As I was taking a slow right turn off Route 66 onto my dark residential street at 11 p.m., something whizzed in front of me, causing me to slam on my brakes. Time stretched with fright. Out of the blocked driveway of the corner restaurant, like a flash of a shadow, a guy dressed in all black on a lime-green scooter cut perpendicularly near the hood of my car. He threw his head back in glee like he was riding a roller coaster while I gasped at the near accident I avoided. Had I not seen the green of the scooter, I would not have seen him, camouflaged in the night. When I finally exhaled, I raised my fist and cursed out in Cantonese, Yeem mang cheurng! My second outburst was, “I didn’t want to kill you!”
I thought my mother tongue of Cantonese had faded because I don’t regularly practice it, but in a moment of panic, it reared its dominant head as my first outburst. There’s no good translation for this guy who “minds (that) life (is) long!” Cantonese is compressed and poetic in this expression for saying someone is reckless, so careless with his life that he is tempting death on purpose. The three-word Cantonese phrase needs no pronouns or connective tissue. The English translation, on the other hand, takes a full sentence of at least ten words.
I am often living in translation. During my college years, I had friends whose mother tongue was Spanish. They told cultural jokes I wanted to understand. And when I read Pablo Neruda’s love poems translated into English, I knew I was missing something if I couldn’t understand his poetry in Spanish. Poetry, salsa dancing, and missing out on friends’ jokes inspired me to study Spanish in my twenties. This Romance language had more syllables and longer expressions, quite the opposite of Cantonese. Any chance I had to go study Spanish abroad at an immersion language school, I was there. I designed my nonprofit management fellowship to work with a microcredit nongovernmental organization in Costa Rica for a summer. While there, I tried to find a local tica to date at a “club ambiente” (i.e., an underground gay club). I was following up on advice my American gay boys gave me: “Get a native, Spanish-speaking girlfriend. It’s the fastest way to improve your language skills.” My attempts were thwarted as the mostly closeted local women living with their parents didn’t want a foreign girlfriend who was only there for the summer. The Costa Rican, carefree surfer vibes greeting of pura vida did not translate into an interest in dating, at least, not among the queer women I met. They did not want a carefree, short summer romance.
Moving through life as a cultural translator and a bilingual child, as well as through multilingual friend groups, I was searching for something universal to create a common language for poetic expression. While putting together my poetry collection Braided Spaces, I created a poetic lens called “Feng Shui Poetry.”
After years of reading and studying spirituality, I realized that the Five Elements of Feng Shui can be something people across different cultures could understand. As an American-born Chinese, I am often negotiating Eastern and Western cultural influences. Feng Shui Poetry is a way for me to give people a spiritual lens so we can share our poetry with some common understanding. I often start explaining the Five Elements with fire because we need fire to cook, and we witness someone’s fire when we see passion, anger, or fame. Let’s take something general, like food, and look at it through the lens of each element:
• Fire: food as an expression of fame
• Earth: food as self-care and health
• Metal: food as precision and beauty
• Water: food as a career
• Wood: food as family gathering
If we are struggling to express something in a poem, the Five Element lens can offer a way in. Picking an element allows us to put on a pair of sunglasses that comes with its own vocabulary, like red and sparky words for fire, or blue and flowy words for water. For the last three years, I’ve offered a Feng Shui poetry writing class at University of California, Los Angeles Extension, and elsewhere. If you’re curious, please join a class where we get poem prompts that help us get started on each element. We then write our own poems from each of the Five Elements. I curate new poems each time I teach a class, so repeat students can enjoy deepening their expression of the Five Elements. Some students have said how it is easier to write from certain elements and how other elements are like weaker muscles they want to train. No element is better than the other. We need all of them to be in the fullness of expression, just as Mother Nature needs all the elements for its healthy ecosystem.
If you’re living with cultural translations like I am, I hope the Five Elements help you find some common ground and inspiration as they do for me and hundreds of poetry students. If you speak multiple languages, may your languages serve you when you need them to say something poetic. My faded mother tongue found me when I needed to curse in a panic, and I’ll keep finding ways to practice the idioms and unique phrases in better circumstances. As we develop more authentic voices, it is important for us to remember our cultural roots. I offer you a sweet ancient Chinese blessing: Lung mah zing san. Wishing you the strong energy and liveliness of the dragon and the horse.