A Natural History of My White Girl
after Mendi Obadike
When I was a white girl, I had no mother.
I drank whiskey, lived in a house with no walls.
Girls visited and marveled at my room to breathe.
When it was sunny, they let down their hair, drank fresh orange juice.
We drank all morning, didn’t go to class.
I knew which words to carry in the arsenal, which memory to disarm the most resilient bully.
Nobody bothered us or asked why we were missing.
I never doubted this was me. I knew how to pull up short, how to light my name under their skin.
There was no need for mirrors. No need to get free.
Copyright © 2014 by Ching-In Chen. Used with permission of the author.
“‘A Natural History of My White Girl’ started as a challenge from Gregory Pardlo—to write to the ghost in the room, one which I always secretly imagined lived under the surface of my life, morphing through the television screen of my childhood, through the laughter of the children in my elementary school who couldn’t pronounce my name. Ultimately, this poem is about growing compassion for myself and for the ghosts I imagined kept me company, whose stories I inherited.”
—Ching-In Chen
Ching-In Chen
Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer, and teacher. They are the author of recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2017) and The Heart’s Traffic (Arktoi/Red Hen Press, 2009).
A Kundiman and Lambda Fellow, they have also been awarded residencies and fellowships from Callaloo, The Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Jack Straw Cultural Center, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Imagining America, EmergeNYC, the Intercultural Leadership Institute, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.