By Karen Hui | December 15, 2016
my niece. blonde-brown curls and round cheeks big(ger) eyes/pale pale (brown) skin the neighborhood aunties comment. she’s so white! eyes so big!/mixed children are just prettier she is so pretty. like one of those cherubs from raphael’s sistine madonna faces resting in fat hands/bored demeanors/eyes rolled up to the skies, framed above my grandparent’s bed even she thinks she’s pretty. sometimes she looks in the mirror and says to herself: leng leng she’s so smart! my grandmother beams. she recognizes her own beauty. one day i’ll tell her you are an ocean. because you love eating rice in bone broth, because chinese falls out of your mouth like smooth marbles, because when your great-grandfather bounces you on his knee his ninety-two years on this earth distill into a grain of salt. you contain the histories of laboring women and men, their backs like rounded hills among the peanut fields. you contain revolutions, failed and successful. but she’s only two years old. she looks in the mirror, she smiles. leng leng
