Dumplings

Russell Jeung says Chinese people can speak two love languages fluently: food and sacrifice

Every time I visit her apartment, my grandma does two things: she cooks pan fried dumplings
And she presses a new $100 bill into my hand, Benjamin Franklin wrapped in a red envelope like a robe

She lives across from the Montgomery Mall, where we walk after lunch, bellies straining
To search up and down the aislеs of K*B Toys
I lie on her carpet through thе late afternoon playing with my new LEGOs
As she watches the Chinese news on her old TV

Grandma is an immigrant - worked to support three sons -
Knows how to leave everything behind - knows these dollars
Are nothing more than a nursery of fading green
A paper thin cocoon transforming labor into life

What idiot collects shed skin and dead hair and calls that life?
I do

For two months, my friend David hid every mirror in his house
Turning frames and taping up newspaper
Until he was living in a perpetual state of tornado readiness
He said: the more he looked at himself, the less he saw others

I’m afraid to accept that I’ve forgotten how to see you
Grown used to seeing what I need from you;

Terrified to confess that I care more about what I’m saying than who I’m saying it to

That’s not language. It’s a mirror

And isn’t our world filled with mirrors, kisses like cold glass
And songs clear and clean like the air in a bank?

Maybe the answer is learn from grandma:
I'll cook you your favorite food, press into your hand my stored labors which you will spend on late afternoons with me

If I'm gonna live in a world where kisses taste like summer and songs sing like two palms warm against each other
I will need to speak In a language I haven’t yet mastered, but need to

We speak two love languages fluently: food and sacrifice