Xiaole Zhan 詹小乐
The sky rained with millet
and the ghosts wailed in the night
Language under language.
From the beginning. Come clean.
The first word? Footprints left by a bird.
The first painting, the sky fallen into the sea.
The first artist, four-eyed man drawing
the first word. My grandmother
was not a bird, left no marks in the earth.
She never learnt to read or write. Begin again.
Cangjie saw the bird’s footprints and understood
the marks as language. He began to draw. Green
moth, grandmother. Grey feather, grand-
father. Do you understand me? The truth in
words under words. I ask my mother,
Did you love him once? She replies,
I was so tired. I tell her I don’t know
how the hole in my bedroom wall
was born. Perhaps I don’t remember.
Let me tell you in my language:
think remember want miss
我想， 我想, 我想，我想
I think I want. I want to remember.
I remember I miss. I never felt homesick
as a child. Until now, reading on the top floor
of Chengdu Library as it rains. Homesick
for where? I never learnt to read or write
in Chinese. I want to write a letter to myself
in another life: Here the sky is white. The branches
are black. The gingko leaves are bright yellow.
I miss you. The first time I wrote a story
I loved, I ran to my mother who nodded
and carried on washing the dishes.
I knew then I was loved
so long as I was a daughter and not
a stranger and read my stories
alone. At her parents’ graves
my mother spoke in Cantonese,
It’s me. I’m home. Xiaole
came home too. Green moth, grey
feather. My popo used to speak
over the phone to me in Cantonese
even though I could only reply
in Mandarin. My gong gong
passed away when my mother
was my age. Dad, it’s me. Xiaole
is my daughter. Grandmother,
grandfather. Popo, Gong Gong.
Do you hear me? Do you
understand me? Let me begin again.
I think of you, I remember you,
I want to see you, I miss you,
我想你，我想你，
我想你，我想你,
& whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name
When Cangjie invented writing,
the sky rained with millet
& the ghosts wailed in the night,
fearing their actions may now be condemned
by the written word. I understood, too,
as a child who was beaten
out of love, what it means
to become a consequence. How
I came to recognise love
as revenge. How I hurt my mother
by hurting myself. Do you know
in Chinese the word for meat is
the animal? Say beef, you call cow 牛, followed
by the word meat 肉. If your daughter were
butchered, would you call her flesh
by her name? When I was a child
in Aotearoa, my mother read with me
every night The Very Hungry Caterpillar. When
we got to the very long list at Saturday, I wasn’t
so much reading as memorising shapes
& sounds. When does remembering
become reading? Or is reading a kind of re-
membering over & over? It wailed for forty
days, forty nights & the broken ark was gap-
toothed with light. My childhood piano grazed
in my Pākehā grandmother’s garden among the
ruminants, dromedaries, somnambulists. Foxs-
kin grinned & glistened, drawling the horizon. I
rose 瑰 like a ghost 鬼 between two trees 林,
魔 summoned by karakia. I dreamt as a king 王
bitten hollow by moths, four mouths 口
in an endless scream 噩. See, before things had
names you would just draw. Clot, jewel,
pomegranate seed all the same. Swallow
chocolate cake, pickle, lollipop, ice-
cream & call it Saturday. The oldest
words were beaten into oracle
bones. Remember & dis-
member. The word
for name 名 comes
from dusk 夕 &
mouth 口. O how
we call for each other
in the dark. O be-
fore name was
named I o-
pen-
ed my
dusk
mouth
& called —
for
-est; for
-get; for
you
Xiaole Zhan 詹小乐 is a Chinese-Aotearoa writer and composer based in Naarm. Their work is featured in AUP New Poets 11, and they are the 2024 Kat Muscat Fellow, as well as the winner of the 2023 Kill Your Darlings Non-Fiction Prize. In Chinese, their name means ‘Little Happy’ but can also be read as ‘Little Music’.