My boss, the head nurse, says she has a collection of Ming Dynasty crockery,

                   Qing dynasty snuff bottles and a

                   Shang 代 bronze tripod vase

                   always filled with fresh pomegranates

                   looted by her ancestors or

                   bought at Sotherby’s

                   for all the tea in China.

                   “I’m the poor cousin, the others got more

                   Come for dinner and you’ll see them all.”
I disliked her then, now I dislike her now

                   But it is Queen Victoria I should 更讨厌

                   throw rotten eggs

                   or spray Four bandits on the pedestal upon which

                   she sits in the park at the end of Great George Street.

                   ‘Looty’ was her Pekinese,

                   say it in Cantonese ‘北京狗!’
It is my boss, not Victoria, who wants me to eat beef stroganoff and polenta

                   off my ancestor’s plates.

                   sniff the potpourri she’s placed

                   in rhinoceros shell lined bottles

                   translate the inked poems

                   about ancient fish

                   and explain why the toad has red eyes

                   flared nose and only three legs
For dessert she will make a Pavlova in her new Bosch oven

                                 with fresh cherries, bruised seconds from local farms.
I usually pay to admire stolen goods, encased in glass cabinets,

                   national treasures and ancient clays I cannot afford to buy.

                   I’ve seen the Egyptian treasures, excavated

                   by the men who live in Downtown Abbey

                   “Your Chinese mouth would not touch these Chinese treasures

                   had we not salvaged history back to Portsmouth.

                   Look at what happened to the Temple of Ballashamin

                   the Giant Buddhas of Bamiyan!”
We have an understanding she and I.

                   I order pens, paper, ink cartridges and pantry supplies, soaps,

                   malted milk and chocolate biscuits

                   for children who attend our geriatric clinic.

                   I add two extra boxes of tampons

                   “For the patients of course”

                   I nod when she says, “People should  pay for their health care.”

                   because she gives me hour long-lunch breaks

                   and calls me “good boy.”

                   So I say “will come to dinner.”
I will see if Russian gravy taste better on centuries old porcelain plates

                   patterned by cobalt and manganese

                   and ingest the same trace elements as

                   imperial court nobles who ate 菜 off the

                   crockery when they were fresh out of the kiln.
But my cousin says that our people were the peasants who woke up early to

                   harvest grains of rice with our hands,

                   and we were foreigners to the forbidden city.

                   I ask him what I should wear to a meal with the descendants

                   drug dealers who poisoned a nation with opioids

                   rendered it sick

                   too yellow and diseased

                   to walk in leafy green meadows

                   when they could not cure their addiction to yum cha.
He says, “I will lend you my vest, cut from the uniform of a Song dynasty eunuch.

                 It does not fit me but it will indeed fit you.”
                                                  Perhaps

                                                                  Perhaps

                                                                                  Perhaps.
代 – ‘dai’ – era

更讨厌 – ‘geng tao yen’ – more hate

菜– ‘cai’ – food dishes

*北京狗– ‘Bei Jing Gao’ – Pekinese Dog but Cantonese pronunciation is ‘bah-ging gow’