In a small apartment, an expecting mother sits
  at a cheap dining table and asks how not to be defined
by the quietly-swelling curve of her abdomen.

  She speaks to an empty audience. Her husband
  gazes at her stomach and from its roundness
  he thinks only of a son that will rise from her
  flesh, white and slick like a pulsating heart. He
  has no Mandarin for her. He speaks English, only
  English, and his lips flap like a fish and balk.

  An English monologue is playing on the phone: her mother
  in-law insists there is nothing sweeter than American motherhood;
  she hangs up and lets the phone drop; it bounces uselessly on
  a taut rubber wire, curled up like a child in the fetal position,
  tethered by an uncut umbilical cord, slowly swaying to a stop.

  At night, she sits in the little bedroom and whispers
  English words; they drip slowly from her tongue like
  coagulating honey. Mother, mother, mother—she
  hates the word for its flatness. She rolls the syllables
  under her teeth and prays that what lies beneath
  her parabolic stomach will say, just once, 妈妈.

  Her husband works at a paint factory
  and he brings home a can of brilliant blue
  for our son's nursery, he says. She asks
  him about a daughter, and he turns away.

She is standing at a subway station when she hears
the song she fears most: woman calling to her son,
only for him to shake his head. Speak English, he
whispers under the burning sunlight. Speak English.

  She tries to bring hot tears to her eyes
  so that she will know what it feels like.

  In the hospital at dawn, a girl lets out a lusty cry
  and she looks down at the black eyes and sees her
  own instead. She wraps the baby in a red blanket
  and calls her nǚ'ér, daughter, and wonders if this girl
  will remember what it means. The duality of Mandarin
  and English slides off the roof of her mouth. She closes
  her eyes; the rising sun warms her eyelids, and the
  soft heartbeat of her daughter charts a new path forward.