Poetry: WHEN YUHUA HAMASAKI WENT HOME by Grace Lau
Grace Lau’s “Yuhua Hamasaki” arrives at just the right moment—with power, with vitality, with dragulous charm. The poem crunches your expectations of womanhood, of Chinese womanhood, and invites you to a feast of new realities.
WHEN YUHUA HAMASAKI WENT HOME
when a Chinese drag queen
finally
sashays into the Drag Race workroom
our ancestors clutch their jade pendants but
no one says anything because
our men have been painting their faces and
singing in soprano since
the Six Dynasties
*
when my grandma performed
in 粵劇
she swung a sword as man
wept as woman
sang as both
Shakespeare isn’t the only
dragulous form of theatre
*
Chinese girls are good
Chinese girls are submissive
Chinese girls will do your taxes
and fill your prescriptions
because survival doesn’t always
look like
a war
*
Chinese girls won’t spill the tea
tea is for serving your elders
and the dim sum table is no place for incompetence
*
yuhua / 玉花 / jade flower
Yuhua / 余華 / just another man’s name
even our mother-
tongue is a drag queen
*
yes, a Chinese queen calling herself Hamasaki
is strange
but it’s no stranger
than Chinese characters in a Japanese alphabet
kanji / hanzi
it’s no stranger than how we take
the names of those who bruise us
husbands / fathers / Nanjing
it’s no stranger than men saying
konichiwa
to me almost everywhere I go
*
the day RuPaul told the first Chinese drag queen
in ten seasons of Drag Race
to sashay away
the sky contracted, blushed
black and white
a small, familiar ache
for the Chinese girls who are not good, not submissive
who aren’t ashamed to be hungry
for love
my brother-sister, drag-
on queen
this feast is
for us
粵劇: Chinese opera
kanji/hanzi: Chinese characters used in Japanese writing
Grace Lau
Grace is a queer Chinese-Canadian writer living on unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations territory in Vancouver, BC. By day, she works as a copywriter in advertising and tech. Her work has been published in magazines such as TRACK//FOUR, Yes Poetry, and Arc. When she’s not writing, she enjoys itinerary-less travel, live music, and loud socks.
