I’m sorry I’ve never been to China. I said this to a man I met after a lecture. He was a true hyperpolyglot. He said beautiful things to me in French, then Arabic, English, Spanish, Mandarin. He drank beer and I took little sips of each description of the places I’d honestly made no sincere effort to visit. What I assume are the clouds above the mountains in Canton. The smell of tea leaves roasting in a wok. I think he took offense at how little I understood, despite the pains he’d taken to learn to communicate. I took offense at the way he spoke to himself through me, though I, too, love to sing a little louder in the shower if I know someone’s listening in the next room. And we knew that we would never see each other again, and it is meaningless to apologize to all the people you never finish revealing yourself to.
[I’m sorry I’ve never been to China.]
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- June 2, 2024
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[I’m sorry I’ve never been to China.] from APOLOGY ENGINE: by Cameron Quan Louie.
Published by Gold Line Press on May 1, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by Cameron Quan Louie.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Cameron Quan Louie has been a Multiplying Mediums Fellow, winner of the 2017 McLeod-Grobe Prize for Poetry, and 2019 grant recipient from the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona for his poetry and photography series, Domestic. His poems, essays, and erasures appear or are forthcoming in jubilat, The Rumpus, Entropy, Quarterly West, Best New Poets, Asian American Writers Workshop, Sonora Review, Salt Hill, Wendy’s Subway, The Spectacle, Hobart, The Gravity of the Thing, Pacifca Literary Review, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere.
Los Angeles, California
University of Southern California
"'Who apologizes to whom?' is the presiding question of Cameron Quan Louie’s Apology Engine, a smart and poignant collection of prose poems that expertly toe the line between gallows humor and a series of sincere apologies in the making. Just as an engine is powered by the assemblage of its parts, Louie’s plunge into the world of apologies takes us from the author’s guilt over dissecting a squid for a school assignment to the apology that would never arrive from the white man positioning himself as an expert on the author’s Chinese background. Each instance of sorry builds into a seemingly unstoppable motion through which no amount of apology would ever be replete. The only solution, Louie weighs, seems to be to pull the engine apart, to let the vehicle break down. What imperfect lessons will we learn then? As for me, I love being so thoroughly schooled by this clever and innovative collection, which reminds me that yes, sometimes repair means we have to first fall apart."
— Muriel Leung
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