When you are landless, you learn to float,
to walk on water. You learn to not think about
how your entire nation is ashamed of its
beauty, faces like full moons facing away
from Earth, from the Greek pantheon. Nation,
call your gods. Where are they? Nation, rise.
Why are you unable to? Has the marsh
caught your feet? Have you spent too long
trying to be loved by the Atlantic that
you forgot yourself? I comb your
low-hanging crescents and reach for your
stilted mountain peaks sharp as yin jian to
let you know that drowning yourself is not
the only way to love. Nation, your dynasties
show full-blooded promises to a full-bodied
youth that has stopped screaming to be heard
because the loudness isn’t nice. Nation,
don’t forget that they pulled up the corners of
their eyes to look like you, after they closed their
borders to your wives. Pushed you in the
coal mine and bouldered the entrance. Took a
limb making daily essentials for their people
while their people became the doctors in the
universities they took from you. Nation, don’t
forget your beauty is Asiatic and glorious,
harmonic and transhistorical. Nation,
I cry into the slopes of your golden valleys and fill
them with lakes that no one may steal. Nation, your
children are tidal. We arrive with
passports of rain; with grandmothers
folded into our vowels with rice fields whispering
beneath asphalt. Nation,
do not fear this multiplicity. A country is not
a mirror — it is a river mouth, sediments
of a thousand journeys meeting
the same unsettled sea. Nation,
look at your body: the spine of
the Rockies, the lungs
of prairie wind, arteries of
interstate, pulsing toward the coasts.
Two hundred and fifty years — I
have seen you — in laundromats
at midnight, in the breath
between languages, on a bus
headed west, in a child
learning the word: citizen
as if it were a fragile animal.

About the Winner

Luisa Luo ’27 is a narrative studies and non-governmental organizations and social change major. Growing up, her parents’ careers took the family from Germany to China to the United States. “As a young adolescent, I struggled to identify a concrete home geographically,” Luo says. “Yet over time, writing about the multilayered world I experienced has led me to a more abstract sense of belonging.”

Why USC Dornsife

Luo says she chose USC Dornsife because it is one of the nation’s few undergraduate programs with established departments and resources for those with interdisciplinary interests. “I appreciate the opportunities to contribute to vast research initiatives and engage with graduate students,” she says.

Inspiration

As the U.S. celebrates its 250th anniversary, Luo says she hopes to remind readers that our existence is not a linear definition of being either American or un-American.

“My aspiration for my poem is to reveal the hidden third places rich with heritage and to highlight ambivalent experiences worthy of remembering.”

A Promising Start

A Trustee Scholar and Thematic Options Honors student, Luo is also a Point Foundation Scholar, a research fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and a finalist for the Obama-Chesky Voyager Scholarship. She served as an editor at USC Dornsife’s online student publication Palaver Arts Magazine and a staff writer at the Daily Trojan. After graduating she hopes to pursue a master’s degree in global affairs, then attend law school, specializing in international human rights law and Asian studies.

From the Judges:

In her poem ‘America’s Landmass,’ Luisa Luo excavates the depths beneath the surface, finding not certainty but a kind of grace as she reminds us that identity — national or otherwise — is always in a state of evolution.

David Ulin, professor of the practice of English

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