Chinese Dream 61
Cartoons. Computer-generated smiles
and fixed eyes fill my daughter’s screen, show her
form is content, content form.
She’s over unicorns. Now she plays a child
who always knows best. There’s nothing to fear
except when we near
an evening when the moon’s not giving light,
turning away. It’s late for attitude,
but it’s now that rude
words are a parent’s heritance. Is she white?
Race is something her father has, a way
of arresting play
away from her, in Timothy’s long trail
of ancestors, immigrants, grasping arms
out of elsewhere, of whom she’ll be one. The child is real.
In the bedtime story she tells herself she’s charmed,
just like her own father.
Copyright © 2024 by Timothy Yu. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 22, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘Chinese Dream 61’ is part of a series of rewritings of The Dream Songs of John Berryman, investigating the presumptive whiteness of the confessional subject and the role of racial stereotypes in the confessional legacy. This poem’s speaker muses on his daughter’s racial inheritance: is race something she ‘gets’ from her father? How does it interact with the ever-present influences of media, the weight of family history, and the stories a child tells about herself?”
—Timothy Yu
Timothy Yu
Timothy Yu is an Asian American poet and literary critic. A Kundiman Fellow, Yu’s first book of poems 100 Chinese Silences (Les Figues Press, 2016) was reissued in 2024 by Punctum Books. He is the Martha Meier Renk-Bascom Professor of Poetry and a professor of English and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He lives in Madison on ancestral Ho-Chunk land.