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).