Even after thirty years in America, my grandmother carried cash
in a silk pouch she pinned to the elastic band of her pants. 
No credit cards (my grandfather kept those), just cash. 

Sometimes the pouch was emerald-green with silver butterflies
or red-gold with white peonies, the same padded cloth envelopes
jewelry came in from my aunts. A single snap front,
a zipper to seal the contents within. 

She was discreet like that, expert at storing things away:
sushi rice at the Japanese buffet under teacups
(to avoid the penalty for uneaten food), restaurant mints
and toothpicks in her pockets. 

When my cousins and I visited, she would call each of us aside,
lift her blouse with one hand, the other on her dimpled white belly
unfastening the pouch from her pants, and parcel out twenty dollar bills
for candy, a hundred for birthdays, graduations, and later just because.

And because she never made it past third grade,
taught herself the higher register of the world by reading the paper,
she always asked me about school, told me to have my own vocation
so I wouldn’t have to rely on any man. 

I think of her, on that train in 1953 from Beijing to Guangzhou,
her escape to Hong Kong, how she must not have slept,
three daughters in tow, my aunt on her breast,
her wedding gold hemmed to the lining of her coat.

[1] Bu Dai - cloth pouch, also homophone for不带, or to not bring, without.

Published February 20, 2022

Annette Wong is an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson. Her poems have appeared in Waxwing, Poetry Northwest, and Lantern Review. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellowship in Creative Writing and her work has benefited from the support of teachers and friends from Warren Wilson, the Community of Writers, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the AWP Writer-to-Writer Mentorship Program, VONA, and Writing Workshops Los Angeles. Annette holds a BA from Yale and a JD from USC. She lives in Los Angeles where she practices law and teaches meditation.

Zhang Gong was born in Beijing in 1959. After graduating from the Central Academy of Arts and Design in 1993, he started to develop his distinctive painting style rooted in surrealism and pop culture. Drawing inspiration from a panoply of American and Japanese cartoons, as well as the urban environments of city spaces, Zhang’s work also encompasses animation and photography. He is currently Professor at the Information Department of Art and Design at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Zhang has exhibited worldwide, including Forms and Effects: Ukiyo-e to Anime, Kresege Foundation Gallery, Rampo College, Mahwah, NJ (2017); Hypallage - The Post-Modern Mode of Chinese Contemporary Art, and FICTION LOVE-Ultra New Vision in Contemporary Art, Singapore Art Museum, MOCA Shanghai, (2006).His animation films have been featured at international festivals such as Cinémathèque Québécoise, Brussels Animation Films Festival, London International Animation Festival, and Without Borders Film Festival in Rome. He has been awarded for his animated short film Trees (2003) at: 3rd Animation Academy Awards, Animation School of Beijing Film Academy, Beijing, China (2003); 10th Asian Film and Culture Festival, Lyon, France (2004) and 3rd CTVA Academy Awards, China (2004). Zhang lives and works in Beijing.