- Poem to bless the bananas that bless my day.

(bright music) You, banana, lying down everywhere in the city because you carry 14 months of blue sky and sunshine in your body.

A comma telling me, come on, slow down, and suddenly, I don't know what on means because I take little words for granted.

But every banana knows, tiny words have the most power.

- Love love for love.

- Hearing them said from inside fruit baskets, meal trays, and altars, before and after prayers, before and after passings.

(audience applauding) It never occurred to me to become a poet.

Ever since I dropped out of high school, I worked in retail, desk jobs, and even in geology trying to figure out how to be in the world.

And out of all the things I did, writing poetry was the only thing that ever felt honest to me.

I started writing poems on Yelp because for me it was really important to have my readers be anyone who normally wouldn't read a poem.

(bright music) To my ma who only ordered dim sum as the street carts rolled out of the kitchen.

That timing, a way of knowing good from bad, a way of knowing what's well hidden.

(bright music) I remembered to eat my almost bad, week old broccoli, still trying to bloom into a June day bouquet.

And it's sad to be 90 broccoli years, doom for taste, but also doom for my desire for fried chicken from Lincoln's on 125th, where every wing and thigh has a bit of fire.

Even the potato wedges get with the spices and chicken grease, dear reader.

Is your heart running like my heart is running?

Do you agree that hunger is a teacher and this abundant oil is just stunning?

Childhood memories in need of fine gloss, now, heart, call back blood in times of great loss.

Can I have one pork shoulder lemongrass banh mi?

(clerk speaking indistinctly) - Yeah.

I remember looking for Vietnamese takeout places.

As I was scrolling through the reviews, I saw one that was very hateful.

For me, it was very important to educate people while letting them know, to me, this is authentic and I wanna show you why.

I was born in the US, but they say I'm not American because my parents were born in Vietnam, troi oi.

But they say they are not Vietnamese because my grandparents were born in China, but they say they are not Chinese, taihi haila.

How dare they use English words on their menu.

That's not authentic.

How dare you say that this is number three, when it is obviously cha gio.

Might as well call it minced pork sausage, or the dead men in our families.

How dare they have absolutely no comfortable seating.

That's not authentic!

America is rich and dreamy, with infinite spaces to steal.

(bright music) A lot of the respected poetry that I grew up with was about nature, and that was what I was told in classes.

Write about deer, write about the trees.

I didn't realize that I was writing from a place of being educated by white men.

So I think it took a lot of time for me to understand that it was okay to write about my experiences and my felt environment, and my own memories of where I grew up.

My parents arrived as refugees in Westminster, California in 1981.

I grew up watching them sew elastic waistbands into polyester pants.

Hours would go by without a single word between my parents and me.

One rare memory my dad shared was that American soldiers set his entire neighborhood on fire.

Lacking structure, I will say what I need to say.

My family fell apart for no good reason, and for no bad reason.

It was the speed of being poor, genes turning off, a fire turning on droughts, memories folding and unfolding across generations, like mountain ranges, pushing up from the torn earth, molding distance by land and by air.

What changes the voice of a father from a father to a stranger?

It is the one question I've been trying to answer for half my life.

(pensive music) When I was 14, my dad thought I stole a boy's bicycle, so he stopped talking to me.

To him, I was a bad daughter who made bad decisions.

My dad treated my mom and siblings the same way.

My mom was so submissive and compliant with my father's wishes for most of my memories as a child, and so when she became angry, I wrote the poem about menopause as a way to understand her, since we weren't speaking with each other.

(pensive music) - Now blood comes out of her mouth with every no, she makes the 10,220th meal for dad.

Too salty, too bland.

Too bad, her silence says.

All the chicken blood wasted in the lidded trash can.

Perfectly good blood to draw circles around the wrong words.

Bad wife, bad mother, bad cook, bad cleaner, bad person.

Here she is, making another meal.

Now she's on the ground to see the dust she can't see, without glasses she doesn't have.

Now she is thinking about flowers, all the ones she never got from dad.

Her chicken blood moves her to the flower store.

She buys potted orchids with all of the grocery money.

(steady music) I spent a lot of time thinking about what my parents went through.

I wonder if they've ever been curious about what I went through.

I don't think my dad ever understood that he put a lifelong wedge between me and my siblings.

(steady music) (bright music) I think many private experiences and taboo questions that we hold in ourselves are really hard to say out loud.

One thing that has been very unexpected, but also empowering is writing poetry to ask really hard questions and give voice to things that really want to be heard.

- No more hate!

No more hate!

No more hate!

No more hate!

No more hate!

- This is my sincerest honor to pass the mic to Cindy T.. - [Cindy] On the day of the vigil for the Atlanta Spa shooting, I felt so scared and overwhelmed.

It was like a string that just kind of pulled me to the vigil, from bed to the podium.

True American sentences.

One, he looks at my name tag and asks, "What's your real name?"

I tell him that Cindy is what's printed on my birth certificate.

"What's your middle name?"

My.

"I knew it was in there somewhere."

Two, on Franklin Avenue, he bumps into me and says, "Watch where you're going."

Three, I stand at a bus stop and an old man turns to me: "I fought in 'Nam.

You're here because of me."

Four, on Grand, he bumps into me and shoves me to the side.

Five, in an Ikea parking lot, I yield.

He signals me to roll down the window of my U-Haul truck, laughs.

"Not too bad for an Asian woman."

And speeds away.

I remember getting really choked up because it brought back so many memories from my own life.

I remember seeing people crying and being stunned that it wasn't just me.

I wasn't the only one.

When people think of an Asian woman, they don't imagine an angry woman.

And I wanted to help people be unafraid, to be angry.

We are full humans who have a full range of emotions.

People should learn to see us as full people.

(bright music) The book I'm working on now is about the long-term estrangement in my family and the fragility of forgiveness.

It doesn't offer closure, but invites us to make meaning from the family stories we leave out.

- [Hung] You remember this picture?

How old do you think you were in here?

- [Cindy] Two years old?

I vaguely remember it because even though I'm older, I remember picking you up and you said "Uppy."

(Hung and Cindy laughing) - [Cindy] Writing about our family and specifically about my experience with estrangement has been really cathartic.

It's like, being able to say so much with just a few words and capture it emotionally with an image and not feeling pressured to be factual or biographic.

- Yeah, I mean, it saddens me and like, it hurts me a lot to know that, you know, you had to go through all these things when we were growing up, and maybe a lot of it was either I was maybe kind of oblivious or not as supportive as I could have been, but I'm glad at least we're talking about it now and trying to do the best we can to help ourselves and help each other.

- Once, I heard a monk say, "We need a path, not to go from here to there, but to go from here to here."

A really good poem will always meet you where you're at.

So I hope to write poetry that will meet people exactly where they're at and it will give them exactly what they need, when they're reading it.

(bright music) When I woke up, the ground moved back and forth, like this poem, asking, is this forgiveness?

A rock shakes like a river to remember it was once fire or dust.

(bright cello music) You, banana, lying down everywhere in the city because you carry 14 months of blue sky and sunshine in your body.

A comma telling me, come on, slow down.

And suddenly, I don't know what on means because I take little words for granted.

But every banana knows tiny words have the most power.

Hearing them said from inside fruit baskets, meal trays, and altars, before and after prayers, before and after passings.

(bright cello music)