Triple Sonnet for Black Hair
By Dorothy Chan
My mother warns me not to blow-dry my hair
too hard, turning it from black to rust, and
I must wear my black hair proudly. Black,
the color of clothing my grandmother hates,
because young women should always wear red
or pink, the colors of luck and youth. Black,
the color of wedding dress the reality TV
starlet circa 2006 wants, but she knows
walking down the aisle in black will break
her mother’s heart, and fact: red is the color
of wedding dresses in Chinese culture—even
if the bride wears white for the ceremony,
she’ll change into red for the dinner—hello,
ten course meal of my dreams that starts
with a meat platter of roasted pork, and how
guests go crazy for the abalone and swallow’s
nest soup with crab meat, and of course there’s
a chicken, a pig, a fish, a duck, and a lobster—
roll call. And fact: at Chinese funerals, relatives
of the deceased don’t wear black, but white.
And fact: eight’s the lucky Chinese number,
not seven, and at dim sum, my grandmother
makes sure she orders eight dishes, not seven,
but nine’s alright too. Eight, like the number of
legs on a spider—a spider, black, like my hair
that my mother warns me not to blow-dry
too hard, turning it into rust, and I remember
my sixth-grade science experiment of lighting
a cigarette, watching how the smoke changed
the spider’s web spinning. And black, because
it’s hypnotic, like little black dresses on gorgeous
women, or how I prefer my lingerie in black
over white, but red is probably the best, an ode
to sexiness—an ode to the color of my culture
and history, and I want to feel like a million
dollars—be a million dollars. And black, the color
of my late dog, Buzzie, a Skye Terrier, twice as long
as he was low, my mother once, joking, said he looked
like a giant rat. Or a licorice bunny. Or a furry snake.
Or a dragon in some iterations of love, majestic in
dreams—how I miss him after these dream visits,
black, the color of my wet hair in the morning.
