Aiden Chee, Taiwan's National Honour
September 2026
The Key
I. THE KEY
The refrigerator hums the long note it knows
quite loud for how little it holds:
a jar, barley tea, a pot of seaweed soup
the color of low tide, made in a quantity
that means this will last the week.
Its light comes on and shows
how much of the shelf is only shelf
Nine o’clock. Kumon workbook, and the pencil worn
to the length of a thumbnail. Kumon:
sums down the left, and down the right the kana
in their small square cells, like rooms
in a building I am learning how to live in.
Ten. The eraser sheds its pink crumbs,
small evidence
Eleven. The building lets its breath out:
the elevator, the corridor, a neighbor’s television
laughing at a joke in someone else’s room.
And then the sound I have been not-listening for:
the key.
Turned slowly, the way you turn a thing
when you would rather not be heard.
Then, under the door, the light:
the entry sensor’s small orange dawn
laid along the floorboards like a ruler
by someone who wants me to know he is home
and not to know from where.
He comes in with his sleeves rolled past the elbow.
He brings the smell of black coffee, or of rain.
I could never tell which. Both are weather
that has been somewhere else
나 왔어. I’m home. He says it softly.
to a room he thinks is sleeping,
and I keep the answer, 어서와, folded in my mouth
like a note i have written and will not pass.
Some nights I win: upright, awake as a sentinel,
the pencil a small boat I steer.
Some nights sleep comes in like a lake
and close over the key, the light, the man who is here.
By morning,
the key is back in its place.
His shoes are beside mine
at the door,
both pairs facing the same way.
II. The DOME
Saturday, and cicadas screaming
from every tree like a siren no one else could hear.
Gravel road, something green against the gray:
my father’s hand closing over mine: like this,
a dome, no seam, nowhere for it to leave.
We filled a water bottle he had emptied for me:
grasshoppers first, then crickets tracked by ear
before the eye, that one I liked best,
a chase that started as a sound.
Dragonflies he caught by the wings,
slow where I expected quick,
and let me hold the paper of them
just long enough to see the veins, the spikes,
the whole machine that from a distance reads as blur.
Then we opened our hands
and let the field take everything back.
He never told me why he was so good at this:
holding a thing without letting it feel held.
III. TWIN BAR
He said he wasn’t tired. He said he’d eaten already.
He said we had money enough for ice cream,
and split the twin bar down its seam
so one half came out bigger: his, somehow,
every time, by accident.
I took the big half home.
I did not know yet what a father subtracts from himself
to make a number look whole in front of a child.
The soup lasted the week because so much else
could not. I only learned that arithmetic years later,
doing the sum he’d spent a decade
not showing me how to do.
IV. WHAT HE SAID
I asked him once we were old enough
for the question not to break anything:
did you know how much I was counting on it:
the ten o'clock, the eraser dust, the light.
He said, I was tired the whole time.
He said, there was nothing you could have done.
so why hand a child
the weight of a thing he can’t put down.
I think of the dome again: a hand
closed around something not to trap it,
but to keep it from finding out yet
how easily it could be lost.
나 왔어, he still says, down the phone.
I’m home. And some nights
I still fold my answer in my mouth,
but now I know the shape of it.
어서와.
Though the door has stood open for years,
Though no one, anymore, is pretending to sleep.
Score: 97 out of 100.
A quietly powerful, specific and well-threaded family sequence whose arithmetic of love lands, marred only by a few small grammatical and continuity slips.
Read the September 2026 National Honours