University of Northern Iowa

The Most Selfish DesireAuthor(s): Mark HarrisonSource: The North American Review, Vol. 291, No. 1 (Jan. - Feb., 2006), p. 34Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25127523 .

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N A R

MARK HARRISON

The most selfish desire

this boy's known was for a girl

bent over

a toilet bowl

she just sat on,

throwing up

wine

she just drank?

her naked panties

pulled down

around her thin ankles,

my bare open hand

barely touching the thin shirt on her back.

She was beautiful

then, and I loved her

for it.

It was the least I could do.

MAIJA RHEE DEVINE

Chinese Bride, 1999

Before Mao, women

waddled on mummied, shrunken

feet, blew honey-red smiles from behind

screens, flashed thighs through slits in silk qipao, coaxed

their voices to tweak like satin tearing,

boy-baby machines,

little-emperor incubators.

After Mao, Not enough

college money even for one

son!

A high school diploma good enough for a girl! A Nanjing daughter obeys, beheads

her dream of college, serves it on a tray to her younger brother,

Suowei, meaning "Our future depends on

you."

A forty-watt bulb dangles over

the daughter home-schooling herself

after daily bank work, seven years.

She's slipped her silver and gold into

the wrinkled palms of her mother, into her brother's tuition piggy bank as she'd done as a ten-year-old

her five fen, candy money from her father

into her brother's pocket, while he napped. Why would a little girl do that?

Mountain-spring love, some say.

Conditioned to sacrifice, others say. For herself cynics say, her brother will gallop to her, if her husband fails.

The year she wins her degree-by-exam,

the Year of the Sheep, she lights incense to Buddha,

scorning a red kneeling cushion silk-tasseled at corners,

grinds her knees on the oak, a hard thanksgiving for a hard-earned heaven. She bows, both

her hands on the floor, palms skyward, and toward lotus blossoms around the dais.

On the eve of her wedding, she commits to memory every

line of a book, to earn

a scholarship to mei guo, America, the Beautiful Country, where money and fame trees grow for women, too.

On the wedding night her handsome groom asleep,

gardenia blossoms in her hair, she eases her head on a pillow, a big thick tome.

34 NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW January-February 2006

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