Smiling Lotus
Here, my mother is grinning like a wedge of lemon
on a dish. If asked, she’d say she is remembering her collection
of the 50¢-a-piece porcelain figurines
in her childhood cabinet. Say cheese. Snap.
This one here, barred doors and frameless windows
on 2/F, 32 Tai Yuen Street, a balcony floating
out of reach of our city’s grand narrative. Snap. Stop daydreaming.
The War’s over. Her father snapping his fingers at the new baby.
The sound of summer wind stuttered through
iron window grille, like little kisses between toothy gaps.
My mother smiles to remember sitting in the middle
of a row of chairs. Chairs all facing the same direction. Smile.
“If that’s all we have” to smile. Water taps are now back on.1 All neighbours
grinned with water buckets swinging from their shoulder poles.
Only her teeth were stained sepia yellow by tetracycline
before antibiotics were made affordable. But it was youth.
There was love; it looked like an unfinished drawing of Spring. One more.
Sit still. Snap. She remembers it all.
She remembers growing up: 11 people in a small flat; 5 slept on the same
bed. “Even when we forget”, “Keep a photo in the drawer”. Let time gnaw
like ants. Strands of damp hair still stuck on the wall. “This is the last one.”
My mother points at a picture in a tourist guidebook,
remembers the breeze, our Fragrance Harbour2.
She smiles at me, and tells me her name in Cantonese —
Smiling Lotus. Her mark in this world. An image that has never
been exposed to light, so it will never become a shadow in my world.
1 In the 1960s, water was supplied for only four hours every four days due to severe drought in Hong Kong.
2 The literal meaning of Hong Kong in written Chinese.
Wing Yau (she/them) is a Hong Kong-born poet whose recent poems have appeared in The Garlic Press, Hot Pot Magazine, Island Magazine, Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. A Pushcart nominee, Wing is currently based in Wurundjeri country. Their debut poetry collection, Fiction of Flying is forthcoming (Puncher & Wattmann, 2025).
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