Close All The Windows, by Cyril Wong

After discovering the Internet,

my mother has trouble

finding a connection, and

calls me up for help

while I am at work.

We keep miscommunicating.

She has clicked open

so many windows

the computer threatens to hang.

And my logic runs out

of variations to explain

the same thing over

and over. Suddenly,

I imagine she is looking

for her future through

that glowing screen

and I am really helping her

to find back her life after

all her children have left

for new homes,

new families to love.

‘What now?’ she asks.

‘Try again,’ I reply, the phone

pressed to my ear. ‘Close all

the windows. Tell me —

what do you see?’

Commentary: It might be useful to teach students the etymology of words, and how the meaning of certain words alters with the culture and time. Technological change, in particular, has brought about linguistic and cultural changes. Words such as ‘windows’, ‘connection’ and ‘logic’ have been prescribed new meanings. Often these words act as a metaphor for words that have already existed. In this case, ‘windows’ has gone from being a glass panel which lets light in, to a framed area on a computer screen to view information. If capitalised, Windows is also an operating system for personal computers. This play on words is signficant as it also explains why the persona and his mother ‘keep miscommunicating’, as the mother struggles to understand the language of this generation. Yet, it is the very thing she uses to find a ‘connection’ between herself and the persona. As the persona morphs into the technology he uses daily (‘my logic’ – logic is a system underlying the arrangements of elements in a computer or electronic device that allows it to perform a task) and the computer becomes more human-like (‘threatens to hang’), perhaps the poem raises more questions about technology than it answers. There is the clutter that has come into our lives due to technology (we have “clicked open/so many windows”), the isolation that technology brings (“Close all/ the windows” – shutting oneself from the world), yet it seems to have a redeeming factor in bringing about the connection between the persona and his mother, or even the ability to help one “find back (their) life”.

Suggestions: A pre-activity could be getting the students to come up with a list of words which have derived new meanings in the era of the internet (eg. viral, tweet, troll, bump, friend, text, follow, poke etc.) or millenial words (eg. triggered, shook, woke etc.) and getting students to realise how language evolves.