Emma Shi
the customer is always right
customer asks where you’re from. you reply, auckland, and somehow he hears, start guessing, instead. he talks over you, japanese? you look japanese. are you japanese? you move over to the grill and turn all the knobs up to high heat. the flames reach out to you, tiger orange and desperate. bacon rinds curl up into carbon crisps. your three fried eggs are smouldering, but you leave them there, yolks beaming. until soot falls from your eyelashes, blushing your cheeks. until the sun turns away, saying that she’s seen enough.
customer says something unintelligible. you say, what? he says, do you know what that means? do you know? he is smiling so wide. he says, it means you are beautiful in chinese. he clashes the sounds together again in his mouth. you want to scrape the eyeliner off your big sloping monolids, like an avalanche down a mountain, then fall asleep to the cascading snow. you say sorry to your overflowing eyes. you say sorry to your mother.
customer says, you are not a new zealander. you think about walking out the back door and into the harbour. you would sizzle briefly, like a fire being put out. enveloped by water, you would be safe. you could drift facedown all the way back to the motherland, eyes closed as the fish nibble at your hair. but maybe the mermaids at the yellow river would still shake their heads, pinning your western accent down against your tongue. and then you would have to float all the way back here and clamber up onto the wharf, face dripping the pacific ocean.
Emma Shi was the winner of the National Schools Poetry Award 2013 and the Poetry NZ Prize 2017. Her work has appeared in Landfall, Poetry NZ Yearbook, Starling and Bitter Melon Press’ Stay Home Diary, and was included in Best New Zealand Poems 2017. Emma has self-published several chapbooks, including a picture book about a bear that lives on the moon.