Quan Âm on a Dragon

Teresa Mei Chuc brings us a voice often muted in America—the young refugee’s. Here she is with her mother fleeing her native country, Viet Nam, to ironically find refuge in the very country that set out to destroy hers. She begs the question for all of us—are we capable of genuine compassion? Can we open up our arms?

Mother shows me a lacquered painting on a plaque of Quan Âm, bodhisattva of compassion, riding a dragon.

It is misty around the bodhisattva and the dragon. The picture looks so real, almost like a photo.

A sacred vase in one hand and a willow branch in the other to bless devotees with the divine nectar of life.

Mother says that she and other boat refugees saw Quan Âm as we were fleeing Vietnam after the war in a freight boat with 2,450 refugees.

When she looked up towards Heaven, in the clouds, she saw the bodhisattva in her white, flowing robe riding a dragon.

Mother says that the goddess was there to guide and save us from the strong waves of the South China Sea. I should know better than to believe her though she swears it’s true. I ask again and she nods, says really, I saw Quan Âm in the clouds as we were escaping. I should know better than to believe her.

But, a part of me wants to believe in a bodhisattva, in compassion riding on a mythical creature, to believe that somehow something more than just our mere human selves wanted us to live.

This poem first appeared in Whitefish Review.

Teresa Mei Chuc

Teresa Mei Chuc was born in Sài Gòn, Việt Nam and fled her Vietnamese homeland with her mother and brother shortly after the American war, spending three and a half months in a freight boat stranded in the East Sea before being rescued. Her father, who had served in the Army of the Republic of Việt Nam, was imprisoned in a Việt Cộng “re-education” camp for nine years. From 1993 to 1994 and from 1996 to 1997, Teresa traveled to and lived in Palestine to gain more understanding after seeing the horror in Gaza on the news. Her poems, “Playground” and “Eternity in Gaza” are based on scenes from the 2002 documentary Gaza Strip filmed by James Longley. She is the Altadena Poet Laureate, Editor-in-Chief (2018-2020) and English Teacher in Los Angeles Unified School District for nineteen years, Teresa Mei Chuc is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, Invisible Light (Many Voices Press, 2018), Keeper of the Winds (FootHills Publishing, 2014) and Red Thread (Fithian Press, 2012). She is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2025), and her poetry was recently published in Here Was Once the Sea: An Anthology of Southeast Asian Ecowriting (University of Hawaii Press, 2023).