my mother’s country

is so close to the equator

everything sticks

my saggy Cantonese

tightens to a snakelike coil

my clothes turn skin-clingy

every uncle ashing

into the gutter outside

an MRT station while

gossiping in Singlish

is a funhouse mirror

vision of all my maybe-futures
          the first time I came back here

          my bones hummed like a tuning fork

          possessed by a perfect frequency

          but I couldn’t read the music

          the room the pinyin

          on any of the gravestones

          in that garden where it seemed

          I’d arrived a decade too early

          or too late to pay my respects
having taught English for a decade

now I know that even handwriting

can carry an accent

the shape of scribed letters

bent irreversibly to the

curves of the mother tongue

being my mother’s son

I know I bear more of her marks

than numbers I can count to

in her language each of her

fingerprints a tiny labyrinth

that has taken me years to solve
          how can I make amends

          with a country who refuses even to look up

          from her phone when I am speaking to her

          how might I convince her soil

          to recognise my humming bones

          in her I am little more than

          a plume of cigarette smoke

          that lingers in the air

          like a string of impossible questions