Riversong
Sugar Land, TX
2025, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
Yuan Xiangying (my great-grandmother)
First, she learns how to baptize away the rot. Mother
River hisses against her lotus plum feet, kneading the
twisted nails and crushed knuckles and supple tissue as
if the current will mend the edges together. Needle and
all. The water is young, like a spring lamb wishing for
the warmth of a mother’s womb, and she averts her eyes
at the sight of her curdled flesh. It is not shame, but something
close. The air echoes with the thundering beat of trapped carp,
funeral drums against the chipped wood of the passing sampans.
She envies their silver tails, the unbroken silk, rippling mist
against the heat of a buzzing afternoon. She stares, and stares.
The fisherman does not care for the glistening eyes, the milky
tears running down his arm from the carp in his fist. He
hurls the runts and reeds back in with a religious devotion.
A talismanic fury. It is love. As Mother River drinks the
salt from slit gills and bloated bellies, the watcher prays,
once more, that his nets will not sever his wrists at the same
time she wishes the carp will sew together their scars and
thicken their arteries. To allow the blood-drunk water a
semblance of peace. An aching-like mourning.
Xie Taozhi (my grandmother, Yuan Xiangying’s daughter)
She awakens to the sound of thrumming feet hitting red
dirt and knows, at once, her husband has drowned. The
second sign is the unlit altar. Fermented rosewood purified
with bruised nectarines litter the feet of a gracious deity. That
karmic Godhead, that unrelenting surf. She catches glimpses
of the man who laid beside her the night before as she wades
through dripping rice paddies, the frothing current rising
to her knees, and hips, and stomach. When she finally spills
into open water, Mother River blesses her with half a cracked
mast discarded alongside a water-logged straw hat. A divine
kindness. She does not speak, only caresses the braided millet
stalks from a hat that smelled like dawn. The awk-awk-awks of
the river herons are thick enough to coat the sky as she begins
to shovel sodden clay into a heap. Then
a burial mound. Then a mountain. Mother River is staunched.
She does not realize until she wakes up the next morning, the
stench of blood river burned into her tongue, that the wailing
sullying the air is spilling from her own mouth.
Xu Chuandong (my father, Xie Taozhi’s son)
It is only after eleven years, while tumbling across the
ocean in a boiling metal cage, that he dares to remember
the afternoon he first met Mother River. It comes in
waves. Sandy fingers tucked between his. Wasp-bitten
ankles. The stream, humming with reproach. The stillness.
Then, the fall. How he lunged after the tiny foot swallowed
by the swell, dìdì1 clinging to his throat like a syrupy coffin.
Someone later whispers he had cried for his mother; shivering,
he realizes the water must have known he was not calling
for her. A glacial rage. Now, he is safe, he thinks. She cannot
reach him here. It is a sinful solace. The year after he flees,
Mother River floods one last time, devouring the millet and
rice fields until his mother and his mother’s mother cremate
their crops into a pillar of fire; the sun chokes under the weight
of its filth. Then, for the next twenty years, it is silent.
Xu Duojia
Mother River quivers in her slumber. Patience, the silver carps
murmur. Longing, the water retorts. The year of the Rooster is
auspicious, and the tides begin to swell in the south. When the
sky splits apart, the sun shrouded like a fleshy apricot pit, she
knows it has begun. Wind howls shriek for their estranged
daughter as churning arms grab for the retreating coastline. It
is a treacherous refoulement. The waves that carried her father
here now pool at her feet; for the first time, she listens as the
river speaks through her. She listens to the undulations, the soft
divulgence. For the first time, Mother River begins to talk. It is
less divine osmosis and more a confession, the way the memories
spill out, salty and raw:
The watery aftertaste of rot.
The desperate babbling of lips siphoning breath from my lungs.
Tiny fingers, clawing through me, trying to break the surface.
Girl, is your fury against the ocean?
Is your anger against the streams?
She listens, eyes mirroring the lapping waves. The burden of
recollection, of reunion, of recompense, ebbs and flows. A pair
of pock-marked hands rise from the swell, clasping her feet and
washing them with care. It washes, and washes. Perhaps the water
is mixed with tears. Under the wandering eyes of Mother River.
1dìdì: little brother
Reflection
Mother River is not a fictional goddess. She exists as the ever-flowing water encircling our Earth, and in my family’s story, she embodies the Yangtze River. For generations, my father’s side of the family built their lives in Wuhan, through the heart of which flows the mighty Yangtze. For generations, my ancestors shaped their futures in the yellow silt that lines her banks. I spent hours talking with my father about his family’s history, starting with him and going back to my grandmother and my great-grandmother. As story after story flowed through him, I feasted on decades worth of longing, of stability, of tragedy, and most poignantly, on the steadfast power of the Yangtze. Of my Mother River. This poem is not just a memoir of my family; it is the song of the Yangtze. It sings her mercy as a bubbling brook, her fury as a devouring flood, and her desperation as a hurricane. But even a goddess needs to rest; the Yangtze is now one of the most polluted rivers in the world. Perhaps it is time for us to rediscover our Mother River. Perhaps it is time for us to bring her to our lips and let her memories ripple through us. Perhaps it is time for us to listen.