Không không[1]
No no – you shall not come over
Null none – there is nothing here
nothing to see and savor just
a wry, worn, cussed woman
a black hole
Once upon a time, the symmetric Grecco-Roman marble column that signaled seeds of the wealth and status in stately Neoclassical buildings on Main Street was called a caryatid. The caryatid was a woman who bore the weight of a temple’s roof on her head, her body a pillar to uphold the house of pleasure and worship. She was a mute who had felt robed men crawling out of her, but said nothing. She had witnessed the revolutionary flipping the tabernacle, spilling innocent blood, but never acted. The orgasm and violence eroded the caryatid from the inside, a slow death of thousands of years of submissive witnessing. When she collapsed, the temple came thundering down with her.
空空[2]
Void void – she needs a room with a window
Vacancy – you, yes you! Out, out on the street!
Emptied out the sky, the pool, the bed, the brain,
a billowing T-shirt bandaging her heart
time the fuck she already bled out
I used to date a depressed anthropologist. He put such a gloomy spell on me that I had to ghost him after one last rendezvous at the zoo. Believe it or not, sad people, beyond themselves, had such a funny way of looking at life. He was a firm believer in the correlation between what women wore and how they were treated in certain cultures. He rambled about the kimono, the sari, the abaya. How men beat, porned, raped, and owned the shit out of women who had carefully layered and covered themselves in the finest of fabric they could afford, like ribboned presents to the world. Crazy one, that anthropologist. Sometimes I wondered what became of him, if he still got hard remembering me naked. Perhaps not, we all got what we came for.
くうくう[3]
何もない[4] – she said there was nothing to
keep her down, tie her up, lock her in,
not even them, and you, precious, it
imploded, inside out – the universe
where she had treasured all of you
When I go to the beach in Vietnam, I alternate beachwear depending on mood of the day – a skimpy two piece is Eastern Europe, long-sleeve and big hat are East Asia, salt washed shorts and T make me Vietnamese. I know who I am but I don’t know who I am anymore, in the sense that the self reflects what it has taken from the group, like a sleepwalking thief who wasn’t aware of what she stole. The Bonnie in Pulp Fiction. I respect how nondiscriminatory the beach is, how it can accept everything, humans – yellow, white, black, brown, straight, gay, gold, trash, poop and pee. Maybe one day I will be old enough to carve out a beach inside of me, fill it with bitter salt water, with blinding blue summer, seafood hawkers, fortune tellers, and endless, endless waves crashing into the sand underneath my feet.
[1] “No” in Vietnamese
[2] “Empty” in Chinese
[3] “Empty” in Japanese
[4] “There is nothing” in Japanese
Thao Vu graduated from Eastern Nazarene College (Quincy, MA), National Taiwan University (Taipei, Taiwan), and is writing her debut novel through the MFA program at Virginia Tech (Blacksburg, VA). Her recent and forthcoming work can be found at BULL, MockingHeart Review, THIMBLE, Villain Era, Zin Daily and at www.vuqythao.com.