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2022 Janef Preston Poetry Prize

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Where Are You From

by Cindy Nguyen

 

Where are you from? The basement beneath my grandfather’s footsteps. It was the first home I had ever known, the only place my parents could take refuge in until I was eight years old. Where are you from? That’s a question I was asked almost daily in my youth, my status as an American questioned so constantly that I felt the need to grasp onto it tight. They were only ever asked in innocence and yet it made me feel like a roadside attraction all the same. Where are you from? See, now you’re trying to psych me out now because you know that’s a hard question for me to answer. It grates on my nerves every time I hear it. Where are you from? Well, everything began with living in the basement of my grandfather’s house before he moved out and left my father the key. I don’t remember much of those days. My mother told me that she and my father had good enough savings when it was only me and my older sister but then they were reduced to living on pennies when the twins were born. We now live in a house big enough for a bedroom for each daughter but I remember a time in my life when we all had to claim different corners of a single mattress in order to sleep. We were all curled up like little cats resting beneath a strip of sunlight. Where are you from? Both of my parents were born and bred in Vietnam and immigrated in their adulthood. My father’s father lost a finger in the war that got brushed over in every U.S. history class I ever took while my mother’s father was briefly imprisoned. My sisters and I were born and bred in America, a country that has so deeply scarred so many other countries in ways I never learned until after high school. For the entire breadth of my life, America has ostensibly been at war in the name of the freedom to drop bombs on kindergartens and weddings. Where are you from? At school, I can be found hiding away in the corner, with nothing to say to anyone there. The same goes for family gatherings where everyone is speaking a language I have yet





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