my mother always made me finish my kimchi broccoli for my health,
drink red ginseng tonic orange juice for vitamins and immunity.
my halmoni mémère made army beef stew with savory vegetables
my father’s mother asked me, “Have you eaten yet?”
we ordered Chinese takeout once per week,
enjoying my black bean noodles shrimp lo mein with square chopsticks.
at the Lunar New Year, we celebrated over rice cake soup veal parmesan;
at Chuseok Thanksgiving we melded half-moon shaped rice cakes crescent rolls
into emblems of the harvest of our gratitude,
dreaming of frolicking on Jeju Island Hampton Beach after the long cold.
sometimes we went into Busan Boston to see the ‘big city,’
gazing out at the harbor, colorful ships coming and going,
as I waited all winter for the coming of the cherry maple trees.
if we wished to use another language,
we greeted each other with a Merry Christmas Buon Natale
in English Italian, and, when asked point blank what it was like, I answer,
“like everyone.” “not like everyone,”
my Italian Korean heritage set me apart—going to dinner at friends’ houses
where they didn’t eat kimchi pasta at every meal—or even rice?—
where you didn’t need to ask to be excused from the table,
where even their ancestors spoke only English. how lucky, for me,
to feast on doubled traditions, magpies and storks, to grow up, to grow
into the rough draft of my life—
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Maria Picone is a Korean adoptee with work in Ice Floe Press, Moonchild Magazine, and Whale Road Review. Maria won Cream City Review’s 2020 Summer Poetry Prize. You can find her on Twitter @mspicone.
Photo by Eiliv-Sonas Aceron
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