When I first sat down and read ‘Fricatives‘ by Eric Yip, I didn’t know what to expect. In fact, I was downright unprepared for the way it gripped me. It didn’t just poke at the nerves, it hammered them with a relentless, almost sinister precision. There’s something about this poem that leaves you unsettled, not in the way that a twist ending or a cheap jump scare does, but in the deeper, more haunting way that lingers like a slow-acting poison. It crawls under your skin and gets inside your bones. By the time I was done, I felt like I’d been inside someone else’s mind—someone caught in the middle of a cultural war they couldn’t escape. The kind of war that isn’t fought with guns or knives, but with words. Words that have a history, words that have baggage, words that can suffocate or elevate, but always, always, they have weight.
I’ll tell you right now, this isn’t some neat little poem about language. It’s a bloodletting. It’s a trip through a wasteland of identity and memory, a battleground where the first casualty is always the self, and language is the weapon that cuts the deepest. Right off the bat, Yip hits you with an unsettling instruction: “To speak English properly, Mrs. Lee said, you must learn / the difference between three and free.” Now, if you’re like me, you probably read that and thought, Okay, a little grammar lesson. Maybe something innocent about accents, maybe a moment of identity in a foreign language. But by the end of the first line, Yip’s already shown you how he’s going to bend your mind. The “difference between three and free” is so much more than a lesson in phonetics; it’s a reflection on the deep divide between cultures, between the colonizer and the colonized. It’s the kind of thing that could only come out of Hong Kong’s history—where English wasn’t just a language, but a tool of power. Mrs. Lee doesn’t just want the speaker to learn the difference between these words—she’s telling him that to thrive, to survive, he must be different, he must change, he must abandon parts of himself. To speak properly means to surrender some piece of your soul. That’s no small thing.
This isn’t just an immigrant’s story, and it’s not just about language—it’s about the price of assimilation. It’s about that tug-of-war between who you were and who you’re expected to be. And the thing that really gets you, that pulls you into the grim world Yip creates, is how physical it is. It’s not abstract, not some intellectual discussion about cultural difference; it’s a visceral thing. When Yip writes, “three men / escaped from Alcatraz in a rubber raft and drowned / on their way to Angel Island,” he’s not just referencing some random historical fact. No, this is Yip’s version of a prison break—the kind of prison where escape isn’t just impossible, it’s fatal. These men didn’t just drown on their way to freedom—they drowned because freedom, in the colonial world, is an illusion. It’s a destination you can see but never reach. Just ask anyone who’s ever tried to unshackle themselves from the weight of their past, their history, their culture. It doesn’t matter how far you paddle, how fast you swim, you’re still stuck in the same water, surrounded by the same barriers. It’s not unlike how a prisoner’s mind can trap them even once they’re out of the physical cell—there’s no real escaping.
It’s here that the poem starts to take on the feel of a ghost story, one of those slow, creeping ones where the hauntings aren’t supernatural, but historical. The dead are not restless spirits, but the echoes of the past, seeping into every moment of the present. Yip gives us a glimpse of that haunting when he writes, “You must learn to submit / before you can learn.” That submission? It’s not just part of the lesson. It’s a survival mechanism. The kind of lesson that Mrs. Lee is teaching isn’t just about saying “three” instead of “free.” It’s about learning to give in, to accept that the rules are rigged, and that you don’t get a choice in this game. You have to submit. You have to swallow the words, swallow the past, swallow the shame, and only then will they give you a voice.
And there’s the rub. Before you can speak, you must be given a voice. It’s a cruel irony, isn’t it? This child is being taught to speak the language of the colonizer, but he’s being stripped of his own voice at the same time. That’s the horror of it, and it’s a horror that’s all too real for anyone who’s ever been caught between two cultures. The kid with the “Hong Kong accent” isn’t just being taught to speak; he’s being taught to disappear. He’s being taught to become the language he’s speaking, to lose the thing that makes him different in exchange for the “privilege” of being heard by the powers that be.
But Yip doesn’t just leave it there. No, he digs deeper, and the deeper he digs, the more unsettling it gets. The rice. The rice that comes later in the poem. Rice isn’t just a symbol of culture in this poem—it’s something else. It’s food, yes, but more than that, it’s survival. It’s the stuff that kept people alive. And when Yip writes about it being “beaten till their seeds spill,” it’s like he’s talking about the way colonialism doesn’t just erase culture—it mashes it. You don’t just forget who you were; you’re forced to sacrifice your heritage, to turn it into something bland, something sterile, something that can be consumed. And this is where the poem starts to get downright chilling. Because it’s not just the body that’s being eaten; it’s the very heart of who you are.
And then—bam!—we hit that line about the stranger’s cock in the “piss-slick stall / of that dingy Cantonese restaurant.” Let’s not kid ourselves here: this isn’t just some salacious moment thrown in for shock value. No, this is the point where the poem gets raw, where the stakes get real. The stranger’s demand to “give me / some bite” feels like a kind of twisted redemption. It’s as if the speaker’s learned all his life to swallow, to hold back, to conform, and now—now, in this dingy restaurant where the food is served and the language is twisted—it’s time to bite back. But there’s a darkness to it. This isn’t a clean victory, not by a long shot. There’s no escaping the fact that the speaker’s body is still bound by the same colonial forces. There’s no clean break from the past. The act, even in its violence, doesn’t free the speaker. It just places him in another kind of prison. A prison of desire, a prison of exploitation, a prison of language that demands he conform to a new set of rules.
And then there’s the mother. You can feel the weight of her disappointment, the unspoken expectations she carries with her. When she talks about how “everyone speaks differently here, more proper,” it’s the voice of the old world—the one that believes that English, and only English, will make everything better. But Yip isn’t giving her the easy victory here. The speaker’s subtle act of defiance—ordering dim sum in English—is more than just a moment of cultural assimilation. It’s a reclaiming of power. In this small, almost comical act, the speaker is asserting his identity, his agency, in a world that would rather he forget where he came from. It’s like something out of the heart of King’s own work—this moment where the smallest, most seemingly insignificant gesture becomes a desperate act of survival.
And finally, that rice again. The “perfect, white” rice. This is where Yip’s imagery hits like a freight train. It’s not just food. It’s the final nail in the coffin of colonial erasure. It’s rice, yes, but rice that’s been bleached, stripped, sterilized, turned into something that no longer carries its heritage. This is the price of assimilation. This is what you lose when you buy into the myth of the “perfect” life that the West sells you. It’s all sterilized, all white, all perfect. But there’s nothing real about it. There’s nothing human about it.
By the time the poem ends, you feel like you’ve been caught in the undertow of something far larger than any one person. The speaker is left standing, trying to reconcile the language of his oppressor with the heritage that’s been beaten out of him. He’s left with a perfect meal, a perfect culture, but it’s not his anymore. And that’s the darkness at the heart of ‘Fricatives’—it’s a poem about the death of the self, the death of the identity you once held, and the horrifying realization that the ghosts of the past are still waiting for you. They always will be.
Words by Cassandra Fong
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