Five Year Plan

FIVE-YEAR PLAN

A good Chinese American housewife has a five-year plan.

It's strategic, sparse,

menacing. It stutters at nothing, a tin present tense, perhaps a new VCR

in two years. A good Chinese American daughter washes

windows and retains

curvatures. And when I'm finished, I revise my five-year plan to exclude window-

washing, to include speaker of the house in two years, in four, maybe president.

And a good Chinese daughter and housewife has a ten-year plan, but the sum of parts

does not equal the whole. And when did this dimming and mapping start? When did kicking

apart and putting back together tread? At birth, a contract must occur, because

all Chinese parents ask new son-in-laws: *Do you have pension?* And it's reinforced,

the way a rubber snake sneaks and scares. It's not amazing that we can balance eggs

on our heads and fix a man's heart together. We have degrees

in everything and

nothing. We can polish cats while solving proofs, like belching & breathing. And all this

premeditation, like sugar in theory, but really tastes aluminum, clogs

the esophagus. It always grows back, never reaches twenty- twenty and there is

no standard deviation, no chance for seeing a spare owl

or the red fox that

wanders just beyond the border. All knew I would "make it," or at least control it

to a strangle so that the throat only brings in half the air.