My English Teacher Poses the Question of How Something Becomes an Angel
And I think of telling him about the wetland grave—
behind my pōpō’s Sichuan apartment, stabbed rebar tendon
jutting— sick-like through the aftermath of 1937/2008/2020. On the nightstand
sits her Mā’s lucky plastic god— knockoff Jesus with a craving for mapo tofu. I can
imagine it: B-rate Netflix film; Hollywood darling swathed in white
appears— in the kitchen
where a young woman crouches—peeling ginger for her unborn
daughter.
—He wants his knife back. The wok. His prayer beads—jade clattering like
cicadas in the month before everything dies again. He is not so soft
and fuckable now, is he— beneath
these checkered autopsy lights. Boy seraph—stoops—a bowed
cherry branch, miracling knobbly dirt thumbs—gestures to the cast iron,
her father’s blessing. In six years a soldier will—
piss in this pot, call it sour fish soup.
The heat will— melt half the angel’s face
off.
//
And I think of telling him, Listen. Listen, these trumpets are made of chives, plucked
out of our good cigarette breath and collapsed sidewalk. My pō wants to die facing the sky
not for makeshift heaven but the kneaded earth at her back. Even now she is fleetingly
immortal, smelling of 姜 rather than burning. When I say there are no birds in Chengdu, there are
none. I don’t want a four-page essay on this. It’s not about the
angel, you hear? The sky the sky the
sky, she kept gasping when I saw her last. 天天天. His knife, where did it
go? I promised I would give it back to
him. Nothing will hurt after that.
____________________________________________________________________________
姜 (jīang) — ginger
天天天 (tiāntiāntiān) — skyskysky; mygodmygodmygod
Emily Tong
Emily Tong is an Asian-American poet from New Jersey. An alumnus of the Iowa Young Writers' Studio, her work has been recognized by or is forthcoming in the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, Fugue, Palette Poetry, Hollins University, Augur Magazine, and more. When not writing, she enjoys painting and reading. Someday she hopes to be in love.
Why this Knocked Taylor Out:
The title immediately grabbed me. I mean what a title. And then to immediately have the tension of the intermingling of languages subverting the idea of an English hierarchy. The form works so will with the imagery that we are given and the IMAGERY dude wow. Every single line grounded me in the same moment it compelled me forward. Cigarettes and the sky. Cicadas and prayer beads. (Every good poet needs a good cicada image in at least one of their poems right?)
I think there is so much richness here to explore as far as content as well. This is a poem that carried both the broad weight of history and the personal weight of family. It is dated and also timeless in that sense. These are burdens many of us carry. These are burdens only you carry. May we all one day return to our sky sky sky with the names of those we loved in our mouths.
Interview:
Why did you choose Team Taylor for this poem?
When looking at what Taylor was into, many of her interests were right down my poem's alley. Religious iconography, as well as inheritance and culture, are topics that tend to be present in my poems, either intentionally or unintentionally; they permeate my identity as a person and poet, and therefore the work I create.
There's a turn in the middle of the poem after the "//" marks where the speaker implores the "him" to "listen." Why is this turn necessary? How did you approach creating this turn within the poem?
The “//” is meant to signal a shift in temporal and experiential register. Whereas the first section is something filtered through inherited memory, and therefore cannot truly belong to me (hence the fragmented nature of that section), the part of the poem following the "//" reflects the transition between past and present, grandmother and granddaughter. Similarly, the "him" I am referencing is more grounded in lived experience, indicating my English teacher, and the "he" in the first part of the poem indicates the plastic Jesus. I believe address, and shifts in address, are always situated in relationships and power. I actually debated writing "I promised I would give it back to / him" as "I promised I would give it back to / Him", but liked the denial of using an impersonal title, the intimacy of it.
One of the characters "天天天" is translated as both "skyskysky," and "mygodmygodmygod" in the footnote. Could you pull back the curtain on how that functions for us?
There’s a small linguistic compression happening there that I was interested in. In Mandarin, “天啊” (tiān a) is an exclamation roughly equivalent to “oh my God,” but the root “天” also literally means “sky” or “heaven.” What I was drawn to was not just the meaning, but the sound of it—“天啊” carries an audible sense of gasping after “天,” almost like the word is being pulled out mid-breath. That breath-like quality is important in the poem because it echoes my grandmother’s own gasping in that moment. Her speech, while only directly addressing the sky rather than explicitly invoking “heaven” in a religious sense, becomes re-inflected through suffering—her breath makes the utterance feel religious again, even when it resists that framing. “skyskysky” and “mygodmygodmygod” aren’t meant to be competing definitions so much as parallel registers of the same utterance: one rooted in the literal sky/heaven meaning, and the other in the emotional or spiritual reflex of astonishment.