抢 / qiǎng / to steal 

the first time i was stolen, you forced my name 

through the folds of your gritted teeth & wondered 

how the withered syllables oxidized like blood. 

something decaying & unholy — war carries 

a stifling breath before the sky sinks its teeth into a 

city’s flesh. bombs pinched into blackened flecks of coal 

spat dry from the clouds, a harbinger of hungry 

vowels — 美女, scrounged from thirsty mouths, 

guttural. porcelain skin of young daughters 

unspooled like silk. your joss-paper effigies braiding 

crimson trails into the yangtze, nanking’s murky 

throat to swallow your briny tears & scorched body 

in one, concluding 

gulp. 

杀 / shā / to murder 

the first time i was murdered, the filth of silence was 

my only witness. i was seven, olive-skinned & bearing 

a childhood soon pilfered. you called it conquest, i 

screamed murderer, my life pillaged & fractioned like 

the blooms of mushrooms i nursed under rotten floorboards. 

my mother knelt in front of the altar, lacquered elm splintered, 

incense flushed out, a bayonet poised just above 

the gauge of a fleshed-out heart. her bony hands clasped 

in a sort of prayer that feeds off the anguished, a 

filthy & discarded woman drowned 

in her own blood yet still 

unbeknownst. 

记 / jì / to remember 

the first time i was remembered, my wounds bled salty 

scabs. i peeled them back, undressed them, felt embraced 

by a foreign beauty. to live is to simply change the radical 

from the word for speech — 话 to the word for to live — 活. 

so i speak & reminisce for all of nanking’s 美女’s, for the 

children nursing mushrooms to kill hunger, for all the 

exsanguinated elegies of womanhood. perhaps to have been 

seen is to have lived as a 美女. so i shuck the name, 

raw, down to its pit & reclaim myself, 

buried in my own 

tongue.

*美女 - měi nü - a term translating to “beautiful woman/girl” which was used by the Japanese during the notorious Nanking Massacre (otherwise known as The Rape of Nanking) to lure, abduct, murder, and sexually abuse young women and girls. This word became a powerful symbol of the dehumanization and suffering faced by the Chinese during this period, as well as the resilience and unity of civilians who fought back against this development.