The term Kundiman comes from the Tagalog phrase "kung hindi man," or "if it were not so." These Filipino love songs sang not just of love, but of love of country in a time of colonization and political unrest.
Adding to our collection of Kundiman Love Poems, we've curated this list of short stories, essays, and novels written by Asian American authors. These stories reconfigure, recomplicate, and reimagine love in our world today-– whatever form of love that may be. Like Kundiman, we hope that these voices, singing together, bring forth light and possibility.
This list is curated by 2020-21 Communications Intern Helli Fang.
I am “queer” for two reasons — because I am gay and because my body — a half-Pakistani body by law if not by blood or ancestry — lies out the mainstream of what the mother country now considers acceptable.
I long to come home, to come home and be welcomed, to be welcomed and held, to be held and known.
––from “A Letter from an Indian in Exile” by Kazim Ali
The girl and I share a bowl of watermelon on the sidewalk, the juice steaming warm as our bowels. We eat the meat, suck out its lineage of seeds, and spit them as far as we can at the cars at the sun at the squirrels at the lampposts at the stray cat at the house across the street with its white cactus garden, its orchard of bones. In her mouth, seedlight. The shape of the seed’s future body: mine. We aim our mouths, shotgunning the seeds across the street. They mature mid-air and land on the far sidewalk, full-grown watermelons spilling soft rubies of meat, sweet before we know the word for it.
––from “Consequences of Water” by K-Ming Chang
Their romance has started in earnest this summer, but the prologue took up the whole previous year. All fall and spring of the previous year they lived with exclusive reference to each other, and were viewed as an unspoken duo by everyone else. Little remarked, universally felt, this taut, even dangerous energy running between them.
––from Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
I am the kind of person who is always coming to a precipice in her life. She must sit quietly there. The idea of herself, the person she needed herself to be in order to be okay, has fallen apart. In the last seven or so years I have come to this precipice over and over again. I wanted a different kind of life, a life as fortress. My mother wanted me to have this kind of life: she wanted me to be safe.
––from “Safe House” by Shamala Gallagher
For me, writing poems is a way of breaking that cage, a way to have the unicorn become the narwhal become the speaker become the writer become the reader all at once. It is a resistance to colonial forms of Imaginary takeover—a rebuke of having my dream space occupied by measures that insure that what the United States calls a chair is a chair. Sometimes a chair is a kursi, a pirha, a golposh, a saddle, a chariot. I want to ride the possibilities of what a chair can be into the darkest shadow of Lemuria, or across the galaxies.
––from “Unicorns, Narwhals, and Poets” by Rajiv Mohabir
It’s true that if you cry hard enough for long enough you can end up with blurred vision.
I was lying down, it was the middle of the day, but I was in bed. All the crying had given me a headache, I’d had a throbbing headache for days. I got up and went to look out the window. It was winter yet, it was cold by the window, there was a draft. But it felt good—as it felt good to press my forehead against the icy glass. I kept blinking, but my eyes wouldn’t clear. I thought of the women who’d cried themselves blind. I blinked and blinked, fear rising. Then I saw you.
––from The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
He kisses her. She returns with a sudden heat. The scent of incense, bergamot perfume. They are already lying down on her bed. Some of their clothes are tossed to the side. He can feel the arch of her body, pressing closer against his. He wants to be overwhelmed. He wants to give in. But he feels himself pulling away.
“What’s the matter?” The flash of unease in her eyes cripples him further. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry. I want to, I really do.”
“Okay?”
“I just can’t.”
––from “Enlightenment” by William Pei Shih
I marry a man when winter ends. Our wedding is private and tastes like burnt sugar spilled over snow. My husband smells like cedar trees and coffee and I have fallen for the cleanliness of his light blue eyes. Our counters are never sticky and our meals paired with wines that all taste the same, but they go well with the chicken breast that has been trimmed of its fat and skin and flavor. Could I get more salt? I ask the waiter at the restaurant near the university. And pepper? I think of my mother but I still do not call. I have not seen her in five years but if I saw her again, I would sniff her sleeve the way I did as a child.
––from “Fish Paste” by Nay Saysourinho
Mama taught me everything: how to dress, draw my eyebrows, pencil in my lips, articulate, sit up straight and like a lady, cross my legs, command a room, distract a stranger if he insulted me, laugh, make friends, debate, trust my intellect, fight for my intellect.
––from “Remembering My Lola By Teaching Myself How to Cook” by Melissa R. Sipin
For once, I won’t be one of those poets who say: What I’m trying to say is. No, this time I just say it, ruthlessly sentimental. Without hesitation or simile or metaphor: “I love you.”
And when he says it back to me, slowly, like dipping a toe in a needle-cold lake, I imagine all the mosquitoes in the world bowing their glassy wings.
––from “To Love a Mosquito” by Jane Wong