Mantis 22 (Summer 2024)
dis.orientations
Wei Shao
Linguistic Disability
... to Brooklyn…Indian English Korean English British English American
English Chinese Irish English Jewish English Englishes English just
English just Paper…
English can be a song in Chinese
Chinese in English is Chinglish
Which language is better?
In the spatial constellation, who are we?
monolingual’ bilingual’ trilingual’ quadrilingual’ pentalingual, which-lingual
Who is more important, you or your language?
How to understand each other with so many languages?
Indian English Korean English British English American English Irish
English Jewish English
Englishes Englishes Yours Ours His Hers Mine Theirs Its
Where are we in language?
In the bad luck month of Lily’s Valley
MY ENGLISH MY CHINESE MY ENGLISHES MY CHINESES
Just a sunflower bitch
And, you are disabled
Story of Dragon
Every hometown has a story of the dragon
Young people should go out to try the world. Like the ducks
In folklore, they swam into an upstream rock hole and showed up
Downstream years later. If they had never left, there would be no story;
If they left and never showed up, their story would be tragic; if they left
and came back, their story would become glorious.
If ducks could end up somewhere else,
Could you do the same?
You could end up
Being somewhere else and becoming new.
SHAO WEI grew up with her grandfather by the Yangtze River in China and came to the United States in 1996. She earned a MA in Creative Writing from New York University, a MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin, Ph.D. in from UT Dallas. Her books include Pulling A Dragon’s Teeth (Pitts Press) and a memoir, Homeland (Taipei).