moved by time

Summer

Summer was a bus ride to a small town 50 years 

south of Hong Kong. A less perceivable duration 

would be seven hours. Upon arriving at my 

grandparents’ home, my parents would rummage 

through their suitcases for gifts that were meant to 

improve life there then. One such gift was a shower 

head, brought because they thought a bath with a 

ladle took too long. But the fixture from the future 

worked in vain with the weak water pressure; water 

unhurried through the pores as the faucet was 

turned on, claiming there was no need to save time

in the long days of summer in a small town south 

of Hong Kong.

Ox Statue

There once stood an iron ox statue on an ancient 

bridge. It had been struck down by lightning one 

stormy night and survived by a twin. My grandfather 

narrated this local legend like an obituary, as he 

cycled with me on the back seat, on our way to the 

bridge to see the ox that remained. From story to 

life, the wheels turned beneath us, memory formed 

in iteration.

Evening news

Hong Kong’s TV channels were accessible there, 

but not every news item, or every bit of the news, 

would be shown. A commercial would cut in, rather 

abruptly and awkwardly, to supplant any content 

deemed improper for the nation. Picturing how the 

staff in charge of this job was anxiously anticipating 

the right moment to block the wrong news, I 

laughed out loud. While I found the act clumsy and 

funny, my parents saw it as backward.

Backward

A forward force exerts a backward reaction. I 

understood pretence at that age. Coming home 

from school I censored my news to my parents to keep their li— , our li—, this li— intact.

Whenever my grandfather visited us in Hong Kong, 

he would sit on a metro train all day long, letting it 

take him around, while others hopped in and out. 

While others considered the ride quotidian, he 

relished the free AC.

Janet Cheung, a Web Producer at the Poetry Foundation, writes more often in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) than in any human language. She saves her poetry writing for the evenings, after her son is lulled to sleep. Lately, she is focused on completing her first chapbook.