Welcome to the New China
Here is my home.
Only five floors up walking.
I’d like you to meet my piano
and my ping-pong table,
and this is the roof-top garden,
where my wife’s father
grows garlic and gardenias.
I take care of AC and TV.
Here is my one child.
She has some tricks to show.
She can pirouette and play
five songs on the piano.
Her dog died when out
the window he jumped, so now
she keeps two birds plus computer.
Here is my wife.
She is good at English
but does not like to cook at all.
However, she can serve you
watermelon and give you
a present of lacquer to remind
us of the good old China.
Because of her, it is a wedding
bond on my left hand’s finger.
Elizabeth Schultz retired in 2001 from the University of Kansas where
she was the Chancellor’s Club Teaching Professor in the English
Department. Elizabeth is the author of Unpainted to the Last:
Moby-Dick and Twentieth Century American Art (1995), Shoreline: Seasons
at the Lake (2001), Conversations: Art Into Poetry at the Spencer Museum
of Art (2006) and Her Voice (Woodley Press, 2008). She
was founder of the Melville Society Cultural Project in New Bedford,
Massachusetts. In 2007 she was a Fulbright lecturer in Beijing.