not many years later in graduate school.
Writing is not for writing’s sake,
it’s already, again, from your own personal experiences.
I want you to write down your stories to keep these details with you
to take a closer look at the stories
underneath the daily experiences of the rocks you carry with you,
and to lift up that lid of the boiling water
and see what you find in there.
I want you to connect with people through language,
through minute details that have a story already embedded within them.
And I want you to honor the language that is around you,
and to honor the people that are around you as well.
I want to keep it relatively short
because I want to share poetry that gets that exact idea across to you
that sheds light on the specific sensory details that I’m talking about.
And this poem is about growing up in that famed restaurant.
It’s called: How to Pass the Time in the Restaurant.
Brush your hair 50 times
Untangle that hair from a wool blanket
Shake up a can of orange soda
Defrost that shrimp
Now, defrost your hands
Chase the curly white dog on the train tracks
Brew honey water
Water the jade plant covered in dust
Wash off the graffiti off the restaurant
Draw on the backs of menus
Hiss at boys
See how long it takes for gum to fall when you stick it under the table.
Sweep up piles of your father’s cigarette butts,
Breathe in, deeply
Peel grapes over a purple bucket
And now take those grapes and roll them underneath a fryer
And see how long it takes for them to melt
Imagine them melting
Days from now
Punch a bag of flour
Listen to the sound of gravel under tires
Clean the muck out of that white dog
Teach your grandpa to say “apple” in English
“No,” he says
Teach me in your language how to say poverty, floods, and pollution.
And now that I shared a piece of my own upbringing,
I want you to reflect on your own through those sensory details,
to those tiny, tiny, minute details.
And I want you to use it to tell your story
and connect with others.
I want you to literally punch that bag of flour, in your memory,
and write down what comes out of it.
Thank you.
(Applause)
”
Be First to Comment