The Mechanisms of Doorknobs
BY Eileen Chong
I am six years old / I was born in November / I am in the last class / My form teacher is Mrs Aw / I write with a pencil / I do not know how to spell orange / how do you say zebra-crossing in Mandarin / I was caught thinking of cheating at the test / I want to eat hot soup at recess time / the bowl is red the noodles are yellow the fishballs are white / I don’t like vegetables yet / the auntie cuts a hard-boiled egg in half with a fishing line / it is like magic / I could watch her all day long / when I grow up I will learn about lots of things / a ring of green around the yolk means the egg is overcooked / Serious Eats can be way too serious / I once knew the names of all the moons of Jupiter / it seems silly now to remember so much that is so useless / it is true I am impatient with prose / there are many rules that poetry can circumvent / I cannot pretend to understand or make sense of everything that happens to me / anything can happen in a poem like in a dream / but some poems are nightmares / especially the rhyming ones / someone you don’t know chases you down a dark corridor / no end in sight / da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM / you mustn’t stop running / your heart nearly explodes / I recently read a novel I actually wanted to read / then I read another / they were both very good although they were very different / by very good I mean I wanted to keep on reading / the first gave me a headache every time I picked it up / the mark of its genius was how I kept hearing the voice in my head even after I’d put the book down / writing is a kind of possession / some writers can animate your thoughts seemingly against your will / though I suppose you could always just stop reading / the second book I read was very quiet / all I could think of was how the mother of the main character was so unlike my own / if it had been my mother in the novel she would have shouted non-stop / by which I mean her voice would have been loud regardless of what she might have been saying / I have heard my mother speak softly once or twice before / maybe she was at the tax office or at the hospital / so I know she is capable of it / at least in theory / remember you cannot talk at all during chapel or the teachers will get you / but you are allowed to read the Bible in your lap / too bad it is quite boring / except for the sex bits / the withdrawal method is unreliable unlike my maths grades / nothing ever seems to add up / why do some people get to write about other people then get upset when the people they write about write back / ha ha / it is about power of course / my ex-therapist said it was obvious / no one wants to be told they are wrong / especially when they are wrong / it is far easier to double down and dig in / sometimes a poem is a window and sometimes a poem is a mirror and sometimes a poem is a threshold and at all times poems are lies / all writing is facsimile / a lot of art is about elevating the mundane because life is mundane and people who are alive necessarily have to go through the mundane again and again until they die / yes I very much like the work of Do Ho Suh / the video reminds me of that strange movie in which the characters had to jam the lift between floors and force the doors open / did you hear about the private after-hours party sponsored by some big corporation / someone got drunk and fell through part of the sculpture / the artist declined to comment / we do not know if the artwork was insured / because of these rich cunts I missed out on viewing the installation as it had been intended by the artist / I wonder what it was like before the museum removed the damaged sections / I guess I will never know / oh wait you bought the catalogue / when we were there in person I looked very carefully at the gauze and wire replicas of bolts and hinges / light switches and wires / the mechanisms of doorknobs / distinct components of the fire extinguisher / remember the embroidered magna carta laid out like a runner across the total length of the gallery once / obviously not the same artist because you know / I spoke to my friend about it / she said it was exploitative because they used prison labour / 36 unnamed prisoners incarcerated across 13 prisons did the bulk of the sewing / some famous individuals stitched choice words like freedom and liberty and common people / I was ashamed I had not realised that grossness immediately / though I did feel sick to my stomach after / I read about how prisoners in Jinxiang are forced to peel garlic cloves with their fingernails / until those crumble and then they have to use their teeth / who can afford domestically grown garlic / at least skin the imported bulbs yourself / the smell leaves a trail like an uncleared cache / rub your fingers across the back of a stainless steel spoon under running water / no real way to remove the odour / Gao Rong I love her work / she was born in Inner Mongolia / her family were from Shaanxi / they were forced to relocate / they used to be landowners you see / her grandmother traded craft for survival / seven children raised on needle and thread / the billionaire must have multiple hangars filled to the brim with this stuff / I could not believe my eyes / her grandparents’ home and its contents reproduced in fine handiwork / floor tiles / full-scale kang / flowered quilts / peeling paint / rusty pipes / stove and wok / spatula and scoop / photographs in frames / thermoses with peonies / a pair of enamel mugs / washing machine and calendar and wall clock / mirrors and windows and doors / each fibre a memory / an infinite spool of remembrance / Do Ho Suh reconstructed his stove and toilet and sink and pipes / a red stairway floating up to a complete floor of somewhere other than here / his childhood home encased in layers of mulberry paper and charcoal-rubbed in its entirety / rubbing is a kind of loving / loving is a method of living / poetry is a way to contain time / writing is a type of fixity / artists recreate and reorder and replicate / the kitchen sink with its padded dishes / fish bones sutured on an oval plate / triptych of the bus station sign / cash strings of cryptic codes / unfired clay of the squat toilet / unfinished basin and dripless tap / not all art is beautiful but truth can make it so / find what you have to do / do it as well as you can / keep on doing it / for as long as is possible / our hands press up against the glass / make your mark / bloodless palms leave indecipherable smudges / we scroll past and past / our mosaic of faces blur into one / you cut up many flags / unpick new meanings from them / flowers are an external manifestation of sex / details are parts of the whole we cannot possibly fathom / it’s nearly time / the laundry basket is overflowing / the ironing pile must be gotten through / you know you buy less when you shop on foot without a trolley / but my hands hurt from carrying the bags / remember I broke my foot recently / no poems have been accepted this week / someone dropped out of the session so you could attend for free / who would pay to talk about white privilege to a roomful of whites / Chinese waiters serve us Chinese food / no one eats the roast duck leg because it would be too messy / would anyone notice if I wrapped it in a napkin and put it in my bag for later / what goes around doesn’t always come around / karma is a chameleon / I push the glistening drumstick away on the lazy susan / byebye / bye / bye
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Notes
The poem is, in part, a response to the artworks listed below:
Do Ho Suh’s My Home/s Vertical (2014-2019), the Hub series, in particular Hub: Unit G5, 23 Wenlock Road, Union Wharf, London N1 7SB, UK (2015), Stove, Apartment A, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA (2013), Toilet, Apartment A, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA (2013), Basin, Apartment A, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA (2015), Staircase III (2010), Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home (2013-2022), Floor (1997-2000), and Who Am We? (Multicoloured) (2000); Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich (1999); Cornelia Parker’s Magna Carta: An Embroidery (2015); Gao Rong’s The Static Eternity (2012), Level 1/2, Unit 8, Building 5, Hua Jiadi, North Village (2010), Station (2011), and Some Days Later (2015); Lin Zhi’s Afraid of Water (2013); Raquel Ormella’s Australia Rising #2 (2009), New Constellation No. 1 (2013), and Wealth for Toil No. 1 (2014).
I also make reference to Gao Rong’s interview with Luise Guest on Artist Profile, which can be found here: https://artistprofile.com.au/gao-rong/, and to the title of the song ‘Karma Chameleon’ (1983) by Culture Club.
Eileen Chong is a poet of Hakka, Hokkien, and Peranakan descent. She is the author of nine books. Her work has shortlisted for numerous awards, including twice for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. Her next poetry collection, We Speak of Flowers, is forthcoming with UQP in 2025. She lives and works on the unceded lands of the Gadigal people. eileenchong.com.au