Poetry / Chloe Weng

:: famine as a symphony ::

you listen to her play piano through her father’s phone
on saturdays, when he calls you and shows her off,
as if to preen and proclaim: look, i succeeded.
recall how once, you dismantled a piano
and pulled apart its strings like tearing yóutiáo sticks,
revealing soft dough underneath the crispy exterior,
grease sticking to your fingers like calluses.
this is what happens when there is a famine:
you chew through treble clefs, swallow piano strings
whole to relieve your hunger. metal ridges scrape
the flesh of your throat, and the coppery taste that
emerges as acrid bile becomes your water.
in the paddy fields as mud cakes up to your knees,
strings jut out of your stomach, rake over your shoulder,
rice grains slip through callus-worn hands.
she will tell you in secret that she doesn’t like
piano lessons—recitals churn her stomach.
and you will bite back—the reason you are given this ache
is because your stomach is full.
saying thank you is something she will gain with age—
when that day comes, you will show her everything
you have swallowed—not yóutiáo but bloodied piano strings.
she will think herself as carrying a debt, but that strain of debt
is uniquely American—what you will truly mean is
i am proud of you. that is family—to be impaled
by a lonely, yet rewarding ache of hunger.

From the writer

:: Account ::

One of the key quotes that has changed my life is from my grandfather over the phone: “下次用中文给我写首诗吧” (“Write a poem for me in Chinese next time”). Unknowingly at the time, these words struck a chord in me, and I felt inexplicably sad despite the laughter in his voice. I could barely write an essay in Chinese, let alone spin the characters into lines and stanzas, and my poetry often strayed away from my roots except to speak of the erosion of my cultural ties. For years I have accessed a part of myself solely through the lens of loss, and the consequences surfaced during that innocuous Saturday night phone call.

I had planned to visit my grandparents for the first time since before COVID-19 next summer. With over six years of distance, a thought lingered in the back of my mind, making a home there: How much of me do you remember? And, more frightening: How much of you do I remember? Only my grandfather has recently developed brain cancer, and I’m now told that he will pass before this visit happens, robbing me of answers to both questions. Without being as fluent in my mother tongue, and the only thread of connection being occasional calls, my grief takes on a particularly fragile shape. I contemplated how to reconnect with my family and culture, of generational cycles and love and pain that can only be half-described in either language of mine.

Thus, I wrote “famine as a symphony” as an attempt to trace those roots. This poem is what I will tell my grandfather when the time comes—that I understand exactly what he has sacrificed and how I can make it all worth it, how I can keep him in my memory. I kept the language simple and plaintive—family, for me, has always been nakedly beautiful in that way.

Chloe Weng is an emerging writer based in Houston, Texas. She edits for The Hyperbolic Review and is the author of the poetry book Archived Nightmares. Her work has won multiple awards, including a Scholastic Gold Medal, an NCTE Achievement Awards in Writing First Class Distinction, and a Bronze Award from the Bow Seat Ocean Awareness Contest.