BEGIN SCENE
The child sits at the kitchen table, doing homework. The mother describes the atrocities she witnessed when she was the child’s age, for the forty-seventh time, the atrocities that make her act in that strange way, strict, unrecognizable, something the child has learned not to talk about in school or with their friends.

The child is, disrespectfully, zoning out so hard their eyes are crossing a little bit, their head drooping as they study the grain of the glossy wood because they have heard these stories so many times that they are bo-ring and the child is not yet concerned with understanding the mother as a person who existed before them or a person who might have wanted to write poems before she had to cross the ocean to here.

The child is bored and doesn’t realize how eventually there will be a time that they grow so far away from these stories that they forget, and hearing the echoes of these stories feels like coming home to across the ocean where they have never been. Or at least they will say it does and they will only have to try a little bit to feel that way.

There will be a time when the child can no longer mouth along with these stories word-for-word (a skill practiced only when the mother’s back is turned or shouting from the kitchen.) Cannot remember them in the left-behind language in from the place that the mother is from, cannot picture the fruit or the mother’s shape hovering in the doorway or the hands that pinch the dumplings closed.

But right now, the child is bored and would like to skip eating the vegetables cooked in the mother’s traditional cultural way, the way the mother ate them as a child, the way from across the ocean, and instead go play a game on the computer. The child has to finish reading some extra books assigned by an enthusiastic social studies teacher on the historical event that caused the child's mother to flee. This is something the child feels they get enough of at home, but cannot say no to an authority figure like a teacher.

Later, the child will write this scene and wonder how much of their recounting has been influenced by the poetry, the essays, the thinkpieces, the posts, the videos, and the graphics they've read over a lifetime. How much of that kitchen table is real, and how much has been abstracted, formulated, and created--programmed. How much any of that matters.
END SCENE

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