Art by Heather Green
1. The Estate
The yard is vast, a park held in private hands. A tennis court, a pool, an outdoor bar breathing the expensive scent of sandalwood.
She returns from a run, hauling a bloated body and hair tangled like a thicket.
An eight-year-old boy slips from his room—eyes heavy with a century’s fatigue, arms thin as bamboo stalks.
He snatches a bottle of water and vanishes back to the blue light of an online chess class.
Outside the window, a birdhouse sits, offering grain to a sky that has moved on.
She stares at me, eyes a sudden, fractured panic.
How did you get in?
The party, I say. He said the others are coming.
She nods, tightening the knot of her messy hair. She turns, letting the shadows of the high ceiling swallow her whole.
2. The Inheritance
You return after years to measure me. A joke about my weight, a casual probe: Are you pregnant again?
My body, to you, is merely a vessel for your lineage.
You colonize my kitchen, rearranging the spoons, the knives, the salt—mapping your order onto my private chaos.
You discard my sweets like contraband, calling them poison for your granddaughter.
Then, the red envelope.
Thick with cash—the heavy price of my submission.
I collapse into a grief you cannot fathom, but you watch with the clinical eye of a statue.
To you, my four-year-old is a draft to be corrected; you demand mathematics for a soul still learning to breathe.
She was laughing until she saw you. Now she runs, and you stand there, stranded in your own bewilderment.
Among the silk dresses and the curated photos, I watch you pack your things—folding the disappointment, tucking it neatly into the corners of your suitcase.
3. The Burial of Summer
Once, I held a brush. In the park, the water was not water—it was a kaleidoscope, a riot of colours blooming across the stillness.
He called it a distraction. A hollow path. So I laid down the light and picked up the ledger.
I chose the commerce of the safe, the practical, the steady rhythm of a desk that pays for its own silence.
Now, the years are a flat horizon. Each Christmas, I flee to the tropics, chasing a sun that cannot thaw the permafrost growing beneath my ribs.
I am well-fed, well-clothed, yet I wear a face of ash—a mask fused to the skin.
On my birthday, I stare at the candles.
The flame waits for a wish I no longer possess.
My hunger was discarded decades ago, thrown into a bin in the midsummer heat when I was ten.
I still miss it—not the brush, but the girl
who believed the lake could be purple.
Carmen Zong is a Toronto-based writer who grew up in the industrial pulse of middle-class Shanghai. Working as an office worker by day, she dedicates her nights to diverse creative practice spanning fiction and children’s literature. In her poetry, she specifically focuses on the thin veil of middle-class respectability, unearthing the hypocrisies and diaspora struggles that persist across generational divides. Her poetry acts as a bridge and a barrier, capturing the exhaustion of a contemporary diaspora experience caught between the weight of tradition and the relentless mechanics of urban survival.