a singular crumb

English is my third language. This sounds impressive, but I will explain briefly. Like 99% of my written communication, including creative work, is English. Obviously I am not claiming full mastery, but it is my most fluent language. I will have one full conversation spoken aloud in English maybe once a month. It is certainly not a unique experience… Just another thing of life’s weirdness.

Tagalog is my second language. I don’t write in Tagalog, but I speak decently. In fact, I am most comfortable speaking Tagalog, and thank goodness for that. Pero pwede pang pag-aralan kasi hindi ko alam yung malalim na salita. Yung pang araw araw lang. It’s crazy, growing up in the Philippines, I was enrolled in one of those Christian schools that were pushing English so hard, they banned their students from speaking Tagalog. Punishment was a fine of one peso per Tagalog word spoken. (Interestingly, I heard something similar happened in Taiwan during the White Terror–the government was pushing Mandarin Chinese so hard, students were fined for speaking any of the local and indigenous languages.)

In between my second and first languages, there is Hokkien. I am saying “in between,” because the situation was very strange. In my school, afternoon classes were times when the elderly Chinese teachers spoke at you. They spoke Philippine Hokkien, and told students to memorize Chinese translations of Bible verses. Kids were never formally taught Hokkien, but it was assumed Hokkien was the primary language in those Chinese-Filipino households. That was not the case in my family, but I learned a smidge of Philippine Hokkien, via osmosis. Now, that meant I could understand a smidget of Taiwanese Hokkien as well. Not enough for any of it to be practical, but oh well!

What’s left? My first language. I must have lost it by age six. All I can say now is, my Mandarin is absolutely fucked! Possibly, it is fucked beyond all hope because I don’t even want to learn it anymore, despite current living in Taiwan. I would want to learn Hokkien, however.

Would Yuji Beleza learn Hokkien? He’s an Irish-Japanese polyglot who travels the world talking to as many people as humanly possible. That’s nuts めちゃめちゃヤバい he’s like if Mr. Rogers was a polyglot vlogger who traveled the world talking to literally every person on the streets. I think he should learn 台語 .

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My new poem “love note from my guardian angel” is releasing July 17th for Patreon subscribers of Spec Colorways In Verse. I’m doing audio for it too! Happy pride, spread the word, support queer and BIPOC poetry 🫵🌈

It’s a beautiful sunny day and I was almost flattened like a pancake AGAIN!

It’s not that the streets in Taiwan are dangerous. For all the griping I hear from locals, I still say the road safety here is decent. Because road safety is much MUCH worse in the Philippines, it’s practically nonexistent. I lived for decades in the chaos of Manila, making daily commutes through smoke belching engine screeching jeepneys, the rickety tricycles, the stray dogs and catcallers, pickpockets, holdapper, the fucking sidewalk gun assassin, the dog shit and trash colonies baking at tropical temps, so on and so forth. Like that’s just Tuesday in Manila. Borrowing words of the Wise One, I say the pedestrians of Taiwan “couldn’t last a day in the asylum where I was raised.”

And that’s the thing, isn’t it, I’m out of my element. I’ve got my guard down for real, so spoiled now by these freshly painted pedestrian lanes and abundance of stoplights counting down as if to tell your slow ass to hurry the fuck up.

Twice now!!! Nearly flattened like Denji Chainsawman!!!

I didn’t play fucking patintero with the jeepneys along Avenida just to get pancaked by a little bitch Honda going 50 downhill at a goddamn parking lot in Taichung.

No place is ever safe.

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Because I haven’t embarrassed myself enough, I’m sharing some of the poetry I clobbered together over this wretched month! It really is such fun to be rotting fooling around instead of working. Prompts come from the official napowrimo site, which I read with eyes half-closed. I started with the early bird prompt for the first day.

_{“april one haiku”}¹
_{how to shuck oyster
break fingers and swallow salt
walk into the sea}

“april five go girl give us nothing”
snow burns at your feet
plum skies cry upon angel wings
the sun is cold without your lips²
crowning halo of a harvest moon

_{“april eight normal poem”
my super sexy angel hunny
ass so fat and biceps juicy
biceps triceps trapezius thicc
flex that belly feed it jelly}

“the twin you ate in the womb”³
you were so hungry
tasting sun-ripe tomato
must be delicious.

_{“april seventeen FML”}⁴
_{dead thing
bone dry, crusted
gossamer wings shattered
this is what it means to be small
dragonfly for a day
crushed underfoot
to ash}

1. I fell back on a lot of haiku for the month ↩︎
2. Huh? ↩︎
3. “beloved relative” prompt for day twelve ↩︎
4. The eintou, from African American poetry, is supposed to contain a “pearl of wisdom” but I have none!!! ↩︎

NGL I didn’t think I’d stick through napowrimo for this long. Still haven’t missed a day too. The talented folks at the Taipei Poetry Collective are really nice.

Just for funsies, I picked out an “art name” (號) for myself. To mark the occasion, I made an IG account and put up some random photos to seem human. Well… I said it was for funsies but really, if I’m going to apply for a writer residency in Taipei, I’ll need a pronounceable name for my application form.

So, I found out that native speakers of Mandarin Chinese pronounce “Caroline” as Kǎluòlín. What? Kǎluòlín? Who is that? I don’t know her. Doesn’t feel like me at all. Even my Taiwanese relatives don’t call me that. I bet they’d be mildly amused, though, if they found out I chose 紅蘿蔔, pronounced Hóng Luóbo. It’s the Mandarin word for “carrot”. There is one other translation for “carrot”, though it’s less used in Taiwan. Just more of those regional language differences, like the way we say Good morning is Zǎo ān, and not the Zǎoshang hǎo used in China.

And Hóng Luóbo 紅蘿蔔 is doubly great for me because the Hung in my English name is supposed to be pronounced as Hong, anyway. We can thank Wade–Giles for that spelling, by the way.

I’m glad I managed to think of a good one. My friends say so too.

Back to the IG thing, my first time using it and the vibe is very agreeable, I’m surprised. Somehow the reels don’t rot my brain in the way other apps do? I haven’t caught myself doomscrolling on it, at least. So far, the algorithm’s been showing me writers, poets, reviewers, eco-activists and… it’s great learning from them. I’d feel curious and motivated afterwards, not at all hopeless. Very anti-doomscroll for me. Also I’m obsessed with Maureen Onwunali‘s poetry.

Lunar New Year is in a couple weeks; I’m usually chill about any holiday but it’s a bigger deal to me this year for reasons that will soon become clear. 🐎🔥

What else, what else? More crumbs to share, but I’ll save them for next time. x