18 pages • 36 minutes read
Wang PingThings We Carry on the Sea
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Mother Tongues
The “mother tongues” (Line 15) carried by the speaker contains a number of meanings. The “mother tongues” primarily serve as a synonym for the speaker’s languages, which they speak in the three lines following the phrase. The phrase “mother tongue” also serves to connect the language to the speaker’s ancestry (through the word mother) and body (through the word tongue). Their language becomes a physical part of them just like their “hands, feet, bones, [and] hearts” (Line 8).
Though language is created by the body, its form is a nexus of one’s identity, culture, and homeland. The speaker’s use of their native languages—particularly ones that do not use Latin characters—serves as a point of cultural translation or assimilation. The speaker includes parenthetical anglicized versions of Chinese, Arabic, and Yiddish scripts. Rather than translate the words, the speaker chooses to share an analogous English pronunciation. This sharing suggests a larger desire to share their language and culture. However, this reading is complicated by the influence of Western culture (See: Themes) and the use of parentheses, which make the English pronunciation self-contained and reliant on the original.
Burdens on the Back and Spine
“Things We Carry” places an emphasis on how what the speaker carries acts as a burden (see: Poem Analysis). The attention the speaker pays to backs and spines of the immigrants (and their ancestors) solidifies this emphasis physically. When the speaker itemizes the “railroads, plantations, laundromats” (Line 10) and other structures built by immigrant labor in the Americas, they say these things are “built on our ancestor’s backs” (Line 10). The word choice “on” here suggests that the ancestor’s backs support the burden of these structures.
This burden is reflected in the speaker’s “old homes along the spine” (Line 11), which represent a similar structural development—either overseas or in the speaker’s homelands. Like their ancestors, the speaker’s hard work and labor in establishing these structures continues to burden their back. This burden suggests a physical wear on the body from the labor involved in building these homes, like the labor from working in the “fields” (Line 3) the speaker mentions earlier.
The Sea
Ping sets her poem on an unspecified sea, and this setting is essential to understanding the work as a whole. The speaker’s lack of specificity about the sea reinforces their plural identity as immigrants from multiple places. This lack of specificity also presents the sea as a liminal space between the speaker’s homeland and the land they hope to immigrate into. The sea, in this sense, is best understood as international waters, not belonging to any nation but to the spaces between them.
For human beings, the sea is a temporary, transient space they are unable to settle. The speaker’s “rubber boats” (Line 19) drift “from shore . . . to shore” (Line 19) in hopes of finding solid ground. The sea, holding these immigrants, becomes a symbol of transient populations more generally. This reading of the sea resonates with the poem’s larger focus on climate change’s effects in developing countries (See: Themes). As the seas rise “from industrial wastes” (Line 14), more people will inevitably become displaced and join this transient population.
