Angela Liu

In college, I used to churn out 5,000 word short stories two-hours before class in a burst of god-like arrogance and never look at them again.

Now I can spend thirty minutes or more just staring at single line, questioning if I even know how to write anymore.

For me, over-editing is a product of trying to get published—an inconvenient extension of imposter syndrome. In a world where there is only rejection or acceptance, there is no room for mistakes. Is this really the best version of the story? Because if it’s rejected, there’s no redo. Sometimes, even after a work is published, I will still be haunted by every description or piece of dialogue that I wish I could change.

I relate hard to Galway Kinnell who continued to edit his epic poem “The Bear” for years and would read newer versions of it at readings.

But I had a great poetry teacher in college (who is a major reason for why I continued writing), and when I told him I was struggling with over-editing, he said something that I’m still thinking about:

“It helps to think of [a story or poem] not as a thing that can be utterly perfected, but as a thing that is an artifact of a time and mindset.”

I love this idea of embracing imperfection as just another part of the art. It’s not imperfection, but a precious record of who you were at that time.

I also like how this means revisiting older work doesn’t necessarily mean improving it, but just reinterpreting it through a new lens. I’m thinking of how I went to a Yoko Takahashi concert recently and she played her 1997 song “Tamashii no Rufuran” (from the classic Evangelion: Death & Rebirth movie), except as an electronica remix with two back-up idol dancers. I love the original, but this new version felt more in line with the times.

So this time, I wanted to share a revised version of one of my oldest poems. I didn’t want to fix it—I just wanted to update it for the person I am now. And who knows, maybe I’ll write another version in another ten years.

The original was published in Issue 12 of Stanchion Zine.

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A BODY WITHOUT A NAME
Ten years ago, grandpa forgot which bus to get on
and ended up at a police station

When they asked for a name, he pointed
to a sunlit gash between the trees—an imagined place marker for home

Now he is a ghost
we both are, patting through the ash
for half-smoked cigarettes,
waiting for a train home.

There’s a house somewhere in Shanghai
with his name still on it.
A canvas pouch of teeth in a Long Island drawer, a reminder
the dentist did not speak Chinese

One summer, we talked about old Chinese dramas on the elevator,
how the voices never match the mouths,
how an asynchronization of sound and sight
can be fixed in the brain

So we fixed the memory,
forgot about the time he threw a kettle at mom,
stunned by the stranger in his bedroom, how she kept
apologizing, even as the boiling water burnt her hands, as if
she was praying.

I don’t pray,
but I beg sometimes, in the bathroom,
on the line at immigration, in front of the ocean
when the waves are aligned just right like blades

They say even dogs can’t find their way home in the rain, my aunt says,
a loss of scent like a loss of memory.

But what about people, I ask
what do we say about them?

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