Green Onions
by Chen Li
translated by Chang Fen-Ling
Mother bade me to buy some green onions.
I passed Nanking Street, Shanghai Street,
and Chiang Kai-shek Road (which sound strange
nowadays), and then I reached
Chung-hua Market.
I said in Taiwanese to the vegetable saleswoman,
“I want to buy some green onions!”
She handed me a bunch of green onions smelling of mud.
When I got home, I heard the Holland peas in the basket
telling Mother in Hakka dialect that the green onions were brought home.
I sipped the Japanese soup in the morning as if sucking Mother’s breast
and took it for granted that miso shiru was my mother tongue.
I ate the pan bought from the bakery every evening,
not knowing that I was eating the bread with Portuguese pronunciation.
I put the scrambled eggs into my lunch box, put my lunch box into my satchel,
and ate my lunch stealthily after every class.
The teacher taught us music, the teacher taught us Chinese,
the teacher taught us to sing “Counter-attack, counter-attack, counter-attack the Chinese mainland,”
The teacher taught us arithmetic:
“If each national flag contains three colors,
how many colors then do three flags have?”
The class leader said there were nine, the vice-leader said three,
the green onion in my lunch box said one.
“Because,” it said,
“Whether in the soil, in the market, or in the scrambled eggs with dried radish,
I am the green onion,
the Taiwanese green onion.”
I traveled around with the empty lunch box smelling of green onion.
The noise in the market called my name zealously in the box.
I struggled over the Brahmaputra River, the Bayenkala Mountains,
and the Pamirs (which don’t sound unusual
at all now),
then I reached the Green-Onion Mountain Range.
I said in Taiwanese Chinese, “I want to buy some green onions!”
The vast Green-Onion Mountain Range gave no answer.
There was no green onion in the Green-Onion Mountain Range.
All of a sudden I am reminded of my youth.
Mother is still at the door waiting for me to bring back green onions.
Translator’s note:
Taiwan has been coveted by many countries since ancient times. It was visited by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, colonized by the Dutch and the Spanish in the seventeenth century. After that, it was governed by Zheng Chen-kong and the Manchus. In 1895, it was ceded to Japan, which ruled over it for fifty-one years until the Kuomintang government took it over in 1945. Under the reign of so many different rulers, the culture of Taiwan has undergone the process of mixture and assimilation.
Miso shiru is a kind of Japanese soup flavored with miso, a food paste made of soybeans, salt, and, usually, fermented grain; pan in Taiwanese means “bread,” yet it is actually a word borrowed from Portuguese. Scrambled eggs with dried radish is a typical Taiwanese dish flavored with green onion.
The Bayenkala Mountains, in the eastern Tibetan Highlands, are where China’s two longest rivers, the Yangtze River and the Yellow River, originate. The Green-Onion Mountain Range (the Pamirs are part of it) is a mountain range in southwestern Sinkiang, known as the ridge of Asia. The journey of buying green onions can be seen as a process of returning to the native land. “There was no green onion in the Green-Onion Mountain Range” because the poet has come to realize that his roots are in Taiwan.
