ART BY JAYLIN CHO

Shame (for me) is a Filipino grocery store.
Every distance is more vast
when home is a sea away.
My mom had a handful

of places that made the miles feel
less stretched, where she could exist
among familiar faces. She needed to be
there—the closest traces of wholeness, and she

took me wherever she went. These tiny stores
were all the same, quaint and sandwiched
between six other stores. They were the end
of the distance she wore on her face

and it was all to smell the pungent wet fish.
In this production of The Philippines: The Play,
the scene is staged: sweat, electric
fans, pale tiled floors, and looming decay

in the kick of the fish—their
metallic stench—burrowed in rows and rows of ice.
Their long familiar faces. The cashier weighs one
and tells my mom the price

that isn’t marked on any of the shelves. The bags
of exported leaves, waiting to be cooked far
from their forgotten trees, the jackfruit,
the pandasal, the strawberry jellies,

the foreign brands that confused
me and hardened my hate, peeling me away
like the labels I could not translate,
while the white fluorescent lights flickered above

the shrimp chips I secretly liked,
even though they could not hide the rot,
all the shame of being lost, while I snacked on corn nuts
that she bought, even though I said I didn’t want

them—to be dragged again and again
from the slanted minivan—to all the stores
without names—across the California desert. I did not
know what home is, and I still cannot find it

in the burlap bags of jasmine rice. I am
searching inside the fish displaced,
fried far from their ice—grasping with my
own bare hands, I will feed myself until I feel whole.