You Cannot Resist Me When My Hair Is in Braids

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780814349427
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women Authors Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

In the aftermath of a messy divorce, Frances Kai-Hwa Wang writes in the hope of beginning to build a new life with four children, bossy aunties, unreliable suitors, and an uncertain political landscape. The lyric essays in You Cannot Resist Me When My Hair Is in Braids deftly navigate the space between cultures and reflect on lessons learned from both Asian American elders and young multiracial children, punctuated by moments rich with cultural and linguistic nuance. In her prologue, Wang explains, "Buddhists say that suffering comes from unsatisfied desire, so for years I tried to close the door to desire. I was so successful, I not only closed the door, I locked it, barred it, nailed it shut, then stacked a bunch of furniture in front of it. And now that door is open, wide open, and all my insides are spilling out." Full of current events of the day and #HashtagsOfTheMoment, the topics in the collection are wide ranging, including cooking food to show love, surviving Chinese School, being an underpaid lecturer, defending against yellow dildos, navigating immigration issues, finding love in a time of elections, crying with children separated from their parents at the border, charting the landscape of frugal/hoarder elders during the pandemic, witnessing COVID-inspired anti–Asian American violence while reflecting on the death of Vincent Chin, teaching her sixteen-year-old son to drive after the deaths of Trayvon Martin and George Floyd, and trusting the power of writing herself into existence. Within these lyric essays, some of which are accompanied by artwork and art installations, Wang finds the courage and hope to speak out for herself and for an entire generation of Asian American women.A notable work in the landscape of Asian American literature as well as Midwest and Michigan-based literature, You Cannot Resist Me When My Hair Is in Braids features a clear and powerful voice that brings all people together in these political and pandemic times.

A SUGGESTION OF SALT

RAVI SHANKAR AND FRANCES KAI-HWA WANG

Yes, Lycra can improve your performance,

But it feels so wrong to be putting on Under Armour with my Hawaiian print skirt for tonight’s poetry reading, let alone shoes.

As the leaves change and the first snow falls, I ask myself again, “Why am I here?”

My friends tease that I should turn on the heat, but they all have tenure. Already I feel the chill of the next few months rolling in.

No, you and I should be someplace restless and warm, eating papayas with lime, salt on our lips and sand in our toes.

It is an accident of history that we are here.

---

A historical accident that we are dropped in an unasked-for womb at an unexpected time, languishing on a coast

or in the heartland in one continent or another, instead of nestled in a condor’s nest.

Leaves turn to fire before they shrivel in the driveway to crunch like pages ripped from old books.

The Buddhists say that each instant our karma is ripening with respect to another, from seeds planted in another life,

tended in this one, until the fruit, musky and butter-like in its consistency, with peppery undertones in its innermost cavity,

falls to the ground, begging to be eaten. I would feed you chunks of such fruit if not for the fact of this distance.

---

Distance is not a fact; distance is a choice. Rama didn’t let a little thing like distance get in the way of going to Sita (although he then botched it with his insecurity).

Are you brave enough to risk what comes next for that moment of flame in my cheeks?

We have the technology—email, text, Twitter, Skype, Facebook, FaceTime, poetry—to create all the connection and distance we could want. Who needs karma? Google both our names together: we were connected before we even knew of the other’s existence.

Tonight, I turn off the computer, stuff my pockets with marigolds, and light the lamps from my room out my door down the path toward the river where the Canada geese take pause. If I float a diya down the river, I wonder if it will find its way to you by the sea.

Then all you have to do is follow the trail of lights on this dark night and walk with me until the moon returns.

It is as simple as clay, mustard oil, wick, and spark.

---

Imagine the lights are flags for the eyes to sing anthems to, a place to land a plane in the dark.

To tell you the truth, I was more into Hanuman myself, the monkey king carrying a mountain in one hand, a mace in the other,

His magnificent tail a rudder in the wind. He probably could have knocked Rama cold in a fist-fight but chose instead to serve him. I find that fascinating

When power acts against its own best interests. And what I wouldn’t do for a prehensile tail, one that could serve the purposes of another appendage, to grab

And coax that flame in your cheek to a blaze. I remain amazed at the way these simple letters can track miles and years, carrying

With it a part of you, a sliver of me, the essential core of us, the not-yet-happened and the imagined song, to a place of perpetual motion.

---

I was first told the stories of Hanuman in the Himalayas by people with no power, people amused by the powerful’s incompetence to identify a simple herb. I traded them stories of the mighty Sun Wu Kong, master of seventy-two transformations (except for his tail), fireproof, immortal, troublemaker, king, kept in line by a golden crown.

My grandfather gave me these stories in a cramped Ontario apartment when I was ten, yet I, too, once gave up my power for a golden crown and behaved in obedience to its pinch.

I follow the news of a young boy of color walking across your campus at Halloween, a sword across his back. I have the same sword, have walked across campus many times with it, practiced in the alley behind Philosophy with it. I did not know how lucky we are to be alive, merely arrested for other people’s fears, once again given away by our inability to transform our tails completely.

What kind of place is this that the son of a professor cannot walk across campus without police and SWAT teams being called? What kind of exercise is this that I am watching the real-time newsfeed and Twitter feed of some distant poet’s town? #CCSUlockdown

I look forward to your letters too much.

I wake up every morning at 3:30 a.m., too cold to sleep, too sleepy to work, so I reach for my phone in the dark to read your most recent poem again.

---

And then the gulf of time—does even the passage of a few weeks diminish the movement else add to the longing, making a fetish of it, sprinkling desire with a little juju, dollying it up with a dollop of abracadabra

the way a buffalo is a provider, the wolf a pathfinder, the bear a shaman and the mountain lion a warrior in certain Native mythologies. The emic attribution of value to an object like this keyboard with such swift currents

running from the mind to the fingertips to thoughts of you. Turns out the alleged shooter was a boy wearing a Halloween costume three days after the pagan celebration had been zealously candified. He had a samurai sword and a mask and a

fake AK because, well, why not? Isn’t that freedom of expression, or would he have been arrested if he wasn’t Black? And the Twitter flames fanned. And the dockets bred fear. Gave proof to the right that the frisk is still here.

Students alternately terrified and used to it, gun culture being part of their upbringing, this the third or fourth lockdown they had sat through in their young lives. What would Hanuman do? Instead, I’d like to leave this suggestion

of salt as a reminder for you.

---

There you are. I thought that you had disappeared.

Funny that you reappear today, on Thanksgiving Eve, just as I sauce my vegetarian ba bao sticky rice stuffing, my mother’s voice in my head, “Soy sauce is not salt!” Yet she would not approve this secret pinch of salt that you bring me, pink with ‘alaea clay and the caress of the sea.

Nor are any of my girlfriends impressed, as they hover in my kitchen debating the faults of all my suitors as if I weren’t here, dismissing you most disappointedly of all, “Mr. Monkey Tail.”

I have traveled through thousands of stories since last we were here in the space of this poem, now uncertain how to continue.

There is no debate or uncertainty among the civil rights activists sitting around my kitchen table. Here, where a nineteen-year-old girl of color, Renisha McBride, knocks on a door seeking help after a car accident in the night and gets shot in the face. Here, where community-wide vigils and protests are needed to arrest the white man who killed her. Here, where I review with my children again how to talk to strangers and police—don’t run, keep your hands visible, take off your hoodie, walk with a friend, be careful of the night—knowing full well that another Halloween past, sixteen-year-old Yoshihiro Hattori was wearing a white tuxedo while standing on the sidewalk with a white friend in the afternoon when he was shot and killed, the white man acquitted, his fear of the Other understandable.

My children nonchalantly explain to my friends the secret codes and annoying protocols of school lockdowns while in another room their teenage girlfriends squeal over a latest crush, and there you are at the door, with a song and a kiss of salt in your hands.

---

Monkey tail indeed! You know in some versions of the Ramayana, like in Bandung & West Java, Indonesia, Hanuman is the hero. Not Rama. This simian dazzling in anklets is not slavishly devoted to his master but has an army of acolytes of his own to worship him although the reason he is so revered is because he was brave and humble. Did you know that the name Hanuman comes from the Sanskrit hang- which means “chin” and mat- which means “excellent.” So literally he was the “one with the awesome chin,” like some Superman screen star with whorl of lock on his forehead. Really it is because he survived a blow from Indra. But I’ll demur and grin to see if the shape of my imagined jawbone might just conjure your hand.

Still many don’t know that he had another name also—Maruti, or “born of the wind.” OK so now I’m going to get real desi-geek on you and drop it like it’s doxa or at least a hot dosa off the griddle, a dosage of the dopest saga till Sega went gaga with Sonic at least according to some priestly sorts, the ones who wear white linen even in the video arcade. The ones who bathe in the river. I’m talking about mad skillz this Ravana-stomper had: anima, to shrink (in the pond we’d wound up on); maxima, to expand (swelling with slippery touch); lagima, to become weightless (waist a sail, ankles spurs); garma, to grow planetary in size (keening plums, thrumming tongues); brapti, teleportation and celestial acquisitiveness (inside the outer layer, unpeeling with forefinger and thumb); parakmya, irresis...