Yiming Ma
Selected Writing
“The boy had been born with four healthy limbs, but by the end of his first year he had already lost both his arms. […] [His parents] had been born during the glorious years of the Long March and the rise of our Communist Party; recently they had enjoyed the fortune of watching our leader, Chairman Mao, dive into the Yangtze River to swim against ‘the great wind and great waves of the bourgeois.’ Oh, how lucky we all had been to witness the launch of our
Cultural Revolution!”
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Swimmer of Yangtze
“Sometimes I found myself resenting my invisible brother — for never having been born. [...] I imagine Thanksgiving, Chinese New Year and Christmas — my family of loved ones and friends gathered around a wooden dining table — and there he is in the corner, sitting beside my mother and laughing at another of my father’s awful jokes. My sibling’s face is blurred but my heart recognizes him instantly.”
My Invisible Brother
“Should Haru still be considered a boy, given the pain he has endured? Sometimes, when his head is buried in the flesh of an opponent, he wonders this too. [...] They face off in deep squats as their heads bob above clenched muscles, sweaty backs and chafing loincloths sinking into the quicksand of their bellies. Then, with no more warning than a flick of a wrist, Haru pushes off from the earth and launches toward the wrestler before him.
The deep suck of compressed air on flesh reverberates around the stable when they collide.”
Chankonabe
Finalist, Ploughshares Emerging Writers Contest, 2020
Shortlist, Gulf Coast Prize, 2020
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“First movement: Forest (chorus of deceased)
Oh little Natasha! Where did you go?
You’ve chosen a cold land where no cows roam, no mushrooms grow.
Come back, Natasha. To harvest the apples from your soil, nourished by our bodies – the fruit has turned a glorious red.
Visit us. We float amongst the white trees – wailing, waiting
for you still.”
Ancestral Symphony from Belarusian Forest
“Near the mountains of Chaozhou, far from our family home in Shanghai, my uncle’s eyes are shut. He dreams in a coma. [...] Yet, I soon find myself unable to follow [my grandmother’s] voice. All I hear are the sounds of mountain waterfalls, of tea trickling downward from a clay pot, of Uncle’s brush dabbing on inkstone and the dance of his calligraphy, the characters imprinting themselves onto white paper where there had only been emptiness.”
Hero Dreams
“Back at the hotel, I unpacked my laptop. On the screen, I noticed a deep smudge, a fingerprint too small to be mine. For a while, I stared at the pattern that your finger must have made, pressed spirals looping round and round from the center, amused at how different your lines looked from my own.
And then I wiped the smudge away.
See, I didn’t really need your print there, dirtying my screen. Because after all, you’d already reminded me this morning with your kiss–to remember not to forget you."​
To My Girl On a Plane