L.E. Gill

You Work for Me

Got myself a new bike seat
For my tender bum at REI yesterday, aka the white people zone
I forget often that I’m not a full white but then the way I’m looked at I remember
But I’m so sly I know all their white people things
Climbing gear
Unnecessary lifestyle cutlery
Ugly fleece jackets
Very friendly, very innocuous, everyone is very nice
Except for me, I am judging

How much of my life is the white people zone
My friends (mostly Jews, Francophones, & Eastern Europeans?? Because they have a sense of pathos)
At home I’m the only one on the lease so I am as Korean as I please
My roommate is sheepish if I disagree with his Asian cooking ideas
I make him buy the mirin and the gochujang and the sesame oil
Watch out crackers, I am going to become the Korean dominatrix you secretly want

Like Rita Repulsa from Power Rangers
When I’m online I can see the communist Korean butches
(Where were you when I was growing up? Why didn’t we do drugs together?)
Who are all my dongsengs, I am their unni because I am 31 and they are 24
The NB hanguk-saram with septum piercings, tattoos, bike shorts,
When will I be truly unni? Cast me in the Handmaiden

Can I get Canada to pay for me to finish learning Korean?
I want to translate the politics of the diaspora dispossessed settler for Quebecers
They’ll see themselves
It’s cliche for this sex drive to be for the freedom to not resent
Being put in this position
Having to prove myself something something for an imagined committee who
Basically doesn’t like me anyway (I hear what they say behind our backs)
Because I see how they tortured mom
Until she became a destroyer, the pumps, the Wolford stockings that last
“At least 50 wears”
(Memorize all the brands that are used as a shibboleth for class membership)
(Protect your daughter by saving her from the mortification of any error in front of white people, make her sexually desirable to the men she will work for, so she will never be poor)

Lifestyle wage labor friends want my approval but judge me for making my own money
So I never have to go back to mom again, never ask her for hers
When I got a little tipsy at the xmas party I told my boss how at ten she pissed herself
Because she didn’t speak English
And couldn’t ask to go the bathroom
And her unni, my aunt who named herself after a sitcom character
Kicked the ass of all the kids who made fun of her
I have my dad’s language to use for our power
Sons of bitches,

The small weight shift of needing something from me
(Forgiveness)
Is actually needing
To be someone else
(Not my enemy, not anyone’s enemy)
Not guilty/innocent, but working for the world we see in our hopes
Or working for the world that we have now
Yourself, just like I do
They must be shouting at themselves
And if there is no priest to absolve them
They go to the white people zone
But hey, I’m there too
Because my butt is sore