i traded my mother tongue for fluency in assimilation. i would have cut it out myself, muscle from membrane, if it made me sound more like everyone else.
my ancestors could not recognize me. i am saturated with a culture that does not belong to me, or anyone who looks like me. repeat after me, the pundits bade me. familiarity, too, can be outsourced for manufacture—made in elsewhere. my repertoire of practiced references play on loop. they fall easily and cleanly from a foreign mouthpiece.
these are not the old songs or icons my parents grew up with. i have the influences of a ghost generation, postured on borrowed capital. look at my nostalgic farce in the mirror, the wistful gaze of a past from a different continent. i am scrubbed clean of their homeland; found a new home in this western palimpsest. if i looked all the way down the barrel, there is no heritage of mine to claim.