In ‘Luzviminda, or Filipinas Make Such Good Maids’ she understands the viciousness of this gaze, how it can diminish entire memories of a life. Written from the point of view of a domestic worker, the persona mourns:
In vain, I try to make angels in the melting Snow but my wingless guardian waits Where I left her at the customs, Clutching a passport long expired. What again is my real name? It rides And vanishes with my short-lived Breath. Even the dirty dwarf has given Up on eating what’s left of a heart, mess Of pale ashes. My thinning shadow Crosses the snow bridge of burning Coals, walking on bare feet home. (CS 50)
And if not the gaze, it is the borrowed tongue that alienates the migrant. The opening poem in Crossing the Snowbridge, ‘Alphabet Soup, or Mimicry as a Second Language,’ describes America as a ‘zoo of sycophants,’ where the persona is merely a ‘parrot who is almost human’ (3). In ‘Potluck,’ the persona is othered once again: ‘’Doesn’t she speak English / Beautifully?’ / Ms. S. announces dinner / With pride’ (24). And no matter how hard the persona tries, her ‘tongue [is] tired / From talking on stilts’ (24). So, the night ends and the persona asks ‘What next to do? / Walk to the bus stop, / Wave at the receding cars, / And warm myself / With the leftovers / Cooling / In the paperbag’ (25). English and the cold are often symbols for debilitating loneliness:
But there is no word for ‘snow’ in your language. The flakes as they fall, make no sound. You turn around and stare at your footprints. In the thick forests, you had never left tracks. Telling as ancestral ghosts, and as fleeting, The breath that you had never seen, perplexes you. How to say ‘a-cold-colder-than-cold?’ What word to mean a darker, lonelier white?’ (“Walking in the Snow,” WR 26)
Here, along with anger, the reader finds a loneliness that comes with the guilt and ambivalence of knowing that, though cruel, America is, in other times and in other’s lives, perceived as an object of optimistic dreaming. In ‘Resident Alien as Acrobat,’ Lim-Wilson sits in this difficult space, while finding a way to nevertheless depict the quiet rage that the migrant is forced to keep small, a necessary mode of survival:
How polite I am even as my heart pounds A wolfpaced beat. When I turn around, I unclench my fist, releasing arrows Of curses, silently. I walk in a crouch Disguising kings in my blood and white wings Fluttering beneath my thin coat. […] When my throat rages dry, I recall the dozen ways to say “rain”. Now and then, I let my tongue swim Against the tide of names: my brothers And sisters leaping wordlessly Out of my sight, our likeness Blurring into a muted darkness. But, I survive, you see. Even thrive Here in this jungle of damp noises, I bare my teeth, twist my jaws Like a well-trained chimp. Watch me (CS 51)
While Lim-Wilson’s poetry makes space for the complexity of the migrant’s emotional lifeworld, she is firm in criticizing the gaze and violence that has objectified Filipino migrants. She provides the necessary map for the migrant’s emotional itinerary, yes, but Lim-Wilson makes clear: no sort of optimism, cruel or otherwise, about this ‘promised’ land makes its way into their heart. America cannot claim the persona of Lim-Wilson’s poems, despite the difficulty of resisting from within the belly of the beast:
And now it is America that chisels Itself into my memory, but I will not Blink at the glistening monuments, Nor step back at the approach of oversized Cars. My hands grow coats of armor From their bouts with the cold, thorned Fruit, the repetitive rubbing of my last Coins. Here, doors are made of glass, Spinning like windblown pages, The lobbies within grinning Like madmen with no teeth and no Clothes. Nothing still surprises me. I keep warm with the crisscross Of my own arms. Memories grow Stale as bread, but the open air Does me good. I welcome the rain (CS 13)
