“What Shuts Them Up”

by Beth Phung

When I was thirteen

and I had gotten just

dark enough that summer

to warrant my grandmother 

to force me to stand in the shade,

a boy at school screamed at me,

“Go back to where you came from.”

So now, every now and then,

I drive through Escondido

and wave at Palomar Hospital’s

fourth floor: where I was born.

I’m just connecting to my roots, you know?

Throughout my life, I’ve endured

idiotic bombshells that napalmed

the dense jungle in my brain,

hucked out of the fighter plane mouths

of ignorant people I’ve encountered

in the form of stupid questions.

“So, where are you from?”

“No, where are you from from?”

The answer is always the same:

From the ashes my father carried

with him from eight years old,

the ones that clung to his

clothes and hair as his home village 

of bạc liệu, Vietnam burned to the ground

at the end of the war.

That usually shuts them up.

“How do you say hello?”

“Can you teach me to say something?”

Man, I can’t even say something!

My father was too afraid 

of his own language being a carrier

of his trauma 

that he never bothered to teach it to me.

“How do you say I love you?”

In my family, we don’t say it.

We show it,

so I can’t help you there.

What I can do is hand you

a bowl of homemade rice porridge

when you’re sick, 

because that’s what my father taught me

to mean, “I love you.”

Beth Phung (She/They) is a high school English teacher, currently teaching 10th and 11th grade at Ramona High School. They are first generation Vietnamese-American, nonbinary, and an alumni of CSU San Marcos with a Bachelor's in Literature and Writing Studies. For more writing from Beth Phung, follow their writing Instagram @mywordsonscreen.