Tess Liem

$1 Per Word for Travel Writing

On the first day of the Year of the Pig
my uncle said he wanted to go to the mall
to buy something without saying what.
In the harshly pleasant air conditioned air
we ate rousong buns and saw young girls staged
in a beauty pageant. Of course I searched for the word
later. My uncle pointed, said meat bread.
We took the mall in like a centuries old monument
escalating and pausing to look down
from each level. Outside heat
waved off the pavement. It said in order
for a place like this to “thrive”
on “hospitality” it must be inhospitable
to all activities other than being hospitable to you.
And sometimes it looked like tourists
were sleeping on every double bed in the country.
Less so in the mall. Stuff another meat bun
in my mouth. In the far-away-from-Here mall
it was just like Here except my prefixed half
wasn’t worth a dollar. I go on wanting to claim
what will not claim me. Identity’s a bitch that way,
isn’t it. Language one barrier—half travels roughly
back to me as not—skin another. Here
where I was raised and born
a stranger stopped me in the street
to tell me in the future
everyone would look like me and I take that
to mean the ~tone~ of my skin didn’t scare
him pale to his core. Let me swallow
another meat song and sing for you
the story of an elementary school teacher
who put her arm next to mine
and told me I wasn’t pink
like her. In the mall, my uncle and I,
we fulfilled our purpose of buying common
dish soap and I have a video of him tossing bags of the liquid
into a shopping cart before he raised his arm
and said please, take anything you want.