Lingua Franca

The only time I ever heard my fathe
r speak his native Cantonese was on vacation
when we'd stop at a Chinese Wok or Chop
Suey restaurant. He'd yammer at the waitress
until she brought out the owner, stunned
my father, who didn't look Asian, spoke
perfect Chinese. He'd finagle us a
Happy Family Meal, or something else
not on the menu. Then try to teach us kids
to use chopsticks—stabbing his Mongolian Beef
and prying it apart, picking up a single
grain of rice and holding it to the light.

My father would tell us how he and his brothers
had three words for everything: Chinese,
Portuguese, and English, choosing what
best captured the thing they meant to say,
the resulting pidgin a dialect all their own.
But talking that way produced a subtle yet
permanent crisscrossing of his language wires,
causing him endless embarrassment as an adult
in America: saying dis and dat to customers
at his store, asking us to sweep the ground
or weed the floor, telling Mother to close,
not turn off, the kitchen lights.

Perhaps that's why he always loved
the dumbest puns: tricking us into saying
MacHine instead of machine; demonstrating
how assume made an ass of u and me;
boasting of an insurance policy so good
it covered one not merely from birth to death,
but from the erection to the resurrection.
Perhaps that's why he never wanted to teach us
any Chinese or Portuguese—he was an American
now, and we were his American children. Faraway
Hong Kong just a dot on the globe
spinning on my older brother's desk.

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