This “migration as a broken history,” comes into sharp focus later in the poem, when the speaker narrates the definite moment on the eve of her senior prom when her father came into her room to tell her “he had less than [ ] months to live” while she was trying to overcome the stuck zipper of her prom dress. Faced with her father’s actual, undeniable disappearance from her life, “I folded twenty times into his lap—the zipper on my side without any give—a gush of gold / and tulle scattered across the wooden floor.” Again, the dots suture the width of the page, sealing the scene, and the father himself, into almost mythic memory: when we next see the speaker she is at prom, dancing with “a human-sized hole.”
Coming so early in the collection, that gushing image of the dress—an ill-fitting carapace of rigid American girlhood— seems to refract throughout the other sections, reflecting the double-sided allure and painful strictures of gender and cultural assimilation. We recall it later, in the poem “A Careful List of All My Failures” in which Leung recalls a possessive gush of racist objectification from a lover who tells the speaker:
“You are
the prettiest pretty my pretty can you
speak Japanese to me can you my pretty
please” and I was grateful to be
even considered while dissolving
beneath him that I shuddered away
the alarm and said “That is not me”
but also “Okey.”
An unyielding persona of girl and womanhood is again on display when Leung ponders the figure of Guem-Ja, the central character of Park Chan-wook’s Lady Vengeance, in “I Marvel at the Noises a More Perfect Vengeance Makes.” Here the speaker seems to both observe and inhabit the character of Guem-Ja, a woman falsely imprisoned for child murder who eventually exacts revenge on her teacher, the real murderer. If our traumas, like the bright constricting dress, shape us, how do we move forward while still bearing their memories, Leung wonders. Is vengeance the only path? “How do you tell a cauterized wound not to confront the harming body? / I remember everything before and after and nothing in-between.”