The Secret Lives of the Dandelions: A Poem for the Refugees and Immigrants

Immigrants waiting to be transferred to Ellis Island, 1912
Library of Congress photo

During the height of the Trump Era, when anti-immigrant sentiments were not an exception but the norm, I sat down and wrote "The Secret Lives of the Dandelions." It's my tribute to my grandparents, who left their homes in Canton, China, so their children wouldn't perish in the famine and the Cultural Revolution; and to my parents, who brought me and my sister to the U.S. so we wouldn't have to grow up under a military regime in Burma. 

Today, refugees and immigrants continue to flee, seeking shelter from Putin's missiles, the lawless gangs of Honduras, political persecution in China, and civil war and starvation in Ethiopia, among others.

In her poem "Home," Somalian poet Warsan Shire, an immigrant from Kenya, wrote "No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark." It's important to remember that people didn't choose to be born in war-torn, famine-plagued, dictator-ruled countries. Through accident of birth, some of us ended up in these hellish places, and others in greener pastures, kinder shores. 

Today, as I celebrate America's Independence Day, I think of the millions desperately seeking a passage out of the shark's mouth. 

The Secret Lives of the Dandelions

Every day the winds of war
Brought dandelions to the New World,
Some arrived as pilgrims on the Mayflower,
Some as cargoes in slave ships,
Some as stowaways on the last chopper out of Saigon,
Some as tumbleweed across the border,
Some as orphans with no mother or paper,
As Einstein at 54, as Don Corleone at five,
As your grandfather at 95, as your grandmother at nine.

Some dandelions’ long march ended
In the kitchen sink of a takeout restaurant,
Polishing pots and pans for eight dollars an hour,
Patching up their battle scars from Tiananmen Square,
Pinching the corners of two-for-a-dollar dim sums,
Dreaming of the day their son would walk on Wall Street.

Others cooked up recipes
For Mandarin chicken, for hoisin sauce,
For beef dishes seasoned with the dust clouds of nomadic riders,
For fish fillet spiced with peppercorn, soothed with sighs,
While they stewed in their bunkbeds on Angel Island.

Some brought with them
Memories of a lost kingdom
That once stretched across the known world,
From west of the Ganga to east of the Golden Gate,
From the Bay of Bengal to grizzly Montana;
From time to time, they brew Moghul tea
In their communal apartment shared by three families,
In a room smaller than a piece of naan.

Some dandelions speak in thick accents,
Their tongue caught in the quarter pounders
They haven’t learned to swallow,
But listen carefully,
You’ll hear in their heartbeats
The Spring and Autumn Annals, 

The Dream of the Red Chamber,
The Bhagavad Gita and Rumi’s poetry;
And The Art of War in their breath.

Never forget
The dandelions that never made it
Because they didn’t have the right kind of visa,
The right skin color, or the right country of origin;
The ones that were tossed back into the tempest,
Into the tiger’s mouth and the bomb shelters,
Into the rocket rains and the traffickers’ den.

Imagine the gardens that would have grown
In the waving wheat fields and rolling dust clouds,
In the sparkling sands of the diamond desert,
In the endless skyways and the golden valleys,
In the redwood forest, in gulf stream waters,
In this land of you and me.

A group of people waved goodbye to the Statue of Liberty as they were deported, 1952
Library of Congress photo