“The Mountains,” photography, from The Mountains, 1999
Home
Home is where you feel comfortable. The making of home in a new land, however, comes with the uneasy feeling of being a stranger. Continually, we weave the old and the new together through our bodies and souls. It is within the clash of two cultures that we were simultaneously destroyed and reborn.
My family
Under the clouds
Moves from one land to another
Struggling between cultures
Not knowing to which we belong
Even though the flowers are falling
The fruits will appear later
When the maple leaves rest
On the ground
My family finally settles down
We are like seeds
In the depths of this land
Absorbing fresh water and light
Straining to put down roots
But blossoming will soon follow
And then at last bearing fruit
A flower
A leaf
A cloud
A deep breath
Bringing with it
A new life
Gu Xiong
1999
Me And You
Each time I see you,
I see myself;
I see the past and the present.
We both came from China,
You stayed inside the grand institution,
I stayed in a dark basement.
People came to admire you,
But can you hear their praise?
Or speak your gratitude?
I could hear, but I couldn’t speak.
I guess then, you are the same as me.
You came here before me,
You found your home here and made it bright.
This, is my new home,
I will make it bright as you did to yours.
At last,
I have learned about your visitors,
Their culture and society,
And I became one part of them.
It was painful but the joy came after.
I will come back to see you often,
And share my experience with you.
From your mouth I hear silence,
But I can feel your spiritual voice,
You said to me,
The four seas are our home.
Gu Xiong
1999
For Ge Ni, the Canadian…
We know it was hard
but we can never know how hard
for how hard could it be
for a woman with such a smile?
In Canada, when two cars collide
we call the people inside
accident victims.
In Canada, when two cultures collide
we call the people in them
immigrants.
Both are heavy with loss.
It is as if
you went to sleep
and awoke to find the weave of the world
unraveled, rewoven,
the familiar textures and patterns of living
vanished.
Then, as in an accident,
having to re-learn everything.
Learning as a child was easy
we knew nothing else
but learning as an immigrant
stings.
The comfortable ways
fled, vanished
like a car in the night.
Having to practice here
what needed no practice there,
each word, so easy there,
a labor here.
Not wanting to say the wrong thing
unsure of the right thing
knowing you could say it there
afraid to say it here.
Wishing to be heard,
to understand,
but above all
wishing to be yourself again.
We can not feel what you feel
but we can see what you can not see.
We see you.
Your hands, moving across a table
in grace and light
your smile, coming out
like a best friend coming out to play
so warm
somewhere
glaciers are melting.
And know this:
we who are born here
not there
who feels its rivers
coursing in our veins
its mountains in our bones
its forests waving in our hands
its oceans washing our dreams,
know this is a better country today
because of you.
James Lamb and family
December 5, 1995