A cockroach crawls in front of meA cockroach. Without thinking I spread my palm and lift it high in the air.The cockroach crawls slowly. It crawls slowly and stops on the page infront of me.Its antennae fidget. And my palm stays still in the air above its fidgetingantennae.I look at my palm. The cockroach, too. It, too, looks at my palm heldabove its head.My palm opens. My palm opens, making it clear to the cockroach that Iam not depending on anything now. Not on the slipper that I usually hold.Not on an old, rolled-up newspaper. Not on the draft of a speech, not onthe draft of poetry criticism, no drafts of any kind, no white paper no greenpaper no other paper of any size. Not even disposable gloves of variouscolors and kinds. This—it makes me embarrassed. It is the embarrassmentof spreading one’s naked palm without thinking and realizing one hasnothing to rely on.The cockroach looks at my naked palm that relies on nothing. Crawlingslowly again. It crawls along the clean pages in front of me. Its antennaefidget arrogantly. I don’t know if its contempt is for the words on the pageor for my frozen gesture. It crawls slowly. Crawling from one side of thetable to the other. From one group of words to another. Time stretches.Time long enough for me to raise my palm and hold it in the air and thinkabout “tolerance” over the length of a lifetime—and the embarrassmentand dismay of a tolerant person who opens his naked palm and finds itrelies on nothing. 
A Tolerant Person
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- May 31, 2022
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“A Tolerant Person” from MOVING A STONE: by Yam Gong.
Published by Zephyr Press on May 31, 2022.
English Copyright © 2022 by James Shea and Dorothy Tse.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Born in 1949, Yam Gong is a celebrated Hong Kong poet whose honors include the Hong Kong Youth Literature Award, the Workers’ Literature Award, and the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature for his first book And So You Look at Festival Lights along the Street (1997). He later published an extended edition of this collection, titled And So Moving a Stone You Look at Festival Lights along the Street (2010).
James Shea is the author of two poetry collections, The Lost Novel and Star in the Eye, both from Fence Books. Recipient of grants from the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, Hong Kong Arts Development Council, and National Endowment for the Arts, he is the director of the Creative and Professional Writing Program at Hong Kong Baptist University.
Dorothy Tse is a Hong Kong fiction writer whose books include Owlish and So Black. Tse has received the Hong Kong Book Prize, Unitas New Fiction Writers’ Award (Taiwan), and the Hong Kong Award for Creative Writing in Chinese. She has been a resident at Art Omi, the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, and the Vermont Studio Center.
"...a vivid array of poems from work written over four decades... Yam Gong’s metaphysical searching, his oblique meaning-making, and his witty, allusive wordplay are all evident..."
—Heather Green, Poetry Foundation's "Harriet Books"
"No recommendation of Yam Gong’s poems could be as effective as simply reading one… a self-taught, blue-collar laborer, he’s developed a strikingly vivid poetic language by mixing colloquial Cantonese with more literary dictions and wild, mythic imagery. The terrific introduction to this book includes biographical information and notes on a translation that must negotiate into English, for instance, an expression which has the double meaning of receiving a lung X-ray and being scolded by a superior. I’ve never read anything like this!"
—Forrest Gander
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