The Hinge
The personable, plucky, pale-skinned, slightly chunky teenage daughter
of the Chinese couple who run the White Dragon Restaurant in Whitehorse, BC,
wears a punk rock t-shirt, black nail polish and a studded belt,
and translates my order
from smooth Canadian-English to the kitchen in Mandarin.
In white, flat-topped paper hats, the old guys back there—probably her uncles—
start talking a loud, jagged, pot-lid banging, plate-clatter kind of talk
and heat up the wok and toss in my vegetables
with a grand hissing sound.
Her mother, wrinkled sparrow of a woman
with shiny skin,
sits behind the cash register
and rings up the ticket, takes one of the pencils
sticking out of a half-pint soup container
full of uncooked rice,
and writes something down, says words to her husband
that sound like tissue-paper uncrinkling from a box packed with delicate glass;
he looks up from the Beijing newspaper in his lap, and nods once.
Call it the hinge of the daughter, growing up in two languages,
who turns on a well-oiled swivel
between an ancestral sea-journey
and Friday night smoking cigarettes outside the Esso mini-mart
with friends who think
the skinny guitarist on the new Fetid Rat CD is
cute.
When she brings to my table the tea
I see pagodas and rickshaws etched on the side of the pot
as she pours the past into the present, then tells me,
laying down the check,
she’s cool with either currency.
.