My po po tells me to marry a woman who speaks Cantonese,

a warning against miscegenation with western devils.
This fence she draws around family is the outer limit

by which I am to understand myself defined
but what if when I grow up I’m the one teaching them English:

when to use a period and when a semicolon, how to demarcate
clauses that hedge against one another like shifting land borders

or the odd spellings of their drifted words, i.e. i before e
except in weird, conceit, and deceive? A kowtow, maybe,

but if gwei loh is the extent of the Cantonese I retain
and in their language I devise a voice more expansive

than could ever be afforded me elsewhere, who’s bowing
to who? What does it matter if I assimilate their speech

more deeply than the pinyin of my own Chinese name?
If po po had the answers, she took them with her when she passed.

Not that I could read a note written in her hand. I measured
every minute at Saturday school, determined to learn

nothing. I scrubbed all my Mandarin tones from my tongue.
She might have guessed I’d be so stubborn, but not

what I’ve grown to regret: my lack of her language? No,
just that I was made to choose at all between beige and foreign,

between Sheila and geisha, between my language and me.