A note about the poem “For Girls Who Talk Too Much at Lunch” from Steffi Sin for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 issue: My poetry collection For the Ones Who Grew Up In Hong Kong Style Cafés is comprised of twenty-six sonnets, all set in San Francisco Chinatown’s now-closed ABC Café & Restaurant. Each poem is a vignette of a meal the narrator experiences, and the use of Anglicized Cantonese represents the fluidity of language for bilingual speakers, playing with Cantonese-English rhymes and homophones. “For Girls Who Talk Too Much at Lunch” is about the disconnect between the narrator, who is trying to comprehend the violent history of Chinese in America she’s learned in school, and her immigrant father, who doesn’t have the mental capacity to discuss these issues because he’s preoccupied with the family’s financial struggles. The poem is titled as a commentary about the double-standard for daughters. Oftentimes, when women speak up, the people around them don’t listen, and their words are dismissed as drivel, as foolish, and they’re told they’re disconnected from reality. Education is perceived as a road to success, towards the illusion of the American Dream, but when women use their education to question the norm, education then becomes an instrument spoiling their minds. The lines that break from the established rhyme scheme then represents the narrator’s persistence in challenging these constraints.