Assistant Editor Madeleine Wattenberg: I’ve always been obsessed with the image of a single coin—it’s impossible to have heads without tails; you can have two sides or zero, but never just one. Yet still there is the single coin composed of its two surfaces. Kien Lam’s “Notes on Translation” engages this slippery duality. Its title primes the reader to look for sites of translation: between languages, of course, but also between bodies, land and sea, between parents, between selves. Here, everything is shaped by qualities of light, by context, by choice: “You will see that where there is no shape, there can be every shape too.” And so change, and its risks and necessities, are made possible.
Notes on Translation
- Dad pulls you aside and says Do you want to live with your mother? Does not offer himself up as an option. In your head this is said in English. Everything you’ve ever heard says the predator will leave if you can stay quiet enough. Do not make a sound. Do not let him find you.
- The word for forget is quên.
- If the world drowns in its own heat, then grow gills and fins. To survive is to adapt. Or maybe it is the other way around. There are so many theories as to why whales beach themselves. We think it an accident and we try to push them back into the ocean. A pail of water to keep it cool. And another. And sometimes, I think, of course it wants to live. But maybe what I mean is I want to live.
- In fifth grade, you spell silhouette wrong and lose the spelling bee. When dusk hits a city, the skyline starts to merge into one big building with no roads between its stems. What is that but a kind of love. No light to show the difference. But if you focus less on the outline and more on the darkness, you will see that there are trees and animals and people. You will see that where there is no shape, there can be every shape too.
- Your mother never asks you about it.
- Statistics say 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. I call heads every time on a flipped coin. I look right before I look left. I don’t think it’s fair to say I have commitment issues. I don’t think it’s as easy as saying yes.Every time I imagine myself on an altar, it feels like being spit-roasted over a fire. Only the fire is some kind of passion. But I am still some kind of pig.
- An unrequited love is like having a needle slowly pulled from your stomach only to find a thread pushed through its loop, and the thread is stitched into your lung such that you are always trying to surface so you can breathe like a whale.
- My obsession with whales began in elementary school. I learned that the biggest animal in the world was a blue whale and that it had no interest in swallowing me.
- In Vietnam, there is a wet season and a dry season. The word for their difference is assimilation. The rain beats on the gravel until it becomes mud. Then it reverts when the rain leaves. I am the rock and the river—the kind of shape that changes when touched.
Kien Lam is a Kundiman fellow and Indiana University MFA graduate. His work has appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles where he writes about esports.
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