(May Lee is a Hmong American writer living in St. Paul, Minnesota. She received her B.A. in English from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is a former recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, a former participant of the Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series in Creative Non-Fiction, and a former participant in the Playwright Center’s Many Voices Program. Currently, she is working on a play project through Mu Performing Arts’ New Performances Program and is developing a 10-minute play through the Dab Neeg Project at the Center for Hmong Arts and Talent. She has previously been published in To Sing Along the Way: MN Women Poets From Pre-Territorial Days to the Present; Bamboo Among the Oaks: Creative Writing by Hmong Americans; and Paj Ntaub Voice.)

What I Brought to America

I brought a wallet-sized black and white photo of me
Only a few months old
My chubby cheeks nestled against my mother’s thin frame
An anonymous hand holds a sign slashed in front of us
Like a bar latching a gate
Perhaps like a criminal taking a mug shot
Scrawled on the sign is my name, already distorted in English
An unidentifiable number beneath us

I brought a faded grayish-green cloth
With a flower pattern reminiscent of dandelions
My mother said she used it to wrap around the infant me
I clung onto that cloth until I was seven or eight
My security blanket
Thin, light
I let go of it only because my mother said
It would fall apart otherwise

I brought a diseased leg
My parents said I had mob rwj
Rwj can mean a boil, ulcer, or abscess
I still don’t know which it was
I only imagined that perhaps the Red Cross clinics had cut it out
Given me medicine at the very least
My dad did say it almost cost us our trip to America
Twenty-six years later, I finally asked what happened
“We told them nothing,” he said. “We pretended there was nothing wrong with you.”

Correspondence from Laos

Come in the form of
cassette-recorded letters
sent by relations known only to us kids by name

They send their stories recorded on tape
because they cannot write
says my mother

In nearly every letter, the messages are the same

How is your family doing?
We are so poor
Please send us money
We miss you
Don’t forget us

Though the cassettes are wrapped in plastic
they are vulnerable in the hands of little children
who rip out the frail, brown tape
containing updates about a nephew’s marriage
an uncle’s death
an aunt’s plea for us to remember them

Even when my mother uses a pen to ravel the tape
back into the cassette
it never sounds the same
Parts of the story are skipped
Static ensues
Until we can only fall back to memory to record their words in our minds

Nearly thirty years after we have left Laos
my father hands me a cassette tape in the car
Play this for me, he says
And it occurs to me that I can’t
because I haven’t owned a tape player in ten years

I wonder how he will find a machine
that corresponds to the stories recorded in his hands

Alien

The school wants some form of identification
At twelve, I have no state ID, no license

My father holds up my elementary school ID
We need something more official, says the lady

How about a birth certificate?
I don’t have one

Who doesn’t have a birth certificate?
She turns to my father

How did you document that she was born?
My father and I look at each other
wondering if we should go into all the details of Laos, Thailand, and the camps
She asks for my name and I give it to her

pronouncing each syllable like a first-grader learning to sound things
She asks me where I was born and when I say Thailand

She asks if I’m Thai
I shake my head

She asks if I’m a citizen and when I say no
She whispers, Are you illegals?

This must have reminded my father of something
because he pulls out his wallet and starts looking through it

Then he finds a card and hands it to the lady
What is that? she asks

And I already know what it is before my father tells her
It is my alien card