Christine Wu, familial hungers: poems

 

THE TASTE EQUIVALENT OF A GLIMPSE

Gustatory wink, olfactory flicker, food
flashback. A resuscitation
that rockets by, a blur that ignites
sleeping palates, lightning jolt
just out of reach and not quite enough
to awaken the full-flavour dream, leaving
behind a full-bodied craving. No words
for this brief animal possession. Fleeting
infuriating, unannounced, swift knock
on the door of nostalgia, ding-dong ditch
at the mouth of memory.

I’m only just now getting to the full-length poetry debut by Halifax-based Vancouver poet Christine Wu, her familial hungers: poems (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2025), a collection that describes itself as a “lyric feast,” as the poems that make up the collection purposefully write through and around food, and into a foundation of family. “The only way my mother knows how to say hello: / a three-minute broth awaiting my prodigal return // at midnight, ” the poem “THREE-MINUTE LOVE LETTER” begins, “filling the space between hunger / and sustenance, waxen strands in a bath // of rehydrated crystals, silver foil sachet packed / with the myths of MSG that keeps white ghosts away.” Wu writes on family turmoil and childhood memories, and the collisions of language and culture, offering a way through food as both foundation, and a means through articulating the conflicts and the discomforts, the unspoken, and what should never have been. Wu writes food, whether preparation, shared meals or particular dishes, as a cultural and familial underpinning, impossible to distinguish from the rest of her upbringing. As the poem “WHY I STOPPED COMING HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS” begins: “Because I was scheduled to work. because flight costs / kept going up. Because I was embarrassed // by your accent. Because I hated Chinese / school. Because rice. Because teenage angst // never ends. Because he hit me when he was angry / and called it discipline. Because you did not stop him.”

Set in four titled groupings of first-person lyric narrative poems—“Residue of Hunger,” “Offerings at the Altar,” “Shadow Histories” and the title section, “Familial Hungers”—Wu’s poems provide a kind of landscape across the messiness of family, and family residue, and attempting to find where the narrator might themselves land, amid this background. It is through these poems that Wu attempts to reconcile not only her threads of history, but how she herself fits into the narrative of those threads, within it, from her research into various imperial and colonial occupations, articulated specifically through the poem “ANCESTRY.COM HAS NOTHING ON ME,” to exactly what she, in the end, might inherit. “Maybe this insatiable thirst is punishment // for my secret sham: those childhood nights / I stole away from the table,” she writes, near the end of the poem “WHEN ASKED WHY ALL MY POEMS ARE ABOUT SOUP,” “leaning into being // part of a family that’d stopped eating / together, crowded out by silence and hoarded // trauma.” This is a book about examining and reconciling large histories, both immediate and a few steps removed, and that natural impulse to not only discover who we are, but decide, as well, what of the past we might wish to still carry.

WHAT WE INHERIT

Metal tong wan molds.
The holy trinity: ginger, garlic, scallions.
A recipe for pork and watercress jiaozi.
The ability to sleep on a pull-out couch
and call it good. The ability to eat
steamed white rice and call it home.
History of the Great Leap Forward
and the forty-five million who starved. Midnight ramen.
Immigrant instinct to feed every last hungry ghost.