Ode to My Family

I am an old candy bar
getting made again
because I’m back en vogue again
Wait- I was never en vogue
I have invoked myself
to be alive again
I am America,
daughter to
immigrant parents,
who dreamed a dream
that one day
we’d be wrapped
in wealth,
but really, love

I am the rain
that grew our garden
a garden so small
but kept blooming
because of dad’s prayers
and mom’s scolding jokes
the hiker and the harmonica teacher
gave birth to a daughter photographer
and a daughter playwright

I am recycled dreams
I’ve been eating my parents’
leftover dreams
my mother wanted to be an opera singer
but her family lost their fortune
so she married a restaurateur
whose specialty was electric-grilled
whole chicken

After I was born,
I bathed in the kitchen tub
where they washed the chickens
my dad knows how to kill chickens
he’d twist their necks
for a clean death
I bathed in the kitchen tub
that smelled of chicken skin
and feathers

My first school was my parents’ diner
when customers finished eating
my 3-year-old hands
stacked empty bowls
that held banchan
I worked in
a real hole-in-the wall joint,
not a toy kitchen

I am the sprouts of my parents’ seeds
I arrived on time
in the right season
in another country
mastering a mysterious tongue
learning to swim between two cultures
fitting in like strange fat fish
in sometimes unbearable weather

I am long Korean letters my mother wrote
when we lived in a small Virginia apartment
I asked who was she writing to
she always answered, her best friend,
but looking back,
she probably wrote to old beaus
because she would cry
when she would get air mail letters
she read none of them aloud to me

I am a baby artist witch
who came from an artist witch
I am my mother’s old dreams
that got shelved and forgotten
She got culinary DNA
My sister got visual DNA
I got writer’s DNA

My fingers type words
that are not my own sometimes
as if a spirit takes over
from another world
perhaps from the motherland

From a family of artists and
small business owners
I am a hodgepodge of
curiosity
arousal
ineffable longing

I am a summer itch returning from a sunset hike
I am an out-of-tune saxophone ready to play
I am a tiny home smelling of garlic and onion
dancing in a pan
I am baked regret pie
I am a winter fire, my teenage son
started on a snow day
I am the shy dessert afraid to be eaten
I am guests who drank too much
who fell off the chair laughing
I am the dangerous digestif
If you drink me,
I will help digest your story, too

Soo-Jin Lee is a playwright, poet, and singer-songwriter born in Korea and raised in the U.S. Her 18 plays explore cultural identity and belonging. She received her MFA in playwriting from the University of Texas at Austin. When not crafting works for the stage or writing new songs, she writes for robots from her home in northern Virginia.

From the I, Too, Am America Project, selected for publication in the Amplify US Literary Journal