Meditation in a College Composition Classroom
by Qiang Meng
Here’s the rhetorical triangle: speaker, audience, subject.
My students hate it. I have no faith in making them care. None of us are punished for pretending.
I call this situation the triangle of no-one-cares.
The poet Li-Young Lee says there are three primary colors: staying, leaving, and returning.
I teach three days a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
On my way to teach today, a blonde girl high-fived her blonde friend. They were going to a bowling class, where the pins stand in a triangle, lighthearted.
The equilateral sign across the road says YIELD in red.
There are three items on my grocery list: tomatoes, cough drops, potstickers.
I remember Pittsburgh’s three waterways: the Allegheny, the Monongahela, merging to form the Ohio River.
Three animals remind me of Miami: the rooster roaming outside Popeyes, the performing orca who died after the Seaquarium announced her retirement, the moth trapped with moonlight in a Metrorail bound for the casino.
Why don’t I call them the grocery triangle, the Pittsburgh triangle, and the triangle of sadness?
In Chinese, 三 means three, and 川 means river.
地三鲜 means “three treasures from the earth,” a dish in my hometown made of stir-fried potatoes, eggplants, and peppers.
三 is pronounced san, as in San Francisco. Or sandwich, though not all sandwiches are triangles.
China was divided into 三国 in 220 AD: Wei, Shu, Wu.
Dynasty Warriors is a video game about the Three Kingdoms. I spent the cruelest winters of middle school playing by myself.
Sadness is what I inherit from the stone pavilion in my school’s peony garden. Nobody gave me a high-five.
I read The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin and believed our universe was foldable like aluminum foil.
SAN is the abbreviation for Sanity in role-playing games like Call of Cthulhu. It goes down when a character encounters something horrifying.
My friend pronounced the English word “three” as tree, “thinker” as tinker, and “thank you” as tank you.
It reminds me of the Tank Man during the Tiananmen Square protest, 1989. If I were there, I would witness the horrifying, which means I’d lose sanity.
So let me introduce the triangle of one’s lost adolescence: hangnail, sparrow, forgiveness.
Let me draw another diagram of the adulthood triangle: assimilation, dishwasher, paid parking.
And purpose the small-moments-of-joy-in-breathless-weeks triangle: snow-covered railing, postcard from Hong Kong, loading a fridge with dragon fruits.
The Macbeth-desperately-wants-to-hear-from triangle: witch, witch, witch.
Yesterday I ordered a take-out samosa shaped like the Great Pyramid, a miraculous triangle I’ve never seen—
I wrote aini, “love you,” in a text message, but a typo made it aiji, which means “Egypt.” I tapped send anyway, knowing you’d get what I wanted to say.