Chinese Silence No. 22

after Billy Collins, "Monday"

The Italians are making their pasta,

the French are making things French,

and the Chinese cultivate their silence.

They cultivate silence

in every Chinatown on the persimmon of earth—

mute below the towers of Toronto,

silently sweeping the streets of Singapore

clear of noisy self-expression.

The Americans are in their sport utility vehicles,

the Canadians are behaving reasonably,

but the Chinese remain silent

maybe with a cup of tea or an opium pipe

and maybe a finger puzzle or water torture is involved.

Or maybe the Chinese are playing the Chinese

game of ping-pong,

the pock-pock of the ball against their tight-lipped mouths

as their chefs dice scallions and bean curd.

The Chinese are silent

because it is their job for which

I pay them what they got for building the railroads.

Which silence it is hardly seems to matter

though many have a favorite

out of the 100 different kinds—

the Silence of the Well-Adjusted Minority,

the Girlish Silence of Reluctant Acquiescence,

the Silence that by No Means Should Be Mistaken for Bitterness.

By now, it should go without saying

that what Crocodile Dundee is to the Australian

and Mel Gibson is to the Scot,

so is silence to the Chinese.

Just think—

before I invented the 100 Chinese silences,

the Chinese would have had to stay indoors

and gabble about civil war and revolution

or go outside and build a really loud wall.

And when I say a wall,

I do not mean a wall of thousands of miles

that is visible from the moon.

I mean a noisy wall of language

that dwarfs my medieval battlements

and paves the Pacific to lap

California’s shores with its brick-hard words.

Source: 100 Chinese Silences (Les Figues Press, 2016)