A Contextual Aside

I am the last of seven children. Had fate been delayed for a second, or had it rounded one corner more quickly, I might never have been born. Or I might have been born in Cambodia, the Philippines, India, or Viet Nam (the birthplaces of my six siblings). As it turns out, the hand my family was dealt had me born in New York City. It had my family believe for some years that their stay in the United States was temporary, that they would return to Viet Nam, that English would be my second language, and that my name would be foreign. They were close on one oddly appropriate count: "Barbara" means foreign.

There is much about my family's history — how exactly the family landed here in two groups in separate years, and when and how they realized there would be no return — that is unknown to me. On some topics, my family has chosen to remain silent for obvious reasons, reasons shared by many who leave their countries unwillingly or unwittingly. Likely, other bits of our history remain untold for more intimate reasons.

There are factors that made it easier for me not to ask questions. I don't speak the native tongue of my parents and siblings, and I was barely old enough to be conscious of (and thus easily shielded from) the war that kept us from the place my family knew as home.

The reasons I have been disinclined to explore the "facts" are more complex. There is the natural erosion of memory, aided by the self-protective creation of new, more palatable "memories" that make the quest seem fruitless. Where in eight different drafts of the truth does the truth actually lie? And when you multiply those eight perspectives by the number of years, where then has the truth gone? And even if there were a "truth" to uncover, there are some things that should be left unsaid.

Rather than vehicles for the delivery of fact then, my poems are meditations on the people my parents might have been when they were younger, meditations on the people whose paths they might have crossed, people my parents or siblings — or I — might have been had some small factor been slightly different.