Favorite Daughter

By Nancy Huang

Favorite Daughter is a poetry collection trying to uproot America from inside the body, and find where China is buried underneath. Divided into four parts, Daughter explores ideas like navigating hybridity, localism, and harmony in ways that disturb commonly-held notions about broad terms like "belonging" and "cultural struggle." A compilation of immigration stories, Chinese radio segments, Google translate entries, and dictionary remixes, Huang immerses herself in everything she is uncertain of.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Write Bloody Publishing
• Release date: Sep 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781949342123

Nancy Huang

Nancy Huang grew up in America and China. She was a finalist in the Regent's Outstanding Arts & Humanities Award, the James F. Parker Award for poetry, the National YoungArts Foundation, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and the Michigan Young Playwright's Festival. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hot Metal Bridge, Vinyl, Bodega Magazine, TRACK//FOUR, and others. She lives in Austin.

Book preview

BREAKS

PART I:

IMMIGRATION

NAMESTAMP: A PARTIAL CHINESE-ENGLISH DICTIONARY

(huáng) adj. yellow; the way sun filters through dust; the way a river flows through silt; commonly mispronounced as huh-wAng by american teachers, white classmates, and immigration officers; a practice in symmetry; a body of water in china that calls my name back to me.

(jiéher skin is. look at it."; identifier, the way words can seep out of the imagination—can be born out of the body, screaming.

(nán) adv. south, southern; liquid heat; can apply to the smog mountains of fuzhou — tilting up your head, realizing why china is called sky country; back in shanghai the metropolis is melting outside, buildings steaming and sautéed, dripping with juice; the storm floods the streets and seeps under the doors.

(x ī) adv. west, western; a fabrication; regimen, risk; in a dream my grandparents told me never to come back; like china was a place instead of my body, my mother’s, our throats raised in supplication; something forbidden and secret; outside the storm is implacable, torrential downpour and screaming winds with a calm, quiet center.

AFONG MOY

Afong Moy was the first female Chinese immigrant to the United States. In 1834, she was brought to New York City from her home of Guangzhou by Nathaniel and Frederick Carne, who exhibited her as the Chinese Lady. They put her on display in a Chinese-decorated diorama room, charging customers for entrance into the strange and foreign Middle Kingdom, and to meet one of its inhabitants.

This is how guilt works:

Words become a desert landscape, like

I’m sorry no one knows your name.

America put dirt in your mouth

and kept it there.

America would crack your mouth open

to steal your jawbone, and

I’m sorry I still don’t know your name.

America said,

Eat every bit of rice.

Be our Curiosity.

Stuff your mouth wide with jewels.

I am trying to picture our shared country as

one room; maps and birds and drawings;

red silk sliding over the straw floor;

jade carvings of waterfalls and mountains;

the lanterns covered in characters that almost look familiar.

I’m sorry the cage they built you

Looked so much like home

If there’s anything this new land taught you, it was

how to be selfish.

I’m sorry this poem isn’t longer

I’m sorry I can’t stop seeing you in that box.

Maybe I’d like to see you smiling. 

I’m sorry that this is all I know about you:

You are nineteen.

You stood on stolen land with stolen feet.

Someone put you in a box and you never left it,

even when you did.

I like to imagine you somewhere else.

The box: gone. You: letting the sun

cloak your