MICROCOSM

Picking up a presciption from a pharmacy yesterday, I kept repeating my name to a man who kept mis-hearing it, then mis-spelling it, then completely unsure if I was telling the truth.

He asked, "Last name?"

I said, "Newman"

I never tend to think that Newman is a difficult last name to pick out of the air. Two syllables. Both easy, fourth grade-level words. New-Man. I say it slowly.

He looks at me like I am lying. This man must not know about adoption, I think.

"What is it?" he asks.

"Newman" I say, again. "N-E-W-M-A-N."

I say this and he looks offended.

I realize there are variables for the spelling of my surname like Neuman or Neumann, but the secret to there confusion isn't the name itself. It's that it is my name. It blows minds.

In Kentucky as an undergraduate, I always spelled my name outloud for Pizza Hut when ordering a pizza. N-E-W-M-A-N.

And yesterday, I spelled my first name too, just to speed the process along: "First name--J-A-E"

At founder's day at my undergraduate college, the president asked me to join a small group of students to meet some of the trustees. A tall white haired man walked over to me and said, rather clearly, "What is your name?"

"Jae," I said.

"No, what do they call you at home?"

"Jae," I said.

"No, what is your Japanese name?"

"My Korean name is Jae."


This is the sort of microcosm that I have got accustomed to. It isn't always that America means to be racially insensitive--it's just, and I include myself in this, we are a bit clueless sometimes.

When I first started writing poems, I wanted to end racism, as any passionate nineteen year old would want to do. Now, I understand what that would take. My life and thousands like it, singing in unison.

Instead, I turned off my disdain for others who couldn't grasp who I was or where I came from and started writing poems that weren't angry anthems. After all, I could neither side myself solely with Asians--I am American too.

This poem is one I've worked on for a few years. Gone are so many tendrils of anger. I've been reading a lot of Wallace Stevens, which you could probably tell.

BIRTHDAY DINNER WITH
THE COMMANDER OF THE EMPIRE OF JAPAN
Red Lobster, 2001

Forty-one years after the bombing, a man in a navy cap
still wants me to play Commander of the Empire of Japan.
It is my civic duty I suppose, to absorb hate.

Sitting in a seafood restaurant, she holds my hand
without noticing radioactive waves across the room.

He stares at me, and I stare back,
like any worthy adversary.
I bow
shying away
from a kiss. His shoulders rise, angry.

The tank of lobsters is more full than usual. Dinner on display,
boiled cries
unrecorded in the annals of time. No one will care

that the man in the navy cap is racist. They will say I am hyper-
sensitive. Banded claws,
I can say nothing. I can tell her nothing.

I sit commiserating with the lobsters. Banded claws,
banded speech.

For those of us yet to arrive in America, infamous eyelids
make it difficult to find something
to talk about,
make me regret that some men
will always be nineteen and

that there is nothing I can say to him
when he looks at me like I’m a lobster.