I dug out this poem. It is the first one I ever shared.
On June 23 1982, Chinese American Vincent Chin was beaten to death the day before his wedding.
Dear Vincent, you
they say your skin was painted too dirty to be worth anything,
they colored you different
you, they saw your eyes were too slanted to be recognized as human,
they saw you different,
And as they ran after you,
you were not surprised,
you always knew they were coming,
So when they got to you,
when they got to you,
I watched as they split your head open with a baseball bat,
as it splat, striked open,
crackled like fireworks,
I know how it feels
I've been there too.
I go there in the lonely nights,
in the years I dedicated to writing hate about myself,
In the years, I cursed my name,
hated the way it sounded, how I dreaded the silence before teachers attempted to articulate the "Xuan" in "Wenxuan."
it sounded too foreign,
so I crafted the letters into something more American, hide behind a curtain of assimilation.
But when you died,
the sun rose once again after the darkness of nights under the silence of the Chinese exclusion act,
the Japanese concentration camps
I was there as your spirit danced in the moonlight,
illuminated,
the brightness of your skin,
burned as we colored you hope,
we colored you magnificent.
because in 1982,
your death gave life to the fist ever widespread Asian voice all across America,
As we all,
Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean,
all cried out your name.
Dear Vincent,
can you see us in all our different colors,
the fire in our voices lighting up as we elevated towards the sky,
crackled like fireworks,
Dear Vincent,
when they say your eyes are too slanted,
you tell them about your lover,
how beauty was in the eyes of whoever could be hold her
looking at her
looking at her was just too much for you eyes to endure.
Dear Vincent,
Im sorry they stripped you from love,
Im sorry I didnt speak up earlier,
when I was there.
