samsui girls

“Our lives went by like that. What can we hope for? No family here. Cannot regret… already came

here. No regrets, once we made up our minds to come.”

– “An Immigrant’s Story: With Sweat, Tears and Toil – The Samsui Women” (Mediacorp News and Channel News Asia, 1995).

our lives went by like that. what can we hope for?

a cent worth of food and a little bit of sky. 

the luxury of a moment’s reprieve.

a packet of tobacco and papers to roll a life out of this.

tomorrow the lorry will come again, and we will build

what needs to be built. no family here. cannot regret. 

you think you know what we’re made of?

we’ll tell you – you do what you can to survive.

god forbid we be young and want things for ourselves.

the girls we drown in the sun to give you old women.

and if i tell you about the shape of my loneliness,

what would you see?

is this not survival? doing what i can to dream?

About the Author

Laura Jane Lee is a Bread Loaf alum and a Brooklyn Poets Fellow, an awardee of the Sir Roger Newdigate Prize, and was shortlisted for the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. Her work has been featured in Cordite, Ambit, Atlanta Review and Bellingham Review, among others.