Jennifer S. Cheng on Her Letters to Mao

In "Writing Letters to Mao," Jennifer S. Cheng, whose first book includes missives to Mao, and whose most recent is MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems (Tarpaulin Sky, 2018), considers what it means "to experience a history of trauma and blood in ephemeralities, in residue."

"Writers always say that first books try to be everything: We want to imbue our inaugural words to the world with as much of ourselves, as deeply and comprehensively, as possible. When I first started writing letters to Mao in the summer of 2012, I didn’t know where it was going." More, from Catapult:

Dear Mao, I wrote, If the world, drowsy, were to be washed in a sheen, perhaps we would all have some intuitive knowledge of the immigrant body.

Growing up in Texas, Mao was in some ways like an estranged but unspeakable family member: a familiar face that looked more like mine rather than my classmates’ at school; a name I knew but a body I had never met, like so many of my actual family members. There was no singular conversation but rather an evaporation of allusions: Mao Zedong was the suffering of your family, my mother might say as she plucked steamed pork balls into our bowls. Mao Zedong was the loss of homeland’s soul, as she wiped the tabletop with a wet cloth. Mao Zedong—, she would say, in conjunction with a word that means to harm, to wound, evil, calamity. The sounds of his name uttered from my parents’ lips carried a heaviness I didn’t fully understand but accepted as the cosmology of my home. Less a person, he was more: fact, shadow, air. He was like a ghost woven into the lamplight, the threads of the carpet, the pattern the window blinds made on the floor in the late afternoon. To say I loved Mao would have been repugnant and inaccurate. But to say I hated him would have been inadequate in ways as well. What does it mean to experience a history of trauma and blood in ephemeralities, in residue?

Find all of Cheng's essay at Catapult.