bloodline

By Claire Yu & Jesse Chen

A pair of poems inspired by the title “bloodline” and the poets’ own heritages and culture. How do our family and our history connect and define us to ourselves and to others?

bloodline
by Claire Yu

my soul
is a tapestry of guiding 
migration trails, when strings 
I can’t see or touch tie me
to places I’ve never been
people I’ve never met. When
something in my mother’s eyes
reveals a memory in me that isn’t mine
Some longing for another land underneath my
feet. 

I’m from my mother’s womb
always a shared place
My sister and I holding each other inside
somehow knowing each other with our eyes closed
Some things transcend what we see
and blood truly runs deeper than memory,
crimson with the ferocity of a mother’s determination
passed down, traced through my veins like a road map
flowing through both outstretched hands, holding on 
to the East and West with the firm belief I can
fit the whole world in a single embrace.

Korea comes to me in fragments - 
snippets of conversation
an elderly woman in the subway with curly hair
savory soups slipping through parted lips -
all sewn into the silky folds of a hanbok;
little shards of stained glass I see through
colorful and momentarily corporeal, like infant memories
of riding on my grandfather’s shoulders, 
nothing secure and feeling so sure that home could be 
anywhere under the stars that makes my heart 
feel this full, walking through the streets of
my Seoul

bloodline 
by Jesse Chen

white people in america 
like to give each other 23andme kits for the holidays
because most of their ancestors were so busy running around the world 
taking everyone else’s shit and spreading diseases 
and enslaving people and taking them from their homes, 
that they didn’t have any time to pass down their cultures,
so now their descendants have to drop a hundred dollars 
just to fill a vial with spit and learn about which kinds of colonizers they came from.  

i think about this every time some chapstick-colored chad 
in a patagonia vest and boat shoes asks me where i’m from 
and refuses to accept “new jersey” as the answer. 
whenever they demand to know where i’m “really” from, as if anybody 
would choose to be from the same state as chris christie, as if someone 
with the last name Chen or Mathur or Kim
couldn’t possibly be from the same place as Snooki or Bon Jovi. 

bitch. where are you from? 
how did your family get there? 
what did they do to the people who lived there first? 
does your 23andme tell you the names 
of the people your ancestors took from 
to give you the money that bought your lake house and your trust fund? 
do you know who your ancestors were? 
whether they were farmers, scholars, soldiers, leaders? 
do you know what village they came from? what they left it for? if they ever went back?
can you cook any of their food, speak any of their language? 

each time another white person tries to tell me hello 
in an asian language that i don’t even speak, 
or compliments me on my english, or asks how long 
i’ve been in america, and a flood of molten lava anger roils 
through my veins, i just think about 23andme tests
and percentages and not knowing where you’re from 
or who you are except “white,” and i forgive them, because how sad it must be 
to lack an identity, to not have a history, to be so detached 
from the people that came before you 
that you have to search for meaning 
in a pie chart and some drool. 

Process

We created this piece as a reflection on our heritage and families as Asian Americans. First, we spent several meetings brainstorming the titles that relate to the themes of family, culture and heritage. After deciding on “bloodline,” we then each wrote a poem based on that title and the corresponding themes, about our personal experiences as children of immigrants.