“trout lake” wins best motion picture
Mountain View, CA
2025, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
They told me it was the apocalypse,
so I wore wài pó’s wedding dress,
drove four hours to the forest to pray
beneath a bleeding sky. She used to say
she was born among sequoias, not in Taiwan—
swam with slippery trout instead of riding city buses
reeking of cigars. Once, we packed a picnic—
sweet bottled juice, pork dumplings, pickled radish—
and let our feet sink into the mud.
Wài pó would tell me stories:
about the redwood she once slept in,
how brush fire had hollowed its body,
how she fed acorns to an unnamed squirrel
when it snowed, her fingertips turned purple.
*
They told me it was the apocalypse,
so I cupped ash from the river,
drank deep, pretended the acidity
came from lumpy green bitter melon, the kind
wài pó swore would clear our blood.
I watched trees bow into flame, spines collapsing
like my old picture books of
Taiwanese nursery rhymes. In my dreams,
I trace soot onto my eyelids, smoky eye shadow,
ready for the red carpet unfurling behind me.
*
It’s funny—wài pó dreamt of being a movie star—
Hollywood, jade earrings, fluorescent lights.
So I pretend that I am filming, that these
scorched woods are a set and
Oscar-winning special effects—that the smoke I breathe
is dyed vapor, that the squirrel in my hands is CGI,
not wài pó’s dead best friend. That this cinder-stained
wedding dress is a costume, that the sky is only scarlet
on screen, and I’m not really trampling embers in high heels—
that my children someday will picnic in this forest,
beneath sequoias that never fell.
I keep rehearsing until my movements are practiced,
but I’m still crying in the lake with the trout,
washing charcoal from my face, my nail beds,
and no one ever calls cut.
Translation:
wài pó – maternal grandmother
Reflection
When I was seven, my wài pó (grandmother) and I took a road trip to Sonoma County to see the sequoias. We picnicked in a quiet clearing as she told me stories of her childhood in Taiwan and her dreams of becoming a movie star in America, about how these Californian woods took her breath away, how this forest made her feel more at home after she immigrated to America in her twenties with just a suitcase. Only three months later, that forest was destroyed in the 2017 Sonoma Complex Fires. I still remember the smoke, how the landscape from my memories was reduced to cinders. It’s difficult to watch my state burn annually, each fire erasing more of what once felt permanent. It’s scary how tragedies (large and small) become only a statistic. This poem emerged from memories in those woods—of loss disguised as performance, of grief rendered cinematic. “trout lake wins best motion picture” is a reflection on climate disaster, memory, and the illusions we create to cope with irreversible damage. Through this poem, I hope to challenge readers to question the narratives we use to normalize destruction—and to remember that behind every wildfire, every collapsing ecosystem is someone’s story, someone’s grandmother, someone’s forest turned to ash.