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Jeffrey Woodward

The Girl from Shanghai

gazing intently 
at the many pointed rays
of these starry emblems
no less than the sown heavens 
the chicory in bloom 

That is where I first observed Mei Lin, there on a midsummer day in a city park, a young Chinese girl with my son of like age, fellow resident of his at the group home, similarly troubled but with the added barrier of language. No one spoke her native Mandarin at the residence and Mei Lin had only a smattering of English at her command. 

That is where they stood, my son and the young girl from Shanghai, surrounded on all sides by that pale blue sprinkling of flowers that clings to the shoulder of a road, to the cracked macadam of an out-of-the-way or dead-end alley, to the vacant or abandoned lot, to the waste places and disturbed sites of transient human habitation.

I first discovered Mei Lin some days earlier in a spiral notebook left open on my son’s bed. Page after page of meticulous but masculinely drawn Chinese characters were there underlined by an English paraphrase in a feminine hand—the girl from Shanghai teaching my son Mandarin, my son teaching the girl English.  

No one at the home could tell me how or when Mei Lin had arrived. Everyone agreed that she did so in her current state. Her world was elsewhere—not in North America, certainly, and perhaps not in Shanghai. Her world was my son’s, and my son’s was hers: for the time being—in the heat of a summer day, under a cloudless sky, there with the wildflowers.

a wayfarer
or stowaway
from Eurasia
the chicory is blue on
either side of the road 

Editor’s Note: First published in Modern English Tanka (Summer 2008)

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About the Author

The founder of Haibun Today, Jeffrey Woodward has been a leading voice in the haibun and tanka prose community. His books include Evening in the Plaza (haibun and haiku), Another Garden (tanka writings), and The Tanka Prose Anthology.