Anna May Wong has Breakfast at Tiffany’s

By Sally Wen Mao

In Santa Monica, the sunrise has this way of emptying

everything inside you. I visit my future deathbed.

It’s February 1961, and I watch myself sleep.

Dawn: outside my window, date palms sway and lovers

in blue Corvettes make their morning getaways.

There will never be another breakfast. I die of a heart

attack. Perhaps the night never pauses its seesaws.

Perhaps I resign myself: Holly Golightly, I can’t go

lightly. I muse face my faces—deception, despair, death.

Because being seen has a different meaning to someone

with my face. There will never be another breakfast.

The French toast sits untouched with the blackberries.

So I speed up time, reckless, toward a world

where I don’t exist. Eight months later, Audrey Hepburn

walks down Fifth Avenue in a black Givenchy.

This is the role I’d have died for. This is love,

reciprocated. Beside her, Mickey Rooney plays Yunioshi,

another tapeworm-eyed uncle with a limp. And I yawn

at another generation of white men in yellowface.

Before him: Roland Winters, Sidney Toler, Warner Oland.

There is applause for them. The laughter is constant.

I have played their daughters—their pretty but untrustworthy

incarnates. There is no second generation for actors like me

but I’ve often pined for them. My progeny. Girls with tar-black

widow’s peaks, who stumble across spotlights in purple tights,

taught to be meek. Girls who inherit my warnings, victories,

and failures, too. But for these girls, there will never be

breakfast. I will travel through all time searching for them.

Source: Oculus

Poetry and Film: Reading in the Dark