Jamie Uy
Issue 1: RISE, July 2023
you were born during hungry ghost month. in the basement a wet kitchen
and buddha. a fat milkfish gutted for your first birthday, with one hundred
and eighty translucent bones. while the radio cassette played the chanting
of monks in their saffron robes, you were baptised in an alabaster church.
your mother gave you the english name of an angel. you wore a tiny jade
bracelet. years later, the fortuneteller wrote out the characters of your
chinese name with the water radical. all over the country families gathered
around smoke. bits of burned paper fluttering from one housing estate to
another. the ashes of paper watches, paper cars, paper houses, and paper
money commingling with the ashes of the dead. you were born during
hungry ghost month. the first rice bowl you ate was an offering. you hold
chopsticks the way you hold a pen. as if you can bite back into the past.
the world a perfect peanut ball, swallowed whole. eat the word made
flesh, duck blood and red bean bun. the ministry insisted on recording
your mother tongue as mandarin. it is customary for the certificate to
crumble like a country made of sesame. pussy willow, pear branches, and
apricot flowers in your ah-ma’s house you wish you could name. when
your granduncle died, shot by the japanese while drawing water from a
well, he left no heirs. the temple recorded your father, the second son, as
the son of a ghost. you are the granddaughter of a ghost, and this paper
should be burned after reading to make way for the ancestors. steam the
thousand layer cake. use the cinders of the letters to light the stove. to
cook the water chestnuts. you were born during hungry ghost festival. in
the belly of the sky. under clouds rolled like glutinous rice cakes. you must
believe in something, fengshui or our lady of fatima or family trees, to
write in this other tongue. you eat the eye of the fish carefully. your back
nothing like bamboo. your hands carrying clumps of barley grass.
Jamie Uy is a M.A. English candidate at Nanyang Technological University researching environments in Singapore science fiction. Her academic and creative interests include ecocriticism, popular culture, and postcolonialism. Her creative writing appears in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, the Journal of Southeast Asian Ecocriticism, and OF ZOOS, among other publications.