I wrote this for Thien Minh Ly, who was killed in a hate crime. There are links to essays about his life and his death below. I didn't know him, but I imagined him as an older brother - transposing what i've read of his life with the times I spent with my older siblings when I was a kid. Link to Article Another Article Thien Minh Ly You could have been my brother. Thien Minh Ly, you shared a fraction of my first name, a vessel of soil from Viet Nam which we were born to outgrow, uproot, and find once again. Stabbed over two dozen times, kicked in the head again and again by two white men who called you Jap and bragged about it. You could have been my brother. The good looking older brother that everyone liked, the tennis player and scholar who loved your awkward younger brother, sneaking me champagne at the Da Vu's, singing along with the beautiful Ca Si's as they crooned, making your suit snap in a cha cha or tango, giving me quarters to play Ms. Pac Man. You could have been my brother, taking care of me amongst a throng of your friends while ma and bo were at one of their jobs. We could have sat, a nightmare platoon, in late night restaurants, laughing at white people cuz the only time they dressed as well as us was for special occasions, like Prom, and no matter how hard they tried they'd never look as good. Vietnamese and English swarming like angry bees till we couldn't tell the difference, putting up with free refills of stank coffee while daydreaming of ca phe sua da, we yellow people lost between the white of the salt and the black of the pepper eating french fries and telling ghost stories while the waiter wishes we'd just go home. Thien Minh Ly, Vietnamese American, honors student, double major in English and Biology, UCLA, masters in physiology and biophysics in one year at Georgetown, handsome Vietnamese Student Association leader, poet who started a Vietnamese newsletter. Dead. A red exclamation point in Tustin. It doesn't matter if they killed you because you were too dark or too bright. You didn't die for us to learn, we've learned this lesson many times before. And no one is talking about you. They want to bury you twice. You were my brother, one of many that I will never meet. A family of ghosts: Thanh Mai, Naoki Kamijima, Tony Pham, Won Joon Yoon, Mukesh and Kanu Patel, Thung Phetakoune, 8 year old Jean Kar-Har Fewel's raped body hangs from a North Carolina tree. And still they try to enlarge our family: a Hmong home is burnt down in Manitowoc, Asian women raped and murdered by American GI's in Okinawa, Korea, by good ol' American boys in Spokane, Chicago, Cornell. My love is burning, slowly, from me till only a wisp of smoke curls, fills my nostrils, incense to those who passed and will pass through me. You, Thien Minh Ly, brother, and all the other brothers and sisters who I never had the chance to love who fill me until I forget myself and can't write this no matter how hard I try. 2002

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