It is 4:20 am here in Vancouver, on the unceded and traditional territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, as I begin to write. The day has awakened me. The memory of what happened, thirty-four years ago, near a square named for heavenly peace, still disturbs. Quiet on the pre-dawn streets outside, no human detectable, and yet. It is the time of the Lung Meridian, a time where the mind-body remembers what other mind-bodies suffered.
A day that stands as memorial, stands not just like a single human, on two feet, but extends and connects, a web of witnessing. A day on which betrayal might seem unnameable—distance or silence where warmth had once been; or perhaps, when feeling might serve as truth-telling. Another day to be moved and inspired by love and whimsy, or to be angered by wrongdoing. Or to choose instead, to turn away, to only tend to the mundane yet necessary.
I was in my last year of doing a PhD in Kingston, Ontario, half a life-time ago, when a government decided to betray its youth, half a world away. On the cusp of a significant shift in my life trajectory, I became painfully aware of an enormous theft of souls.
I wonder how many other strangers also remember; how many immigrants living in this neighbourhood of East Vancouver, are asleep yet remembering in their dreams. Or do they awaken, their grief as witness?
What do we do, when our spirits are disturbed; when the waves of memory that stir us, begin with others? Together, we have become more than our solitudes.
A day has voice. Do we hear its shifting inflections? It interrogates that which tries to stifle our spirits. It coaxes us to live with conscience. Outside my home, seagulls are swooping down on the park, claiming the expanse of green before humans emerge from sleep.
How to cite: Kwa, Lydia. “Just Another Day: Lydia Kwa.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 4 Jun. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/06/04/lydia-kwa.
Lydia Kwa has published two books of poetry and four novels. Her fourth novel Oracle Bone was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2017 as the first novel in the chuanqi 傳奇 duology. A new version of The Walking Boy was released in Spring 2019 (Arsenal Pulp Press). Her next novel, A Dream Wants Waking, will be published by Buckrider Books, an imprint of Wolsak & Wynn, in Fall 2023. A book of poetry, from time to new, will be published by Gordon Hill Press in Fall 2024. She lives and works on the traditional and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, known by its colonial name, Vancouver. [All contributions by Lydia Kwa.]
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