So There It Is : An Exploration of Cultural Hybridity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry [1 ed.] 9789401207010, 9789042034143

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“So There It Is”

C

ROSS ULTURES

Readings in Post / Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English

143 SERIES EDITORS

Gordon Collier (Giessen)

Bénédicte Ledent (Liège) CO-FOUNDING EDITOR Hena

Maes–Jelinek

Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)

“So There It Is” An Exploration of Cultural Hybridity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry

Brigitte Wallinger—Schorn

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011

Financial assistance towards the publication of this book was provided by the Stiftungs- und Förderungsgesellschaft der Paris-Lodron-Universität Salzburg Cover image: Gordon and SJ Collier Cover design: Inge Baeten The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3414-3 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0701-0 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2011 Printed in The Netherlands

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

vii 1 8

Introduction Historical Contexts The Asian American Community: Stereotypes, (In)Visibility, Heterogeneity

13

1 Cultural Hybridity Asian American Subjectivity Hybridity Theory Cultural Hybridity in Asian America The Asian American Aesthetic and Poetic Tradition

29 33 42 57 65

2 Linguistic Hybridity Translating Tongues Dismantling the Master’s Code

75 80 93

3 Narrative Hybridity Tracing Identities Political Positionings

121 122 155

4 Formal Hybridity Asian Formalism European Forms

177 182 200

Conclusion

219

Works Cited

225

Appendix: Interviews Interviews with Kimiko Hahn

249 249 249 260 272

Kimiko Hahn on the American Poetry Scene Ethnic and Spatial Roots Hahn on Asian American Literature

The Political Power of Kimiko Hahn Speaking Sexuality

Interview with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Index

282 291 292 299

Acknowledgements

T

H R O U G H O U T T H E Y E A R S O F T H I N K I N G A B O U T A N D W R I T I N G this book, I found myself lucky to be supported by many people and institutions. I want to begin by thanking Hanna Wallinger from the University of Salzburg for her critical reading, smart advice, and warm encouragement. Many thanks to my friends and colleagues from the University of Salzburg. The University of Houston granted me permission to use their excellent library. Grateful acknowledgement is also given to the following institutions for grants and scholarships: the Stiftungs- und Förderungsgesellschaft der Paris-Lodron-Universität Salzburg, the University of Salzburg, the European Union, the Japanese Foreign Ministry, the Austrian Association for American Studies, and the Fulbright Foundation. I am especially indebted to my editor, Gordon Collier, at Editions Rodopi, who recognized the value of this book and carefully navigated it through the publishing process. I owe a large debt of gratitude to Kimiko Hahn for her kind aid and encouragement throughout this project. In addition, she granted me permission to publish our interviews and the poem “Komachi to Shōshō on the NinetyNinth Night.” Many thanks also to Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni for allowing me to publish our interview of 2005. I thank Lawson Fusao Inada, who granted me permission to reprint his poem “From Live Do.” Many thanks to Cyn. Zarco for allowing me to publish her poem “Vanishing Act.” Emma Bolden generously lent poetic expertise. My deep thanks to the following poets for their support (in alphabetical order): Joseph Puna Balaz, Laure–Anne Bosselaar, Nick Carbó, Tina Chang, Victoria Chang, Marilyn Chin, Eric Chock, Denise Duhamel, Mark Doty, Carla Harryman, Priscilla Lee, Walter Lew, Miho Nonaka, Prageeta Sharma, Cathy Song, Kao Kalia Yang, and Monica Youn.

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Homi Bhabha, Amritjit Singh, and Norman Yetman provided valuable suggestions. Thanks also to the fellow Asian Americanists Guiyou Huang and Valerie Solar and to Quang Bao from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Harold Schechter illuminated many dark passages, both in this study and in Houston. Heidi Burrows helped with the English, Keiko SellnerAdachi, Ido Misato, Wu Feiliang, and Kang Yang Moon with the Asian languages. My husband, family, and friends offered warm support and interest in my work. I would not have been able to start (and, for that matter, finish) this book without their encouragement and love.

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Introduction

Asia is where my people are from. America is where I live. Poetry is what I do. So there it is: Asian American poetry.1

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H I S D E F I N I T I O N O F A S I A N A M E R I C A N P O E T R Y by Lawson Fusao Inada launches this study of cultural hybridity in contemporary Asian American poetry. According to his poem “From Live Do,” Asia is the home culture of his ancestors, America is his home country, and his profession is poetry. These three aspects echo in Asian American poetry today, and denote the key concept of cultural fusion. Asia constitutes one of the cultural roots of the Asian American community, and the U S A is their

1

Lawson Fusao Inada, “From Live Do,” in Frontiers of Asian American Studies: Writing, Research, and Commentary, ed. Gail M. Nomura, Russell Endo, Stephen H. Sumida & Russell C. Leong (Pullman: Washington State U P , 1989): 238. Reprinted with the kind permission of Lawson Fusao Inada. Born in Fresno, California, on 26 May 1938, Inada is a third-generation Japanese American and has published poetry since the 1970s. His collection Legends from Camp (1972) won an American Book Award. The “poet laureate of Asian America,” he is especially known for his jazz poetry; Gayle K. Sato, “Lawson Fusao Inada (1938– ),” in Asian American Poets: A BioBibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Guiyou Huang (Westport C T : Greenwood, 2002): 150.

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home country. Therefore, Asian American poets are ‘compositional subjects’2 whose writing is influenced by majority American, Asian American, and Asian cultural fields (though other American ethnicities, of course, also exert an influence to a certain extent). “So there it is” – culturally hybrid contemporary Asian American poetry. This hybridity, including the often neglected aspect of form, is the subject of the present study. Susan Koshy has observed, of Asian American studies, that “although substantial historical scholarship has been produced, the field has been weak in theoretical work.”3 Through a careful discussion of hybridity in Asian American poetry, I hope, in “So There It Is” – the first extensive literary study of the subject – to have gone some way toward meeting the need for more substantial theoretical investigations. Along with Xiaojing Zhou’s The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry (2006), Timothy Yu’s Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965 (2009) and Josephine Park’s Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (2008), it is one of the few book-length studies of contemporary Asian American poetry. My aim thereby is to demonstrate the values of cultural plurality and to question the constrictions and distortions of hegemonic discourse. I shall be countering imprecise, racist perceptions of Asian American poetry, including the prejudice that this literature deals only with Asian American issues and lacks aesthetic quality. Further goals of this work are the amplification of hitherto unheard voices and the articulation of an historical consciousness. I also align myself emphatically with an antisexist and antiracist discourse. This study not only looks at issues of ethnicity but also explores the literary quality and aesthetic achievement of the poetry examined, something too often overlooked by scholars in the field of ethnic studies. In her introduction to Literary Gestures, Sue–Im Lee affirms that a cultural-materialist, sociological, and historical analysis of Asian American literature must be counterbalanced by a consideration of literary aesthetics

2

Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian / American Women (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2002). 3 Susan Koshy, “The Fiction of Asian American Literature,” Yale Journal of Criticism 9.2 (1996): 316.

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Introduction

3

and the application of formal analysis. “The study of the aesthetic is not a non-Asian American activity,” she emphasizes.4 The concept of cultural hybridity, examined in chapter 1, links the theory of cultural hybridity to the material reality and poetic manifestation of various Asian Americans. Literary evidence, as shown in chapters 2 to 4, contextualizes and exemplifies these theoretical assumptions. Asian American poetic art is a concrete expression of Asian American culture, reflecting collective and individual Asian American concerns. Asian American cultural hybridity is examined here through close readings of contemporary Asian American poetry on three levels: language (chapter 2), content (chapter 3), and form (chapter 4). The languages, narratives, and forms of the poems will be analyzed – where necessary – in sufficient explanatory detail to enable the reader to grasp the subtle contours of the more difficult poems. Naturally, the three analytical parts cannot be segmented and separated; they interlink at times. Although, clearly, it is the significance of Asian American poems and the poetic skill of Asian American poets that I wish to emphasize, I nevertheless consider Asian American poetry to be an integral and influential part of the American poetry scene as a whole. Amy Ling declares: “I may not be able to persuade anyone to like tofu or Asian American writers, but I can tell them, as we’re all telling them, we’re here.”5 My broader objective is thus to let my readers know that Asian American poetry ‘is here’ – in American literature. The most realistic and fruitful approach was to cover a wide and representative range of authors. The contemporary poems analyzed include the work of well-known Asian American poets who have shaped the Asian American poetry scene since the late 1970s and early 1980s and who gained recognition in the 1980s and 1990s. These include Kimiko Hahn, Li–Young Lee, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Cathy Song. The poetry of upcoming talents and lesserknown poets who have been publishing poetry since the late 1990s are discussed as well, among them Victoria Chang, Srikanth Reddy, Suji Kwock Kim, and Nick Carbó. 4

Sue–Im Lee, “The Aesthetic in Asian American Literary Discourse,” in Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing, ed. Rocío G. Davis & Sue–Im Lee (Philadelphia P A : Temple U P , 2006): 14. 5 Amy Ling, “I’m Here: An Asian American Woman’s Response,” in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol & Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick N J : Rutgers U P , 1991): 745.

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The selection of authors also illustrates the diverse regional presence of Asian American poets throughout America. The residences of the writers discussed range from the East Coast (e.g., Kimiko Hahn) to the West Coast (Marilyn Chin), from the North (Wang Ping) to the South (Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni). Male and female writers with ethnic backgrounds in many Asian countries are discussed. The heterogeneity of present-day Asian American poets is boundless. They are part of American poetic movements, including, among others, confessional poetry (Kimiko Hahn, Yuko Taniguchi), performance poetry (Jessica Hagedorn and Cyn. Zarco), Language poetry (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha), postmodernist poetry (such as poems by John Yau and Walter Lew), experimental poetry (Myung Mi Kim, Mei–mei Berssenbrugge),6 local-color poetry (Lois– Ann Yamanaka), and A I D S pandemic poetry (Timothy Liu).7 Not only do the styles of Asian American poets vary, their biographies and the relationships to their ethnic communities also differ. Some are immigrants from Asia like Wang Ping, Yuko Taniguchi, Myung Mi Kim or Koon Woon, some are second-generation Americans (including Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Victoria Chang, and Arthur Sze), some are third-generation Americans (e.g., David Mura and Kimiko Hahn). Others are not forthcoming about their generation of Americanness. Some were born in the 1950s, others in the 1980s. All in all, they partake of the heterogeneity of Asian Americans and cannot be pressed into a single mold (though, arguably, the very nature of the eurocentric catch-all designation ‘Asian American’ attempts to do so). This analysis of cultural hybridity in contemporary Asian American poetry employs basic postcolonial assumptions such as discursive subject-formation 6

For an extensive discussion of Asian American experimental poetry, see Timothy Yu, Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965 (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2009). 7 Timothy Yu goes so far as to state that trends in ‘mainstream’ American poetry rather than demographic developments are to be held responsible for the changes in Asian American poetry: “The few differences between […] first- and second-generation writers can be attributed less to changes in demographics and experience of Asian Americans over the past few decades than to shifts in what mainstream American poetry is doing”; Yu, “Review of Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation,” Galatea Resurrects 2 (2006), http://galatearesurrection2.blogspot.com/2006/05/asianamerican-poetry-next-generation.html (accessed 10 July 2008). However, clearly both factors influence Asian American poetry.

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Introduction

5

and a view of agency as process rather than as original authority. Such approaches challenge fixed, organic identity and the hegemony of Western epistemologies. Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt point to a bifurcation in contemporary U S postcolonial studies: there is the post-ethnicity school, and there is the borders school.8 Post-ethnicity scholars acknowledge contradictions in American culture, but believe in its self-correcting dynamic and tendency toward inclusiveness. The borders school, which includes hybridity studies, focuses on external and internal borders in U S culture, and analyzes the connecting and separating aspects of different cultural subgroups. Borders scholars assume that color and class hegemony will proliferate in America under the new guise of globalization. They look at multicultural U S identities in relation to assimilation, otherness, exile, diaspora, and cultural hybridity. My own study of cultural hybridity in Asian American poetry adheres, in the main, to this latter line of thought. Aspects of poststructuralism and postmodernism need to be incorporated because an individual’s identity is a hybrid of several subject-positions such as gender, sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity. This study stresses the interconnectedness of all ethnicities, classes, gender, and sexual orientations, of source and target cultures, and of literary and cultural studies. The poststructuralist emphasis on discourse is also relevant for this study. The chapter on linguistic hybridity will identify poems of some of the Asian American authors that have postmodernist features, such as narrative fragmentation and the absence of closure. An exclusively postmodernist approach to Asian American poetry would be flawed, however. It ignores two important features that inform Asian American poetry: the postcolonial power-structures and the sense of displacement that stems from cultural or phenotypical difference and from U S stereotypes of Asians and Asian Americans. “It is a fiction, a very dangerous one,” warns Meena Alexander, “to think that we can play endlessly in the postmod-

8

Amritjit Singh & Peter Schmidt, “On the Borders between U.S. Studies and Postcolonial Theory” (2000), in Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature, ed. Singh & Schmidt (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 2000): 4–15.

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ernist fashion, because our ethnicity is located in our bodies and comes in as a pressure to resist this sort of fracturing.”9 The poetry of Asian American writers, unlike mainstream postmodern poetry, incorporates a postcolonial awareness and the presence of the racially marked body, leading to “disidentification,” to use Lisa Lowe’s term. Lowe explains that Asian American subjects are determined by (neo)colonization in Asia and racialization in America. Consequently, Asian Americans defeat the nation’s expectations of speedy assimilation and uncritical identification as American citizens; they are at odds with programmatic American national identity – disidentified.10 Disidentification “allows for the exploration of alternative political and cultural subjectivities that emerge within the continuing effects of displacement.”11 It creates critical subjectivities that rearticulate forms of alienation in politically oppositional forms. The problematic relationship between Asian American art and postmodernism also involves an epistemic gap: in contrast to postmodernist skepticism about historical narratives, history is not over for Asian Americans, whose culture remembers past wrongs and achievements. The lack of historicity that postmodernists emphasize is non-existent in ethnic communities. They keep “the past alive in order to construct a better future,” confirms Kimberly Chabot Davis in the African American context.12

9

Alexander, in Gargi Chatterjee, transcriber, & Augie Tam, ed. “Is There an Asian American Aesthetics?” in Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader, ed. Min Zhou & James V. Gatewood (New York: New York U P , 2000): 629. 10 To be precise, they contradict the national pedagogical narrative that considers the U S A to be bounded and stable through time. This pedagogical approach to the American nation or people stands in contrast to the performative approach, which understands the national identity as process. The performative concept deals with quotidian life and the multiple transformations of American national identity; see David Huddart, “Hybridity and Cultural Rights: Inventing Global Citizenship,” in Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-Colonial Studies in Transition, ed. Joel Kuortti & Jopi Nyman (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2007): 23–24. 11 Lisa Lowe, “Decolonization, Displacement, Disidentification: Asian American ‘Novels’ and the Question of History,” in Cultural Institutions of the Novel, ed. Deidre Lynch & William B. Warner (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1996): 102–103. 12 Kimberly Chabot Davis, “ ‘ Postmodern Blackness’: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the End of History,” Twentieth Century Literature 44.2 (Summer 1998): 242.

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Introduction

7

Moreover, postmodernism is a theory mainly of and for a white elite culture. Although its theoretical focus lies in difference and otherness, minority artists are rarely discussed by postmodern critics. In her article “Postmodern Blackness,” bell hooks argues that one must not separate postmodern politics of difference from the politics of racism. hooks also warns that one has to be suspicious of applying postmodern critique of the subject to ethnic, subjugated Americans who “feel themselves coming to voice for the first time.”13 At the same time, the African American theorist points to the power of the postmodern critique of essentialism for minority Americans. The challenge of universality and static identity can create new possibilities for subject-formation and agency.14 In the Asian American context, this means that postmodernism can affirm multiple Asian American identities and challenge onedimensional imperialistic perceptions of this population group, thereby subverting white hegemony. It is this latter aspect of postmodernism that is given due consideration in this study. My understanding of cultural hybridity, based on that of Homi Bhabha, will be outlined in chapter 1. According to Bhabha, cultural hybridity “entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy”15 and deconstructs the eurocentric hierarchy implicit in American society. The cultural hybridity of Asian Americans originates in their interstitial passage between the fixed identifications of majority America, Asian America, and Asia. Bhabha is not interested in the boundaries demarcating different, fixed identities, but in the beyond, the liminal space between these separated units. This in-between – what he calls “Third Space”16 – is the exact location of cultural hybridity, the source of newness and invention, and the subject of this study. Cultural hybridity is manifested in contemporary Asian American poetry on the linguistic level (chapter 2), on the narrative level (chapter 3), and on the level of form (chapter 4). Asian words or characters are inserted into an otherwise English text, or there is a more extensive alternation of Asian and English lexis and register, or these can be found fused syntactically. The sub13

bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness,” Postmodern Culture 1.1 (September 1990): 130–35, http: // www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Postmodern_Blackness_18270 .html (accessed 14 November 2007). 14

hooks, “Postmodern Blackness,” 130–35. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 4. 16 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 36–39. 15

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ject-matter– or narrative – likewise expresses the cultural hybridity of this ethnic community, and poems that reveal subjectivity and political positions will accordingly be analyzed for interstitial characteristics. Contemporary Asian American poems also avail themselves of both Asian and European poetic forms, in varying degrees of hybridization or alternation. In the course of this study, I interviewed several Asian American poets and experts in the field; my most extensive conversations, with Kimiko Hahn and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, centered on the cultural hybridity in their work. Because of their undoubted value and significance for other scholars, I have chosen to make these dialogues accessible in the form of an appendix.

Historical Contexts Before I embark on theoretical and textual discussion, some general remarks about Asian American ethnicity are advisable, not least to provide some prefatorial terminological guidance and to sketch in some essential sociological background to Asian communities in America, particularly concerning the prison-house of stereotypes they inhabit, the aetiology of their supposed ‘invisibility’, their emergence into ‘visibility’, and the vital heterogeneity of their identity.

Terminology I generally speak of ‘America’ when referring to the U S A , the socio-cultural macro-context of my analysis. This aligns me with the ‘nationalist’ wing of Asian Americanists who perceive this nation as the political location of the Asian American struggle to transform American power-structures based on race. Sau–ling Cynthia Wong maps the shift of Asian American studies from a domestic to a diasporic perspective and warns that “a denationalized Asian American cultural criticism may exacerbate liberal pluralism’s already oppressive tendency to ‘disembody’, leaving America’s racialized power structure intact.”17 Although nationhood seems outdated in our postmodern age, Wong underscores the need for Asian Americans to monitor the nation in order to fully participate in this democracy. The historical oppression of Asian Americans on American soil, their participation in the formation and civilization of the U S A , and their celebration of their own Asian American iden17

Sau–ling Cynthia Wong, “Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads,” Amerasia Journal 21.1–2 (1995): 18–19.

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Introduction

9

tity as a vital part of this nation18 – all are significant for their sense of community and for the directions taken by their cultural expressions. A discussion of cultural hybridity is naturally also linked to transnationalism and to the exilic perspective of many Asian Americanists. The latter emphasize the advantages of a global perspective, stressing distance from undue nationalist concerns, the permeability between Asia and Asian America, and the shift from a domestic to a diasporic point of view. According to this school of thought, to see Asian exilic culture in a global perspective frees it from a focus on the adopted country and obeisance to, or endless struggle with, its hegemonic ideologies.19 Susan Koshy explains that today ethnicity in general is produced “at multiple local and global sites,” and that the transpacific, geopolitical realignment between Asia and America has also contributed to the need for a transnational perspective on Asian American literature and for a deeper understanding of global institutions and forces.20 Is it possible to espouse, in fruitful paradox, the arguments of both the exilic and the nationalist domains in Asian American studies? I acknowledge the critical potential of the denationalized, transhemispheric approach. Literature in general is transnational and comparative, and authors collaborate and influence each other. Asian American literature in particular crosses national borders and Asian American subjects are influenced by entry, expulsion, and movement. At the same time, I maintain that a national perspective is valuable for my narrative, formal, and linguistic analyses of contemporary Asian American poetry. Rachel C. Lee answers the initial question: transcultural frameworks “do not displace the older nationalist problematic but occur side by side with it.”21 Heinz Ickstadt argues similarly, observing that the study of 18

Such Asian American celebrations include the Buddhist Obon Festival in New York City, the Chinese New Year Parade, and events on the occasion of the Asian Pacific American Heritage Month – for example, the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. 19 See Eleanor Ty, “Rethinking the Hyphen: Asian North American and European Ethnic Texts as Global Narratives,” Canadian Review of American Studies 32.2 (2002): 239–52, and Shirley Lim, “Immigration and Diaspora,” in An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, ed. King–kok Cheung (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1997): 289–311. 20 Susan Koshy, “The Fiction of Asian American Literature,” 316, 341. 21 Rachel C. Lee, The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1999): 11.

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American culture – including, I would add. American poetry – can have a national and transnational perspective, “since cultural identities are the result of complex cultural exchanges embedded in histories that extend beyond national borderlines.”22 Thus, the space of the U S A is of crucial importance for Asian American people and literature and my literary analysis. At the same time, I will also consider transnational alignments, thus outbalancing the discursive centrality of the U S nation. For the purpose of this study, I define an Asian American as an individual, foreign-born or native, who resides in the U S A and has his or her origins in East Asia (China, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, Japan), Southeast Asia (Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam), and/or South Asia (India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Nepal, Bhutan). The term ‘Asian American’ is satisfactory to me, because it implies the diverse history, diaspora, and tradition of all people of Asian descent.23 The largest Asian American sub-ethnicities are Chinese Americans (3.6 million), Filipino Americans (2.9 million), Asian Indian Americans (2.7 million), Vietnamese Americans (1.6 million), Korean Americans (1.5 million), and Japanese Americans (1.2 million).24 Admittedly, the term ‘Asian American’ is trapped by its limitations – for instance, its homogenizing of a heterogeneous group, previous problematic uses of the term that stressed masculine and heteronormative biases as well as an East Asian orientation.25 For lack of a better term, however, many critics use it. I do not use the terms ‘Asian Pacific American’ or ‘Asian and Pacific Islander American’, because I consider the Native Hawaiian (American) and Pacific Islander (American) cultures as different from Asian (American) cultures. The former should receive separate and extensive analysis, which is

22

Heinz Ickstadt, “American Studies in an Age of Globalization,” American Quarterly 54.4 (2002): 556. 23 I am indebted to Kimiko Hahn, Valerie Solar, and Quang Bao from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop for their suggestions of how to define this term. 24 See the American Community Survey 2006, http://factfinder.census.gov. 25 For an elaborate discussion of this issue, see Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2003).

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beyond the scope of this study. Asian American literature written in languages other than English is also not considered.26 If I use the term ‘Asian American’ as separate from majority American culture, do I repeat ethnic division and thus support a social hierarchy?27 Is the separation of majority culture and ethnic culture a perpetuation of the hegemonic framework? At first glance, it may well seem that by separating Asian American and majority American cultures the binary compartmentalization is preserved and existing power-divisions in American society are accepted. This division, however, presents a common distinction between majority American and Asian American cultures that is a racial reality in today’s American society. Critics discuss ethnic literature separately to give it the space and attention it deserves and thereby contribute to the valorization of ethnic art and its inclusion in the American art canon. This is in line with Marilyn Chin’s demand: “It is our duty to usurp the canon from its monolithic, monolingual, monocultural, and henceforth monotonous fate.”28 The paradox that Asian American literary canons are treated separately from majority American literary canons to enforce their inclusion therein also haunts Asian American literature departments at universities, where they coexist alongside American literature departments. Given the fact that all ethnic, religious, and class-based communities are somewhat different but equal and that at the same time all communities constitute American culture, theorists ask for and emphasize the recognition of ethnic art as part of American culture. “Multicultural is not a description of a category of American writing – it is a definition of all American writing,” the Before Columbus Foundation pointedly argues in its mission statement.29 26

For a concise survey of Chinese-language literature in the U S A , see Xiao–huang Yin, “Redefining Chinese American Sensibility: A Study of Chinese-Language Literature in America,” in Not English Only: Redefining ‘American’ in American Studies, ed. Orm Øverland (Amsterdam: V U U P , 2001): 178–98. 27 By ‘majority’ or ‘mainstream’ culture I mean the dominant culture of Euro-Americans. 28 Marilyn Chin, “Introduction” to Dissident Song: A Contemporary Asian American Anthology, ed. Marilyn Chin & David Wong Louie (Santa Cruz C A : Quarry West, 1991): 4. 29 In Shawn Wong, Asian American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology (New York: Longman, 1995): 5; emphasis in original. The Before Columbus Foundation is a nonprofit multicultural literary organization founded by Ishmael Reed.

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Another question arising in relation to the term ‘Asian American’ concerns the percentage of Asian ancestry that qualifies someone as Asian American. Does one have to have “at least” one Asian or Asian American parent, or is one Asian or Asian American grandparent “enough”? Like Victoria Chang, I argue that a writer’s ethnic identity does not depend on a minimum percentage of ethnic ancestry but, rather, on the author’s self-identification.30 However, choosing one’s ethnic identity has its limits, primarily due to physiognomy. If a woman looks Filipina but has one Anglo-American grandfather, people will consider her an Asian American, no matter whether she calls herself Anglo-American or not. Like Mary Waters,31 David Hollinger explicitly points out in his book Postethnic America that choosing one’s ethnic affiliation is more possible for white Americans than, for example, for African Americans: “The persistence of the ‘one-drop rule’ deprives those with any hint of black skin of any choice in their ethno-racial affiliation.”32 Eric Liu predicts that “the ranks of the white will simply expand to include the ‘lighter’ or more ‘culturally white’ of the multiracials.”33 Many Asian Americans – whether of mixed racial ancestry or Asian ancestry only – qualify for this “cultural whiteness” due to their socio-economic status – advanced education, profession, and income. They are consequently becoming increasingly perceived as white.34 30

Victoria M. Chang, “Introduction” to Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, ed. Victoria Chang (Champaign: U of Illinois P , 2004): xxvi. In many cases, the contemporary Asian American poets discussed in this study confirmed their ethnicity to me in emails. I am indebted to the many authors who generously took the time to respond to my enquiries. 31 Mary C. Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: U of California P , 1990): 18–19. 32 David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1998): 27. For a concise discussion of the so-called ‘one-drop rule’ in the African American context, see Werner Sollors’ “Introduction” to Interracialism: Black–White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law, ed. Sollors (New York: Oxford U P , 2000): 6–7. 33 Eric Liu, quoting from Mary Waters, Ethnic Options, 194. 34 This argument is also sustained by Norman Yetman, “Introduction: Definitions and Perspectives” and “Race and Ethnicity in the United States at Century’s End,” in Majority and Minority: The Dynamics of Race and Ethnicity in American Life, ed. Norman R. Yetman (Boston M A : Allyn & Bacon, 6th ed. 1998): 8–12 and 443–46 re-

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Unlike other Americans of ethnic origin, such as Italian or Irish Americans, Asian Americans will as a rule not be considered white.35 Italian Americans, for example, were originally considered ‘black’ and then re-labelled ‘white’ due to a self-demarcation from and racism against African Americans36 and owing to an increase in income and the mastering of the English language.37 However, the high percentage of new Asian immigrants and their close connection to the respective Asian culture and language prevent an integration of all Asian Americans into majority, white America. Moreover, the Asian body, superficially judged, seems more different than the Italian body from the Anglo-American (prototypically white) body and might prevent a blending of Asian Americans into the American majority population. Nazli Kibria uses the phrase “A Part Yet Apart,”38 arguing that Chinese and Korean Americans might increasingly participate in majority culture, but that they can never become ethnically unmarked Americans, because of marginalization through the ‘alterity’ of their Asian physiognomy.

The Asian American Community: Stereotypes, (In)Visibility, Heterogeneity Although sixty-five percent of Asian Americans are U S citizens, the U S Americans perceive Asian Americans as the most foreign population group. They are racialized as foreign despite acculturation, nativity, and citizenship.39 Kimiko Hahn describes the situation of Asian Americans thus: spectively, and Herbert J. Gans, “Symbolic Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America” (1979), in Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: New York U P , 1996): 454. I am grateful to Norman Yetman for discussing this development with me in extensive email communication during November and December 2006. 35 See Waters, Ethnic Options. 36 See Stefano Luconi, “How Italian Americans Became White,” in Close Encounters of an Other Kind: New Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity and American Studies, ed. Roy Goldblatt, Jopi Nyman & John A. Stotesbury (Joensuu: U of Joensuu P , 2005): 266–67. 37 See Gans, “Symbolic Ethnicity,” 458. 38 Nazli Kibria, Becoming Asian American: Second-Generation Chinese and Korean American Identities (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 2002). 39 See Kandice Chuh, “Of Hemispheres and Other Spheres: Navigating Karen Tei Yamashita’s Literary World,” American Literary History 18.3 (2006): 618.

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We are the ‘model minority’ on the one hand and ‘dogeater’ on the other: exotic and second class. We are ‘forever foreign.’40

David Leiwei Li argues that the stigmatization of ‘Orientals’ as foreigners is linked to the complex and often repressed relation between the American national formation and acts of Asian exclusion.41 During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, America’s nationalism focused on capital accumulation and it was felt that ‘native’ (white) labor was threatened by Asian Americans. This resulted in anti-Asian legislation of immigration, citizenship, land, and education as well as in local lynching, state violence, imprisonment and internment, and linguistic and political subordination. All these aimed at reminding Asian Americans of their status as foreigners, aliens, and economic as well as military enemies. Susan Koshy reveals that the enormous economic growth in parts of Asia and the close network between the U S A and the Pacific Rim countries have challenged racist stereotypes of the perpetual foreigner.42 In addition, she argues, these developments will cause Asian Americans who have historically repudiated their connection to Asia to re-negotiate their relationship with it. Majority Americans will reconsider Asia as a political and economic partner, leaving behind former assumptions of patronage and conquest. The way white Americans perceive Asian Americans cannot only be linked to America’s national formation, its subsequent exclusionary legislation, and recent transnational collaboration. It has also been profoundly shaped by the stereotypes that are proclaimed and perpetuated by the popular media. The media often make no distinction between Asians and Asian Americans, thereby supporting the view that Asian immigrants and their offspring are all foreigners. “Essential duplicity”43 has been defined as the core stereotype of Asian Americans and Asians, but beneath this overall stereotype is a dichotomy: Asian Americans are frequently portrayed in two ways: the good Asian 40

Kimiko Hahn, quoted in Elena Tajima Creef, Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body (New York: New York U P , 2004): 171. 41 David Leiwei Li, Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 1998): 25–26. 42 Susan Koshy, “The Fiction of Asian American Literature,” 336. 43 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 66.

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Introduction

15

(American), and the bad Asian (American).44 Bad Asian (American) men often speak English perfectly and are sinister, mean, brutal, and dangerous, since they are uncontrollable (for example, Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu). The good male Asian Americans are described as geeks, nerds, and swots with buck teeth and horn-rimmed glasses who never contradict whites. In older films and novels, they have a strong accent or cannot speak English at all. There they are also shown as obsequious, mild, asexual, effeminate, and lacking virility as well as potency.45 Charlie Chan, Earl Derr Biggers’ Asian American police inspector, is a case in point.46 Amy Tachiki argues that since

44

See Elaine H. Kim, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context (Philadelphia P A : Temple U P , 1982): 3–22. 45 David L. Eng discusses Asian American male subjectivity and how Asian American men are “feminized, emasculated, or homosexualized” in the U S cultural imaginary; Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2001): 16. Wenxin Li explains that the historical grounding for the feminization of Asian American men was the legislative racism of the nineteenth century which denied them their women and forced them to do jobs regarded as feminine, such as cooking and gardening; “Gender Negotiations and the Asian American Literary Imagination,” in Asian American Literary Studies, ed. Guiyou Huang (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2005): 111. King–kok Cheung points out that the terms ‘effeminate’ and ‘emasculated’ underwrite the superiority of the masculine over the feminine; “Of Men and Men: Reconstructing Chinese American Masculinity,” in Other Sisterhoods: Literary Tradition and U.S. Women of Color, ed. Sandra Kumamoto Stanley (Urbana: U of Illinois P , 1998): 174. The Language poet John Yau deals with Asian American stereotypes and clichés in his poem “Genghis Chan: Private Eye X X I V ,” in Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, ed. Walter K. Yew (New York: Kaya, 1995): 379; discussed in Timothy Yu, “Form and Identity in Language Poetry and Asian American Poetry,” Contemporary Literature 41.1 (2000): 422–61. 46 Jessica Hagedorn confirms the stereotype by triumphantly rejecting it in the titles of her two edited collections Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993) and Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home in the World – An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction (New York: Penguin, 2004), in both of which Elaine Kim, in her preface, states: “Gone for good his yellowface asexual bulk, his fortune-cookie English.” Yet the specific case of Earl Derr Biggers’ creation (based on a real Chinese-Hawaiian detective) is far from being this cut-and-dried, as is revealed in a recent and highly sympathetic biography of Biggers by the Chinese-born California-based literature profes-

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Asian Americans have been labeled a model minority (for a discussion of this concept, see below) and are no longer considered socially inferior to white Americans, the Asian American male image has been “desexed,”47 so that the boundary between Asian American men and white women could still be maintained. Traise Yamamoto contradicts this argument and explains convincingly that Asian countries, paradigmatically Japan, have always been feminized and minimized by the West as a reaction to the threat of not being able to conquer them.48 The media also present good and bad types of Asian American women: the secretive, malevolent, deceitful, calculating, and sexually tempting dragon lady (e.g., The Dragon Lady from Milton Caniff’s famous comic strip “Terry and the Pirates”) or the shy, innocent, ready-to-please, and submissive lotus blossom who never opposes anyone (paradigmatically Suzie Wong).49 Through such stereotypes of ethnic women, American imperialism and colonial attitudes have contributed to belief in the “availability of nonwhite women for the sexual outlets of white males”50 and a “hypersexual encoding”51 of the Asian American female body. Elaine Kim pointedly asserts: “Asian men have been coded as having no sexuality, while Asian women sor Yunte Huang: Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010). 47 Amy Tachiki, “Introduction” to Roots: An Asian American Reader, ed. Amy Tachiki, Eddie Wong, Franklin Odo & Buck Wong (Los Angeles: U C L A Asian American Studies Center, 1971): 3. 48 Traise Yamamoto, Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body (Berkeley: U of California P , 1999): 15. See also Sepp Linhart, “Dainty Japanese” or Yellow Peril? Western War-Postcards, 1900–1945 (Münster: L I T , 2005). 49 Singh and Schmidt comment on the submissive lotus-blossom stereotype of Asian American women. They emphasize that Asian American women are described as reticent and passive, while African American women are stereotypically portrayed as loud, aggressive, and mean (“On the Borders between U.S. Studies and Postcolonial Theory,” 34). In Outlaw Culture, bell hooks argues similarly, pointing to the oppositional stereotyping of Asian American and African American women that prevents these two ethnic groups from collaborating; hooks, Outlaw Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994): 218. 50 Tachiki, “Introduction,” 3. 51 Yamamoto, Masking Selves, 73.

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Introduction

17

have nothing else.”52 Often the stereotyping of Asian Americans is determined by ambivalence and ambiguity, so that an Asian American woman might be simultaneously portrayed as sexually submissive and dominant, and an Asian American man shown to be mean and brutal as well as obsequious. Stereotypes of Asian Americans are related to Orientalism and its ideas of how ‘Orientals’ behave and what they think and know.53 Edward Said’s influential book Orientalism (1978) elaborates on the genealogy of Orientalism, the discursive invention of the Orient by Europeans, and the representation and knowledge of a ‘primitive’ Orient.54 He distinguishes between ‘manifest’ Orientalism, scientific knowledge about the Orient, and ‘latent’ Orientalism, unconscious fantasies and desires. Sheng–mei Ma pointedly defines Orientalism as the Western tradition of “dealing with the subject and the subjugation of the East” that entails the “demonization and domestication of the other.”55 The Orient is fictionally created as the quintessential Other, at a considerable geographical and cultural distance from the Self.56 Oriental stereotypes are connected to fantasies of despotism, splendor, cruelty, and sensuality. Common Orientalist practices include feminizing, homogenizing, exoticizing, and objectifying the Orient.57 Through the fictionalization of the ‘Oriental Other’, the West can exercise control over manifestations of alterity and reduce their supposed danger and threat. The Orient is an ambiguous and invented region that is usually said to include the Arab nations (including, and often preeminently, North Africa) and 52

Elaine Kim, “ ‘ Such Opposite Creatures’: Men and Women in Asian American Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 39.1 (Winter 1990): 69. 53 Cf. Josephine Park’s Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (New York: Oxford U P , 2008); this study reads Asian American literature “against a backdrop of American Orientalism” (19). 54 Asian Americans were, of course, orientalized long before the publication of Said’s influential book. See, for example, Russell C. Leong, “Before and After Orientalism: From the Oriental School to Asian American Studies,” Amerasia Journal 31.1 (2005): v. 55 Sheng–mei Ma, The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2000): xi, xx. 56 See Carmen Birkle, “Orientalisms in Fin-de Siècle America,” American Studies 51.3 (2006): 323. 57 See Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2003): 6–7.

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Southeast Asia. Said’s theory about the Orient has thoroughly shaped Asian American studies. “No other outside practitioner has influenced Asian American Studies more than Edward Said,” confirms Moustafa Bayoumi.58 Indeed, Said’s Orientalism not only initiated postcolonial studies but it has also encouraged Asian Americans and Asian Americanists to combat stereotypical representations, American nationalism, and racial oppression. Through art and literature, celebrations of Asian American culture and political activism and involvement, alternative representations of Asian Americans are offered. The idea of Asian Americans as a ‘model minority’ must be seen in the context of the good Asian (American) stereotype. The model minority is presumably congruent with white America, because it is perfectly assimilated, works hard, believes in the American Dream, remains quietly in the background, and does not challenge white superiority and racist inequality in American society. The high level of educational achievement among Asian Americans is also connected to the myth of the model minority: forty-nine percent of the Asian American population holds a bachelor’s degree or has achieved an even higher level of education. According to a Census Bureau Report of 2005, Asian Americans have the highest proportion of college graduates with a bachelor’s degree or higher, followed by non-Hispanic whites, African Americans, and Hispanics.59 Model minority Asian America is said to be well-mannered, law-abiding, well-educated and hard-working, living in well-disciplined, close-knit families. Eric Liu reveals that, in the 1980s, Asian Americans became “the country’s favorite nonwhite folk.”60 He calls this new stereotyping of Asian Americans as a superior group – in contrast to previous stereotyping as weak, decadent, and sensualist Easterners – “New Orientalism.”61 The new celebration of Asian America is no better than before: once again, Westerners make people of Asian ancestry the object of their fascination, and the division of the 58

Moustafa Bayoumi, “Our Work Is of This World,” Amerasia Journal 31.1 (2005): 6. 59 See Mike Bergmann, “College Degree Nearly Doubles Annual Earnings, Census Bureau Reports” (28 March 2005), http://www.census.gov/P -Release/www/releases /archives/education/004214.html (accessed 13 April 2010). 60 Eric Liu, The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker (New York: Vintage, 1999): 128. 61 Liu, The Accidental Asian, 130.

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Introduction

19

world into East and West is perpetuated. Moreover, constructing Asian Americans as one model minority overlooks the diversity within Asian America. Amy Tachiki points to the celebration of Asian America as a model minority and to the simultaneous obliviousness to the Asian American contribution to the American nation: America has ignored the history and participation of Asians in this country’s development; it has distorted the ethnic and cultural identities of Asian people; and still it hails Asian Americans as its most ‘successful’ minority.62

She highlights the psychological and emotional costs of the celebrated higher educational and income levels, in comparison to other non-white population groups.63 Tachiki describes the dangers of this myth of success as reinforcing the underlying value system that caused it and assuming that non-whites have to ‘earn’ their Americanness. The myth of the model minority also directs attention away from presentday racism against Asian Americans and suggests that the discrimination against other socially disadvantaged minorities is justified because they do not work hard enough and lack initiative. In addition, this myth obscures the economic hardship of some Asian Americans, especially the poverty of many refugees from Laos and Cambodia. Elaine Kim argues that Asian Americans are seen as “docile honorary whites whose very existence proves that Latinos and African Americans are lazy and stupid and that racism does not exist in American society.”64 The fact that Asian Americans are described as a model minority also reveals that they are not perceived as adhering to majoritarian Americanism: “We are Model Minorities, after all, not Model Americans.”65 Since the 1960s, Asian Americans have been favorably contrasted as a model minority specifically in relation to African Americans, thereby encouraging the antagonism of other ethnic communities.66 Kim argues that Asian Americans have been favored by white America because they “require less 62

Amy Tachiki, “Introduction,” 1. Tachiki, “Introduction,” 1. 64 Elaine H. Kim, “Korean Americans in U.S. Race Relations: Some Considerations,” Amerasia Journal 23.2 (1997): 71. 65 Tracy Chu, “Review of Asian American Women: The Frontiers Reader,” Amerasia Journal 31.3 (2005): 214. 66 See Sooyoung Kang, “Model Minority,” in Greenwood Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature, ed. Guiyou Huang (Westport C T : Greenwood, 2009): 702. 63

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white energy to suppress.”67 Although Asian Americans were resistant to the way they were treated early on, white America has largely ignored their way of expressing opposition. No matter if an ethnicity is the subject of racist love, like the model minority of Asian America, or racist hatred, like African America, the basis of this treatment is still white racism. Difference often makes one the object of racist stereotyping, and in order to undo these stereotypes and construct one’s real ethnic identity, one must evoke and deconstruct what has falsely been reported as one’s ethnicity. Sheng–mei Ma warns that deconstructing distortions and racial stereotypes of ethnicity entails “an unwitting reiteration of Orientalist images.”68 Conversely, I consider it necessary to deal with racist stereotyping in order to be able to establish a new understanding of ethnic identity. For me, the hybrid nature of Asian America, grounded as it is in incorporating majority American aspects as well as Asian culture, constitutes this new identity, which has liberated itself from the old stereotypes precisely because it dared to face them. Cultural hybridity defies wholesale assimilationism, monolingualism, and racism – hence does not perpetuate the Orientalist hegemony. The term ‘Oriental’ has, by and large, been replaced by ‘Asian American’ or ‘Asian Pacific American’, but Asian Americans remain the target of American racism. Just recently, the radio talk-show host Adam Carolla ridiculed the 2006 Asian Excellence Awards and the Asian Americans’ purported inability to speak English on his show.69 Regularly, Sikhs are harassed for their turbans and hair, reports the Sikh Coalition.70 Injustice on the basis of racism leads to the formation of solidarity. Events like the Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month and the Asian Excellence Awards as well as Asian American organizations – for instance, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop – and Asian American associations like the Asian American Journalists Association 67

Kim, Asian American Literature, 178. Sheng–mei Ma, The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2000): xi. 69 See Vincent Yee, “N A A A P National Tunes Out the Adam Carolla Show” (28 January 2006), http://www.naaapphiladelphia.og/News.do?id=918 (accessed 13 April 2010). 70 See Anon., “Another Sikh Boy Suffers Hate Assault in New York City School,” The Sikh Coalition (5 June 2008), http://sikhcoalition.org/advisories/JagmohanHate Assault.htm (accessed 13 April 2010). 68

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(A A J A ) or the National Association of Asian American Professionals (N A A A P ) are important for the Asian American community. They create a feeling of unity, celebrate heritage, and express pride in community. Asian Americans have spoken out about the needs and values of their community since the 1960s, when the Asian American movement arose along with the ethnically conscious civil-rights movements of the time. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a pan-Asian identity and a Third-World consciousness developed, Asian American literary works were identified, and a literary tradition was named.71 However, only a small number of Americans have taken notice of the Asian American lobby, and the literature on social movements has disregarded it. Despite the increasing activity within the Asian American community itself,72 many Americans are still ignorant of this ethnic minority. But why? There are several reasons for this lack of visibility.73 The Asian American Movement has not had a nationally known leader (as Martin Luther King, Jr. was for the African American population). The absence of Asian American leaders in private, public, and non-profit sectors has led to a significant lack of role models and mentors and to the general impression that Asian Americans are not ‘leadership material’.74 In addition, there has been an absence of specific aims, and the history of Asian American labor exploitation and consequent resistance is little known in America.75 71

See George Uba, “Coordinates of Asian American Poetry: A Survey of the History and a Guide to Teaching,” in A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature, ed. Sau–ling Cynthia Wong & Stephen H. Sumida (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2001): 312. 72 See Glenn Omatsu, “The ‘Four Prisons’ and the Movements of Liberation: Asian American Activism from the 1960s to the 1990s,” in Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader, ed. Min Zhou & James V. Gatewood (New York: New York U P , 2000): 80–112. 73 See William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia P A : Temple U P , 1993): 3–4. 74 Vu H. Pham, Lauren Emiko Hokoyama & J.D. Hokoyama. “Become Visible: Let Your Voice Be Heard,” A A P I Nexus 4.1 (2006): 1–12. 75 Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin emphasize the violence of the indentured labor of Asian Americans and compare it to the cruelty of slavery , but comparing two enormous evils is difficult; The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 2002): 25. Spivak rightly says: “I have no desire to make some kind of competitive list of who is the worst victim. I think that is where

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Another reason for Asian America’s invisibility is the fact that its population is comparatively small: less than one percent of the total U S population in the 1960s and 1970s, and 4.3 percent of today’s.76 This number will rise to 8 percent by 2050.77 In addition, race issues are mainly concentrated on the black and white populations in the USA. Asian America has been relegated to the status of a “buffer minority”78 or “middleman minority”79 between the black and white communities. Moreover, the Asian American community is highly heterogeneous. One reason for this is differences in immigrant status: 31.1 percent of the Asian American population is native; 34.4 percent of Asian Americans are foreignborn but have become naturalized citizens; and 34.5 percent are foreign-born people who are not U S citizens.80 There are two historical phases of Asian immigration to the U S A that are significant factors in the lack of cohesion within the community. The first wave occurred between 1850 (initiated by the California goldrush and the subsequent arrival of the Chinese in the U S A ) and the beginning of the Second World War. The second wave is usually considered as beginning at the end of the Second World War and continuing up to the present. The first phase of Asian immigration to the U S A was characterized by the capitalist madness lies”; Deepika Bahri & Mary Vasudeva, “Transnationality and Multiculturalist Ideology: Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,” in Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality, ed. Bahri & Vasudeva (Philadelphia P A : Temple U P , 1996): 88. 76 American Community Survey of 2005; see http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet /GRTTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=01000US&-_box_head_nbr=R0204&-ds_name=ACS _2005_EST_G00_&-redoLog=false&-format=US-30&-mt_name=ACS_2005_EST _G00_R0204_US30. 77 See Mike Bergmann, “Census Bureau Projects Tripling of Hispanic and Asian Populations in 50 Years; Non-Hispanic Whites May Drop To Half of Total Population” (18 March 2004), http://www.census.gov/P -Release/www/releases/archives /population/001720.html (accessed 13 April 2010). 78 Kim, Asian American Literature, 240. 79 Elaine H. Kim, “Defining Asian American Realities Through Literature,” in The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, ed. Abdul R. JanMohamed & David Lloyd (New York: Oxford U P , 1990): 148. 80 See “We the People: Asians in the United States,” at http://www.census.gov /population/www/cen2000/briefs.html (accessed 13 April 2010).

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23

economy’s recruitment of cheap Asian labor, which stood in harsh contrast to the simultaneous national eagerness to create a unified (white) citizenry.81 The immigrants of the first wave were predominantly Chinese and Japanese who mainly performed unskilled agrarian labor.82 The offspring of these immigrants speak English perfectly. Their ancestry contributed to the rise of the nation – through the construction of the railroad system, for example. The many historical wrongs done to this community include Chinese exclusion acts, the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, and the colonization of the Philippines. Many of the children of Asians belonging to this wave of immigration have a good education and have been able to improve the family’s financial position. In short, many of them have made it (though they still have to face racism). The second, postwar wave of immigration started when production shifted to Asia and Latin and South America, and when the U S A turned to economic internationalism “to expand labor and capital.”83 This second phase is marked by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s signing of the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, abolishing the racist elements of immigration laws and establishing a preference for nuclear family unification and skilled people in areas of labor shortage.84 These immigrants were “low-wage, service-sector workers as well as ‘proletarianized’ white-collar professionals.”85 Since these immigrants came mostly from South Korea, India, the Philippines, South Vietnam, and Cambodia (most of which have been affected by U S [neo]colonialism), they were influenced by both the racialization of people of Asian descent in America and by America’s military and economic colonialism in Asia.86

81

As Lisa Lowe points out in Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1999): 12–13. 82 See Garrett Hongo, “Introduction” to The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America, ed. Hongo (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1993): xx. 83 Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 15. 84 See Nadia Mustafa & Jeff Chu, “Between Two Worlds: Born in the U S A to Asian Parents, a Generation of Immigrants’ Kids Forges a New Identity,” The Times (16 January 2006): 64, http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,11471 77,00.html (accessed 14 February 2006); see also Lowe, Immigrant Acts 15. 85 Lowe, Immigrant Acts 15; see also Hongo, “Introduction,” xx. 86 See Immigrant Acts, 16.

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Many of these more recent immigrants are poor, have not yet made it, and do not speak perfect English. Susan Koshy points out that a considerable number of recent Asian immigrants entered the U S A illegally, subsequently working under extremely exploitative conditions in restaurants, brothels, and sweatshops.87 They are perceived by some established Asian Americans as a threat to their improved situation and more positive public image. This helps explains why wealthy Asian Americans, many of whom are the offspring of early Asian immigrants, prefer to donate to majority-culture institutions instead of Asian American nonprofit groups.88 By so doing, they desire not only to promote extensive appreciation of their cultural heritage and make their ethnicity visible, but also to become part of the American philanthropic circle (dominated by Anglo-Americans), thereby ignoring the poverty of unassimilated, newly arrived Asian Americans. The waves of immigration and the consequent different class status contribute to defeating unity among Asian Americans. Along with generational differences among immigration, there are other significant variations in pan-Asian American subgroups concerning, for example, education, income, and household and family size.89 Hmong Ameri87

Susan Koshy, “The Fiction of Asian American Literature,” 322. Nina Bernstein reports political and regional discrimination within the Chinese American community that prevents some of them from donating to other Chinese Americans (in “Class Divide in Chinese-Americans’ Charity,” New York Times (20 January 2007): A1, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/20/nyregion/20philanthropy .html?ex=1326949200&en=0729876cd9369083&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rs s [accessed 13 February 2007]). In “New Ethnic Patterns of Residence: The First Suburban Chinatown,” Timothy Fong uncovers the hostility of long time Chinatown residents toward recent Chinese immigrants; Fong, “New Ethnic Patterns of Residence: The First Suburban Chinatown,” in Major Problems in American Immigration and Ethnic History, ed. Jon Gjerde (Boston M A : Houghton Mifflin, 1998): 475–86. Xiao–huang Yin explains that in American Chinese-language literature one cannot find much basis for ethnic solidarity within the Chinese American community due to economic polarization; Yin, “Redefining Chinese American Sensibility,” 189. 89 These differences can be explored in detail via the American Fact Finder; see http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/SAFFFactsCharIteration?_event=&geo_id=01000 US&_geoContext=01000US&_street=&_county=&_cityTown=&_state=&_zip=&_la ng=en&_sse=on&ActiveGeoDiv=&_useEV=&pctxt=fph&pgsl=010&_submenuId=fa ctsheet_2&ds_name=DEC_2000_SAFF&_ci_nbr=031&qr_name=DEC_2000_SAF F_R1010®=DEC_2000_SAFF_R1010%3A031&_keyword=&_industry= 88

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cans have the highest welfare rate of any group in the U S A ,90 whereas the median income of Japanese Americans is higher than that of whites.91 In addition, many Asian nations do not share a common language, culture, history or religion. Phuong Nguyen even claims that Asian Americans are “the most unstable racial group in America.”92 Moreover, there are many Asian Americans with mixed ancestry; the high out-marriage rate of about thirty percent contributes to ethnic heterogeneity.93 Shirley Geok–lin Lim asserts that, contrary to the Western imaginary, in which ‘Orientals’ are “indistinguishable as individuals,”94 Asian Americans also differ phenotypically and do not share “a common physique or color.”95 Robert G. Lee argues similarly: Only the racialized Oriental is yellow; Asians are not. Asia is not a biological fact but a geographic designation. Asians come in the broadest range of skin color and hue.96 90

Harry H.L. Kitano & Roger Daniels, Asian Americans: Emerging Minorities (Englewood Cliffs N J : Prentice Hall, 1995): 144–45. 91 See the Census report “We the People: Asians in the U.S.,” issued in December 2004; http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/briefs.html (accessed 13 April 2010). 92 Phuong Nguyen, “Review of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America by Viet Thanh Nguyen,” Amerasia Journal 30.3 (2004–2005): 110. However, pan-Asian institutions and initiatives have existed since the concept was forged in the late 1960s; see Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia P A : Temple U P , 1992): 172. They have increased considerably since the ‘mistaken identity’ killing of Vincent Chin in 1982. Chin was a Chinese American murdered by two white men in 1982 because they thought that he was Japanese American. They were angry about U S auto manufacturing jobs being lost to Japan. The goals of pan-Asian organizations are the establishment of social ties, collaboration on common problems, resistance to racism, and the discussion of shared experiences (Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity, 164). 93 See an internet release of the U S Bureau of the Census from 10 June 1998: http: //www.census.gov/population/socdemo/race/interractab2.txt. The survey category is Asian Pacific Americans. 94 Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia P A : Temple U P , 1998): 5. 95 Shirley Geok–lin Lim, “A Dazzling Quilt,” in The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology, ed. Shirley Geok–lin Lim, Mayumi Tsutakawa & Margarita Donnelly (Corvallis O R : Calyx, 1988): 10. 96 Robert G. Lee, Orientals 2; my emphasis.

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Often the political, economic, or cultural discrepancies between Asian countries (paradigmatically Japan and China, or India and Pakistan) are enormous. The Asian American population is diverse in terms of physique, education, class, culture, history, generation of immigration, language, and religion. This heterogeneity does not foster the creation of a unified and thus powerful Asian American movement. The Asian American population is aware of the fact that it has been overlooked in American history. In the “Introduction” to his anthology The Open Boat (1993), Garrett Hongo writes that in the 1970s he “was forever fighting the stereotype, the dehumanized image of Asians in America, the invisibility of our historical, social, and cultural presence in this country.”97 And Jeffery Paul Chan and his co-editors argue similarly when stating that “America does not recognize Asian America as presence, though Asian-Americans have been here seven generations.”98 Mitsuye Yamada recounts an incident in an ethnic American literature course she was teaching: one student complained about the militant tone in Aiiieeeee! and said that she “didn’t even know the Asian Americans felt oppressed.”99 Until the 1960s, there had been a discrepancy between the actual presence of Asian Americans and a “discursive absence” of this ethnicity.100 David Li explains this gap in terms of the dominant European morphology of the U S A , which had excluded subjects of non-European descent.101 The American public differentiated among Asian American groups during the Second World War, with Japanese Americans being considered as enemies and Chinese and Filipino Americans as allies. Since the 1960s, Americans of various ethnic

97

Garrett Hongo, “Introduction,” xxi. Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada & Shawn Hsu Wong, “Preface,” in Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers, ed. Chin, Chan, Inada & Wong (Washington D C : Howard U P , 1983): ix. 99 Mitsuye Yamada, “Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster: Reflections of an Asian American Woman,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings of Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe L. Moraga & Gloria E. Anzaldúa (Berkeley: Women of Color P , 2002): 34. 100 David Leiwei Li, “The State and Subject of Asian American Criticism: Psychoanalysis, Transnational Discourse, and Democratic Ideals,” American Literary History 15.3 (2003): 603. 101 Li, “The State and Subject,” 603. 98

Introduction

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27

backgrounds have been fighting for the affirmation of civil rights for all citizens and against the segregation of non-Euro-Americans. An example of such transethnic activism is the Annual Asian American / African American Poetry Reading, which took place for the third time on 6 March 2008.102 Moreover, America, desiring transnational capital, has opened up to new immigrants from Asia. Participating in the nation, Asian Americans have been publicly represented since the 1960s and want to be heard. Asian America’s invisibility has been countered in several ways. Popular stereotypes have been exposed: through literature, film, and other arts, Asian America has voiced the hollowness of populist accusations that Asian Americans are foreigners, are passive and quiet, and all live in gaudy ‘oriental’ ghettos. Yamada assures that “to finally recognize our own invisibility is to finally be on the right path toward visibility. Invisibility is not a natural state for anyone.”103 Asian Americans now refuse to be defined by others and prefer to define themselves. The difference between the Asian American community and majority America has been accepted and celebrated, resulting in a new kind of positive identityformation. A special challenge in the deconstruction of stereotypes of Asian Americans and a realistic portrayal of Asian Americans is the revelation of European America as another ethnicity, not a cultural standard: “for all our rhetoric about ‘making ourselves visible,’ the real challenge in the next cultural politics of difference is to make ‘whiteness’ visible for the first time, as a culturally constructed ethnic identity.”104

Patricia Chu declares that “we can only know what we are to become by understanding what we have been.”105 Consequently, activists demand inclu102

On this occasion, the Asian American and African American communities as well as anyone interested gather for a night of poetry readings by, for example, Meena Alexander, Jeffery Renard Allen, Regie Cabico, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, R. Erica Doyle, and Bakar Wilson. 103 Yamada, “Invisibility,” 40. 104 Kobena Mercer, quoted in Shantanu DuttaAhmed, “Border Crossings: Retrieval and Erasure of the Self as Other,” in Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality, ed. Deepika Bahri & Mary Vasudeva (Philadelphia P A : Temple U P , 1996): 340; emphasis in original. 105 Patricia P. Chu, Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2000): 189.

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sion and representation of Asian American history in the sites of knowledge production (including schools, colleges, and universities). Past history (paradigmatically the relocation and internment of approximately 110,000 West Coast Japanese Americans during the Second World War) and historical persons have been explored. Another important issue is the creation and maintenance of Asian American studies departments in colleges and universities as well as the foundation of new Asian American community centers, museums, and magazines. Contemporary Asian America is concerned with the display of real Asian American life, critical of Western stereotyping and Orientalism, and creates new, positive images of Asian Americans in U S American politics, art, and the media. These positive images, it is hoped, will triumph over the negative stereotypes and racial fantasies. An example of positive Asian American activism concerned with the reality of contemporary life is the first Asian American Writers’ Congress for established and aspiring writers, teachers, students, publishers, editors, agents, and librarians that took place at U C L A in May 2006. Complete assimilation has been unmasked as cultural bankruptcy, and it has generally been advocated that being American and at the same time belonging to an ethnic minority like the Asian American is possible, and even desirable. This tendency is also reflected in contemporary Asian American poetry. In this poetry, Asian American identity is presented as a new, culturally hybrid subjectivity independent of – and at the same time interrelated with – Asian and majority American cultures as independent conceptual entities. This new “third space” (Bhabha’s term) of Asian American identity is expressed in the culturally hybrid content of the poems, in their poetic forms inspired by European as well as Asian models, and in their use of English as well as Asian languages. Given the heterogeneity of the Asian American population, it is obvious that its authors are equally different from one another and deal with various subject-matters, express themselves in distinct formal styles, and have diverse political, social, and cultural views.

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1

Cultural Hybridity

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.1

T

H E W O R L D T O D A Y I S C H A R A C T E R I Z E D B Y G L O B A L E X C H A N G E and ‘glocality’, the fusion of the global and the local. Thus cross-cultural exchange affects not only Asian Americans but all people. Postindustrial capitalism enables transnational production, the unification of the world’s financial markets, and geographically flexible consumption and financial accumulation. International cyberculture – a deterritorializer and leveler of social, cultural, and racial differences – and the mass media have shaped a ‘global village’, a one-world community.2 Increasing mobility has

1

Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is not a Luxury,” in Sister Outsider (Trumansburg P A : Crossing Press, 1984): 37. 2 The impact of cyberspace on Asian American subjectivity and community is discussed in Race in Cyberspace, ed. Beth E. Kolko, Lisa Nakamura & Gilbert B. Rodman (New York: Routledge, 2000); Amit S. Rai, “India On-line: Electronic Bulletin Boards and the Construction of a Diasporic Hindu Identity,” Diaspora 4.1 (Spring 1995): 31–57; Lisa Nakamura, “Race in/for Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet,” Work and Days 131.1–2 (1995): 181–93; Yuan Shu, “Information Technologies, the U.S. Nation-State, and Asian American Subjectivities,” Cultural Critique 40 (Fall 1998): 145–66; Jeffrey A. Ow, “The Revenge of the Yellowfaced Cyborg Terminator: The Rape of Digital Geishas and the Colonization of CyberCoolies in 3D Realm’s Shadow Warrior,” in Race in Cyberspace, ed. Kelko, Naka-

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led to the phenomena of mass migration, diasporic peoples, and transnationality with attendant displacement, exile, cultural hybridity, and “flexible citizenship.” Aihwa Ong uses the latter term to designate a subject’s geographically fluid and pragmatic response to changing economic and political conditions, in the form of the accumulation of capital and social prestige.3 Through flexible citizenship, Ong argues, diasporan subjects can benefit from the advantages and circumvent the disadvantages of different national regimes by choosing different sites for family relocation, work, and investment.4 At the same time, the nation does not lose control over its frontiers or succumb to mass immigration: It specifically allows rich and skilled subjects, from whom it can benefit at little cost, to cross its borders.5 Citizenship is thus a performative act that is not presented by the state once and for all but “repeatedly scripted and enacted.”6 It is a process of making oneself and being made within the power-system of the nation. Power-systems and concepts of nationhood are closely related to hybridity studies. They theorize people and phenomena heterogeneous in cultural origin. Yet not all cultures are hybrid in the eyes of a postcolonialist: hybridity in the postcolonial sense involves contested authority, colonial difference, and cultural hierarchies: Colonial hybridity is not a problem of genealogy or identity between two different cultures […]. Hybridity poses a problem of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other ‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority.7

So, although today all cultures are confronted with multicultural stimuli and globalization, not all cultures are hybrid in the postcolonialist sense. mura & Rodman, 51–68; and David Palumbo–Liu, “The Ethnic as ‘Post-’: Reading The Literatures of Asian America,” American Literary History 7.1 (1995): 161–68. 3 Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1999): 6. 4 Ong, Flexible Citizenship, 112. 5 See Flexible Citizenship, 112. 6 Lily Cho, “Diasporic Citizenship: Inhabiting Contradictions and Challenging Exclusions,” American Quarterly 59.2 (June 2007): 470. 7 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 114; emphasis in original.

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Asian America is included under the umbrella concept of postcolonial cultural hybridity. Asian American culture is informed by majority America, the Asian countries in which Asian American families originate, Asian American sub-ethnicities, and the pan-Asian American community and its history.8 Asian Americans are a highly diverse community in terms of religion, economic status, and language, to name but a few. Asian American literary expression is characterized by hybrid and postcolonial subject-positions and multiethnic backgrounds. In its generic presence, Asian American poetry is thus a powerful expression of the culturally hybrid life of Asian Americans. As the epigraph to this chapter by Audre Lorde assures us, “poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”9 As such, the writing of Asian American poets is one of discursive self-construction. Through their writing, theyfoster an awareness of identity and difference. This consciousness of hybridity gives voice to what has been muted or silenced by white hegemony and is essential for political change. Merle Woo affirms the importance of creative Asian American literature, of “how crucial it is to get our stories in writing.”10 Writing is not inanimate letters on paper, but has active power, explains Gloria Anzaldúa: My “stories” are acts encapsuled in time, “enacted” every tome they are spoken aloud or read silently. I like to think of them as performances and not as inert and ‘dead’ objects (as the aesthetics of Western culture think of art works). Instead, the work has an identity.11

Asian American poetry, like Anzaldúa’s words, has potential to actively influence the political environment and national cultural discourse. Pnina Werbner sees cultural hybridity studies as containing an elusive paradox: 8

Of course, Asian Americans are also influenced by other American ethnicities such as African Americans or Chicano/a Americans. An analysis of this mutual influence, which involves a myriad different power-relationships among these minorities, lies beyond the scope of this book. 9 Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is not a Luxury,” 37. 10 Merle Woo, “Letter to Ma,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings of Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe L. Moraga & Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1981; Berkeley: Women of Color, 3rd ed. 2002): 162. 11 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999): 89.

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Hybridity is celebrated as powerfully interruptive and yet theorized as commonplace and pervasive. […] the paradox is energized by anti-essentialist, anti-integrationist zeal.12

On the one hand, cultural hybridity subverts the categorization and strict differentiation of cultures, and is celebrated for promoting cultural reconsideration and change. On the other, cultural hybridity today is routine, given globalizing trends and the postmodern questioning of all cultural boundaries and national definitions. Cultural hybridity thus simultaneously has a transgressive side that gives space to protest and resistance, and a quotidian normalcy that encourages tolerance, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism. The factor that prevents pervasive globalization, mass migration, and a rethinking of national concepts from dissolving the concept of the Other is the human fear of the stranger and the primordial need to belong to a restricted community. The ‘Other’ is perceived as a threat to the self, as a danger to one’s own group. The identification of one group is based on demarcation from the Other. Safety is always associated with the familiar and fear with all that is different. Strangers to a community are feared and excluded to boost the authority of one’s own group; attendant emotional latencies emerge as hostility, aggression, and suspicion. Through the mass migration initiated by capitalism and technological advances, ‘Others’ have increasingly become part of once exclusionary communities. Everyday reality and demographic facts reveal cultural diversity and hybridity, but the basic fear of the Other and the desire for a restricted group of one’s own persist. Herein resides the transgressive power of culturally hybrid people: They continue to live in their own tight community although they are feared and wished away, and thus they expand and redefine the limiting group concept. However, despite the power of cultural hybrids to prompt a rethinking of the U S nation and its boundaries, they must not be idealized. Cultural inclusiveness and a reconsideration of the nation do not come about because cultural hybrids exist or wish to be included. Only through their active contributions to the good of the group (through art, work, taxes, etc.) can cultural hybrids compel inclusion in and transformation of the

12

Pnina Werbner, “The Dialectics of Cultural Hybridity,” in Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, ed. Pnina Werbner & Tariq Modood (London: Zed, 1997): 1.

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community entered. In this way, the hybrid can become “not the beast, but the angel of change.”13 Earlier Asian Americanists believed that Asian American art could either assimilate to or protest against majority American culture (viz. Elaine Kim’s Asian American Literature or Chin et al.’s Aiiieeeee!). However, today it is commonly acknowledged that Asian American poetry is not only a reaction to or reflection of its social conditions. It is also marked by poetic innovation and aesthetic quality. Moreover, it negotiates and subverts majority American culture through a hybrid play with languages, forms, and cultural myths. The cultural hybridity of Asian Americans constitutes the core of chapter 2, which discusses how this hybridity is present in Asian American subjectivity and culture.

Asian American Subjectivity ‘Hybridity’ is part of a thoroughgoing theoretical discourse of ethnic existence within a white majority that has often been accused of failing to discuss racist realities, hence unable to improve the situation of ethnic Americans.14 This study will counter such accusations by linking the theoretical amplifications of chapter 1 with poetic proof in chapters 2 to 4. I fuse literary theory and analysis with U S racist reality and Asian America’s social circumstances, because, like George Lipsitz, I believe that “studies of culture too far removed from studies of social structure leave us with inadequate explanations for understanding racism and inadequate remedies for combating it.”15 Americans with Asian roots must somehow cope with the multicultural impulses in their lives. The multiplicity that marks their subjectivity, however,

13

Velina Hasu Houston & Teresa K. Williams, “No Passing Zone: The Artistic and Discursive Voices of Asian-descent Multiracials,” Amerasia Journal 23.1 (1997): vii. 14 Paradigmatically, Susan Koshy criticizes the fact that “formulaic invocations of […] ‘hybridity’ […] are used promiscuously without any effort to link them to the material, cultural or historical specificities of the various Asian American experiences”; Koshy, “The Fiction of Asian American Literature,” Yale Journal of Criticism 9.2 (1996): 316. 15 George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies,” American Quarterly 47.3 (September 1995): 371.

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cannot be thought of as a ‘split’ or ‘schizophrenic’ Self.16 Doris Sommer points to the contradictory relationship between the concept of subjectivity and minority Americans.17 As she argues, identity refers to something “coherent” and unified, whereas Asian Americans, African Americans, Chicano Americans, etc. have a subjectivity based on more than one culture.18 Their identity is thus not coherent but “an unstable, transitional cluster.”19 I dispute this argument. The subjectivity of an Asian American individual is certainly unified. There are influences from several cultural realms on an Asian American, but all individuals decide for themselves which aspects of their lives are influenced by which culture. Thus their identities are not at stake. However, the Asian American subjectivity is a more problematic matter, since all Asian Americans, of course, have their own ideas about what role the Asian, AsianAmerican, and majority American cultures play in a ‘typical’ Asian American’s life. This incongruent group identity needs to be accepted as a fact of life and not condemned as an unstable subjectivity. Many Asian Americans try to be successful in America while at the same time wanting to respect their Asian ancestors’ traditions and values, and especially to avoid hurting or disappointing the family. The novelist Jhumpa Lahiri describes the difficult life of immigrant children as “dealing with oil and water.”20 Naturally, the unification of several cultures in one subjectivity is not unproblematic.

16

I use the term ‘subjectivity’ as synonymous with the word ‘identity.’ Donald E. Hall gives a concise overview of the term and its concepts in his book Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 2004). David Hollinger is skeptical about the word ‘identity’ and prefers the performative term ‘affiliation’: “identity implies fixity and givenness, while the word affiliation suggests a greater measure of flexibility”; Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1998): 7. 17 Doris Sommer, “Choose and Lose,” in Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: New York U P , 1998): 301–303. 18 Sommer, “Choose and Lose,” 301. 19 “Choose and Lose,” 301. 20 Nadia Mustafa & Jeff Chu, “Between Two Worlds: Born in the U S A to Asian Parents, a Generation of Immigrants’ Kids Forges a New Identity,” The Times (16 January 2006): 67, http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1147177,00 .html (accessed 14 February 2006).

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For an Asian American subject, the unification of one’s Asian, Asian American, and majority American characteristics can be complicated by, for example, physiognomy, stereotypes, traditions, and racism; “coexisting and unresolvable opposites are daily experiences for bicultural people.”21 Many Asian Americans describe the fact that they are neither ‘pure’ American nor ‘real’ Asian as a negative experience. This feeling is illustrated by a sentence frequently uttered by Asian Americans, “I never felt like I belonged”22 and questions that many Asian Americans hear: “What are you?”23 or “Where are you really from?”24 The lives of culturally hybrid Asian Americans might be perceived as a threat to ‘authentic’ cultures, since the naturalness and necessity of a ‘pure’ culture is questioned by hybridity. This concept problematizes “naturalized boundaries”25 and criticizes what seems natural and unified. In 2005, the U N E S C O General Conference approved a convention on the “protection and promotion” of cultural heterogeneity.26 In “The Case for Contamination,” Kwame Appiah questions the concept of authenticity. He compares “trying to find some primordially authentic culture” to “peeling an onion.”27 Many aspects of a culture now considered ‘authentic’ and ‘pure’ were imported from another culture a long time ago. Take the traditional costume of Namibian Herero women: it is derived from the clothing of nineteenth-century German missionaries. Many of today’s traditions used to be innovations in the past. The question now is how far back one has to go to get a ‘real’ tradition. Criti21

Amy Ling, Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry (New York: Pergamon, 1990): 112. 22 Mustafa & Chu, “Between Two Worlds: Born in the U S A to Asian Parents, a Generation of Immigrants’ Kids Forges a New Identity,” 66. 23 Shawn Wong, “Introduction” to Asian American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology (New York: Longman, 1995): 4. 24 William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia P A : Temple U P , 1993): 44; emphasis in original. 25 Joel Kuortti & Jopi Nyman. “Hybridity Today,” in Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-Colonial Studies in Transition, ed. Joel Kuortti & Jopi Nyman (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2007): 1. 26 See Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Case for Contamination,” New York Times (1 January 2006): 3, http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res= FB0812F839540C 728CDDA80894DE404482 (accessed 22 May 2006). 27 Appiah, “The Case for Contamination,” 3.

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cizing cultural preservationism, Appiah states: “Societies without change aren’t authentic; they’re just dead.”28 Thus the addition of Asian and Asian American features in American culture is no threat to authenticity, but a natural sign of change and progress. Cultural hybridity is not a recent phenomenon; migration, conquest, trade, religious missionary activities, and travel have always shaped cultures. Western cultural purists condemn globalization and the international flows of information, capital, and populations. They want non-First-World cultures to preserve their traditions against economic reason and individual free will. Criticizing this ‘cultural imperialism’, Appiah argues: structuring the consciousnesses of those in the periphery treats people (from the Third-World) […] as blank slates on which global capitalism’s moving finger writes its message, leaving behind another cultural automaton as it moves on.29

The philosopher comments that such assumptions are “deeply condescending” and false. No matter if some cultural purists would like a culture to stay the same forever, one cannot force the young to live in their culture’s ‘authentic’ way. Authenticity and cultural purity are unrealistic and imaginary terms, since all cultures have been influenced by others, as Kwame Appiah shows. He calls attention to the fact that free will must not be disrespected by (Western as well as non-Western) cultural preservationists. He also emphasizes the ageold tradition of cultural hybridity, which accordingly can constitute no threat to the purity of cultures, and is, rather, an integral part of cultural development and progress. The cultural hybridity of Asian Americans undermines the policy of strictly separating Asian American, Asian, and majority American cultures, and also deconstructs the implicit hierarchy; it “entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.”30 This cultural in-betweenness turns Asian Americans into insiders of several cultural realms, thereby undoing the splitting of the population into white ‘us’ and non-white ‘Others’. Through de-

28

Appiah, “The Case for Contamination,” 3. “The Case for Contamination,” 3. 30 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 4. 29

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mands for assimilation, the subaltern is urged to mimic the dominant culture, in this sense promoting the subversion of the latter. Not only can the hybridity of Asian Americans overcome the hierarchies and hegemonies of white America, it also deconstructs grading and judging within the Asian American community itself. Internal hybridity destabilizes the standards and hierarchies that have existed in Asian America up to now. Many Asian American writers criticize and question the higher rank assigned to uniracial, heterosexual, and American-born Asian Americans of early immigrant families from China and Japan, as well as of men. Asian American poetry is a ‘menace’ to majority America b not only ecause it opposes the cultural hegemony of European Americans; it also exposes internal Asian American power rankings and discloses or parodies these. In general, Asian American poems disrupt and mock the idea of power hierarchies in all of America, including the Asian American community itself. Trinh Minh–ha, however, warns of focusing on otherness in Asian American subjectivity: “Difference is […] that which undermines the very idea of identity, deferring to infinity the layers whose totality forms ‘I’.”31 Accordingly, I do not attempt to define Asian Americanness through difference (being neither Asian nor hegemonically American) or to dismember the identities of members of the Asian American community into their various constituent parts. A unitary Asian American subject cannot be divided into its Asian, Asian American, and American elements. One cannot split, for example, Kimiko Hahn’s identity into Asian American, biracial, female, heterosexual, highly educated, middle-class, atheist, mother of two daughters. She is all of these at the same time. It is, however, legitimate to point out certain cultural influences in her work that she picks up and adapts to her own needs. Such multi-ethnic impulses and cultural fusions will be described and evaluated. I argue that Asian American identities are unitary selves even though their selves are grounded in a number of cultures. Asian American subjectivity is grounded in several cultural realms. But what if somebody wants to ignore the Asian or American influence on their lives? If Asian Americans decide to ignore Asian influences and focus on the (majority) American way of life, behavior, and culture, they will still be per-

31

Trinh T. Minh–ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1989): 96; emphasis in original.

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ceived as Asian, as “’forever foreigners’”32 due to their physiognomy.33 Robert G. Lee calls it a “ ‘common understanding’ that Asians are an alien presence in America.”34 Regardless of their attempts to assimilate or of how long their families have been living in the U S A , their body reveals their own or their ancestors’ immigration there.35 This readability of the body is called “bodily scripts” by Robyn Wiegman.36 Asian Americans will face racism because of America’s “epidermal hierarchy,”37 irrespective of their degree of assimilation or citizenship status.38 Amy Ling describes Chinese American women’s position “between worlds”: “Their facial features proclaim one fact – their Asian ethnicity – but by education, choice, or birth they are American.”39 In addition to nineteenth-century ‘scientific’ racism (based on the alleged biological inferiority of certain races), a new kind of racism, called ‘cultural racism’, has entered the stage. It is based on the assumed difference and in-

32

Mustafa & Chu, “Between Two Worlds,” 66. For extensive analysis of the body and ethnic people, see: Traise Yamamoto, Masking Selves, Making Subjects (focusing on Japanese Americans); Yamamoto, “Different Silence(s): The Poetics and Politics of Location,” in Reviewing Asian America: Locating Diversity, ed. Wendy L. Ng, Soo–Young Chin, James S. Moy & Gary Y. Okihiro (Pullman: Washington State U P , 1995): 137–45; and Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1995): 21–42. 34 Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture, 4. 35 Lee describes an incident in which Mathew Fong, a fourth-generation Chinese American who ran as a candidate for Secretary of State in California (a position his mother had held from 1974 to 1994), was asked in an interview if his loyalty was divided between China and the U S A (Orientals, 4). 36 Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender, 9. 37 Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender, 9. 38 Pnina Werbner elaborates that the human body is not the only target of racism. She adds individual and group property, sacred communal symbols, and group political autonomy; Werbner, “Essentialising Essentialism, Essentialising Silence: Ambivalence and Multiplicity in the Constructions of Racism and Ethnicity,” in Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, ed. Pnina Werbner & Tariq Modood (London: Zed, 1997): 236. 39 Amy Ling, Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry (New York: Pergamon, 1990): 20. 33

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compatibility of cultures.40 A cultural racist would never admit to his or her prejudice against other people because of their skin color, but would assert that different cultural values are sufficient grounds for an inability to coexist. Norman Yetman points to another racist trend in white America: Despite increasing white verbal acceptance of principles of nondiscrimination and racial segregation, ethnic minorities […] continue to be confronted with and encounter barriers based on race.41

In elaboration, he observes that whites employ a ‘meritocratic ideology’ that makes believe everybody has the same opportunities and that success depends on individual talent and merit; but America’s reality is full of racial and ethnic stereotyping and insults as well as discrimination in relation to income, housing, power, and prestige.42 The importance of the racialized body is not a recent discovery. In 1903 W.E.B. Du Bois described “double-consciousness,” the African American’s awareness of being both American and African, as this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, – an American, a Negro; […] two warring ideals in one dark body.43

40

See Tariq Modood, “ ‘ Difference’, Cultural Racism and Anti-Racism,” in Debating Cultural Hybridity, ed. Modood & Werbner (London: Zed, 1997): 154–72. Interestingly enough, Modood also describes two kinds of anti-racism in this article: Color conscious anti-racism that uncovers race bias as well as celebrates the pride in one’s racial roots and color blind anti-racism that holds all people equal (156–57). Spivak, in line with the latter kind of anti-racism, has invented the concept “strategic essentialism,” which counters oppressive colonial tactics by strategically positioning essential identity (see Singh and Schmidt, “On the Borders,” 27). 41 Norman R. Yetman, “ ‘ Black Monday’: Brown v. Board of Education and the Significance of Race in American Life,” in Transitions: Race, Culture, and the Dynamics of Change, ed. Hanna Wallinger (Münster & Vienna: L I T , 2006): 43. 42 Yetman, “ ‘ Black Monday’: Brown v. Board of Education and the Significance of Race in American Life,” 42–45. 43 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997): 615.

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He explains that people from ethnic minorities perceive themselves the way they are and, in addition, the way they are seen by whites – what Robyn Wiegman criticizes as “the shackles of race’s dual specular and panoptic regimes.”44 Frantz Fanon similarly discusses the racially marked body, which, for him, perpetuates colonial hegemony. He elaborates on “the burden of that corporeal malediction”45 in Black Skin, White Masks: The black man has two dimensions. One with his fellows, the other with the white man. A Negro behaves differently with a white man and with another Negro. That this self-division is a direct result of colonialist subjugation is beyond question.46

The division of the individual into a self and the racially marked body was also lamented by Daniel Okimoto in his 1971 autobiography, where he refers to the schism between the Japanese American body and the self as the ‘American in Disguise Syndrome’ and thinks of the physical characteristics of Japanese Americans as a “mask that prevented the ‘others’ […] from seeing us as we truly were.”47 Eleanor Ty argues that Asian Americans have the freedom of choice, that they possess “the fluidity of subjectivity.”48 To my mind, American subjective fluidity ends with the corporeal. If some members of the Asian American community choose to live in an exclusively Asian American environment, eat Asian food, work in exclusively Asian American companies, speak their respective Asian language only and ignore the American environment, there will still be one part of their lives where they cannot escape America: education. They or their children will have to go through the American school, system where English is the first language, American holidays are celebrated, and majority American ideology

44

Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender, 42. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Charles Lam Markmann (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952; tr. 1967; London: Pluto, 1986): 111. 46 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 17. 47 Daniel Okimoto, American in Disguise (New York: Weatherhill, 1971): 5. 48 Eleanor Ty, “Rethinking the Hyphen: Asian North American and European Ethnic Texts as Global Narratives,” Canadian Review of American Studies 32.2 (2002): 249. 45

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and history are taught. And American media certainly also exert an enormous influence. As stated in the Introduction, I use the term ‘America’ as a synonym for ‘the U S A ’. America is geographically a federal republic of fifty states situated in North America. It also includes the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands of the United States, and the islands of American Samoa and Guam. Logically, all citizens of this country are Americans, regardless of their skin color. But if one visualizes a typical American, isn’t she or he white? Even in this age of Obama, some Americans seem to be more ‘American’ than others. Concepts of nationality are usually linked to concepts of race.49 No matter whether one is a racist or a multiculturalist, one visualizes a Kenyan as black and an Austrian as white. We do not think of a prototypical American as Native American or Mexican, although they are the indigenous inhabitants of that space. European settlers have almost completely erased the native population and have installed themselves as ‘real’ and ‘original’ Americans. Everyone who came to this land after these Europeans was called an immigrant, relegated to an inferior, because ‘non-original,’ status, despite Emma Lazarus’s invitation to the “huddled masses.” Thus the U S A has turned into a ‘white’ federal republic of fifty states, and “the implicit assumption from Atlantic settlement onwards has been that whiteness bears the very D N A of American nationhood.”50 When I argue that Asian Americans have created a distinct identity informed by American, Asian American, and Asian cultural constellations, this sounds like a contradiction, because Asian Americans are Americans. The sad truth is that this is a theoretical notion, not always an everyday reality – and, as Frantz Fanon warned, “one should not lose sight of the real.”51 ‘America’ really means ‘white America’, since whites hold the majority of powerful positions and often, consciously or subconsciously, treat non-whites as in-

49

Space precludes discussion of the constructional character of the national concept; interested readers should turn to Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990). 50 Robert A. Lee, Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2003): 235. 51 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 83.

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ferior and foreign.52 This is true despite changing demographics, and despite marginal features such as professional mobility. Asian American subjectivity is informed by cultural hybridity and a racially marked body. Although they are made up of manifold layers and facets and sometimes struggle with belonging and authenticity, Asian Americans are unified selves.

Hybridity Theory The “challenge of being both Asian and North American”53 can be categorized in various ways. The postcolonial concept of cultural fusion subsumes theories such as ‘hybridity’ (Bhabha, Bakhtin, Hall, Fludernik), ‘creolization’ (Brathwaite), ‘syncretism’ (JanMohamed), ‘transculturation’ (Hirabayashi, Birkle, Ortiz), ‘transdifference’ (Breinig and Lösch), and ‘borderland’ (Anzaldúa). All of these concepts are related to the interaction, relation, and mutual influence of the native and colonial cultures. They share a critique of “an evil widely resented, the narrowness of the prevailing culture of the United States.”54 The seminal theoretical concept of cultural fusion has found expression in many different terms and interrelated assumptions. One such theory was refined by the poet, playwright, critic, and historian Edward Kamau Brathwaite, who broadened the application of the term ‘creolization’ in 1971.55 He 52

There certainly are exceptions to the fact that Asian Americans frequently have racist experiences. In a memoir, Eric Liu paradigmatically states that he never had to face severe racism: “I wish, if only for storytelling purposes, that I could offer a more dramatic tale, a searing incident of racism that sent me into deep, self-abnegating alienation. The truth is, I can’t;” Liu, The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker (New York: Vintage, 1999): 46. However, he later acknowledges that “society is still ordered by the random bundle of traits we call ‘race’” (65). And Amy Ling asserts that “race has always played a more significant role in the lives of minorities in white America than has class,” because racial characteristics can be seen; Ling, Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry (New York: Pergamon, 1990): 14. 53 Cyril Dabydeen, “Introduction” to Another Way to Dance: Contemporary Asian Poetry from Canada and the United States, ed. Dabydeen (Toronto: T S A R , 1996): xvi. 54 David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1998): 2. 55 Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, 2. The term has a long and vexed ancestry, applying initially to plant and stock breeding, thence to colonial

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argues that creolization is a cultural process that is linked to the stimuli and responses, to the interaction of the colonizer and the colonized.56 Brathwaite offers Jamaica as an illustration of creolization: there, “two cultures of people” had “to adapt themselves to a new environment and to each other.”57 These cultures amalgamated into a new mode. Jamaican society accordingly cannot be seen as “separate nuclear units” like master and slave or white and black, but, rather, as “contributory parts of a whole.”58 Likewise, American society consists of several contributory components, including the “ethnoracial pentagon” (Hollinger’s term) of Native Americans, European Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic Americans, as well as mixed-race people. In 1985, Abdul R. JanMohamed argued for “syncretic solutions to the manichean opposition of the colonizer and the colonized.”59 ‘Syncretism’ is often used for the cultural fusion in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean.60 JanMohamed understands syncretism as “a rapprochement between self and Other”61 and praises novels that attempt to overcome racial opposition. The ideology of the manichean allegory spawning much colonialist literature justified the allegedly superior position of the colonizer and the denigration of

settlers, then to linguistic phenomena, and on to racial and cultural blending. See esp. Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature, and Identity, ed. Kathleen Balutansky & Marie–Agnès Sourieau (Gainesville: U P of Florida & Barbados: The Press, University of the West Indies, 1998), and A PepperPot of Cultures: Aspects of Creolization in the Caribbean, ed. Gordon Collier & Ulrich Fleischmann (Matatu 27–28; Amsterdam & New York, 2003). 56 Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “Creolization in Jamaica” (1971), in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995): 202–205. 57 Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “Creolization in Jamaica,” 204. 58 Brathwaite, “Creolization in Jamaica,” 203–204. 59 Abdul R. JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory” (1985), excerpt in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995): 19. 60 Joel Kuortti & Jopi Nyman. “Hybridity Today,” in Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-Colonial Studies in Transition, ed. Joel Kuortti & Jopi Nyman (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2007): 4. 61 Abdul R. JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory,” 22.

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‘inferior’ natives.62 The relationship between colonizer and colonized can easily be compared to the power-relations between majority Americans and minority Americans such as Asian Americans. Lane Ryo Hirabayashi and Carmen Birkle, among others, employ the concept of ‘transculturation’, coined by the Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz in the 1940s and applied extensively by Françoise Lionnet. It delineates the interpenetration of different cultures in contrast to reductive assimilation or acculturation. Instead, for example, of expecting Asian immigrants to jettison their culture and adapt completely to white majority America, transculturation observes and promotes mutual influence. Transculturation is to be seen in connection with transnationalism, the moving of people (such as Asians), often in greater numbers, to another nation, where they create their new home.63 Birkle sees transculturation as a process that “diminishes the opposition of globalization and localization into something new.”64 This new unit is a new culture fed from several cultural tributaries. Hirabayashi states that “transculturation necessarily creates the dynamic of ‘neoculturation’ – the creation of new, unique, cultural formations.”65 Breinig and Lösch have coined the term ‘transdifference’. Especially its prefix, this points to the fact that difference by itself “can never be adequate for defining the identity positions of individuals and groups in the face of multiple affiliations […] in multicultural contexts.”66 Transdifference thus opposes the construction of meaning grounded on an exclusionary binary model67 and instead stresses possible simultaneous and conflicting participation and positionings of a subject who does not strive for unification. As Alexandra Ganser points out, this term is open to the transgression of any 62

See JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory,” 23. See Pnina Werbner, “The Dialectics of Cultural Hybridity,” 12. 64 Carmen Birkle, Migration – Miscegenation – Transculturation: Writing Multicultural America into the Twentieth Century (Heidelberg: Winter, 2004): 6. 65 Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, “Reconsidering Transculturation and Power,” Amerasia Journal 28.2 (2002): x. 66 Helmbrecht Breinig & Klaus Lösch, “Introduction: Difference and Transdifference,” in Multiculturalism in Contemporary Societies: Perspectives on Difference and Transdifference, ed. Helmbrecht Breinig, Jürgen Gebhardt & Klaus Lösch (Erlangen: Universitätsbund Erlangen–Nürnberg, 2002): 21. 67 See Breinig & Lösch, “Introduction: Difference and Transdifference,” 23. 63

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categorical boundaries, be these racial, ethnic, gender-related, class-specific, related to age, etc., and allows the critic to work with several of these theoretical frameworks simultaneously.68 Contrary to Ganser, I argue that this multidisciplinarity is also true for ‘hybridity’, which designates not only racial or cultural mingling but also all kinds of metaphorical, theoretical, and conceptual mixtures. Another major theory relating to cultural amalgamation is Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderland concept. In her seminal Borderlands / La Frontera, Anzaldúa examines the physical borderland between Mexico and the U S A , which, she argues, has been determined by the territorial depredations of four countries: Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, and the U S A Here two “worlds,” Anglo and Hispanic, merge “to form a third country – a border culture.”69 She also looks at the spiritual, sexual, psychological, cultural, linguistic, and class borderlands in this region as well as its female inhabitant, the – originally Spanish-Amerindian – mestiza. Such a hybrid, liminal space exists wherever two or more cultures, classes, races, religions, and even individuals occupy one territory. For Anzaldúa, “a borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is a “state of perpetual transition.”70 This “racial, ideological, cultural and biological crosspollination”71 and mixture of different conditions and individuals in a borderland contributes to an opening-up of fixed boundaries, to tolerance of ambiguity, to the juggling of cultures, to creativity, and to the dissolution of rigidity – an ideal, provisionally terminal state which Anzaldúa calls the New Consciousness. Although no actual land border exists between the U S A and any Asian country, the borderland existence that Anzaldúa assigns to Latin Americans parallels the life of Asian Americans in the U S A on the metaphoric level.

68

Alexandra Ganser, “Racing the Road: Nomadic Migrations in Diane Glancy’s Claiming Breath and The Voice That Was in Travel,” in Transitions: Race, Culture, and the Dynamics of Change, ed. Hanna Wallinger (Münster & Vienna: L I T , 2006): 246. 69 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987; San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999): 25. 70 Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 100. 71 Borderlands / La Frontera, 99.

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One of the most popular terms for cultural or racial fusion is ‘hybridity’. In general, it refers to any mixing of different species, and, like ‘creolization’, had plant and animal breeding as its original context. It has had racial overtones since the nineteenth century in the U S A , with the negative connotation of racial impurity and miscegenation (as, even earlier, did mestizaje).72 Today it is predominantly used metaphorically for a multiplicity and equality of different beliefs, attitudes, and customs that oppose homogenization and domination. Key hybridity theorists are (in this developmental sequence) Mikhail Bakhtin, Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, and Monika Fludernik. Cultural hybridity designates the influence of more than one culture or ethnicity (including languages and traditions) on a person or group of people, whereby the unbalanced relationship of the stimuli involved is acknowledged.73 72

See Monika Fludernik, “Introduction” to Hybridity and Postcolonialism: Twentieth-Century Indian Literature, ed. Monika Fludernik (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1998): 10, Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1996): 6, and Joel Kuortti & Jopi Nyman, “Hybridity Today,” in Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-Colonial Studies in Transition, ed. Joel Kuortti & Jopi Nyman (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2007): 4. 73 I understand ‘ethnicity’ as a group of people who share the same culture (including history, politics, nationality, values, behaviors, food, clothing, attitudes, language, etc.). Susan Koshy offers a brief discussion of the historical patterns of Asian American ethnicity-formation in “The Fiction of Asian American Literature,” Yale Journal of Criticism 9.2 (1996): 319–23. ‘Race’ is a grouping of people according to certain shared physical characteristics. However, a clear differentiation between the two is not always possible. Originally, ‘race’ was thought to be a biological category. But today we know that this term is biologically meaningless, because no such thing as a “pure race” exists. “Racism is real, but races are not,” comments David Hollinger, in “An Attempt to Move Beyond Multiculturalism to a Postethnic America,” in Major Problems in American Immigration and Ethnic History, ed. Jon Gjerde (Boston M A : Houghton Mifflin, 1998): 446. ‘Race’ is truly defined by society: “the characteristics that distinguish one racial group from another are arbitrary and thus are socially defined and constructed”; Norman R. Yetman, “Introduction: Definitions and Perspectives,” in Majority and Minority: The Dynamics of Race and Ethnicity in American Life, ed. Yetman (Boston M A : Allyn & Bacon, 6th ed. 1998): 3. The various racial concepts and myths are influenced by “historical trends, social mores, and demographical developments”; Hanna Wallinger, “Introduction” to Transitions: Race, Culture, and the Dynamics of Change, ed. Hanna Wallinger (Münster & Vienna: L I T , 2006): 9. These vary from society to society, and change over time. In this way, ‘race,’ too, is

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Fludernik explains that there have been two major changes in the concept of hybridity in postcolonial studies.74 First, the subjects of colonialism in early theory used to be Africans exclusively. Now any (non-white) Other can be the subject of hybridity studies.75 Secondly, the focus of study was previously on colonized countries only, but today theorists also discuss migrant or diasporic communities, who might even live in uncolonized territory. This is significant to my own study, since it deals with Asian immigrants and their offspring in the U S A , a territory where Native Americans and not Asian Americans were colonized. The situation of an ethnic group that emigrates to the U S A is similar to the (post)colonial position: while the modern American surroundings affect the immigrants’ life, the ancestral home country is still influential. The profound linguistic alienation of immigrants to the U S A is also comparable to that of the (post)colonized. Moreover, the hegemony experienced by (former) colonies is also experienced by ethnic minorities in the U S A . A sense of displacement typical of a (previously) colonized state can also be found in minority Americans. In addition, several Asian countries were colonized by the U S A . Even though colonialism has officially ended, today it is still active under the guise of transnational corporatism.76 Lily Cho adds that present-day colonialism becomes visible in the contradictions surrounding diasporic subjects and

strongly influenced by culture. For a more extensive discussion of the differentiation between ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’, see Norman R. Yetman, “Introduction: Definitions and Perspectives,” 1–38. A critique of the category of ‘race’ can be found in Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” in ‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1986): 21–37. 74 Monika Fludernik, “Introduction” to Hybridity and Postcolonialism: TwentiethCentury Indian Literature, ed. Fludernik, 12–13. See also, more generally, Diaspora and Multiculturalism: Common Traditions and New Developments, ed. Monika Fludernik (Cross / Cultures 66; Amsterdam & New York, 2003). 75 See Fludernik, “Introduction,” 12–13. 76 See Masao Miyoshi, “A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State,” Asian American Studies: A Reader, ed. Jean Yu–wen Shen Wu & Min Song (New Brunswick N J & London: Rutgers U P , 2000): 210.

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U S citizenship.77 It is thus possible to draw an analogy from the colonial to

the postcolonial and immigrant scenarios. Asian Americans themselves or their ancestors have immigrated to America. Their conflicts as underprivileged, physiognomically different immigrants and their offspring with the privileged host culture are comparable to the confrontations between slave and master.78 Needless to say, American (cultural and economic) imperialism has additionally had several Asian countries in its grip – most notably the Philippines, Japan, Vietnam, and South Korea. In this sense, there is a (post)colonial connection between the U S A and several Asian countries. Asian American culture is affected by the West’s colonization of Asian countries and its Orientalism, which has been subjugating, stereotyping, and discriminating against people of Asian descent since the first imperialist encounters between both hemispheres. Cultural hybridity is thus not only present in the Asian American community because of the actual postcolonial relationship the U S A has had with numerous Asian countries, it is also expressed in the fact that Asians and their Asian American descendants are treated like inferior foreigners in the supposedly superior American host culture. Cultural hybridity can refer to colonial, postcolonial, and migrant ethnic groups. The situation of colonized, formerly colonized, and immigrant people is similar, because they are all suppressed individuals, peripheral to the dominant ideology, who fight for a place violently or otherwise as “historical subjects.”79 As Fanon explains in detail in his seminal book Black Skin, White Masks, the colonized try to adapt to the white colonizers’ culture in order to become like them. However, no matter how assimilated they may be, they can never be wholly like the colonizers, because they cannot be white. Homi Bhabha calls this attempted resemblance “mimicry – a difference that is al77

Lily Cho, “Diasporic Citizenship: Inhabiting Contradictions and Challenging Exclusions,” American Quarterly 59.2 (June 2007): 477. 78 See Monika Fludernik, “Colonial vs. Cosmopolitan Hybridity: A Comparison of Mulk Raj Anand and R.K. Narayan with Recent British and North American Expatriate Writing (Singh–Baldwin, Divakaruni, Sunetra Gupta),” in Hybridity and Postcolonialism: Twentieth-Century Indian Literature, ed. Monika Fludernik (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1998): 287. 79 Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1995): 3.

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most nothing but not quite.”80 This small difference has a big effect: it “fixes the colonial subject as a ‘partial’ presence”81 with an incomplete identity. Bhabha also mentions menace in this context, arguing that the colonized’s mimicry of the colonizer can assume a threat to the latter, whose identity and authority are subverted through the imitation.82 In addition, the colonizers see upsetting mirrors of their own subjugating habits.83 Thus mimicry and hybridity are “at once a mode of appropriation and of resistance.”84 Mimicry’s menace resides in its “double vision,”85 because it discloses the ambivalence and artificiality of colonialist discourse and authority. In a chapter of The Location of Culture significantly called “Sly Civility,” Bhabha explains that the menace of mimicry leads to paranoia on the part of the colonizer, who imagines the threatening intentions of the “litigious, lying native.”86 Further: “in the colonial discourse, that space of the other is always occupied by an idée fixe: despot, heathen, barbarian, chaos, violence.”87 Both Bhabha and Fanon point out that the influence of the colonizer on the colonized is reciprocated. Paradigmatically, Bhabha calls for “strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power,”88 and Fanon asserts the power of the colonized, “the Negro’s superiority,”89 in imagined sexual terms. The cross-influencing of colonizer and colonized and the manifestation of the power of both are also valid in postcolonial scenarios, where there is an overlapping of the native’s (traditional) and the former colonizer’s (modern) views. 80

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 91; emphasis in original. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86. 82 See Robert J.C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1996): 147, and Ana María Manzanas & Jesús Benito, Intercultural Mediations: Hybridity and Mimesis in American Literatures (Münster: L I T , 2003): 75. 83 See Amritjit Singh & Peter Schmidt, “On the Borders between U.S. Studies and Postcolonial Theory” (2000), in Postcolonial Theory and the United States, ed. Singh & Schmidt, (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 2000): 37. 84 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 120. 85 The Location of Culture, 88; emphasis in original. 86 The Location of Culture, 100. 87 The Location of Culture, 101; emphasis in original. 88 The Location of Culture, 112. 89 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 159. 81

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The colonizer, the former colonizer, and the culture that a minority has immigrated into influence the colonized, the formerly colonized, and the immigrant minority. Naturally, the colonized also influence the colonizer in a colonized country, as, even though the colonizer might rule a country, the colonized create everything there. Formerly colonized groups, in parallel, exert influence on those belonging to the culture of the former colonizer (cohabiting as equals – at least, from a legal point of view – now both contribute to the wellbeing of the country). But where is the influence of an immigrant community like that of Asian Americans on the hosting nation, e.g., the U S A ? It must be considered that in a (post)colonial country the (post)colonized outnumber the (former) colonizer and that this numerical superiority and the ensuing high levels of productivity empower the oppressed in the face of the controlling, rule-issuing, and thus powerful colonizer. But in the host country the immigrant community is just a minority and has no numerically based position of power. Clearly, Asian wellness centers (offering acupressure, acupuncture, ayurveda, yoga, reiki, feng shui consultation, etc.), fashionable Asian art galleries (providing artefacts as diverse a as jade dragons, Buddha figures, origami, and ikebana arrangements), Asian takeaways, Asian religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, Asian community activities such as taiko drumming and karaoke singing, and Asian martial-arts gyms substantiate the influence of Asian America on the U S A and rationalize seeing that community as a case in point for cross-cultural pollination and cultural hybridity. The transformative agency of difference is also visible in high art, not only popular culture. According to Toni Morrison, it is a search for “the ghost in the machine” to find out how ethnic Americans have shaped the structure, language, and theory of majority American literature.90 I would call the influence of Asian American artists on majority American culture even more than a ghost. Its presence is real and detectable. Through language mixing, the incorporation and adaptation of majority American, Asian and Asian American cultural myths, and a reinvention of Asian and European poetic forms, Asian American poetry inspires mainstream American artists and influences the general American poetic tradition. To cite but a few examples, let me name the following artists: Laure–Anne 90

Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28.1 (Winter 1989): 11.

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Bosselaar acknowledges Kimiko Hahn’s and Li–Young Lee’s honesty and directness as a significant influence.91 Sam Hamill affirms that Kimiko Hahn’s work inspired his poetic meditations on Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book zuihitsu.92 Agha Shahid Ali’s use of the Asian poetic form of the ghazal is an influence on Mark Doty and Marilyn Hacker.93 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s multilinguality, radical politics, and intertextuality have influenced Carla Harryman.94 Fludernik suggests that we should view all American ethnic minorities as one,95 in which case the large number of members of all ethnic communities and their communal achievements appear powerful enough to affect the U S host culture and ensure cross-hybridization. This argument recalls the 1970s, when the civil-rights and Black Liberation movements empowered not only African Americans but also Asian Americans and thoroughly transformed the U S A . 96 91

Laure–Anne Bosselaar, in an email to me on 24 February 2007. Hamill, in an interview with Rebecca Seiferle; http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/hamillview.htm (accessed 13 April 2010). 93 Mark Doty, in an interview with me on 28 November 2005; see also his poem “Shahid’s Couplet” in Doty, School of the Arts (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005): 25. Marilyn Hacker cites Ali as an influence on her poetry in “Ghazal: Style,” Poetry Northwest, http://www.poetrynw.org/2006/02/marilyn-hacker-ghazal-style/ (accessed 13 April 2010). 94 See Carla Harryman’s poem “Dimblue: After Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée,” in In the Mode of (La Laguna C A : Zasterle, 1991): 5–14. See also Juliana Spahr, “Postmodernism, Readers, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée,” College Literature 23.3 (October 1996): 23–43, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3709/is_199610 /ai_n8758048/pg_12 (accessed 20 February 2007). 95 Monika Fludernik, “Colonial vs. Cosmopolitan Hybridity,” 274. 96 Outside of America, the Afro-Asian alliance started in 1955 with the historic Bandung Conference. The significance of the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, where representatives of twenty-nine Asian and African nations met from April 18 to 24, 1955 to discuss racism and colonialism is described by Tamara Nopper in “The Illusion of Afro-Asian Solidarity?: Situating the 1955 Bandung Conference,” extended version of introductory remarks given at the forum The State of Black–Asian Relations: Interrogating Black-Asian Coalition 50 Years after Bandung (Philadelphia, 2 August 2005), posted on 17 August 2008, http://bandung1955.wordpress.com/ (accessed 18 August 2008). Nopper interrogates the conference in the context of the Cold War and critizises its underrepresentation of African nations. Richard Wright attended 92

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The demonstrations against restrictive immigration laws, in favor of granting citizenship to illegal immigrants throughout the U S A , in April and May 2006 were initially organized by Hispanics but were joined by people from other ethnic communities and are thus paradigmatic of this aggregating view of American ethnicities. “Immigrants are coming together in a way that we have never seen before, and it’s going to keep going,” states Jaime Contreras, President of the National Capital Immigration Coalition.97 This emergence of power and influence in one united trans-ethnic community is not something perceived solely by ethnic activists. Politicians, too, acknowledge the power of a pan-ethnic alliance, “bonding in difference.”98 The Kansas Republican Senator Sam Brownback said in an interview: “I think everybody sees the immigrant community as an emerging force. I think everybody is quite sensitive that they don’t want to be on the wrong side, politically, of this group.”99 It is not entirely convincing to me for cross-hybridization and transformation of the host culture through immigration to be based on quantitative demography, since the allegedly powerful unity of America’s different ethnicities is a very fragile construct. The above-mentioned demonstration illustrates this: while united Hispanic and Asian Americans called for illegal immigrants to be granted citizenship, African American activists protested against this, fearing that even more black Americans would become jobless if illegal immigrants were granted citizenship and could legally work in the U S A .100 In the conference and chronicled the event in his book The Color Curtain (1956); Richard Wright, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956; Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1994). The author was fascinated by the conference’s transracial bonding and anti-imperialist attitude: “The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed – in short, the underdogs of the human race were meeting. Here were class and racial and religious consciousness on a global scale. […] what had these nations in common? Nothing, it seemed to me, but what their past relationship to the Western world had made them feel. This meeting of the rejected was in itself a kind of judgment upon that Western world!” Wright, The Color Curtain 12. 97 Jaime Contreras, quoted in Rachel L. Swarns, “Immigrants Rally in Scores of Cities for Legal Status,” New York Times (11 April 2006): 1. 98 Amritjit Singh & Peter Schmidt, “On the Borders between U.S. Studies and Postcolonial Theory,” 14. 99 Sam Brownback, quoted in Swarns, “Immigrants Rally in Scores of Cities for Legal Status,” 1. 100 “black anti-immigration activists planned a march for jobs for American-born

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theory, it is a powerful tool if ethnicities bond to strategically combat racism and oppression and increase their political influence. In practice, old prejudices against other ethnicities and differing political or religious views surface to militate against pan-ethnic alliances. Still, it is of the utmost importance to increase pan-ethnic projects. In this spirit, I not only embrace the premises of Asian Americanist theorists but also incorporate selected aspects of other theories, such as those of Gloria Anzaldúa and bell hooks. An important achievement of the hybrid condition is that it allows for more political alliances and thus increases the power of the Asian American community. If one allows differences of class, sexuality, gender, race, religion, etc. within one ethnic group like the Asian American, one enables the strategic alignment with gender-specific, class-focusing, and religion-centered groups and thus increases the awareness, influence, and power of the Asian American community.101 Lisa Lowe believes that “to enable crucial alliances – with other groups of color, class-based struggles, feminist coalitions, and sexuality-based efforts”102 – contributes to the transformation and deconstruction of hegemony. Rather than hailing similarities and homogeneity among Asian Americans, one must thus not neglect its particularities, divergences, and hybrid aspects. Hybridity in an ethnic community allows for more alliances and a decrease in the importance of the mainstream culture. In “Signs Taken for Wonders” (1986), Homi Bhabha explains that hybridity, the mixing of the knowledge of the colonizer, the former colonizer, or the host culture with that of the colonized, formerly colonized, or immigrant, is by itself an active form of resistance to the former’s hegemony because the knowledge of the ‘Other’ enters the dominating culture and transforms it.103 Blacks on Apr. 28 in Los Angeles. This is a direct counter to the planned mass action three days later by some immigrant rights groups”; Earl Ofari Hutchinson, “Discrimination, Not Illegal Immigration, Fuels Black Job Crisis,” FinalCall.com (10 May 2006), http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_2608.shtml (accessed 20 February 2010). 101 See Jonathan Friedman, “Global Crises, the Struggle for Cultural Identity and Intellectual Porkbarrelling: Cosmopolitans versus Locals, Ethnics and Nationals in an Era of De-Hegemonisation,” in Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, ed. Pnina Werbner & Tariq Modood (London: Zed, 1997): 87. 102 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 83. 103 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 112–16.

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How do the hybrid’s transformative power and Bhabha’s theory materialize in the concrete situation of the U S A ? In general, this means that the dominant, majority Americans assume that Americans are white. However, non-whites with roots in Native America, Africa, Asia, and Latin America see the U S A as their home country and can acquire American citizenship (which is the nation’s formal means of conferring national identity upon an individual104). They speak English, and contribute to the American economy as well as to culture. Through this, ethnic people prove themselves to be Americans by white U S citizens’ standards and subvert the notion of a typical American as white from within this culture. The white nation is supplemented by minorities and their discourse, which causes a renegotiation of political and cultural authority and power. This theory of hybridity as resistance can also be exemplified on the level of cultural particulars: immigrant foodways such as the Japanese and Indian add to majority American cuisine, and most Americans today are familiar with dishes such as sushi and chicken tandoori. By living in white America, ethnic people undermine the dominant structures of white American culture from within and add to as well as extend its ‘typical’ characteristics. Paradigmatically, nachos, chop suey, and gumbo are today perceived as being as American as Thanksgiving turkey, hamburgers, and pumpkin pie. Many Americans rely on Asian meditation and wellness techniques like yoga, qigong, and traditional Chinese medicine (T C M ).105 All of these examples undermine the omnipotence of white, Western traditions of thought in the U S on an everyday level. Homi Bhabha’s key contribution to hybridity studies is his theory of the “Third Space.” Cultural hybridity originates in the “interstitial passage be-

104

See Helena Grice, Negotiating Identities: An Introduction to Asian American Women’s Writing (Manchester: Manchester U P , 2002): 156–198, and Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 1–36. 105 The interest of Americans in these aspects of Asian culture is what Stanley Fish calls “boutique multiculturalism.” Fish differentiates between two kinds of multiculturalism: “Boutique multiculturalism” is characterized by “its superficial or cosmetic relationship to the objects of its affection;” Stanley Fish, “Boutique Multiculturalism” (1997), in Multiculturalism and American Democracy, ed. Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger & M. Richard Zinman (Lawrence: Kansas U P , 1998): 69. It is opposed to what he terms “strong multiculturalism,” the valuing of difference in and for itself (73).

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tween fixed identifications,” and “marks the identification with culture’s difference.”106 A culturally hybrid person visualizes and contains the differences between cultures, absorbing these difference without implicit hierarchy. Hybrid subjects reconstruct their identity, shedding fixed, binary, originoriented identity-positions. Bhabha is not interested in the boundaries demarcating different entities and fixed identities, but in the beyond, the liminal space between separated units. This in-between, the “Third Space,”107 is the locus of cultural hybridity, and the source of newness and invention. Cultural hybridity relates to subjectivities and communities that are “neither the One […] nor the Other […] but something else besides”;108 a new entity emerges despite the difference of its constituents. It is not just the sum of its two constituents but a new creation of their interactions which “sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives.”109 A Third Space enables its previously opposing constituent elements to “elude the politics of polarity,”110 thus overcoming the Western concept of duality.111 As Bhabha also declares, For me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge.112

The hybrid existence of Asian Americans, with their roots in more than one culture, questions binary concepts such as foreigner–national and exposes the uselessness and incoherence of such classifications. The hybrid condition opposes essentialism and the notion of the ‘original’, instead favoring multivocality and ambivalence. Consequently, the present study does not attempt to

106

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 4, 224. The Location of Culture, 36–39. 108 The Location of Culture, 28; emphasis in original. 109 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 211. Apropos of the ‘new’, note further his chapter “How Newness Enters the World. Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Times and the Trials of Cultural Translation” (212–35). 110 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 39. 111 See Hélène Cixous & Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, tr. Betsy Wing (La jeune née, 1975; Minneapolis M N : U of Minnesota P , 1986): 63–100. 112 Homi K. Bhabha, “Interview with Homi Bhabha,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990): 211. 107

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break down contemporary Asian American poetry into its Asian and mainstream American aspects. Rather, the simultaneous existence and fusion of both characteristics, as well as distinct Asian American features, are explored. Having a hybrid existence can be perceived as positive insofar as it overcomes binary oppositions and promotes creativity. For Audre Lorde, “difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.”113 However, the critic R. Radhakrishnan warns against a blue-eyed perception of difference – ‘metropolitan’ theorists’ “celebration of ‘difference’ is completely at odds with the actual experience of differences undergone by diasporic peoples in their countries of residence.”114 Joel Kuortti and Jopi Nyman likewise define hybrid existence as “a zone where people can meet” and as “an ongoing struggle, a continual emergence.”115 Culturally hybrid artists have more than one culture as points of reference and inspiration, yet hybridity can also mean instability and conflict. Although the Asian American poet Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, for instance, is empowered by the plural cultural realms from which she takes her inspiration, her poems also express the racial reality of Asian Americans’ persecution by racists: “We do not speak / of motel raids, cancelled permits, stones / thrown through glass windows, daughters and sons / raped by Dotbusters.”116

Cultural Hybridity in Asian America Where can this cultural hybridity now be located in relation to Asian America? Asian America is definitely not the Third Space between Asia and America, since a Third Space “cannot ‘in itself’ be conscious.”117 And Asian 113

Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe L. Moraga & Gloria E. Anzaldúa (Berkeley: Third Woman, 3rd ed. 2002): 107. 114 R. Radhakrishnan, Diasporic Meditations: Between Home and Locations (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1996): 174. 115 Joel Kuortti & Jopi Nyman, “Hybridity Today,” 16. 116 Dotbusters (referring to the decorative bindi worn between their eyebrows by Hindi women) are violent anti-Indian gangs. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, “Indian Movie, New Jersey,” in Leaving Yuba City (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1997): 114. 117 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 36.

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Americans are certainly conscious of their position in American society and culture. They self-consciously claim that they belong to this community and demarcate it from the white majority American grouping. The notion of a Third Space must contain a sense of ambivalence118 and unconsciousness as well as the fact that it “contests the terms and territories of both”119 groups. It could be argued that early or first-generation immigrants from Asia have made “no essentialist or historicist /nationalist claims of ‘belonging’” to this ethnic grouping and therefore their community qualifies as a Third Space between Asia and America.120 But many of these first Asian immigrants used to live in segregated ethnic communities like Chinatowns, Nihonmachis, Koreatowns, Little Manilas, Little Bombays, which white Americans avoided and ignored (resulting in the ‘invisibility’ of Asian Americans in America). Despite the fact that they did not call themselves ‘Asian Americans’, they established clearly demarcated cultural communities in which they helped each other in the face of economic and social hardship and racism, competed with and honored each other, celebrated together, and remembered their lost homeland.121 In this sense, majority America and the Asian American population have always been two separate entities, whether voluntarily or involuntarily on the part of either population; thus Asian America is not a Third Space between Asia and America. Asian Americans have made a conscious effort to promote their ethnic group, have raised consciousness throughout America for their history and contributions to the nation, and have become politically active. The “Third Space” of the Asian American cultural hybridity exists in the in-between space of majority America, the Asian American community, and Asia. Elaine Kim articulates the importance of a “Third Space” for Asian American studies where Asian Americans have “one foot in the margins and the other in the mainstream.”122 Asian Americans today are neither only Asian American nor only majority American or only Asian. There is a new space, a third alternative, a connecting fusion between the Asian American community, Asia, and majority 118

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 36. The Location of Culture, 28. 120 Homi Bhabha (email to me, 2 May 2006). 121 See Pnina Werbner, “The Dialectics of Cultural Hybridity,” 12. 122 Elaine Kim, “Korean Americans in U.S. Race Relations,” 78. 119

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America as a manifestation of “a sense of diverse community across difference.”123 Asian Americans, by raising general American consciousness of, and their own pride in, their community, have laid claim to their own ‘territory’, which of course in itself is a fusion between Asia and America, the “mutually exclusive binaries between ‘East’ and ‘West,’ between Asia and America, and between suspect alien and patriot.”124 In a “Third Space,” internal differences are transformed into a source of productivity.125 Likewise, the connecting hybridity between majority America, Asia, and Asian America brings forth creativity and art. It deconstructs hegemonic authority through the ambivalence of geographic, cultural, ethnic, and linguistic multiplicity. The hybridity of Asian America is visible in all of its cultural expressions, in poetry, drama, installations, novels, and other art forms. This community draws its creative power not only from its Asian and Asian American roots, but it also generates creativity from mainstream America. This can be seen on the level of content, in the use of languages, and in the transformation of Asian and European / mainstream American poetic forms. This hybridity is explored in detail in chapters 2, 3, and 4. Having said this, I have countered the critique of some theorists that hybridity theory essentializes the poles of a multiethnic identity. Walter Lew, for example, claims that postcolonial approaches such as mine “remain bipolar even when positing a ‘Third Space’.”126 Sunn Shelley Wong observes, of the designation ‘Asian American’, that its two constituent terms “remain the two discrete poles of a split identity rather than the mutually constitutive aspects of a labile subjectivity.”127 And Andrew Hammond argues: 123

Homi Bhabha (email to me, 2 May 2006). Elaine Kim, “Preface” to Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction, ed. & intro. Jessica Hagedorn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993): viii. 125 See Elisabeth Bronfen & Benjamin Marius, “Hybride Kulturen: Einleitung zur anglo-amerikanischen Multikulturalismusdebatte,” in Hybride Kulturen: Beiträge zur anglo-amerikanischen Multikulturalismusdebatte, ed. Elisabeth Bronfen, Benjamin Marius & Therese Steffen (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1997): 3. 126 Walter K. Lew, “Grafts, Transplants, Translation: The Americanizing of Younghill Kang,” in Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital, ed. Jani Scandura & Michael Thurston (New York: New York U P , 2001): 180. 127 Sunn Shelley Wong, “Sizing Up Asian American Poetry,” in A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature, ed. Sau–ling Cynthia Wong & Stephen H. Sumida (New 124

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To speak of two cultural forms merging to form a hybrid third […] risks constructing the original forms as stable, monolithic entities grounded in opposition or difference.128

I maintain that hybridity studies do not repeat ethnic classifications, but represent the culturally mixed reality of multi-ethnic identities. It is theoretically true that by stating that an identity is influenced by the Asian, Asian American, and European American communities the demarcation of these units is emphasized. In real life and contemporary art, however, the participation of an individual in several ethnic communities is a fact. In everyday life and art, cultures and ethnicities mix and fuse. Such amalgamation of codes enables new modes of communication that transcend binary oppositions. Transcendence of Western hegemony can be reached by overcoming the dichotomies of center and margin, identity and difference, and realizing the cross-contamination and hybridization of all cultures. Mikhail Bakhtin stresses the power of cultural hybridity to undo hierarchies. His concept of ‘hybridity’ refers to languages. For him the meaning of one language depends on the encounter and communication – hybridization – with another language: What is hybridization? It is a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor.129

Bakhtin distinguishes between unconscious (unintentional) and conscious (intentional) hybridity.130 Unconscious hybridity is part of the historical evolution of all languages, which import words from other languages at a certain point in time – for example, the word ‘tsunami’, which entered the English language in the late-nineteenth century, is Japanese in origin. Conscious hybridity is intentionally dialogic because it applies “differing points of views

York: Modern Language Association of America, 2001): 289. 128 Andrew Hammond, “The Hybrid State: Hanif Kureishi and Thatcher’s Britain,” in Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-Colonial Studies in Transition, ed. Joel Kuortti & Jopi Nyman (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2007): 223. 129 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P , 1990): 358. 130 See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 358–66.

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on the world” in an “ironic double-consciousness.”131 The irony, doublevoicedness, of one voice, argues Bakhtin, has the power to unmask and mock the other voice with the same utterance.132 Transferring these linguistic assumptions to cultures and societies, this means that one feature of all cultures is unconscious borrowing from other cultures – “There is no culture in and of itself.”133 Since cultures are mutually influenced, no single culture can proclaim that it is superior to and independent of other, ‘inferior’ cultures. Anthony Appiah argues similarly, recognizing that “we are all contaminated by each other,”134 thereby underwriting a subliminal desire on the part of postcolonial subjects uncontaminated by eurocentrism and universalism. ‘Purity’ theorists, including Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka, and Chinua Achebe, believe that truly African literature will overcome the hybrid, Afro-European literary “tradition in transition,” by which Ngugi means “the literature written by Africans in European languages.”135 Arguing for a crosspollination of cultures, Appiah shifts away from the unconscious eurocentrism of the theorists of purity and nativism. Their cultural nationalism and insistence on being ‘Other’ reinscribe the separate identities that the West has forced upon its racial Others136 and contribute to the existence of a “recognizable Other.”137 Spivak also stresses the counterproductivity of obsessively opposing a European center. To her mind, this valorizes the center and confines the subaltern to the margins.138

131

Pnina Werbner, “The Dialectics of Cultural Hybridity,” 5. See Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire, 20, and Ana María Manzanas & Jesús Benito, Intercultural Mediations, 67. 133 Pnina Werbner, “The Dialectics of Cultural Hybridity,” 5. 134 Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford U P , 1992): 155. 135 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986): 26–27. 136 See Appiah, In My Father’s House, 62. 137 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86. 138 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, with Harold Veeser, “The New Historicism: Political Commitment and the Postmodern Critic,” in Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990): 156. 132

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Asian American culture as a whole is an “unconscious hybrid” (Bakhtin’s term). Its internal division of the English and respective Asian languages (including Asian American pidgins) as well as mainstream American and Asian American customs has grown historically and has been fused into a new, hybrid subjectivity. Many Asian American individuals, especially the artists, are conscious of their cultural hybridity and use this to set different perspectives in conflict with each other, thus making political statements by playing with and criticizing Western binaries. If one should define a characteristic of typical Asian American identity, one could only point to its atypicality and diversity, because the degree of importance of Asian, Asian American or American cultures for an individual fluctuate considerably. This is not to say that Asian Americans have a neurotic dual personality that can be analytically separated into an Asian and an American half, that they are unable to integrate into American society, or that they therefore deserve racial prejudice and are responsible for their being excluded.139 The argument here is that there exists a distinct Asian American identity – based extensively on communal racist oppression and resistance to it as well as a mutual history and collective celebrations – and that someone who has two cultural influences is organically connected to both of them and affected by them to varying degrees. Although there are Asian and American elements in contemporary Asian American poetry, this art is not divided into distinct parts. Rather, the Asian as well as the American cultures influence the status quo of contemporary Asian American poetry. The specific generation of a given immigrant often determines the subjectmatter chosen by Asian American poets. Asian immigrants experience the realities of the U S A with their Asian (American) cultural sensibilities. For them, “framing and asserting continuity with their national identity remains primary.”140 Often a sense of loss and nostalgia is present in their art. Elaine 139

See Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada & Shawn Wong, “Preface,” in Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, ed. Chin, Chan, Inada & Wong (Washington: Howard U P , 1983): viii; see also Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada & Shawn Wong, “An Introduction to Chinese- and JapaneseAmerican Literature,” in Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, ed. Chin, Chan, Inada & Wong, xxiv–xxv and xxxiii–xxxvi. 140 Gargi Chatterjee, transcriber, & Augie Tam, ed. “Is There an Asian American Aesthetics?” 630.

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Kim explains that many first-generation immigrants identify with Asia and often speak their Asian language only.141 In their lives, the Asian dominates over the American. This is certainly seen in relation to the degree of prior education an immigrant has: Highly educated immigrants are often intimately familiar with the English language; their daily life is, however, strongly influenced by their Asian home country and its traditions. Second-generation Asian American poets, born and schooled in the U S A , frequently have a deep urge to belong to this country.142 This generation tries to assimilate and sometimes even rejects its ethnic roots. They try to persuade themselves and the U S public that, despite their physical appearance and their immigrant parents, they are ‘real Americans’. This leads to tension with their parents, who try to make them live according to the etiquette of their Asian home country, speak their Asian language, eat Asian food, and cherish Asian values. Second-generation Asian Americans are under the strong influence of both cultures and feel the tug-of-war between familial expectations and a desire to be part of mainstream America. By the third immigrant generation, Asian Americans usually speak English only, feel completely American, and often are curious about their ethnic roots.143 These writers “look back to an idealized heritage which they can claim as their cultural legacy.”144 Herbert J. Gans argues that third- and fourth-generation ethnics pick parts of their ethnic community’s culture (especially holidays and food) and incorporate these into their otherwise mainstream American lives, a practice he calls “symbolic ethnicity.”145 According 141

Elaine H. Kim, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context, 23–32. 142 See Maria Dürig, Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster: ‘Race’ und ‘Gender’ in der zeitgenössischen asiatischamerikanischen Literatur (Munich: Peter Lang, 1995): 34. 143 The shift of importance from the Asian country of origin to the U S A is explored in Joann Faung Jean Lee’s collection Asian Americans: Oral Histories of First to Fourth Generation Americans from China, the Philippines, Japan, India, the Pacific Islands, Vietnam and Cambodia (New York: New Press, 1992). 144 The artist Margo Machida, quoted in Gargi Chatterjee, transcriber, & Augie Tam, ed. “Is There an Asian American Aesthetics?” 630. 145 Herbert J. Gans, “Symbolic Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 2 (1979): 1–20. Repr. in Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: New York U P , 1996): 425–59.

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to Gans, third-generation ethnics are “more concerned with maintaining their ethnic identity,”146 with the feeling of being Asian American, than with their secular and sacred ethnic cultures. Correspondingly, new identities of panAsian Americanness are created and described by some third-generation poets. As Margo Machida explains, ironically, members of this generation often experience the most frustration because, as American as they may feel, the majority culture continues to look on them as aliens and foreigners.147

These tensions, of course, are connected to physiognomy. Gans adds that even immigrants who distance themselves voluntarily from their ethnicity are “forced to maintain some contact with their fellows, if only for reasons of security,”148 because mainstream Americans do not perceive them as white, as belonging to their community. Living as a culturally hybrid Asian American does not imply that the home culture needs to be forgotten or replaced by the mainstream. Hybridity does not stand for the total assimilation of Asian Americans to European American standards, but instead suggests the partial preservation of Asian culture, and it “marks the history of survival within relationships of unequal power and domination.”149 Lowe stresses that hybridization is not free, unrestricted, or unregimented; it stands not for “the ‘free’ oscillation between or among chosen identities” but is “an uneven process through which immigrant communities encounter the violences of the U S state […] and the process through which they survive those violences by living, inventing, and reproducing different cultural alternatives.”150 She points here to the importance of power and hegemony in the context of hybridity, and stresses the involuntariness of the hybrid condition on the part of minority immigrants. It is disputable whether an immigrant’s hybridity is a transnational state enforced by the host nation or whether an immigrant deliberately enters hybridity by migrating from one nation to another. This very probably differs from individual to individual. 146

Gans, “Symbolic Ethnicity,” 434. Machida, quoted in Gargi Chatterjee, transcriber, & Augie Tam, ed. “Is There an Asian American Aesthetics?” 630. 148 Gans, “Symbolic Ethnicity,” 455. 149 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 67. 150 Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 82. 147

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The different generations of immigration and their issues and problems are reflected in contemporary Asian American poetry, although one has to be careful here: usually Asian American poets publishing volumes of poetry in English are well-educated and face no language barrier. Thus their readership is informed by this specific fraction of Asian Americans. But they, too, partake in several cultures to varying degrees and know about their ethnic community’s problems. A first-generation immigrant from India, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has published two collections of poetry, Black Candle: Poems about Women from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (1991) and Leaving Yuba City (1997), which are mostly set in the Asian or Asian American context. The poetry of Wang Ping, a Chinese American poet born in Shanghai who has published two collections of poetry (Of Flesh and Spirit, 1998, and The Magic Whip, 2003), often evokes her Chinese origin. Of course, there are also Asian elements in the work of poets who were born in the U S A . Buddhism is a strong influence on the second-generation Chinese American poet Arthur Sze (his eighth collection of poetry, published in 2005, is called Quipu), for example. Kimiko Hahn, a third-generation Japanese American poet (her latest of eight collections of poetry, Toxic Flora, was published in 2010), weaves Japanese literature, genres, and aesthetic concepts into her work. Whatever their immigrant generation, an Asian American poet is influenced by at least three cultures, the Asian, Asian American, and majority American, and expresses this hybrid condition in her/ his work.151

The Asian American Aesthetic and Poetic Tradition In a study of Asian American poetry, two crucial questions arise: is a grouping of poets on the grounds of common ethnicity legitimate? Are there even Asian American aesthetic modes, concepts of artistic beauty and quality, which unite contemporary Asian American poetry? Let me start off this discussion with a counter-question: are there European American aesthetic modes or an African American aesthetic? Europe and Africa are no more homogeneous or less heterogeneous than Asia. Looking for the cultural similarities between Japanese and Chinese is as difficult as between Greeks and Englishmen or Moroccans and South Africans. What unites peoples situated 151

Extensive analyses of contemporary Asian American poems in the context of cultural hybridity will follow in the next three chapters.

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on the same continent is their (usually war-freighted) common history, mutual cultural and linguistic influences, and one or two major religions. But we are not discussing European or Asian or African aesthetics here. The subject of this study is Asian American aesthetics, a subdivision of the general term ‘American aesthetics’. The diversity and ethnic heterogeneity of European Americans, African Americans, and Asian Americans is a fact, but not per se a problematic one. It lies in the nature of all communities that there cannot be complete homogeneity or identicalness. However, the Asian American community has made an effort to establish unity, however separate the Asian countries of their families’ origins may be. Divakaruni admitted in an interview with me that “many of us feel: If we are categorized as Asian American let’s really get together and form a group that will have some power and some political voice. If we had lived in our home countries, we would not have done that. Here we do it.”152 Arguing for an Asian American aesthetic is not a racist act of demarcation or exclusion. While participating in America’s poetry scene, Asian American poets are at the same time aware of their cultural differences and of stereotyped images of them. Therefore, the core of the Asian American aesthetic does not lie in distinguishing Asian America from the rest of America, but in the revelation of the Asian American experience and the challenging of a uniform and immovable majority American art.153 The attempt to deconstruct eurocentric domination of art is a characteristic of Asian American aesthetics. The consequent exploration of Asian American history, of being a racial and cultural minority (an ‘Other’), and of oppression, racist violence, and humiliation is another aspect of it: the art of an Asian American grapples with the disorder in society, with violence. And in our writing we need to evoke a chaos, a power equal to the injustices that surround us. So, for me, art is always political, even if it is most abstract.154 152

Interview conducted in Houston on November 15, 2005. See Appendix page 319. The complete interviews with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Kimiko Hahn are contained in the Appendix. 153 See Paul Pfeiffer, quoted in Gargi Chatterjee, transcriber, & Augie Tam, ed. “Is There an Asian American Aesthetics?” 632. 154 Meena Alexander, quoted in Gargi Chatterjee, transcriber, & Augie Tam, ed. “Is There an Asian American Aesthetics?” 628.

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In addition to the Asian and Asian American history and past, the American present is also part of an Asian American aesthetic (Inada’s poem “From Live Do” echoes here). In Yearning, the African American theorist bell hooks explains that aesthetics is “more than a philosophy or theory of art and beauty; it is a way of inhabiting space, a particular location.”155 Asian Americans inhabit American space, the “particular location” being the figurative borderland between the U S A and the Asian countries. Asian American artists are not limited to Asian folktales and traditions, but of course take up issues that have been shaping the U S A Here I am not only talking about the racist reality of America, but also of Western idioms, traditions, and artistic trends. Asian American aesthetics include political meaning. This covers a broad field of political statements, ranging from explicit anti-racist declarations and social criticism to the deliberate decision to exclude ethnic reference. Although the latter choice might not immediately seem to be political in nature, it is. An Asian American writer’s refusal to weave Asian or Asian American facets into her or his poems constitutes a refusal to be limited to one’s Asianness and an emphasis on one’s Americanness. It is a claim for the American nation, while the incorporation of Asian and Asian American elements into Asian American art expresses the cultural hybridity of Asian America and emphasizes the full value of minority and majority culture. By no means can the work of every Asian American artist be divided into fifty percent Asian features and fifty percent Euro-American. The degree of expression of Asian and majority American influences in Asian American art varies considerably. Naturally Asian American poets are part of the national poetic tendencies such as Language poetry, confessionalism, and neoformalism, and some may not explicitly refer to their Asian ancestry, but their experience of living as a racially marked ‘Other’ certainly influences their art. It is this mixture between Asian and American influences that differentiates the Asian American aesthetic from other minority American aesthetics that also feature resistance to majority America’s domination and to relegation to the subject status of ‘Other’.

155

bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston M A : South End, 1990): 104.

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Many Asian American artists, including Meena Alexander,156 Paul Pfeiffer,157 and Kimiko Hahn, assert the existence of an Asian American aesthetic. Hahn has her own pointed definition of it: I’ve taken years to imagine an Asian American aesthetic. I think it’s a combination of many elements – a reflection of Asian form, an engagement with content that may have roots in historical identity, together with a problematic, and even psychological, relationship to language.158

The poet first mentions the combinatory nature of an Asian American aesthetic. Both Asian and American culture are an influence on it, and it is expressed on different levels in the poems: namely, in their form, content, and language. Her mentioning of “Asian form” as a characteristic of Asian American art is not part of a general Asian American aesthetic but, rather, Hahn’s own. Most Asian American poets do not reflect Asian poetic forms in their work. Her statement on content is very open: an Asian American aesthetic may be influenced by Asian American historical identity, but this is not valid for all Asian American art. Hahn’s last point, language, is very valuable, though. English is part of majority American culture. A critical relationship to language as part of a resistance to the domination of majority American culture is characteristic of Asian American art. It is important to see the historical dimension of an Asian American aesthetic. There is a long Asian American artistic tradition. As an example of this tradition, I describe the evolution of the Asian American poetic tradition. This discussion is allowed some length because there are popular misconceptions about the beginnings of Asian American poetry and its periods that need to be elucidated. I deliberately give more space to the earliest Asian American poets than to contemporary artists in this description, because these are presumably less familiar to many readers. In her landmark 1996 anthology Quiet Fire, Juliana Chang points out that, contrary to popular belief, the origins of Asian American poetry are not 156

Meena Alexander, quoted in Gargi Chatterjee, transcriber, & Augie Tam, ed. “Is There an Asian American Aesthetics?” 627–29. 157 Paul Pfeiffer, quoted in Gargi Chatterjee, transcriber, & Augie Tam, ed. “Is There an Asian American Aesthetics?” 631–32. 158 Kimiko Hahn, in Terry Hong, “Writing over Borders: A Conversation with Kimiko Hahn,” A.Magazine April (1993): 51.

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located in the 1970s or 1980s.159 Asian American poetry was first published in the 1890s with the work of Carl Sadakichi Hartmann (1867–1944) and Yonejiro Noguchi (1875–1947). The former, son of a German trader and a Japanese woman and, came to the U S A in 1882. He became a U S citizen in 1894 and was one of Walt Whitman’s secretaries. According to Kenneth Rexroth, Hartmann might have been the first poet to write haiku in English.160 He published his first poetry collection in 1898 and was a prominent member of the Greenwich Village artists colony at the fin de siècle.161 Yonejiro (Yone) Noguchi, resident in the U S A from 1893 to 1904, was the first Japanese national to publish poems in English there;162 his debut collection, Seen and Unseen; or, Monologues of a Homeless Snail, came out in 1897.163 In 1919, Eunice Tietjens called Noguchi’s poetry “a first breath from the living Orient” that “directly […] forecast the modern movement.”164 He enjoyed a reputation among the Imagists in general and Pound in particular.165

159

Other critics, like Bruce Iwasaki in 1971, have pointed to this fact before Chang. See Juliana Chang, Quiet Fire: A Historical Anthology of Asian American Poetry: 1892–1970 (New York: Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 1996): xv–xx, and Chang, “Reading Asian American Poetry,” M E L U S 21.1 (Spring 1996): 82–83. 160 See Sadakichi Hartmann, White Chrysanthemums: Literary Fragments and Pronouncements, ed. George Knox & Harry Lawton (New York: Herder, 1971): ix. 161 See Stan Yogi, “Japanese American Literature,” in An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, ed. King–kok Cheung (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1997): 127. 162 See Anon., “Yone Noguchi,” The Noguchi Museum, http://www.noguchi.org /yone_noguchi.html (accessed 5 April 2006); see also Bruce Iwasaki, “Response and Change for the Asian in America: A Survey of Asian American Literature,” in Roots: An Asian American Reader, ed. Amy Tachiki, Eddie Wong, Franklin Odo & Buck Wong (Los Angeles: U C L A Asian American Studies Center, 1971): 89. 163 Edward Marx, “Yone Noguchi,” in Asian American Poets: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Guiyou Huang (Westport C T : Greenwood, 2002): 265. 164 See David Ewick, “Noguchi, Yone,” The Margins (5 January 2006), http: //themargins.net/bib/D/d15.html (accessed 5 April 2006). 165 See Ewick, “Noguchi, Yone;” see also George Uba, “Coordinates of Asian American Poetry: A Survey of the History and a Guide to Teaching,” in A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature, ed. Sau–ling Cynthia Wong & Stephen H. Sumida (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2001): 310.

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Asian American poetry of the early-twentieth century not only consisted of published poetry like that of Jun Fujita, Wen I–to, and H.T. Tsiang. It also took the form of Japanese folksong-inspired plantation work songs and Cantonese rhymes from Chinatown, as well as poetry written in regional haiku, tanka, and senryū societies and poems carved on the walls of the immigration detention center on Angel Island. Jun Fujita (1888–1963) was an issei (firstgeneration) poet who came to the U S A in 1904. His poetry is marked by the Japanese poetic tradition and inspired by his emotions and natural surroundings. Wen I–to (1899–1946), who is also referred to as Wen Yiduo and as Wen Jiahua, lived in the U S A from 1922 to 1925. His poems are known for their metrical structure and the treatment of social or personal difficulties.166 In the late 1920s and early 1930s, H.T. Tsiang (1899–1971), also known as Jiang Xizeng, wrote about the hardships of racial and social injustice. These early Asian American poets were mostly part of an educated elite and their criticism of American society was tentative, if at all existent. Asian American poets such as Toyo Suyemoto (1916–2003), Hisaye Yamamoto (b. 1921), Carlos Bulosan (1913–56), and José García Villa (1908–97) gained prominence in the 1940s and 1950s.167 Suyemoto and Yamamoto were concerned with personal tragedies and national injustices like the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. Bulosan and Villa aroused unprecedented interest in Filipino American culture. The poetry of these writers claimed America as a home for Asian Americans. Although Asian Americans had written poetry since the time of Hartmann and Noguchi, it was only in the 1960s and 1970s that America began to take note of it as something of more than coterie interest.168 Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn, Merle Woo, Al Robles, Arthur Sze, Mei–mei Berssenbrugge, Ron Tanaka, and Lawson Fusao Inada brought Asian American poetry to national prominence. The poetry of Janice Mirikitani and Mitsuye Yamada contributed 166

See Fabio Grasselli, “Evoluzione della Poesia Cinese Moderna dal 4/5 alla Rivoluzione Culturale,” Cina Oggi (9 March 2005), http://www.cinaoggi.it/arte /letteratura/poesia-cinese/4-rivoluzione-culturale.htm (accessed 5 April 2006). 167 See Stan Yogi, “Japanese American Literature,” 144. 168 See Guiyou Huang, “Introduction: The Makers of the Asian American Poetic Landscape,” in Asian American Poets: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Guiyou Huang (Westport C T : Greenwood, 2002): 3.

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to American feminism at the time. In the 1970s, poetry was a medium of political activism and expression and, together with the newly emergent Asian American drama, inspired the rise of the Asian American Movement. It was also at this time that Asian American poetic writing was included in the first Asian American literary anthologies.169 Asian American literary magazines like Bridge, Aion, and Amerasia Journal were founded in the 1970s,170 and the first Asian American Writers’ Conference took place in Oakland, California in 1975. In the 1980s and 1990s, the first Asian American poets to receive widespread recognition on the U S poetry scene published their books. These include Agha Shahid Ali, John Yau, Garrett Hongo, David Mura, Marilyn Chin, Kimiko Hahn, Cathy Song, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Li–Young Lee, and Lois–Ann Yamanaka. Asian American literature was first treated seriously by the literary academy in these decades. Among the most recent and youngest group of Asian American poets are Timothy Liu, Srikanth Reddy, Nick Carbó, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Tina Chang, Suji Kwock Kim, Miho Nonaka, Brenda Shaughnessy, Monica Youn, Priscilla Lee, and Victoria Chang. Scholars have differing ideas of the composition of the various generations of Asian American poets. Victoria Chang, for example, argues that the “first generation” comprises those authors who were widely recognized and received national poetry prizes in the 1980s and 1990s.171 This group includes Marilyn Chin, Kimiko Hahn, Garrett Hongo, and Li–Young Lee.172 In his introduction to Asian American Literature, Shawn Wong calls his own generation of writers, including Lawson Fusao Inada, Frank Chin, and Jeffery Paul Chan, the second generation of Asian American writers, following firstgeneration poets like Hisaye Yamamoto, Carlos Bulosan, Diana Chang, and 169

Paradigmatically, Roots: An Asian American Reader, ed. Amy Tachiki, Eddie Wong, Franklin Odo & Buck Wong (Los Angeles: U C L A Asian American Studies Center, 1971). 170 A detailed account of these magazines can be found in William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia P A : Temple U P , 1993): 65 and 112–31. 171 Though she explicitly explains in an end note that this does not suggest that no other Asian American poets existed before them. 172 Victoria M. Chang, “Introduction” to Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, ed. Victoria Chang (Champaign: U of Illinois P , 2004): xv.

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Toshio Mori.173 In the knowledge that the Asian American poetic tradition stretches back as far as the 1890s, I cannot agree with calling poets from the 1970s or 1980s the first generation. TIf one generation of writers spans approximately thirty years, the first generation of Asian American poets is associated with the period from the turn of the century to the early 1930s. The first generation of Asian American poets thus includes Hartmann, Noguchi, Fujita, Tsiang, and their contemporaries. The second generation ranges from the late 1930s to the 1960s and covers Suyemoto, Yamamoto, García Villa, and Bulosan. The third generation includes Lawson Inada, Cathy Song, Marilyn Chin, and Kimiko Hahn, who have shaped the Asian American poetry scene since the late 1970s and early 1980s and achieved prominence among American poets in the 1980s and 1990s. The fourth and latest generation of Asian American poets has been publishing poetry since the late 1990s, and includes Victoria and Tina Chang, Nick Carbó, Suji Kwock Kim, Brenda Shaughnessy, Miho Nonaka, and Srikanth Reddy. It is these last two generations that I am referring to in my title as “contemporary,” and it is they who are the subject of this study. Victoria Chang claims that the first nationally recognized Asian American poets focused on themes of culture, identity, ethnicity, assimilation, and place, while the latest generation writes less about ethnic or political issues and more about majority American themes like voyeurism and gender.174 These themes, however, are not dependent on the year the poet was born, but on the year they or their ancestors emigrated to the U S A . Those who are immigrants themselves will write about assimilation, culture-clash, nationality, and the like. Fourth- or fifth-generation Asian Americans focus on other topics. Factors such as education, class or caste, sexual orientation, religion, and gender also influence poetic themes. All this explains the wide thematic and formal range of contemporary Asian American poetry and makes it difficult to group them by generation alone. Contemporary Asian American poetry captivates the reader with its diversity: it may relate to ethnic heritage (and is thus referred to by Asian American community hardliners as “authentic”) or not (disapprovingly called 173

Shawn Wong, “Introduction” to Asian American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology (New York: Longman, 1995): xvi. 174 Chang, “Introduction,” xv and xviii.

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“inauthentic”); its authors can be active members of their ethnic community (praised as “loyal”) or not (degraded as “disloyal”); it can be successful among the whole American readership (and thus looked down upon as “assimilationist” or “commercial”) or only among the ethnic community (and thus valued as “essential”). Today’s Asian American writers can call themselves “Asian American” and claim this cultural identity without giving in to the pressure of having to be authentic, loyal, and essential. The Hawaiian poet Garrett Hongo proclaims that “the powerful human wish for a community of affection cannot restrict our literary expression (or even our critical thinking) to conform to whatever might politically be constructed (or captured) as community will.”175 So there it is: the Asian American poetic tradition, reaching as far back as the 1890s. Yonejiro Noguchi, Carl Sadakichi Hartmann, and Wen I–to were among the first Asian American published poets. Since then, much Asian American poetry has been written. In the 1980s, the first Asian American poets were awarded prestigious literary prizes, including Kimiko Hahn and Cathy Song. The Asian American aesthetic is characterized by Asian American writers’ opposition to eurocentric dominance in American art and lifestyle, by their exploration of their culturally hybrid homes and lives, and by their subversion of a voiceless Other. If Asian American poetry is such a valuable example of Asian American life, why has this genre been so shamefully neglected? Generally, the American readership, and consequently the U S publishing market, prefers prose to poetry, as sales figures show. The publishers act accordingly, as do the literary critics who write about literature that is widely read and in fashion in order to get published. It is a question of genre preference, not of ethnic provenience: “both contemporary American poetry and Asian American poetry have been eclipsed by attention to prose.”176 Explanations of why one literary genre is preferred over the other are, of course, speculative, but it seems reasonable to suppose that people prefer 175

Garrett Hongo, “Introduction” to The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America, ed. Hongo (Garden City N Y : Anchor, 1993): xxxvi. 176 Jeannie Chiu, “Identities in Progress: The Experimental Poetry of Mei–mei Berssenbrugge and Myung Mi Kim,” in Asian North American Identities: Beyond the Hyphen, ed. Eleanor Rose Ty & Donald C. Goellnicht (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 2004): 85.

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stories that are told in vivid detail and at some length so that the storyline can be followed as in a film. Poetry offers a story or idea, or maybe just fragments of this, in a highly condensed form with gaps that the reader must fill in. In this sense, poetry demands more active participation and concentration from the reader than does prose. Poetry today is considered to be the domain of the intellectual elite (the chief current exception being probably the motoric, musical, and prosodic accessibility of rap lyrics). It is widely perceived as a complicated intellectual challenge, its reading and interpretation having more to do with hard work than with joy. Since at least the age of Eliot, Pound, and other modernists, serious poetry has been conceived of as a ‘high art’ radically distinct from the easier gratifications of mass or popular culture − a wilfully complex and obscure form of expression meant to exclude the ‘common’ reader. Asian American poetry faces a special difficulty: Possible allusions to the Asian and Asian American cultural realm, be they on the narrative, formal, or linguistic level, create difficulties for readers and critics who may not have access to this knowledge.177 If readers want to understand each and every detail in Asian American poems, they will have to acquire the information they lack. Consequently, many Asian American poems mean additional work for the majority of American readers and U S academics. Asian American poetry consequently suffers from “critical marginalization.”178 In addition, American academia often discusses Asian American poetry not in American literature courses, but in specific Asian American literature classes. It is usually treated as sub-canonical and taught separately in Asian American studies or ethnic studies departments. Not only do academics avoid Asian American poetry because it has a small readership and partly demands cultural research. In addition, non-Asian American academics might feel that they do not have the right to write about an author who has a different racial or ethnic background than themselves, and the number of Asian American literature professors is, compared to the total of American literary academics, small. These factors make Asian American poetry lesss popular with readers and academics, and it has not received 177

This is partly the reason why, in this study, I have chosen to interpret the poems in detail, explain difficult words or phrases, and thus pay the poems due respect. 178 Juliana Chang, “Reading Asian American Poetry,” M E L U S 21.1 (Spring 1996): 84.

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as much attention as it deserves. Not only does it demand attention, close reading, and cultural research by every kind of scholar; it also addresses the vital issues of American life over the past century – a sufficient and urgent justification for critical studies on Asian American poetry. 

The hybrid connection between Asian, Asian American, and majority American generates tensions and innovations that, of course, find expression in Asian American arts. As David Mura argues, [an Asian American poet] who wants to describe that [Asian American] experience must somehow violate the accepted practice of the language, must bring into the language an alien vocabulary and syntax, rhythms that disrupt, images which jar, ideas which require totally new relationships to language and the reality it contains.179

The following chapters will accordingly explore these ruptures and violations along the trajectories of narrative, linguistic, and formal hybridity The categories of form, language, and content are interconnected and their sum is what makes up a particular poem. There is no content outside of a form, no form without language; anyone translating a poem from one language into another has grappled with the indivisibility of form and content. The three divisions are made here for analysis’ sake. These three concepts are basic literary entities and as such are ideal tools for analyzing Asian American poetry in depth and to extensive scholarly profit. The first step will be to examine linguistic hybridity: Asian American poems are informed by the English language and by Asian languages as well as by mixed codes such as Hawaiian Pidgin English. Answers will be attempted to the following questions: Is linguistic hybridity a prominent feature of Asian American poetry? Which forms does linguistic hybridity take in these poems? Which authors express themselves in a hybrid code? And why and to what effect do they resort to this device?  179

David Mura, “The Margins at the Center, the Center at the Margins: Acknowledging the Diversity of Asian American Poetry,” in Reviewing Asian America: Locating Diversity, ed. Wendy L. Ng, Soo-Young Chin, James S. Moy & Gary Y. Okihiro (Pullman: Washington State U P , 1995): 171–72.

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What we uphold is the defiance and resistance to “Moloch,” in the collective speech of the multinational multi cultural American tongue and voice.1 I think that’s why many of us write. Because we’ve been changed by language and we hope that our language will have some influence on others.2

I

“‘H OWL ’ AND H AIL ” published on the the fiftieth birthday of Allen Ginsberg’s collection Howl and Other Poems (1956), Amiri Baraka describes the multilingual status quo of the U S A , including of course Asian America, and its power to be defiant. Here he argues for resistance to Moloch, originally a Semitic deity described in the Old Testament to whom children were sacrificed. In Ginsberg’s landmark poem, Moloch is the personification of the materialistic, prudish, cold, and restrictive realities of the U S A , manifested, for example, in the recent demands for an adoption of English as the official American language. As this chapter will outline, the merging of languages and cultures – “the collective speech of the multinational multicultural American tongue and voice” – can challenge the “Moloch” of nationalist, monolingual America. Baraka points to the connection between power and language, something that postcolonial critics have discussed in great detail.3 “Power […] has

1

N T H E F I R S T E P I G R A P H , TAKEN FROM HIS ARTICLE

Amiri Baraka, “ ‘ Howl’ and Hail,” American Poetry Review 35.2 (March–April

2006): 8–9. 2

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, interview; see Appendix (301).

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always inscribed itself in language,”4 affirms Trinh T. Minh–ha. The second epigraph of this chapter, from Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, substantiates this: “I think that’s why many of us write. Because we’ve been changed by language and we hope that our language will have some influence on others.” The poet believes that language forms the world that we live in; by knowing its power, one can change it, which is a chief motivation for authors to write. Colonial power forces a ‘superior’, ‘civilized’ standard language upon the colonized Other while at the same time demoting the native language and variants of the colonial language as impure and inferior. Language being an integral part of the colonized culture, the colonizer reduces the value of the culture of the colonized through this linguistic domination. As a consequence, the colonized, to reach equality with the colonizer, endeavour to master their code: The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter – that is, he will come closer to being a real human being – in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language.5

But if the colonized speak the language of the colonizer perfectly, they will have internalized the inferiority of their native culture.6 Robert Young, too, points out that colonialism encompasses not just economic and military action but also the permeation of “forms of knowledge”7 like language. Not only is language a means of communication but it is also an integral part and expression of a culture – to examine language is to examine culture; indeed, “the claim that a concentration on language ignores material culture misinterprets the materiality of language and the semiology of culture.”8 Lin3

For example, Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 17–18; Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 97–98; Rajeev S. Patke, Postcolonial Poetry in English (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2006): 33; Ashcroft, Griffith & Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, 37–76; Douglas Robinson, Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained (Manchester: St Jerome, 1997): 31–45. 4 Trinh T. Minh–ha, Woman, Native, Other, 52. 5 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 18. 6 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 97. 7 Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1996): 163. 8 Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989): 86.

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guistic hybridity thus not only denotes a mixing of languages but also involves a fusion of cultures. Of course, the supposed superiority of one language or culture is not limited to colonialist scenarios. Just as colonizers exerted their hegemony over the colonized through language, the white American center peripheralizes ethnic languages and the creolized English of ethnic Americans9 and upholds, by definition, standard American English. Yet ethnic language is a crucial component of ethnic subjectivity: “Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity – I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself.”10 The repression of ethnic languages in the form of a national expectation of undisturbed monolingualism is tantamount to complicity, however unconscious, in racism.11 Language is a bearer of political and ideological meaning, as Aihwa Ong confirms: the key issue, perhaps, is not language […]; rather, it is how the arrival of affluent immigrants [from China] challenges white Americans’ understanding of themselves as privileged American natives.12

Linguistic hybridity can offer resistance to such nationalistic notions as language purity and ‘authenticity’. Asian Americans poets claim the right to use the English language, too, as an expression of their conviction that America is their home nation and that they are as American as any white citizen. In her exposé of the poor support given in U S language policy to bilingual education and her enumeration of political and legal initiatives against multilingualism, Martha Cutter sees the American “English Only imperative” as leading to “language loss.”13 America’s official language policy ultimately signifies the disempowerment of ethnic groupings and a strengthening of mainstream white America. Language death happens only “to the disposed 9

Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 81. A possible, and partially institutionalized (yet still problematic) exception is African American ‘Ebonics’. 10 Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 81. 11 Ana Celia Zentella, “ ‘ José Can You See?’ Latin@ Responses to Racist Discourse,” in Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations, ed. Doris Sommer (New York: Macmillan, 2003): 50–66. 12 Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship, 101. 13 Martha J. Cutter, Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic American Writing and the Politics of Language Diversity (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P , 2005): 217, 218.

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and disempowered, peoples who most need their cultural resources to survive.”14 Fortunately, as Cutter convincingly explains, ethnic tongues depend not only on the official U S legal situation but also on everyday multilingual practice.15 In the private sphere, language diversity and translation flourish. Of all 10,242,998 Asian Americans, 7,516,563 speak a language other than English at home. 2.3 million Americans aged five and older speak a Chinese language at home. After Spanish, the Chinese language group is the most widely spoken non-English language in the country. Tagalog, Korean, and Vietnamese also have more than a million speakers each.16 The 2006 American Community Survey shows that, of the 8,275,131 Americans who speak Asian or Pacific Island languages and are five years and older, 51,3% speak English very well and 48,7% speak passable English. English is a strategically important tool for business and a “necessity for social mobility and white-collar employment.”17 Ethnic communities with financial skills – for example, the Chinese – create ethnic schools for their children where the language, culture, and history of their respective countries of origin are taught. Along with such economic factors, language is maintained both through the perception of a given ethnic culture as containing valuable support and knowledge and through the use of the ethnic language at home.18 On the one hand, dominant power-structures can impose hegemonic constraints on minorities through a standard language; on the other, minorities can also deconstruct this hegemony through the creation of a multicultural, multilingual, alternative realm of discourse. Linguistic hybridity exists where English and, for example, Korean interact and create a new form of language. “Cram the khimchee jars with what will sour and scald,” writes Suji Kwock 14

James Crawford, At War with Diversity: U S Language Policy in an Age of Anxiety (Tonawanda N Y : Multilingual Matters, 2000): 63. 15 Cutter, Lost and Found in Translation, 227–43. 16 Statistics from Census 2000 at http://factfinder.census.gov/. 17 Quentin Lee, “Delineating Asian (Hong Kong) Intellectuals: Speculation on Intellectual Problematics and Post/Coloniality,” Third Text 26 (1994): 13. 18 See Cutter, Lost and Found in Translation, 230–31, and Min Zhou & Carl L. Bankston, “Social Capital and the Adaptation of the Second Generation: The Case of Vietnamese Youth in New Orleans,” in The New Second Generation, ed. Alejandro Portes (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996): 200–13.

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Kim in “Translations from the Mother Tongue.”19 Neither wholly English nor wholly Korean; it is a new creation, a fusion of, or peaceful cohabitation between, those two languages, destabilizing the ‘purity’ and ostensible fixity of Standard English prescribed by the American majority culture. In this sense, Asian American poets contribute to the enrichment of the American language. Moreover, the practice of linguistic hybridity substantiates the multiethnicity of the U S A and undercuts Euro-American hegemony. Most Asian American poems, admittedly, are written almost exclusively in English. Poetry in Asian languages will not be considered here. Between these poles, numerous poems are composed in more than one language, and it is these I will be looking at in order to determine where ethnic languages feature as well as the effects brought about by the insertion of non-English words or characters. As already indicated, the languages employed in this poetry include Standard English, English slang and other registers, Standard Asian languages (Japanese, Korean, Tagalog, etc.), Hawaiian creole English, and syntactic and lexical mixtures of these languages. In linguistic plurality, there are generally two ways to deal with the codes involved: they can be considered as quite separate and through translation one can bridge the gap; or one can use and construe both codes at the same time. With regard specifically to Asian American poetry, these are the two options: in the first, poets can treat different linguistic codes separately and try to mediate (translate) between them. Translation from or into English, however, is difficult at times, as not all ethnic cultural realities can be expressed in Standard English. “Meaning seldom moves across borders with pristine integrity.”20 A second possibility available to Asian American poets is the fusion of the different languages. This way, one can use whatever code seems best in a par-

19

Suji Kwock Kim, “Translations from the Mother Tongue,” in Notes from the Divided Country (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P , 2003): 15; emphasis in original. As with the unglossed absorption of indigenous lexis into the English (or Dutch) of the early colonists of America, or the biculturally aware acceptance of Mori into New Zealand English (or its converse, the transliteration of English words into Mori or, for that matter, Japanese), such sentences as the one just quoted exemplify perfectly normal cultural-linguistic processes. 20 Nikos Papastergiadis, “Tracing Hybridity in Theory,” in Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, ed. Pnina Werbner & Tariq Modood (London: Zed, 1997): 278.

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ticular situation or moment. Through this sudden change of tongues, a new kind of language comes into being which is neither English nor an Asian language but a new, third kind of speech reminiscent of Bhabha’s Third Space. One is able to explore a Third Space not only on the content level of contemporary Asian American poetry, but also on the linguistic level. As a first step toward tracing this linguistic hybridity, the linguistic codes involved need to be examined. I will accordingly now explore translation to find out whether total linguistic separation is present in this poetry and where its limits lie.

Translating Tongues Translation can be understood as a both positive and negative process. Many people perceive translation, the transfer of meaning from a source text in one language to a target text in another, as a positive moving between cultures that celebrates multiethnicity. Translation enables the contact of foreign cultures and the communication of new ideas and knowledge. However, in the colonial context or that of today’s minorities, it can also be perceived as a hegemonic instrument associated with the betrayal of one’s own people, a sellingout of one’s own culture to the dominator, a sign of faithlessness or unstable identity. The pure native or introduced culture is traduced by the translator and linguistically infiltrated and changed by the colonizer or contemporary host culture. Through translation, dominant ideology is transported as ‘civilization’ (historically, the colonizer’s culture; today, the dominant host culture). More sharply formulated: translation harbors the danger, in the encounter between Western and non-Western textual expectations, of perpetuatingf existing prejudice towards a second culture and a continuation of the binary of a self-enclosed, cultivated, superior language (and culture) versus a foreign, savage, inferior language (and culture).21 Translation is an interpretation on the part of the translator rather than a (wellnigh impossible) literal replication of a text in another language.22 The translator not only transfers the content of a source text in one language into an equivalent target text in another tongue, but also has to wrestle with, for 21

Cutter, Lost and Found in Translation, 30. See André Lefevere, “Translation: Its Genealogy in the West,” in Translation, History, and Culture, ed. Susan Bassnett & André Lefevere (London: Pinter, 1990): 15. 22

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example, formal features, connotations, functions, and cultural peculiarities of the original text that might be unknown to the reader of the target text and thus need to be explained.23 The translator judges which parts to translate and what to ignore, knowing that some things just cannot be translated. Inherent in translation, therefore, is the impossibility of a “precise set of parallels” and the probability of loss and imperfection.24 A successful translation implies that the translator mediates peculiarities, differences, and values and creates fusions that connect often contrasting cultures and languages. In this way a translator can “transmigrate tongues” and “reformulate cultural and linguistic practices,”25 in a balancing-act of fresh transcultural communication. Translation connects peoples: As early as 1816, Wilhelm von Humboldt emphasized the enrichment of one’s mother tongue through other languages as well as the opening-up of another culture’s literary art and experiences to monolingual readers.26 Naturally, not every aspect and detail of the source text will be found in the target text (the title of Martha Cutter study of language diversity in ethnic writing, Lost and Found in Translation, expresses as much). For many Asian Americans, translation is part of everyday life as they shuttle between cultures and language codes. Wang Ping, in her poem “Ways to Ai 愛,” is concerned with losing and finding when translating the word ‘ai’, Mandarin Chinese for ‘love’.27 Wang Ping was born in Shanghai in 1957 and moved to the U S A for educational 23

See A.K. Ramanujan, “On Translating a Tamil Poem,” in The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field, ed. Rosanna Warren (Boston M A : Northeastern U P , 1989): 57, and Roger T. Bell, Translation and Translating: Theory and Practice (London: Longman, 1991): xv. 24 Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Thick Translation” (1993), in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 2nd ed. 2004): 397. With regard to the above-mentioned language / culture nexus, it is significant that Appiah’s title here should allude to James Clifford’s familiar concept of ‘thick description’ as applied to culture. 25 Cutter, Lost and Found in Translation, 14. 26 Wilhelm von Humboldt, “From Introduction to His Translation of Agamemnon” (1816), tr. Sharon Sloan, in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, ed. Rainer Schulte & John Biguenet (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1992): 56. 27 Wang Ping, “Ways to Ai 愛,” in The Magic Whip (Minneapolis M N : Coffee House, 2003): 32–34. Further page references are in the main text.

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reasons in 1985. This professor of literature and creative writing has written two collections of poetry as well as short stories and novels. In “Ways to Ai 愛,” the poetic persona writes the Chinese character for ‘love’ and is unsure about its meaning in China. “Seventeen years away from China, and I’m losing my mother tongue,” she laments (33). The fact that she does not know the meaning and character of ‘love’ in Chinese, that she has to turn to translation via her “biggest dictionary,” expresses the loss of her mother tongue and her distance from the Chinese home culture (33). She needs to use her dictionary, but the translations it offers are “‘love among brothers’,” “ ‘love=adultery’,” and “‘love=penny-pinch=greed’.” She links these negative connotations with famous poets and politicians who preach control of love so that it does not destroy you. More importantly, the translations remind her of what her own family used to say: “my father warned me over and over again not to ‘talk love’ before I’ve established myself” (33), an admonition that is repeated twice further on. He exerts the patriarchal right to control his daughter’s sexuality. Her grandmother’s favorite dinner story was about a widow who cut flesh from herself to make broth for her dying mother-in-law. “‘Have you heard a better love story than that?’” (32), she asks her granddaughter, diverging from the Western concept of romantic love and praising filial piety. With “Can love buy you a decent meal with rice and meat” (32), the grandmother questions the poetic persona’s idea of tender affection. Her mother talks about “the best love a mother can give to you” (32), referring to physical punishment. She believes that love for children comes through restriction and that love for a partner is temporary because men cannot be trusted: “when you choose a husband, no need to look at his face or crotch, just look into his checking account” (33). Her sister also warns her about romantic love and its inconsistency, comparing it to a “wild deer in the forest” (33) that does not return to you. The perspectives of other people interfere with the poetic persona’s own thoughts on love. She never uses the word “ai,” which “sounds like bad luck” (32) to her. Musing on the meaning of this word, memories long buried come up again: she is reminded of her first crush and the family’s disapproval of it as well as the stories about the family’s way of dealing with love and hate. The way the Chinese voices which the poetic persona remembers see love is not the romantic way Americans perceive it. Love is not absent from Chinese literature, of course. However, as Chilla Bulbeck explains in relation to the

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characters in Chinese classics, “those who succumb to it usually end in disaster.”28 Trying to turn away from personal stories, the poetic persona consults the translational authority of the dictionary, which traces the composition of the Chinese character 愛: “a friend holding up the roof of a house with an assuring hand” (33). Along come companion words such as duty, respect, security, responsibility, gratitude, but nothing connected to romantic emotions. Suddenly she finds the traditional version of the character “ai,” which includes the character for “heart,” 心.29 She realizes that the heart was central to the “love stories” she has grown up with, and to her own experiences. Dot by Dot, I try out the newly found character, adding the heart [心]. Memories rush to me from all sides: first crush, first fight, first betrayal, the whipping, the cursing, my mother and grandmas barking their stories to my ears, my ancestors, their ways of love, of hatred, cunning and twisted, with its own wisdom and truth. I thought I’d buried them, to make my life easier, more modern, more western, but they’ve been living with me, all these years, waiting to come out. (34)

Now the translation of “love” by the word “ai” makes sense. The poetic persona has found an aspect of love, the heart (心), that forms part of the Chinese and American understanding of love. “Ways to Ai 愛” describes the loss of complete mastery over the mother tongue, the lamented absence of romantic feelings in the Chinese concept of “ai,” as well as the discovery of “heart” in the word’s original shape through translation research and, by extension, through the poetic persona’s recollection of positive experiences with love. Although translation has made her aware of her removal from both home culture and mother tongue, it also helps her to find parallels between her original and new home. As Cutter states, Translation as trope often signifies a process of continual negotiation and renegotiation between languages and an ongoing struggle between conflicting and often clashing cultures and ideologies.30

28

Chilla Bulbeck, Re-Orienting Western Feminisms: Women’s Diversity in a Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1998): 67. 29 Chinese characters were simplified in the 1950s. 30 Cutter, Lost and Found in Translation, 6.

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While differences remain between cultures, translation, such as that of the Chinese word “ai” as described by Wang Ping, can cause “a syncretic reconciliation between competing cultures, languages, and ideologies.”31 In “That Half Is Almost Gone,” the first-generation immigrant Marilyn Chin describes a similar situation.32 The poetic persona has forgotten the character for ‘love’ and links this to her relationship with her mother and her distance from Chinese culture. Her statement “ai, ai, ai, ai, / more a cry than a sigh”33 is a pun on the exclamation of pain, “ai,” and the Mandarin word for love. Born in Hong Kong in 1955, Chin came to the U S A soon after with her family. She received her B A in Chinese language and literature from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and her M F A from the University of Iowa. She is a poet, editor, translator, author of short stories, and creativewriting professor. Like Wang Ping, Chin knows the immigrant experience, linguistic difficulties, and gradual disconnection from Chinese language and culture. In her poem, the poetic persona directly associates her separation from the Chinese language with the aloofness of her mother, who criticizes the speaker’s removal from Chinese culture and customs. The persona’s distance from Chinese culture is expressed in the final lines: Today, on the 36th anniversary of my birth, I have problems now even with the salutation.34

Greeting belongs to the most basic language knowledge. To have problems with the salutation implies that one does not use a language at all anymore – a symbol of the linguistic and cultural distance between the poetic persona and her mother. Martha Cutter argues that the trope of translation “is extremely pronounced in Asian American literature.”35 Due to the fundamental differences between 31

Lost and Found in Translation, 6. Marilyn Chin, “That Half Is Almost Gone,” in Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002): 17–19. Rhapsody in Plain Yellow appeared a year before Wang Ping’s collection The Magic Whip that contains “Ways to Ai 愛.” 33 Chin, “That Half Is Almost Gone,” 17. 34 “That Half Is Almost Gone,” 19. 35 Cutter, Lost and Found in Translation, 33. 32

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Asian and European languages, the translator’s role as interpreter and creator is emphasized, as in Shih–Hsiang Chen’s discussion of Chinese-to-English translation.36 The Chinese language has an array of meanings in one character or word, with “three to sixteen times as many meanings as English words.”37 Context and interpretation are thus far more relevant in Chinese than in English, and translations are more interpretive than, say, from English to German. The syntactical ambiguity of the Chinese language is breathtaking for anybody whose mother tongue is English. Prepositions, articles, and function words are left out in Chinese. Wang Ping focuses on this in her poem “Syntax,” in which she lists sentences, first in the correct English version with syntactic markers, then without them. The second, grammatically incorrect versions correspond to what the Chinese ideogrammatic equivalent of the English sense-bearing units would express. The English sentence ‘She walks to a table’ would be expressed with signs for ‘she’, ‘walk’, ‘to’, and ‘table’. Wang then writes the first example in the present progressive aspect, for the translation of which into the ‘Chinese version’ she adds a “now”. “What difference does it make,”38 asks the speaker rightly further down, because, in the examples cited, the versions without the syntactic markers can be understood as well. The poet also shows (verblessly) that sometimes Chinese sentences do not have a verb: “In Nature, no completeness / No sentence really complete thought.”39 Language, like nature, needs its ambiguities and ambivalences, its processual incompletion. “Language, like woman / Look best when free, undressed,”40 the poetic persona concludes, advocating the loosening of syntactic rules in a simile that once again evokes a ‘state of nature’ and, in its morphological reduction, turns Western mockery of ‘imperfect’ English back on itself, in a carnivalesque gesture. Though less syntactically ambiguous than Chinese, Japanese is also fundamentally different from the English language. Through pitch accent, for example, one can differentiate between ‘hashi’ (with the pitch accent on the first 36

Shih–Hsiang Chen, “Re-Creation of the Chinese Image,” in The World of Translation (New York: P E N American Center, 1987): 254. 37 Cutter, Lost and Found in Translation, 33. 38 Wang Ping, “Syntax,” in Of Flesh and Spirit (Minneapolis M N : Coffee House, 1998): 11. 39 “Syntax,” 11. 40 “Syntax,” 11.

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syllable), meaning ‘chopsticks’, ‘hashi’ (accent on the second syllable), meaning ‘bridge’, and ‘hashi’ (without pitch accent), meaning ‘edge’. A mass of case-marker particles and an extensive grammatical rule-system underscore the difference between English and Japanese. In Japanese it is possible to leave out any sentence element (except the verb) if the skipped elements can be understood from the context. Thus concepts expressed with many words in English can consist of a single word in Japanese. Many poets, including Li–Young Lee, Victoria Chang, and Yuko Taniguchi, comment on the phonetic differences between English and Asian languages. In “Persimmons,” Lee explores the difficulty of differentiating certain sounds in English for a person whose mother tongue is Chinese. Lee was born in Indonesia in 1957, of Chinese parents; together with his family, he moved to the U S A in 1964. In an interview with Tina Chang, he states that he comes from a “really old-fashioned”41 Chinese family. In “Persimmons,” the poetic persona remembers how he was told off at school for not being able to tell the difference between ‘persimmon’ and ‘precision,’ between ‘fight’ and ‘fright’, and between ‘wren’ and ‘yarn’. He was punished for this by the teacher, Mrs Walker. Although the speaker does not know how to pronounce the word, he has a richer understanding of the fruit than his linguistically correct English teacher. Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class and cut it up so everyone could taste a Chinese apple. Knowing it wasn’t ripe or sweet, I didn’t eat but watched the other faces.42

Persimmons do not only remind the speaker of being punished. His mother once said that persimmons had “a sun inside” (18) and were warm like the speaker’s face. His father had once drawn a picture of persimmons, “so full they want to drop from the cloth” (19), a picture that the two of them rediscovered in the cellar. Talking about persimmons and the difficulty of pro41

Tina Chang & Li–Young Lee, “The Totality of Causes: Li–Young Lee and Tina Chang in Conversation” (2007), http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19802 (accessed 13 February 2008). 42 Li–Young Lee, “Persimmons,” in Rose (Rochester N Y : B O A , 1986): 18; italics in original.

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nouncing this word, the poetic persona remembers these incidents and the love he feels for his parents. In her poem “Chinese Speech Contest,” Victoria Chang comments on the reverse problem, the difficulty of pronouncing Chinese words for a person whose first language is English. Chang, born in 1970, is a second-generation Chinese American poet and anthologist,43 whose first poetry collection, Circle (2005), deals with the progress of the human mind, be it personal progress in matters of love, temporal progress from one generation to the next, or the general progress through human evolution. The second section of Circle, “Five-Year Plan,” explores her Chinese American selfhood and family. Part of this subsection, “Chinese Speech Contest,” describes the difficulty of pronouncing the word “shi” correctly at a Chinese speech contest. The persona expresses her separation from China and the pressure on contestants from their families to perform well. She refuses to participate in the speech contest again, proclaiming: I would return to that stage again and again if I could sow those words onto a land I recognized. Let others straighten their backs to crag, burning with winning blood. Let others who want and want weed those words from some other land.44

The persona is frustrated that she is not able to pronounce “shi” correctly: “shi should be easy, the beginning of shit, like cowshit, / an easy whip of the lips” (32). Instead of pronouncing it easily, she calls herself a “fool / for getting it wrong on my tongue” (32). Yuko Taniguchi, born in Yokohama, Japan, in 1975, moved to the U S A at age fifteen and now lives in Rochester, Minnesota. Her novel The Ocean in the Closet (2007) was a finalist for the 11th Asian American Literary Awards. In her poem “Foreign Words,” the poetic persona states how her Englishspeaking husband pronounces the Japanese words kawaii (lovely) and kowai 43

See Brigitte Wallinger–Schorn, “Chang, Victoria (1970– ),” in Greenwood Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature, ed. Guiyou Huang (Westport C T : Greenwood, 2009): 137–40. 44 Victoria Chang, “Chinese Speech Contest,” in Circle (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P , 2005): 32.

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(scary) the same way. The man, though trying to speak Japanese, cannot express himself correctly in his wife’s first language: “To match the sounds, meanings, and intention, / he practices speaking alone – lovely, lovely, lovely.”45 At times, they are separated by language. Only in the case of the death of their friend does her spouse’s mistake with the two adjectives make sense – a metaphor for how the couple’s minor linguistic difficulties disappear in the face of the hurdles of life such as the death of a friend. Not only the couple depicted by Taniguchi but also poets have to wrestle with the task trying to master both tongues and feel close to both cultures. In “The Izu Dancer,”46 Kimiko Hahn, a third-generation Japanese-American with German ancestry, uses Japanese passages taken from Yasunari Kawabata’s short story “The Izu Dancer.”47 Hahn’s mother was fluent in English and Japanese, and also spoke Hawaiian pidgin. However, she herself did not learn Japanese with fluency at home. Hahn says she was “emotionally bilingual,”48 feeling as attached to the English as to the Japanese language. She is the author of eight collections of poetry and the recipient of, among many other honors, an American Book Award and a P E N / Voelcker Award for Poetry.49 Most recently, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.50 Hahn 45

Yuko Taniguchi, “Foreign Words,” in Foreign Wife Elegy (Minneapolis M N : Coffee House, 2004): 23. 46 Kimiko Hahn, “The Izu Dancer,” in Earshot (New York: Hanging Loose, 1992): 87–93. 47 See The Izu Dancer and Other Stories, tr. Edward Seidensticker & Leon Picon (“Izu no Odoriko,” 1926; tr. 1954; Rutland V T & Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1974): 9– 29. The other stories in the collection are by Yashusi Inoue. 48 François Luong, “At the Intersection of Murasaki Shikibu and Rapunzel: The Poet Kimiko Hahn,” eBao (2005), http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2006_01_01_archive .html (accessed 10 January 2008). 49 The P E N American Center desribes its award thus: “The award is given to a poet whose distinguished and growing body of work to date represents a notable and accomplished presence in American literature. The poet honored by the award is one for whom the exceptional promise seen in earlier work has been fulfilled, and who continues to mature with each successive volume of poetry”; see http://www .pen.org/page.php/prmID/1316 (accesses 13 April 2010). From the judges’ citation of 2008: “With wild courage Kimiko Hahn’s poems voyage fearlessly into explorations of love, sexuality, motherhood, violence, and grief and the way gender inscribes us”; see http://www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/1604 (accessed 13 April 2010).

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has two daughters and lives in New York City, where she teaches literature and creative writing as a Distinguished Professor in the M F A program at Queens College, C U N Y . In “The Izu Dancer,” the poetic persona describes her experience of translating Kawabata’s story from Japanese into English and her relationship to the Japanese language, being part of her maternal family’s culture as well as a language she studied but then forgot. The persona also links Kawabata’s storyline to her own experiences as a young student who had difficulty reading the original text and who yearned for the romance of language: “I persevered in my search for the fragrance of words / in this modest story – the only Kawabata story I could read.”51 Below or above Kawabata’s original sentences, Hahn inserts the corresponding English translations. Readers who understand Japanese script can judge Hahn’s version and certainly understand the difficult task of translation. The poet inserts Kawabata’s lines not in romanized Japanese but in kanji and hiragana.52 People unable to read this script will thus find the original sentences even more unfamiliar than romanized Japanese words. This gives them the impression that translating from Japanese to English must be even more difficult.53 Most Euro-American readers will not be able to read the Japanese lines. Hahn takes away their hegemonic power and confidence in deciphering, understanding, and knowing everything. Of course, it is not the sole purpose of this poem to make the English-speaking readers believe that they and their language are not a standard and that there are American poems that they do not fully understand, like “The Izu Dancer.” Subversion and deconstruction of patriarchal assumptions may not be a conscious intention of Asian American

50

See Anon., “Guggenheim Fellowship Awards, 2010,” John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (14 April 2010), http://www.gf.org/news-events/press-releases /Guggenheim-Fellowship-Awards-2010/ (accessed 15 April 2010). 51 Hahn, “The Izu Dancer,” 89. 52 Kanji script is a system of ideographic characters derived from Chinese; hiragana is one of several Japanese syllabic writing units (in hiragana, 48), used for indigenous Japanese words and some Chinese loanwords. The latter contrasts chiefly with katakana, a phonetic syllabary used to transcribe foreign words. 53 See Traise Yamamoto, Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body (Berkeley: U of California P , 1999): 248.

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authors, but they are “generated, inescapably, by the ideological conflict that inevitably takes place in the text.”54 Asian American poetry is not burdened with the task of changing hegemonic mindsets, but exists in its own artistic right. Its subversive and revolutionary power adds to its aesthetic features. Readers who do not know Japanese are in doubt: are the translations presented in “The Izu Dancer” exact or are these just interpretations? Has something been left out? The reader has to trust the speaker to translate the Asian language truthfully. In this sense, the translator occupies a position of power as mediator between languages, cultures, and peoples. The reader depends on the translator’s willingness and ability to translate. Kimiko Hahn herself does not link the insertion of Japanese language and literature into her poems to authority or the educating of her readership. In an interview with me she said: “I don’t think my poetry really is about educating; maybe exposure and engagement, which is also a kind of education, but different from instruction.” Her poetic personae, she believes, do not educate their readers but expose them to Japanese culture, literature, and language. Hahn states that she does not write didactic poetry or impose any authority on her readers; instead, she introduces her readers to a different cultural realm. From the reader’s perspective, however, this is likely not to be the case. Hahn does quote from Kawabata, and readers do have to trust the authority of the translator or else do extensive research on their own. Hahn’s quoting from Kawabata also serves to make the following point: in order for someone to be able to translate, they must not only know both languages, they must also believe that there is something worth translating, “something useful and relevant to communicate.”55 By deciding to insert parts of Kawabata’s text, Hahn implies that his work contains useful, important information, beauty, and feeling. The storyline of “The Izu Dancer” is used to complement the story of the poetic persona. Translation does not only involve transferring a text from one language into another, it can also be a symbol of bridging different cultures and generations. Let us return to the Korean American Suji Kwock Kim (born in 1969) and her poem “Translations from the Mother Tongue,” briefly mentioned in the introductory part of this chapter, and included in Kim’s first book of 54

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 2nd ed. 2002): 174. 55 Cutter, Lost and Found in Translation, 54.

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poetry, Notes from the Divided Country (2003). In a reading for the Lunch Poems Series at Berkeley on 7 April 2005, Kim acknowledged that she comes from a strict Korean immigrant family.56 In the reading, Kim compared her mother to that of the Korean American comedian Margaret Cho, whom the latter parodies in her comedy shows by using stereotypes of Asian Americans. The poet explained that her own mother wanted her to become a dentist and was disappointed that she was not married. The title of the poem is highly significant: translation from Korean is meant, but, rather than being the poetic persona’s own mother tongue, Korean is her mother’s first language (i.e. ‘translations from my mother’s tongue’). Kim herself was born in Milton, N Y . Her own mother tongue is English; she studied Korean as a Fulbright scholar at Yonsei University and Seoul National University The translations referred to in the title are not only of a linguistic nature. As the ambiguity about the persona’s first language and her mother’s first language suggests, the translation is also generational: I want to know what survives, what’s handed down from mother to daughter, if anything is, bond I cannot cut away, that keeps apart what it lashes together. And I want to know what cannot be handed down, the part of you that’s only you [...].57

The translation addressed in these lines explores what the persona has and has not inherited from her mother; it relates to “the dream of translation as ‘survival’.”58 Translation in this sense alludes to the cultural and personal histories the daughter has access to and the heritage that is untranslatable, that the child cannot access. In the poem, Kim uses English words as well as a romanized Korean word, “khimchee.” Khimchee is a traditional, very spicy Korean pickle. It is very interesting that she uses the roman alphabet and not the Korean alphabet hangul, which is a symbol of patriotism, freedom, and resistance to foreign 56

Suji Kwock Kim, “Lunch Poems Reading” (Berkeley, 7 April 2005), http://www .youtube.com/watch?v=DHON6gFvLKs (accessed 12 February 2008). 57 Suji Kwock Kim, “Translations from the Mother Tongue,” in Notes from the Divided Country (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P , 2003): 16. 58 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 226.

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control in Korea and has even got its own national holiday, ‘Hangul Day’, on 9 October. This is especially noteworthy considering the fact that, first, Kim knows hangul and that, secondly, she uses the Russian alphabet and Chinese characters in the epigraphs to the chapters of Notes from the Divided Country. The poet obviously does not want to shut out hangul illiterates. Rather, she writes the word “khimchee” in roman letters so that all American readers who are familiar with Korean cuisine will understand the sentence. Translation can transport literal meaning, but often the words translated carry cultural connotations, too. Justin Chin, a poet, performance artist, and playwright, born and raised in Singapore and Malaysia, and now resident in San Francisco,59 lists a number of such literal ‘translations’ from English to Bahasa Indonesia (the official language of Indonesia) in his poem “Mistranslations” and also points out their meaning to American racists. The poem starts with the words “Lesson # 1.” Apparently, the list of Indonesian sentences and English translations that follows is part of a linguistic training course for English-speaking visitors to Indonesia, probably tourists or business people. Chin takes basic sentences in Bahasa Indonesia for such locutions as “This egg is fried” or “Let’s eat”60 and writes the literal English translations below these sentences. In between, in brackets, Chin places translations or, as he calls them, “mistranslations” of what the Indonesian sentences mean in a racist’s mind. The Orientalist connotation of “This egg is fried” is that, with a fried egg, the speaker knows what she or he is eating. “Let’s eat,” the poetic persona explains, implies that the speaker is worried about the standards of hygiene in Indonesia: Let’s eat! (I love the cuisine of this country. I hope they washed their hands before preparing this meal.) Mari kita makan!61

Chin also cites the translation of “brokenhearted.”62 It has, the speaker states, sexist and racist overtones, and is translated as “pata hati.” Allow me a digres59

See Gerry Gomez Pearlberg, “InterText: A Conversation with Justin Chin,” http: //www.frigatezine.com/essay/lives/eli03chi.html (accessed 7 January 2008). 60 Justin Chin, “Mistranslations,” in Harmless Medicine (San Francisco: Manic D, 2001): 82, 83. 61 Justin Chin, “Mistranslations,” 83.

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sion into Bahasa Indonesia. The semantically correct English translation of “pata hati” is ‘brokenhearted’, but literally it means ‘broken liver’. This funny literal translation is inaccessible to readers who do not speak Bahasa Indonesia or care to consult an Indonesian dictionary. Translation, the separate treatment of linguistic codes, is a difficult enterprise, but a possible one. There is no exact correspondence between source and target languages which lends interpretative authority to the translator. Translation is not just a moving between languages, but also has generational and cultural connotations. There are numerous examples of this in contemporary Asian American poetry. The writers concerned with translation are either immigrants – like Marilyn Chin and Justin Chin – for whom translation was an everyday necessity, or thoroughly studied an Asian language – as did Suji Kwock Kim and Kimiko Hahn – and thus encountered the world of translation in a scholarly context. Contemporary Asian American poems concerned with translation are far outnumbered by poems which use several languages at the same time; linguistic hybridity is preferred to linguistic purity. Why is this so? For most Asian Americans, hybridity is an everyday reality. Most of the time, cultures and languages do not exist separately but constantly mix. Translation and the separate treatment of linguistic codes thus do not correspond to Asian Americans’ hybrid daily experiences. They replicate binary divisions and affirm and maintain difference – it is the “acknowledgement of the ‘gap’ or ‘loss’ that haunts translation.”63 Gloria Anzaldúa likewise argues that one has to take pride in one’s cultural hybridity and mixed language in order to take pride in oneself and that translation is an obstacle to this; an ethnic subject is not proud of herself “until [she is] free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate.”64

Dismantling the Master’s Code Minority-group Americans have long had a strained relationship with the English language. Special emphasis was put on English as the U S American language during the First World War when Theodore Roosevelt argued that “one of the ‘elemental things’” in americanization was a common tongue: 62

“Mistranslations,” 82. Cutter, Lost and Found in Translation, 30. 64 Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 81. 63

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“One absolutely certain way to bring this nation to ruin […] would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”65 Back then, americanization equaled anglicization – the English language as a vehicle of forced assimilation and cultural uniformity. It is not only the language with all its syntactical rules and cultural implications that is oppressive, but also what is said by racists, nationalists, and colonizers in English. As bell hooks laments, it is not the English language that hurts me, but what the oppressors do with it, how they shape it to become a territory that limits and defines, how they make it a weapon that can shame, humiliate, colonize.66

The English language is a legacy of a colonial past and postcolonial present. In her influential article “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Audre Lorde argues that as long as ethnic writers rely on the English language, the supremacy of white culture will persist and there will be no change in the situation of ethnic people in the U S A , the white master’s land: “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”67 If ethnic minorities are occupied with the master’s concerns and language, Standard American English, they will not be able to find their own voice, language, and subjectivity or take pride in these. Amy Ling does not share bell hooks’ resentment at the English language, instead making an important pragmatic point: “Tools possess neither memory nor loyalty; they are as effective as the hands wielding them.”68 The English language does not belong to someone; it is a neutral medium that anyone can use to their advantage. Moreover, how could Asian American authors change American society if they did not address it in a code most Americans can 65

Theodore Roosevelt, quoted in Orm Øverland, “Redefining ‘American’ in American Studies,” in Not English Only: Redefining ‘American’ in American Studies, ed. Øverland (Amsterdam: V U U P , 2001): 2. 66 bell hooks, quoted in Cutter, Lost and Found in Translation, 269. 67 Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” 108; emphasis in original. 68 Amy Ling, “I’m Here: An Asian American Woman’s Response,” in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol & Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick N J : Rutgers U P , 1991): 741.

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understand? The readership for Asian American poetry does not only consist of Asian Americans, but also of Euro-Americans, African Americans, Chicano Americans, Native Americans, and anglophones around the world. Moreover, even within Asian America, English serves as a lingua franca, since Asian languages are numerous and many Asian Americans speak English only. The majority of contemporary Asian American poets who write only in English are certainly in line with Ling’s argument that the English language is an effective tool, independent of loyalty to Anglo-America, for conveying the most partisan and minoritarian message, or the most conciliatory, to all English-speaking Americans, a group which makes up 92 percent of all Americans aged five and over.69 For those Asian American writers who do not only write their poetry in English, the master’s language is not the sole source of expression. Their linguistically hybrid poems dismantle the master’s code, refusing the supposed superiority of Anglo-America and (linguistic) assimilation. The decision to use Asian languages betokens their respect for these codes and cultures. Linguistically hybrid poems express the culturally fused reality and diasporic backgrounds of Asian Americans and subvert supposed hierarchies by uniting the dominant and the marginalized in an “interlingual poetics” that “change[s] the shapes and sounds of dominant languages like English by pushing the language to its limits and breaking it open or apart.”70 The fused code subtly deconstructs the notion of originality and unitary nationhood and confirms the possibility of inhabiting more than one linguistic world. The mixing of American and Asian languages transforms all of the languages used, creating a new, third poetic discourse. There are parallels between the hybrid use of English and Asian languages and the culturally hybrid lives of ethnics within an American reality dominated by Euro-Americans. Cutter confirms this: Rushdie argues there is ambiguity in the use of English that reflects struggles taking place in the real world, struggles between the cultures within individuals and societies.71

69

See 2000 Census, http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-29.pdf. Juliana Chang, “Reading Asian American Poetry,” 93. 71 Cutter, Lost and Found in Translation, 250. 70

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And Heinz Kloss asserts that, in the U S A , there have always been long-standing bilingual communities and a legal freedom to cultivate one’s language, even if many instances of moral pressure upon ethnics have occurred.72 Multilingual texts deploy a newly forged code on the border between majority and minority discourse. English as the master’s tool “is only threatening,” Lorde asserts, “to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”73 Those writers who have an additional source of support, another linguistic code at their disposal are, accordingly, not threatened. Linguistic hybridity is referred to in various ways: more traditionally, as ‘macaronic poetry’ and ‘polyglossia’, but also as “bilingual games,”74 “selective lexical fidelity,”75 or “radical bilingualism.”76 Linguistic hybridity can take several forms in Asian American poetry.77 There can be one or more untranslated words inserted into an otherwise English poem. This technique conveys a sense of cultural distinctiveness. Code-switching is a more extensive alternating use of different languages. Another method is syntactic fusion, where linguistic structures mix syntactic or lexical forms. 

Kimiko Hahn’s poem “Roost” illustrates the insertion of one or more words in an Asian language into an otherwise English text. The poem describes how a child gets up in the morning and meets her grandmother, who asks “the ‘tori’ / woke you?”78 The old woman wonders if ‘tori’ is English or Japanese, and both of them laugh about this language confusion. Later, the grandmother

72

Heinz Kloss, The American Bilingual Tradition (1977; McHenry I L : Center for Applied Linguistics and Delta Systems, 1998): 370. 73 Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” 108. 74 Doris Sommer, Bilingual Games. 75 Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, 63. 76 Abdelkebir Khatibi’s term for bilingual texts that constantly move between languages. See Samia Mehrez, “The Subversive Poetics of Radical Bilingualism: Postcolonial Francophone North African Literature,” in The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance, ed. Dominick LaCapra (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1991): 255–77. 77 See Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, 60–71. 78 Kimiko Hahn, “Roost,” in Air Pocket (New York: Hanging Loose, 1989): 14, ll. 15–16; italics in original.

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realizes that the English word for ‘tori’ is ‘chicken’. The linguistic gap between the older woman, whose mother tongue is Japanese, and the young girl, who is a native speaker of English, does not lead to separation or conflict: “When I laugh / she laughs,” “And when we bathe / she laughs again,” “The laughter / fills every corner.”79 The grandchild could have interpreted this ‘language hiccup’ as estrangement from her grandmother. However, codeswitching here serves as a humorous link between generations and unites the two in laughter rather than dividing them. The poem contains biographical details of the poet’s life: as a child, Hahn visited her grandmother, a Japanese immigrant in Hawai‘i. In an interview with me on 20 November 2005, Kimiko Hahn stated that the visits made a lasting impression on my identity, my body, and my writing. […] I’ve probably conflated my grandmother and Hawai‘i. Hawai‘i also represented a kind of charmed sense of childhood.

The images from those visits and the magic of the location that Hahn describes resonate in “Roost.” The author also talks about perceiving Hawai‘i as a home, though she acknowledges that “It’s strange to feel so at home in a place I have been so few times.” Hahn has so far visited Hawai‘i five times, and surely her considering this island a home is to be seen in connection with it being her maternal family’s home. The mixed Hawaiian population and high percentage of Asian Americans in the population might also have shaped this perception and made blending in as a local easy. In the interview, Hahn also commented on her visit in 2000: “There’s a very strong community of writers there and they were so wonderful to me; sort of treated me as an ‘honorary local’.” A local is a native or long-term resident of an area, so ‘honorary local’, a local in spirit but not physical presence, is an apt term for Hahn’s relationship to Hawai‘i. The poet also emphasizes her admiration for the active and strong local poetry scene, specifically the Bamboo Ridge affiliation that includes Cathy Song, Lois–Ann Yamanaka, Wing Tek Lum, Eric Chock, and Juliet Kono. Nick Carbó also regularly uses the technique of linguistic hybridity in his poetry collection Secret Asian Man (2000), which won an Asian American

79

Hahn, “Roost,” 15, ll. 18–19, 26–27, 29–30.

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Literary Award from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.80 Carbó was born in the Philippines in 1964, raised in Manila, and moved to the U S A to attend Sarah Lawrence College, where he earned an M F A in 1992. The poet speaks Tagalog, English, and Spanish. Most of his poetry is written in English. Carbó is well-known for his printed poetry, but he is also the author of more experimental work including video poetry. In the twenty-nine poems of Secret Asian Man (2000), Carbó has his central character Ang Tunay Na Lalaki, which means ‘The Real Man’ in Tagalog, explore New York and American culture. Lalaki is a muscular Filipino T V commercial character. Carbó’s poem “Ang Tunay Na Lalaki’s Fourth Workshop Poem”81 has as its subject a poem Lalaki wrote for his creative-writing class, and is subtitled “Aswang vs Wonder Woman.” Characters featuring in the poem include Aswang, a Filipina immigrant, Wonder Woman, Aqua Man, Green Lantern, and Hawk Man. These figures are white comic-book heroes, except for Aswang, who is a Filipina American version of the famous Batwoman. Aswang, an immigrant flying around Manhattan, is seen by Wonder Woman, who immediately assumes that she is a monster: From the Wonder invisible plane Wonder Woman spots a giant big black bat wings flitting from window to indow along the upper west side of Manhattan. This could be the monster that’s been sucking live fetuses from pregnant mothers.( 55, ll. 1–8)

When Wonder Woman calls the Justice League, a team of American superheroes, for backup, Aswang attacks Wonder Woman, biting her until she screams and hurls insults at her: Aswang’s teeth are smelly, she is “immigrant 80

I am indebted to Harold Schechter for pointing out the allusion of the title of this collection to Johnny Rivers’ hit record “Secret Agent Man,” theme song of the T V series “Secret Agent” (also known as “Danger Man” in the U K ). 81 Nick Carbó, “Ang Tunay Na Lalaki’s Fourth Workshop Poem,” in Secret Asian Man (Cincinnati O H : Cherry Grove Collections, 2004): 55–57. Further page (and line) references are in the main text.

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scum,” a “foreign piece of crap,” and is told to speak English (56, ll. 35, 41, 40). Aswang responds with equally degrading slurs (“Putang ina mo! Yankee go home!” and “Eat my / bulbul you ugly American”; 56, ll. 37–38 and 42– 43). After beating up Wonder Woman, Aswang disappears and Wonder Woman swears revenge. Hawk Man comes and chases Aswang; they both fly out of sight. All of the Tagalog words are put in italics, but not translated. Batwoman’s name, Aswang, means ‘monster’. Her “claws” (56, l. 36), “canine teeth” (56, l. 23), and the fact that “she’s eating something / fleshy and raw” (55, ll. 13– 14) are in line with her name. The phrases “Putang ina mo! Yankee go home!” are misleading. The first sentence seems to be the Tagalog version of the second, but it really means ‘your mother is a whore’. Aswang’s other insult is “Eat my // bulbul you ugly American,” where ‘bulbul’ means ‘pubic hair’. Carbó uses Tagalog to express taboo words that are considered unacceptable and indecent in America. Wonder Woman also uses impolite terms like “crap.” Moreover, readers figure that Aswang, who is enraged, uses taboo terms when addressing Wonder Woman. Those not literate in Tagalog will mentally insert English words that could be the equivalents of the Tagalog expressions. Carbó’s insertions of this Asian language, however, are a linguistic representation of Aswang’s immigrant status: she mixes languages, resorting, when infuriated, to her mother tongue, Tagalog. Sonja Saldívar–Hull reminds us that “the multilingual text does not easily admit those who refuse full engagement with the linguistic demands of Border language.”82 The reader has to fully engage with Carbó’s poem by finding out the meaning of the Tagalog words, otherwise, the text will deny full access to its meaning. Kirsten Twelbeck, commenting on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s book Dictée, says: “Itself […] linguistically hybrid, Dictée self-consciously shifts the responsibility of being understood from the ‘speaker’ to the one who listens.”83 This is also true for Carbó’s poem “Aswang vs Wonder Woman” and for all linguistically hybrid Asian American poetry: the reader is responsible for deciphering the non-English words or signs, if these are not 82

Sonja Saldívar–Hull, “Introduction to the Second Edition,” in Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 8. 83 Kirsten Twelbeck, “ ‘ Elle venait de loin’ – Re-reading Dictée,” in Holding Their Own: Perspectives on the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, ed. Dorothea Fischer–Hornung & Heike Raphael–Hernandez (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2000): 232.

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annotated. This subverts the eurocentric convention that ethnic speakers have to make sure their utterances are understood. In Secret Asian Man, the reader encounters Tagalog words over and over again, as they are contained in almost all of the poem titles and are also scattered throughout the poems themselves. In this way, Carbó forces non-Filipino American readers to silently pronounce Filipino words, as it were, and thereby to enter Filipino culture. During the American colonization of the Philippines from 1898 to 1945, Filipinos were indoctrinated with American culture and had to memorize American literature, pronouncing words that made no sense in their world, like ‘chestnut tree’, which was unknown in an archipelago where mango and santol trees grow. Filipinos had to adopt American culture and customs in order to get a good education. As a postcolonial counter-action, Carbó has his American readers pronounce Tagalog words which do not make much sense in their linguistic environment: By making my American readers twist their mouths into Tagalog shapes, I am asserting my culture over them and thus, making them a little more Filipino. I am re-colonizing the former colonizer with my poems.84

Carbó has remarked that during and right after American colonization, Filipino poets “borrowed a foreign tongue to express their poetic voices. Today, with […] poems written in English, we return this borrowed tongue.”85 Carbó refrains from a simple use of English – the language of one of the two Philippine colonizers, the other being, of course, Spain; he adapts the English language to his own, self-defined needs and thus ‘returns the borrowed tongue’ to his American readership. In “Rearticulating ‘Otherness’,” Xiaojing Zhou affirms that Filipino American poets have turned the colonizer’s language into their own even as they express their sense of alienation from that language.”86 In his most recent

84

Karen Anne C. Liquete, “The Carbonator,” The Manila Bulletin Online (28 August 2007), http://www.mb.com.ph/issues/2007/08/28/YTCP20070828101255 .html (accessed 6 November 2007). 85 Nick Carbó, “Returning a Borrowed Tongue: An Introduction,” in Returning a Borrowed Tongue: Poems by Filipino and Filipino American Writers, ed. Nick Carbó (Minneapolis M N : Coffee House, 1995): xiv. 86 Xiaojing Zhou, “Rearticulating ‘Otherness’: Strategies of Cultural and Linguistic Differences in Asian American Women’s Poetry,” in Asian American Studies: Identity,

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collection, Andalusian Dawn (2004), Nick Carbó also includes Spanish and Visayan words in his English poems.87 Not only is the Spanish language connected to Philippine colonization, but, as the title of the collection suggests, many of these poems are concerned with Spain and the poet’s experiences there. Spanish is especially close to the poet’s life, as he was adopted by a Spanish couple. Like Carbó’s “Ang Tunay Na Lalaki’s Fourth Workshop Poem,” all linguistically hybrid poems refuse to quietly acquiesce to a racist American power pyramid with a dominating Anglo-American group and its language at the top, instead engaging in ethnic empowerment as linguistic activism and thereby renegotiating and retrieving a distinctive, but fully American, Asian American subjectivity. Linguistic hybridity can also be a means of maintaining a separation of languages and cultures in certain domains.88 Many Asian-language words in contemporary Asian American poems relate to cuisine, clothing, and family. This is unsurprising, as these realms are linked to growing up and belonging to the family unit. Asian-language lexis in these contexts signifies strong familial links, while the use of the English language acknowledges engagement with the broader every-day English-language world. In her poetry collection Leaving Yuba City (1997), Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni uses Hindi vocabulary relating to family, clothing, and cuisine. Born in India in 1956, Divakaruni moved to the U S A at the age of fifteen to pursue graduate studies, earning a PhD from Berkeley in 1984. In 1991, she cofounded M A I T R I , a West Coast helpline for South Asian American women. This professor of creative writing has received many poetry awards, including an Allen Ginsberg Prize and a Pushcart Prize, and she is also a successful novelist. In her creative work, she explores women’s lives in connection with social, (trans-)national, racial, and personal issues. Images, Issues Past and Present, ed. Esther Mikyung Ghymn (New York: Peter Lang, 2000): 153. 87 Nick Carbó, Andalusian Dawn (Cincinnati O H : Cherry Grove Collections, 2004). Visayan is a language spoken by about fifteen percent of the population in the Philippines. 88 See Cutter, Lost and Found in Translation, 255; and Monica Heller, “Introduction” to Codeswitching: Anthropological and Sociological Perspectives, ed. Heller (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1988): 6.

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Divakaruni uses romanized Hindi words sparely but consistently. She annotates key words but leaves others untranslated, compelling the reader to either accept them as they are or determine their meaning. She takes care to ensure the accessibility of her work, which a reviewer of her collection Black Candle (1991) interpreted as selling exotic Indian stories to a Western market. This reproach is not new to Asian American women writers, including Maxine Hong Kingston.89 Divakaruni, who shares this fate with Kingston, told me in an interview that “Maxine Hong Kingston has been a big influence for me, even in writing my poetry and certainly in writing my prose.”90 While Divakaruni’s poetry may not be highly complex in its craft, her stories are intricate explorations of women’s issues and certainly not repetitions of stereotypes. The poet herself counters such accusations astutely and realistically: I live in America; America is part of my life; should I not write for white people also? It’s a defeatist and hypocritical attitude to say that I will live in America and write only for other Indians.91

Writers do not compose for a special community; rather, they try “to reach out and communicate across barriers and to create and improve understanding between people.”92 Divakaruni does not write for whites only, she writes for whites as well. Accordingly, she translates key vocabulary to guarantee a thorough basic understanding of her poems. In “The First Time,” a son excitedly greets his arriving father with “baba, baba” (father, father), and the father calls his son “manik, my jewel.”93 The meaning of the first Hindi word, ‘baba’, can be guessed from the context, and 89

See Jeffery Paul Chan, “Introduction” to The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature, ed. Jeffery Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada & Shawn Wong (New York: Meridian, 1991): xv. See also Wenxin Li’s comments on the Kingston–Chin controversy in “Gender Negotiations and the Asian American Literary Imagination,” in Asian American Literary Studies, ed. Guiyou Huang (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2005): 115–20. 90 Interview undertaken in Houston on November 15, 2005. See Appendix page 317. 91 Divakaruni, quoted in Dharini Rasiah, “Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni,” in Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers, ed. King–kok Cheung (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P , 2000): 147. 92 Divakaruni, quoted in Dharini Rasiah, “Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni,” 147. 93 Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, “The First Time,” in Leaving Yuba City (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1997): 24; italics in original.

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‘manik’ is translated appositionally by the speaker. These Hindi words, the only ones in the poem, emphasize the prominent place of father and son in the family constellation. The other personae speak or are described in English and are excluded from this close bond. In the poem, a four-year-old adopted girl takes center stage. She plays with her brother all day, and when the father returns home, she, like her brother, happily runs towards the father to be picked up. The father picks up the brother, calls him his jewel, and laughs with him. When the girl claims his attention, he hits her and calls her a bastard. She lies on the floor, “flat as a shadow he could step on.”94 No one dares to help the girl. Along with the other members of the household, the mother watches the scene silently, but angrily. The adopted daughter and her mother are united in their silence and pain. It is the first time the girl has experience patriarchal rejection and gender inequality, but not the first time for the mother, who makes fists in the folds of her sari clenched so tight I know the white nails, tiny curved blades. Know the scars they leave.95

In the poem “The Brides Come to Yuba City,”96 Divakaruni uses Hindi vocabulary for clothing and food to express the connection of her personae to Indian culture. Yuba City is located in California and was populated by Indians in the early 1900s. The poem describes the arrival in Yuba City in the 1940s of Indian wives who “cannot recognize a single face.”97 The wives had to wait in India due to immigration restrictions until they were finally allowed to enter America. Some of them have not seen their husbands for thirty years. Others, the so-called ‘picture brides’ (reminiscent of the ‘mail-order brides’ of the old American West), were married in the absence of their Indian American husbands and now arrive to see their arranged spouse for the first time. Divakaruni does not gloss the Hindi words she uses, though two of the ten

94

Divakaruni, “The First Time,” 25. “The First Time,” 25. 96 Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, “The Brides Come to Yuba City,” in Leaving Yuba City (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1997): 102–103. 97 Divakaruni, “The Brides Come to Yuba City,” 103. 95

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Hindi words in a previous poem are explained in the notes thereto.98 The meanings of the other words are left untranslated for the reader to find out. “The Brides Come to Yuba City” had already appeared in Divakaruni’s first collection, Black Candle, in 1991. Interestingly enough, this volume contains an extensive glossary that includes translations of the words used in the poem under discussion here. The use of Asian lexis in the contexts of food and clothing is occasionally a necessary measure in the absence of English words for certain Asian goods. In these instances, Asian terms serve as a ‘bilingual prosthesis’: “When a concept is lacking, prosthetic borrowings fill in.”99. This is partly the case in “The Brides Come to Yuba City.”100 The persona mentions bajra, an Indian wheatlike grain, and laddus, an Indian desert. In the poem, the Indian clothing of the excited and nervous men and women are itemized: they wear chappals (sandals), bright salwar-kameezes (women’s loose pants and tunics), and kurtas (man’s loose tunics). The women’s mothers packed food for them to bring to America: laddus, bajra flour, and seeds of methi (fenugreek), karela (bitter melon), and saag (spinach). The men and women are united by their Indian clothing and the Indian food. Their Indianness is in contrast to the American soil they stand on and which is their new home. However, the poem also describes the distance of the women, who have come to Yuba City by ship and train, from the men awaiting them on shore. One woman is described in detail: Harvinder, married last year at Hoshiarpur to her husband’s photo, which she clutches tight to her to stop the shaking. He is fifty-two, she sixteen. Tonight – like us all – she will open her legs to him.101 98

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, “The Widow at Dawn,” in Leaving Yuba City (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1997): 71–73. 99 Dale Shuger, quoted in Doris Sommer, “Introduction” to Bilingual Games, 8. 100 In a conversation with me, Hanna Wallinger pointed to the allusion of the title of Divakaruni’s poem to the title of Stephen Crane’s short story “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” (1898), in which a marshall brings his bride to his home town. Its tone is comparable to that of “The Brides Come to Yuba City,” insofar as it is marked by insecurity, otherness, and an East–West movement. 101 Divakaruni, “The Brides Come to Yuba City,” 103.

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Although strangers to each other, the couples will perform the most intimate of all acts, sex, that very same night. Linguistic hybridity is also present in Shirley Geok–lin Lim’s poem “Nonya.” Here, Malay words are inserted into an otherwise English text. Lim is known as a critic and editor, but she is also a prolific writer of poetry, stories, and a memoir. She was born in Malaya, then a British colony, in 1944 and moved to Boston in 1969. Her work reflects both her Chinese-Malayan heritage and her American home. ‘Nonya’ is the Malay word for an assimilated Chinese Malaysian woman, the poet informs us in a footnote. In the poem, a young woman describes the beauty of the sea, situated right behind her home, holding treasures and evoking passion. In contrast to her fascination with the sea, her mother does not even notice it; she is occupied with work, while her daughter steals away from home to “wander / down the waves when she’s not looking.”102 The daughter associates the sea with slippery, hard men who attract her. But these marine beings, her mother warns at the beginning of the poem, “leave marks of possession.”103 The question that arises concerns the identity of the assimilated Chinese Malaysian woman, the ‘nonya’ of the title. At first, the poetic persona appears child-like while her mother does housework and is an admonitory presence. The mother takes center stage in the initial lines, leaving us to think that it is she who is the ‘nonya’. The middle part of the poem is dedicated to the sea, the poetic persona’s hopes and longings, and her attraction to beauty and sensual pleasure. From here on, the poem focuses on the young woman and her desires and sexual awakening: she is the ‘nonya’ of the poem. Other Malay words occur, for different kinds of fish, fruit, and leaves: “ikan merah, ikan kembong” stand for red snapper and flounder, “belingbeling” is a green sour fruit, and “sireh” means betel-nut leaf.104 The culinary vocabulary, meticulously translated in footnotes, adds to the rural Malaysian beach setting of the poem. The word “nonya” stands apart from this local coloring through cuisine and botanical vocabulary. According to the footnote, it is linked to the concepts of womanhood, migration, and assimilation. The 102

Shirley Geok–lin Lim, “Nonya,” in What the Fortune Teller Didn’t Say (Albuquerque N M : West End, 1998): 15, ll. 7–9. 103 “Nonya,” 15, l. 4. 104 “Nonya,” l. 14, l. 15, ll. 22 and 27; l. 25.

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history of nonyas is closely linked to Malay history. The Chinese traded in the Strait of Malacca, but only men were allowed to leave China to set up business with Malaya. This led to intermarriage with Malay women and Chinese Malaysian families. Since the poetic persona longs for the sea and dreams of ships and men, it could be that she pictures herself as a nonya and imagines a sexual encounter with a Chinese man. More likely, however, her family is mixed Chinese–Malyasian and the nonya is aware of her transnational heritage, conveyed through marine references and her sexual awareness. As Monica Heller has indicated, linguistic hybridity is part of a “process of ethnic mobilization which is characterized less by social transformation than by a realignment of the relations of power between ethnic groups.’”105 Kimiko Hahn’s poetry collection Mosquito and Ant is an example of such inter-ethnic alignment. However, her attempt to realign does not only reach out to ethnic minorities but also addresses white American readers. It specifically advocates communication and bonding among women from all possible locations, ages, and cultural backgrounds. In the title poem, Hahn alludes to ‘nu shu’, a secret script used by Chinese women. The poem compares the Immortal Sisters, a group of distinguished female Taoist adepts from the third to twelfth centuries, to modern women: The Immortal Sisters. One has only daughters. One has a husband and a lover. One has two ex-husbands. […] One tattoos fireflies on her back. One can’t speak to the others. One searches for the others as her source of immortality.106

The communication between women and their community takes center stage here. Each woman is allowed individuality through separate sentences in separate lines, but, read together, they form a female collective within a female tradition. Through her interpersonal and inter-ethnic language in Mosquito and Ant, Hahn sets a counterpoint to an often Orientalist and hegemonic English. 105

Monica Heller, “The Politics of Codeswitching and Language Choice,” in Codeswitching, ed. Carol M. Eastman (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1992): 138. 106 Kimiko Hahn, “Mosquito and Ant,” in Mosquito and Ant (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999): 28.

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In the context of language, it should be noted that women have been forbidden to learn to read and write in many cultures and ages. Trinh Minh–ha describes this sad truth: Learned women have often been described in terms one might use in describing a thief. Being able to read and write, a learned woman robs man of his creativity, his activity, his culture, his language. Learning ‘unfeminizes.’107

As a solution, some women invented a secret language, like the nu shu, or resorted to communication that was regarded as vulgar by men, such as that of female Heian poets who used the Japanese hiragana script while the ‘learned’ men wrote in Chinese.108 Kimiko Hahn comments on this in “Cruising Barthes”: “Heian women overpowered the culture.”109 Female writing and learning, although disapproved of by men, means over-powering them and their patriarchal culture. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni also describes women’s oppression and their prohibited access to education – for example, in the poems “Sudha’s Story”110 and “How I Became a Writer.”111 We must also recognize the importance of gender in linguistic poetic expressions and “‘see race, class and gender determinations in the formation of language’.”112 

The poems discussed above illustrate the insertion of Asian words in an otherwise English poem. Another technique of linguistic hybridity is code-switching, the more extensive inclusion of Asian text. Myung Mi Kim’s poem

107

Trinh Minh–ha, Woman, Native, Other, 19. ‘Heian’ relates to Japan from around 800 A D to the twelfth century, in which period Chinese influence was at its height. 109 Kimiko Hahn, “Cruising Barthes,” in The Unbearable Heart (New York: Kaya, 1995): 35. 110 Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, “Sudha’s Story,” in Black Candle: Poems about Women from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (Corvallis O R : Calyx, 1991): 45–49. 111 Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, “How I Became a Writer,” in Leaving Yuba City (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1997): 1–3. 112 Gayatri C. Spivak, quoted in Trinh Minh–ha, Woman, Native, Other, 44; emphasis in original. 108

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“Siege Document,”113 which is part of the “Works” section in her collection Commons (2002), is a case in point. Kim was born in 1957 in Seoul, South Korea. Her family moved to America following the Korean War, when she was nine years old. Kim is the author of five collections of poetry, Commons being the most recent. Kim is the recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative North American Poetry and several awards from the Fund for Poetry, among others. Her poetry is experimental and fragmented. In a reading for the Lunch Poems Series at Berkeley on 1 March 2007, Kim explained: “I’m writing into one continuing open work”; she perceives her oeuvre as “a series of linked books, linked projects.”114 Her poems tell stories, but the narrative is fragmented and sometimes mere sounds or words appear. Key concerns in Commons are war, violence, and language. Only the major sections bear a title. There is an introductory “Exordium,” then “Lamenta” and “Works,” and a final guide to the poems called “Pollen Fossil Record.” The individual poems in “Lamenta” are titled with three-digit numbers from 229 to 722. Although the numbers rise consistently, many numbers are omitted. In “Works,” some sections have a clear title, such as “Siege Document.” However, one cannot tell where exactly these sections ends. There are several titles inserted as potential end-points to the poem, but it is unclear whether these indicate subsections of “Siege Document” or poems in their own right. The textual structure of “Works” is thus very open. At the Lunch Poems venue, Kim read parts of “Works,” but not in the way the text appears on the printed page. She deliberately left out some parts, pointing to the infinitely open process of creation, history, and imploded chronology. “Siege Document” describes an all-out military iffensive. Several hints point to the fact that the context is that of the Korean War: first, the author was born in Seoul and parts of the text are written in Korean. Secondly, the U S A and Russia are mentioned.115 Thirdly, the expatriate’s letter, written in 1992, talks of a life without family and home for forty years.116 This temporal information correlates with the period of the Korean War, 1950–53. 113

Myung Mi Kim, “Siege Document,” in Commons (Berkeley: U of California P ,

2002): 76–104. 114

Myung Mi Kim, “Lunch Poems Reading” (Berkeley, 1 March 2007), http://www .youtube.com/watch?v=Hg7upJ1fYo0 (accessed 12 February 2008). 115 Kim, “Siege Document,” 83 and 86. 116 Myung Mi Kim, “Siege Document,” 83.

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109

The poem starts with a long text in hangul,117 a lyrical passage which translates as ‘All people of the world / hear my words / during daytime the water is clear / at night the fire is light / when is when?’118 The hangul text closes on the English question “This time what time does it happen to be,” echoing the last sentence in hangul. Reading this initial part of the poem in the context of war, which the title and further content suggest, the question relates to the insecurity about when the next enemy attack will occur. In the daytime, nature is beautiful and life safe. But at night, the enemy might strike again. Above and below every line in hangul there are romanizations of the phrases – but these romanizations are inconsistent. Are there several ways to romanize hangul? In “Pollen Fossil Record,” Kim confirms this suspicion and adds: “Where does the authority of romanizing reside?”119 The authority lies with the colonizers. They set the standards for romanization, trying to describe sounds that are unfamiliar to their ears: How physically (almost physiologically) impossible it is to pronounce or even imagine what Korean words are being depicted under the standard (standardized) romanization of Korean. The odd vowel blurs, the unclear consonant combinations.120

By using hangul and then showing the reader that these sentences can be romanized in different ways, Myung Mi Kim makes visible the inconsistency and instability of European authority over a colony. Not knowing certain sounds, they could not agree on how to transcribe them. Kim states, in her Lunch Poems Reading, her “continuing concern about linguistic oppression” and her attempts “to address the problematic of the ideology of monolingualism.”121 The assumed linguistic authority of Europeans in Korea, the Korean War, the Korean American author Kim – all this directs the reader’s thoughts to the political context of the Cold War, the Korean War, and U S and Russian military authority. 117

Kim, “Siege Document,” 76. I am indebted to Kang Yang Moon for the translation. 119 Myung Mi Kim, “Pollen Fossil Record,” in Commons (Berkeley: U of California P , 2002): 110. 120 Kim, “Pollen Fossil Record,” 110. 121 Kim, “Lunch Poems Reading,” (Berkeley, 1 March 2007), http://www.youtube .com/watch?v=Hg7upJ1fYo0 (accessed 12 February 2008). 118

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As the poem unfolds, images and episodes are summoned up that describe, in English, the siege of Korea and its consequences for the Korean people: As they enter, they cut down grains, tear down the inner and outer walls, and fill up the ditches and ponds; they exterminate the aged and the weak […] If you don’t work You don’t eat122

Then a handwritten section in hangul is inserted. It is a letter from “The Elder Olga Kim,” written in Siberia in 1992.123 The dying woman laments that she has lived in Russia for forty years, but she has never been able to forget her home country and family. This letter is a brief sketch of the tragic fate of a Korean exile that can only be understood by those who know hangul.124 Those not literate in Koreanlearn only that Olga Kim wrote this letter in Siberia in 1992, as this information is provided in English at the end of the text. “Siege Document,” it is clear, is given depth through the insertion of extensive sections in hangul. Not only is the plight of these people described in English, the language of the oppressor, but readers also encounter actual Korean voices who express themselves in their mother tongue. This adds realism and authenticity to the lyrical account: the reader, shocked, is suddenly directly confronted with war victims. Through the code-switching, the English discourse is culturally disrupted. In her exploration of the combinatorial power created by linguistic hybridity, what Kim finds intriguing are the possibilities for transcribing what occurs in the traversal between the two languages (and, by extension, between the two ‘nations,’ their mutually implicated histories of colonization, political conflicts, and so on).125

The poet compares the moving between languages with the traversal of nations and cultures, the extending of American English to “make plural the written and spoken.”126 122

Kim, “Siege Document,” 82–83. “Siege Document,” 83. 124 Was Olga Kim deported? Did she enter Russia as a refugee? Myung Mi Kim does not inform the reader why Olga Kim moved to Siberia. 125 Kim, “Pollen Fossil Record,” 110. 123

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Another Korean American, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, makes extensive use of code-switching in her book Dictée. Born in South Korea in 1951, Cha emigrated to the U S A with her parents in 1962 and studied literature, theory, performance art, and film-making, all of which has influenced her work. The author and mixed-media artist moved to New York City in 1980, where she was murdered by a stranger in 1982, a few days after the publication of Dictée. Dictée is an autobiographical multi-genre work containing poems, prose, drafts, photos, letters, grammar exercises, calligraphy, a map, and illustrations of the human body, thereby undermining the notion of fixed genres. She explores history and identity through language and considers “language […] a site for identity production.”127 The languages used in the poems are English, French, and Chinese. The poet indicates through the title (French for ‘dictation’) that this book was ‘dictated’ to her. The book is divided into nine chapters, named after the Greek Muses, who inspire the artist’s disingenuously ‘passive (i.e. ‘Oriental’) reception and transmission of history, love, memory, culture, spaces, and language. Although Cha, in Dictée, explores her Korean American identity and the world around her, including universal, personal, and family history, she does not use the Korean language. The vast majority of her work is in English, but with insertions in French and Chinese characters. That Cha eschews the Korean language in her poem, be it romanized or in hangul, comes as a surprise, since there are so many references to Korea and the author’s mother tongue is Korean. Addressing her mother in a prose part of the autobiographical book, the speaker says: The tongue that is forbidden is your own mother tongue. You speak in the dark. In the secret. The one that is yours. Your own. You speak very softly, you speak in a whisper. In the dark, in secret. Mother tongue is your refuge.128

Her mother was forbidden to talk Korean by the Japanese invaders in the 1940s. By keeping the Korean language to herself as well, and by not using it in her text, Cha aligns herself with her mother. Thus Korean becomes their 126

Kim, “Pollen Fossil Record,” 110. Kirsten Twelbeck, “ ‘ Elle venait de loin’ – Re-reading Dictée,” 230. 128 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée (Berkeley: U of California P , 2001): 45. Further page references are in the main text. 127

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own secret code, a refuge they share and from which the reader is excluded. In line with this secrecy, there are, in a barely decipherable picture just opposite the title page, hangul sentences that Laura Hyun Yi Kang translates as “Mother, I want to see you. I am hungry. I want to go home.”129 This message, accessible only beyond Dictée’s text, tells of the emotional bond between daughter and mother. It also alludes to physical distance (they live on different continents) – a source of nostalgia and longing. The speaker in Dictée explains that her mother was Korean, but moved to China to escape from the Japanese occupation. This links Cha’s personal history to the use of Mandarin Chinese in her work. The page-filling Chinese characters for ‘woman’ and ‘man’ and for ‘father’ and ‘mother’ (26–27 and 54–55) are prominent in the book. The symbols for man and woman follow the introduction to Yu Guan Soon, a Korean revolutionary, who was “born of one mother and father” (25). The Chinese characters represent the importance of Yu Guan Soon’s conception through her parents. The ideograms of father and mother follow a section in which the speaker describes her mother’s final leave-taking from her parents and her death, described as coming “back to your one mother to your one father” (53), the universal deity. The chapter “Urania Astronomy,” which opens with a picture of the human body and descriptions of the body parts in Chinese ideograms, refers to the wisdom of traditional Chinese medicine. What follows is an exploration in English of body parts used for articulation in relation to language and silence. Another instance of Chinese text is a list of Chinese numbers and words (154). The Chinese ideograms designate the numbers one to ten and the words ‘extreme’, ‘earth’, ‘ability’, ‘elephant’, ‘movement’, ‘stars’, ‘fortune telling’, ‘circle’, and ‘sequence’. Such a list of ten reappears further down (173), where we find a list of Cantonese Chinese words that are numbered one to ten. Each of these numbers is connected to a Chinese numerical unit. One refers to the universe, two to Yin and Yang, three to the threefold grouping of heaven, earth, and mankind, four to the four directions North, South, East, and West, five to the five elements of metal, wood, water, fire, and earth, and so on. This list of Cantonese words faces exact English translations and explanations of these terms. With this second list, the first list that appears earlier in Dictée is made clear. The Asian words refer to the age-old Chinese knowledge of astronomy, feng shui, and philosophy. Through the presence of 129

Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Compositional Subjects, 233.

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Chinese in Dictée, Cha evokes the ancient wisdom and traditions of the Chinese people, a cultural treasure that surely influenced her, given the admittedly problematic but nevertheless close ties between Korea and China. Many passages of Dictée are composed in French – another master-tongue, a code imposed on Asia by European colonizers. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, France was the second-largest global colonial empire after the British Empire. In the seventeenth century, both countries started colonizing activities in Asia, trading goods, establishing naval bases, and spreading Christianity.130 In the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, France was the colonizer of Indo-China (today the region of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam).131 This historical background resonates in Cha’s use of the French language. Dictée features a quantitative suppression of Asian languages through the colonial codes of English and French. Cha’s personal history also points to France: She spent 1976 in Paris for postgraduate studies in filmmaking and theory. Fittingly for a book called Dictée, it starts with a dictation in French. This section is about a woman, probably a foreigner who “had come from afar” (1), who returns home and recounts her first day (we do not know what this first day relates to, probably the first day in France): “there is someone […] From afar” (1). The essence of this first day in a new place is the estrangement she feels. Under the French text, there is the English translation.132 Since many readers will not know 130

See Patrick Tuck, “French Ambitions in Southeast Asia,” in South Asia: A Historical Encyclopedia from Angkor Wat to East Timor, ed. Ooi Keat Gin (Santa Barbara C A : A B C –C L I O , 2004): 517. 131 See Rupert Emerson, “Challenge to Mother America,” in South East Asia: Colonial History, ed. Paul H. Kratoska (London: Routledge, 2001): 312; Tuck, “French Ambitions in Southeast Asia,” 517–20; and Ooi Keat Gin, “French Indochina,” in South Asia: A Historical Encyclopedia from Angkor Wat to East Timor, ed. Ooi Keat Gin (Santa Barbara C A : A B C – C L I O , 2004): 520. Nicholas Tarling explains the political connection between the French colony of Indochina and the Korean War in “Korean War” (743–44): The French use the “threat” of a Communist Chinese takeover as exemplified in North Korea in the Korean War to attract U S material support for their rule over Indochina; Tarling, “Korean War (1950–1953),” in South Asia: A Historical Encyclopedia from Angkor Wat to East Timor, ed. Ooi Keat Gin (Santa Barbara C A : A B C –C L I O , 2004): 743–44. 132 It is identical except for one comma that is missing before a direct citation in the English version. This seems to be an error rather than intention.

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French, they will experience a sense of alienation and linguistic distance at the very beginning of the reading process. After a short prose piece on a ‘diseuse’ (French for female speaker) and how she experiences speech, an invocation of the Muse follows: Oh Muse, tell me the story Of all these things, O Goddess, daughter of Zeus Beginning wherever you wish, tell even us. (7; my emphasis)

Who constitutes the community the “us” refers to? The speaker and the readers? The colonized people? The people in exile? Koreans and Korean Americans? Whoever the group of the insiders “we” are, they are considered inferior, as the phrase “even us” shows. We are not told who the superior group is. The context of the inferior/ superior dichotomy allows the plausible assumption that the “we” refers to the colonized. Following the invocation of the Muse, there are French translations and grammar exercises.133 This points to how one has to work in order to be able to master a foreign code and to the normative character of colonial languages. The exercises allude to not being understood (“3. If you did not speak so quickly, they would understand you better”; 8) and the effort one has to put into studying a language (“9. Be industrious: the more one works, the better one succeeds”; 8). Readers have to wait until the third chapter, “Urania Astronomy,” until French reappears. Especially noteworthy is the fact that French was shut out of chapter 1, “Clio History,” which tells of Korean resistance fighters and activities. The French colonizer is not given any space in this section. “Urania Astronomy” includes an untitled poem on speech, memory, and the body that is printed in French and English, in facing versions. While the languages in this poem are neatly separated, the poem “Aller/Retour” (124–27) is the very opposite. This poem is the last passage in Dictée in which French appears, and forms part of the chapter “Elitere: Lyric Poetry.” In this text, codes alter seamlessly, leaving readers who do not speak French with the intense frustration of not understanding a considerable amount of the poem and leaving 133

In the grammar exercise there is one mistake (“le rue“ should have the female article “la”). Again I suggest that this is an error. The only other interpretation would be that Cha wanted to show that such standard language exercises can be flawed, too, which does not add to the meaning of her book.

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readers who have mastered the French language with the difficulty of separating the codes. The French-speaking reader will experience confusion over where the English ends and the French begins, and vice versa. “Aller/ Retour,” a poem on being an insider or outsider and on moving back and forth (the title translates as ‘go / return’, or as ‘return ticket’), contains a list of elements that refer to the interior and the exterior: “Inside. Outside. / Glass. Drape. Lace. Curtain. Blinds. Gauze. / Veil. Voile. Voile de mariée. Voile de religieuse / Shade shelter shield shadow” (127). This illustrates the fusion of languages, both through the author’s bilingual text and through the reader’s difficulty in perceiving which language, and consequently which pronunciation, is being dealt with. After grammar and translation exercises and a poem that consists of a French version accompanied by its English translation, in “Aller/Retour” Cha fuses the languages. The author cunningly illustrates the acquisition of a foreign language in her book about moving, belonging, and hybrid identity. In the poem, readers who know French are also shown the beauty of this language. Cha’s composition in French is not just a comment on language acquisition and the sense of estrangement through a colonizer’s language; it also expresses admiration of this code and promotes its aesthetic value. Linguistic hybridity is conspicuous in Dictée, in Cha’s mixing of English with French and Chinese. Through the frequent change of linguistic codes, language itself is made a topic. The author conveys how a second language is acquired and how difficult it is to feel at ease in a foreign code. The seamless alteration of codes questions their differences and separability. Trans-ethnic communication and cultural realignment are promoted through a multilingual text. Cha is also displaying languages as aesthetic phenomena linked to a culture’s achievements. Through the more extensive multilingual technique of code-switching, linguistic hybridity gains more prominence in the readers’ minds than the use of selective Asian words. If longer passages are written in a code other than English, the English-speaking reader has to deal with multilinguality to a greater extent. 

Syntactic fusion, mixing syntactic or lexical structures, is another expression of linguistic hybridity, but is a technique rarely found in contemporary Asian

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American poetry appearing in print. In the poem “Syntax”134 by Wang Ping, already discussed earlier in a different context, Chinese syntactic structures are used, while the vocabulary is English. Wang thereby weds English and Mandarin Chinese in a hybrid new code, playfully stretching the syntactic tolerance of the English language while still preserving meaning. However, there are several Asian American poets from Hawai‘i who write linguistically hybrid poems in the form of Hawaiian pidgin English, also referred to as H C E (Hawai‘i Creole English). The Asian American population of Hawai‘i, who make up 56 percent of the total Hawaiian population, has shaped its very own hybrid code, a pidgin consisting of elements of English, Hawaiian (a Polynesian language), and the languages of Asian immigrants (mainly Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Tagalog).135 Standard English grammar rules are invalid – for instance, double negatives occur frequently, forms of ‘to be’ are omitted, ‘goin’ indicates future tense, and ‘wen’ expresses past tense. The pidgin variant has its own distinct intonation and pronunciation, as well as its own particular vocabulary. The use of pidgin by Hawaiian poets is intimately connected with the affirmation of their identity. Rob Wilson comments on Hawaiian authors’ relationship to the English language: So-called haolification through the white mythology of American English and its attendant dilemmas of self-division (cultural schizophrenia) registers an identity theme energizing the often pidgin-based literature of contemporary Hawai‘i.136

He emphasizes the close ties between linguistically hybrid pidgin and Hawaiian identity. The poetry of Lois–Ann Yamanaka (born in Hawai‘i in 1961 as a third-generation descendant of Japanese immigrants) is written in Hawaiian pidgin “without shame or fear,” but with the intention of writing in the language in which Hawaiians experience their everyday lives. Accordingly, in “Empty Heart” she says:

134

Wang Ping, “Syntax,” in Of Flesh and Spirit (Minneapolis M N : Coffee House,

1998): 11. 135

See “U.S. Census Bureau News,” released 17 May 2007, http://www.census.gov. /P -Release/www/releases/archives/population/010048.html. 136 Rob Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2000): 129.

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I write in the pidgin of the contract workers to the sugar plantations [ . . . ] . Our language has been labeled the language of ignorant people, substandard, and inappropriate in any form of expression – written or oral [...]. I met poet / teacher Faye Kicknosway in 1987 [. . . ] and I was encouraged to write in the voice of my place without shame or fear.137

In “Kala: Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre,” Yamanaka describes young Kala, who goes to see an X-rated movie with two boys. They force the young girl to watch the whole movie so that she can learn from the white (‘haole’) porn actresses, because afterwards they want to have sex with her. Kala is not only desired by the sexually aroused boys, but she is also the sexual object of old Filipino men sitting in the last row of the cinema. The poem about the experiences of violence and sexuality of a young girl from the plantation town of Pahala contains several pidgin expressions. At the beginning, Kala gossips about a classmate, Nancy: NNNAaannccy. The one – the one told us she had policeman in the sixth grade. Policeman. Fuzz, brah, fuzz. Yeah, you neva know? The theatre lady is her madda.138

Kala tells the story in an oral style, and accordingly the poem displays Nancy’s name in an oral-style version. Grammatical rules of Standard English are ‘flouted’, such as the omission of the word ‘who’ from “the one told us she had” and the subversion of the question ‘didn’t you know?’ into “you neva know?” “Fuzz, brah, fuzz” means ‘Policeman, brother, policeman’, and “madda” stands for mother. Writing her poems in Hawaiian pidgin, Yamanaka conveys that she is not ashamed of her local language or her hybrid Hawaiian culture. On the contrary, she celebrates and affirms her Hawaiian characters’ and puts it on the same level as Anglo-American culture with its ‘Standard’ English. She uses the English language, but in the vital orality of pidgin, to authentically capture her linguistic and material environment.

137

Lois–Ann Yamanaka, “Empty Heart,” in Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction, ed. & intro. Jessica Hagedorn (New York: Penguin, 1993): 544. 138 Lois–Ann Yamanaka, “Kala: Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre,” in Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge, 1993): 22; italics in original.

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As well as Lois–Ann Yamanaka, there are other Asian American authors on Hawai‘i who create poetry that thoroughly mixes Asian languages and English by way of H C E . Eric Chock, Juliet Kono, Hina Kahanu, Dean Honma, Joe Hadley, and Lee Tonouchi are cases in point.139 Of course, Hawai‘i is also the home to non-Asian American pidgin poets like Joseph Balaz.140 The pidgin poetry of Hawai‘i is a testimonial to the cultural hybridity of this state as well as to the pride these Asian American writers take in their hybrid identity. On Hawai‘i, Standard English is often considered crucial to economic success and upward social mobility.141 H C E , which historically came into being due to colonial trade and imperial exploitation, is used locally as a means of resisting Anglo-American hegemony, assimilation, and isolation.142 Affirming pidgin by using it in the supposedly elite genre of poetry, authors deconstruct the common perception of oral modes of English as low or trivial codes.143 139

I am grateful to Eric Chock for drawing my attention to Joe Hadley, who, as he remarked in an email to me on 1 March 2008, wrote “the ‘first’ pidgin poetry book over thirty years ago, written in his own handwritten original spelling.” 140 Joseph (Joe) Puna Balaz’s poem “Da Mainland to Me,” which forms part of his poetry C D Electric Laulua (1989), is especially noteworthy. In this comic poem, a man affirms that Hawai‘i, his home state, is the mainland to him and not continental America. 141 See Kathryn A. Davis, Sarah Bazzi, Hye–sun Cho, Midori Ishida & Julius Soria, “ ‘ It’s Our Kuleana’: A Critical Participatory Approach to Language-Minority Education,” in Learning, Teaching, and Community: Contributions of Situated and Participatory Approaches to Educational Innovation, ed. Lucinda Pease–Alvarez & Sandra R. Schecter (Mahwa N J : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005): 11–12; and Darrell H.Y. Lum, “Local Genealogy: What School You Went?” in Growing up Local: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose from Hawai‘i, ed. Eric Chock, Kames R. Harstad, Darrell H.Y. Lum & Bill Teter (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge, 1998): 13. 142 See Amy N. Nishimura, “Speaking Outside of the Standard: Local Literature of Hawai‘i,” in Asian American Literary Studies, ed. Guiyou Huang (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2005): 206–24. 143 An especially firm advocate for H C E is the poet Lee Tonouchi, born in 1972. Ron Wilson even dubbed him “Da Pidgin Guerrilla,” a label the writer quickly adopted; see Ryan Senaga, “Da Pidgin Guerrilla: Does the Fate of Hawaiian Creole English Lie in the Hands of Lee Tonouchi?” Honolulu Weekly (13 November 2002), http: //www.honoluluweekly.com/archives/coverstory%20%202002/11-13-02%20Pidgin /11-13-02%20Pidgin.html (accessed 1 March 2008).

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The majority of contemporary Asian American poems are written in English only, thus ensuring that each American reader can understand all the words. For their authors, English is not the master’s tool perpetuating eurocentrism, but a universal, useful instrument without memory or loyalty. The English language is part of Euro-American culture. Its use in contemporary Asian American poems reflects at once Euro-American domination and the American English-speaking community and everyday life. As a sign of resistance, some Asian American poets incorporate elements of an Asian language in their poems to create a new mode. The two formerly separate language systems are not threatened; indeed, their differences are acknowledged: “differences remain or undergo change, but they do not disappear.”144 Linguistic hybridity may not be grammatically correct, but it is how many Asian Americans speak and live today: “un nuevo lenguaje. Un lenguaje que corresponde a un modo de vivir. Chicano Spanish is not incorrect, it is a living language.”145 In this sense, Asian American poets return a borrowed tongue and contribute to the deconstruction of limits and borders in American language and culture. Whether Asian words or characters are inserted into an otherwise English text, or there is a more extensive alternating use of Asian and English languages, or the languages mix on the syntactic level as well, and whether the juxtaposition or seamless fusion of linguistic codes has the down-to-earth goal of making up for conceptual absences in English or, more subversively, to maintain cultural separation in certain domains, the reader is put in a position of increased interpretive and cross-cultural obligation. The formerly colonial Other is now in the driver’s seat, while the former master is partly countercolonized through language. Poets composing linguistically hybrid poetry deny that the English language is a possession of whites. They claim it for themselves, as Americans, and so reach out to disrupt racial stereotypes, such as the inability of Asian Americans to master the English language. A linguistic realignment of cul144

Martha J. Cutter, Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic American Writing and the Politics of Language Diversity (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P , 2005): 6. 145 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 77.

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tures takes place. Linguistic hybridity serves as an inter-ethnic medium of communication and transmitter of stories in a ‘Third Space’, as a liminal code existing between as well as within discrete languages. Authors express themselves through linguistic hybridity because they take pride in their hybrid identity and community and want to write in the way they talk in everyday life. Audre Lorde confirms that “survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.”146 The existence of linguistic plurality and hybridity betokens an acceptance of cultural inbetweenness as a natural position, and is thus a space of identity-production. This can also be observed on the formal level of contemporary Asian American poetry as well as on the narrative level, which latter is my focus in the next chapter.

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146

Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,”

108; emphasis in original.

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Where bones always nudge Against the fuzziest skin. Where inside and outside Are confused and flushed.1

T

H I S C H A P T E R E X P L O R E S C U L T U R A L H Y B R I D I T Y IN THE NARRATIVE

(the actional and explicitly thematic level) of Asian American poetry. This narrative cultural hybridity originates in Asian American, Asian, and European American cultures, stories, traditions, and myths. As thematic units, I subdivided this chapter into “Tracing Identities” and “Political Positionings.” The first section explores narrative cultural hybridity in contemporary Asian American poetry that relates to the Self. This covers the prominent topics of subjectivity, family, food, ethnicity, ethnic myths and stories, cultural displacement, sexuality, and the body. The second subsection deals with narrative cultural hybridity in Asian American poetry which moves beyond the self towards national and transnational concerns. The poems analyzed in this section speak about war, Third-World politics, and feminism. The epigraph to this chapter comes from Linh Dinh, a Vietnamese American poet, essayist, painter, and translator. The bilingual Linh Dinh, born in Saigon in 1963, emigrated to the U S A at age eleven, and has written four volumes of poetry. Dinh is among the few straight contemporary men writing

1

Linh Dinh, “Borders,” in Borderless Bodies (Berkeley C A : Factory School,

2005): 8.

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erotic and body-centered poetry, as Ron Silliman points out.2 The soft bodily borders described in the epigraph can serve as a metaphor for narrative Asian American cultural hybridity. The cultures of influence nudge against each other in poems, yet it is difficult to locate the borders and demarcate an inside and outside; the cultural borders “are confused and flushed.”3 Asian American poets likewise express the fusion of European American, Asian American, and Asian cultures. Through these culturally hybrid poems they contribute to a more inclusive corpus of American literature and reinforce the perception of American poetry as multicultural, not anglocentric. In what follows, I will endeavour to show the culturally hybrid content of contemporary Asian American poetry, and to draw conclusions from this evidence.

Tracing Identities This section analyzes poems relating to subjectivity. Took Took Thongthiraj, a second-generation Thai American writer, expresses the cultural hybridity of Asian American selfhood as follows: “I’m 100% American and 100% Asian.”4 This does not mean that her identity is twice as extensive (200%) as Euro-American identities, but that she has “worked hard to create a cultural hybrid for myself”5 which is American and Asian at the same time; an identity that is a part of and apart from majority American culture. Elaine Kim reports, of the importance of self-determined cultural hybridity for young Asian Americans:

2

Ron Silliman, “Wednesday, January 18, 2006,” blogcomment on Linh Dinh’s Borderless Bodies, http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2006/01/in-not-quite-four-decades -since.html (accessed 15 April 2008). See also Matthew Sharpe, “In Conversation: Linh Dinh,” The Brooklyn Rail (May 2004), http://www.thebrooklynrail.org/books /may04/linhdinh.html (accessed 15 April 2008). 3 Note the Buddhist dimension of Dinh’s poem. Inside and outside fuse; clear distinctions cannot be made. Non-duality, the dissolution of bipolar distinctions so dominant in European (American) thought, is typical of Buddhist thought; see Linda H. Chance, Formless in Form: Kenkō, “Tsurezuregusa”, and the Rhetoric of Japanese Fragmentary Prose (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 1997): 21. 4 James Walsh, “The Perils of Success,” Time (2 December 1993), http://www.time .com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,979746,00.html (accessed 17 April 2008). 5 Walsh, “The Perils of Success.”

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“It used to be that you had to be assimilating or foreign. Now we have young Asian-American writers who are refusing that choice. What they are trying to do, and succeeding at it, is to create a new self-defining way of being Asian American.”6

Identity is a set of characteristics that is unique to a person and constitutes her or his personality. The “true self,” however, is not one homogeneous unit, but has “infinite layers” (Trinh’s term). Trinh T. Minh–ha describes the multiple self as such: I/i can be I or i, you and me both involved. We (with capital W) sometimes include(s), other times exclude(s) me. You and I are close, we intertwine; you may stand on the other side of the hill once in a while, but you may also be me, while remaining what you are and what i am not.7

According to Trinh, subjectivity is infinitely layered, as it positions itself in relation to others who are both different from the self (“you”) and connected to it (“we”). Where does identity reside? One’s subjectivity is initiated at birth and in being given a name. When asked who you are, you answer by citing your name. In the confessional poem “How I Got that Name,” Marilyn Chin explains how she was named and traces her identity and personality from there. The subtitle of the poem is “an essay on assimilation.”8 Through this, she links her identity to the American immigrant experience in general and the Asian American community in particular. The poem starts out as follows: I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin. Oh, how I love the resoluteness of that first person singular followed by that stalwart indicative of “be,” without the uncertain i-n-g of “becoming.” (16, ll. 1–6)

6

Elaine Kim, quoted in James Walsh, “The Perils of Success.” Trinh Minh–ha, Woman, Native, Other, 90. 8 Marilyn Chin, “How I Got that Name,” in The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty (Minneapolis M N : Milkweed, 1994): 16. The formal characteristic of an essay, a rational text of logical arguments, stands in stark contrast to the lyric poem. Chin’s ‘essay’ intends to list facts, theorizing assimilation, but feelings and thoughts transform it into a confessional poem. 7

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The name, a cultural fusion consisting of a U S American and a Chinese part, stands for her cultural hybridity. The autobiographical speaker goes on celebrating the determination of the first-person singular and of the indicative of ‘to be’ in this statement. She likes the static strength of her identity and utterance, which surpasses uncertainty and development, represented by the word “becoming.” After this self-assurance, the poetic persona reveals her immigrant identity. On the passage from China to Angel Island, her father transcribed her name from Mei Ling to Marilyn, because he was lustfully “obsessed” with Marilyn Monroe (16, l. 11). The father’s renaming of his child has two severe consequences. First, a distance between Marilyn, her mother, and Chinese culture is established. Her own mother cannot pronounce her new name – the allophone ‘r’ is not part of the sound spectrum of Chinese. Cultural distance is also caused by the fact that Marilyn Monroe was a white actress. Secondly, the power of the father is revealed: “And nobody dared question his initial impulse” (16, l. 13; my emphasis). Later, this statement is repeated in a slightly altered way: “Nobody dared question his integrity” (16, l. 31). The patriarch renames his daughter following an impulse and nobody objects, neither the girl herself nor her mother. There are forms of resistance, though. In the title, Marilyn Chin refers to her name not as “my name” but as “that name.” She keeps her distance from the name her father gave her. Moreover, she describes herself as a “wayward pink baby” (16, l. 17); in infancy, she is already disobedient and independent. Although Asian Americans are often linked to the color “yellow” (“Yellow Peril,” etc.), Marilyn is pink. She is more Euro-American in appearance than Asian American, and is also named after a Euro-American beauty and body icon. Her mother avoids the unpronounceable new name ‘Marilyn’ by dubbing the girl “‘Numba one female offshoot’” (16, l. 21): This does not come as a surprise, however, as referring to family members by their rank is a common practice in Chinese culture. In the initial part of the poem, the U S A is represented by Marilyn Monroe and Angel Island. Monroe, who lived from 1926 to 1962, was a legendary U S model, actress, and singer. Interestingly enough, her name was changed as well: born Norma Jeane Mortenson, at the beginning of her career in 1946, she chose her mother’s maiden name and was advised to adopt “Marilyn” as her stage name. Ben Lyon, casting director at Fox, was responsible for Mon-

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roe’s patriarchal renaming: he told her to adopt the name ‘Marilyn’ because this would be more commercial.9 The speaker describes Monroe as “some tragic white woman / swollen with gin and Nembutal” (16, l. 18). The confessional poetic persona does not identify with the glamorous, successful Monroe, but with the depressed addict the star was in the late 1950s when Chin’s own renaming took place. Between 1910 and 1940, the immigration facility of Angel Island in San Francisco Bay functioned as a holding area for immigrants from China whose right to enter America was under question.10 Waiting to convince the authorities that they were eligible for entry, many immigrants carved poems dealing with their frustration or hopes into the barracks’ walls. The speaker states that her father was a ‘paperson’. Papersons owed their chance to emigrate to the U S A to the San Francisco earthquake and fires of 1906, which destroyed an essential part of the city’s official records. Since children of American citizens were allowed to enter the U S A , these men claimed to be sons of Chinese American citizens, which San Francisco authorities could not disprove. They were questioned thoroughly on Angel Island, but had been well prepared by coaching papers.11 Chin’s persona’s family emigrated in the 1950s, a time when Angel Island was already closed; the father thus cannot be a paperson. The poet plays with historical accuracy, to the effect that she fuses her own life with the experiences of immigrants before her; autobiographical elements are fused with ethnic history. Her identity involves not only herself but also her family and 9

Remarkably, it was only in 1956, at age thirty, that the actress legally adopted the name Marilyn Monroe; Sarah Churchwell, The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (New York: Picador 2005): 139. 10 See Darwin Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel (New York: Blood Moon, 2005): 678. As Lan Cao and Himilce Novas explain, Angel Island differed considerably from its East Coast counterpart, Ellis Island; Everything You Need to Know about Asian-American History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996): 3939. It took the average immigrant coming ashore at Ellis Island three to five hours to be processed by the immigration authorities. The average Angel Island immigrant spent two to seven weeks in this holding area; some were detained for as long as two years. 11 Simei Leonard & George J. Leonard, “The Beginning of Chinese Literature in America: The Angel Island Poems: Two Poems by Xu of Xiangshan,” in The Asian Pacific American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts, ed. George J. Leonard (New York: Garland, 1999): 377.

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ethnic origin. Identity is a hybrid construct that goes beyond one’s own body and mind to encompass the Asian American community as a whole. Claiming that the father, who renamed her, renamed himself as a paperson in order to be able to enter the U S A , the speaker parallels their fates: Both were born and named, then later renamed. The father chose another name due to the xenophobic American immigration law and political climate, the hierarchy of native over alien. The hierarchy of man over woman caused Mei Ling Chin to be named Marilyn. The fact that the father’s paperson identity is made up destabilizes his authority over his daughter: “Despite the patriarchal arbitrariness of the naming, the father’s authority is itself not stable, because he himself is a man with a fake identity, a paperson.”12 In the poem, the sole motive for the father’s renaming of his daughter is an “initial impulse” due to lust for the buxom blonde (16, ll. 14–15). The subtitle of the poem, “an essay on assimilation,” casts a different light on the anglicizing of the first name. Mei Ling and Marilyn sound very similar; in the assimilationist world, the anglicized name would ease the girl’s life, simplifying americanization. Why does the speaker leave this out? Does she not want to state the obvious? Is it too painful to articulate this truth? Gradually we learn that the voice that started out as an autobiographical poet–speaker is unreliable. Historical facts are mixed up; motives stated omit essentials. The poetic persona goes on to describe her mother’s immigrant life: she is confined to the domestic sphere, concerned with her children and the kitchen deity. Her father is portrayed in an equally clichéd way: he is called “a tomcat in Hong Kong trash” (16, l. 26). The man is a gambler and a criminal who bought chop suey joints with illegal “Gucci cash” (16, l. 30). His children are pigeonholed as intelligent, hard-working, and devout (16, ll. 32–33). The speaker’s portrayal of her family is not ‘authentic’: Chin is playing ironically with stereotypes of Asian Americans. In addition, she subverts the binary

12

Susanne Opfermann, “ ‘ Not quite boiled, not quite cooked’: Transdifferenzerfahrungen: Eine Lektüre von Marilyn Chin’s Gedicht ‘How I Got That Name: an essay on assimilation’ (1994),” in Cultural Encounters in the New World, ed. Harald Zapf & Klaus Lösch (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2003): 231; my translation of “Patriarchaler Willkur der Namensgebung zum Trotz erweist sich die Autorität des Vaters ihrerseits als nicht sehr stabil, weil er selbst ein Mann mit erschwindelter Identität ist, ein paperson.“

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option of good or bad: Marilyn Monroe is not just a movie star but also a drug addict; the respected father is also a criminal. The next section mocks assimilated Asian Americans, holding in contempt the “Model Minority,” studious but supposedly uncreative. The second section bitingly hails this group: Oh, how trustworthy our daughters, how thrifty our sons! How we’ve managed to fool the experts in education, statistics and demography – We’re not very creative but not adverse to rote-learning. Indeed, they can use us. (17, ll. 36–41; emphasis in original)

The “we” here is different from the universal or feminist “we” in the first section (“we all know / lust drove men to greatness, / not goodness, not decency”; 16, ll. 14–16). “We” here aligns the speaker with all Asian Americans, excluding non-Asian American readers and emphasizing ethnic bonding in the face of discrimination. This also alludes to the fact that Asian Americans are often not recognized as individual Americans but as members of one collective group. Given the fact that the poem deals with assimilation, the “history” addressed in this part of the poem is very likely the history of assimilation (17, l. 48). It faces a dark present, the persona predicts, because immigrant life depends on European American popular culture instead of on high art: life doesn’t hinge on that red, red wheelbarrow, but whether or not our new lover in the final episode of “Santa Barbara” will lean over a scented candle and call us a “bitch.” (17, ll. 50–55)

Assimilation is a process strongly influenced by the consumption of popular mass culture. The “we” here seems to be referring to the whole of American society with its low cultural expectations. Chin plays with identification here by useing a “we” that can refer to more than one community – a pronominal cultural hybrid like the “We” used by Trinh Minh–ha. It is interesting that Chin takes the William Carlos Williams poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923) as representative of Euro-American high art. Williams (1883–1963) was a culturally hybrid artist of Basque, French, Dutch,

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English, and Jewish background. The concrete, ordinary subject of his poem, the wheelbarrow, is in line with the Imagist tradition and is ultimately linked to the Japanese haiku tradition. “Santa Barbara,” by contrast, is an American soap opera tracing the luxurious life of the white Chapman family (aired from 1984 to 1993). The final question, “Oh God, where have we gone wrong? / We have no inner resources!” (17, ll. 56–57), is an ironic address to the Asian American model minority. The third section of the poem returns to the life of the speaker, Marilyn Mei Ling Chin. The late patriarch Chin is presented as God looking down in contempt from heaven at his family. The speaker lists her father’s critique of herself and other family members. The “nice” and “bright” children of section one (16, ll. 32 and 33) are now “ugly” (17, l. 61). His least favorite child, Marilyn, is not interested in fighting for her people, he states. The “Santa Barbara” fan is already too assimilated in his eyes. Instead, she lets her Asianness die “without resistance” (18, l. 70). “The fact that this death is also metaphorical / is a testament to my lethargy” (18, ll. 72–73), she states dully, in sharp contrast to the resolute voice we hear at the beginning of the poem. What remains when she lets go of her ethnic identity? Is there an identity if the ethnic identity dies? This question is connected to the “Asian American values and selfhood (typically conveying greater concern with community and family) against the individualist norms”13 of American experience. The speaker is unsure whether individual identity can prevail without communitarian subjectivity. The fourth and last section of the poem replaces first-person address with a third-person speaker. With her ethnic identity left behind, the poetic voice has lost her ability to speak for herself. A new voice emerges who speaks an obituary for the late (ethnic) Marilyn. The poetic persona goes through a startling development within the poem: she is autobiographical at first, then turns fictional, and is finally transformed from a first-person into a third-person persona who speaks her obituary. The shift in perspective and voice plays with narrative authority and subjective expression, ultimately questioning the “resoluteness” (16, l. 2) of an identity that is “solid as wood (18, l. 93). The late Marilyn Mei Ling’s family members are listed in the obituary: husbands, her parents, and grandparents. These concrete familial roots fade out into vague mass of more distant relativess (“cousin of a million”; 18, l. 13

Patricia Chu, Assimilating Asians, 17.

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80). Marilyn’s Asianness is said to have been “neither black nor white” (18, l.

82) – a statement representative of Asian America’s invisibility between the

Euro-American and African American communities. In an interview, the firstgeneration immigrant Marilyn Chin said: “I am afraid of losing my Chinese, losing my language, which would be like losing a part of myself, losing part of my soul.”14 In the poem “How I Got that Name,” Chin expresses this fear. The speaker Marilyn, whose sole activity next to “wait[ing] for imminent death” (18, l. 71) was “minding her poetry” (16, l. 25), is described as having had an average, meaningless ethnic identity. Through the process of assimilation, this side of her identity shrank, and she (her ethnic self) died by being engulfed in a chasm. The woman did not complain about this violent act, but instead was “happily / a little gnawed” (18, ll. 93–94). Now the proverb proclaimed in section three makes sense: “‘To kill without resistance is not slaughter’” (18, l. 70). The woman has not resisted assimilation to EuroAmerica. The latter’s killing-off of her ethnic identity is not a crime, because she let it happen in the first place. “Assimilation is inescapable,”15 Marilyn Chin assures us. However, the fierce tensions between an assimilated majority American life and Asian American family traditions are emphasized throughout the poem. The chasm which swallows the persona is compared to the jaws of Godzilla, a Japanese film monster, and of a white whale, an allusion to Melville’s Moby-Dick. The two monsters of ethnic and mainstream cultural backgrounds endanger the identity of the assimilated speaker. In the poem “How I Got that Name: an essay on assimilation,” Marilyn Chin traces the loss of ethnic roots through assimilation. It starts out with an exploration of the speaker’s identity and how she was named. Her subjectivity is firmly connected with her ethnic identity and socio-historic forces. Her representative personal experience of assimilation is interlinked with the general history of assimilation among Asian Americans. In the course of assimilation, the speaker’s self becomes an object, a solid piece of wood on the surface of which different cultures leave their mark.16 The poetic persona thinks passively about what was given to and what was taken from her. She 14

Bill Moyers, “On ‘How I Got that Name’: from an Interview with Marilyn Chin,” Modern American Poetry, ed. Cary Nelson (18 November 2001), http://www.english .uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/chin/name.htm (accessed 17 April 2008). 15 Moyers, “On ‘How I Got that Name’.” 16 Susanne Opfermann, “ ‘ Not quite boiled, not quite cooked’,” 236.

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understands assimilation not only as the loss of her Chinese culture but also as a profitable process through which she has absorbed Euro-American culture into her life. Chin conscious of her cultural hybridity, does not fight against it, instead accepting “the differences grasped both between and within entities”17 and exploring them in her poetry. Identity in general is considered a hybrid of several subject-positions, such as ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, class, and ‘race’. The core identity itself – i.e. operations of our unconscious – consists of many layers,18 all of which “form the open (never finite) totality of ‘I’.”19 Such multiple selves are contained in Chin’s poem: She is the “wayward” baby who does not resist her renaming, has a “devout” and “trustworthy” personality but calls her father “a gambler, a petty thug” (16, l. 27), she is swallowed by a chasm but does not flinch, she digs down to find China while watching “Santa Barbara.” As Marilyn Chin confirms, “I see myself and my identity as nonstatic. I see myself as a frontier, and I see my limits as limitless. […] I don’t believe in static identities. I believe that identities are forever changing.”20 Individuals experience their identities – however infinitely layered these may be – within a certain community. The self is defined by how we see ourselves and how others see us, what we share with others and how we are different from them. The first group interacting with an individual is her or his family. Cathy Song explores family relations in her first collection of poetry, Picture Bride (1983), winner of the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. The author was born in Honolulu, Hawai‘i in 1955. Her mother is the daughter of Chinese immigrants, her father a second-generation Korean American. The poet has chronicled her family since the age of nine.21 Song, the mother of three, lives with her family in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, and has a B A from Wellesley College in English and an M A in creative writing from Boston University. Her most recent, fifth volume of poetry is Cloud Moving Hands (2007). 17

Trinh T. Minh–ha, Woman, Native, Other, 94; emphasis in original. See Minh–ha, Woman, Native, Other, 90. 19 See Woman, Native, Other, 94. 20 Bill Moyers, “On ‘How I Got that Name’.” 21 Gayle K. Sato, “Cathy Song (1955– ),” in Asian American Poets: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Guiyou Huang (Westport C T : Greenwood, 2002): 276. 18

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In “Easter: Wahiawa, 1959,” Song pictures a childhood scene: Easter eggs are hidden for the children of a family, the poetic persona finds three of them and eats them in the company of her grandfather. The child speaker and her grandfather take center stage. In the first section, a typical Euro-American Easter egg hunt is described. While the adult women of the family, who are associated with the domestic sphere and fashion, hide the eggs, the grandfather and head of the family looks after the excited children. In the second section, Song depicts the strong ties between granddaughter and grandfather. As a young boy in Korea, his homeland, the old man performed an egg hunt of his own. On a riverbank, he eagerly searched for quail eggs. The man emigrated to Hawai‘i, where he labored in the sugarcane fields. After many years of hard work, the Korean American was able to finance his dream of a family and a house, culminating in the Easter egg hunt of 1959: from the porch to the gardenia hedge that day he was enclosed by his grandchildren, scrambling around him, for whom he could at last buy cratefuls of oranges, basketfuls of sky blue eggs.22

While section one deals with the Euro-American tradition and the everyday life of the American majority, Asian American ethnicity is at the center of the second section. Here the grandfather’s realization of the American Dream is described. But the poem does not focus on the ethnic dimension; the tender ties between grandfather and granddaughter are beyond ethnicity, and it is this love between family members that takes center stage in Song’s poem. The color blue is of prominent importance in the poem. The blue imagery includes the ocean, a river, the sky, rain, blue-gray whiskers, and marinecolored Easter eggs. The afternoon egg hunt takes place during a spell after rain and ends in an evening downpour. The water, however, is not part of the sad or gloomy atmosphere commonly connoted by the locution ‘blue’. It is a natural expression of a season, during which Easter eggs are hidden in a 22

Cathy Song, “Easter: Wahiawa, 1959,” in Picture Bride (New Haven C T : Yale

U P , 1982): 9, ll. 69–71.

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“soggy yard,”23 and quail eggs “gleam from the mud / like gigantic pearls.”24 Similarly, Song’s Easter memory is not a melancholic recollection of a family gathering in Wahiawa at Easter in 1959, but one full of positive emotions that strengthen her identity. Blue, the color of the Easter eggs and the grandfather’s mustache, is further positively associated with the ocean and the sky. These are limitless, open, continent-connecting units that add space to a poem that mentions Hawai‘i and Korea as well as the Christian ‘territories’ included via the Christian Easter festival. Korea is the home country of the grandfather. He traveled across the Pacific Ocean to reach Hawai‘i, which is clearly the family center; Wahiawa, a city on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, is named in the title, and Korea is more a memory than a presence. The grandfather was one of the first Korean immigrants to come to Hawai‘i to work on sugar plantations in the early twentieth century. Many of these men arrived in the U S A as singles and arranged their marriages by mail; as indicated earlier, their spouses are often referred to as “picture brides.” Indeed, the collection that contains “Easter: Wahiawa, 1959” is called Picture Bride. The title poem, which opens the volume, describes the experience of the picture bride, the speaker’s grandmother. The next poem, “The Youngest Daughter,” depicts the poetic persona’s relationship to her mother, whom she loves and wants to take care of but at the same time wishes to leave in order to live her own life: She knows I am not to be trusted, even now planning my escape. As I toast to her health with the tea she has poured, a thousand cranes curtain the window, fly up in a sudden breeze.25

And in a later poem Song reveals that the mother “kept the children under cover.”26

23

Song, “Easter: Wahiawa, 1959,” 8, l. 30. “Easter: Wahiawa, 1959,” 8, ll. 45–46. 25 Song, “The Youngest Daughter,” in Picture Bride (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1982): 6, ll. 47–52. 26 Song, “Leaving,” in Picture Bride (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1982): 14, l. 23. 24

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“Easter: Wahiawa, 1959” is the third poem in Song’s collection. Here the male immigrant experience is described, and the grandfather is a model for the granddaughter because of his adventurous spirit, independence, and success. He supports his grandchild, peeling the Easter eggs for her and feeding her: “I ate what he peeled / and cleaned for me.”27 The speaker’s own adventurous spirit and urge for independence are strengthened and fortified by her grandfather. The strong link with him and his encouragement of her drive for freedom suggests that the poetic persona wants to be a part of the family, celebrating Easter in the family community. At the same time she wants to be apart from the family, disappearing to search for what makes her as happy as the blue Easter eggs: “We dashed and disappeared / into bushes, / searching for the treasures.”28 In the first three poems in Picture Bride, Song situates her speaker in the family but also gives her a space of her own. The poems appear confessional because the speaker and Cathy Song share biographical details. The author’s paternal grandparents were Korean immigrants, too. She also grew up in Wahiawa. In Picture Brides, her maternal family’s Chinese roots are present in the poems featuring Mah-Jongg tiles, jade, and Chinatowns. Grappling with family history and family relations, Song gets hold of her own identity. The family both supports her, like the grandfather in the Easter scene, and restricts her, like the mother in the tea scene of “The Youngest Daughter.” In the poem “Blue and White Lines after O’Keeffe,” Song describes how I discovered my own autonomy then, crawling out from your wide skirts and into your flowerbeds, where I proceeded to crucify the dolls, decapitating your crocuses.29

Although bonded to her mother (it is her flowerbeds she crawls into), she is self-sufficient. “I can feel my own skin,” she self-consciously declares further down.30 27

Song, “Easter: Wahiawa, 1959,” 9, ll. 76–77. “Easter: Wahiawa, 1959,” 8, ll. 33–35. 29 Cathy Song, “Blue and White Lines after O’Keeffe,” in Picture Bride (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1982): 47, section 5. 30 Song, “Blue and White Lines after O’Keeffe,” 47, section 5. 28

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Like many third-generation immigrants, Song is connected to her Korean and Chinese ethnicities and even pan-ethnically reaches out to the Japanese American community present in poems such as “Ikebana”31 and “Girl Powdering Her Neck.”32 The influence of cultures and ethnicities is a daily experience on Hawai‘i. The culturally hybrid poet who finds inspiration in art relates several of her poems to Kitagawa Utamaro and Georgia O’Keeffe. Utamaro (1753–1806) was a Japanese master of the print technique and O’Keeffe (1887–1986) was an American semi-abstract painter (significantly, often of flowers). Nevertheless, all of Song’s poems are just as accessible to European or Native Americans as to Asian Americans, because they can be accessed without knowledge of Asian cultures or languages. The short glossary at the end of the book helps here, as well as the universal topics of the poems such as mother–daughter relationships or becoming a mother. The cooked eggs are the treasures at the center of Song’s Easter hunt poem. Food is generally closely linked to family identity and assumes a prominent place in numerous contemporary Asian American poems. The Chinese American poet Victoria Chang gives credit to the importance of food when it comes to family relationships by featuring it in many poems in her debut collection Circle (2005). Chang mentions not only Chinese American dishes like chicken feet33 and winter melon soup34 but also Euro-American food such as bundt cake35 and meringue.36 Like Victoria Chang, Aimee Nezhukumatathil is a second-generation Asian American. Born in Chicago in 1974 to a Filipina mother and a South Indian father, she holds an M F A from Ohio State University and teaches English and creative writing at the State University of New York at Fredonia.37 31

Song, “Ikebana,” in Picture Bride, 41–42. Song, “Girl Powdering Her Neck,” in Picture Bride, 39–40. 33 Victoria Chang, “Hong Kong Flower Lounge,” in Circle (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P , 2005): 14. 34 Chang, “Seven Reasons for Divorce,” in Circle (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P , 2005): 9–10. 35 Chang, “Preparations,” in Circle (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P , 2005): 16. 36 Chang, “Edward Hopper Study: Hotel Room,” in Circle (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P , 2005): 18. 37 See Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s homepage at http://aimeenez.net/home.html (accessed 26 March 2010). 32

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She has published three collections of poetry: Fishbone (2000), Miracle Fruit (2003), and At the Drive-In Volcano (2007). In her poem “Fishbone,” she describes her experience of cultural hybridity in connection to food. The speaker is warned by her mother that she should swallow a ball of rice if a fishbone gets stuck in her throat: At dinner, my mother says if one gets stuck in your throat, roll some rice into a ball and swallow it whole. She says things like this and the next thing out of her mouth is did you know Madonna is pregnant?38

On the one hand, the mother serves Asian food for breakfast and gives related advice; on the other, she is fascinated by majority American celebrities and gossips about them. The speaker is disgusted by the fried smelt the family has for dinner, because she is “supposed / to eat them whole.”39 She also wishes for more ‘standard’ American breakfast like Cheerios and buttered toast, which she considers “Safe. Pretty. / Nothing with eyes.”40 While she observes her food, the poetic persona remembers how ‘un-American’ her mother’s superstitiousness is, when she collects dimes for each year her daughter is alive. The young woman is not the only one feeling discontented, though: her mother complains about the absence of traditions in their family and blames her husband for this. While her daughter thinks the mother holds on to an Asian way of life, she herself feels their family does not have many Asian traditions left and has a very Euro-American life-style. “These are the things she says / instead of a blessing to our food,” the speaker comments, missing this EuroAmerican custom. The final scene of the poem describes the young woman as she snaps off the fishes’ heads, which she is not supposed to do. The Asian (American) and the Euro-American food customs diverge, yet the Asian American girl manages to have access to both cultures and finally resorts to a culturally hybrid 38

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, “Fishbone,” in Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, ed. Victoria Chang (Champaign: U of Illinois P , 2004): 107, ll. 1–5; italics in original. 39 “Fishbone,” 107, ll. 9–10. A smelt is a small silvery fish (whitebait). 40 “Fishbone,” 107, ll. 15–16.

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solution: eating the Asian dish but removing the fish heads as Euro-Americans would do. To take up an image of the poem, her knowledge of both cultural realms and her hybrid self are the rice ball which helps in swallowing the ethnic fishbones that block Asian American throats every now and then. In the poem “Egg Tarts,” Koon Woon describes how ethnic food intensifies the relationship to one’s ethnic identity. Koon Woon, born in China in 1949, emigrated to the U S A in 1960 and presently resides in Seattle’s International District. The Truth in Rented Rooms (1998) is his first poetry collection. The “Egg Tarts” featured in the poem’s title are what the speaker eats “to feel Chinese.” It’s a trick to feel Chinese even in Chinatown Where tour buses inch along, the driver pointing out Its exotic features while winos slump, Street people, tattooed guns and knives, Benevolent orders tight-lippedly banging Mahjong.41

Egg tarts are the speaker’s way of connecting to his ethnicity in a majority American surrounding that includes a tourist-occupied Chinatown. Ancient Chinese verse also helps the persona to maintain links with China – but this literature is read in English translation, hence via Euro-American culture. This is despite the fact that the speaker knows Chinese, which we can infer from the fact that he can read the Chinese characters in the shop-sign, “Ten Thousand Things Have Mothers Bakery.” 42 Both locations, China and the U S A , thus figure in the poem. Space and nation also feature prominently in “Palm Trees in Ontario, California,”43 a poem by Kao Kalia Yang, a Laotian American who gained recognition through her book The Latehomecomer (2008), in which she traces her Hmong family’s story. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Carleton College

41

Koon Woon, “Egg Tarts,” in The Truth in Rented Rooms. (New York: Kaya,

1998): 34, ll. 9–14. 42 “Egg Tarts,” 34, l. 6. 43

Kao Kalia Yang, “Palm Trees in Ontario, California,” in Yellow as Turmeric, Fragrant as Cloves: An Anthology of Asian American Female Poets, ed. Anne Marie Fowler & Sholeh Wolpé (O’Fallon I L : Deep Bowl, 2008): 134.

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and an M F A from Columbia. Born in a Thai refugee camp in 1980, the writer was brought to Minnesota when she was six years old. Her family’s geographical movement from Laos to Thailand and then America is a journey many Hmong Americans undertook in search of a home after the communist takeover of Laos in 1975. Numerous Laotian Hmongs44 were allies of the U S forces during the Vietnam War. Hmong Americans are a relatively poor Asian American sub-ethnicity: Their median household income in 1999 was $32,076 compared to the Asian American median household income of $51,908. Their average household size is six persons, twice as large as in the average Asian American home. Their level of education is comparatively low, with only 4,053 out of 143,168 Hmong Americans holding a bachelor’s degree or higher. U S states with the largest Hmong American population include California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.45 The geographical displacement of the trees in “Palm Trees in Ontario, California” is a metaphor for the cultural hybridity of the Hmong American speaker and, in a further step considering Kao Kalia Yang’s immigrant identity, of the poet herself. The plants from tropical shores where “sand dirt held their roots firm”46 are now outside their climatic home, neighbored by cement and “snow-capped mountains” (134, l. 10). In their country of origin, local farmers actively “cherished their fruits” (134, l. 4), while here in California, Minnesotan tourists passively “feast on their display” (134, l. 8). On the one hand, the Californian home of the palms lacks the tropical climate and environment of their natural habitat; on the other, the Golden State announces their existence to the world through postcards and “promote[s] their glory” (134, l. 10). This is why, at the end of the poem, the speaker wonders if the palms yearn for the time when they lived in their natural habitat and when they were true, placed, 44

The Hmong are a tribal highland people living in Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, and China. 45 Statistics here from Census 2000, http://factfinder.census.gov/ (accessed 26 March 2010). 46 Kao Kalia Yang, “Palm Trees in Ontario, California,” in Yellow as Turmeric, Fragrant as Cloves: An Anthology of Asian American Female Poets, ed. Anne Marie Fowler & Sholeh Wolpé (O’Fallon I L : Deep Bowl, 2008): 134, l. 5. Further references are in the main text.

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beautiful, and side-by-side? (134, ll. 12–15)

She can find no answer. Yang’s decription of the tropical plants in California and her pondering on geographical displacement is a metaphor for Asian Americans in the U S A . Do they prefer the advantages of America over the country where their families come from and where they would blend in phenotypically? In “Palm Trees in Ontario, California,” the first-generation immigrant Kao Kalia Yang explores nostalgia and the loss of an original culture. In Yang’s poem, phenotypical difference is expressed when she writes about the tropical palm trees and how “snow-capped mountains promote their glory.” Bodily difference strongly influences Asian American subjectivity. The racially marked body is a narrative impulse in “The Hemisphere: Kuchuk Hanem”47 by Kimiko Hahn. In this poem, Hahn explores and challenges Orientalist stereotyping of the ethnic body and the subsequent sexism through the points of view of four people: an unnamed contemporary poetic persona; Gustave Flaubert, an Orientalist writer who visited Egypt; Edward Said, the scholar who unmasked Orientalism as a Western invention racially degrading concept of Eastern countries from Arabia to Southeast Asia; and Kuchuck Hanem, a Nubian dancer Flaubert encountered in Egypt and described in his writing. It is a multiple meta-narrative: Hahn’s persona quotes Said who refers to Flaubert who recounts Hanem’s words. The multiplicity of voices is taken up in a variety of type fonts: there are two kinds of type, some words are set in italics, sometimes there is indentation, and the size of the letters varies. The array of layouts and voices highlights the many views of the Orient. Through the contemporary Asian American poetic persona, Hahn wrestles with the concept of the Oriental female – submissive and obedient, eager to please the Western man, especially sexually. On the beach, the poetic persona meets a Portuguese sailor with a geisha tattoo. Trying to seduce her, he points at his tattoo “as if I would identify with it” (48). Since she has grown up with Oriental stereotypes, she even identifies “a little” (48, 57) with the geisha and 47

Kimiko Hahn, “The Hemisphere: Kuchuk Hanem,” in The Unbearable Heart (New York: Kaya, 1995): 45–61. The Unbearable Heart won an American Book Award. It consists of several sections rather than regular poetic lines, and reference is therefore by page number.

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her sexual connotations. The American persona is troubled by being perceived as an Oriental female representing all Eastern women; lost in thought, she repeats “I have become a continent” (49), “I have become half the globe” (49), “a hemisphere” (51). This connects her with Kuchuck Hanem, who was viewed similarly by Western men of her time. Kimiko Hahn is well aware that she was brought up in a system of Western education infiltrated by Orientalist assumptions and that she might therefore unconsciously repeat parts of this ideology. In a metatextual section, she worries whether she can give voice to the dancer at all: “Can I speak for her? For the Turkish, Nubian, the – brown, black, blacker?” or “will I fall into the trap of writing from the imperialists’ point of view?” (51). Throughout the poem, direct quotations from Edward Said’s influential book Orientalism are inserted. In his book, Said analyzes Flaubert’s descriptions of his travel to Egypt in 1850 and exposes their Orientalist ideology. The epigraph of the poem (45) is also a quotation from Said, in which he argues that Flaubert’s descriptions of Kuchuk Hanem produced a prominent model of the Oriental woman. This argument is taken up by Hahn in her title, which equatess Hanem with the Eastern hemisphere. Said also laments that Hanem did not speak for herself, but that the French author spoke for her and represented her as typically oriental (45, 46). Hahn reacts to this by giving voice to Hanem. The last Said quotation sheds light on the status, as a British colony, of Egypt, “an almost academic example of Oriental backwardness” (51) that reinforced England’s power. The passages from Said, an influential literary theorist, serve to provide an objective scientific counterbalance and supplement to the subjective critiques of Orientalism offered by the persona and Hanem. Gustave Flaubert is present in “The Hemisphere: Kuchuk Hanem” through direct quotations from Flaubert in Egypt, translated and edited by Francis Steegmuller. Hahn does not take authority from the Frenchman by speaking for him, but lets him speak for himself. Flaubert describes both Hanem and Egypt negatively. The dancer is portrayed as a sexual toy and primitive object that Flaubert and his friend use at will: “She asks us if we would like a little entertainment, but Max says that first he would like to entertain himself alone with her, and they go downstairs. After he finished, I go down and follow his example.

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Groundfloor room, with a divan and a cafas [basket] with a mattress.” (50; italics in original)

Further down in the poem, Flaubert argues that “‘the oriental woman is no more than a machine: she makes no distinction between one man and another man’” (60). Egypt is depicted as a dirty region (“‘I performed on a mat that a family of cats had to be shooed off’”; 49) where even the animals are sexually perverted (“ ‘A week ago I saw a monkey in the street jump on a donkey and try to jack him off’” and “‘an ostrich trying to violate a donkey’”; 54). Through speech – a sign of power denied her by Flaubert – Kuchuk Hanem is enabled in this poem to counter many Oriental stereotypes: for example, that the East, in contrast to the West, is a place of extreme squalor. She reveals that sexual intercourse with animals is practiced in both Egypt and France (“I’m told it also happens in France”; 48) – the French are hardly morally superior. Hanem even makes fun of gullible Flaubert, finding it amusing that he gives her chocolate and believes she would consider the evenings with him “amorous” (46; italics in original). Moreover, the dancer is disgusted by his behavior, because “he liked to fart under the cover then plunge under to smell the gas” (49). In “The Hemisphere: Kuchuk Hanem,” Kimiko Hahn explores the Oriental female by touching on the myths and stereotypes surrounding it and exposes them as fantastical. Four different voices from America, Europe, and ‘the Orient’ shed light on Orientalism: Flaubert’s voice illustrates Orientalist sexism and stereotyping, Said’s voice theoretically deconstruct this ideology, Kuchuk Hanem reveals that Flaubert’s portrayal of her is prejudiced and distorted, and the contemporary American persona makes us aware deconstructively of the influence of Orientalist ideology on the bodies of today’s Asian American women, and, indeed, of all monolithic concepts of non-white women. Kimiko Hahn explores sexuality as something than can be liberated from the net of Orientalism, as part of active subjectivity rather than of the Other as passive object. Her poem “Komachi to Shōshō on the Ninety-ninth Night” elaborates on Komachi’s sexual identity. Komachi tells her lover Shōshō of her sexual arousal and longing for him, expressing her sexual orientation and desires openly. The woman talks about more than sex though; she also refers

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to – indeed, closes the poem with – true love (“my heart / your eyes.”48 Although relatively short and syntactically simple and anaphoric, the poem harbours a number of complexities: KOMACHI

TO

SHŌSHŌ

ON THE

NINETY-NINTH NIGHT

I will tell you what I am feeling: the back of my knee desires your tongue, my ass your fingers, my waist your palms, my clit your rough chin, my nipples your lips, my lips your teeth, my earlobe your teeth, my shoulder blades your fingernails, my instep your toes, my inner thighs your hips, my heart your eyes.

5

10

The love desired by the speaker is expressed in the poem in several ways. The frequent fricatives and plosives (especially /t/, /∫/, /t∫/, /z/, /s/ and /w/) create a passionate and powerful atmosphere. The rhythm created by iambic feet which prevail the lines of the poem allude to the up and down of human bodies during sexual intercourse. The use of parallelism adds to this regular rhythm: nouns meaning bodily parts and possessive pronouns are combined, and this structure is constantly repeated from line 3 to line 12. There is always an alternation of the parts of the body belonging to the speaking persona and those of the one spoken to. The repetition of the words “lips” as “your lips” and “my lips” in line 7 allude to the ‘melting’ of the two bodies, the insertion of the penis into the vagina. The subsequent lines suggest the rising sexual stimulation of the persona until she reaches her climax (and the poem reaches its climax) and expresses emotional love. The speaker describes how she desires to be touched by her lover from bottom to top twice (from knee to earlobe and from her instep to her heart) and she even describes with which parts of his body and where he should touch hers. It is interesting to see that the lover is most often advised to use 48

Kimiko Hahn, “Komachi to Shōshō on the Ninety-ninth Night,” in Mosquito and Ant (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999): 81, ll. 11–12. The poem is reprinted here in its entirety with the permission of Kimiko Hahn.

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his head, the seat of intellect and imagination, and his hands, among other things symbolizing skill. The persona wants to be satisfied by someone who is intelligent as well as imaginative and knows what to do. A part of the foot, the toes, is also mentioned, reminding the reader of the phrase ‘hand and foot’ meaning ‘satisfying all demands’. The fact that the woman tells her lover what she desires indicates that she is more powerful than him, ‘ordering’ him how to satisfy her. The speaker does not directly order her lover around. She says “I will tell you what I am feeling,” claiming only to describe her emotions. She hides her orders by stating that some parts of her body “desire” parts of the lover’s body. Indirectly, she shows him how she can be sexually satisfied, although she leaves out what the lover should exactly do with his body: i.e. she does not say that his fingers should stroke, spank or squeeze her buttocks when saying “my ass / [desires] your fingers.” This gap in the poem sparks the reader’s imagination, encouraging fillingin by verbs describing the lover’s performance. There is another gap in the poem for readers unfamiliar with the legend of Ono no Komachi, because this story gives a special twist to the woman’s sexual fantasy. Ono no Komachi was a Japanese poet who lived around 800 A D . According to legend, she ordered one of her suitors, Shōshō, to wait in front of her house for a hundred days; only under this condition would she receive him. He froze to death in front of her house on the ninety-ninth night. Knowledge ofhis legend spices the poem with strong irony: the woman indulges in her sexual fantasy inside her house while her lover is dying outside. She fantasizes about procreation and satisfaction at the same time as the man she chose for this purpose is dying without satisfaction because he does not live to get the woman he worships. To see the poem in this light makes the last line especially sad because the woman wants the lover to open his eyes to her heart while he is closing his eyes forever. The sexuality of the woman takes center stage. Although the poem alludes to a poet living many centuries ago, her sexual desires are described in a highly explicit way that we associate more with a woman of the twenty-first century. The cultural hybridity of this poem exists in the sexual explicitness of the story of the well-known Japanese legend of Ono no Komachi and of the contemporary American poet Kimiko Hahn. The author is very open about sexuality throughout her poetry. Hahn was born in 1955 and came of age in

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the 1960s, the decade of free love and civil rights which opposed the historically Puritan culture dominating the U S A . Chilla Bulbeck has argued that “some women of colour proudly assert their sexuality, often in opposition to a perceived puritan repressive sexuality in white women.”49 This repressive Puritan sexuality is linked to the Victorian stereotype of women as asexual, procreative, domestic, impassionate beings.50 Hahn confirms that the sexual openness in her poetry partly relates to her identity as ethnic Other: “Part of my fervor comes from distinguishing myself, a ‘Eurasian’, from the white/ W A S P / Caucasian women around me; literally and culturally”; however, she also attributes her poetic openness about sexuality to her identity as woman: “part of my fervor comes from a female’s overall resistance, gut-reaction to American and Western history and culture.”51 “A resistance, a defense, and offense,”52 thus Hahn’s motives behind the sexual explicitness in her poems – resistance to a patriarchal and racist society, defense against sexist and racial stereotypes, and offense to the Puritan culture by following her “desire to break out, to connect myself to my body and my body to the outside world, and to express myself.” Ultimately, the poet argues, “writing is a physical expression.”53 Sexual identity in contemporary Asian American poetry is, of course, not limited to heterosexual contexts, but also encompasses homosexual orientation.54 Like Asian American heterosexuality, Asian American homosexuality, has been “confounded with broader notions of exotic Asian or ‘oriental’ sexuality.”55 Dana Y. Takagi reveals another basic truth in an article on sexuality 49

Chilla Bulbeck, Re-Orienting Western Feminisms, 130. See Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1984): 94 and 615–16. 51 See Appendix (293). 52 See Appendix (293). 53 See Appendix (293). 54 Naturally, Asian American sexuality includes more than homosexual and heterosexual positionings. As in all ethnicities, there are bisexuals, transgenders, people indulging in homoeroticism but engaging in heterosexual sex, people identifying themselves with one of the above but living in celibacy, etc. 55 Russell C. Leong, “Home Bodies and the Body Politic,” in Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay and Lesbian Experience, ed. Russell Leong (New York: Routledge, 1996): 3. 50

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and identity politics in Asian America, which she significantly calls “Maiden Voyage”: The general diversity of the Asian American community has been well explored, but at the same time ”we are relatively uninformed about Asian American subcultures organized around sexuality.”56 This is true despite the existence of Asian American sexual interest groups such as S A L G A (South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association) and K O A L A , a Korean lesbian group in Chicago. Asian American sexuality is located in a hybrid space between fixed cultural identifications. Asian Americans who are not heterosexual are additionally on the margins in consideration of heterosexual norms, “a minority within a minority”57 and as such “doubly shocking.”58 Unlike phenotypically visible ethnic affiliation, sexual orientation can be kept secret, and the ‘Asian Americans’ and ‘homosexuals’ communities have very different histories: these separate worlds occasionally collide through individuals who manage to move, for the most part, stealthily, between these spaces. But it is the act of deliberately bringing these worlds closer together that seems unthinkable.59

In the following, two poems by the Asian American authors Brenda Shaughnessy and Timothy Liu will be analyzed. Both explore homosexuality and erotic language without reference to ethnic background. Within their volumes of poetry as a whole, however, the poets do allude to both their ethnicity and their sexuality, thereby treating their Asian American and homosexual subjectivity “as non-mutually exclusive identities.”60 A contemporary Asian American poet who is outspoken about her lesbian preference is Brenda Shaughnessy. Shaughnessy, who has a Japanese mother and a Euro-American father, was born in Okinawa, Japan, in 1970 and grew 56

Dana Y. Takagi, “Maiden Voyage: Excursion into Sexuality and Identity Politics in Asian America,” in Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay and Lesbian Experience, ed. Russell Leong (New York: Routledge, 1996): 21. 57 Takagi, “Maiden Voyage,” 22. 58 Richard Serrano, “Beyond the Length of an Average Penis: Reading Across Traditions in the Poetry of Timothy Liu,” in Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature, ed. Xiaojing Zhou & Samina Najmi (Seattle: U of Washington P , 2005): 190–91. 59 Takagi, “Maiden Voyage,” 25. 60 Takagi, “Maiden Voyage,” 16.

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up in Southern California. She earned a B A from the University of California at Santa Cruz and an M F A at Columbia, and is the author of Interior with Sudden Joy (1999) and Human Dark with Sugar (2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets.61 Her poem “Panopticon,” which presents the speaker’s sexual subjectivity, starts out as follows: My bedroom window can be seen from the viewing deck of the World Trade Center. I’ve seen it. What I saw?62

Such is our acute sensitivity to the words “World Trade Center,” if we did not know that Interior with Sudden Joy was published two years before 9/11 we would think that the perspective here is a cruel, self-absorbed inversion of the scene of the infamous suicide attacks. Instead, the panopticon of the title is ‘simply’ the best external view of the speaker’s own apartment. She watches her roommate using her vibrator and enjoys “the luxury / of an octopus” who moves but “is never using any legs for walking” (71, ll. 20–21). She can watch her roommate without actually being in their flat. The female peeping Tom is aroused by her “strange vision” (70, l. 15; emphasis in original) and she is sure her friend “can feel it, my seeing, even through a trance of fog” (70, l. 8). The poetic persona’s lesbian attraction is not lived out openly but in anonymity of a distant viewing platform. However, the woman is convinced her roommate can feel her arousal and sexual orientation. This positive affirmation of the ‘telepathic’ strength of desire is, however, qualified by the lowering presence of the poem’s title, which, with its evocation of the prison surveillance system invented in the late-eighteenth century by the Enlightenment philosopher Jeremy Bentham (and analyzed by Michel Foucault in his study of the disciplinary society63), reminds the reader of the often imprisoning constraints placed on the practice of alternative sexualities.

61

See Anon., “Brenda Shaughnessy,” The Academy of American Poets, http://www .poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/765 (accessed 13 April 2010). 62 Brenda Shaughnessy, “Panopticon,” in Interior with Sudden Joy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999): 70, ll. 1–3. 63 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan (Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, 1975; New York: Vintage, 1977).

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Timothy Liu (Liu Ti Mo) is another Asian American homosexual poet who explores his sexual identity in his poetry A second-generation Chinese American, the author was born in 1965 in San Jose, California. After earning a B A from Brigham Young Universityand an M A from the University of Houston, he taught at the universities of Michigan and North Carolina, and presently teaches at William Paterson University and at Bennington College’s Writing Seminars.64 He lived in Hong Kong for two years as a Mormon missionary.65 Liu has written six collections of poetry. Of his multi-faceted hybrid identity, Liu says: My Asianness, my Mormon roots, my homosexuality, are but a part of my being and therefore but a part of my poetry. Therefore, in addition to those identities, there are countless others.66

In “Getting There,” Liu describes a scene of covert homosexual love in clear, understated imagery reminiscent of the poetry of William Carlos Williams.67 The speaker and his boyfriend, who carries a bunch of roses, ancient symbols of love, sit next to each other on a bus on their way home. Instead of a romantic love scene, we witness silent, secretive tokens of love: GETTING THERE

with a man who carries roses, a bundle of cut stems drying in his fist. No words exchanged,

64

See Anon., “Timothy Liu,” The Academy of American Poets, http://www.poets .org/poet.php/prmPID/114 (accessed 13 April 2010). 65 See Andrena Zawinski, “An Interview with Timothy Liu,” Poetry Magazine (September 1999), http://www.poetrymagazine.com/archives/1999/sept99/interview.htm (accessed 6 May 2008). 66 Andrena Zawinski, “An Interview with Timothy Liu.” 67 Richard Serrano has said that William Carlos Williams was a major influence on Liu. As an Imagist, he was influenced by translations of Chinese poetry, which leads to the point that Serrano detects Chinese elements in Liu’s work which he does not trace back to the latter’s Chinese ancestry, but to the influence of the sinophile Williams on Liu; Serrano, “Beyond the Length of an Average Penis,” 196. Chilla Bulbeck, interestingly, points out that China has the longest continuous recorded history of male homosexuality, dating as far back as 722 B C . She explains the decline in ancient homosexual practices in terms of an increase in moralistic and religious homophobia, also due to Western influences; Bulbeck, Re-Orienting Western Feminisms, 150.

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only looks that quickly volley back and forth, then seated side by side on thisPort Authority bus heading for Hoboken, knees touching.68

But suddenly, the poetic persona initiates conversation and asks his love how the roses are holding up. The latter replies by offering a rose to the speaker: “‘Something for your girlfriend’” (40, l. 8), he adds. Although the scene of the two men sitting next to each other on a bus is so innocent and unsuggestive, the man feels obliged to prove to the other passengers that he is not gay: he pretends not to know his partner at all and even suggests he has a girlfriend. This hurts the speaker, of course: immediately the rose, symbol of their love and precious relationship, wilts: “This single / long-stemmed beauty now starting to fall apart” (40, l. 8–9). At the beginning of the poem, the flowers are described as “a bundle of cut / stems drying in his fist.” The stems are already wilting, drying, dying, in the lover’s grasp. Naturally, persons carrying flowers hold them in their hands, but the emphasis on “fist” stresses the man’s tenseness and, to a certain extent, even brutality. As the bus ride continues, the two men soon reconnect with “the entire length / of our thighs pressing hard against each other” (40, ll. 11–12). The closer they get to their home, the more physical contact the men have; they are “getting there.” However, there is no further conversation: “we ride in silence the rest of the way home” (40, l. 13), The men are uncomfortable about displaying their homosexuality in public and resort to silence as camouflage. Silence in the context of American society is associated with oppression through racism or heterosexism. It is at the same time a general form of resistance to patriarchal logocentrism.69 The men’s silence is not a refusal to use any of the majority American or Asian American codes. They have their own code of movements (legs touching, quick glances), which is their means of articulation. Considering the fact that the author is Asian American, one must note that in several Asian cultures, silence does not equal victimization or weakness, but is an acknowledged form of tacit communication.70

68

Timothy Liu, “Getting There,” in Of Thee I Sing (Athens: U of Georgia P , 2004):

40, ll. 1–5 (including the title). 69 70

See T. Minh–ha Trinh, Woman, Native, Other, 83. See Maria Dürig, Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster, 205.

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However, the speaker does not seem to enjoy their code. He is disappointed by his boyfriend’s behavior and would like to talk to his partner on his way home, as suggested by his initiative in striking up a conversation. Although the persona does not talk about being gay, he breaks the silence forced on many homosexuals. Breaking the silence about his homosexuality can mean becoming the target of discrimination and stereotyping, but he accepts this danger. Speaking out about oneself, one’s feelings, one’s sexual olrientation is also an act of self-assurance and self-confidence. In order to avoid discrimination, numerous homosexuals, even today, stay ‘in the closet’ and pass as heterosexual. “Getting There” is one poem by Timothy Liu that refers to homosexuality openly. In others he reflects on his Asian American ethnicity or religious convictions. All of his identity-positions, not just his cultural hybridity, influence his poetry. As is the case with Brenda Shaughnessy, these positions do not all appear in one particular poem at the same time. Stereotypes against Asian Americans, parametric in Asian American subjectivity, have a prominent position in Bryan Thao Worra’s electronic chapbook Monstro (2006). Worra is a Laotian American poet who was born in Laos in 1973 and lives in St Paul, Minnesota. In his Monstro poems, the author traces fears, most prominent the immigrant’s fear of being an Other, the fear of not belonging in the land you consider your home, and the fear of being revisited by horrific war memories. In “Surprises in America,” the speaker describes surprising incidents, such as when he found out that Hitler and Hess were vegetarians and that the Soldier of Fortune magazine, which introduced “participatory journalism,” as it proclaims on its homepage, offered a reward for the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. The poetic persona is surprised that the U S A is not always the “good guys.”71 The biggest surprise for him, however, is that people doubt he is American although he has lived in the U S A all his life: It struck me by surprise that many people didn’t believe I was an American When I had lived here all my life. (Except for that two-day trip to Toronto.)

71

Bryan Thao Worra, “Surprises in America,” in Monstro: Poems from 1991–2006, E-Chapbook, http://members.aol.com/thaoworra/monstro.pdf (accessed 27 May 2007): 21.

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If they had told me instead that my mother had died, I don’t think I would have been as surprised.72

Being considered a foreigner forever is, with calm irony, relativized against the greatest possible personal loss. Storytelling and national or ethnic myths are also identity-shaping, insofar as they transport certain values and behavioral patterns. Several European American myths and legends are alluded to in contemporary Asian American poetry; most prominent among them being that of the American Dream, the theme of coming to the U S A and making it through hard work. Chitra Divakaruni writes in her poem “Indian Movie, New Jersey” about an Indian American home where several people watch an Indian movie that celebrates sacrifice, success, and luck. The film celebrates “the America that was supposed to be,”73 as the speaker observes in disillusionment about the American Dream and immigrants’ hopes. In an interview with me, the poet states her emphasis on the contradiction between the American Dream and the real lives and actual experiences of immigrants: The poems in Leaving Yuba City are very concerned with that whole myth which drives the immigrant to America and then even further West to California. Obviously like all myths, it’s a faulty myth and when you come here you’re bound to be disappointed. That is the nature of any myth or any dream. So I am very concerned in many of my poems about what is the reality of the life of the immigrant.

In “Chinese Girl in the Mirror,” Priscilla Lee also explores the American dream when a young Asian American woman sees herself through other people’s reactions to her. Lee, born in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1966, is second-generation Chinese American; with a B A from Berkeley, she works as a technical writer and lives in San Francisco.74 The Chinese girl in the mirror is not called a Chinese American despite the fact that she lives in the U S A . Although she is hard-working (she is a student and works in a store) and in contact with mainstream American society, the American Dream remains an illusion for her. Just as the title suggests, the other, white people 72

Worra, “Surprises in America,” 21. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, “Indian Movie, New Jersey,” in Leaving Yuba City (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1997): 114. 74 Priscilla Lee provided this information for me (email, 8 May 2008). 73

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featured in the poem portray her as foreign, different, and alien. The perception of her identity starts with her English-class teacher, who patronizingly damns her with faint praise: “[…] distinctly Asian voice in your writing – it’s really quite pleasant; maybe you should write about the crosscultural experience.”75

In a store, a fellow employee refers to her as “the short Oriental girl,”76 and at lunch, her best friend makes fun of Chinese food. Then a man called David wonders about her physical otherness and she bitterly and ironically explains that her front teeth are for the purpose of chewing bamboo shoots and eating bark off trees.77

Another man, Jack, even asks the young woman whether her family would move back to China if the communists were overthrown. Her reaction: she informs this simple-minded person that her family might actually have been in America longer than his, doing more for the nation more than his, since her great grandfather helped build the railroads. Despite her family’s contribution to the country, he claims to be part of America, whereas she, for him, is not. The poetic persona asks what his family ever did to cause this. The poet leaves out the answer, but the reader will know that the reason why the Chinese American girl in the mirror of her white environment is perceived as less American than Jack is her racially marked body. Asian Americans may attempt to live out the American Dream, but many minority Americans will experience the limits of this dream in the form of their surface appearance. Other majority American or European myths which are visible in contemporary Asian American poetry and contribute to Asian American identity are ancient legends and tales. The fairy-tales of the brothers Grimm resonate in

75

Priscilla Lee, “Chinese Girl in the Mirror,” in Wishbone (Berkeley: Heyday,

2000): 31, ll. 2–3. 76 77

“Chinese Girl in the Mirror,” 31, l. 12. “Chinese Girl in the Mirror,” 32, ll. 39–41.

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several poems, such as Kimiko Hahn’s “Charming Lines,”78 in which she retells the following stories in seven sections: “Hansel and Gretel,” “Rapunzel,” “Little Red Riding-Hood,” “The Girl without Hands,” “Snow White,” “Cinderella,” and “The Shoes That Were Danced to Pieces.” Recurring in each section is the melodic line “As she twirls around her skirt swirls up,” and the color pink features prominently. This sets a joyful tone that paradoxically highlights the action of the folk-tales, which are “exceptionally crude and grisly.”79 François Luong locates Hahn in a culturally hybrid position, between Japanese literature and the European folk tradition. 80 Srikanth Reddy takes the Grimms’ “The Valiant Little Tailor (Or Seven at One Blow)” as a starting point for his poem “Corruption (II).” Reddy, born in 1973 to Indian immigrants, was educated at Harvard and the University of Iowa, and is poet-in-residence at the University of Chicago. “Corruption (II)” closes his first collection of poems and is the companion-piece to “Corruption,” the second poem of that volume. In the latter, Reddy goes back to the origins of culture and the world. Its culturally hybrid starting point is expressed in a psalm written in India ink. The title of these poem is a ‘corruption’ of the otherwise factual poems in Facts for Visitors, which present observations such as “No matter how often you knock / on the ocean the ocean / just waves.”81 The ‘corruption’ poems, by contrast, are fantastically imaginative. “Corruption (II)” starts with the bird a little tailor releases in order to win a throwing contest with a giant: In one of Grimms’ stories, a little tailor defeats a giant in a throwing contest by lofting a bird in the air. Happily ever after arrives, but the bird never lands. She flies straight out of the tale.82 78

Kimiko Hahn, “Charming Lines,” in The Artist’s Daughter (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002): 41–43. 79 Harold Schechter, Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment (New York: St Martin’s, 2005): 11. 80 François Luong, “At the Intersection of Murasaki Shikibu and Rapunzel: The Poet Kimiko Hahn,” eBao (2005), http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2006_01_01_archive .html (accessed 10 January 2008). Murasaki Shikibu (ca. 978-1026) was the author of The Tale of Genji, generally considered the world’s first novel. 81 Srikanth Reddy, “Hotel Lullaby,” in Facts for Visitors (Berkeley: U of California P , 2004): 9, ll. 1–3. 82 Srikanth Reddy, “Corruption (II),” in Facts for Visitors (Berkeley: U of California P , 2004): 58, l.3.

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Like the animal who leaves the nineteenth-century tale, a rocket is launched and flies to the nearest solar system forty thousand light-years away, bearing recordings of present-day civilization and nature. The poem points to the future, but ends with a musing on the word “here.” “Here might be enough,”83 the speaker suggests, bringing the reader ‘down to earth’, to the present and home. There are several poems by Asian American authors based on Asian folktales, such as “The Storyteller”84 by Janice Mirikitani (a third-generation Japanese American born in 1941, and a well-known poet and political activist85), in which she discusses partnership in terms of the well-known Japanese story “A Crane’s Gift.”86 Kimiko Hahn starts her first collection of poetry, Air Pocket, with the poem “When You Leave,” in which she describes the separation of young Momotaro, the hero of the Japanese folk tale “Peach Boy,” from his foster mother.87 He is a teenage rebel, and wants “to leave all thoughts of peach behind him,” but his mother is the origin of his strength and power, “she, the one who opened the color forever.”88 A few Asian American poems, such as Monica Ferrell’s “Persephone,” relate to myths from European antiquity. The mixed-race poet Ferrell, born in 1975 in India, holds a B A from Harvard College and an M F A from Columbia, and lives in Brooklyn, New York. In “Persephone,” she gives voice to the 83

Reddy, “Corruption (II),” 58, ll. 10–11. Janice Mirikitani, “The Storyteller,” in Love Works (San Francisco: City Lights Foundation, 2001): 70–71. 85 Tamiko Nimura, “Janice Mirikitani (1941– ),” in Asian American Poets: A BioBibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Guiyou Huang (Westport C T : Greenwood, 2002): 233–35. 86 A young Japanese man saves a crane’s life. This crane turns into a beautiful woman who comes to live with the ignorant man. By night, she secretly turns back into a crane and weaves her feathers into most beautiful silk fabric in a shed. The farmer sells the silk, but, wondering how the woman produces it, surprises her in the shed – but sees the crane he once rescued, who then has to leave the man. See Keisuke Nishimoto, Japanese Fairy Tales (Torrance C A : Heian, 1999), vol. 1: 26–31. 87 A childless old Japanese couple finds a big peach. The woman cuts the fruit in half and out comes a little boy, whom they name Momotaro. He gets strong and sets out to find a treasure, which he does, and then returns to his parents. 88 Kimiko Hahn, “When You Leave,” in Air Pocket (New York: Hanging Loose, 1989): 11, ll. 16 and 18. 84

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daughter of Demeter and Zeus. Persephone talks to her mother, explaining how her life in the underworld is different from her mother’s: Mother, I love you. But with the dead we drink differently, holding the cup in the left hand, pouring the wine this way into our mouths. Please understand. What we do not say, I still mean; the sound of purple drowns those other words out.89

She wants her mother to understand her existence in a world of shadow and asks “Now do you see?”90 The flexible recourse to, and interplay between, both European and Asian myth and legend creates a liminal or hybrid space where all references are at home at the same time, however different and separate they may be beyond this ethnically hybrid community. The poet Bryan Thao Worra is a perfect example. As mentioned above, he refers to European myths and also discusses Asian ghosts,91 the Japanese mythical figure of the Oni, an ogre-demon,92 the Thai ghost Nang Nak,93 and Japanese monsters like the overdimensional moth モスラ, transliterated as Mothra or Mosura,94 and the three-headed Ghidrah.95 In a hybrid trope, Worra even compares Ghidrah to Cerberus, the threeheaded dog of Greek mythology: A monstrous mercenary Of vermiform glory Savage as Cerberus. (10, ll. 10–12)

To the Asian and European cultural dimensions the poet adds American culture in the form of fierce “Topeka lightning”; this culturally hybrid crea89

Monica Ferrell, “Persephone,” in Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, ed. Victoria Chang (Champaign: U of Illinois P , 2004): 61, ll. 1–6; italics in original. 90 “Persephone,” 61, l. 27. 91 Bryan Thao Worra, “A Discussion of Monsters,” in Monstro: Poems from 1991– 2006, E-Chapbook, http://members.aol.com/thaoworra/monstro.pdf (accessed 27 May 2007): 14. 92 Worra, “Oni,” in Monstro, 18. 93 Worra, “The Ghost Nang Nak,” in Monstro, 19. 94 Worra, “Mothra,” in Monstro, 8. 95 Worra, “Ghidrah,” in Monstro, 10.

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ture made up of so many different monsters possesses such power that “only a nightmare of our own making / Can bring your defeat” (10, l. 9, ll. 17–18). In Monstro, Worra features additional ethnicities when referring to “chipped Egyptian colossi” in “Temporary Passages”96 and when speaking of Lady Xoc, an ancient Maya queen, linking her famous act of drawing a barbed rope through her tongue to present-day America’s first ladies and the Gordian knot.97 He also refers to figures central to Jewish legend.98 Monica Youn, a second-generation Korean American born in 1971, also alludes to various cultural and ethnic realms in her collection Barter (2003). In “Naglfar,” she describes a woman, about to die, compulsively cutting her fingernails “to prevent the end of the world.”99 In Norse mythology, Naglfar is a ship made in the underworld of the fingernails of the dead. It will be launched upon completion, which will initiate Ragnarök, the Doom of the Gods, and the end of the cosmos. The speaker hopes that, by cutting off her nails, she can prevent the completion of this boat. Youn explains this myth in a note to the poem. Scholars have speculated that the building material for Naglfar comes from “each person who is left unburied, or is put into his grave without being […] washed, combed, cleaned.”100 Although the speaker is excluded from her community (she will not be buried or her corpse will not be tended), she worries about the people she leaves behind. By cutting her nails, she is protecting the community that rejected her, thus triumphing over her own marginalization. Youn also tells of Korean people who have sacrificed themselves. In the poem “103 Korean Martyrs,” the speaker watches a movie about the 103 people who were victims of religious persecution in nineteenth-century Korea and are memorialized in the Korean American Catholic community. These martyrs were canonized by the Catholic Church in 1984.101 The poetic per-

96

Worra, “Temporary Passages,” in Monstro, 31, l. 2. Worra, “Lady Xoc,” in Monstro, 27. 98 Worra, “Golem,” in Monstro, 16. 99 Monica Youn, “Naglfar,” in Barter (St Paul M N : Graywolf, 2003): 67, l. 14. 100 Viktor Rydberg & Rasmus B. Andreson, Teutonic Mythology (Whitefish M T : Kessinger, 2004): 379. 101 Ferdinand Holboeck, New Saints and Blesseds of the Catholic Church, vol. 2 (Ft. Collins C O : Ignatius P , 2003): 279. 97

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sona would have rather stayed outside, where “the moon ringed / in rose,”102 and is disgusted by what she sees: a girl pushed through a doorway, naked among the soldiers: she grew a dress to cover herself, a blue dress with a blinding sash.103

Youn addresses Catholic mythology in several of her poems, as in the ekphrastic “Titian’s Salome.”104 She takes inspiration from several cultural realms, expressing in the narratives of her poems the cultural hybridity of her subjectivity. Subjectivity includes both self and others. The self, an infinitely layered entity, exists in connection to the family, the ethnic community, the nation one lives in, and the region one’s ancestors or oneself come(s) from. The body as site of the self and interlocutor to the environment features prominently position, as does sexuality. The cultural or ethnic myths and stories that shape values and behavioral patterns play an additional role in who we are. The characteristic of Asian American subjectivity is that its subcategories are situated in and between the Asian, the European American, and the Asian American cultural spheres. This cultural hybridity is visible on the narrative level of contemporary Asian American poetry, as the discussion of the poems above has shown.

Political Positionings Contemporary Asian American poetry not only discusses a person’s own subjectivity, but also reaches out to other subjects and political positions. Like identity-related poetry, political verse – national and transnational concerns such as war, Third-World politics, and feminism – is enmeshed in the culturally hybrid lives of its authors. American participation in wars in Asia is often a topic of contemporary Asian American poetry. The countries affected include Japan (World War Two, active American participation from 1941 to 1945), Korea (Korean War, 102

Monica Youn, “103 Korean Martyrs,” in Barter (St Paul M N : Graywolf, 2003):

65, ll. 3–4. 103 104

Youn, “103 Korean Martyrs,” 65, ll. 17–20. Monica Youn, “Titian’s Salome,” in Barter (St Paul M N : Graywolf, 2003): 15.

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1950–53), and Vietnam (known as the Vietnam War in America and as the American War in Vietnam, 1961–75). ‘Superior’ America supposedly came to Asian nations to ‘empower justice and freedom’ and do away with ‘evil regimes’. The Asian enemies, both countries and individual people, were considered exotic, alien, treacherous, and inferior, a view that also affected the Asian American population in the U S A , who were made guilty by association, their Americanness and loyalty put into question. The most extreme effect of a U S war in Asia on the Asian American population was the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. Kimiko Hahn treats the dropping of the first atomic bomb by America on Hiroshima in her poem “The Bath: August 6, 1945.” The speaker is taking a relaxing bath when the bomb detonates: “a hand that tore the door open / pushed me on the floor / ripped me up.”105 Although it would be easy “to write it off as history” (46, l. 44), the speaker is haunted by this experience to this day. Her personal fate is part of the historic event, and just as her life continues to the present, the history of violence persists: And it would be gratifying to be called a survivor I am a survivor since I live […] if I didn’t feel the same oppressive August heat auto parts in South Africa, Mexico, Alabama. (46, ll. 62–71)

The poetic persona avers: “I will to live / in spite of history / to make history” (47, ll. 79–81). The poem was written in New York on 12 June 1982, as a note at the end of the poem points out. On this day, 750,000 anti-nuclear demonstrators rallied in Central Park, on the occasion of the U N Disarmament Conference in support of the Nuclear Freeze Movement. The poetic persona seems to speak to these political activists at the end of the poem: I bring these words to you hoping to hold you to hold you and to take hold. (47, ll. 87–90) 105

Kimiko Hahn, “The Bath: August 6, 1945,” in Air Pocket (New York: Hanging Loose, 1989): 45, ll. 34–36.

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The speaker at once holds the audience through her survival and activism, and wants to be held by them through their support and comfort. The poem bridges past and present, connecting a victim of war with anti-war demonstrators. The Second World War affected not only the Japanese American population but also all Asian Americans. Often, white Americans could not tell the difference between the various sub-ethnicities. This led to attempts to define the difference between Chinese (i.e. Chinese Americans), war allies, and Japanese (i.e. Japanese Americans) war enemies (for example in “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese,” a Life Magazine article from December 1941). Chinese Americans wanted to make sure everybody knew they were Chinese, as Nellie Wong (born in Oakland, California in 1934, and a graduate of San Francisco State University) describes in her poem “Can’t Tell.” In “Can’t Tell,” a Chinese American family witnesses the beginning of World War Two. They hear of it on the radio, and instantly “glued our ears, widened our eyes.”106 They are afraid of what will happen to them now, their bodies shivering: Will all Asian Americans now be the target of racial hatred, or just the Japanese Americans? The children, “huddled on wooden planks” (270, l. 15), repeatedly whisper “We are Chinese, we are Chinese” in order to avoid confusion with Japanese Americans: Shortly our Japanese neighbors vanished and my parents continued to whisper: We are Chinese, we are Chinese. We wore black arm bands, put up a sign in bold letters. (270, ll. 20–25)

This is an account of how many Chinese Americans at the time resorted to identifying their national origin with buttons and armbands in order to avoid anti-Japanese discrimination.107 The family does not openly proclaim their Chineseness. The only firm voice in Wong’s poem is that of the authoritative American radio speaker 106

Nellie Wong, “Can’t Tell,” in The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America, ed. Garrett Hongo (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1993): 270, l. 3. 107 See Elena Tajima Creef, Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body (New York: New York U P , 2004): 147.

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who announces Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s participation in the Second World War. Why is it that they do not identify their ethnicity in a loud and clear voice? They do not have a language problem, because they are able to whisper that they are Chinese. They do not feel that they have the authority to claim protection as war allies. In addition, they do not think that the white Americans would believe their word or listen to them. Chinese Americans have been discriminated against ever since the first immigrants came to the nation, and the family once again fears racist acts against them. The Korean War is also a topic in contemporary Asian American poetry, such as that of Walter K. Lew, a second-generation Korean American born in Baltimore in 1955, who is active as a poet, editor, translator, and literary scholar. His first collection Treadwinds: Poems and Intermedia Works, appeared in 2002. He is the editor of Premonitions, an anthology of innovative Asian American poetry, and Muae, a journal of transcultural production. “Leaving Seoul: 1953” features a family who emigrates from Korea to America. The leave-taking is intensified by the son and his mother burying her family’s urns at the Korean airport just before flying off. They tried to leave them in a back room, Decoyed by a gas lamp, and run out But they landed behind us here.108

They wanted to leave the urns in their house, but could not do so, for fear of what would happen to them in the family’s absence. The speaker does not tell us why they wanted to leave the urns in their home: were they too bulky to take along in the airplane? Did they want to leave the ancestors in their home country? Were there regulations against bringing urns into the U S A ? Before boarding the airplane, the mother buries the urns next to the landing strip so that her ancestors may rest in peace. When the son criticizes his mother for her clumsiness in the burial, she replies: “Get out, she says Go to your father; he too / Does not realize what is happening.”109 The upset mother blames the men for not understanding what

108

Walter K. Lew, “Leaving Seoul: 1953,” in Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Poets, ed. Joseph Bruchac (Greenfield Center N Y : Greenfield Review Press, 1983): 152, ll. 2–4. 109 Lew, “Leaving Seoul: 1953,” 152, ll. 14–15; emphasis in original.

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their parting from Korea and their ancestors means. The father waits for the airplane in a discarded U S Army Overcoat. He has lost his hat, lost His father, and is smoking Luckys like crazy.110

The father focuses on his ‘lucky’ future in America, symbolized by his chainsmoking of American cigarettes and his Army coat. It is only decades later, the poem reveals, that the son is able to understand the significance of this parting scene. The Vietnam conflict was the first war that the U S A lost, and it was the first television war that transformed American citizens back home into observers, into medial “veterans.”111 About 58,000 Americans died and over two million Vietnamese were killed or wounded. David Mura discusses the Vietnam War in his poem “Lan Nguyen: The Uniform of Death 1971.” Mura was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1952; the third-generation Japanese-American poet holds a B A from Grinnell College and an M F A in creative writing (1991) from Vermont College. Among his many honors are two National Endowment for the Arts grants and a P E N Award.112 He has written three books of poetry: After We Lost Our Way (1989), which won the National Poetry Series Contest, The Colors of Desire (1995), awarded the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, and, most recently, Angels for the Burning (2004). Mura also gained recognition with his two memoirs, Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei (1991) and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality and Identity (1996). In “Lan Nguyen: The Uniform of Death 1971,” Mura describes the atrocities of the Vietnam War. The poetic persona, a Vietnamese guerrilla fighter named Lan Nguyen, wonders: “Where is the man’s face I dragged to the fire?

110

“Leaving Seoul: 1953,” 152, ll. 16–18. Philip D. Beidler, “Vietnam,” in A Companion to American Thought, ed. Richard Wightman Fox & James T. Kloppenberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998): 705. 112 See Eileen Tabios, Black Lightning: Poetry-in-Progress (New York: Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 1998): 333; see also Roy Osamu Kamada, “David Mura (1952– ),” in Asian American Poets: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Guiyou Huang (Westport C T : Greenwood, 2002): 243–51. 111

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/ Through the screams, I saw skin bubble and blacken.”113 Mura does not explore the conflict from the American point of view but from that of the Vietnamese. American soldiers are described as “heads breathing, / humming […] a foreign tongue” (202, ll. 10–11). In the poem, nature and soldiers fuse. The carcass of a dog is eaten by flies and worms as well as by the speaker. His face, reflected in the river, looks “twisted, mottled green, / a mongo rotted eight days in the jungle’s oven” (202, ll. 17–18). This blending of nature and soldier culminates in the line “Flares, fireflies, flares, fireflies” (202, l. 37), which imitates the sound of an approaching helicopter. Mura rounds off the parallel between nature and humans by emphasizing the difference between cricket and man: If you cut its legs, a cricket, since it sings from its legs, just rocks, silent on its belly; but tear each limb from his sockets, a man still sings out with a burst of his lungs. (202, ll. 38–42)

The speaker kills many people – in his words, he “mark[s] men unfit for life” (203, l. 56). At the end of the poem he realizes his fate. just like the other people involved in the war, he will get killed. “Who will call me from life,” he asks, “Who wears the uniform of death?” (203, ll. 58 and 60). This levelling, all-reducing uniform of death will be American. Who is this American soldier who will kill him? This soldier is not just personally unknown to him, but the whole army is from a foreign country, intruders speaking a different language. While the Vietnamese warrior is identified as Lan Nguyen by appearance and behavior, the American soldiers are faceless beings who are not seen but heard, moving as a row of “a hundred heads” (202, l. 8). Mura criticizes American policy in Vietnam and creates sympathy for the Vietnamese warrior about to be killed by an American soldier. The Hmong American poet Kao Kalia Yang is concerned with the Vietnam War from the Hmong perspective. Many Hmong collaborated with the American military and were killed as traitors or in combat. In fact, the Communist Laotian government committed genocide among the Hmong also after 113

David Mura, “Lan Nguyen: The Uniform of Death 1971,” in Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Poets, ed. Joseph Bruchac (Greenfield Center N Y : Greenfield Review Press, 1983): 202, ll. 20–21. Further references are in the main text.

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1975, the year in which the war ended for the U S A . “A child that would be born in the safety of the refugee camps of Thailand, I would not know those they [her family] speak of. But […] I feel I know,” Yang explains.114 In “Digging Up the Dead,” she describes the death and burial of Hmong people in the Vietnam War and in Thai refugee camps. During the war, the persecuted Hmong fled to the jungle, where “there was no time for burials”: Our bodies fell among the dead leaves and the weak tree limbs.115

Those who died in the Thai refugee camps, the poem reveals, are no better off; their final rest is interrupted when their bodies are exhumed for fear of water pollution. As the voice movingly recounts, the bitter taste of broken lives, opened up to the sun, drying, dying all over again.116

Yang is not afraid to spell out who is to blame: “refugees from the Vietnam War; / fought because of America’s cause.”117 The poet refuses to have the victims of the Vietnam War be foreign, detached faces, instead ensuring that these are suffering bodies rent by the atrocities of the war, and implicitly condemning America’s intervention in the political fate of Vietnam and the whole region. Contemporary Asian American poems concerned with American military action in Asia do not explicitly align with Asia or turn their back on the U S A when criticizing these wars. Rather, they critique America in terms of humanity and ethics, as do Kimiko Hahn and Walter Lew. David Mura expresses disapproval of American neocolonialism and military intervention in zones beyond its ‘concern’. Kao Kalia Yang reminds us that a war does not end with the signing of a treaty but continues for the people who live in the region of 114

Kao Kalia Yang, “To the Men in My Family Who Love Chickens,” http://www .lanternbooks.com/blog/entry.php?id=169 (accessed 27 May 2008). 115 Kao Kalia Yang, “Digging Up the Dead,” in Yellow as Turmeric, Fragrant as Cloves: An Anthology of Asian American Female Poets, ed. Anne Marie Fowler & Sholeh Wolpé (O’Fallon I L : Deep Bowl, 2008): 217, ll. 9–11. 116 “Digging Up the Dead,” 218, ll. 37–40. 117 “Digging Up the Dead,” 217, ll. 7–8.

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war. They have to rebuild their destroyed home country or, as is the case with the Hmong Vietnamese, become refugees. Some Asian American poets discuss conflicts in Asian countries without implicating the U S A at all. Meena Alexander is a case in point. In her poem “In Naroda Patiya,” she describes a particularly cruel incident, a Hindu attack on a Muslim community in Gujarat State, India, in February 2002. Three rioters killed a pregnant woman, cut open her womb, and held the fetus up for display. Alexander comments on the paralyzing atrocity of this deed: No cries were heard in the city. Even the sparrows by the temple gate swallowed their song.118

Alexander, born in Allahabad, India, on 17 February 1951 and a resident of New York City,119 does not comment on the crime from a national or religious point of view, but considers it from a neutral, human perspective. This is a murder of specifically cruel proportion, silencing not only the attacking mob and its victims, whose cries cease, but also nature: even the witnessing birds are shocked. 

Politically outspoken contemporary Asian American poetry also engages in feminist concerns, be they of national or transnational dimensions. Barbara Tran is one such articulator of feminist concerns. A second-generation Vietnamese American, Tran was born in New York City in 1968; she received her B A from New York University and her M F A from Columbia, and lives in Vermont and Virginia.120 She is co-editor of the anthology Watermark: Viet118

Meena Alexander, “In Naroda Patiya,” in Raw Silk (Evanston I L : Northwestern

U P , 2004): 75, ll. 12–17. 119

See Purvi Shah, “Meena Alexander (1951– ),” in Asian American Poets: A BioBibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Guiyou Huang (Westport C T : Greenwood, 2002): 21. 120 See Barbara Tran’s homepage at http://www.betasquared.net/barbaratran/bio .html (accessed 26 March 2010).

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namese American Poetry and Prose (1998) and recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Gerald Freund Fellowship. Her debut poetry collection, In the Mynah Bird’s Own Words (2002), was a finalist for the P E N Open Book Award. Tran has three sisters and three brothers, but she is the only child in her family who was not taught Vietnamese: “The family came over during the 1960s without knowing they were leaving forever. And as the years rolled by they spoke less and less of Vietnam.” Tran’s poetry is, to her, “a means of creating this place in time I never experienced.” Her father, a member of the South Vietnamese mission to the United Nations in New York, sent for his family in 1967 because of the Vietnam War. Her mother Marie opened one of the first Vietnamese restaurants in New York City, the “Cuisine de Saigon,” and was head chef there.121 In “Rosary,” Tran traces the life of Marie, the speaker’s mother. The poem is partly autobiographical, the parallels being the mother’s first name, her seven children, her emigration from Vietnam to the U S A , and her job as a chef in America. The poem starts with a question: Should the speaker begin in the present or does the story start with the first time my mother took the wheel – the first woman to drive.122

Something that stresses the courage and resoluteness of the mother is this fact of her being a pioneer driver in Vietnam. In a subsection of the poem called “Heat,” the speaker describes her mother in the present, at age sixty-seven. While cooking at the stove, she remembers her past life. She imagines standing by the sea, watching her father’s employees at work. The heat refers not only to the heat in the kitchen, but also to the sexual tension between the male and female workers. The mother’s father is worried about his fourteen-year-old daughter’s sexual

121

Details in this paragraph from Anon., “First, Second Generation Immigrant Poets Make Their Voices Heard,” http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/a-13-2005-0502-voa45-67528287.html?CFTOKEN=95848534&CFID=17276646 (accessed 26 March 2010). 122 Barbara Tran, “Rosary,” in Ploughshares 23.1 (Spring 1997): 187–94, http: //www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmarticleID=4244 (accessed 10 March 2008).

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awakening. She dreams of flying, birds, wind, and freedom, but he associates her with pure whiteness and spotlessness: “Her father thinks she will like the / seagull with the pure white underside.” While the girl is worried about earning money to make up for what her father spends on opium, the father is obsessed with losing his daughter: with each breath, his daughter grows more impossibly beautiful. He knows he will not be able to keep her long. (“Downpour”)

The father wants to possess his daughter and “keep her for / himself.” For years, he tried to keep her hands from coming in contact with anything but the food she ate and the money she counted. (“Prayer”)

The patriarch wants to control the girl’s sexuality and keep her as his trustworthy worker. In the subsection “Safe,” the speaker describes how her mother sends money to a young man whose sisters would like Marie to marry their brother because of her father’s wealth. The young man, however, is a gambler and wastrel who has got many young women pregnant. In this scene of the poem, it is the women, not the men, who are powerful. Marie’s father is rich, which is why the sisters aim at marriage. However, they do not attempt to influence the father, but the daughter. And they will not report back to their own father or brother, but “will tell / their mother.” The brother does not seem to have a say in the marriage plan. In his financial crisis, he would certainly be happy to have a wealthy female supporter. The subsection “Faith” refers to more than Marie’s belief in God and her emphasis on prayer and fasting. While in church, the young woman notices other couple’s secret tokens of love, “the stolen / glances, the passing of prayer books, the spreading of goose bumps.” Marie wears Easter lilies in her hair in remembrance of Jesus, which is how she attracts her future husband’s attention. Faith also relates to Marie’s father’s repeated belief that “he could keep my mother [Marie] by / his side.” This wish turns out to be an illusion when the young man and woman marry and Marie leaves her father, who

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wonders “how this happened” (“Prayer”). Nevertheless, the father gives his daughter a bar of gold and they part on good terms. In the subsection “Hope,” the speaker reveals how the love between her parents vanishes after their first year of marriage and is replaced by duty and responsibility. Love remains, however, between Marie and God. The marriage is violent; she withdraws from her husband, hoping he will not demand sexual intercourse with her. She uses the rosary she received from her own mother “to ward her own husband away, as if / after seven children, he might somehow stop.” Still living in Saigon, her husband starts to cheat on her. In the U S A , the man leaves her, taking the two oldest children with him; “my mother still has four” (“Balance”), the speaker assures, as if this evened out the now separate groups of the family. Despite Marie’s otherwise independent way of living and cooking, the speaker notes critically, she holds on to “her determination to keep / my father. With this, she was painfully methodical” (“Measure”). The couple has an additional child, the speaker, who is born after the father’s illegitimate child. Consequently, had her mother not been so “irrational” about continuing her marriage with the speaker’s father, the speaker would not have been born. She owes her existence to her mother’s persistence and Catholic belief in eternal marriage. The speaker, who was born and raised in America, does not understand her mother and considers her as passive. This judgment, however, disregards Marie’s immigrant identity: in addition to typical family tensions, she also struggles with Asian values like obedience, familial interest, fatalism, and self-control.123 The children, all but one born in Vietnam, profit from the freedoms of America, “with all its independence and / escalators, its planes, trains, and fast ways of getting away” (“Measure”). However, they do not behave in the way their mother would want them to; a daughter wears red lingerie, a son indulges in beer-drinking, whereas, when Marie was young, she counted her Hail Marys on her rosary, Now she counts them off on the heads of her seven children, counting herself as eight, 123

See Esther Ngan–Ling Chow, “The Feminist Movement: Where Are All the Asian American Women?” in From Different Shores: Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America, ed. Ronald Takaki (New York: Oxford U P , 2nd ed. 1994): 185–86.

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and her husband, as one and ten (“Rosary”)

And so the poem ends. The faith in God is not expressed in praying with the rosary anymore, but in praying through her family. The enumeration of the ten rosary beads is interesting. The man holds positions one and ten. For Marie, their family begins and ends with him. The six children who were born in Vietnam are numbers two to seven. Marie counts herself as eight, connected to her husband (number ten) through the speaker, who is, logically, number nine – number nine, child of marital sexual intercourse in the new home nation, connects mother and father. However, she also separates them, because her disapproval of her father’s behavior fuels the conflict between the parents. Women’s “freedom from oppression is based on an expansion and preservation of individual rights.”124 Likewise, Marie’s liberation from her father and the marriage with the men she chose is an example of feminist emancipation and expresses core feminist values. As Dionne Espinoza explains, the woman of color has moved from a positioning as an object of oppression to one as a subject who responds to oppression through multiple modes of resistant selfunderstanding.125

In this sense, the subject Marie becomes an agent and resists oppression by driving a car, leaving her possessive father, and actively shaping relationships in her own family. The title of the poem “Hearing” by Mei–mei Berssenbrugge does not suggest an active female speaker. Hearing, so it seems, is a passive process. But the author considers hearing to be “explicitly a feminine, if not feminist power.”126 In her view,

124

Chilla Bulbeck, Re-Orienting Western Feminisms, 16. Dionne Espinoza, “Women of Color and Identity Politics: Translating Theory, Haciendo Teoría,” in Other Sisterhoods: Literary Tradition and U .S. Women of Color, ed. Sandra Kumamoto Stanley (Urbana: U of Illinois P , 1998): 48. 126 Mei–mei Berssenbrugge & Charles Bernstein. “A Dialogue,” Conjunctions 35 (Fall 2000): 190–201, http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/berssenbrugge/bernstein.html (accessed 23 June 2008). 125

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‘hearing’ moves to the wider arena of compassion, transcendent and particular giving expressed by hearing, as a source of power. There’s a synapse between hearing a cry and understanding its meaning, a synapse where all fragments occur.127

Berssenbrugge thus understands hearing as active and powerful. Who is this poet who transcends everyday words like ‘hearing’ and adds completely new dimensions to limited concepts? Berssenbrugge was born in her mother’s native city of Beijing, China, in 1947. Her father was secondgeneration Dutch American. When Mei–mei was still very young, her parents moved from China to America, where the poet gained a B A from Reed College in 1969 and an M F A from Columbia in 1973. She lives in New Mexico and New York City with her husband, the sculptor Richard Tuttle, and their daughter. The postmodern and experimental author has written twelve books of poetry, most recently I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems (2006). Xiaoping Yen observes that Berssenbrugge – who is associated with the Language school – writes poetry which does not narrate cultural hybridity or ethnic identity, but instead “embraces philosophizing and a poetic structure of seemingly unrelated sentences.”128 Contrary to Yen, I argue that in these loose units, Berssenbrugge does, among other concerns, speak of feminist and ethnic issues. “Hearing,” which consists of four sections, is a case in point. Berssenbrugge starts her poem with what Yen calls a philosophizing and poetic structure. The initial phrase is “A voice with no one speaking, like the sea, merges with my listening, as if imagining her thinking about me / makes me real.”129 At first, the ontological undertones and cryptic image of a voice emerging through listening attract attention. Who is this other woman the speaker needs for self-confirmation? “Its matter is attributed to its passing away, a transcendence whose origin has come apart” (117, section 1), the poetic voice continues. The transcendental discourse of matter grounded on vanishing and origins that have dissolved adds confusion, it seems. But a reading of the whole of section one makes it clear that the speaker is a mother 127

Berssenbrugge & Bernstein, “A Dialogue.” Xiaoping Yen, “Mei–mei Berssenbrugge (1947– ),” in Asian American Poets: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Guiyou Huang (Westport C T : Greenwood, 2002): 46. 129 Mei–mei Berssenbrugge, “Hearing,” in I Love Artists (Berkeley: U of California P , 2006): 117, section 1. Further references are in the main text. 128

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watching over her girl child. She thinks about her daughter as confirmation of her own existence; her daughter “makes me real” (117, section 1). While the speaker values the act of hearing her child and interprets it as a bonding (“a community exposed”; 117, section 1), the child is unaware of being observed: “she can’t hear me hearing her” (117, section 1). The woman’s hearing, she concludes at the end of the section, is invisible yet absolutely necessary for the daughter. Moreover, the girl will pass on the mother’s love she experienced through the speaker’s listening to her own offspring: “Hearing: transparency arms arc over, glass nest for her young” (117, section 1; my emphasis). The merging voice described at the beginning of the poem is the poetic persona’s love as expressed through her listening. The image of a glass nest at the ending of section one smoothly hands over to section two, where birds play a prominent role. Their flight parallels children’s attempts to deal with life on their own. However, not all acts of independence are successful: A bird falls out of the air, through the anti-weave, into the anti-net, delineating anti-immanence. Twenty-four crows upstate, each fall is a gestural syllable. Cover them with a blue cloth of creatures ready to be born, contact like starlight that will arrive, for sure. Let mothers catch them, raccoon, Labrador bitch, girl, interspecies conservative mothers, arms out like foliage, no locomotion of their own. (118, section 2)

The seemingly passive mother does not move herself, yet she is able to catch her falling child due to her hearing the “birdcall,” as Berssenbrugge explains in section 3 (118–19). In this section, she uses the image of an airplane. The daughter’s urge to be independent and free gets stronger as she grows up, expressed by the switch from the bird metaphor to that of the airplane. At the airfield, the speaker observes her daughter “falling along a / stitched in-andout of my hearing it [her] call and its [her] ceasing to exist” (119, section 3). Landing in a different location from her mother, the young woman is prevented by the noises around her from registering her mother’s love. Thus the latter cannot constantly ‘hear’ her – i.e. give her emotional attention and protection. Ultimately, the mother fears losing her daughter, which to her equals the daughter’s “ceasing to exist” (119, section 3).

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In section 3, the poet explores the “empty space” between her and her daughter. Now, the younger woman exists as a memory only. The distance between mother and daughter is aligned at once with “the dignity of stars” and with “homelessness” and “health ruined by addiction” (119). Even in death, when “present and future shed perspective” (119), the speaker affirms that she will still hear her child: “her gaze, in / memory, on beloved children retained the physical latency of hearing them” (119). Euro-Americans, certainly, consider ‘speaking’ as a more active form of communication than ‘hearing’, which is the passively perception of sounds. ‘Hearing’ can also be compared to the more active ‘listening’, or concentrating on hearing someone. In contrast to listening, hearing lacks an active effort to perceive. Berssenbrugge, however, conveys that, for her and her poetic persona, hearing is an active process. She rejects conventional subject-positions and ideologies and valorizes her subjective perceptions as fully potent, thereby fulfilling what U S , Third-World-oriented feminism demands: a new subjectivity, a political revision that denies any one ideology as the final answer, while instead positing a tactical subjectivity with the capacity to recenter.130

In the context of Third-World feminism, there needs be a reflexive application of the notions of individual agency. The claim of feminists on the right to speak and on undoing eurocentrism is a reflection of the Euro-American occupation with the self. In Asian cultures, the community and society are also very prominent. Tibetan identity, for instance, “is located in family, class and lineage, and relationality rather than agency is valued.”131 Bulbeck also mentions Japanese identity, which she divides into three spheres: the self in relation to public and personal relationships; an inner self of real truth and emotions; and a boundless Buddhist self.132 Berssenbrugge, born in China to a Chinese mother, understands family as identity-shaping and as an agencymotivating unit; in “Hearing,” the mother is acting on her own will, although she relates her own identity to that of her daughter. 130

Chela Sandoval, “U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in a Postmodern World,” Genders 10 (Spring 1991): 14; emphasis in original. 131 Bulbeck, Re-Orienting Western Feminisms, 66. 132 Re-Orienting Western Feminisms, 66.

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In addition, what is considered in Euro-America as passive behavior does not equal passivity in Asian countries. Silence, for example, is not victimization or weakness in this context. In Japan, silence is an acknowledged form of communication.133 Similarly, the mother’s silent hearing is not a passive form of communication, but an active process of alert observation. Not only does Berssenbrugge emphasize the power of hearing, she also writes about it – women authors of color resist American cultural hegemony through words. They are “Word Warriors, breaking silence, becoming speaking subjects.”134 “‘Guerilla ethnography’” 135 is what Renae Moore Bredin calls texts by women of color and their “taking up the pen and writing the gun into a text.”136 This ‘guerrilla ethnography’ is writing which comes as a surprise attack on demarcation and categorization. “Guerilla ethnography is a strategic response to internal colonialism”137 which is a threat to stability and continuity. Adding dimensions to Euro-American concepts such as hearing is a kind of resistance to the hegemony of this culture. The poetic expansion of the concept of ‘hearing’ is a subtle linguistic and cross-cultural shorthand for ethnic resistance and feminist empowerment. Ethnic particularities and feminist tendencies do not necessarily point into the same direction. Susan Okin formulates a challenging question in this respect: What should be done when the claims of minority cultures or religions clash with the norm of gender equality that is at least formally endorsed by liberal states (however much they continue to violate it in their practice).138

Child marriage and polygamy are instances of conflicts between minority cultures, majority culture, and Euro-American feminists. Multiculturalism and

133

See Maria Dürig, Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster, 205. Renae Moore Bredin, “Theory in the Mirror,” in Other Sisterhoods: Literary Tradition and U.S. Women of Color, ed. Sandra Kumamoto Stanley (Urbana: U of Illinois P , 1998): 228. 135 Bredin, “Theory in the Mirror,” 229. 136 “Theory in the Mirror,” 228. 137 “Theory in the Mirror,” 241. 138 Susan Moller Okin, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” Boston Review 22.5 (1997), http://bostonreview.net/BR22.5/okin.html (accessed 12 September 2007). 134

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feminism are in conflict when it comes to family honor or the protection of the rights of women and children. Okin goes on to ask: When a woman from a more patriarchal culture comes to the United States (or some other Western, basically liberal, state), why should she be less protected from male violence than other women are?139

Homi Bhabha responds to Okin in “Liberalism’s Sacred Cow.”140 There he argues that minority groups are not shut off from from American progress. Minorities are a part of the nation. In his view, multiculturalism is not an enemy of feminism. He warns of an easy judgment from a Western point of view and reminds us that Westerners have also repressed and ill-treated women. Will Kymlicka, joining the discussion initiated by Okin, calls for protection of ethnics, including language rights, guaranteed political representation, funding of ethnic media, land claims, compensation for historical injustice, and regional devolution of power.141 At the same time, he emphasizes that no legal legitimacy should be granted to such intra-ethnic restrictions as the oppression of women and polygamy. Kimiko Hahn’s poem “Responding to Light” is an expression of feminist empowerment and intercultural collaboration. The title alludes to Luce Irigaray’s first name. Throughout the poem, the writer quotes from Irigaray’s “Le corps-à-corps avec la mère.”142 Irigaray, born in Belgium in 1932 and a student of Jacques Lacan, was the first to include the role of women in psychoanalytic discourse. In “Body against Body,” the feminist emphasizes autoeroticism and argues that the first body we relate to is female. Hence the first love of a woman is the love of another woman, the mother. In dialogue with a European feminist, Hahn builds a coalition among white women and women of color, thereby promoting a global framework within women’s studies and fostering alliances across national and cultural boundaries.

139

Okin, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?,” online document. Homi K. Bhabha, “Liberalism’s Sacred Cow,” Boston Review 22.5 (1997), http: //bostonreview.net/BR22.5/bhabha.html (accessed 12 September 2007). 141 Will Kymlicka, “Liberal Complacencies,” Boston Review 22.5 (1997), http: //bostonreview.net/BR22.5/kymlicka.html (accessed 12 September 2007). 142 Luce Irigaray, “Body against Body: In Relation to the Mother,” in Sexes and Genealogies, tr. Gillian C. Gill (Sexes et genres à travers les langues, 1990; New York: Columbia U P , 1993): 7–21. 140

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Mitsuye Yamada reminds us of the difficulties of collaboration between Asian American and Euro-American feminists, complaining about white feminists who think Asian American feminists need to explain themselves and their work: I am weary of starting from scratch each time I speak or write, as if there were no history behind us, of hearing that among the women of color, Asian women are the least political, or the least oppressed, or the most polite.143

She reminds white activists of their responsibility to inform themselves about the lives and history of Third-World women.144 The history of Indian women’s activism dates back to the early nineteenth century,145 for example. “My ethnicity cannot be separated from my feminism,”146 Yamada stresses, as do other Asian American feminists.147 bell hooks reveals that many feminists wrongly believe that “sexism can be abolished while racism remains intact, or that women who work to resist racism are not supporting the feminist movement.”148 Women of color are the subject of double oppression, as Gayatri Spivak explains: If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow.149

Esther Chow emphasizes the collaboration of feminists of color in this respect: “Asian American women must unite with other women of color.”150

143

Mitsuye Yamada, “Asian Pacific American Women and Feminism,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings of Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe L. Moraga & Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1981; Berkeley: Women of Color, 3rd ed. 2002): 74. 144 Yamada, “Asian Pacific American Women and Feminism,” 75. 145 See Bulbeck, Re-Orienting Western Feminisms, 24. 146 Yamada, “Asian Pacific American Women and Feminism,” 77. 147 For example, Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 74, and Trinh T. Minh–ha, Woman, Native, Other, 104. 148 bell hooks, Yearning, 59. 149 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), excerpt in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995): 28. 150 Esther Ngan–Ling Chow, “The Feminist Movement: Where Are All the Asian American Women?” 191.

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Hahn also reaches out to white feminists like Irigaray and applies their postulates to her speaker’s life. Hahn’s poem “Responding to Light” starts out with the following statement by Irigaray as the epigraph to section i: “‘Every desire has a relation to madness’.”151 The first section describes the desires of two girls: they long for the outside world and for chocolate, both of which their father withholds from them. The daughters look out of windows and imagine the sea from marine scenes painted by their father. They are described as “larger than desired” (77) (larger than desired by the father, that is) and are allowed to eat chocolate only once a year, tellingly finding the candy “stimulating and simulating / what cannot be said” (77). The father is the breadwinner (“father’s paycheck purchases the meat / the mother stews”; 77), controls speech (“no one is permitted to speak / over the five o’clock news”; “the silent daughters are silenced”; 77), and shields his daughters from the outside world (“no one / can see the television but the father”; 77). The girls’ desires relate to the patriarchal ‘madness’ of their father: Despite Hahn’s adversion to Irigaray’s “Body against Body: In Relation to the Mother,” it is the father who dominates the initial section. The mother is referred to only as transforming the meat her husband pays for into stew to nourish the family. Section ii opens with “... our society and our culture operate on the basis of an original matricide” (77; italics in original), also from Irigaray. The phrase “original matricide” refers to Irigaray’s argument that the mothers’ lives are killed off by men who keep them down. Consequently, Hahn’s first image in this part of the poem is the mother disappearing in the small house. When one of the daughters gets her period, a crucial phase of sexual maturation, her mother leaves her alone. Here the mainly third-person poem temporarily becomes a first-person account with the speaker judging: “I would not have left” (78). The daughters and their loveless parents are also criticized at the end of section ii, where “the interior of the house,” the family, is depressingly characterized as “a heart without blood. Veins without color” (78). In between these negatives, Hahn inserts a list of similar-sounding words: SOAR SORE

151

Kimiko Hahn, “Responding to Light,” in Mosquito and Ant (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999): 77; emphasis in original. Further page references are in the main text.

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SOEUR SOUR SUR S U R E . (78)

These conjure the growing sisters (‘soeur’ is French for ‘sister’), their pain (“sore” and “sour”), their tenacity and firm belief in themselves (“sure”), and their upward movement, which can be understood as positive development or as rising into the sky as symbolic of freedom (represented in the preposition “sur”). Through the mixing of English and French, the Asian American writer once again aligns herself with Irigaray. Section iii portrays the mother as sending her daughter around: “come here go away / or go away come here, / darling” (78; italics in original). Although the mother speaks in this scene, the epigraph reads “‘.. . the threatening womb. Threatening / because it is silent, perhaps?’” (78). The silence of the mother does not mean that she does not speak to her daughters, but that she has no say in the household. This makes her a negative role model, a threat to the growing girl. The mother’s silence is a threat to the husband as well, as he does not know what she thinks or plans to do. Section iv opens with the title of Irigaray’s article, “‘ .. . corps à corps’” (79). The bodies that touch are the those of the girls, but the latter are connected less as sisters than as daughters (“They were more daughters than sisters”; 79). Their roles as daughters to their father defines them more than does female bonding. Their lives center on food (“They peeled carrots”; 79), school (“They added and subtracted”; 79), and beauty (They traded blouses. / […] They trimmed each other’s hair and pierced their faces”; 79). Section v emphasizes the corporeal bonds between daughter, mother, and daughter’s children. The girl explores her genitals and masturbates, participating in her family’s female tradition: “if she tastes her taste / she is tasting her mother and daughter” (79). The final section, beginning “‘We barely ... have access to fiction’” (79), deals with the mother’s storytelling, which creates worlds in her daughters’ minds. The epigraph to this section permits the assumption that this happens rarely, however. The adult woman deems her stories of the sea unimportant, but the girls realize that her tales would become not only our stories but the granddaughters’ tales to tell classmates in the school yard filled with balls and ropes. (80)

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These stories are part of a female tradition handed on from woman to woman, excluding the men of the family: “The stories, even when told by father, / were mother’s” (79). The final line conjures up the image of the stew again. Previously a meal cooked by the mother, but paid for by the father, it is now used as “a stew fragrant with fiction” (80). The cooking of the stew is not only a period when the mother depends on the father, it is also the time when she tells stories, when she bonds with her daughters and ultimately with their female progeny. Through seeing and speaking, the daughter resists patriarchal rules: “Every time she speaks it is a leave-taking / of the sealed-off room” (80). In “Responding to Light,” Kimiko Hahn applies Irigaray’s theories to the family life of an Asian American girl and shows that through speech and interaction with the outside world (seeing) as well as resistance to patriarchal power, women can free themselves. In “Interpreters of Transnationalism,” Christiane Schlote argues that ethnic gender studies deal with the following concerns: first, the deconstruction of monolithic concepts and stereotypes of women of color who are not passive victims, but inhabit a tradition of activism and resistance. Secondly, the emphasis on a socially conscious feminist materialism. Thirdly, the improvement of an international framework within women’s studies and general female collaboration across national and ethnic boundaries.152 Contemporary Asian American poetry dealing with feminist issues expresses these three concerns.

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152

Christiane Schlote, “Interpreters of Transnationalism: South Asian American Women Writers,” American Studies 51.3 (2006): 402.

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i.

time passes empty spaces love lost

ii.

time passes empty spaces

iii.

time passes iv. 1

T

C Y N . Z A R C O ’ S P O E M “ V A N I S H I N G A C T .” In its four sections, a magic trick is performed by the form of the poem. The first section consists of three lines. In section two, the third line is missing. Section three leaves out the second and third line of the first section, and section four contains no words anymore.2 Cyn. Zarco, born in Manila (Philippines) in 1950 to parents of mixed ancestry,3 is a poet-journalist in 1

HE EPIGRAPH IS

Cyn. Zarco, “Vanishing Act,” in Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, ed. Walter K. Lew (New York: Kaya, 1995): 134. Reprinted with permission of Cyn. Zarco. 2 As Cyn. Zarco points out (email to me, 16 April 2010), she wrote this poem in the early 1970s for her boyfriend, David Brown, the bass player for Santana. She put the poem in between his pancakes. The title later inspired Terry McMillan’s successful novel Disappearing Acts (1989), which was made into a film with Wesley Snipes in 2000. 3 Cyn. Zarco (email to me, 16 April 2010).

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Florida. Her text visualizes the transitory nature of life, which for her consists of love, space, and time. Each section gets shorter and shorter until the final section iv contains nothing. This links the form to the four seasons, which start out with the energetic release of spring, full of life, and end with the barrenness and cold of winter. Similarly, many human beings start out their lives fully absorbed in time, space, and love but ultimately vanish into the emptiness of death. The vanishing act can also be interpreted as the loss of a lover that needs time and space to be overcome. Cyn. Zarco infuses the form of her poem with all these meanings, exemplifying the perfect unity of form and content. Form designates “the organization of the elementary parts of a work of art.”4 This organization can relate to rhythmic units, visual grouping, rhyme schemes, leitmotifs, or the structure of thought in a poem. ‘Form’ can also refer to the “attributes that distinguish one genre from another.”5 Form is the pattern the authors give to their poems. If the form is a conventional poetic genre like the sonnet, the reader can recognize the form and navigate the text in the respective units (certain meters, particular imagery, rhyme scheme, tone, etc.). A literary form shared by artist and readership increases the apprehension of the formal level at the stages of creation and reception. Form is a creative unit in both the European and the Asian poetic traditions. In the European context, it is well-known that formal and generic divisions have existed since the ancient Greeks and Romans. Among the bestknown European poetic forms are the ballad stanza, the heroic couplet, and the sonnet. Asian poets also structured their creative texts early on. Among the well-known Asian poetic forms are the haiku and the ghazal. “Chinese texts,” Linda H. Chance states in Formless in Form, her discussion of the Japanese form zuihitsu, “are […] controlled by a well-developed system of types.”6 In other Asian cultures there are formal units as well, although these concepts may differ from their European counterparts, of course.

4

William Harmon & C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature (Englewood Cliffs N J : Prentice–Hall, 7th ed. 1995): 221. 5 Harmon & Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 221. 6 Linda H. Chance, Formless in Form: Kenkō, “Tsurezuregusa”, and the Rhetoric of Japanese Fragmentary Prose (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 1997): 9.

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Classical Japanese texts, for example, “often lack a fixed title.”7 Moreover, authorship, which is an original, unique domain in the individual-centered European context, does not have this significance in the Asian context, where the community is emphasized. Take, for instance, the Japanese genre of renga (linked verse). Its formal regulations are so complex that it “took decades to acquire”8 them. The renga masters composed collaboratively and added lines to previous compositions, also giving new meaning to these preceding lines. Chance even argues that “every poetic text in Japan was – had to be – open to rewriting that undercut any presumption of singular authorship.”9 In the course of analysis, literary scholars separate form from content, “form’s evil twin.”10 Despite the analytical division, content exists in form and form shapes content. Although readers and scholars alike tend to focus on the content of poems and the words used, the formal level of poetry is also a parameter in the interpretation of this art. Zhou and Najmi emphasize that “it is necessary to interrogate not only social and historical contexts but also formal strategies for identity construction.”11 Form is a major part of poetry, although, in the postmodern era, metrical regularity catches readers and critics unawares: “Contemporary metrical verse surprises many learned readers simply by existing.”12 The Language poet13 Ron Silliman argues that ethnic poets focus on the representation of their stories rather than on form or formal innovation: Poets who do not identify as members of groups that have been the subject of history, for they instead have been its objects […] – women, people of color, sexual minorities, the entire spectrum of the “marginal” – have a manifest political need to have their stories told. That their writing should often appear much more conventional, with the notable difference as to who is the subject

7

Chance, Formless in Form, 9. Formless in Form, 11. 9 Formless in Form, 16. 10 Formless in Form, 7. 11 Formless in Form, 25. 12 David Caplan, Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2004): 3. 13 The Language poets are a group of contemporary American writers whose poetry expresses skepticism about the efficacy of written language; see Harmon & Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 286–87. 8

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of these conventions, illuminates the relationship between form and audience.14

Formally radical language poems, it is maintained, cannot be written by Asian American poets. Silliman’s view is by no means representative of the Language movement, though: Leslie Scalapino, Rae Armantrout, Lyn Hejinian, and Susan Howe challenge his argument in both theoretical and poetic texts.15 Contemporary Asian American poets counter Silliman’s statement as well and engage decidedly with form in the composition of their work. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha crafts formally unconventional creations, as do Myung Mi Kim and Walter Lew. The innovative use of Asian linguistic structures in the poetry of Kimiko Hahn, Carolyn Lei–Lanilau, Marilyn Chin, and Myung Mi Kim amounts to “a growing structural sophistication in the flourishing of an Asian American ethnopoetics.”16 In recent times, formal regulations and generic boundaries have often been blurred and altered: “It is almost the rule that a successful work will combine genres in some original way.”17 In addition to this postmodern fashion of flux and deconstruction of traditions, Asian forms and genres typically considered as European or Euro-American are adapted by contemporary Asian American poets due to their hybrid subject-position: they are insiders to both cultural realms and have full access to these poetic forms, a multicultural stance that allows them to change and reinvent formal patterns. At the same time that we witness a fusion of forms and a postmodern deconstruction of formal stability, scholars detect a formal revival in contemporary American poetry.18 The pattern of formal poetry can be experienced as 14

Ron Silliman, “Poetry and the Politics of the Subject: A Bay Area Sampler,” Socialist Review 18.3 (1988): 63; emphasis in original. 15 Timothy Yu reveals that Rae Armantrout initially stated her belief in a female need for representation in 1978. In an essay written in 1992, however, she doubts that conventional representation could be the right mode for the representation of women’s oppression; Yu, “Form and Identity in Language Poetry and Asian American Poetry,” Contemporary Literature 41.1 (2000): 422–23. 16 Robert Grotjohn, “Kimiko Hahn’s ‘Interlingual Poetics’ in Mosquito and Ant,” in Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits, ed. Shirley Geok–lin Lim, John Blair Gamber, Stephen Hong Sohn & Gina Valentino (Philadelphia P A : Temple U P , 2006): 232. 17 Harmon & Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 231. 18 For instance, David Caplan, Questions of Possibility, 3–4.

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a sort of liberation, “’just as a dancer might praise the limitation of gravity for making dance possible in the first place.’”19 Some scholars consider the neoformalist trend reactionary, conservative, and populist: for example, the poet– critic Ira Sadoff.20 Sadoff associates neo-formalism and regular meter with “nostalgia for moral and linguistic certainty, for a universal (‘everyone agrees’) and univocal way of conserving culture.”21 Bypassing the wounded vanity of different poetic schools, this chapter once again makes the poets’ ethnicity the primary frame of reference and analyzes formal choices of contemporary Asian American poets as expressions of cultural hybridity. In a discussion of poetic form, it needs to be remarked that numerous contemporary Asian American authors transcend the generic boundaries of literature. Among the Asian American poets who show a transgeneric style are the following: Kimiko Hahn and Arthur Sze, who bring science and technology into their poetry;22 Chitra Divakaruni, who weaves film into her work;23 Nick Carbó, who presents poetry as video art;24 in some of Timothy Liu’s and Marilyn Chin’s poems, music plays a prominent role;25 Walter Lew and Mei–mei Berssenbrugge interact with installation art in their poetic com-

19

Michael Davidson, “American Poetry,” in The Princeton Handbook of Multicultural Poetries, ed. T.V.F. Brogan (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1996): 40. 20 Ira Sadoff, “Neo-Formalism: A Dangerous Nostalgia,” American Poetry Review 19.1 (January–February 1990): 7–13, http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/sadoff .html (accessed 28 August 2008). In this article, Sadoff specifically attacks Robert Richman’s neo-formalist anthology The Direction of Poetry. Mary Karr likewise criticizes both Richman’s collection and neo-formalism; Karr, Viper Rum (New York: New Directions, 1998): 67. 21 Sadoff, “Neo-Formalism: A Dangerous Nostalgia,” 8. 22 Cases in point are Kimiko Hahn, “Vivisection,” The Artist’s Daughter (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002): 51–54, and Arthur Sze, “Earthshine,” in Quipu (Port Townsend W A : Copper Canyon, 2005): 9–15. 23 For example, in “The Tea Boy: After Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay!” in Leaving Yuba City (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1997): 65–66. 24 See Nick Carbó’s poem “Mon Père,” http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=s0pZv bu3Zok 25 For instance, Timothy Liu, “Triptych in Black Lipstick,” in Of Thee I Sing (Athens: U of Georgia P , 2004): 6–8, and Marilyn Chin, “Blues on Yellow,” in Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002): 13.

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positions;26 and Cathy Song and Brenda Shaughnessy respond to paintings in some of their poems.27 Full analysis of this transgeneric form in Asian American poetry lies beyond the scope of this study, however. The focus of this chapter lies on contemporary Asian American poems composed in poetic forms of older European and Asian traditions, this despite the fact that the vast majority of contemporary American poetry is written in free verse. 28 The focussed analysis of formal verse allows for a specific study of Asian and European forms as well as their subversions. My formal interpretation is divided into poetry composed in or improvising on Asian poetic forms (“Asian Formalism”) and poems using or adapting European verse forms (“European Forms”). Among the European forms in contemporary Asian American poetry we find sonnets, couplets, the ode, the elegy, and the ballad stanza. Asian forms used include the zuihitsu form, the jueju, and the ghazal. Whether Asian American poets compose in European or Asian verse forms, they adapt them to their own needs and create something new: a Third Space that manifests cultural hybridity on the formal level of poetry. With the development of new categories and forms in hybrid poems, old parameters of form are redefined. Asian American adaptations of poetic forms destabilize genre definitions and dogmas and contribute to the ever-shifting possibilities of cultural hybridity. As such, Asian American poetic forms are forms in flux.

Asian Formalism We commence with poems using or adapting Asian poetic forms. Apart from the haiku, Asian forms are generally not very well known in the U S A . Dis-

26

For example, Mei–mei Berssenbrugge, “I Love Artists,” in I Love Artists (Berkeley: U of California P , 2006): 129–32, and Walter K. Lew, “Treadwinds,” in Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, ed. Walter K. Lew (New York: Kaya, 1995): 529–37. 27 For example, Shaughnessy’s “Interior with Sudden Joy: After a Painting by Dorothea Tanning,” in Interior with Sudden Joy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999): 79–81, and Song’s “Blue and White Lines after O’Keeffe,” in Picture Bride (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1982): 43–48. 28 Alice Fulton emphasizes that free verse has subtle governing structures, too, and is by no means formless; Fulton, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry (St Paul M N : Graywolf, 1999): 43ff.

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cussion of each poetic form will thus precede analysis of examples thereof. The Indo-Pakistani ghazal, the Chinese jueju, and the Japanese zuihitsu will be explored as exemplary of the many Asian forms employed in contemporary Asian American poetry.29

The Zuihitsu The combination of genres is a relatively new phenomenon in Western literature, culminating in the extreme fragmentation and fusion of postmodern texts. An ancient Japanese form that is such a combination of genres – judged by European standards – is the zuihitsu. It appeals to postmodern transgeneric aesthetics because it is, in appearance, close to prose, owing to the absence of line breaks, while at the same time its “economy of expression” and compact unity of theme closely link it to poetry.30 Kimiko Hahn, who occasionally composes in the zuihitsu form, has said, in response to my question whether zuihitsu is poetry or prose: As far as the actual form – from the Japanese point of view –there is no Western equivalent to zuihitsu. It’s a genre in and of itself. It’s from a different ‘kingdom:’ like fungus which are neither plants nor animals. So to answer your question […]: strictly speaking, the zuihitsu is neither.31

The form perfectly fits into contemporary postmodern American poetry, since it consists of fragments that convey a sense of disorder but at the same time are arranged around a unifying theme. The term ‘zuihitsu’ is of Chinese origin, although the genre was naturalized in Japan.32 The term aptly trans-

29

Among other Asian poetic forms which contemporary Asian American poets employ are the tanka – e.g., Kimiko Hahn’s “Conspiring with Shikishi,” in The Narrow Road to the Interior (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006): 102–104; the haiku – e.g., Bhargavi C. Mandava’s “Desert Haiku,” in Another Way to Dance: Contemporary Asian Poetry from Canada and the United States, ed. Cyril Dabydeen (Toronto: T S A R , 1996): 137; the renga – e.g., Marilyn Chin’s “Reggae Renga,” in The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty (Minneapolis M N : Milkweed, 1994): 34–35; and the senryu – e.g., Michael Ishii’s “Senryu 1991,” in Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, ed. Walter K. Lew (New York: Kaya, 1995): 386. 30 Chance, Formless in Form, 2. 31 Interview (26 November 2005). 32 Chance, Formless in Form, 46.

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lates as ‘follow the brush’ or ‘just as the brush goes’33 – authors writing such poems impulsively write down what comes to their mind on a certain topic. The zuihitsu is characterized by a private voice, flexibility, fragmentation, juxtaposition, openness, discontinuity, contradiction, and variation. This poetic form “shapes while refusing to take a shape.”34 It is, however, no poetic laissez-faire version and cannot be considered random rambling. The openness of the text is linked to “the aesthetic value of impermanence, averring that everything changes and should not be conceived of as fixed.”35 The flowing text recalls the Buddhist perception that everything is connected and that the world is fleeting, ambiguous, and impermanent. Just as the world is fragmented, the text of the zuihitsu consists of fragments. Therefore, “it is rather the unity of the text in Japan that appears as the special case.”36 Chance brings the appeal of zuihitsu and its fragmentary comments on a certain topic to the point when speaking of it as a “constantly unfolding kaleidoscope.”37 One of the ancient masters of the zuihitsu was Sei Shōnagon (c.966– c.1020). She was a court lady of a Japanese empress and wrote Makura no Sōshi, The Pillow Book, in which she describes her life at court. Among these zuihitsu are fabulous, highly original lists of things which make her laugh, occasions on which she cries, objects that she likes, etc. Following Shōnagon, Kimiko Hahn included several zuihitsu in her second-latest book of poetry, The Narrow Road to the Interior (2006).38 “Things That Are Full of Pleasure” is a case in point. The pleasures listed in this poem have to do with the speaker’s family, moments when she felt especially close to family members. The first half of the poem depicts childhood scenes: As a four-year-old, the speaker gets a dress that resembles her mother’s, and she cherishes this resemblance. Her grandfather teaches her how to swim, thus ensuring her survival in water. Her

33

Chance, Formless in Form, 46–47. Formless in Form, 1; emphasis in original. 35 Formless in Form, xvi. 36 Formless in Form, 18. 37 Formless in Form, 37. 38 Hahn’s second-latest collection of poetry is named after Matsuo Bashō’s famous journal masterpiece, Oku no hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North). The Japanese haiku and renga poet Bashō lived in the Edo period, from 1644 to 1694. 34

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father shows her how to correctly treat a weak plant. Smells of hibiscus and gardenia bring her grandmother to mind. At the thought of mango trees, the perspective shifts from almost pastoral childhood scenes associated with nature to adult memories. The mango trees, which presumably bear fruit, prompt memories of scenes from her life as a grown-up. Her first husband is remembered as speaking street Spanish, which gives him an adventurous, cosmopolitan air. The second husband saved her from turbulent times, “guiding me out of rough waves I had gotten myself into.”39 But she was discontented with the new, safer life, and on the beach could not stand “the hot air. The hot towel” (89). Then the speaker remembers her third husband. There is no further information on him: Obviously, all of the time they have spent together and his whole personality are a pleasure for her. Finally, the speaker mentions her daughters. A pleasurable scene associated with them is that they are home before midnight and in their beds. They each come in quickly and kiss me goodnight. I tell them: sticks feathers string mud. They understand. (89; emphasis in original)

The behavior of the young women shows respect for their mother and the curfew she imposed. Moreover, they kiss her goodnight, reversing the roles of childhood: the mother, anxious about their welfare, can be sure now that they are home safe and sound. The speaker tells her children a secret message they understand: “sticks feathers string mud” (89). While the daughters immediately know what her mother wants to tell them, readers have to pause and decipher it. The natural materials described are used by birds for constructing their nests. The speaker and her daughters know that the mother and their home is the bird’s nest the girls can always return to for safety and food. At the same time, the former ‘baby birds’ have learned to fly and have gained a certain independence and freedom as adolescents. The childhood memories that relate to four family members (the speaker’s mother, father, grandfather, and grandmother) are divided in two by a phrase enumerating plants. Following the memories of the mother and the grandfather and preceding the memories of the father and the grandmother, the poet 39

Kimiko Hahn, “Things That Are Full of Pleasure,” in The Narrow Road to the Interior (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006): 89.

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inserts “pine, leaves, rose, hedge, stem” (89; emphasis in original) – the pleasure the speaker gets from nature. The plants mentioned relate to a garden, possibly the speaker’s family’s garden where she experienced many delightful moments in the circle of her family. Discontinuity, ambiguous authorial stance, and variation are hallmarks of Japanese zuihitsu,40 but rarely part of Hahn’s poetry. “Things That Are Full of Pleasure” is consistent in remembering pleasant moments spent with family members. Only the list of garden plants in the childhood part and the memory of the mango trees separating / uniting childhood and adulthood memories are caesuras in an otherwise homogeneous composition. Hahn’s zuihitsu relates to Sei Shōnagon’s texts in The Pillow Book insofar as it is a list relating to the speaker’s emotions and memories. The Japanese writer, centuries before, composed a text entitled “Things That Make One Happy.” Her list includes unread great books, a horrible dream that is judged insignificant by her fortune teller, being the center of attention at a party, the healing of a sick friend, being asked for advice by a high-ranking person, finding lost things, giving arrogant people, especially men, short shrift, witnessing bad luck befall people she dislikes, and having a comb made that is more beautiful than expected. Although Shōnagon’s list consists of individual memories, too, Hahn’s zuihitsu “Things That Are Full of Pleasure” is more personal and intimate than Shōnagon’s and as such relates strongly to a ‘mainstream’ lyric tradition, confessional poetry. Zhou Xiaojing argues that a particular literary form […] is a mode of subject positioning, a means of articulating the writer’s resistance or affiliations within the field of literature and in the social spaces.41

Hahn’s own cultural hybridity as a biracial poet and her self-understanding as Japanese American are echoed in her adaptive use of the zuihitsu form. She affiliates herself with the contemporary American poetry scene in composing confessional poems and relates to her Asian roots in writing zuihitsu. Hahn’s use of the zuihitsu also evinces resistance to Euro-American dominance in 40

Chance, Formless in Form, 1. Xiaojing Zhou, “Critical Theories and Methodologies in Asian American Literary Studies,” in Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature, ed. Xiaojing Zhou & Samina Najmi (Seattle: U of Washington P , 2005): 5. 41

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American poetry. By introducing an Asian form to the American poetry scene, she influences both majority American poets and writers of other ethnicities. The poet also composes more traditional zuihitsu. However, she also inserts postmodern elements, which are typical of her oeuvre, in these more conventional zuihitsu, such as isolated words and metatextual comments, intertextual references, and the subfragmentation of the text through italicizing, bracketing, and indentation. “Sparrow,” on the passing of time and events in the speaker’s life, is one of Hahn’s more typical zuihitsu. She inserts isolated words in this poem that tell a story of their own: “Wound. Wind. / Wind.”42 These words expresses how the wounds inflicted to the speaker by her former husband are being forgotten (or maybe even forgiven) over time. Hahn also inserts metatextual remarks that are connected to the content of the poem and at the same time make visible the crafting process involved, opening up an additional dimension to the mere recounting of a life story: “Note to myself: jot down words like, warming and warning. Cloister and cluster” (30). Italicizing, bracketing of certain passages, and indentation of certain sections introduce additionally fragmentation. Through intertextual references to other poets and their works (for example, Matsuo Bashō and Elizabeth Barrett Browning in “Sparrow,” 26 and 30), she links her poetry to other writers and artistic traditions. These postmodern elements of the American poet’s zuihitsu are absent from traditional Japanese zuihitsu. Through these, she adapts the form to her own style and to her culturally hybrid identity. In addition, the modified form reflects today’s fragmented, transcultural, and volatile world. Justin Chin’s use of this genre was certainly inspired by Kimiko Hahn, who brought the zuihitsu to the attention of American poets. Chin, a Singaporean American author of three books of poetry, Bite Hard (1997), Harmless Medicine (2001), and Gutted (2006), was born in 1969. In his latest volume of poetry, which won the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, he mourns the death of his father, like Kimiko Hahn in her elegiac collection The Unbearable Heart (1996). In fact, Chin even refers to the title poem of Hahn’s volume in his own title poem “Gutted,” where he states that “grief comes in

42

Kimiko Hahn, “Sparrow,” in The Narrow Road to the Interior (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006): 30.

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waves.”43 Hahn’s phrase “grief comes in spasms”44 resonates here. “Grief comes in lapping waves / high tide, low tide, never done” (96) is Chin’s beautiful elaboration further down. The 94-page-long, elegiac poem is subdivided into several sections. One of these is “Twelve” (30–31), a zuihitsu on time. Here, Chin describes the passing of twelve years – the length of time, the speaker informs us, that the Hatfield–McCoy feud lasted.45 It is the life-expectancy of a big cat in captivity. It is how long it takes a coconut palm to bear fruit. This period of time is connected to waiting and ultimate disappointment with the awaited. For instance, it took Da Vinci twelve years to paint the famous “Mona Lisa,” but visitors to the Louvre who stand in front of the picture ask, “in a variety of languages, ‘Is that it?’” (30). At the end of the poem, Chin reveals that in an average human life, the heart stands still for twelve years. Since the stopping of a heart means death, Chin here implies that everybody is dead for twelve years during his or her lifetime. This poem contains the features of the zuihitsu form. In different fragments, the poem introduces topics as diverse as the solar system, coconut palms, and Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.” This conveys a sense of disorder, variation, and discontinuity, typical of the zuihitsu genre. The overall theme, the passing of twelve years, unifies the impulsive collection of stories. Although “Twelve” appears in prose sections, its dense expression and composition relate it to poetry, as in the closing fragment: Put your hand on your heart. Every thump you feel is counting down, one more down, to its last beat, that last squeeze. (31)

Typically for the zuihitsu, the persona speaks in a private voice and even addresses the readers twice, telling them to “put your hand on your heart” (30 and 31) and ordering them paradoxically to commence the task of amnesia (“What do you want to forget in 12 years? Start now”; 30). “Twelve” is a typical zuihitsu, but it is part of a long poem which mainly consists of free-verse pieces. Chin argues that “Gutted” as a whole “is loosely structured after the Japanese poetic form, zuihitsu” (144). He considers his 43

Justin Chin, “Gutted,” in Gutted (San Francisco: Manic D, 2006): 96. Kimiko Hahn, “The Unbearable Heart,” in The Unbearable Heart (New York: Kaya, 1995): 2. 45 Two American clans who fought fiercely from 1878 to 1891. 44

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mixing of traditional zuihitsu (including “Twelve”), free verse, commentaries, prayers, dialogue, and fragments to be a loose zuihitsu, adapting the Japanese poetic form to his needs and taking a postmodern approach to the genre.46

The Ghazal The Japanese zuihitsu recalls the Indo-Pakistani poetic form of the ghazal: they are both fragmented poetic forms with a thematic organizing principle. The ghazal consists of rhyming couplets which are autonomous entities contributing to an overall topic. The ghazal’s listing of self-sufficient couplets permits a certain associative freedom similar to the zuihitsu’s fragmentation. In addition, both poetic forms possess a religious dimension: while the zuihitsu is linked to the Buddhist assumption of a fleeting, impermanent world, the ghazal is connected to Islamic mysticism. The components of a ghazal are the sher, the radif, the kaafiyaa, the maqta, the matla, and the beher.47 Each ghazal consists of five to fifteen couplets, called sher. The overall topic and tone is introduced in the first sher, the matla. The last sher, the maqta, includes, as a signature, the author’s name. The second lines of all sher end with the same word or words, the refrain-like radif. The first sher ends on the radif in both lines. In all sher, the word preceding the radif, the kaafiyaa, must rhyme.48 The lines have to be of the same length (beher), for which purpose the poet has to adhere to metric or 46

Justin Chin uses another Asian form, the ghazal, in Gutted: The ghazal “Tonight, again” (9–11) is the opening text of the collection and talks of memories of the dead father that haunt the speaker. The ghazal form, too, is opened up by Chin, adhering to many basic rules (matla and maqta), ignoring some (beher, number of sher), and varying others: for instance, the kaafiyaa and radif (these terms are explained below). 47 See Abhay Avachat, “What Is a Ghazal?” http://smriti.com/urdu/ghazal.def.html (accessed 27 August 2008). See also Agha Shahid Ali, “Introduction” to Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English, ed. Agha Shahid Ali (Middletown C T : Wesleyan U P , 2000): 3; Agha Shahid Ali, “Basic Points about the Ghazal,” http://members.aol .com/poetrynet/ghazals/ (accessed 10 January 2006); and Huelya Uenlue, Das Ghasel des islamischen Orients in der deutschen Dichtung (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Peter Lang, 1991): 20–30. 48 Kate Braid and Sandy Shreve explain that the kaafiyaa “acts as a cue to listeners who, when they hear it, traditionally join the poet and call out, with much shared pleasure, the concluding refrain in each couplet;” Braid & Shreve, In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry (Vancouver: Raincoast, 2005): 79.

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syllabic consistency. To summarize: a ghazal consists of five to fifteen sher (couplets), including a matla (first sher stating theme) and maqta (last sher with poet’s name). The sher have to have the same radif (refrain occurring at the end of the second sher lines and of both lines of the first sher), kaafiyaa (rhyming words before the radif), and beher (line length, meter). The Arabic ghazal is a poetic form of Persian, Turkish, and Indo-Pakistani cultures.49 The word ‘ghazal’ is Arabic, designating a song through which a man addressed a beloved woman. The traditional ghazal isthus a love poem, often dealing with constant longing and the unattainable lover.50 The love of a woman is a symbol in Islamic mysticism (Sufism) for the love of God. In former times Sufi poets, for example the famous Mewlana Dschelaleddin Rumi (1207–73), described their love and fidelity for a woman to express their adoration of God.51 The ghazal is a common poetic form in Pakistan and India today.52 In Questions of Possibility, David Caplan traces the entry of the ghazal, which was established in Persia at least a century before the sonnet in Italy,53 into the American poetry scene.54 In anticipation of the centennial anniversary of the Persian ghazal poet Mirza Ghalib (1797–1869), Aijaz Ahmad translated 49

The official language of Pakistan is Urdu, which is why some scholars refer to Pakistani ghazal as Urdu ghazal (Uenlue, Das Ghasel des islamischen Orients in der deutschen Dichtung, 24). 50 Roger M.A. Allen, “Arabic Poetry,” in The Princeton Handbook of Multicultural Poetries, ed. T.V.F. Brogan (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1996): 44. 51 Uenlue, Das Ghasel des islamischen Orients in der deutschen Dichtung, 41, 47. 52 See Vinay Dharwadker et al., “Indian Poetry,” in The Princeton Handbook of Multicultural Poetries, ed. T.V.F. Brogan (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1996): 201– 202, 204. There are online ghazal platforms such as “Urdu Poetry” (http://www .urdupoetry.com/ [accessed 13 April 2010]) and the poetry section at Urdu Point (http://www.urdupoint.com/poetry/ [accessed 13 April 2010]). 53 David Caplan, Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2004): 44. 54 Caplan, Questions of Possibility, 43–58. Uenlue and Ali argue that the origin of ghazal poetry lies in the seventh century; Uenlue, Das Ghasel des islamischen Orients in der deutschen Dichtung, 14; Agha Shahid Ali, “Introduction” to Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English, ed. Agha Shahid Ali (Middletown C T : Wesleyan U P , 2000): 1. The sonnet developed in Italy in the thirteenth century; Harmon & Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 488.

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Ghalib’s ghazals into English, in 1968. He handed these raw translations over to American poets to create crafted versions. These ghazals were then published in Ghazals of Ghalib in 1972. Adrienne Rich was among the collaborating American poets. Her sequence of “Blue Ghazals” (1968) were the first ghazals published by an American writer.55 Jim Harrison, John Thompson, and Denise Levertov also contributed to this book. According to Caplan, the sudden popularity of the ghazal among American poets in the 1960s is not only due to the exoticism and ‘Orientalism’ of the Eastern form, but also derives from America’s difficult political and racial situation at the time. The political turmoil created the need for a “cross-cultural poetry of witness, a poetry of reconciliation and cross-racial identification”56 which the ghazal could satisfy. The American poets, however, took great liberty in the composition of this form and often ignored the strict rules of the ghazal tradition. Agha Shahid Ali judged this permissiveness as “an insult to a very significant element of my culture.”57 Ali was an American poet, translator, anthologist, and essayist, born in New Delhi in 1949. He grew up in Kashmir and

55

Caplan, Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form, 43. This dwelling on America should not obscure the fact that other Western cultures, past and present, have been attracted to the form, including Germany (e.g., Rückert, von Platen, Goethe), Australia (Judith Wright), and Canada (Lorna Crozier). This does not apply in the same measure to the renga, where collaborative creative demands are so stringent, but one notable exception – a first-class effort on the part of poets from four nations, Mexico, France, Italy, and the U K – is Renga: A Chain of Poems by Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti, Charles Tomlinson, ed. & intro. Charles Tomlinson, foreword by Claude Roy (Paris: Gallimard, 1971; tr. 1972; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). The preface and introduction, as well as essays by Roubaud and Tomlinson, are intimate and insightful reflections on the historical tradition, the meeting of East and West, religion, and the overcoming of Orientalism and ego. 56 Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form, 44. 57 Agha Shahid Ali, in Faiz Ahmed Faiz, The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems, tr. Agha Shahid Ali (Amherst M A : U of Massachusetts P , 1995): xiii. Ali says of his “true-to form assertions” (his term): “Those claiming to write ghazals in English (usually American poets) had got it quite wrong […]. Of course I was exercising a Muslim snobbery, of the Shiite clan;” Agha Shahid Ali, “Introduction” to Ravishing DisUnities, 1. He argues that he “found it tantalizing to strike a playful pose of ThirdWorld arrogance”; Ali, “Introduction,” 2.

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moved to the U S A in 1976, where he lived until his death in 2001.58 Significantly, he started publishing ghazals after more than a decade in America, although he had known the form since childhood.59 Ali argues that once a poet composes a ghazal and follows the rules of the ghazal form “she or he becomes its slave. What results in the rest of the poem is the alluring tension of a slave trying to master the master.”60 Possibly the unwillingness of some American poets to live out this ‘formal slavery’ led to so many poets’ refusal to adhere to all rules of the ghazal. Kelly Le Fave argues that so much is given in the form – the regular syllables of the lines, the absence of enjambement, the disunity of one’s couplet’s relation to another, the thematic address to the absent beloved, the rhyme and refrain – that what is left to the poet once the scheme is established is solely the inventive delight of the momentary.61

What she appreciates in this form are “the brief lyric moments contained within strict structural restrictions.”62 Ali’s second-to-last poetry collection, Rooms Are Never Finished, includes the poem “Ghazal,”63 which, as the title indicates, adheres strictly to the ghazal rules. The poem begins with the following question: “What will suffice for a true-love knot?”– the answer is: anything, “even the rain” (57, l. 1). This phrase is the radif of Ali’s ghazal and as such substantively repeated at the end of every second line. The rain is the material which the “true-love knot” is made of and the symbol of the speaker’s love for a partner he has lost. The different sher describe how the rain brings to mind memories of their love and the speaker’s pain of separation, as in the poem’s conclusion:

58

Agha Shahid Ali, Rooms Are Never Finished (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002):

107. 59

The ghazal master Faiz Ahmed Faiz visited Ali’s family in Kashmir, and his grandmother recited ghazals to Ali; Caplan, Questions of Possibility, 53. 60 Ali, “Introduction,” 3. 61 Kelly Le Fave, quoted in Ali, “Introduction,” 4. 62 Kelly Le Fave, quoted in Ali, “Introduction,” 4. 63 Agha Shahid Ali, “Ghazal,” in Rooms Are Never Finished (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002): 57–58. His last collection of poetry, Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals, was published posthumously in 2003.

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They’ve found the knife that killed you, but whose prints are these? No one has such small hands, Shahid, not even the rain (58, ll. 25–26),

Ultimately it is not the speaker’s love to his former partner, symbolized by the rain, that destroys him, but something smaller, of less matter. “No one” leaves so little trace of its existence as the divine. Is God responsible for the speaker’s death? Ali addresses God twice in the ghazal (57, ll. 5 and 13). While traditional Sufi poets paralleled their love for and belief in God with their love to a woman, the speaker in this poem talks of a punishing God who leaves people in the dark and entertains a “house of executions” (57, l. 13). The speaker believes in a sinister divine creature which negatively influences his life to such an extent that his positive energy is killed off. The speaker’s critical stance towards God, along with the fact that the ghazal does not present abstract musings of love and longing but a personal story, differs from the classical content of the ghazal form. Amardeep Singh identifies Agha Shahid Ali’s writing as a culturally hybrid style: Though his writing is thickly influenced by the Persian-Urdu tradition (his style could be called ghazalesque), he wrote in English, not Urdu. He blended the rhythms and forms of the Indo-Islamic tradition with a distinctly American approach to storytelling.64

The Kashmiri American poet also physically locates the poem in the Urdu form within the U S A when he has his speaker say: “New York belongs at daybreak to only me, just me” (58, l. 23). Apart from these adaptations of the traditional ghazal, Ali is faithful to the original form: “Ghazal” consists of 13 sher (5 to 15 are allowed), unrelated units lacking enjambement. The first line states an idea, raises a question, or presents a narrative; the second line drives home the argument or narrative, including a turn and containing the radif “even the rain.”65 The kaafiyaa significantly rhymes on “knot,” which emphasizes the love-knot as a symbol for the eternal love between the speaker and his beloved. The poet also respects the rule of beher (regular line length): All lines have seven stressed syllables. The poet’s name, “Shahid,” is mentioned in the final sher or maqta, 64

Amardeep Singh, “Ghazalesque: Agha Shahid Ali, Kashmiri-American Poet,” http://www.lehigh.edu/~amsp/2004/05/ghazalesque-agha-shahid-ali-kashmiri.html (accessed 29 August 2008); emphasis in original. 65 See Agha Shahid Ali, “Basic Points about the Ghazal,” http://members.aol.com /poetrynet/ghazals/ (accessed 10 January 2006).

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while the first sher states the topic or matla. Sorrow for the absent beloved is topically present – also typical of ghazal poetry. The Kashmiri American poet also adds the religious dimension with his already discussed references to God. Agha Shahid Ali adheres strictly to the typical ghazal form, thus linking him to the poetic tradition and Kashmiri culture of which the ghazal is a significant element.66 David Caplan argues that Ali’s immigrant experience caused his fervor for the ghazal: “His gradual attraction to the ghazal form expresses the complicated politics of exile inflected in formal poetic terms.”67 The poet’s diasporic displacement prompts his use of the traditional ghazal, allowing him to re-create “his [ethnic] losses in another tongue, in other places, among other peoples.”68 In “Red Ghazal,” Aimee Nezhukumatathil omits the religious allusions, but retains the traditional longing for a lover. The poem tells of the speaker’s experiences of love, passion, violence, and sexuality, emotions associated with the color red in (Euro-)American culture. She also uses the color itself in her poem, talking, for example, of deep violet and red bruises,69 of a girl with “hair orange and wild” (111, l. 3), and of a flushed neck (111, l. 12). Interestingly enough, red has similar connotations in Indian (American) culture, with one exception: red signifies purity, which is why it is worn by brides at their wedding.70 While Nezhukumatathil does not refer to the connotation of purity, she takes a strong female stance in her poem, exploring domestic violence and women’s sexual and emotional needs.

66

This is expressed by Agha Shahid Ali himself when he condemns adaptations of the ghazal as “an insult to a very significant element of my culture”; Agha Shahid Ali in Faiz Ahmed Faiz, The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems, tr. Agha Shahid Ali (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P , 1995): xiii. 67 Caplan, Questions of Possibility, 53. Presumably, Ali called for American poets to respect the Urdu ghazal and protect its rules, because he missed respect for (Arab) immigrants in America. 68 Rajeev S. Patke, Postcolonial Poetry in English (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2006): 236. 69 Aimee Nezhukumatathil, “Red Ghazal,” in Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, ed. Victoria Chang (Champaign: U of Illinois P , 2004): 111, l. 2. 70 See Peter J. Claus, Sarah Diamond & Margaret Ann Mills, South Asian Folklore: An Encyclopedia (London: Taylor & Francis, 2003): 51, 99, and 289.

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In a “Red Ghazal” by an Indian American woman poet, readers might expect a reference to the bindi, a red dot worn on the forehead by women in India.71 The writer does not talk about her Asian American ethnicity, however, but recounts typical incidents and emotions in the life of a young American woman (e.g., kissing goodnight, breaking up with a boyfriend). Significantly, the use of the Indo-Pakistani verse form is the poet’s only reference to her South Asian roots or Indian and Indian American cultures. Does Nezhukumatathil respect the ghazal rules of matla, maqta, beher, radif (refrain), and kaafiyaa (rhyming word before the radif) in “Red Ghazal”? The poem consists of eight sher. The first sher, the matla, establishes the theme centered on the connotations of the color red. The beher of her ghazal is coherent, consisting of nine stresses syllables per line. In these respects, she is true to the traditional ghazal form. The maqta, the final sher, originally mentions the poet’s name. Nezhukumatathil plays with this tradition and does not name “Aimee” but playfully uses the words “my aim”: I throw away my half-finished letters to him in my tiny pink wastebasket, but my aim is no good. The floor is scattered with fire hazards, declarations unread. (111, ll. 15–16)

The poet fuses the rules that a ghazal has to have a radif and a kaafiyaa. She uses the word “red” and rhyming words at the end of the sher, fusing radif and kaafiyaa. Nezhukumatathil does not use enjambement between the sher. Agha Shahid Ali, the ‘missionary of proper ghazals,’ emphasizes in his article “Basic Points about the Ghazal:” “No enjambement between couplets. Think of each couplet as a separate poem […]. […] certain kinds of enjambements would not work even W I T H I N the couplets […]. Once again, A B S O L U 72 T E L Y no enjambement between couplets.” The two lines of a sher should not contain an enjambement if this linking entails a narrative fusion of the lines, Ali argues. Nezhukumatathil disrespects this rule in her poem, for example in the second sher: “The little girl I baby-sit, hair orange and wild, sits

71

See Claus et al., South Asian Folklore: An Encyclopedia, 99–100. Agha Shahid Ali, “Basic Points about the Ghazal,” http://members.aol.com /poetrynet/ghazals/ (accessed 10 January 2006); emphasis in original. 72

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splayed and upside down / on a couch, insists her giant book of dinosaurs is the only one she’ll ever read” (111, ll. 1–2). Enjambement, the thematic or grammatical continuation from one line to the next, enables the visual and rhythmical emphasis of a word where it would not naturally rest.73 The visual stress stems from the exposed position at the end of the line and the rhythmical emphasis is created by the little reading pause made at the end of a line. Run-on lines evoke everyday speech and a natural speech rhythm. By using enjambement within the sher and by fusing kaafiyaa and radif, Nezhukumatathil makes her ghazal more natural and more similar to both everyday language and free verse. Although the poet takes the liberty of using enjambement in her ghazal, she respects major rules like the autonomy of the sher and the maqta, matla, and beher restrictions. She does not refer to God or to her ethnicity, but recounts incidents that could be part of any young American woman’s life, thereby carefully adapting the Indo-Pakistani form to contemporary American poetry and makes her poem “Red Ghazal” a cultural hybrid.

The Jueju Another poetic form used in contemporary Asian American poetry is the Chinese quatrain, the jueju, from the Tang dynasty (618–907), generally considered the golden age of Chinese poetry.74 It developed out of the poetic genre yuefu, a quatrain of five-character lines.75 Marilyn Chin employs this form in her poem “Chinese Quatrains (The Woman in Tomb 44).” The jueju, literally ‘cut verse’,76 is a quatrain consisting of five or seven Chinese characters per line.77 It features a rigid tonal pattern and a structure of grammatical and semantic parallelism; there is a rhyme at the end of each couplet, and the

73

See Harmon & Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 186. “Chinese Poetry,” 86. 75 See “Chinese Poetry,” 85. The yuefu is a subgenre of the fu, the rhapsodic form typical of Han court poetry; Chang, “Chinese Poetry,” 84. The title of Chin’s collection containing “Chinese Quatrains (The Woman in Tomb 44),” Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, links the whole collection to the tradition of Chinese fu poetry. 76 Chin, in a note to the poem, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002): 105. 77 Kang–I Sun Chang, “Chinese Poetry,” in The Princeton Handbook of Multicultural Poetries, ed. T.V.F. Brogan (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1996): 86. 74

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phonic pattern of the Chinese quatrain depends on the effects of dui, contrast, and nian, connection.78 In a note to the poem “Chinese Quatrains (The Woman in Tomb 44),” Chin mentions that the form she uses in this poem is “adapted from jue-ju:”79 According to Merriam–Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, to “adapt” means “to make fit (as for a specific or new use or situation) often by modification:”80 As this definition reveals, Chin has changed the jueju to make it fit the requirements of a different culture (the U S A instead of China) and a different epoch (today instead of the Tang era). Since the title mentions the poetic form of the Tang dynasty, the reader will interpret ‘the woman in tomb 44’ to be a consort of an ancient Chinese king, buried in an extensive burial ground somewhere in China. Chin, however, describes a Chinese American woman of our time (she mentions an airplane in jueju 1). The dead woman is the speaker’s mother, and she has a migrant background (the deceased married her husband for a green card; jueju 10). The buried woman very likely lies in tomb 44 of an American graveyard. The title, “Chinese Quatrains (The Woman in Tomb 44),” points to the connection between poetry and death, mentioning both the poetic form and a female body in a tomb. In Mandarin (and in Japanese), ‘four’ (shi) is homophonous with ‘death’ and ‘poetry’. The emphasis on death (“shi”) is not only reflected numerologically in the tetrameter quatrains (twelve – three times four – jueju), but is also in the ‘unlucky’ title, “The Woman in Tomb 44.” In “Chinese Quatrains (The Woman in Tomb 44),” the speaker traces the life of her mother from when she met her husband to her death. The sinister tone initiated by the title is maintained throughout the poem; consequently, the encounter of the speaker’s father and mother is described as such: “My father escorts my mother / From girlhood to unhappiness.”81 When the mother is finally put into her tomb, she does not come to rest, either. She is decorated

78

Chang, “Chinese Poetry,” 86. Marilyn Chin, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002): 105; emphasis in original. 80 Merriam–Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield M A : Merriam–Webster, 11th ed. 2003): 14. 81 Marilyn Chin, “Chinese Quatrains (The Woman in Tomb 44),” in Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002): 24, jueju 1, ll. 3–4. 79

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with burial objects, due to which, the speaker knows, “They will rob her again and again” (26, jueju 12, l. 4). In line with her own cultural hybridity, Marilyn Chin adjusts the Chinese form, insofar as she retains the traditional quatrain but ‘translating’ the line pattern of seven Chinese characters into one of a predominantly four-stress line. Interestingly, this links Chin’s jueju with the long-measure ballad, a narrative poem consisting of an unlimited number of quatrains in tetrameter lines.82 Maybe the poet defines her poem as a Chinese quatrain in the title in order to avoid confusion with the ballad form. In this jueju, Chin keeps the typical firm tonal pattern, strictly adhering to the tetrameter, but she largely ignores the normally obligatory rhyme at the end of each couplet (in lines 2 and 4). In jueju 1 there is a slant rhyme (“penis” and “unhappiness,” lines 2 and 4), and in jueju 11 between “hens” and “fen.” Lines 2 and 4 of jueju 3 are connected by means of assonance (“doll”–“God”). Chin employs many alternatives to this rhyming rule, such as consonance, assonance, alliteration, and rhymes between lines 1 and 3 (e.g., “girl” and “pearl” in jueju 3) and lines 1 and 2 (e.g., “cry” and “eyes” in jueju 4). Jueju 2 illustrates Chin’s exploration of consonantal affinities: A dragonfly has iridescent wings Shorn, it’s a lowly pismire Plucked of arms and legs A throbbing red pepperpod. (24, jueju 2, ll. 1–4)

The poem is full of rhetorical figures like parallelism, expanalypsis, anaphora, and polysyndeton. The following parallelism evokes the Confucian philosophical tradition: Man is good said Meng–Tzu We must cultivate their natures Man is evil said Hsun–Tzu There’s a worm in the human heart. (26, jueju 9, ll. 1–4)

Meng–Tzu (Mencius) and Tsun–Tzu are both pupils of Confucius but disagree on the nature of mankind. Presumably, the speaker cannot answer the question of whether man (her father in particular) is good or bad, either. The

82

Caplan, Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form, 110; Braid & Shreve, In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry, 21.

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father’s seduction and subsequent betrayal of the mother are expressed in the following anaphora: He gleaned a beaded purse from Hong Kong He procured an oval fan from Taiwan […] He abandoned her for a blonde. (26, jueju 10, ll. 1, 2, 4)

The polysyndeton “from Hong Kong” and “from Taiwan” emphasizes their Chinese ethnicity. The expanalypsis “Cry little baby clam cry” (24, jueju 4, l. 1) dramatizes anthropomorphically the distress of a young shellfish which is opened by a sharp knife – a metaphor for the speaker’s loss of virginity. Chin’s jueju also frequently employs the traditional poetic devices of dui, contrast, and nian, connection, but not on the traditional phonic level. She uses the techniques on the narrative level. She contrasts dragonfly and pismire, but at the same time shows their connection: “A dragonfly has iridescent wings / Shorn, it’s a lowly pismire.” We can assume that the speaker compares the dragonfly to her mother, whom she perceives as an angel with “iridescent wings.” Deprived of her good qualities by the adulterous father, the woman becomes a simple but industrious ant, bearing burdens that are a multiple of her own body-weight. The birth of the speaker is also marked by the dui and nian principles: Baby, she’s a girl Pinkly propped as a doll Baby, she’s a pearl An ulcer in the oyster of God. (24, jueju 3, ll. 1–4)

While the baby girl is a pearl on display (her pink flesh suggesting one of the freshwater pearl’s most valuable color-grades), the notion of the nacreous coating of a sand-corn through irritation is then turned into a negative: patriarchal Chinese culture considers baby girls to be a permanent, ulcerous burden, because women leave the family upon marriage and therefore cost dowry and cannot look after their aging parents. In “Chinese Quatrains (The Woman in Tomb 44),” the Chinese quatrain, a poetic form from the golden age of Chinese poetry, links Chin’s poem to the ancient high culture of this country and stands in harsh contrast to the narrative of the poem, which centers on a poor, betrayed Chinese immigrant in America. This opposition between form and content emphasizes the sadness of the life of the speaker’s mother.

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Asian forms in contemporary Asian American poetry, albeit not omnipresent, are present enough to link the poets who employ them to their illustrious precursors and originators (Kimiko Hahn is connected to Sei Shōnagon, Marilyn Chin to the Golden Age of Chinese poetry, Agha Shahid Ali to Faiz Ahmed Faiz and other famous ghazal poets). This allegiance is not merely to formal poetic traditions, but also a cultivation of respect for the respective ‘old-world’ cultures of origin. This allegiance, however, is not the rigid continuity of revivalism, but, in awareness of the exigencies of existence in a ‘new-world’ environment, involves the taking of liberties with poetic forms and their adaptation to new and individual (rather than traditionally collective) needs: Kimiko Hahn fuses zuihitsu and confessional poetry, Aimee Nezhukumatathil gives the ghazal a present-day American appearance, and Justin Chin adds postmodern genrefusion to the zuihitsu. Thus, beyond general connotations of form such as the perfection of order and clarity, control, technical mastery, and intellectual clarity, Asian forms in contemporary Asian American poems involve daring adaptations that bridge cultures. Can these forms be played with so easily because they are beyond the realm of Western aesthetic dominance and as such a neutral, anti-imperialist site of subversion? If qualified adherence to Asian forms by practitioners of Asian origin suggests the inhabiting of a creative, culturally hybrid ‘third space’, can the same be said of the ‘imperialistic’ and assimilatory use of European forms in contemporary Asian American poetry?

European Forms The assumption that European poetic forms are part of (Euro-)American culture and as such are difficult to subvert by Asian American authors implies that the latter are not or cannot be part of the Euro-American tradition. But through their cultural hybridity, they have full access to majority America. In addition, Asian American poets, like all in the ‘Republic of Poetry’, can use whatever poetic form they choose.

The Sonnet Kimiko Hahn’s poem “Reckless Sonnets” might be considered reckless because a Japanese American poet uses this form of European origin. However,

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it is primarily reckless because many formal (and conventionally essential) rules are ignored – rhyme scheme and regular meter, for instance. In fact, at first sight only the title of the sequence of eleven sonnets and the fourteen lines per sonnet point to the form. There is even an exception to the latter rule: namely, sonnet number seven, which consists of fifteen lines. This sonnet is the only one describing a weak woman, filled with loathing and self-pity, and thus stands in contrast to the other ten sonnets, which focus on women in positions of power: for example, women who leave a lover or enjoy sex and independence. In addition to mostly having fourteen lines, Hahn’s “Reckless Sonnets” have two more technical attributes typical of the sonnet form: the topic of love and, in most of the sonnets in this sequence, a division of the structure of the argument into a narrative octave and a sestet with a twist. In most of these sonnets, the octaves describe a peculiarity of an insect (i.e. the symbiosis between yucca moth and yucca flower or the paradox that the cicada cries but has no ears). The sestets of the “Reckless Sonnets” link the animals’ characteristics to people’s lives. The octave of sonnet number two, for example, describes the coupling of insects: How lavish are the pheromones? How iridescent the light if there is light radiating from the body, for the compound eyes that cannot afford mistaking stem for leg, leaf for wing?83

The speaker especially thinks of the praying mantis, which eats the male after copulating. In the sestet, the speaker wonders how people can return to everyday life, “listening to the percolator,”84 after sexual intercourse. Although the paralleling of insects and human beings is not typical of the traditional sonnet, the love theme dominating this sonnet sequence is. The fusion of science, in this case entomology, with love sonnets, is a thematic contribution of Kimiko Hahn to the sonnet tradition. Her formal innovation consists of her loose application of sonnet conventions. The argumentational structure, the subject of love, and the mainly fourteen-line length of most of the “Reckless Sonnets” are traditional. How83

Kimiko Hahn, “Reckless Sonnets,” in The Artist’s Daughter (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002): 68, ll. 1–5. 84 “Reckless Sonnets,” 68, l. 13.

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ever, the poet only loosely adheres to the prosodic conventions of the sonnet. Her free adaptation of the verse form ignores meter and rhyme, and ultimately “the weight of the form’s Petrarchan past.”85 This justifies the poem’s title, “Reckless Sonnets.” Much like Hahn, Marilyn Chin subverts the sonnet form in her poem “Emilies: Aria for My Mother (Shattered Sonnets, Series 1–3).”86 In what she calls “shattered sonnets,” she, too, dispenses with a rhyme scheme. She sticks to the fourteen-line rule, but splits the lines into several parts, breaking up the formal unity of the poem. The text block of fourteen lines is usually the visual hint for readers pointing at the form, but Chin daringly disrupts this characteristic. She writes a set of three sonnets and “physically cut the poems up with a pair of scissors and reconstructed them.”87 Through this, Chin modifies the rhythm of the sonnet and accentuates parts of the text which would not have been emphasized otherwise. Due to the poem’s formal improvisation, it is difficult to even state where one sonnet ends and the next begins.88 The poem’s syncopation and improvisation prompt me to call them ‘jazzed’ sonnets. The poem’s deeply musical character (and, of course, the very term ‘sonnet’ recalls the form’s origins in music) is emphasized by the author in the title, which classifies the poem as an “aria.” Marilyn Chin’s “Emilies: Aria for My Mother,” linked to traditional sonnets through the theme of love (but already departing from the man–woman nexus), is a song for solo voice (originally in an opera, here in Chin’s Rhapsody in Plain Yellow) for the poet’s deceased mother.89 It describes the speaker at her own funeral, describing the prayers, flowers, and music of the occasion. The physical decay of the deceased is alluded to with references to two flies buzzing around her body. This aspect of the sonnet links Marilyn 85

David Caplan, Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2004): 62. 86 Marilyn Chin, “Emilies: Aria for My Mother (Shattered Sonnets, Series 1–3),” in Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002): 27–29. 87 Marilyn Chin (email to me, 3 October 2008). 88 The author explained in an email to me (3 October 2008) that “the 14-lined markers are after ‘Digger’s Distant Earphones’ and ‘W R E C K E D ’.” 89 It would accord to common practice to assume that the poem is dedicated to the speaker’s mother, but Chin explicitly pointed out in said email to me that the mother mentioned in the title is her own.

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Chin to Emily Dickinson – to the latter’s death poems in general and her poem 465, “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died – ,”90 in particular. In this poem, the fly separates “the light – and me – ,“ the heaven and the soul. Chin’s flies wring their hands, “the fat one fondling my ears / the thin one measuring my head.”91 They inspect the corpse and emphasize the physical decay of the person. The “Emilies” mentioned in the title link the dying persona of Chin’s sonnets to Emily Dickinson’s poetic statements on the topic. Marilyn Chin states that the poem “Emilies: Aria for My Mother” is “trying to merge [Emily Dickinson’s] image with the image of my dead mother.”92 The speaker’s entry into heaven comes with jazz and the feeling of love: fist sassed Billie then Janice now Aretha murrrrmurrrs the sticky wicky icky ko-ans of love.93

The poem ends with music: not only the holy choir and Bach, but jazz and soul singers like Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin. Their songs deal with the riddles of love, which links the dying speaker to her: i.e. Chin’s, mother. In an interview, Marilyn Chin points to an additional sense of maternal love: it can also stand for the love of a mother culture, Chinese American culture in her case. The passage below also sheds a different light on the koan (or Zen Buddhist riddle) of love: In the Chinese American context – love always means assimilation. For when one falls in love one must completely destroy one’s identity to merge with “the other” in a culpable, beautiful way. This is true on the surface level, perhaps. However, in a terrifying allegory – to assimilate into America means to annihilate one’s mother culture, language, religion and to be usurped by a culture which is monolingual, monotheist and whose world view is tied to the vicissitudes of commerce. My work is seeped with the

90

Emily Dickinson, ed. Helen McNeil (London: Everyman, 2000): 34, l. 14. Chin, “Emilies: Aria for My Mother (Shattered Sonnets, Series 1–3),” 29. 92 Marilyn Chin (email to me, 3 October 2008). 93 Chin, “Emilies: Aria for My Mother (Shattered Sonnets, Series 1–3),” 29. 91

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themes and travails of exile, loss and assimilation. What is the loss of country if not the loss of self?94

This statement calls for a reinterpretation of the poem on the symbolic level. The dying speaker can be seen as the ethnic self who dies of assimilation. The aria is, then, dedicated to the mother culture, and the koans of love stand for the love of the speaker for her ethnicity. The enigmatic aspect of this love is the speaker’s letting go of her mother culture through assimilation despite her love for the mother culture. The soul’s entry into the heaven of cultural hybridity, where the self accepts her plural identity, is interrupted by the two flies distracting the speaker: the Asian (American) and the mainstream American cultures, buzzing around to claim their share of the speaker’s self (one touching her ear, the other measuring her head). Chin’s “fusionist’s delight”95 in mixing African American jazz music with the sonnet form is a formal expression of her cultural hybridity: “I think everything must merge, and I’m willing to have it merge within me, in my poetry”96 The author makes explicit the connection between the formal hybridity of her poetry and her culturally hybrid identity: My poetry both laments and celebrates my ‘hyphenated’ identity. I believe that my work is very ambitious in thematic scope and form and is both a delicate and apocalyptic melding of east and west. Sometimes this may mean breeding hybrid forms.”97

While Chin creates a hybrid sonnet, Brenda Shaughnessy respects the traditional form. Her poem “Cinema Poisoning” incorporates all the characteristics of the form: the rhyme scheme of the Shakespearean sonnet, strict tetrameter, fourteen lines, personal focus, and a spirit of passion and love.98 94

Marilyn Chin, quoted in “About Marilyn Chin’s Poetry,” Modern American Poetry, http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/chin/poetry.htm 95 Marilyn Chin, quoted in “What Is American about American Poetry,” Modern American Poetry, http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/chin/poetry.htm 96 Marilyn Chin, quoted in “On ‘How I Got That Name’,” Modern American Poetry, http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/chin/poetry.htm (emphasis in original). 97 Marilyn Chin, quoted in “On ‘How I Got That Name’,” Modern American Poetry, http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/chin/poetry.htm. 98 See Harmon & Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 488–89; David Caplan, Questions of Possibility, 61–85; and Kate Braid & Sandy Shreve, In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry (Vancouver: Raincoast, 2005): 188–90.

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The sonnet’s major theme is love, but not traditional heterosexual love. In this sonnet, Shaughnessy describes the lesbian speaker’s love for her ex-girlfriend who is in love with someone else. Inspired by romantic movies, she hopes for her lover’s return and predicts: “I will be your first, your thirst, your third.”99 She is convinced that the woman’s affair is just an interlude: .

My second coming would not be allowed unless your masokismet lifts her skirts. (42, ll. 4–5)

Finally the speaker realizes that her wishes for a reunion are a romantic illusion, just “cinema poisoning:” The sex & chess & chello fever’s gone from your myopic trust, my Avalon. (42, ll. 13–14)

In “Cinema Poisoning,” the Japanese American poet does not subvert the Euro-American form, but its traditional (heterosexual) content. Caplan detects a new tendency among contemporary writers of sonnets: “During the last two decades, gay and lesbian poets have dominated the art of the love sonnet.”100 ‘Queer sonneteers’ of today have a close affinity for the sonnet’s traditional diction of forbidden and threatened love because of homophobic discrimination and the challenge of A I D S : “the form’s Petrarchan conventions uncannily echo the complex cultural, psychic, and material conditions of contemporary gay and lesbian life.”101 These writers have added to the sonnet – and to American culture, in a broader sense – new definitions of love, sexual desire, and intimacy. Shaughnessy’s poem “Cinema Poisoning,” with its Asian American take on countering patriarchal, logocentric, and heterosexual domination, illustrates this trend.

The Aubade Miho Nonaka uses another European poetic form: the aubade. An assistant professor of English at Eastern Illinois University,102 she is a bilingual poet, born and raised in Tokyo. Her first book of poetry was a finalist for Japan’s 99

Brenda Shaughnessy, “Cinema Poisoning,” Interior with Sudden Joy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999): 42, l. 1. 100 Caplan, Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form, 61. 101 Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form, 62. 102 See Anon., “Miho Nonaka,” http://www.eiu.edu/~english/faculty/bios/nonaka .htm (accessed 13 April 2010).

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National Poetry Prize. In America, she has published her work in prestigious magazines such as Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, the Iowa Review, and Tin House. An aubade is a love poem set at dawn, usually describing the parting of lovers in the morning.103 Nonaka’s poem “Aubade” is about a woman, referred to only as “you” throughout the poem, and her cat, which she calls her sister. Being of Japanese ancestry, the poet associates a certain daring with her use of the aubade: I often do feel, given that I am coming from a totally different cultural / literary background, I need a certain recklessness to write in a European genre.104

Her aubade, in unrhymed tercets, does not traditionally lament the lovers’ parting at dawn, but describes a morning accident: a jar of marmalade hits the cat’s eyes. Its violent reaction reveal its “sheer wildness”105 and “madness” (155, l. 11). It is this “untamed” (156, l. 29) nature of the animal that the woman perceives in herself: a sheer wilderness kept on purpose no one would explain why, but truly, you should have known all along such space is a necessity for your survival. (155, ll. 15–19)

Although the autobiographical “I” is absent from the aubade, the poet’s life resonates: “your anger / being fucked away from your country” (156, ll. 19– 20), Nonaka, who is married to an American, writes. She also addresses her bilingualism, talking of “two opposing tongues” (155, l. 22). Describing the undomesticated cat and, in a further step, the wild side of the poetic persona, the writer seems to be commenting on her own self again: “she will remain untamed, desirous, / will not learn to translate” (156, ll. 28–29). Michael Davidson states that the lyric ‘I’ of post-1960s American poets in general lacks “either Whitman’s all-encompassing Self or the authority of

103

See Harmon & Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 44. Miho Nonaka (email to me, 3 November 2008). 105 Miho Nonaka, “Aubade,” Prairie Schooner 79.4 (Winter 2005): 155, l. 15. 104

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Eliot’s detached personae.”106 He argues that contemporary “poets have renegotiated the territory of subjectivity as an intersubjective and historical phenomenon.”107 Contemporary lyric poetry, Sunn Shelley Wong adds, struggles not only with a redefinition of the lyric ‘I’ but also with a “growing skepticism over the referentiality of language.”108 The Asian American lyric ‘I’, who, as an ethnic Other and cultural hybrid, has a difficult relationship to authoritative self-assertion, similarly reevaluates subjectivity. Xiaojing Zhou notices a general resistance to and appropriations of a privileged, transcendental lyric ‘I’ in contemporary Asian American poetry, as illustrated by the poetry of John Yau and Kimiko Hahn.109 Miho Nonaka renegotiates authoritative subjectivity by exploring the wildness of a cat, which she calls her persona’s sister, then by paralleling cat and persona, and finally by suggesting parallels between this woman and herself. As Nonaka has stated, Ultimately, what made me start writing that poem was Zbigniew Herbert’s poem called ‘The Envoy of Mr. Cogito.’ Not the content, of course, but the maddening and almost Dionysian fervor of that voice: ‘Be faithful. Go.’110

The lyric ‘I’ is masked through a poetic persona and her cat. As Wong suggests, Nonaka is skeptical about language, referred to in “Aubade” as “a confused // murmur of foreign voices.”111 Nonaka uses the aubade, traditionally a narrative of two lovers, to subtly explore her own, multilayered subjectivity and thus subverts the tradition of this form.

106

Michael Davidson, “American Poetry,” in The Princeton Handbook of Multicultural Poetries, ed. T.V.F. Brogan (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1996): 41. 107 Davidson, “American Poetry,” 41. 108 Sunn Shelley Wong, “Sizing Up Asian American Poetry,” in A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature, ed. Sau–ling Cynthia Wong & Stephen H. Sumida (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2001): 299. 109 Xiaojing Zhou, “Two Hat Softeners ‘in the Trade Confession’: John Yau and Kimiko Hahn,” in Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature, ed. Xiaojing Zhou & Samina Najmi (Seattle: U of Washington P , 2005): 168–89. 110 Nonaka (email to me, 3 November 2008). 111 Nonaka, “Aubade,” 156, l. 28.

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The Couplet Victoria Chang composes many of her poems in unrhymed couplets, but not heroic couplets, a recently revived and refurbished form.112 The latter, rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter, is associated with the Augustan ‘Age of Reason’ with its faith in an orderly universe.113 Chang writes unrhymed, nonmetrical couplets, which better suit today’s ‘Age of Unknowing’.114 The couplet form dominates Chang’s collection Circle (2005) and echoes her concern about moral rules, societal regulations, and limits to freedom and life. She deals with five-year plans, Confucian moral rules,115 and the laws of Chinese astrology,116 criticizing regular patterns and probing their restrictions. In “Five-Year Plan,” for example, the speaker describes how Chinese American women are expected to calculate carefully, be it in form of household plans or career plans. “And when I’m finished, I revise my five-year plan / to exclude window- // washing, to include speaker of the house in two years, in four, / maybe president,”117 thereby mocking the forced planning and the pressure in both domains, household and career, as well as the American Dream of upward mobility and democratic egalitarianism. The speaker is forced to make plans by her parents, who even expect their child to double her five-year plan traditionally associated with Chinese thrift: “a good Chinese daughter and housewife has a ten-year plan” (28, l. 11, my emphasis). Parental pressure and this obsession with the future depress the speaker: all this premeditation, like sugar in theory, but really tastes aluminum, clogs the esophagus. (28–29, ll. 24–27)

112

Caplan, Questions of Possibility, 87–104. Harmon & Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 246; Braid & Shreve, In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry, 49–50. 114 Stephen Dobyns, cited in Caplan, Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form, 88. 115 Victoria Chang, “The Laws of the Garden,” in Circle (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P , 2005): 27. 116 Victoria Chang, “Year of the Bombshell,” in Circle, 12–13. 117 Victoria Chang, “Five-Year Plan,” in Circle, 28, ll. 7–10. 113

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The planning and expectations suffocate the woman. This danger is emphasized in the final section of the poem, which is not a couplet but a single line: “a strangle so that the throat only brings in half the air” (29, l. 33). The fact that all line pairs are unrhymed signifies a break with the couplet tradition, as does the variable length. Chang’s compositions in unrhymed couplets formally represent her world-view and conviction that societal rules and patterns can, or maybe even must, be broken. But there is also an interesting, and fundamental, confluence of the aesthetic principles of two cultures, traditionally Eastern and modern Western: Chang’s couplets, identifiable purely by typographical division, clearly evoke modern free verse, but also echo a basic feature of both Chinese and Japanese poetry, which is its inability to lend aesthetic distinctiveness to lines via alliteration or rhyme, because these are such constant occurrences in ordinary speech. Although Victoria Chang’s poems are unrhymed and usually lack a regular meter, they are not unstructured. The author resorts to subtle structuring and patterning: for example, through sound clusters. In “Sarah Emma Edmonds,” a poem on a Michigan woman who disguised herself as a man and fought with the Union troops, the speaker says: I would have been flowering a pot or chopping onions, lamb limp in a pot.118

The writer also frequently uses rhetorical figures of repetition to structure her poems: for example, in “On Quitting” (a poem in unrhymed tercets). She starts this poem with the following anaphora: How many times will I quit you, how many times will you amend me, stitch, and mend me again?119

In addition, lists are frequent in Chang’s poems: noting other women’s skills for soap-making, sweeping, making ordinary tasks enjoyable.120

118

Victoria Chang, “Sarah Emma Edmonds,” in Circle, 4, ll. 8–10. Victoria Chang, “On Quitting,” in Circle, 23, ll. 1–3. 120 Chang, “On Quitting,” 23, ll. 24–26. 119

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The speaker in “On Quitting” is disappointed by her gradual estrangement from her lover: “Each time I set the table, / I move you one more seat away.”121 The repetitions, sound clusters, and lists are Chang’s way to structure her poetry instead of regular rhyme or meter. In addition, these are formal expressions of her thematic repetitions such as disappointment in love, generational difficulties, and brutality. The poet’s formal and rhetorical choices represent her fascination with societal rules and patterns, which she subverts in an attempt to break with strict (poetic and societal) traditions. The regulations she describes stem from both her Chinese American ethnicity (“Five-Year Plan”) and from a majority American point of view (such as being a housewife, in the acrostic “Kitchen Aid Epicurean Stand Mixer”122). The European form tends to emphasize her majority American side more than her cultural hybridity, which she only makes a subject on the content level of her poems.

The Ballad Tina Chang uses the ballad form in some of her poems, but, like Victoria Chang in her adaptations of couplets, does not adhere strictly to the formal conventions. Tina Chang, born in 1969 and raised in New York City, is the author of the poetry volume Half-Lit Houses (2004), finalist for the Asian American Literary Award from the Asian American Writers Workshop. The second-generation Chinese American author is co-editor of the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (2008) and currently teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and Hunter College. She has been poet laureate of Brooklyn, New York City, since February 2010.123 In Chang’s “Hearsay (Hunan, 1943),” the speaker describes a traumatic incident in the life of her mother, a Chinese peasant, who was raped by her own brother. This dramatic episode is presented in simple narrative form characteristic of the ballad.124 Although the seven quatrains lack end-rhyme and as such do not constitute a ballad in the strictest sense, they feature a

121

Chang, “On Quitting,” 23, ll. 26–27. Chang, “Kitchen Aid Epicurean Stand Mixer,” in Circle, 17. 123 See her homepage, http://www.tinachang.com/bio.htm (accessed 13 April 2010). 124 Harmon & Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 49. 122

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regular tetrameter.125 Due to this unrhymed but otherwise regular verse it is legitimate to call “Hearsay” a ballad in blank verse. There are occasional endrhymes (“true”–“you”126), alliteration (e.g., 36, l. 7), and repetition (e.g., 36, ll. 13–16). The ballad form has its roots in oral literature, which is central to the poem. The speaker is not only troubled by her mother’s rape and the fact that she was abused by her brother, but she also rejects the silence about this incident in the family’s history: “Tell me the part / that I hope is not true” (36, ll. 6–7), she commands the clock that witnessed the scene. While her uncles, who are all potential rapists of her mother, recount the family history at family reunions, they omit the rape incident. Chang stresses this by internal rhyme: the voices of my family recounting our history. We come from a dynasty of vanity and ruin. (36–37, ll. 23–25; italics in original)

The uncle’s omission of her mother’s fate enrages the speaker to the point that she “stopped listening” (37, l. 28). Tina Chang sets the poem in Hunan, a South Chinese province that was a site of Japanese depredation in the Second World War. Given the fact that Chang is a second-generation Chinese American, this story might be autobiographical. The speaker emphasizes that the incestuous rape was a direct result of the war and the population’s consequent poverty: Had there been more food, had the night been a cool plate of something else to offer, there would never be this hunger. (36, ll. 17–20)

Despite the Chinese setting, the poet uses the European (and Euro-American) ballad form. Acknowledging the blank verse, the poet adheres to all features of the form, ranging from tetrametric quatrains to the dramatic story of a working-class woman. This formal regularity is a contrast to the inner turmoil

125

The tetrameter of the poem is called ‘long measure’ in ballads; Caplan, Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form, 110. Braid and Shreve argue that quatrains with four accents in every line are so common in ballads now that they are considered standard today (In Fine Form, 22). 126 Tina Chang, “Hearsay (Hunan, 1943),” in Half-Lit Houses (Hanover N H : U P of New England, 2004): 36, ll. 8–9.

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caused by the abuse and its suppression, and the formal choice is related to poetic craftsmanship more than geopolitics. However, it is a direct expression of Tina Chang’s own cultural hybridity: she uses a modified European poetic form to recount a story of a Chinese protagonist, who might even be one of her own ancestors. Shirley Geok–lin Lim also uses the ballad form in her poem “The Double.” The poet takes up the oral character of this form, describing a soliloquy of a woman. She is disappointed in her past self, who dreamed the American Dream of the immigrant (she “wished the million-dollar wish”; 127) and used her body for this purpose (“halfed self and parted thighs”; 37, l. 7). In her attempts to improve her life, she even “forgot her child” (37, l. 11). The speaker considers her past self (rendered in the third person) as separate from her present self, as the poem’s title indicates. In the final line she expresses her divorce what she did and who she was: “Her I hate” (37, l. 12). The verb in this sentence is the only one in the present tense (all others are set in past simple); her hatred of her past haunts her present self and existence. In terms of ballad form, the poem consists of three quatrains, with most lines in tetrameter. The third and fourth lines rhyme, for example: She dreamed the grand dream, wished the million-dollar wish. Sighed Cleopatra’s heart, claimed the heroine’s part. (37, ll. 3 and 4)

This is a variation on the traditional abcb rhyme scheme of the ballad. The fact that the poet frequently uses parallelism (for example in the first lines of all the quatrains: “She dreamed the grand dream,” “she tightened waist,” “she smelled treachery”) and repetition (“dream” appears twice in line 1, “wish” twice in line 2) is typical of ballads. Lim chose to compose a comparatively traditional ballad. Her story of the immigrant chasing the American Dream might be familiar to many Americans, and thus the genre of the folk ballad matches the subject perfectly.

The Ode Prageeta Sharma is a second-generation Indian American; born in Massachusetts in 1972, she lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is director of the crea127

Shirley Geok–lin Lim, “The Double,” What the Fortune Teller Didn’t Say (Albuquerque N M : West End, 1998): 37, l. 2.

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tive writing program at the University of Montana–Missoula. She has published three collections of poetry: Bliss to Fill (2000), The Opening Question (2004), and Infamous Landscapes (2007). Sharma uses another European form in her “Ode to Badminton.” While the title situates her poem in the tradition of the ode, she adheres neither to rhyme or metrical patterns nor to the typical strophe – antistrophe – epode structure. The speaker of the poem enthusiastically praises a sport, thereby subverting the ode’s originally elevated tone and grave subject-matter.128 Through playfulness and irony, Sharma subverts the solemn poetic form, reducing it to a single stanza that celebrates a sport that “imitates tennis.”129 Our birdie is much more exquisite, the obligations of a ball are somehow graceless when compared to a piece of rubber with a crown of fine feathers.130

The speaker repeatedly compares badminton to tennis and warns mockearnestly of the dangers of the sport – racket and shuttlecock. The latter is “a Florence Nightingale, if you will – only do not get her in the eye.”131 The European ode form and the mention of Florence Nightingale and the Duke of Beaufort, after whose country seat the game is named,132 link Sharma’s poem to the British Empire. But badminton is not just an ancient European (Greek) sport, it has also been played in Asia – in Japan, under the name ‘hanetsuki’, since the sixteenth century, and in India as ‘poona’. British Army officers, stationed in India in the eighteenth century, introduced the game to England, where it was played at a lawn party in 1873 at the Duke of Beaufort’s Badminton House. The game was played in England according to

128

Harmon & Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 358–59. Prageeta Sharma, “Ode to Badminton,” in The Opening Question (New York: Fence Books, 2004): 22, l. 4. 130 “Ode to Badminton,” 22, ll. 4–6. 131 “Ode to Badminton,” 22, l. 17. Nightingale was a British pioneer in medicine, statistics, and feminism. Comparing the birdie to the renowned, highly-decorated woman, Sharma again emphasizes the superiority of the birdie over a tennis ball. 132 Sharma mocks this fact, stating that the “game [was] named after a chair” (“Ode to Badminton,” 22, l. 2). 129

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Indian rules until 1887.133 While the Indian American poet does not explicitly point to the Asian history of the badminton game, postcolonial undertones resonate in her praise of the exquisiteness of the allegedly British sport. Sharma’s explicit subversion of the solemn ode through humorous tone and the breaking of formal rules, however, deconstructs European hegemony, if ever so subtly, on formal grounds instead of political outspokenness, avoiding “the open wound of history.”134

The Elegy Like the exalting ode, the elegy is a poem of seriousness, an ancient European poetic form of mourning and sadness, traditionally written in response to someone’s death. Elegiac poetry meditates on loss, grief, admiration, and consolation.135 The formal characteristic of traditional elegiac poetry is its meter, a couplet consisting of “a line of dactylic hexameter followed by one of pentameter.”136 Yuko Taniguchi’s “Elegy with Music”137 lacks an elegiac meter, even lacks metrical regularity in general. It is only the title and the topic that relate her piece to the elegiac tradition. In this poem, the Japanese American poet describes the speaker’s thoughts on the death of a certain Mr Kokai, who is not described further. Taniguchi expresses her sadness on the occasion, musing on the transitoriness of life: “Death resembles a long night and peace.” She explores the interconnectedness of the universe, describing how “everything resembles something”: “The sound of Bach resembles certainty. / Certainty resembles the thin balance of regret and hope.” This is part of the Buddhist cyclical world-view with its emphasis on harmony. The poet 133

See Wendy Garden, “Performing Whiteness: The British in India, 1850–1900: A Perspective through the Camera Lens,” in Exploring the British World: Identity, Cultural Production, Institutions, ed. Kate Darian–Smith, Patricia Grimshaw, Kiera Lindsey & Stuart Mcintyre (Melbourne: R M I T , 2004): 514–39. 134 Josephine Hock–Hee Park, “‘Composed of Many Lengths of Bone’: Myung Mi Kim’s Reimagination of Image and Epic,” in Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits ed. Shirley Geok–lin Lim, John Blair Gamber, Stephen Hong Sohn & Gina Valentino (Philadelphia P A : Temple U P , 2006): 235. 135 See Harmon & Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 178–79. 136 Harmon & Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 178. 137 Yuko Taniguchi, “Elegy with Music,” Foreign Wife Elegy (Minneapolis M N : Coffee House, 2004): 24.

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stresses this quality as well, mentioning one of Bach’s harmonious compositions in the poem and subtitling the elegy “after Prélude Suite No. 1 in G Major by Johann Sebastian Bach Unaccompanied Cello by Yo-Yo Ma.” The speaker notes the transitory nature of her own life as well, stating that she was no different from those who cried listening to Bach years ago, those who lived urgently, those who died, those who live to die.

While Taniguchi composes an elegy, a European verse form, and links it to a prelude by the German Baroque composer Bach, she incorporates Buddhist ontology and resorts to haiku-like aphoristic diction: “A rose resembles layers of time.” This cultural fusion fits her own cultural hybridity (Taniguchi was born in Japan and now lives in the U S A ). The latter is emphasized by mentioning the musician Yo–Yo Ma, who was born to Chinese parents in Paris and moved to America at the age of four.138 The lamented Mr Kokai’s nationality is also not clearly demarcated: he could be either Japanese or Japanese American. Taniguchi’s “Elegy with Music,” with its adaptation of a European form, the link to European classical music, the incorporation of Asian religious and poetic elements, and the emphasis ofn cultural fusion, is less a characterization of an individual person than a manifestation of ethnic hybridity. Like Taniguchi’s “Elegy with Music,” Timothy Liu’s “Little Elegy in G Minor” connects his elegy with music. Not only does the title indicate this; the speaker, who mourns his mother’s death, mentions “Chopin nocturnes.”139 The poet announces the elegy form in the title, but does not use the elegiac meter in his composition. However, the sad tone matches that of the traditional elegy. The fact that Liu set his poem in G Minor, the key most suitable for tragedy and sadness, emphasizes this atmosphere. Music must have been important for the deceased, who bequeathed sheets of Chopin nocturnes to her son. The man perceives her death and the wake in shock, observing that the hours [are] trapezing over that sea of anonymous faces where sidereal glances scale up the piano’s mirrored lid. (20, ll. 12–14) 138

See “The Official Yo–Yo Ma Site,” http://www.yo-yoma.com/yo-yo-mabiography (accessed 13 April 2010). 139 Timothy Liu, “Little Elegy in G Minor,” Of Thee I Sing (Athens: U of Georgia P , 2004): 20, l.1.

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The love of the son for his mother can also be detected before the wake, when the speaker empties his mother’s apartment (together with an unnamed other person). He associates her death with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, thereby pointing to the significance of her life: [her] evening gowns in trash bags making a little Golgotha of their own right in the corner of that studio we had spent all morning emptying out. (20, ll. 3–6)

The time after her death, inferior to her lifetime, is merely “makeshift history” (20, l. 10). Unlike the first-generation Japanese American Taniguchi, who incorporates her ethnicity into her “Elegy with Music,” the second-generation Chinese American Liu foregrounds only his Euro-American) cultural background and Christian faith, though writing of the death of a woman who was presumably born in China. Nevertheless, the references to music can be interpreted as evoking the speaker’s harmonious relationship with his mother. Still, the poet’s total omission of reference to China or the Chinese American community, though perhaps surprising, makes Liu’s poem completely accessible to all Americans, irrespective of their ethnicity. Asian American poets clearly do not shy away from ‘infidelity’ to the original European poetic forms they employ, whether sonnets, aubades, couplets, ballads, or elegies. Even Timothy Liu’s elegy, with its ‘de-ethnicized’ approach to cross-cultural understanding, serves to affirm his own cultural autonomy. Lisa Lowe, in her exploration of the subversion of canonized forms by contemporary Asian American poets in her book Immigrant Acts, warns against interpreting the poetic fragmentation and adaptation of these authors as postmodern fashion and points to their cultural significance: The kind and degree of contradiction that exists between the historical specificities of immigrant displacement and racialization and canonized forms of national culture generates formal deviations whose significances are misread if simply assimilated as modernist or postmodernist aesthetic modes.140

The breaking of formal European traditions in poetry has several effects. First, poets who deconstruct a European form and adapt it to their own, culturally 140

Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 31–32.

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hybrid identities refuse to give up their ethnic culture in exchange for majority American culture, thereby affirming the value of their ethnic identity. Secondly, they refuse European hegemony and break the omnipotence of these norms and rules.

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Conclusion

releasing endorphins in the brain – archipelago: an expanse of water with many scattered islands –1

T

A R T H U R S Z E ’ S P O E M “Archipelago.” The image of a group of islands is suitable for Asian American poets: Not only does their literary work release “endorphins in the brain,” they are also all independent, ‘islanded’ individuals with different biographies, ethnic backgrounds, ages, different generations of immigration, levels of education, and affiliations to poetic movements. Yet they are also all connected: The “expanse of water” that relates them to each other is their Asian family background, the American nation they live in, and their profession, the writing of poetry. A traveler through the ocean of contemporary American poetry, I have undertaken an exploration of this archipelago, and am able to proclaim: “So there it is!” One of these archipelagoes is the well-known contemporary Asian American poet Arthur Sze, a second-generation Chinese American born in New York City in 1950. The author of eight books of poetry, Sze is influenced by Asian, Asian American, Euro-American, and Native American cultures.2 His poems exemplify my argument: contemporary Asian American poetry is 1

HE ABOVE EPIGRAPH COMES FROM

Arthur Sze, “Archipelago,” in The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998 (Port Townsend W A : Copper Canyon, 1998): 261, section 8. 2 Cf. Arthur Sze, Quipu (Port Townsend W A : Copper Canyon, 2005): 101.

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located at the interstices of all of these cultures, in a hybridity is visible in all aspects of the poetry, be it language, content, or form. Sze writes the main body of his texts in English, and for an American readership, but he also inserts words from Asian languages (Japanese and Chinese) in the context of Zen and feng shui ceremonies (e.g., “matcha,” green tea3), thereby expressing his respect and appreciation for Asian cultures. He also interweaves Hopi words from the domestic sphere (for example, “piki,”4 bread made of blue cornmeal). These cultural references are related to his biography (his wife is a Hopi weaver, he works at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and he lives in New Mexico), which reveals his openness to additional cultural and ethnic communities: There are also references to nature using Hawaiian (for example, “’apapane” and “’i’iwi,”5 the names of birds). And he uses Italian as well as Middle and Old English in reference to etymological roots and linguistic analyses. In the final lines of “Archipelago,” which describe a beautiful nature scene, these Middle and Old English words appear: river stones marking the noon solstice – black, blak, blaec – following the thread of recollection through a lifetime – the passions becoming the chiming sounds of jade.6

Sze’s multilingual poetry, a manifestation and celebration of cultural hybridity, here links memory and the apparition of river stones to the deep etymological history of language. Cultural hybridity is also visible in the subjects of Sze’s poems. In “Archipelago,” the writer mentions a visit to a Zen garden and the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, the ceremonial dance of Pueblo Indians, the fate of the Peng family in Chengdu, China, during the Cultural Revolution, a couple quarrelling in the U S A , and an American policeman suspecting a Native American dancer of being in possession of marijuana which then turns out to be marigold. Sze 3

Arthur Sze, “Kaiseki,” in The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998 (Port Townsend W A : Copper Canyon, 1998): 31, section 9. 4 Arthur Sze, “The Redshifting Web,” in The Redshifting Web, 224, section 2. 5 Arthur Sze, “Six Persimmons,” in The Redshifting Web, 46, section 1. 6 Sze, “Archipelago,” 262, section 9.

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frequently refers to nature: for example, describing how the first frost sweetens the apples and how he waters hyacinth bulbs. These references to Asian, Islamic, Pueblo, and American cultures are the islands that constitute the archipelago of the speaker’s identity. The poem enumerates memories of a culturally hybrid individual, “following the thread / of recollection through a lifetime.” The poet interconnects these incidents of various ethnic backgrounds when he mentions them repeatedly in new constellations. The visit to Istanbul, for example, is ornamentally contextualized between the Blue Mosque and a Zen garden (253, section 1). The Turkish port city reappears with “cries from minarets up on a hill” when the speaker and his wife quarrel: If anguish is an end in itself, you walk into a landscape of burned salt cedar along a river. I remember seeing hungry passengers disembark at the docks. (256, section 4)

Some of the speaker’s memories are interlinked: for example, stones recur in the descriptions of the Zen garden and the Pueblo ceremony. In “Intercultural Strategies,” Zhou notes that the Native American dancer’s encounter with the police “resonates with the Chinese family’s experience in Chengdu.”7 In “Archipelago,” he explores the multicultural subjectivity of his speaker. His identity is infinitely layered and exists in connection with his wife, the ethnic communities, Chinese American and Pueblo, he is affiliated with, the nation he lives in (represented by the authoritative policeman) and the regions he lives in and his ancestors come from (New Mexico and China). “Sze’s incorporation of ethnic cultures enables him to search for new signifying spaces and modes of expression,”8 states Zhou. This is not only visible in the language and content level of his poetry, but also in the form of his poems. In Redshifting Web, he uses the Asian poetic forms of ghazal and renga,9 which he adapts radically. Also present are European verse forms like the couplet, all unrhymed. All of these forms are transformed to suit his own expressive requirements. 7

Xiaojing Zhou, “Intercultural Strategies in Asian American Poetry,” in RePlacing America: Conversations and Contestations: Selected Essays, ed. Ruth Hsu, Cynthia Franklin & Suzanne Kosanke (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P , 2000): 104. 8 Zhou, “Intercultural Strategies in Asian American Poetry,” 101. 9 Sze, “Renga,” in The Redshifting Web, 154.

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Sze’s adaptation of the ghazal form is especially noteworthy: In his poem “June Ghazal,” on the natural beauties of June, he breaks almost all rules of the form. The five couplets accord with the sher conventions, but there is no radif at the end of the lines, no kaafiyaa, no beher, and no maqta with the poet’s name. Sze cunningly replaces the kaafiyaa and radif with several repetitions. First, the following two statements appear twice: “the sun a miner, a thief, a gambler, / an assassin”10 and the world is a gold leaf spinning down in silence to clear water. (88, ll. 2–4)11

The central part of the poem (88, ll. 4–7), which includes neither of these two sentences, is marked by an acquatic image cluster – “water,” “blue,” “river” (88, ll. 4 and 5). There Sze also employs parallelism: “The deer watch us in blue leaves. // The sun shines in the June river” (88, ll. 4–5). Another substitute for the radif and kaafiyaa is Sze’s repetition of single words (“joy” and “passing,” 88, ll. 6 and 7). The circular structure of his ghazal is typical of Asian cultures and Hopi ontology and in contrast to Euro-American linear thought. The movement in cycles is typical of all of Sze’s poems, be they composed in European or Asian verse forms. The fusion of cultures and ethnicities in Sze’s poems entertains “difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.”12 It deconstructs a eurocentric hierarchy and national myth in American society and expands binary constructs of racial, national, and ethnic identity. Through the hybrid existence of Asian Americans and its poetic representation, a new idea of nationality has emerged that sees ‘home nation’ as whatever place one feels at home. In this way contemporary Asian American poets exert an influence on their environment. Their culturally hybrid representations give voice to an ethnic Other and articulate Asian American subjectivity. They make visible the erased histories of Asian America, resist assimilation by the dominant EuroAmerican culture, and dismantle racial stereotypes of Asian Americans. The Chinese American poet Sze fuses cultural idioms in his poems and thereby explores interstitial passage between the fixed identifications of 10

Arthur Sze, “June Ghazal,” in The Redshifting Web, 88, ll. 1–2, 7–8. Repeated in a slightly altered form in the final couplet (88, ll. 9–10). 12 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 4. 11

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majority America, Asian America, and Asia. He is not interested in the boundaries demarcating the different, fixed identities, but in the liminal space between these separate entities. His hybrid fusions in content, form, and language are the source of newness and invention. Nevertheless, he does not attempt to flatten or erase cultural and ethnic differences and identifications. This is important, as Nancy Mower emphasizes, because “if we are going to have a truly multiethnic society, we need to show respect and sensitivity for the differences in one another’s culture.”13 Sze’s creative work in particular and contemporary Asian American poetry in general can be interpreted as (re-)articulations of the lives of Asian Americans, as negotiations about culturally hybrid existence, and as reevaluations of and resistance to present-day power relationships and hierarchies. In this sense, culturally hybrid Asian American poetry participates in the worldwide cultural and ethnic exchange and renegotiations of globalization. The many gifted young poetic talents assure that this venture will be continued, so that future critics will also be able to proclaim: “So there it is” – contemporary Asian American poetry in all its crafts(wo)manship, beauty – and cultural hybridity.

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13

Nancy Alpert Mower, “Who Is the Other? That Is the Question: Orientalism Revisited,” in Re-Placing America: Conversations and Contestations: Selected Essays, ed. Ruth Hsu, Cynthia Franklin & Suzanne Kosanke (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P , 2000): 129; Kosanke argues similarly: “Multicultural literature has a chance to provide that glimpse if it will only let the Other be Other”; Suzanne Kosanke, “Versions of Otherness: Ethnic Differences Confront Universal Themes,” in Re-Placing America: Conversations and Contestations: Selected Essays, ed. Ruth Hsu, Cynthia Franklin & Suzanne Kosanke (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P , 2000): 115.

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Wilson, Rob. Reimagining the American Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2000). Wong, Nellie. “Can’t Tell,” in The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America, ed. Garrett Hongo (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1993): 270. Wong, Sau–ling Cynthia. “Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads,” Amerasia Journal 21.1–2 (1995): 1–27. ——, & Stephen H. Sumida, ed. A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2001). Wong, Shawn. Asian American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology (New York: Longman, 1995). Wong, Sunn Shelley. “Sizing Up Asian American Poetry,” in A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature, ed. Sau–ling Cynthia Wong & Stephen H. Sumida (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2001): 285–308. Woo, Merle. “Letter to Ma,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings of Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe L. Moraga & Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1981; Berkeley: Women of Color, 3rd ed. 2002): 155–63. Woon, Koon. The Truth in Rented Rooms (New York: Kaya, 1998). Worra, Bryan Thao. Monstro: Poems from 1991–2006, E-Chapbook, http://members .aol.com/thaoworra/monstro.pdf (accessed 27 May 2007). Wright, Richard. The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956; Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1994). Wu, Jean Yu–wen Shen, & Min Song, ed. Asian American Studies: A Reader (New Brunswick N J & London: Rutgers U P , 2000). Yamada, Mitsuye. “Asian Pacific American Women and Feminism,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings of Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe L. Moraga & Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1981; Berkeley: Women of Color, 3rd ed. 2002): 74–79. ——. “Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster: Reflections of an Asian American Woman,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings of Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe L. Moraga & Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1981; Berkeley: Women of Color, 3rd ed. 2002): 34–40. Yamamoto, Traise. “Different Silence(s): The Poetics and Politics of Location,” in Reviewing Asian America: Locating Diversity, ed. Wendy L. Ng, Soo–Young Chin, James S. Moy & Gary Y. Okihiro (Pullman: Washington State U P , 1995): 137–45. ——. Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body (Berkeley: U of California P , 1999). Yamanaka, Lois–Ann. “Empty Heart,” in Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction, ed. Jessica Hagedorn (New York: Penguin, 1993): 544–50. ——. Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge, 1993).

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Yang, Kao Kalia. “Digging Up the Dead,” in Yellow as Turmeric, Fragrant as Cloves: An Anthology of Asian American Female Poets, ed. Anne Marie Fowler & Sholeh Wolpé (O’Fallon I L : Deep Bowl, 2008): 217–18. ——. “Palm Trees in Ontario, California,” in Yellow as Turmeric, Fragrant as Cloves: An Anthology of Asian American Female Poets, ed. Anne Marie Fowler & Sholeh Wolpé (O’Fallon I L : Deep Bowl, 2008): 134. ——. “To the Men in My Family Who Love Chickens,” http://www.lanternbooks .com/blog/entry.php?id=169 (accessed 27 May 2008). Yee, Vincent. “N A A A P National Tunes Out the Adam Carolla Show” (28 January 2006), http://www.naaapphiladelphia.og/News.do?id=918 (accessed 13 April 2010). Yen, Xiaoping. “Mei–mei Berssenbrugge (1947– ),” in Asian American Poets: A BioBibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Guiyou Huang (Westport C T : Greenwood, 2002): 45–51. Yetman, Norman R. “‘Black Monday’: Brown v. Board of Education and the Significance of Race in American Life,” in Transitions: Race, Culture, and the Dynamics of Change, ed. Hanna Wallinger (Münster & Vienna: L I T , 2006): 19–50. ——. “Introduction: Definitions and Perspectives,” in Majority and Minority, ed. Yetman, 1–38. ——. “Race and Ethnicity in the United States at Century’s End,” in Majority and Minority, ed. Yetman, 431–60. ——, ed. Majority and Minority: The Dynamics of Race and Ethnicity in American Life (Boston M A : Allyn & Bacon, 6th ed. 1998). Yin, Xiao–huang. “Redefining Chinese American Sensibility: A Study of ChineseLanguage Literature in America,” in Not English Only: Redefining ‘American’ in American Studies, ed. Orm Øverland (Amsterdam: V U U P , 2001): 178–98. Yogi, Stan. “Japanese American Literature,” in An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, ed. King–kok Cheung (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1997): 125–55. Yoshihara, Mari. Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2003). Youn, Monica. Barter (St Paul M N : Graywolf, 2003). Young, Robert J.C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1996). ——. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1996). Yu, Timothy. “Form and Identity in Language Poetry and Asian American Poetry,” Contemporary Literature 41.1 (2000): 422–61. ——. Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry

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Appendix: Interviews

Interviews with Kimiko Hahn Kimiko Hahn on the American Poetry Scene This interview with Kimiko Hahn was conducted by Brigitte Wallinger at Hahn’s home in Houston, Texas, on 13 November 2005. The poet later revised the interview. All remarks in parentheses, some in footnotes and all retrospective additions, are hers.

BW: How would you define the term ‘poetry’? KH: Over the past twelve years of teaching, I’ve been searching for an undergraduate textbook that opens with a definition of poetry. And since I have not found an adequate opening chapter, I have collected a variety of definitions – some are very academic, and others wildly subjective, as you can imagine. Emily Dickinson said that she knew what a poem was when she felt the top of her head fly off. My own dry definition is: an arrangement of highly charged language that draws the reader into an experience. (Talk about inadequate!) My favorite, however, comes from the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms, which calls it “a species of magic.” It is thrilling to see the word ‘magic’ as part of a proper definition! And I’ve taken that to heart and talk about what this suggests with my students in both literature classes and workshops. For me, it reminds me that there are areas of poetry, of art, that are necessarily beyond paraphrasing. Isn’t that the point? That we make art because exposition is inadequate? We make magic because a simple calculated recipe cannot conjure?

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BW: Which contemporary U S poetic movements are also present in contemporary Asian American poetry? KH: That’s one interesting aspect about Asian American poetry: it is not one monolithic community or entity. It really covers every poetic movement – not just Language poetry or formalism or spoken word. Asian American poetry really runs across every movement and motion. BW: Is Asian American poetry an isolated entity or is it part of mainstream U S poetry? KH: Because of the different trends just described, it flows in and out of broader movements.... As far as ‘mainstream’ is concerned – that depends on the poet. Some poets primarily identify themselves as Asian American within a particular group and other poets do not want to be identified in ethnic terms at all. I think that most poets – at least my age, anyway, my generation – would consider themselves both or at least within those two extremes: that is, a part of the poetry scene in general, maybe even specific schools or trends, but also Asian Americans. (There are exceptions, of course.) BW: What is the position of Asian American poetry in relation to contemporary mainstream U S American poetry? KH: Someone once extended the metaphor of mainstream – of a river – and described the whole of American poetry as a great many tributaries, or even a number of different currents in the stream. This is not to say that there is not a very powerful mainstream – there is – and that would be probably defined by the academy. (The Academy of American Poets is representative to some extent.) But I think Asian American poets, because we have so many different styles, are increasingly an integral part of the canon and the poetry scene. (Marilyn Chin, Cathy Song, Li–Young Lee are regularly anthologized.) And there is still inclusion by, what shall we call it – ‘affirmative action’? In terms of studying poetry, Asian American poetry is still considered a separate discipline, a separate course of study. Or what I just called ‘affirmative action’ in the context of curriculum. I think, though, for young academics who are in their twenties and thirties, that is less the case. The change we see in anthologies (like Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Poulin and Waters) will make a difference. For one, if a teacher or student does not know where to look for diversity – it is right there. The editors have done that work, which is a very positive sign. And certainly, when I teach poetry, I try to teach work from the vantage of variety, groups, and aesthetics. But there are less progressive academics; some in their fifties and sixties oftentimes return to what they

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learned when they were studying for their Ph.D., and ethnic studies was not a part of that. Cultural change is very slow, very often influenced by individuals. A backlash in the guise of ‘excellence’ (a conservative buzzword) is always possible. BW: Do you feel part of a certain poetic scene? KH: I don’t really consider myself a part of any particular school. I do feel that my poetry shares a lot in common with other women writers in particular – for example Marilyn Chin, Cathy Song, Meena Alexander, and Jessica Hagedorn. We are all very different, but I think there is a kind of sensibility and attention to language, attention to our bodies as subject-matter and to who we are as women in the world. I align myself more frequently with women writers. Two very strong influences, in terms of contemporary writers, would be Adrienne Rich, on the one hand, and Louise Glück, on the other – strikingly different. There are other writers that I feel I share an aesthetic with: for example, Albert Goldbarth has a very dense language, does a lot of research, is very playful, and is also very serious about that kind of attention to language. Carol Frost also oftentimes looks for material outside her own personal life. I increasingly find things in common with them. Arthur Sze’s work is very elegant and subtly textured. BW: What is your significance in the American poetry scene? KH: I don’t know what my significance is. I am very lucky that my last two books and my next book are published by a major publishing house – it is a kind of validation in the worlds of poetry and academia. I am also fortunate to be here at the University of Houston, which has a national reputation. So, in terms of institutions, whether it’s a publishing house or whether it’s a university, I feel that I’m lucky and well-placed. I think it also means that I have some sort of readership. But I don’t think anyone will know where my place is for a couple of decades – and who knows what will happen after I will have passed away? That’s where things really begin to shake out. It’s not for me to say – or even worry about. (February 2006 update: being made a Distinguished Professor at Queens College/ City University of New York is an incredible honor and validation. It is wonderful to be so appreciated by one’s college.) BW: What do you mean by “lucky”? KH: On the one hand – for all Asian American writers, not just myself – there has been an element of exclusion, of not having access or only having limited access because we are Asian American, and I think that people are still sur-

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prised by that. (One friend half-jokes that if an Asian American is awarded a particular prize one year, it will be several years until that is possible again; a slot has been filled.) On the other hand, because the poetry scene has started to become diverse only in the past decade or so, it is still fairly recent that publishing houses and magazines have made an effort to include writers of color. And so I am lucky that I’m writing during a time when there’s interest in such work – objective interest. I’m also a very confident person; I don’t feel that I’m just getting published because I’m a writer of color. I am confident, ambitious, and very proud of what I write and of my accomplishments – so, part of the luck is being born at a certain time in history, and also being a confident person. There is a kind of backlash, however, that I spoke of earlier. For example, a book review of Mosquito and Ant came out in a mainstream journal and the critic didn’t say one word about my writing at all. All he did was say: Oh, she is an academic because she is Asian American. He didn’t even talk about my book. He just attacked me for being an Asian American woman and stated that that is why I am getting published and why I have tenure. What happened to the poetry review? So that’s what I mean by exclusion and by prejudice. And I don’t think a lot of people recognize that there’s still such prejudice. Some people will say I receive certain awards or attention because I’m Asian American. It is probably partly true. I have to believe, and I do, that ultimately my writing deserves it. And that my aesthetics and subject-matter, as influenced by my background, are important. I don’t deny that, but I do see it in a positive light. Certainly, there’s still a kind of quota system going on, too – as my friend suggested. So it’s good to be included, but sometimes a little insidious. And sometimes even unfair to other people. I shouldn’t be one of two or one of three people being included at the exclusion of other writers. But in the little world of poetry, there is plenty of room, and extremely few places at the same time. BW: Would you say that you are adequately recognized by U S literary critics? KH: For my age I am. I hope that other people, critics, will take interest in the next decade. I think, for where I am at right now, it’s okay. BW: How does a typical KH poem develop? KH: I am a real believer in routine. Typically, ever since I was an undergraduate, I’d go to a coffee shop or a library with just a yellow pad of paper and just read and write for an hour. Rather than wait for ideas, I try to write a lot and go for the raw material – just get a lot of raw material out. (What

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Dorothea Brande, in the 1930s, called “tapping the unconscious.”) Sometimes I do have ideas or projects that I want to work on, that I keep returning to. For example, I had the idea to write about ‘possession’. I wanted to write a piece – one of my zuihitsu – on all different aspects of possession: a person feeling possessive of a lover, or a child feeling possessive of a toy, or the idea of feeling possessed by a spirit or monopoly capitalism, possessive bourgeoisie, that kind of possession of capital and labor – all of this percolating was very fun. So that’s one example of a writing project. And in such a project I still try to generate a lot of raw material so I can ‘tap the unconscious’; then, at home, I put that material on my computer (a typewriter in the old days) and it goes through many drafts. BW: What does art mean to you? KH: I was raised with a lot of different arts in my life, especially visual arts, because both my parents were visual artists. I also had Japanese dance classes and tea-ceremony classes, and calligraphy and flower arrangement – a lot of Japanese arts. Also music classes – the flute. Art has always been very much a part of my upbringing. Rock ’n’ roll, and just even dancing at parties – that sort of casual participation – has always been important. For me, the arts are as close as I come to a relationship with a community and a relationship with some kind of spirit or soul. Art itself is a shrine, whether it’s a concert hall or sitting alone and listening to music. When I was in Florence in the summer of 2005, I went to a museum I’d just heard about. Roaming around, I came upon a Byzantine painting and, as I stood in front of it, all of a sudden, tears were just streaming down my face. I just stood there weeping – like the cliché of just turning on a faucet. I’ve never had that experience in a museum. It was just a completely physical experience, very powerful. And I don’t think it was because the picture [was] of, say, Christ or the saints; I don’t even remember what the image was. I do know my response was partly just feeling very moved by that aesthetic – I love Byzantine art – and by the figure. And that’s what I mean by art and poetry being an experience. I felt that there was some kind of spiritual connection for me – not Christian, but just spiritual, although it may have reached back into my childhood upbringing, religious upbringing. I don’t deny that may be part of it. So, although I am not religious now, it may have gone back to some childhood memories and to a time when things could be absolute. Less complex. It was just a very precious moment for me. I was grateful to feel so moved.

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BW: Do you think poetry is a matter of inspiration or a craft? KH: We have a saying about art being a small percentage of inspiration and the rest, perspiration. Of course it’s a combination. When I said that I really believe in routine, I believe that you have to give yourself the opportunity to be inspired. (To conjure!) So, if I go to a coffee shop three times a week, I’m giving myself the opportunity to generate raw material, maybe generate inspiration, in a sense. I don’t believe in sitting around waiting for inspiration – that’s quite a romantic notion: that poets just walk around waiting to be hit by lightning. I think some of my students still believe that. On the other hand, it does happen that every once in a while I’ll jump out of bed or I’ll have to find pen and paper in the car to scribble something down; but that’s lucky, that’s a lucky moment. A gift. I believe that, through an ability to ‘tap the unconscious’ (or whatever a writer wishes to call it), dedication to craft, and through a lot of writing and reading – that’s how poems finally come together. Different poets have different ways of accessing their work. Emphasis on the word ‘access’. BW: Do you think there are weaknesses in your poetry? KH: Oh, of course! There are plenty of weaknesses. I look back at my books now and it’s frightening. I think that my first book was made up of poems that I wrote when I was very young, and I’m proud of them. I think a lot of them have a wonderful energy. In some ways my first two books were kind of a workshop for myself, a kind of M F A program for myself, because I didn’t go to graduate school and study writing. I had a lot of writing workshops as an undergraduate, and when I left Iowa, having studied with Louise Glück, Charles Wright, Marvin Bell, and Michael Burkard (he was a T A , and my first writing instructor) and even a conference class with Rita Dove (also a grad student) – after that very precious time I left, and I returned to New York, where I met a lot of writers who were not coming out of any kind of writing program; they were even critical of writing programs. I kind of got kicked around the block, so to speak – but in a good way. It was at that point that I became influenced by political writers, street poets, the New York School; a lot of diversity, especially Asian American writers. It was a very different kind of influence, and so my first two books really come out of being influenced by very major poets from the academy, on the one hand (whom I adore and I am influenced by still), and, on the other hand, wildly different communities of writers. This mixture created my first two books (Air Pocket and Earshot). I guess I was trying to figure out an aesthetic and those two books helped me do some shaping. After that, my aesthetic continued to

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change, so I think that what I’m writing now is different from those two books, although I hope there is some kind of thread. And certainly I think it’s the same voice throughout.... Oh, you asked about weakness! I wonder if this kind of public shaping and reshaping of my aesthetics over all my books – I wonder if this is a flaw or just one writer’s way of working. I don’t know. Other writers have books that are much more pristine. Others, still, have done what I ended up doing, a zig-zagging progression. BW: What comes more naturally for you, image cluster or rhythmical structure? KH: I would say image cluster. Which might have something to do with influence from American poets, especially William Carlos Williams and T.S. Eliot; then also the writers I studied with. Also, I think this is how we were taught: to rely on the image in a way that was very particular, to depend on an image (to depend on Williams’s red wheelbarrow!). I would say that my rhythmic sense is from what I would call cadence – to emphasize its informal quality. I work with that intuitively – probably not consciously paying attention to cadence, until maybe the last couple of books. Not to suggest I never paid attention to it: rather, I would look at the line break as a way of pacing. Now, if I feel that there’s something bumpy or awkward, I pay more attention to that problem. Also – not just image clusters but sound clusters: I’m paying more attention to constellations of sound. I am very interested in what I would call erratic patterns of sound – in The Artist’s Daughter and my current work. BW: You have talked about the aesthetic changes your poetry has gone through. What exactly do you mean by that? KH: Someone described my early poems as feeling improvisational – almost, say, stream-of-consciousness, trains of thought. I am not sure that my poems possess that kind of fluidity any more, that improvisational feel. And I miss that. I’d like to go back and bring back what I had, say, in Earshot and some of the poems in The Unbearable Heart, mainly “Wisteria.” But at some point I moved away from that, I’m not sure why. I know that at one point I did not want my poems to be as fragmentary, especially after writing “Wisteria,” after my mother’s death. And maybe that’s where I swerved away from that kind of play and improvisation. I am not sure. I haven’t completely thought it through. Right now I’m writing poetry that utilizes outside material – especially science essays. In some prose pieces I do a lot of meandering, I let my mind wander, but not so much in poetry; and I’d like to get back to those sorts of leaps.

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BW: Are you going to publish prose in the near future? KH: Well, I have a secret manuscript of short stories – ‘sudden fiction’, really. We’ll see if I ever work on it hard enough to get it published. BW: Which of your travels has influenced you the most? KH: Certainly living here in Houston and being surrounded by young writers and also seeing and talking with other poets has made an impact. It has allowed me to think about poetry in a more focussed way, read about it in a more focussed way than I have; it’s enabled me to live in a community of writers in a way that I haven’t since I was an undergraduate. Well, I did have little of that in Genova and Firenze (at two International Poetry Festivals) in June 2005. It was thrilling to be in an international setting, to eat dinner and talk about poetry. Poetry around the clock! BW: What is your favorite poem by another poet? KH: I love John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” I think his use of poetic diction is absolutely extraordinary. The way he mixes language that is scientific, religious, and romantic is very inspiring. He is serious and playful at the same time. BW: Do you have a favorite poem of your own? KH: I think everybody else’s favorite poem of mine is the first one in my first book, “When You Leave.” It was the first poem I ever published. And partly for that reason, it is important to me.. .. “Wisteria” is important because it draws together a number of issues – my mother’s death, the body, the elegy, The Tale of Genji and Genji’s interest in women (so it has to do with love affairs), father–daughter relations; it also has to do with growing old for a woman, what is a woman’s place as she ages. BW: What is the role of poetry in the U S A ? KH: A broad answer to your broad question presents an interesting contradiction: poetry in American society is considered very marginal. When I visited Nicaragua in 1982, poetry was a part of people’s lives. You could go into a soldiers’ camp and they would have a favorite poem that they could recite and they would love to do that. Poetry was important to people and they were very proud of having it in their lives, even people who couldn’t read. We don’t have poetry as a part of our lives in the United Sates that way. On the other hand, I think that when people say poetry is marginalized in this country, I don’t think it’s completely the case. I believe that there is a lot more poetry going on than people notice: for example, my students at Queens College work in grocery stores, in high schools; one was a toll attendant, another was

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a janitor in a public high school. So there are people everywhere reading and writing. And that means that poetry is everywhere.... A related issue: I have just read an article in The New York Times [of 13 November 2005] book review section where the writer was criticizing an anthology that included only white and mostly male writers. I think that is unbelievable for a contemporary anthology. One would think that anthology editor today would have made an effort to go beyond such a narrow view. Sad. BW: What is poetry’s effect on the U S ? KH: That’s probably where it is marginal. I think that it isn’t obvious or public the way that it might be in, say, Latin American countries or Europe (although I might romanticize the effect literature plays in Europe). I don’t know about Asia actually, since I’ve gotten out of touch. I do know that after the September 11 attacks, people were emailing poetry to each other all across the country in an attempt to find words to express their horror, fear, outrage, and determination – and just to try and figure out what was going on. So, even though the exchange was on the Internet and mostly between individuals, it was a kind of public expression. Effect? In this kind of extreme case, to make sense of extreme emotions. In a more modest way, one hears poetry at weddings or funerals as well. Then, of course, there are song lyrics that might be considered poetry – from ballads to rap. I’m rambling a bit here – I guess, the effect is to be a mode of expression in moments of distress and joy. BW: Have you ever thought about writing an autobiography? KH: I’ve thought about it, but I think my poetry and prose is fairly autobiographical, so I don’t think I will write a real memoir. (Not that everything I write is factual.) BW: What are the next big projects you are working on? KH: I have to read through my manuscript “The Narrow Road to the Interior” – which is coming out in July. After that, I have my next manuscript: the working title is “Toxic Flora” (after a poem that’s coming out in TriQuarterly Review1). So far, this manuscript consists of a series using different (New York Times) Science Times essays. I don’t think I’ll keep more than probably twenty-five of seventy, because most of them are pretty bad. When I first started writing them I thought that they would be love poems, but the content has taken off in several different directions.... I think most of the “Toxic Flora” manuscript will be this series, and, as I’ve described, most are based on 1

Kimiko Hahn, “Toxic Flora,” TriQuarterly 122 (2005): 132.

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the Science Times articles; but I have others based on other outside sources. For example, poems that talk back to other poems like John Donne’s “Valediction,” and Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” ... Another sort of outside source is Greek mythology. I have one long poem based on the Demeter story.2 I have just written a poem that makes reference to Charon.3 I am resuscitating a poem on hummingbirds that references Calliope.4 So I have three long poems that are based directly or indirectly on Greek mythology... . In the back of my mind I’m thinking, again, of the female body. This time it will be the aging body and what this means for me as a woman and specifically as an Asian American woman. When I addressed issues of the body earlier it was with the eye/ heart of a young woman. That is who I was. BW: When you send your book to a publishing house, do you get comments on your work? KH: Yes and no. The editor at Hanging Loose Press suggested cutting certain poems that he thought were too weak for the manuscript – and he was right. (I probably should have cut more!) As I was working on Earshot, both Ted Hannan (my then husband) and Walter Lew saw a number of drafts. In the case of The Unbearable Heart, Walter, who was the editor at Kaya, asked me for more poems because the manuscript was not full enough. I added the very small section of poems that are based on folk-tales – it wasn’t in the early version. For the poems that are being published by Norton, my editor at Nor2

(Demeter, in Greek mythology, goddess of grain and the harvest, and daughter of the Titans Cronus and Rhea. When her daughter Persephone was abducted by Hades, god of the underworld, Demeter’s grief was so great that she neglected the land; no plants grew, and famine devastated the earth. Dismayed at this situation, Zeus, the ruler of the universe, demanded that his brother Hades return Persephone to her mother. Hades agreed, but before he released the girl, he made her eat some pomegranate seeds that would force her to return to him for four months each year. In her joy at being reunited with her daughter, Demeter caused the earth to bring forth bright spring flowers and abundant fruit and grain for the harvest. However, her sorrow returned each fall when Persephone had to go back to the underworld. The desolation of the winter season and the death of vegetation were regarded as the yearly manifestation of Demeter’s grief when her daughter was taken from her. Demeter and Persephone were worshiped in the rites of the Eleusinian Mysteries. The cult spread from Sicily to Rome, where the goddesses were worshipped as Ceres and Proserpine.) 3 (In Greek mythology, a ferryman who took the souls of the dead across the River Styx to Hades.) 4 (Mother of Orpheus.)

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ton, Jill Bialoski, saw the manuscript of Mosquito and Ant when it was completely raw. I actually sent her two manuscripts – I must have been out of my mind! Volatile was done and I felt was ready to publish. (I thought she might like it because Norton publishes Adrienne Rich’s poetry and she’s very political.) I also sent Mosquito and Ant – thinking that if she didn’t like Volatile maybe she’d feel attracted to Mosquito and Ant, which, of course, has a different feel to it; it was very, very raw. As it turned out, Jill was not interested in Volatile; she liked it, but wasn’t interested in publishing it. However, she was interested in Mosquito and Ant but pointed out that it was rough, which I was very aware of. She gave me some feedback, I worked on it, sent it back to her. Even after accepting it for publication, she gave me more constructive feedback. Jill is a very visionary editor. She took the epistolary poems (which were stuck in a section) and fanned them throughout the book, so that the whole book became Mosquito and Ant, one whole piece. So even the poems that were originally in different sections ultimately became part of the whole Mosquito and Ant system of correspondence and theme of correspondence. As for The Artist’s Daughter, I showed the poems to my husband, Harold [Schechter], as I was working on the rough drafts. Jill saw the book when it was pretty much finished; she did ask me to look at it again and maybe show it to some other writers, which I did. I actually showed it to Tony Hoagland (who is an old classmate of mine from the University of Iowa) and to a former student, Andrew Gephardt. Both of them gave me very good feedback, especially Tony, who suggested some cuts of lines and sections here and there. For The Narrow Road to the Interior, Jill felt that the prose pieces in particular overlapped in theme (what I had originally thought might be considered motifs!) so I asked Laure–Anne Bosselaar (a splendid poet and dear friend) to read it, and she gave me a lot of feedback. Also, the novelist John Weir read it as a narrative because of its chronological flow; he felt that there was a climax missing. So I resuscitated a zuihitsu, a reflection on 9/11 written in journal form, and I placed it among the poems that are about 9/11. This addition created a kind of climax in the chronology. I’m very pleased with it. And I am really grateful for the feedback I have gotten. I guess I’ve commented on editors and others who have given critical comments.... Earlier on, Patricia Jones, Meena Alexander, and Jack Hirschman also gave me encouragement.... (May 24: Aside from my Houston and Queens colleagues, I’ve recently received very warm encouragement from Eamon Grennan and Chris Abani.)

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Ethnic and Spatial Roots This interview with Kimiko Hahn was conducted by Brigitte Wallinger at Hahn’s home in Houston, Texas, on 20 November 2005. The poet later revised the interview. All remarks in parentheses are hers.

BW: What are white people called in the Japanese American community? ‘Gaijin’? KH: Gaijin literally means ‘outside person’, so the Japanese use that for any foreigner. White person is usually hakujin and I don’t think there’s a negative connotation. Among my friends who are people of color we would just say “white people” – and any connotation would depend on tone: i.e. sometimes more negative, sometimes just a label. Oftentimes the term W A S P is used. Strictly speaking, this means White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but it has come to include most white people with a Christian background. Hawai‘i is a different case. My mother grew up speaking Japanese at home, which was the Japanese from the era in which they left Japan. Her parents did not end up speaking very much English at all. My mother spoke Standard English at school, and then, with her friends, she’d speak pidgin. This is a mixture of English, Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese, Tagalog (Filipino), Portuguese, (probably now Korean also). It was a real mixture, basically using English grammar, although even that grammar became a little subverted. Furthermore, even the words that were originally, say, in English would become transformed into ‘slang’. So ‘that’ became ‘dat’. Once my aunt was talking about “melicanguava” and no one could understand what she was saying and then we realized she meant ‘American guava’, but she said it all in one word. The words could become quite different.... Returning to your original question: in Hawai‘i people would say ‘haole’ and that means ‘white person’. It’s not really negative, either. If you’re half white, that’s ‘hapa haole’. Our family would call ourselves ‘hapa haole’, or just ‘hapa’. BW: Where in Japan did your grandparents come from? KH: They came from Hiroshima prefecture – that is, the farmlands in the province of Hiroshima, so not from the city itself. It was very poor farming land and so there were a lot of immigrants from that area at the turn of the last century.

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BW: Where is your father’s family from? Germany? KH: My father is probably third- and fourth-generation German. Let’s see: German on his father’s side, and on his mother’s side a mixture that is mainly German but also maybe a little English and other nationalities – depending on where the borders were in Europe – but mainly German. They all eventually ended up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; there’s a big German population. BW: Could you say something about the neighbourhood you grew up in? KH: I grew up in a little suburb of New York City, about twenty-five miles north of New York City, called Pleasantville. Do you know that weird fictional movie? It’s a little bit like where I grew up: for me, kind of unpleasant, really. Very middle-middle-class, with all the narrowness of mind and culture that that implies. Next door to Pleasantville is Chappaqua, where President Clinton now lives. And that’s a very upper-class community – quite different from Pleasantville, but not particularly interesting or liberal when I was young. It was a mostly conservative county in the ’60s. Westchester County in general was and still is a wealthy county; but my particular town was very middle-middle-class, mostly white-collar but some blue-collar also, and, say, Irish and Italian but also W A S P . The only other people of color were people in the Chinese laundry (whom I never knew) and there was one African American kid, but he was in a foster-home situation and did not grow up in an African American family. Very few Jewish people. There was prejudice against Jewish people in my particular community as well. So, you can see how very conservative it was. On the other hand, we lived in a wooded area, which was lovely, and it was relatively safe. The main danger were car crashes. And the Vietnam War, although very few boys from my school went that route. BW: Were you also a victim of racial prejudice? KH: Well, I was born in 1955 – only ten years after the end of World War II, which means that anti-Japanese songs or the word “Jap” (and usage) was still pretty fresh in peoples’ minds. So there were both lingering feelings about Japanese as enemies combined with general discrimination against people of color, just for being different, visually and culturally. And you know how kids will pick up if you’re too tall or fat, and my thing was that I looked different, so a few kids would pick on me for that.... The school culture was not particularly pleasant, as I said earlier. Plus my family was different in a number of ways, including being bohemian, being artists, so we enjoyed a certain kind of offbeat life-style and a lot of culture. We were in New York City every Satur-

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day and my sister and I were really brought up to feel that Japanese was a very strong part of our culture. So that was the family culture. I had two best friends. One was my next-door neighbor and we fought like two kittens – a kind of sibling rivalry, I guess; I am still very very close to her. The other was a friend of mine from school; she was one of the few Jewish kids going to my grade school. She and I were very kooky and had a lot of fun. Neither girl attended my high school, so I was pretty much a loner during those years. But back to your question: I wouldn’t say there was a lot of prejudice, but there was always a feeling of being different and not a part of the community. Some of my isolation, in hindsight, was my own doing. BW: Was it at school that you became aware of racial prejudice? KH: Yes, at school. I grew up on a street that was very secluded; there was a little forest across the street. There were some children in the neighborhood but not many – so those friends I described, I didn’t have any problems with them, and they didn’t have any problems with me. I kept to myself. Aside from the people around you, a child becomes aware of prejudice just from popular culture: cartoons and movies where you have the bad Asian as the villain. So it was also popular culture. Prejudice is a part of the fabric of America. But so is the tremendous and powerful struggle against it! And that is also an important development in education today. It wasn’t so much then. We were still trying to process the Holocaust in our history classes! BW: When did you get to know about Japanese American internment during World War II? KH: I did not learn about them until high school, which was from 1969 to 1973. So that’s civil-rights movement. But here is the long answer: my family lived in Japan for a year in 1964 when I was nine years old, and when we returned my parents wanted me to keep up with my Japanese. So my sister and I went to the Buddhist temple every Saturday in New York City for Japanese language and Japanese dance classes. In junior high, I started going out with boys whom I met there, and they were, for the most part, either mixed or Japanese American. Hanging out with kids who were Asian American and then eventually having a boyfriend in high school who was very, very political (he was Japanese American and very involved in the civil-rights movement) – all these new classmates and friends were a very different kind of influence from Pleasantville. My boyfriend’s mother had been interned, and this was when I first learned about that whole shameful period. In other words, I didn’t learn about it at school – that was just not part of our curriculum at all.

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It was outside of school that I began to learn this other stuff – including becoming aware of writing by Asian Americans. All that discovery happened outside school. So my answer contains a kind of history! BW: Did you have role models during your [years at] school, or a tradition you felt a part of? KH: My parents, because they were so nutty and because they were visual artists, really liked Gertrude Stein. It certainly was unusual in the late 1960s and early 1970s to be exposed to her work in high school. Nowadays this might not be that unusual for someone devoted to poetry in a middle-class community. Maybe. Anyway, I thought she was wild. I wouldn’t say she was necessarily a role model, but I realized that there were weird things you could do with language. It was important to be playful and to see how far sounds and subjectivity could take you. I had an interesting English teacher in high school and she brought in a lot of contemporary poetry, so Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s book A Coney Island of the Mind and e.e. cummings were significant; again, writers who were playing with language. I’m trying to think if there were any people of color ... not many. Maybe Langston Hughes.. .. Rock ’n’ roll was a big influence outside the classroom: lyrics by Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, and Marvin Gaye. He was African American (Motown, motor city = Detroit) wrote amazing political lyrics. I thought to myself: how can you have language like “We don’t need no escalation,” which was about the Vietnam War and also the escalation in Cambodia, how can you have the word ‘escalation’ in lyrics and have that be lyrical? “Fish full of mercury” – how can that be poetry? But it was.... Role models?... Here’s an odd reference: Mae West, the movie star! I watched all her movies on T V and loved the way she used double entendres. She had a sassy remark for everything and I loved that! She was powerful and sexy and really really funny. “Is that a pistol in your pocket or are you happy to see me?” I mean, that isn’t poetry but it’s a great image! BW: Did you go on a quest to find out about your roots? Did you want to go to Japanese dance classes yourself? KH: No, I had to. I started as a little girl. My identity was very much – even though I was growing up in a completely Caucasian environment as far as my home town was concerned – my family was very interested in Asian art. Even though my father was German American, he was fascinated by Asian culture. And my mother, because of the war, rejected her background. So it was really, ironically, through my father that the family focussed on Asia... . As a child, the influence was through his interest, my mother’s background and our

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travels to Japan; but then, when it was up to me – because of the civil-rights movement and my boyfriend at the time–my roots did become an important quest for me, an important part of my identity. Identity at that point wasn’t Asian American, but East Asia. It had to do with Japanese movies, Japanese dance, Japanese language, and later on in high school, literature. The problems for me in the ’60s and ’70s were a little similar to the African American tendency: if you were white or if you were part-white, you were evil. Connected to the oppressor’s culture. So, for mixed-race children there was prejudice from the white community, then some prejudice in the Asian community. It could be tough being mixed in either community. This was ironic in my case, since I spoke better Japanese than many third-generation Asian Americans at the time. I pretty much didn’t pay any attention to their prejudice. BW: What sorts of jobs have you had? KH: My jobs have been pretty varied even after undergrad school. I was a secretary and research assistant while I was a student at Columbia University. Because I was assigned to a professor in intellectual history, I researched areas that I wouldn’t have gone. I really enjoyed that challenge. Secretarial work wasn’t bad, because I could do my own writing. I pretended that I was working, but I was often typing my own stuff. I also had odd jobs like cleaning, reception work at art galleries, and giving tours in Manhattan. Later, a friend of mine asked if I wanted to teach at Parsons School of Design, in the Philosophy Department; a course on Japanese aesthetics. That was a lot of work, because it was mainly an art class, but it was a pleasure and I realized that I liked teaching. I didn’t think that I would like teaching, but next to writing, I love teaching. So I’m lucky. Around that time, another poet asked if I wanted to teach a writing class at Sarah Lawrence College, and so I spent three years as an adjunct. That’s when I met Mark (Doty). He and I both taught there. I also taught at Yale, two semesters, I taught at Barnard one semester, Eugene Lang, I taught all over the place. BW: Did you apply for those teaching jobs or were they offered to you? KH: Well, at the point I was beginning to teach, there was really no field of Asian American literature. This was the early 1980s. I was just beginning to have children (so it was in between graduate school and being a secretary, and starting out teaching a little bit and having children), and looking around at ways to keep bringing in some money and stay connected to other writers. The Basement Workshop, a well-known reading series curated for many years by Fay Chiang, then Jessica Hagedorn, was closing. I arranged to ex-

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tend it in a modest form at the Chinatown public library (Chatham Square Public Library), still continuing with mostly Asian American writers. So the Basement Workshop transformed into Word of Mouth and I got to know a lot of Asian American writers. I was also doing other political work, in part an extension of meetings with writers from the American Writers Congress – but I’m getting off track, I think. As a curator, I met Hisaye Yamamoto (can you believe it!), Ai, Shawn Wong, Li–Young Lee, Trinh T. Min–ha, Meena Alexander, Marilyn Chin, Vijay Seshadri, Sesshu Foster, of course Walter Lew and Jessica Hagedorn – and many others. (I’d have to check, but I think I also met Nellie Wong, Cathy Song, Garrett Hongo.) Meanwhile, students on various progressive campuses were demanding Asian American literature courses and some administrators began to scramble. Because of my writing and curating and also because there wasn’t a solidified field of study (i.e. no Ph.D.s yet), word got around that I was available to put something together; this is how I was offered a class at Yale! I had never taught Asian American literature before – so I took the previous instructor’s syllabus, read the work, and made the course up as I went along. I think I did pretty well; the course was always full and I got good feedback. Then I started teaching Asian American literature at Sarah Lawrence and Barnard; I also taught writing workshops at Sarah Lawrence and, eventually, at Goddard College’s low-residency. Meanwhile my poems were published in Air Pocket (1989), Earshot (1992), and The Unbearable Heart (1995). And I was receiving awards as well. These positions were offered to me and I did the whole interview process. When it was clear that I could not stay at Sarah Lawrence College, I went to the M L A and applied for a position at Queens College to teach writing workshops but also Asian American literature. It was a difficult position to get but I did (and now I am Distinguished Professor). For Houston, again, I was invited to apply; for N Y U adjunct courses, I was also invited. Timing was in my favor, as well as my ability (or nerve!) to teach courses that I was pretty much making up. It’s important to be flexible! BW: Could you talk about light in your poetry? Is there any relation to Buddhism, enlightenment, etc.? KH: Oh, I never thought of that connection. Maybe. It is true, that there’s a lot of light imagery. I think it might have to do (and maybe this does go back to Buddhism unconsciously) with my association to fragrance. I mean, I think there’s some kind of interconnection between light and fragrance. Or at the very least, to air – and there is also a lot of air in my work (from “Air Pocket” to “Like Lavrinia”). To state the obvious: fragrance is in the air, light is in the

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air, fragrance is in light and dark air. Further, in Japanese aesthetics there’s something called fragrance, kaoru; which, from what I recall, has to do with what happens in between poems, or in between stanza breaks. There’s a kind of fragrance, something we might call a synapse. I don’t know what we call this in Western literature, what happens in between or lingers after closure. Insofar as fragrance is from Japanese aesthetics, it may have its roots in Buddhism. I think there are images of fragrance in sutras. And Kaoru is, of course, a very important figure in The Tale of Genji, which also contains Buddhist elements. BW: What does New York City mean to you? KH: There are very few places I feel at home. Even in my New York City apartments I have not always felt at home. And by ‘home’ I mean that I physically belong in that space or location. Even as a mother with children I didn’t always feel physically that I belonged in those apartments. I was not uncomfortable, but I was not entirely comfortable – there wasn’t a sense of really belonging. When I separated and divorced from my second husband, I sublet a little two-bedroom apartment, and my children went in and out, so it was just me and my two daughters. That was really the first time I felt incredibly at home. So it wasn’t until my mid- to late-forties, and it wasn’t until I was divorced, that I felt at home in my sublet. Also, the borough of Brooklyn feels important – a particular kind of diversity. It is not hip or uneasysplintering; in the neighbourhoods I’ve lived in there’s a sense of diversity being crucial to a quality of life. So it’s New York, but in particular Brooklyn, that I feel I belong. (Manhattan has become, frankly, a bit too much trouble. Exciting, still, but not worth the stress or expense in terms of actually living there.) BW: How important were the visits to your maternal grandparents in Hawai‘i? KH: I think the visits made a lasting impression on my identity, my body, and my writing – especially poems about my mother. I’ve probably conflated my grandmother and Hawai‘i. Hawai‘i also represented a kind of charmed sense of childhood. I don’t know how or if these images will continue to play out. For example: will the images from those visits combine with my immediate concerns – those of my daughters as young women and my own aging female body ? I am sure I will go back and forth in terms of looking at Hawai‘i and my mother. I know I’m not finished with the images from those early visits, but I don’t know if whatever I come up with will be as powerful.

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BW: Do you return to Hawai‘i often? KH: No, unfortunately I don’t, though I wish I could return with some kind of regularity. I’ve been there only five times – first when I was four years old, and that was very, very crucial to what I just described. That was 1959, when my grandfather was still alive and right before my sister was born. The visit contained a kind of magic for me. Then we went on our way to Japan in 1964, and then again in 1968 we went for a few weeks, and that was the last time I saw my grandmother. I went to Japan in 1970, but I didn’t stop in Hawai‘i then. I most recently visited for a poetry reading, around five years ago; I had such an amazing time. There’s a very strong community of writers there and they were so wonderful to me; sort of treated me as an ‘honorary local’. A ‘local’ means you are from Hawai‘i, and I would never assume that kind of status or belonging. But I feel very, very at home there. I love their writing that has emerged from the Bamboo Ridge group and I love Hawai‘i itself. (Marie Hara took me to Buddhist temple rummage sales, and that was amazing!) It’s strange to feel so at home in a place I have been so few times. BW: Did you also visit your paternal grandparents? KH: I met my grandfather – my grandparents were divorced – maybe three times, but it was only for a dinner here and there. I never stayed with him, so my recollection is somewhat sketchy. But my grandmother and my greatgrandmother on my father’s side I got to know pretty well, because I spent summers with her and she visited a couple of times. I saw her maybe half a dozen of times. (In the United States that’s not uncommon and it’s not a bad average.) While I really loved my grandmothers on both sides, I got to know my paternal grandmother better from closer contact. She was a very strong, domineering woman. She and my father may have had a bit of a stormy relationship, but I got along with her. Like I was saying, she was strong, stubborn, and extremely independent: she ran her own nursing home out of large Milwaukee houses. I just loved her. When I was a child, I loved going to Milwaukee and spending time with her. For her era, she was fairly open-minded: probably because she was a businesswoman and she worked for Jewish doctors and had interactions with African American women who were part of the medical system. So she was quite open. On the other hand, she wasn’t too happy about my parents getting married right after the war, but eventually she accepted my mother. Her own mother was not very open-minded, but she, too, eventually accepted my mother. And I got to know both my great-grandparents as well.

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BW: Have you ever tried to enter the German American community? KH: No. I guess part of it has to do with my father’s own lack of interest; our family didn’t become involved in German culture. I don’t speak any German at all; I grew up hearing a few words from my father. So any kind of German American community exposure came from visiting my grandmother. I recall attending the Lutheran Church one Christmas Eve and hearing the service in German. It was quite lovely, actually. So, in Milwaukee and maybe a little bit through church, but not much. I think food is one of the main ways that Americans stay connected to their parents’ and grandparents’ pasts. BW: Are you a political activist? KH: I used to be very politically active. Now I’d say that I practice my politics in a narrow manner: through having a dialogue with people who are around me, which is mainly in school; also, being open about my politics so that I will hopefully be a role model to my students. I am not interested in political correctness in the sense of dictating action (although it can be a way for socially insensitive people to learn to be polite); in the classroom this is deadly, because it can censure and halt discussion.... I hope that some of my writing is still politically progressive. There are many ways to be political, and my own is very quiet at this point. BW: What are the political issues that have been on your mind? KH: I’d say ethnic and racial divisions continue to be a large and complex issue. But any kind of political issue for me will be viewed through the lens of class and feminist analyses. So, viewing issues of racism, my interpretations are bound to come from, especially, Marxism. So, in effect, Marxism and feminism are also issues.... More specific to your question: the issues foremost on my mind have to do with the rise of fundamentalism internationally and in the United Sates; I am very upset. There is such a huge backlash and swing to the far right, with religion being one of the main vehicles. I’m trying to decide how to address that both in my life and in my work. I’m not sure how to do that yet. BW: Have you figured out why this fundamentalism is going on? KH: I just read an article that has clarified some of that for me. On the one hand, I think it has to do with what used to be called the ‘silent majority’. The counterculture – the civil-rights movement, the women’s movement – in the ’60s and ’70s was very vocal. So the silent majority were the people who were not being vocal. But they were the people who were very pro-war, who were very prejudiced and conservative, and so in 1979 there was born an

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organization called the Moral Majority. And that began to bring together and organize and institutionalize what was once called the ‘silent majority’; they’ve even used grassroots organizing – for example, through churches, which is very smart, since there are already networks of churches all over the country. According to this article, that’s one reason why the right is so powerful today: it’s a backlash against liberal and progressive people; against movements such as the civil-rights movement. And that there is an international dimension; that’s very, very frightening.... I read another article that suggested the rise of Islamic fundamentalism is in part due to the history of Islam – that it did not undergo a reformation and has not developed along with other parts of society. I do not know how true this is. But I am trying to make sense of what is happening nationally and internationally. BW: On which part of your daily life have your Japanese roots been most influential? KH: Part of it might have to do with more Japanese characteristics. Some, not necessarily very positive. I wonder if some of the passivity that I grew up with comes from my mother, who was relatively quiet and passive. I mean she was not a push-over by any means and she had a very wonderful lively side. But I was raised with a kind of quietness that I’ve had to work against – I am thankful for the feminist movement! I think what I pass on to my children is not so much a quietness or a passiveness as the desire to work against that. Feminism was part of the counterculture. It is difficult to untangle the cultural strands: some of the passiveness might have to do with Japanese heritage; some with growing up female in the 1950s.... What else? I do cook Japanese food every now and then. But I don’t think that that’s really what gets passed down – plus, Japanese cuisine is trendy.. .. I think that there’s something more subtle that has to do with character and values, superstitions; definitely superstitions – I am very superstitious about the number four, for example. Maybe the word ‘quiet’ also suggests ‘subtle’ – which is an aesthetic value but could also be a broad cultural trait. My husband, who is not Japanese American, will say “the squeaky wheel gets greased,” while I think: “the nail that sticks up gets hammered” or “don’t blow your own horn.” Very different outlooks! BW: Is there any influence from the German American side of your family on your daily life? KH: Maybe a kind of stubbornness. And – well, both sides – attention to cleanliness. So, from the Japanese taking off your shoes, which we didn’t do

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in my home but in my boyfriend’s – and after we married, of course, we continued in our own household. Actually, some of the Japanese things that I grew up with had to do with him and with his family. So my first mother-inlaw, with whom I am still in touch, was a tremendous influence on my life.... BW: Did she talk about her internment experience? KH: A little bit; not that much. Most of what I know has to do with reading about it, like Hisaye Yamamoto. Anyway, back to the German side: definitely food from that side of the family. The times I visited my grandmother, we would cook together, like home-made noodles; she would actually make homemade noodles – this is a very big deal. And baked goods, especially around Christmas. We grew up with my mother cooking some of my grandmother’s recipes, Sauerbraten, Knackwurst: oh, I love all that stuff. I am sure there’s other German stuff that I grew up with that I am not even aware of, because my father has been a very strong influence; his tenacity. BW: Why did you publish your first book as a joint publication? KH: Well, Susan Sherman invited me to discuss the project with Gale Jackson and the visual artist Josely Carvalho. We thought it would be interesting to bring together our three voices. Susan Sherman was starting a second round of her series of I K O N Magazine, plus starting to publish some books, so it was kind of the beginning of the second life of I K O N . She wanted to put together a book of poems by three women, white, black, Asian, and three women who are political, different ages, and Susan and Gale come from a lesbian background. So we were all very diverse, and yet united in our vision. She envisioned a book where we had a trialogue with each other and then have poetry. Margaret Randall – the photographer, poet and revolutionary – gave her expert advice. BW: Have you taught poetry to any of the next generation poets? KH: I have only recently started teaching graduate students. Noel Sikorski was my undergraduate at Queens College and she went on to N Y U . She is mixed – Polish and Korean, I think. I don’t know if she would call herself an ‘Asian American poet’, but her work addresses her background and is very strong. And I hope she publishes a book some day. I have a student here in Houston, Loren Kwon. (Spring 2006: in my workshop I have a young writer, Sue Song, who is very talented. And two independent study students: the poet/performer, Ishle Park – she is amazing – and the fiction writer, Patty Limjap. And after trip to University of California, Riverside, Spring 2006: some of the Asian American students there were terrifically supportive. And I

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would like to support them as well.) I am thankful that my work has reached young Asian Americans and that some care about the work. BW: Do you think that you have a double audience, Asian Americans, who might understand your references to Ono no Komachi etc., and white Americans? KH: I try not to think about it. Ironically, probably not too many Asian Americans know about Japanese literature at this point. I think there are some wonderful exceptions: Traise Yamamoto, Marilyn Chin, Cathy Song (probably writers who are more my age). I don’t know how many Asian Americans in their twenties or thirties have read a lot of Japanese literature. So it may be mostly non-Asians who are acquainted with those works – maybe their interest is in Asian literature first, then my own riffs.... I try and just write about what interests me, and some of that has to do with Asian American themes and some not. When I’m writing the poetry, I don’t usually think about my audience – I try not to. When I’m editing and when I’m putting my books together, then I am more conscious of readers. Certainly when I’m at the point where I am going back and forth with my editor – it mostly has to do with what’s weak and what’s not weak. It has less to do with what people will understand. Poetry is not a commercial market, so that’s not really a big issue. Double audience? Not because of the Japanese literary references. Maybe due to other factors: so, aside from Asian American material, themes such as death (elegiac work), the body, language itself. BW: Certain things in your poetry that the general reader might not be familiar with are not annotated. Do you want to educate people and make them look these things up? KH: Funny, I think I have a lot of notes! But I think that a reader might not know, say, who Aoi is from The Tale of Genji, but they can see from my notes that she’s from The Tale of Genji; so he or she might want to go and look her up in pertinent chapters or google her to know exactly what I’m referencing. I hope that on one level a reader can just enjoy the cultural references for a kind of complexity, as a textured fabric. I don’t think I have a particular need to educate. I think that it has more to do with issues of selfexpression, and Japanese literature is as much a part of my life as, say, Dante is for others. I don’t think my poetry really is about educating; maybe exposure and engagement, which is also a kind of education, but different from instruction.

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Hahn on Asian American Literature This interview with Kimiko Hahn was conducted by Brigitte Wallinger at Hahn’s home in Houston, Texas, on 27 November 2005. The poet later revised the interview. All remarks in parentheses are hers.

BW: Do you use the term ‘Asian American’ or ‘Asian Pacific American’? KH: I use the term ‘Asian American’ from force of habit – but I have gotten in trouble for that, so I do need to get into this century! As long as we are all going to be thrown in together in this one big community, Pacific Islanders should be included – assuming that they wish to be included! I sense there are various factions. BW: How would you define ‘Asian American’? Does the term imply that one has to have a certain minimum of Asian ancestry? Or to be citizen of the U S ? KH: To some extent – and increasingly, since people are more and more of mixed ethnic backgrounds – people will define themselves. (During WW II there was some legal percentage, as with African Americans.) When I think of Asian American I think of people of Asian ancestry, whether that is completely Asian ancestry or mixed, and residing in the United States. Not necessarily citizens, because there are people here who are illegal or they choose not to be citizens. (I suppose if they are residing here but know that they are going to leave, then it’s up to them to determine whether the U S is even their home.) Maybe some of it has to do with a disconnect: that you’ve disconnected yourself from your home and America is your home, even if you don’t feel you belong here. Obviously, I include myself – Asian mixed with another ethnicity. What is partial is interesting and, I think, depends on the individual: my daughters are one-quarter Japanese but feel very strongly about that part of their heritage. Ultimately, there is an element of self-identity. And it is all within the context of how others have defined and grouped the Other. BW: I am also not sure what ‘America’ means. Does it include Canada? KH: There are anthologies of Asian Canadians. On the other hand, I have seen American anthologies and syllabi that include Asian Canadians. When you begin writing your dissertation I suggest you go to Asian American Writers’ Workshop and see what their definition is. Informally, ‘America’ suggests the United States, but really anyone from the Americas, North and South, are Americans. Although, I wonder if Chileans, for example, would consider themselves American.

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BW: What is Asia for you? Including Russia and Arabian countries? KH: Funny how the question has both an objective and a subjective answer! My inclination would be not to include the Middle East and Russia, Kazakhstan might be added, since there is a population of Chinese descent. I know some people who wonder why South Asians are included under Asian American. And I understand that became a very huge issue in the Association of Asian American Studies, A A A S , several years ago because South Asians writers and scholars felt that they should split off. Because I haven’t kept up with the trends in Asian American studies (I have been teaching mostly writing classes and not Asian American literature), I am not sure what the current view is. I guess, ultimately, for me, it depends on the context of the question or issue. BW: Which books do you teach for Asian American literature courses? KH: I tend to go for the classics for survey courses: Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, Hisaye Yamamoto’s Seventeen Syllables, Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea, and Milton Murayama’s All I Asking for Is My Body. The older generations. Then I include Jessica Hagedorn’s Charlie Chan Is Dead, her first anthology, to update prose. For poetry, I include Li–Young Lee’s, Cathy Song, Marilyn Chin – and others.... One of the most interesting classes I have ever taught was a senior seminar, “Sex and the ‘Oriental’.” We looked at the image of the Asian American as the Oriental – as established by Western stereotypes. Also a couple of movies (Bruce Lee, Charlie Chan, and even a James Bond movie). We established stereotypes, then discussed how Asian American writers respond to the stereotype, especially when it comes to sexuality and the body. It was really a lot of fun. I included Lois Ann Yamanaka poems, which contain an intensity that is close to violent: an adolescent girl talking about herself and her friends; very extreme and well-done monologues. We also looked at Shawn Wong’s book American Knees, and Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl, which actually takes place in Korea, but on an American base. Of course, The Woman Warrior and a few other books. We established the woman as either being a kind of sex kitten or a dragon lady, just slightly different, more powerful, or a boyish figure, desexualized. And men, too, especially Filipino figures, are either oversexed or sexless – usually sexless. It’s very interesting, the way Shawn Wong handles all that and interracial couples.

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BW: How would you define “race” and “ethnicity”? Are these terms synonyms for you? KH: I think there is debate between biologists and sociologists. A friend of mine was doing a study of genealogy and D N A . Apparently the D N A testing on Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the head of the African American Department at Harvard University, revealed that he has no African D N A at all. Afterwards, he just started laughing. So what does that mean, ‘race’? I guess, to some extent, there are similar physical manifestations among certain groups of people – ‘a common gene pool’. ‘Ethnic’ is more of a cultural term. Here is a quote from a 1994 article: it is “a matter of shared history, perceptions, and group identity.” BW: Would you say that all people are pretty much the same? KH: I don’t think men and women are the same. I think the two sexes have the same intellectual potential, but physically we don’t have the same potential. Men can’t have babies, I’m sorry! [laughs]. BW: Other than a male /female dichotomy, do you think that racial differences do exist. If yes, are these culturally constructed? KH: I will leave that up to scientists and anthropologists to answer. As long as everybody has a brain and a heart, literally and figuratively, then we are all the same. I know there is always work going on to try to reveal differences. I don’t trust how those studies will be used and I am not sure the differences really matter. BW: I see a tension with the way ethnic minorities strive for total equality yet claim a cultural difference. How do you feel about that? KH: Objectively, cultural differences do exist. I mean, Japan, for example, is an island nation; it doesn’t have a lot of natural resources. So, in the last century, they engaged in imperialist conflicts, looking to rape other countries for their natural resources. Japan would also receive ideas or products from the outside, whether it was some art form or technology, then they would use their own education and schooling to try and improve them on the object. From what I understand, this tendency has to do with an island nation: Britain did the same, which its old slogan illustrates – ‘the sun never sets on the British Empire’. They were also sailing all over the world looking for spices and other raw material. So there are cultural differences in terms of nations and for ethnic minorities as well; culturally. Tensions can arise when it comes to, for instance, religious differences. Especially since 9/11.... But back to your question! Economic equality is essential – for everyone to enjoy that freedom

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and to take responsibility for themselves. Differences can divide, but they can also be just plain interesting; enriching. The tensions have always existed but are increasingly dicey when exacerbated by economic inequalities. BW: What do you think of David Leiwei Li‘s theory of neo-racism that explains that today we have a “condemnation of biological justifications of racial segregation” as well as an “insistence on the necessary maintenance of cultural thresholds.” Li argues that the “true agenda” of this is “to perpetuate the separation of peoples by demanding the preservation of absolute cultural difference” (“On Ascriptive and Acquisitional Americanness” 122). KH: It’s very tricky. New York City used to be called a cultural ‘melting pot’, which of course was just wishful thinking. Now it’s called a ‘splendid mosaic’, which I think is a very apt and potentially positive way to look at people’s different cultures. I don’t think we should melt all together. The question is how to honor differences, to celebrate them, without any group acting or assuming superiority. How to share without giving oneself and one’s community away? I don’t know. These questions and conflicts are crucial. Assimilation is a blurry area, which was not so true for my mother. BW: How do your paternal and maternal cultural backgrounds influence your daily life and what have you passed on to your children? KH: I think it’s quite subtle. Some are the odd superstition – for example, in Japan the number four is very negative. And my children know this as well. There are not many of these, admittedly, that I practice or hand on to my children.... But when I was revising the piece “Pulse and Impulse,” on the zuihitsu, I was also reviewing Japanese aesthetics and sensibilities – these are very tied to feelings. And I think my aesthetics are also very bound to emotion as well, a kind of emotional sensibility that I think somehow I have taught my children. I think I have also taught them to be tactful and to think of others. I think this behavior has to do with the way my parents raised me, but it also strikes me as being both German and Japanese; some positive, some negative. An attendant strictness or self-repression is not always healthy for oneself or for relationships. Also positive and negative: to always think of the other person first and not to think of oneself. But that’s the way my mother was raised. One does not place the self first. (Which does not play out in every circumstance, of course.) And there’s also saving face – using indirection to watch out for the other person’s feelings – so if you’re going to criticize somebody you try and do it indirectly, not directly. It is a good strategy, generally speaking. I think my children have inherited that. So the influence has to do with

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sensibility and tone and custom.. .. The German side might be more difficult to see, since German culture is European: i.e,what we think of as mainstream. BW: In “Writing Over Borders,” you describe the Asian American aesthetic as follows: “I’ve taken years to imagine an Asian American aesthetic. I think it’s a combination of many elements – a reflection of Asian form, an engagement with content that may have roots in historical identity, together with a problematic, and even psychological, relationship to language.” Is this rather a description of your own aesthetic than that of all Asian American poets? KH: Yes. It is my own aesthetic. It is also what I like about a number of writers who are Asian American – Marilyn Chin and Li–Young Lee in particular. That could almost be a definition for Latino American writers, too, except they have only two languages, Spanish and Portuguese, whereas Asian Americans have dozens of languages and dialects! BW: Do you think that there is a common Asian American aesthetic? KH: No. But that doesn’t stop me from imagining what one could look like! First of all, I think whatever might be in common changes, depending on a number of factors. So, if there is a definition it is probably fairly unstable. For example, in 1970 the definition would probably have been about Chinese and Japanese, third-/fourth-generation writers as well as Filipino immigrants. Now, of course, it includes all the South East Asian countries, as well as Pacific Islanders and Korea. Year of immigration / family’s immigration. Class. Education. Whatever current laws that discriminate against a group at the time – such as anti-miscegenation or exclusion acts. Model minority vs. thugs. Current events (is there a war in that area?). Religions. Urban / country. Male/ female, gay. There might be commonalities that emerge and seem overriding at any given time – but it’s pretty unstable. BW: Do you think that the position of Asian American writers has changed since you published your first book? KH: Yes, quite a lot. Some would say that Asian American writers, particularly women novelists, have become popular – Amy Tan comes to mind. Also, since I published Air Pocket there are more than a few Asian American college courses. Over the decades there have been many cultural organizations that support Asian American artists and writers; the ones today are very sophisticated – for example, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York City.

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BW: Do you think that Asian American writers today have a broader readership and better chances to get published? KH: People are increasingly interested in other people’s experiences, be it in the Other or in various immigrant experiences. So the novelists are well represented. (I do wonder if there is a ceiling.) Poets, too, have found readers.... Better chances of getting published? Better than in Maxine Hong Kingston’s day; but with more writers there is greater competition among them. So “easier” is conditional! BW: Which generation of Asian American writers do you consider yourself part of? In her anthology Quiet Fire, Juliana Chang starts off with poets from the late 1800 s like Wen I–To and H.T. Tsiang. KH: Well, decades after that generation, there’s Carlos Bulosan, then on to – post World War II – Hisaye Yamamoto and Milton Murayama, my parents’ generation. That places my generation around and after the civil-rights movement and the Vietnam War. I am on the younger side of those writers but I would still connect myself with them – specifically, to the editors (Shawn Wong, et al.) of one of the first anthologies,The Big Aiiieeeee. I am not in that anthology, but I would still consider myself a part of that generation. BW: How many years would you say is one generation? KH: It’s supposed to be twenty years; probably now it’s lengthened to twentyfive. BW: The youngest generation is supposed to be forty years and younger. KH: I would agree that people under forty are a different generation than I am. I am trying to think who is in the forties – BW: – Timothy Liu perhaps? KH: I’d say he is a different generation than I am. BW: Prageeta Sharma? KH: Yes, she’s a different generation. I just turned fifty, and since I am on the younger side of the Baby Boomer generation, probably my generation of writers is fifty and up. Some of these writers are about sixty now, sixty-five, who did The Big Aiiieeeee! My aesthetic is much closer to Shawn Wong’s than the younger writers – or is there yet another in-between generation that includes me, Marilyn Chin, Lee–Young Lee, Arthur Sze? It’s very blurry, isn’t it? The older side of the Baby Boomer generation plowed the way for publication and the younger side has benefited from their ground-breaking work... . Continuing to think aloud: I know Jessica (Hagedorn) and Mei–mei

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(Berssenbrugge), and I would ally myself with their aesthetics and voices. If one just considers the women – Marilyn Chin, Cathy Song, Meena Alexander, Jessica, Mei–mei – I mean, we are all in our fifties. There were real avenues for us and real appreciation. BW: In her article “Double Telling: Intertextual Silence in Hisaye Yamamoto’s Fiction,” King–kok Cheung points out that nonverbal communication and indirectness of speech are pervasive in the first two generations of Japanese American families (in Hisaye Yamamoto: “Seventeen Syllables”, ed. Cheung, 161–62). Have you had conflicts with members of the Japanese American community for saying things directly in your poems, for being explicit about sexuality or mentioning taboo topics such as necrophilia? KH: No one from the Asian American community has really responded to my last book (the one with freaks and necrophilia). So, either they are ignoring it or they feel that it’s not an Asian American book. I am not quite sure what that’s about. It makes me a little bit cranky, because I feel that no matter what I write, I am still in this Asian American skin. I imagine that that book just does not contain issues of obvious interest. I have been writing about sexuality and my body since my first book and Jessica has written about that as well, and that’s been considered very important, actually. Young women have told me that my writing has given them permission to write from places of anger or pleasure. BW: King–kok Cheung argues that “belonging to a racial minority heightens her [Hisaye Yamamoto’s] anxiety of authorship” (“Double Telling,” in Hisaye Yamamoto, ed. Cheung, 163). Have you also had an anxiety of authorship? KH: In terms of how she should write or from what point of view? No, it’s because of Hisaye and Maxine Hong Kingston that I did not have that anxiety. These wonderful writers who came before us gave us permission to write in our own voices—and that includes the voice of the so-called minority. BW: Eric Liu argues in The Accidental Asian that Asian American culture lacks a culture. He states that African Americans have a cultural idiom, Jewish Americans have a common religion, Latino/as Americans have a common language, but the Asian Americans have none of these. What unites them is a collective victimization, alienation, and oppression. KH: Well that’s interesting – is he saying he has never faced discrimination? That’s lucky! Or is he suggesting that a person is not an Asian American if he

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doesn’t feel oppressed? This definition feels a bit old-school – that victimhood or victim identity is the single glue that creates community. Of course, oppression or prejudice exists, even today with the growing percentage of Asian Americans on college campuses. I would say that that is not the only thing that defines and unites Asian Americans, especially today. Certainly, bias is something that moves people to take action – like hate crimes. But celebrating a movie by an Asian American, that’s not oppression, that’s a celebration. Attending a dance festival, that’s a festival! BW: Why do you think Asian Americans, who are the most formally educated ethnic group in the U S , are perceived by the population as the group most culturally alien to the American way of life? KH: Well, the stereotype of the Asian family that values education contains some truth, but it’s not across the board. You have extremely poor immigrants; those with little or no education. On the other hand, there are what most Americans would consider the over-achievers. BW: But why the most alien? KH: There must be some national psychic need to have Asian Americans continue as the alien. But, too, their immigration continues, so some American’s mistake me, for example, for the first-generation Korean grocery store clerk. Mixed into that is the 9/11 attack and the issue of fundamentalism and Islam being relatively a new religion to this country – well, both Hindu and Islam. These appear as alien cultures in a renewal of evangelical and fundamentalist Christian culture. On the other hand, there are more and more kids of mixed couples– which was not true when I was growing up. I meet people who have an Asian (which might mean Asian American!) aunt or son-in-law. BW: Do you think racism will become less of an issue with increasing intermarriage? KH: It will be slow going. It certainly has decreased since I was born, which was only ten years after World War II. Intermarriage is probably one of the few ways that people will actually begin to accept people of other ethnic origins – although it continues to be rough for some couples (as it was for my parents!). I mean, for people to come around and accept other cultures, they first must face their own incredible ugly prejudices and meanness. But, amazingly, it can happen – that’s what happened with my grandparents. They came around and accepted my mother and my sister and myself. Perhaps it’s amazing that people can change at all.

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BW: In the U S A the individual is emphasized while in many Asian countries there is an emphasis on family and community and a consequent subordination of the individual. Do you think there is a special problem for Asian Americans? KH: I think it can be a large problem – but that depends in part on how much Asian culture a family or community maintains. I think people have become increasingly self-indulgent since the Me-Generation / Reagan era. There’s an urban self-absorption that I hope will climax soon and shift to greater interest in one’s neighbors. Asian Americans? It depends on their families and communities – class, etc. BW: In her book Asian American Literature, Elaine Kim states that white artists never had to deny their roots in order to get published and accepted as an artist. And I find that recently Asian American writers have to justify themselves if they do not write about their ethnicity, because then they are accused of inauthenticity. KH: True, though it is not as bad as it used to be. John Yau is now considered an Asian American writer. But I think that was not the case twenty years ago, because – or when – he was not producing work that had identifiably Asian or Asian American content. I think people have relaxed the definition – although, as described earlier, not necessarily their assumptions or lens. BW: How is being of Asian as well as of European descent and living in America different from being of Asian descent and living in America? KH: It was very different for my generation. My mother is an example of a Japanese American after the war when many nisei rejected their culture because they wanted to assimilate (I think this is generally not uncommon) and because the war was with Japan. So the bias was extreme. It may have been difficult, because of that bias, to show or feel pride. I think that if it hadn’t been for my father and the civil-rights movement I would not have had as much exposure to Asian culture. I mean, when I was growing up there were not that many restaurants with Asian cuisine, except for Chinese food – not even in the City. So, even this kind of minimal exposure to Asian culture was scarce. Now, of course, it’s trendy! If both parents had had roots in continental Asian cultures, I may have had to wait for the whole civil-rights movement to become more exposed and involved with identity issues. I really gained a lot of appreciation through my father’s interest. As a Eurasian, too, I was fully accepted neither in Japanese and Japanese American culture nor in mainstream white culture. It’s different today.

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BW: Do you think that many contemporary Asian American writers use Asian poetic forms like the ghazal or the zuihitsu? KH: Not so much – well, most people don’t know about the zuihitsu – and I think Asians and Asian Americans consider haiku and tanka as being a little corny, because we are taught those things in elementary school. (Even I felt like they were a little corny.) I had to come back to it through Western literature, in a way. I don’t think a lot of Asian Americans are using Asian forms. The ghazal has become quite popular, however, through Agha Shihad Ali and Naomi Shihab Nye. BW: What does the term ‘translation’ imply for you other than the transferring of a text from one language into another. KH: I think of transformation. Sometimes I use it figuratively in writing workshops to talk about the metaphor – tenor and vehicle. At times I ask a student to translate their abstract noun into imagery – so I might translate my sorrow into a sparrow. Or compare my body, say, to that cup. BW: Do you feel victimized, alienated, and oppressed? KH: These are very strong words. Sometimes I feel that I am experiencing bias, both as a woman and as an Asian American. But I think those three words are probably stronger than what I would use. I have not been physically beaten or bludgeoned. Even the verbal abuse has not been as extreme as others have encountered. Though it has been a real part of my life experience as a child, and even today. BW: You said that oppression existed in the Asian American community, and that you preferred this term ‘oppression’ over ‘prejudice’. KH: Certainly all three of these (victimization, alienation, and oppression) occur. But I, personally, do not want to characterize myself in the extreme, because I have not had to face extreme degradation. I have faced prejudice and had feelings of alienation – socially and personally. But alienation is complex: some comes with the territory of being an artist, some with being my mother’s daughter – almost as if I were feeling them on my mother’s behalf, an identification with what she went through as a female and as a Japanese American in a certain time, as the daughter of a plantation worker in Hawai‘i, and so on. And some of what I feel has to do being ‘mixed’ – as described earlier. So alienation is very complex. And ‘victimized’ and ‘oppressed’ are stronger than my own particular situation. But for many Asian Americans – even today – extreme bias is very real, and to call it ‘prejudice’ feels almost trivial. For example: what to do with Chinese Americans who, over five gene-

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rations have assimilated pretty well – compared with first-generation Chinese or Laotians or Hmong. Some people from these communities would experience oppression, and sometimes victimization. It’s important to use powerful language when the situation calls for it – and not to overuse terms to the point where they lose their power.

The Political Power of Kimiko Hahn This interview with Kimiko Hahn was conducted by Brigitte Wallinger at Hahn’s home in Houston, Texas, on 26 November 2005. The poet later revised the interview. All remarks in parentheses are hers.

BW: Who are the most prominent figures in Asian American feminism? KH: (I assume you do not mean only literature.) When I was a teenager, a friend’s mother was a very important political activist in New York City. Her name was Mary Kochiyama, though she later changed her first name to Yuri. She and her husband, Bill Kochiyama, were prominent activists in the civilrights movement – in fact, she was with Malcolm X when he was assassinated.. .. A literary role model, a woman, would be Maxine Hong Kingston. She really gave many Asian Americans a sense of their own voice, Asian American voice. Through writing about her own life (as opposed to writing from a Caucasian point of view!), she broke through the idea that if you were an author you had to write about mainstream culture. The writer Hisaye Yamamoto was politically active with an organization called the Catholic Worker, a radical organization. And her writing broke ground as well.... Women of the next generation: the filmmaker and writer Trinh Minh–ha is interesting. I like what she has written in Woman, Native, Other – a text I sometimes use in my class. I think there are some interesting filmmakers: Christine Choy and Renee Tajima produced / directed the movie Who Killed Vincent Chin? .. . Interesting: I do not know if these women would identify with being a feminist first. And yet they’ve all broken ground within their communities and as women.. .. And writer friends: Jessica Hagedorn, Meena Alexander, Marilyn Chin, Cathy Song. Younger than myself is Lois–Ann Yamanaka, who wrote a whole book in pidgin. She’s terrific.

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BW: What is the position of women in U S American society right now? KH: I think that, compared to the rest of the world, women in the United States are very fortunate. Much of this has to do with access to items of convenience, whether that takes the form of cars and driving, day-care, preprepared foods, etc. And education is available, although everything is tempered by class. So, you have women living below the poverty line who might as well be in a Third-World country – we saw that after Hurricane Katrina: it blew the cover off of the poverty in the United States – a subject that people wish to ignore. Poverty, especially, falls hard on women and children.... For middle-class women, there are a great deal of privileges which I think young women take for granted – and to some extent, that’s okay as long as they understand where their privileges come from: hard-won rights. (Though sometimes I wonder if most young women do know and appreciate the struggles!) Advances are the good news. The bad news is that the conservative nature of our current social climate is eroding those rights (such as the socalled ‘pro-choice’ issue). And if young women find the word ‘feminism’ annoying or old fashioned – well, a new movement will probably have to be built and they can call it whatever they want. The fact is, it may very well include much of what feminists fought for – if nothing else, in spirit! BW: Where do you see women in the Japanese American community? Does their situation also depend on how wealthy they are? KH: Very much so. All Asian Americans aren’t middle-class. There is a sector of extremely poor immigrant families, for example, although it is not monolithic, culturally. Some families don’t speak any English at all. Some of the immigrants might not even consider themselves Asian Americans; they might just consider themselves Asian. Their kids might want to consider themselves just American. And within the ‘Asian American’ community you have people who immigrated at different times: some in the 1800s, 1900s, some fifty years ago, so you have a whole array of different generations. The level of education is also important. Among South Asians, many arrive with English language better than some Americans.... Oh, but you said, “Japanese American”: well, most Japanese Americans have been here for several generations and so are pretty well assimilated (that is, middle-class); except for a general ‘color’ factor, I think this section of the community does not feel prejudice the way, say, South Asians do.

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BW: Do you think that there will be an end to the inequality between men and women one day? KH: Social and economic equals? I hope so. I think that will happen some day. But culture takes decades to change and there is always the problem of reaction, sometimes in the form of ‘one step forward two steps back’. BW: What do you think of motherhood in relation to feminism? KH: Personally, I am glad that I am the one with the womb! That fact (and actual pregnancy and birth) affects one’s point of view; or at least it should. And affects one’s social outlook, feminism being one social outlook. Practically speaking, I know that I am also fortunate as an artist and a professor to have a fairly flexible work schedule: i.e. not a nine-to-five work-day. Also, my children’s father has always had a flexible work-day – so this allows us to take care of our daughters’ needs. Furthermore, my husband Harold is a wonderful stepfather. The men in my life have been very supportive. After all, it is culturally essential for men to be a part of raising children, although I imagine that that is not the case in most situations – sometimes for economic reasons; sometimes for social reasons, the men don’t believe that they should or that they need to. But children need both parents. So feminism is very child- and family-oriented. It isn’t just about wage parity. It is interesting to see a number of anthologies pointed toward motherhood issues. Women are still trying to figure out difference and difficulties and – celebrate joys. BW: “I wonder if a straight man can read such lines (“Mosquito and Ant” in Mosquito and Ant, 30, l. 62): Do heterosexual men have problems understanding your poems? KH: I feel like saying ‘Yes’ – but the answer is probably ‘Yes and no’. I think that because heterosexual white men are in a privileged position, even the most liberal or progressive cannot fully understand a woman’s social position. They cannot know what it feels like, literally, to have a woman’s body – to be pregnant and to not know what to do, for example. (And, of course, I can’t completely appreciate what it’s like, say, to be an African American woman.) They cannot understand the force of history in shaping one’s attitude toward a body. In that particular poem, I was referring to a kind of vulnerability that gay men might experience that heterosexual men do not; then likening that vulnerability to a woman’s. BW: What does silence include for you? KH: The word that comes to mind is censorship, whether it’s self-censorship, cultural censorship, or legal censorship. ‘Cultural’ can include family censor-

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ship. I particularly think of women not being allowed or at least discouraged from expressing themselves. In the 1950s, not just Asian American but all girls were taught that it was not ‘nice’ to be angry. If you were angry, you were the opposite of nice: a bad girl. A little boy is allowed to let off steam and jump up and down or throw his toys around. But girls really are supposed to ‘contain themselves’ (what a phrase!). ‘Be nice’. And that admonition is a kind of censorship. It’s a physical and emotional censorship and it still occurs today. Even young women have been told to be nice, to be quiet, to sit still, which is different from being polite. It’s important to be polite and to listen to other people. I don’t like it when people just shout and say whatever they want in order to have, say, self-esteem. I think people need to be civilized, but I don’t think that people should be shut off or shut down. And for me, poetry is, in part, my opportunity to speak, to say what I want to say and hopefully to say it in a way that is powerful and authentic. BW: How is it possible to overcome phallocentric speech and yet express oneself? By silence, or fragmentation? KH: Some writers have taken issue with fragments. And I can understand how some might compare fragments with the way a woman’s body is literally and symbolically fragmented in society. Or the way Sappho’s voice was historically fragmented because her poems were destroyed or partially destroyed; now all we have left are fragments which she, herself, didn’t envision as such. So, what we have of hers is a product of patriarchy, her fragments. So I can understand that some feel that there’s something almost anti-female in the fragment as a form. But for me, personally, part of writing in a fragmented manner has to do with subverting logic: subverting male logic: that is, the way we are taught to think that logic is a superior way of thinking. It is a good thing one doesn’t always have to think logically or rationally; it is not objectively ‘superior’. And just because one thinks intuitively does not mean that it’s bad or inferior: i.e. female; it’s a different way of thinking. (And women have been thought to be intuitive and, therefore, inferior.) To think in fragments is a different way of thinking – not necessarily right or wrong, just different. For me, thinking and writing in fragments also reflects the kind of time a woman has to write – in this moment of time. I might only have ‘free’ time to write while I have a baby sitter. Free time is very different for a woman with children, because it is not free. And if a child is sleeping or playing on the floor – that’s luck, not free time, because you’re still tending the child, who will need your attention at any moment. Writing in fragments, which comes from the modernists – not something that started in my generation –

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became a very convenient way for me to write. I think it might be an interesting way of thinking in terms of how women work. My interest in the fragment also comes from Japanese aesthetics and the haiku and tanka – which are not fragments, but much shorter than most Western forms. (See Princeton Book of Poetics on ‘monostich’! It suggests a one-line poem is not even possible in Western languages.) BW: What did you mean when you said that the female body was fragmented? KH: The way that male painters have viewed the woman’s body so you’d only see a fragment. (Body parts!) It depends on the gaze: who is viewing and who is in the position (!) of constructing representation. Is it a way, psychologically, of rendering the female powerless? Disarming the vagina dentata? . . . I don’t read a great deal of feminist theory, so I’m sure it’s been talked about already – but the issue of fragments, for me, is something I’m struggling with – as I began to describe. I think that one way that women get to take over language and subvert language is that they are the ones, primarily, who teach language to children; so it’s through the mother that the child learns language. When I think of learning sounds from my mother, I think of something that was so powerful and exciting and that for me today still has to do with power and excitement, and even eroticism. So, for me, my mother was giving me something, even if it was packed with male codes. My relationship to language has something of feminist power in it. Trinh T. Minh–ha ‘s book Woman Native Other is terrific in this; and she said something to the effect that “the story circulates like a gift” – and the stories in her vision are matrilineal.. .. I guess I am trying to say that the fragment, in and of itself, is no more objectively ‘bad’ than working ‘intuitively’ or ‘rationally’. They are, finally, all devices to be utilized. BW: Do you think that language forms the world we live in and that by understanding its power we can exercise influence over language and thus change reality? KH: In a poem in my new book, I created a diary during 9/11 (that is, it is not a real document). The diary re-creates those few days after 9/11. There were a lot of poems that people circulated on the Internet, especially Auden’s poem “September 11, 1939.” For me, this piece ends with the idea that once we stop speaking, that’s where war begins. And the only way to end war, to end conflict, is through speech. When you become a parent, one of the first things you learn to tell your children when they’re fighting is to use words. You’re un-

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happy? – use words. Try and get them to express themselves – not silence them. I believe that. And I believe women make a qualitative difference in diplomacy. Yes: language, in part, forms the world we live in. But we are not always in control of what we mean – which is not a bad thing in poetry (it’s part of its magic, after all). But in diplomacy, translation or just the connotation of words can have devastating results. Just look what has happened because of mis-translations of so-called sacred texts (“horns” instead of “shafts of light” or “virgins” instead of “raisins”!). We are at the mercy of language at times – don’t you think? BW: What does the term ‘oriental female’ suggest to you? KH: The Orient was defined by Said in his landmark book Orientalism. That is, the Orient was a place that was created geographically by Europeans through colonization and was created culturally through institutions of ‘Oriental Studies’; and even outside institutions – for example, by books like those of Flaubert, who was a nineteenth-century sex tourist. It was, in effect, created through the imagination of Europeans and later by Americans as well. So the word ‘Orient’ has come to suggest a Western fantasy of the Asian person and Asian culture, and a geographically ambiguous place. It was first the Middle East, then it came to include – it depended on colonization – India and the Far East and then even Southeast Asia. It depends on where our wars go. By extension, literally through the Asian diaspora, Asian Americans are sometimes considered Orientals – though this term has pretty much fallen by the wayside. BW: So ‘the oriental female’ would be the West’s projections onto the women from this imagined area. KH: I think so. I’d say the oriental female body is certainly one that is the Other; one that has, as you say, Western fantasies projected onto her. BW: Do you vote? KH: I do vote. I am rarely if ever happy who I vote for, but I do vote. BW: To what extent would you consider yourself a postmodern writer? KH: I was at a Jean–Michel Basquiat exhibition today and now I think that I am not sure what postmodernism means. How would you define postmodernism? BW: I wouldn’t propose one exact definition, but I think the main aspects are a concern for power, a challenge of traditions, intertextuality, politicizing,

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historicizing, and questioning of discourse/ translation / language. In a previous interview you called yourself a postmodern writer. Why? KH: The simple answer would be because people have labeled my work as such. For myself – the elements you have listed, postmodern or not, are of interest to me and they have, in a sense, naturally become a part of my work. It isn’t as though I said: ‘Oh, postmodernism uses intertextuality, therefore that’s something I want to do’. What previous poets have done is a part of my literary heritage: William Carlos Williams in Paterson, for example, uses a collage technique. Or T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land uses foreign words. Really, I was inspired by them and continue what I learned as an undergraduate. On the other hand, part of my imitation was a cheeky challenge. Not so much of what they were doing but of desiring to do my own version – to use the languages I grew up with, for example (I guess that is challenging tradition – isn’t it?) Aside from historical exclusion, I was driven by feeling silenced, and so I thought: Okay, Eliot uses all these footnotes in his work so I’m going to write something that uses footnotes. So I wrote “Ikat,” which is in my first book. My poem begins with April, as Eliot began with April – as Chaucer began with April; so, you can see I was really having a lot of fun. I felt inspired and challenged by the writers before me, and having fun with them – talking back to their work, in effect, but with great admiration and a desire to subvert what they do and to make it mine as a writer, as a female, as Asian American at this point in time. I try to do so with great love and with great vengeance. BW: How about your relationship with poetry and prose? I mean the tendency to overstep genre borders. Is the zuihitsu prose or poetry? KH: It depends on the text, because at this point in time prose does not really adhere to logical narrative any longer. Sometimes short stories will look like poems, essays will look like poems – all these different categories have become pretty blurry. If I write a zuihitsu and it’s a list of things that make me cry, then it looks like a poem. It might not have line breaks but it looks like a poem. If I write a piece that has to do with the images that occurred to me in the first one hundred days after my mother’s death, all those images will appear as paragraphs. That’s how I put together “Cuttings” (published in Unbearable Heart and Premonitions). So, it depends on the zuihitsu piece. Paterson has paragraphs, Michelle Cliff has paragraphs – she’s wonderful. Some essays by contemporary writers like Charles Simic – his work, to me, looks like zuihitsu. Even Hemingway has something that looks like a zuihitsu. Of course, they weren’t written as zuihitsu, but you can see similarities in

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some Western writing. It’s difficult to categorize these days, and I am not sure I can categorize. I know that my editor feels that my next book, The Narrow Road to the Interior, is poetry, so it will be marketed as poetry. As far as the actual form is concerned – from the Japanese point of view – there is no Western equivalent to zuihistu. It’s a genre in and of itself. It’s from a different ‘kingdom’: like fungus, which are neither plants nor animals. So, to answer your question, finally: strictly speaking, the zuihitsu is neither. BW: How would you define identity? KH: Crudely speaking, identity either comes from the outside (so it’s how people look at me and want to define me, whether it’s a Census Bureau or a man on the street or a child asking me what I am) or it is self-definition and how I feel about my relationship to the rest of the world. And my identity shifts, not in a way that is unstable, but depending on the circumstance: Asian American or Japanese American or Eurasian – for example. BW: What is power for you? KH: From a Marxist point of view, Realpolitik: it is owning the means of production; to have some control over one’s welfare. But I guess there is no simple answer to your question, because it is so complicated: there is psychological power, personal power, the power to speak, the power to remain silent. For me, personally, it goes back to the issue of silence and speaking and being heard. BW: What do you mean by ‘personal power’? KH: Very personally, it is the right to say what I need to say, to write what I need to write. On the one hand, it means being able to publish and be heard. On the other hand, for example, I have family members whom I’ve really upset, and I’m sorry I have upset them, but it doesn’t mean that I am going to censor myself. It’s taken me fifty years to be able to express certain things, and if people think I’m going to stop now, it’s pretty sad. Having said that, it is very difficult as a mother to say everything that I want to say, because my first task is to protect my children. Does that compromise me as a writer? It certainly challenges me, because whatever I have to say about my life as a mother and about my daughters’ lives (because what they do profoundly affects me) I might have to find different ways to express, possibly indirectly. It is very tough. I guess part of my subject-matter right now is how difficult it is to be a mother and to be a writer. I do hope they see me as a woman with some power, that they will feel glad for me, and that they will feel that they themselves can be powerful in their own lives. I hope my students and others

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who read my poetry find some strength for themselves in my work. I am very pleased that people have come up at poetry readings and say that some poem or book has made a difference in their lives. That makes me feel powerful and very lucky to be published and to have people want to read my work. BW: What is your relationship to the American myths of the American Dream and success, of the Frontier, Manifest Destiny, the Land of Opportunity and Freedom, the Land of Plenty (fertile, vast land), of innocence (immigrants wanted to create a better world; sex is bad), U S invulnerability as well as ‘democracy’? Do you think that you are an example of the American success story? KH: I am so superstitious; I don’t want to claim to be successful ... But, in truth, I am. I have been published by wonderful presses, I have my third book coming out by Norton, I am teaching at wonderful colleges, I have wonderful people who are supportive of me, so I am successful. And I feel very fortunate. I also feel I work very hard. My grandparents on my mother’s side came to America at the turn of the last century and my mother was born on a Hawaiian plantation. My father went to college on the G I Bill. This is the American Dream: to have a family that works hard and is supportive and to exceed what one’s own parents were able to accomplish. For Americans, it usually translates materially – bigger house, more cars – whatever. But college is part of that, so, yes, my sister and I were both able to go on to college and graduate school. I don’t know if I want to say that I’m a model, that makes me a little uneasy, but I probably am. I’ve worked hard and have been able to move ahead. BW: What do you think of the Manifest Destiny myth? Is it important to America, or ridiculous? KH: ‘Manifest Destiny’? I do not think Anglo-Americans or Americans from the United States should occupy this continent or anywhere else in the world. The postcolonial aspect of the myth has become even more dangerous today. But I think you are raising a larger question about myths in general. Whether I think a particular myth is ridiculous or not, myths are culturally important. The myth of Gold Mountain is not seen as literal, but symbolically it’s why people still want to come here. When my grandparents immigrated, they were very poor, worked as farm laborers. They had seven children, who worked at various jobs and who all were economically in a better situation than their parents. And, as I described, I was able to get a master’s degree and a tenured position, etc.; my mother was a secretary and my father a high-school teacher.

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According to statistics, I am upper-middle-class. It’s a myth that has its own truth to it. On the negative side to this particular myth: some people feel shame and humiliation because they haven’t made it. They haven’t ‘pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps’ – another American myth. I have my political opinions, obviously, but I also want to look at, say, myths, dialectically.

Speaking Sexuality This email interview with Kimiko Hahn was conducted by Brigitte Wallinger–Schorn on 5 August 2008.

BWS: How do you feel about the following: In her book Re-Orienting Western Feminisms, Chilla Bulbeck argues that “some women of colour proudly assert their sexuality, often in opposition to a perceived puritan repressive sexuality in white women” (130). This puritan repressive sexuality is linked to the Victorian image of women as asexual, procreative, domestic, unpassionate beings. Do you see a connection between your outspokenness about (your) sexuality in your poetry and resistance to a European American, puritan view of female sexuality? KH: A complicated question, because I am a woman born in 1955 and brought up in the West; and because I was raised within a dominant, historically puritan culture; and because, of course, I am still the Other. So, yes: part of my fervor comes from distinguishing myself, a ‘Eurasian’, from the white/ W A S P / Caucasian women around me; literally and culturally. And this is because I am not ‘white’, but it also comes from the era – which was also powerfully against this puritanical culture. Coming of age during the social upheaval of the 1960s was a tremendous influence. The so-called ‘minority women’ were resistant, but so were white women. So, yes: part of my fervor comes from a female’s overall resistance, gutreaction to American and Western history and culture. A resistance, a defense, and offense. So, yes: part of me is that young girl, born in Pleasantville in the 1950s: the desire to break out, to connect myself to my body and my body to the outside world, and to express myself. The utterly subjective response. And for me, writing is a physical expression.

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Now, on the other side of the last century’s sexual revolution, I feel that demure is sexy and charming. Full exposure and full disclosure has less appeal. And this revelation may have to do, in part, with being a mother of young women, and being an older woman.

Interview with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni This interview with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni was conducted by Brigitte Wallinger in the poet’s office at the University of Houston, Texas, on 15 November 2005.

BW: Do you feel part of a specific contemporary U S American poetic movement? CBD: I try different kinds of things in my poetry, so I wouldn’t say I’m part of any one particular movement, although I’ve learned so much from different poets. But some of my poetry is historical, some of it is inspired by other art media, some of it is personal; so it’s just many kinds of things. BW: What is the position of Asian American poetry in American poetry? CBD: It’s a very important part and it’s growing, it’s becoming more and more important and also more read by people outside of the community, so I think there’s a real presence of Asian American poetry now. BW: What is the meaning of poetry in the U S ? CBD: It’s different for different people. Poetry for many people here is more personal than political. In other countries, often poetry becomes a big means of political expression, and perhaps it’s less so here, although in Asian American poetry and among the other minority cultures, poetry is more political, because many people have used it as a way to express their views against oppression of their people. BW: Who are the poets who influenced you the most? CBD: I think, among other Asian American poets – and you know I write in poetry and fiction, so sometimes my poetry is also affected by fiction or nonfiction writers – Maxine Hong Kingston has been a big influence for me, even in writing my poetry and certainly in writing my prose. Garrett Hongo was a big influence, because he was one of the first people who really tried to get Asian American poets together, and he has some very important anthologies that he brought out – The Open Boat, for example. And I loved his book

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Yellow Light as well; but even his ideas influenced me a great deal. People like Mei–mei Berssenbrugge; and, of course, I love Kimiko Hahn’s work as well. Cathy Song was one of the early poets that I read. I think other poets out of South Asia, such as Meena Alexander and Agha Shahid Ali – they have been very important to my development. I’m very excited because there are many new voices like Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Srikanth Reddy; his work also, I think, is very powerful. One of my favorite poets, who died tragically, is Reetika Vazirani. BW: Do you plan to publish poetry soon? CBD: Yes, I’m still writing poetry. I’m putting a collection slowly together, although, because I’ve been writing novels, that’s been taking up all my time, and I’m very excited about the prose form right now, because I’m very interested in telling stories and characters. But I continue to write poetry, and writing poetry has really influenced the way I write my prose. BW: What does ‘home’ mean to you? CBD: Home is for me three places: I live over here in Houston, so this is home – where I live most of the time. I lived in California for many, many years, and I keep going back regularly, so California is also home in a very special way, because I kind of grew up and became a writer in California. And then, originally, home is always India also, because that has had so much of an influence on me and on my writing; my mother lives there, I go back to my grandfather’s village whenever I can. So, I think I have these three places that I relate to as home. And I write about all of them. BW: Are the American myths – for example, success and the Western frontier – important to you? CBD: In terms of my subject-matter, yes. The poems in Leaving Yuba City are very concerned with that whole myth which drives the immigrant to America and then even further West to California. Obviously, like all myths, it’s a faulty myth, and when you come here you’re bound to be disappointed. That is the nature of any myth or any dream. So I am very concerned in many of my poems about what is the reality of the life of the immigrant. And I am very concerned about that in my novels, my short stories. My characters are always exploring that myth. BW: How would you define the term ‘Asian American’? CBD: ‘Asian American’ is an interesting term, because it presumes that Asia is this one place, but within Asia there are so many differences and so many cultures. If you look at Indian culture versus Vietnamese culture, Japanese

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culture, we’re all very different. We’ve just been geographically put into one category. Our poetry and our prose are very, very different. However, that said, I think we do share some cultural values, I think, in terms of family particularly. A lot of our writing is about family relationships, and sometimes the changing of those family relationships as you move to another culture. Another poet that I like very much but forgot to mention is Li–Young Lee; I think his work has also influenced me a lot. BW: Do you think there is one unified Asian American community? CBD: Yes, I think so, even though they’re very diverse. Part of it is because we make an effort. Many of us feel: If we are categorized as Asian American, let’s really get together and form a group that will have some power and some political voice. If we had lived in our home countries, we would not have done that. Here we do it. BW: In The Accidental Asian, Eric Liu argues that what unites Asian Americans is their collective oppression. CBD: That’s true to some extent. One always has to look at the other minorities; they also have faced oppression. I think the African Americans have probably faced much more than we have. Compared to theirs, ours is less. But, of course, as people of color we always stand out as foreigners. There is some amount of prejudice that comes out, especially in bad times. After 9/11 the people of the South Asian community faced a lot of prejudice and violence. BW: Who is part of the Asian American community? Would you also include people who are originally from Arab countries? CBD: No, I think that would be the Middle Eastern group, and they see themselves as a very separate identity, Middle Eastern Americans. BW: What do you think of David Leiwei Li’s theory of neo-racism: “condemnation of biological justifications of racial segregation,” “insistence on the necessary maintenance of cultural thresholds”; its “true agenda” is “to perpetuate the separation of peoples by demanding the preservation of absolute cultural difference” (“On Ascriptive and Acquisitional Americanness,” 122)? CBD: All of these are ways for people to define themselves, and you can make them oppressive if you look at them negatively. We are culturally different. We are also racially different. It would be a lie to say that we are not. But we have to use that difference in a positive way to bring people together and not make them split apart. I think the whole idea of cultural difference is a really positive one. One of my really valuable experiences in moving to this

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country is that I got to know people of so many cultures. When I lived in India it was very monocultural. I spoke mostly to people who spoke my language, they were my friends. Here I think the fact of cultural difference is really positive and we shouldn’t try to ignore it; we should be aware of it and see it as a strength. BW: “I’ve taken years to imagine an Asian American aesthetic. I think it’s a combination of many elements – a reflection of Asian form, an engagement with content that may have roots in historical identity, together with a problematic, and even psychological, relationship to language” (Kimiko Hahn, “Writing Over Borders”). Would you say that this describes also your aesthetic? CBD: To a certain extent, yes. I am also interested in the older forms from my cultural background. In fact, right now I’m working on a novel that is retelling one of our epics. I am very interested in working with the epic method of storytelling. So, just like Kimiko Hahn, I’m very interested in those old forms and how to bring them in into our present literature. BW: Do you think that there is a common Asian American aesthetic? CBD: No, I think Asian Americans write in very different ways. We are all different individuals. Even within the smaller South Asian American poets, they are very, very different, very diverse. Some are doing spoken word, and performance poetry, some are writing a much more academic poetry. BW: Which generation of Asian American poets are currently writing? CBD: Now is the third generation, with a lot of young poets who are writing in a very different voice. A lot of them are not as concerned with those earlier ideas of community and oppression; they find themselves very much a part of North America. So their concerns are very different. I would say I am in the second generation. BW: King–kok Cheung said that “belonging to a racial minority heightens [Hisaye Yamamoto’s] anxiety of authorship” (in Hisaye Yamamoto: “Seventeen Syllables”, 163). Would you say that you had an anxiety of authorship at the beginning, too? CBD: I think I did in the beginning. Part of it is being a minority culture in the middle of a larger culture; part of it is just when you start writing. Perhaps if you are very rooted in the culture and that’s the culture all around you have less of it, maybe.

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BW: Why do you think Asian Americans, who are the most formally educated group in the U S , are perceived by the population as the group most culturally alien to the American way of life? CBD: I wouldn’t say that they are the most foreign. To some extent, because of our physical differences, we always will look foreign, but I think after 9/11 the Middle Eastern community is the one that people looked at as most foreign and most dangerous, and it was very sad, very harmful. So I don’t think we can claim that. I think 9/11 changed a lot of things. I don’t think that Asian Americans can say that we have suffered as much as the Arab community, who faces a lot of prejudice every day. And I am very aware of that. BW: When was the first time that you became aware of racial prejudice? CBD: Very soon after I came to this country; probably two days after I came to this country, there was an incident, which I’ve written about in one of my story collections, Arranged Marriage, where I was going for a walk and some boys on the street called me “nigger” and they threw mud at me. That was very shocking, I had just come from India [laughs]. So that was a shock. But actually looking back now, I’m glad that that happened, because that made me aware of prejudice in a deep and personal way, and that made me want to fight it, to write about it and do what I can to make it less. In many ways, America is a wonderful country. I have gained many things from it and that’s why I would like it to become even better. And also, we have to remember that racial prejudice exists in all countries in different forms. Look at what’s happening in France right now .. . We can’t point the finger just at one culture. However, we can say: ‘I’m going to try and make things better right here, because this is where I live’. BW: What does the term ‘translation’ imply for you? CBD: On one level it’s just literal translation. I am very interested in translating, and I translate from my mother tongue, Bengali, into English, often. I think, on another level, I am trying to translate cultural ideas into my poetry, and that’s very tricky. Because the cultural context for that doesn’t exist in English, it’s a real challenge; I’m very interested in that. I think we also translate because we’re influenced by other writers, other poets, and we translate that influence into our writing. BW: What are the problems of translating – from one language to another or one culture to another? CBD: The challenge is to create art. When you’re translating and you’re trying to create art at the same time and you’re trying to be faithful to the origi-

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nal, that’s a big challenge. To remain faithful when I’m trying to translate another poet, I want that poet’s voice to come through, but sometimes if I just do that, the result is not a poem; so that’s the challenge. BW: Do you think that many contemporary Asian American poets use traditional Asian poetic form like the ghazal and the zuihitsu? CBD: A number of them are interested in using those forms. Agha Shahid Ali uses the ghazal form, and some others have done similar things. I don’t, not at this point; maybe some time in the future. But in my prose, as I said, I’m trying to use the epic method of storytelling, which is kind of a circular and indirect way of telling stories. BW: Do you feel that you’re writing for two audiences at the same time (for a double audience)? CBD: I am. I don’t think about it too much, I just want to write the best I can. I think it’s not very helpful to think about audience when you’re creating, because then your attention goes somewhere else. Your attention has to stay on what you’re creating. BW: How does a typical Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni poem develop? CBD: Maybe I’ll start with an image, or sometimes lines will come to me, I’ll just write them down and an idea will begin to take form around those lines. But often it’s lines and images. I do most of my writing at home in my study, and I have two children – so when they go to school, that’s when I write. BW: Who are the most important figures in Asian American feminism? CBD: I want to really say: for me, Maxine Hong Kingston has been such an important figure. She’s been very, very important in terms of writing. In terms of activism, there’s a poet, Janice Mirikitani, who’s done amazing and wonderful activism work. So I think of these two writers. BW: Do you feel comfortable being called a feminist writer? CBD: I have no problems with it. Women are very important to my work; to show women in truthful ways as strong figures is important to me. Also, to show the oppression that women particularly have endured is important to me. BW: Do you think that language forms the world that we live in and that by knowing its power we can change it? CBD: Yes, very much so. That’s my hope. I think that’s why many of us write. Because we’ve been changed by language and we hope that our language will have some influence on others.

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BW: What does the term ‘oriental female’ mean for you? CBD: I think that term has been misused so much. The whole idea of exotification, the woman seen particularly as a sexual identity, all of that. And that has been such a big part of our colonial history. It is very painful to think of that. I think one of my challenges is to create a strong, positive, and beautiful and sexually powerful image of the oriental woman that is against that other image of the oriental woman. BW: How would you define identity? CBD: Identity is a very personal answer for everyone. For me, I guess, identity is really who I am deep down. And when I really go that deep down, it’s beyond being Asian or American or anything; it’s really the human identity. And that, I think, is the other reason why we write: we want to make that human connection with other people. BW: What is ‘power’ for you? CBD: The term ‘power’ is so misused, and the whole concept of power is so misused. I tend to think of power as that which comes spontaneously from inside of a person. Real power is that which is not interested in controlling someone else. Real power is interested in creating something positive in the world. And if it doesn’t, then it’s not real power, then it’s a misused power.

Index

TITLES “103 Korean Martyrs” (Monica Youn), 157

“After a Painting by Dorothea Tanning” (Shaugnessy), 184 After We Lost Our Way (Mura), 161 Air Pocket (Hahn), 99, 154, 155, 158, 257, 268, 279 “Aller/Retour” (Cha), 116, 117 Andalusian Dawn (Carbó), 103 “Ang Tunay Na Lalaki’s Fourth Workshop Poem” (Nick Carbó), 100, 103

Angels for the Burning (Mura), 162 “Archipelago” (Sze), 221, 222, 223 “Aria for My Mother (Shattered Sonnets, Series 1–3)” (Marilyn Chin), 204, 205 Artist’s Daughter, The (Hahn), 153, 183, 203, 258, 262 “Aswang vs Wonder Woman” (Nick Carbó), 100, 102 At the Drive-In Volcano (Nekhukumatathil), 137 “Aubade” (Nonaka), 208, 209 “August 6, 1945, The” (Hahn), 158 “Balance” (Barbara Tran), 167 Barter (Monica Youn), 156, 157 “Bath: August 6, 1945, The” (Hahn) 158

Bite Hard (Justin Chin), 189 Black Candle (Divakaruni), 64, 104, 106, 109

Black Lightning (Tabios, Eileen), 161 Bliss to Fill (Prageeta Sharma), 215 “Blue and White Lines after O’Keeffe” (Song, Cathy), 135, 136, 184 “Blue Ghazals” (Adrienne Rich), 193 “Blues on Yellow” (Marilyn Chin), 183 Borderless Bodies (Dinh), 123, 124 “Borders” (Linh Dinh), 123 “Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, The” (Stephen Crane), 106 “Brides Come to Yuba City, The” (Divakaruni), 105, 106, 107 Call Me Ishmael Tonight (Agha Shahid Ali), 194 “Can’t Tell” (Nellie Wong), 159 “Chinese Girl in the Mirror” (Priscilla Lee), 152 “Chinese Quatrains (The Woman in Tomb 44)” (Marilyn Chin), 199–201 “Chinese Speech Contest” (Victoria Chang), 89 “Cinema Poisoning” (Shaughnessy), 206, 207 Circle (Chang), 89, 136, 210, 211, 212 Cloud Moving Hands (Cathy Song), 133

300 Colors of Desire, The (Mura), 161 Commons (Myung Mi Kim), 110, 111 “Conspiring with Shikishi” (Hahn), 185 “Corruption (II)” (Reddy), 153, 154 “Cruising Barthes” (Hahn), 109 “Desert Haiku” (Mandava), 185 Dictée (Theresa Cha), 51, 101, 102, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117 “Digging Up the Dead” (Yang, Kao Kalia), 163 “Dimblue: After Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée” (Harryman), 51 Disappearing Acts (McMillan), 179 “Discussion of Monsters, A” (Worra), 155

“Double, The” (Shirley Geok–lin Lim), 214

Dragon Lady, The (Milton Caniff), 16 Earshot (Hahn), 90, 257, 258, 261, 268 “Earthshine” (Sze), 183 “Easter: Wahiawa, 1959” (Cathy Song), 133, 134, 135 “Edward Hopper Study: Hotel Room” (Victoria Chang), 136 “Egg Tarts” (Koon Woon), 138 “Elegy with Music” (Taniguchi), 216, 217, 218 “Emilies: Aria for My Mother (Shattered Sonnets, Series 1–3)” (Marilyn Chan), 204, 205 “Empty Heart” (Lois–Ann Yamanaka), 119

Facts for Visitors (Reddy), 153, 154 “Faith” (Barbara Tran), 167 “First Time, The” (Divakaruni), 105 Fishbone (Nezhukumatathil), 137 “Fishbone” (Nezhukumatathil), 137

“SO THERE IT IS”



“Five-Year Plan” (Victoria Chang), 89, 210, 212 Foreign Wife Elegy (Yuko Taniguchi), 90, 216 “Foreign Words” (Yuko Taniguchi), 90 “From Live Do” (Inada), 1, 66 “Genghis Chan: Private Eye X X I V ” (John Yau), 15 “Getting There” (Timothy Liu), 148, 149, 150

“Ghazal” (Agha Shahid Ali), 194, 195 “Ghidrah” (Worra), 155, 156 “Ghost Nang Nak, The” (Worra), 155 “Girl Powdering Her Neck” (Cathy Song), 136 “Golem” (Worra), 156 Gutted (Justin Chin), 189, 191 “Gutted” (Justin Chin), 189, 190 Half-Lit Houses (Tina Chang), 212, 213 Harmless Medicine (Justin Chin), 94, 189 “Hearing” (Berssenbrugge), 169–72 “Hearsay (Hunan, 1943)” (Tina Chang), 213

“Heat” (Barbara Tran), 166 “The Hemisphere: Kuchuk Hanem” (Hahn) 140, 141, 142 “Hong Kong Flower Lounge” (Victoria Chang), 136 “Hope” (Barbara Tran), 167 “Hotel Lullaby” (Reddy), 153 “How I Became a Writer” (Divakaruni), 109

“How I Got that Name” (Marilyn Chin), 125–32 “Howl” (Ginsberg), 77 I Love Artists (Berssenbrugge), 169, 170, 183

“I Love Artists” (Berssenbrugge), 183



301

Index

“Ikebana” (Cathy Song), 136 “In Naroda Patiya” (Alexander), 164 In the Mynah Bird’s Own Words (Barbara Tran), 165 “Indian Movie, New Jersey” (Divakaruni), 56, 151 Infamous Landscapes (Prageeta Sharma), 215

Interior with Sudden Joy (Shaughnessy), 147, 184, 207 “Izu Dancer, The” (Hahn), 90, 91, 92 “Izu Dancer, The” (Kawabata), 90, 92 “June Ghazal” (Sze), 224 “Kaiseki” (Sze), 222 “Kala: Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre” (Yamanaka), 119 “Kitchen Aid Epicurean Stand Mixer” (Victoria Chang), 212 “Komachi to Shōshō on the Ninety-ninth Night” (Hahn), 143

“Mistranslations” (Justin Chin), 94, 95 Moby-Dick (Melville), 131 “Mon Père” (Carbó), 183 Monstro (Worra), 150, 155, 156 “Mosquito and Ant” (Hahn), 108 Mosquito and Ant (Hahn), 108, 109, 143, 175, 255, 262, 287 “Mothra” (Worra), 155 “Naglfar” (Worra), 156 Narrow Road to the Interior, The (Hahn), 186, 260, 292 “Nonya” (Shirley Geok–lin Lim), 107 Notes from the Divided Country (Suji Kwok Kim), 93, 94 “Ode to Badminton” (Sharma), 215 Ocean in the Closet, The (Yuko Taniguchi), 90 Of Flesh and Spirit (Wang, Ping), 64, 87, 118

Of Thee I Sing (Timothy Liu), 149, 183, 217

“Lady Xoc” (Worra), 156 “Lan Nguyen: The Uniform of Death 1971” (Mura), 161, 162 Latehomecomer, The (Kao Kalia Yang), 139

“Leaving Seoul: 1953” (Walter K. Lew), 160, 161 Leaving Yuba City (Divakaruni), 56, 64, 103, 105, 106, 109, 151, 183, 296 Legends from Camp (Inada), 1 “Letter to Ma” (Merle Woo), 31 “Little Elegy in G Minor” (Timothy Liu), 217

Magic Whip, The (Ping Wang), 64, 84, 86

“Measure” (Barbara Tran), 168 Miracle Fruit (Nezhukamatathil), 137

“On Quitting” (Victoria Chang), 211, 212 “Oni” (Worra), 155 Opening Question, The (Sharma), 215 “Palm Trees in Ontario, California” (Kao Kalia Yang), 138, 139, 140 “Panopticon” (Shaugnessy), 147 “Persimmons” (Li–Young Lee), 88, 89 “Persephone” (Ferrell), 155, 261 Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty, The (Marilyn Chin), 125, 185 Picture Bride (Cathy Song), 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 184 “Poetry Is not a Luxury” (Lorde), 29, 31 “Pollen Fossil Record” (Myung Mi Kim), 110, 111, 112, 113 “Postmodern Blackness” (hooks), 6 “Preparations” (Victoria Chang), 136

302

“SO THERE IT IS”



Quipu (Arthur Sze), 64, 183, 221

“Syntax” (Wang Ping), 87, 118

“Raw Silk” (Meena Alexander), 164 “Reckless Sonnets” (Hahn), 202, 203,

“Tea Boy: After Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay!, The” (Divakaruni), 183 “Temporary Passages” (Worra), 156 Terry and the Pirates (comic strip), 16 Toxic Flora (Hahn), 64, 260 “That Half Is Almost Gone” (Marilyn Chin), 86 “Things That Are Full of Pleasure” (Hahn), 186, 187, 188 “Titian’s Salome” (Monica Youn), 157 “To the Men in My Family Who Love Chickens” (Kao Kalia Yang), 163 “Toxic Flora” (Hahn), 260 “Translations from the Mother Tongue” (Suji Kwock Kim), 81, 93 “Treadwinds” (Walter K. Lew), 160, 183 “Triptych in Black Lipstick” (Timothy Liu), 183 Truth in Rented Rooms, The (Koon Woon), 138 Turning Japanese (Mura), 162

204

“Red Ghazal” (Nezhukumatathil), 196, 197, 198 “Red Wheelbarrow, The” (Williams), 130

“Redshifting Web, The” (Arthur Sze), 222

Redshifting Web, The (Arthur Sze), 221, 222, 223, 224 “Reggae Renga” (Marilyn Chin), 185 “Renga” (Arthur Sze), 223 “Responding to Light” (Hahn), 175–77 Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (Marilyn Chin), 86, 183, 198, 199, 204 Rooms Are Never Finished (Agha Shahid Ali), 193, 194 “Roost” (Kimiko Hahn), 99 “Rosary” (Tran, Barbara), 165, 168 Rose (Li–Young Lee), 88 “Safe” (Barbara Tran), 166 “Sarah Emma Edmonds” (Victoria Chang), 211 Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (Lois–Ann Yamanaka), 119 Secret Asian Man (Carbó), 100, 102 Seen and Unseen (Noguchi), 68 “Senryu 1991” (Ishii), 185 “Seven Reasons for Divorce” (Victoria Chang), 136 “Siege Document” (Myung Mi Kim), 110, 111, 112 “Six Persimmons” (Arthur Sze), 222 “Sparrow” (Hahn), 189 “Storyteller, The” (Mirikitani), 154 “Sudha’s Story” (Divakaruni), 109 “Surprises in America” (Worra), 150, 151

“Unbearable Heart, The” (Hahn), 189 Unbearable Heart, The (Hahn), 109, 140, 189, 258, 261, 268, 291 “Vanishing Act” (Zarco), 179 “Vivisection” (Hahn), 183 Volatile (Hahn), 262 “Ways to Ai 愛” (Ping Wang), 84, 85 What the Fortune Teller Didn’t Say (Shirley Geok–lin Lim), 107, 214 “When You Leave” (Hahn), 154, 155, 259

Where the Body Meets Memory (Mura), 162

“Widow at Dawn, The” (Divakaruni), 106



303

Index

Wishbone (Priscilla Lee), 152 “Year of the Bombshell” (Victoria Chang), 210 “Youngest Daughter, The” (Song, Cathy), 134, 135

anglicization, 96, 128 Annual Asian American/African American Poetry Reading, 26 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 26, 31, 42, 45, 53, 56, 79, 95, 101, 121, 174 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 35, 36, 47, 60, 83

AUTHORS AND GENERAL acculturation, 13, 44 Achebe, Chinua, 60 aesthetic(s), 2, 31, 33, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 72, 92, 117, 185, 186, 202, 211, 219, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 267, 269, 272, 278, 279, 280, 281, 289, 298 African Americans, 6, 12, 13, 16, 18, 19, 21, 26, 31, 34, 39, 43, 51, 53, 65, 66, 79, 97, 131, 206, 264, 266, 267, 270, 275, 277, 281, 287, 297 Afro-Asian alliance, 51 agency, 4, 7, 50, 171 A I D S , 4, 207 Alexander, Meena, “In Naroda Patiya” 164; Raw Silk 164 Alexander, Meena, 5, 27, 66, 67, 164, 254, 262, 268, 281, 285, 296 Ali, Agha Shahid, 51, 70, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 202, 296, 300; Call Me Ishmael Tonight 194; “Ghazal” 194, 195; Rooms Are Never Finished 193, 194 Allen, Roger M.A., 192 alterity, 13, 17 American Dream, 18, 133, 151, 152, 153, 210, 214, 215, 293 americanization, 96, 128 Americanness, 4, 19, 37, 63, 66, 158, 278, 297 ancestry, 1, 11, 12, 18, 23, 25, 34, 38, 42, 48, 67, 72, 85, 90, 148, 157, 161, 179, 208, 214, 223, 275 Angel Island, 69, 126, 127

Armantrout, Rae, 181, 182 Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, 21, 78, 92, 98 Asian American Journalists Association, 20

Asian American Movement, 21, 35, 70 Asian American Writers’ Conference, 70 Asian American Writers’ Congress, 28 Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 10, 20, 68, 100, 161, 275, 279 Asian Excellence Awards, 20 Asian Indian Americans, 10, 54, 106, 151, 155, 164, 196, 197, 215, 216 Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month, 20

assimilation, 5, 6, 28, 37, 38, 44, 63, 71, 96, 97, 108, 120, 125, 128, 129, 131, 205, 206, 225 assimilationism, 20 aubade (poetic form), 208, 209 authenticity, 35, 36, 42, 72, 79, 112, 129, 288

autobiography, 113, 126, 127, 128, 130, 165, 208, 213, 260 Avachat, Abhay, 191 Bahasa Indonesia (language), 94, 95 Bahri, Deepika, & Mary Vasudeva, 21 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 42, 46, 59, 60, 61 Balaz, Joseph (Joe) Puna, 120 ballad (poetic form), 180, 184, 200, 212– 15

Balutansky, Kathleen, & Marie–Agnès Sourieau, 43

304 Bamboo Ridge (Hawaiian poetry group), 100, 119, 270 Bandung Conference, 51 Bao, Quang, 10 Baraka, Amir, 77 Bayoumi, Moustafa, 17 Beidler, Philip D., 161 Bell, Roger T., 83 Bentham, Jeremy, 148 Bergmann, Mike, 18, 22 Bernstein, Charles, 169 Bernstein, Nina, 24 Berssenbrugge, Mei–mei, 4, 70, 169, 170, 171, 172, 183, 281, 296; “Hearing” 169–72; “I Love Artists” 183; I Love Artists 169, 170, 183 Bhabha, Homi K., 7, 14, 28, 30, 36, 41, 42, 46, 48, 49, 54, 55, 57, 58, 61, 82, 93, 173, 224 Biggers, Earl Derr, 15 bilingualism, 95, 98, 208 Birkle, Carmen, 17, 42, 44 body, the, 5, 13, 16, 38, 40, 123, 124, 140, 142, 143, 144, 159, 163, 174, 176, 254

Boehmer, Elleke, 48 borderland (Anzaldúa), 42, 45, 66 borders theory, 4, 5, 9, 30, 101, 124, 264, 291

Bosselaar, Laure–Anne, 51 boutique multiculturalism (Fish), 54 Braid, Kate, & Sandy Shreve, 191, 200, 207, 210, 213 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 42, 43 Bredin, Renae Moore, 172 Breinig, & Lösch, 42, 44 Breinig, Helmbrecht, & Klaus Lösch, 44 Bronfen, Elisabeth, & Benjamin Marius, 58

Brownback, Sam, 52

“SO THERE IT IS”



Buddhism, 8, 50, 64, 124, 172, 186, 191, 205, 217, 265, 268, 269, 270 Bulbeck, Chilla, 85, 145, 148, 168, 172, 174, 294 Bulosan, Carlos, 69, 71, 276, 280 California goldrush, 22 Cambodia, 10, 62, 115, 266; refugees from, 19; Cambodian Americans, 23 Caniff, Milton, The Dragon Lady 16 canonicity, 11, 253 Cao, Lan, & Himilce Novas, 127, 128 capitalism, 29, 30, 32, 36, 256 Caplan, David, 181, 182, 192, 193, 194, 196, 200, 204, 207, 210, 213 Carbó, Nick, 3, 70, 71, 100, 101, 102, 103, 183; Andalusian Dawn 103; “Ang Tunay Na Lalaki’s Fourth Workshop Poem” 100, 103; “Aswang vs Wonder Woman” 100, 102; “Mon Père” 183; Secret Asian Man 100, 102 Carolla, Adam, 20 Cha, Theresa, 4, 51, 101, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 182; “Aller/Retour” 116, 117; Dictée 51, 101, 102, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117

Chan, Charlie, 15, 276 Chan, Jeffery Paul, 26, 61, 71, 104 Chance, Linda H., 124, 180, 181, 185, 186, 188 Chang, Diana, 71 Chang, Juliana, 68, 73, 97 Chang, Kang–I Sun, 198 Chang, Tina, 71, 88, 212, 214; Half-Lit Houses 212, 213; “Hearsay (Hunan, 1943)” 213 Chang, Victoria M., 3, 11, 70, 71, 88, 89, 136, 210, 211; “Chinese Speech Contest” 89; Circle 89, 136, 210, 211, 212; “Edward Hopper Study: Hotel Room” 136; “Five-Year Plan” 89,



305

Index

210, 212; “Hong Kong Flower Lounge” 136; “Kitchen Aid Epicurean Stand Mixer” 212; “On Quitting” 211, 212; “Preparations” 136; “Sarah Emma Edmonds” 211; “Seven Reasons for Divorce” 136; “Year of the Bombshell” 210 Chen, Shih–Hsiang, 87 Cheung, King–kok, 15, 281, 298 Chicano Americans, 31, 34, 97, 121 childhood, 99, 133, 186, 187, 188, 194, 256, 269 Chin, Frank et al., 26, 33, 61, 71 Chin, Justin, 94, 95, 189, 191, 202;, Bite Hard 189; “Gutted” 189, 190; Gutted 189, 191; Harmless Medicine 94, 189; “Mistranslations” 94, 95 Chin, Marilyn, 3, 11, 70, 71, 86, 95, 125, 126, 128, 131, 132, 182, 183, 185, 198, 199, 200, 202, 204, 205, 206, 253, 254, 268, 274, 276, 279, 280, 281, 285; “Blues on Yellow” 183; “Chinese Quatrains (The Woman in Tomb 44)” 199–201; “Emilies: Aria for My Mother (Shattered Sonnets, Series 1–3)” 204, 205; “How I Got that Name” 125–32;

The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty 125, 185; Rhapsody in Plain Yellow 86, 183, 198, 199, 204; “Reggae Renga” 185; “That Half Is Almost Gone” 86 Chin, Vincent, 25 China, 114, 115, 138, 152, 199, 213, 218, 222; culture, 114, 115, 138, 201 Chinese Americans, 8, 10, 13, 15, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 35, 37, 38, 42, 54, 61, 62, 64, 65, 79, 80, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 94, 104, 107, 108, 109, 115, 118, 126, 127, 128, 132, 135, 136, 138, 139, 148, 151, 152, 159, 160, 169, 172, 184, 185, 198, 199, 201, 205, 210, 212, 213, 214,

217, 218, 221, 223, 225, 263, 264, 276, 279, 283, 284, 285 Chinese language, 80, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 108, 109, 113, 114, 115, 118, 126, 131, 138, 222 Chinese literature, 138, 201, 202, 211 Chinese Malayan Americans, 107 Chinese Malayans, 108 Chiu, Jeannie, 73 Cho, Lily, 30, 48 Cho, Margaret, 93 Chock, Eric, 100, 120 Chow, Esther Ngan–Ling, 167, 175 Chu, Louis, 276 Chu, Patricia P., 27, 130 Chu, Tracy, 19 Chuh, Kandice, 10, 13 Churchwell, Sarah, 127 civil-rights movement, 20, 265, 267, 271, 280, 283, 285 Cixous, Hélène, & Catherine Clément, 55 Cliff, Michelle, 291 Clifford, James, 83 clothing, Asian, 35, 46, 103, 105, 106 code-switching, 98, 99, 103, 108, 110, 112, 113, 117

Collier, Gordon, & Ulrich Fleischmann, 43

colonialism, 23, 47, 51, 78, 172 colonized, 43, 47, 48, 49, 50, 54, 78, 79, 116, 121 colonizer, 43, 49, 50, 54, 78, 82, 102, 103, 115, 116, 117 confessional poetry, 4, 67, 125, 127, 135, 188, 202 Confucius, 200 Contreras, Jaime, 52 couplet (poetic form), 184, 191, 192, 197, 210–12, 218, 224 Crane, Stephen, “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” 106

306 Crawford, James, 80 Creef, Elena Tajima, 13, 160 creole languages, 81 creolization, 42, 46, 79 cuisine, Asian, 40, 46, 54, 62, 63, 94, 103, 105, 106, 108, 123, 128, 136, 137, 138, 152, 166, 176, 187, 213, 271, 272, 273, 283 cultural imperialism, 36 cultural racism, 38 Cutter, Martha J., 79, 80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 92, 95, 96, 98, 103, 121 cyberspace, 29 Dabydeen, Cyril, 42 Davidson, Michael, 182, 209 Davis, Kathryn A. et al., 120 Davis, Kimberly Chabot, 6 denationalization, 8, 9 Dharwadker, Vinay et al., 192 dialogism, 60 diaspora, 5, 8, 9, 10, 30, 47, 56, 97, 196, 290

Dickinson, Emily, 205 Dinh, Linh, “Borders” 123; Borderless Bodies 123, 124 disidentification (Lowe), 5 displacement, 5, 6, 30, 47, 123, 139, 140, 196, 219 Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee, 4, 7, 48, 56, 64, 65, 70, 77, 78, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109, 151, 183, 295, 300; Black Candle 64, 104, 106, 109; “The Brides Come to Yuba City” 105, 106, 107; “The First Time” 105; “How I Became a Writer” 109; “Indian Movie, New Jersey” 56, 151; Leaving Yuba City 56, 64, 103, 105, 106, 109, 151, 183, 296; “Sudha’s Story” 109; “Tea Boy: After Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay!, The 183; “The Widow at Dawn” 106

“SO THERE IT IS”



Dobyns, Stephen, 210 dominant culture, 10, 16, 26, 30, 37, 48, 54, 80, 82, 97, 124, 225, 294 dotbusters, 56 Doty, Mark, 51, 267 double-consciousness (Du Bois), 39, 60 Du Bois, W.E.B., 39, 47 Dürig, Maria, 62, 150, 172 Ebonics, 79 education, 12, 14, 18, 19, 23, 24, 25, 27, 37, 38, 40, 62, 64, 69, 72, 79, 80, 84, 92, 102, 109, 129, 139, 141, 153, 183, 221, 253, 259, 265, 274, 277, 282, 286, 299

Egypt, 140, 141, 142 elegy (poetic form), 184, 216, 217, 218, 259

Eliot, T.S., 73, 209 elite culture, 6, 69, 73, 120 Ellis Island, 127 Emerson, Rupert, 115 Eng, David L., 15 English language, 7, 10, 13, 14, 15, 20, 23, 28, 40, 54, 60, 61, 62, 64, 67, 68, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 133, 137, 138, 152, 176, 191, 192, 193, 195, 196, 208, 222, 263, 264, 266, 286, 299 enjambement, 198 Espinoza, Dionne, 168 Espiritu, Yen Le, 25 essentialism, 7, 39, 56 ethnicity, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 33, 37, 38, 39, 40, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 57, 58, 59, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 71, 72, 73, 74, 79, 80, 81, 83,



307

Index

95, 96, 102, 103, 108, 109, 117, 122, 123, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 138, 139, 140, 145, 146, 150, 151, 156, 157, 160, 169, 172, 173, 174, 177, 181, 183, 196, 197, 198, 201, 206, 209, 212, 217, 218, 219, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 253, 254, 271, 275, 277, 282, 283 Euro-Americans, 10, 14, 18, 24, 26, 37, 66, 81, 91, 97, 98, 120, 121, 124, 126, 130, 131, 132, 133, 136, 137, 138, 147, 171, 172, 173, 174, 182, 188, 202, 207, 214, 218, 221, 224, 225, 293 eurocentrism, 4, 7, 60, 66, 72, 102, 121, 172, 224 Ewick, David, 69 exile, 5, 8, 9, 30, 112, 116, 196, 206 exoticism, 13, 104, 138, 146, 158

fairy-tales, 153 Faiz, Faiz Ahmed, 202 family, 12, 18, 23, 24, 30, 31, 34, 37, 38, 56, 62, 65, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, 99, 101, 103, 105, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 119, 123, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 142, 147, 151, 152, 154, 155, 157, 159, 160, 161, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191, 194, 199, 200, 201, 204, 205, 206, 210, 213, 217, 218, 221, 222, 223, 258, 259, 261, 263, 264, 265, 266, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 275, 278, 279, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 289, 291, 292, 293, 295, 296, 297, 299 Fanon, Frantz, 40, 41, 48, 49, 78 feminism, 70, 123, 158, 171, 173, 174, 175, 215, 271, 285, 286, 287, 300 Ferrell, Monica, “Persephone” 155

Filipino Americans, 10, 12, 26, 69, 100, 102, 103, 119, 136, 263, 276, 279 Fish, Stanley, 54 Flaubert, Gustave, 140, 141, 142, 290 flexible citizenship (Aihwa Ong), 30 Fludernik, Monika, 42, 46, 47, 48, 51 folk-tales, 153, 154, 261 Fong, Matthew, 38 Fong, Timothy, 24 Foucault, Michel, 148 fragmentation, narrative, 5, 185, 186, 189, 191, 219, 288 France, 115, 142, 193, 299 Franklin, Aretha, 205 free verse, 184, 190, 198, 211 French language, 113, 115, 116, 117 Friedman, Jonathan, 53 Fu Manchu, 14 Fujita, Jun, 69, 71 Fulton, Alice, 184 fusion, cultural, 1, 29, 42, 43, 46, 56, 58, 79, 81, 98, 117, 124, 126, 182, 185, 203, 217, 224, 225; linguistic, 82, 117, 118, 121, 127; poetic, 197, 202, 206 Gans, Herbert J., 12, 13, 63 Ganser, Alexandra, 44, 45 García Villa, José, 69, 71 Garden, Wendy, 216 gender, 5, 45, 53, 71, 91, 105, 109, 132, 173, 177 generational difference, 1, 4, 25, 38, 57, 62, 63, 64, 69, 70, 71, 72, 86, 89, 90, 118, 124, 131, 132, 136, 140, 148, 151, 154, 156, 160, 161, 165, 169, 212, 213, 215, 218, 221, 253, 264, 267, 273, 279, 280, 282, 283, 285, 288, 298 genre, 72, 73, 113, 120, 180, 184, 185, 189, 190, 191, 198, 202, 208, 215, 291, 292

Ghalib, Mirza, 192

308 ghazal (poetic form), 51, 180, 184, 191– 98, 202, 223, 224, 284, 300 Gilbert, Sandra M., & Susan Gubar, 145 Gin, Ooi Keat, 115 Ginsberg, Allen, “Howl” 77 globalization, 5, 29, 30, 32, 36, 44, 225 glocality, 29 Grasselli, Fabio, 69 Greenwich Village, 68 Grice, Helena, 54 Grotjohn, Robert, 182 guerrilla ethnography (Bredin), 172 Hacker, Marilyn, 51 Hadley, Joe, 120 Hagedorn, Jessica, 4, 15, 70, 254, 267, 268, 276, 280, 285 Hahn, Kimiko, 3, 4, 7, 10, 13, 37, 51, 64, 65, 67, 70, 71, 72, 90, 91, 92, 95, 99, 108, 109, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 153, 154, 155, 158, 164, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 182, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 202, 203, 204, 209, 252, 260, 263, 275, 285, 294, 296, 298; Air Pocket 99, 154, 155, 158, 257, 268, 279; The Artist’s Daughter 153, 183, 203, 258, 262; “Bath: August 6, 1945, The” 158; “Conspiring with Shikishi” 185; “Cruising Barthes” 109; Earshot 90, 257, 258, 261, 268; “The Hemisphere: Kuchuk Hanem” 140, 141, 142; “The Izu Dancer” 90, 91, 92; “Komachi to Shōshō on the Ninety-ninth Night” 143; “Mosquito and Ant” 108; Mosquito and Ant 108, 109, 143, 175, 255, 262, 287; The Narrow Road to the Interior, 186, 260, 292;, “Reckless Sonnets” 202, 203, 204; “Responding to Light” 173, 175–77; “Roost” 99; “Sparrow” 189; “Things That Are Full of Pleasure” 186, 187, 188; “Toxic

“SO THERE IT IS”



Flora” 260; Toxic Flora 64, 260; “The Unbearable Heart” 189; Unbearable Heart, The 109, 140, 189, 258, 261, 268, 291; “Vivisection” 183; “When You Leave” 154, 155, 259; Volatile 262 haiku (poetic form), 68, 69, 130, 180, 184, 185, 186, 217, 284, 289 Hall, Donald E, 34 Hall, Stuart, 42, 46 Hamill, Sam, 51 Hammond, Andrew, 59 hangul (Korean script), 94, 111, 112, 113, 114

Harrison, Jim, 193 Harryman, Carla, “Dimblue: After Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée” 51 Hartmann, Carl Sadakichi, 68, 70, 71, 72 Hawai‘i Creole English (H C E ), 118, 120 Hawai‘i, 99, 104, 118, 120, 132, 133, 134, 136, 223, 225, 263, 269, 270, 284 Hawaiian language, 222 Hawaiian Pidgin English, 75, 90, 118, 119, 120 Hawaiians, 10, 15, 72, 81, 99, 118, 119, 120, 134, 263, 293 H C E (Hawai‘i Creole English), 118, 120 hegemony, 4, 7, 20, 31, 37, 40, 47, 53, 54, 55, 59, 64, 79, 80, 120, 172, 216, 219; discursive, 2, 9, 10, 58, 80, 82, 91, 92, 109 Hejinian, Lyn, 181 Heller, Monica, 103, 108 Herero women (Namibia), 35 heroic couplet, 180, 210 heterogeneity, 4, 8, 10, 22, 25, 28, 30, 35, 65 Hindi language, 56, 103, 104, 105, 106 Hinduism, 50 Hirabayashi, Lane Ryo, 42, 44 hiragana script (Japanese), 91, 109



309

Index

Hispanic Americans, 18, 22, 43, 45, 52, 53

Hmong Americans, 24, 139, 163, 164, 285

Holboeck, Ferdinand, 157 Holiday, Billie, 205 Hollinger, David, 12, 42, 43 homophobia, 207 homosexuality, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 207, 279, 287 See also: lesbianism Hongo, Garrett, 22, 26, 70, 71, 72, 268, 295

Honma, Dean, 120 honorary whites, 19 hooks, bell, 7, 16, 53, 66, 96, 174; “Postmodern Blackness” 6 Houston, Velina Hasu, & Terese K. Williams, 33 Howe, Susan, 182 Huang, Guiyou, 70 Huang, Yunte, 15 Huddart, David, 6 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 83 Hutchinson, Earl Ofari, 53 hybridity, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 20, 222, 225; cultural 30–75; formal 179–219; linguistic 77–122; narrative 123–77 hybridization, 7, 51, 52, 59, 63 Ickstadt, Heinz, 9 identity-formation, 27 Immigration and Nationality Act, 23 immigration, 4, 13, 14, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 30, 38, 44, 47, 48, 52, 53, 57, 62, 63, 64, 69, 72, 79, 95, 105, 118, 127, 128, 132, 134, 135, 136, 151, 153, 160, 196, 221, 263, 279, 282, 286, 293 Inada, Lawson Fusao, 1, 3, 26, 61, 70, 71, 104; “From Live Do” 1, 66; Legends from Camp 1

in-betweenness, 36, 122 India, 10, 23, 25, 29, 62, 64, 103, 105, 109, 153, 164, 192, 197, 216, 290, 296, 298, 299 Indonesia, 10, 51, 88, 94 Indo-Pakistani literature, 184, 191, 192, 197, 198 installation art, 183 internment, 14, 23, 27, 69, 158, 265, 273 invisibility, 8, 21, 26, 27, 57, 131 Irigaray, Luce, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177 Irish Americans, 12 Ishii, Michael, 185 Italian Americans, 12, 13 I–to, Wen, 69, 72 Iwasaki, Bruce, 68 Jamaica, 43 JanMohamed, Abdul R., 42, 43 Japan, 114, 216; Heian period, 109 Japanese Americans, 1, 10, 13, 16, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 37, 38, 40, 48, 54, 61, 62, 64, 65, 68, 69, 81, 90, 91, 92, 99, 104, 118, 124, 130, 131, 136, 145, 147, 154, 155, 158, 159, 160, 161, 172, 180, 184, 185, 186, 188, 189, 191, 199, 202, 207, 208, 213, 216, 217, 218, 256, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 269, 270, 272, 273, 274, 275, 277, 278, 279, 281, 283, 284, 286, 289, 292, 296 Japanese language, 60, 81, 88, 90, 91, 92, 99, 222 Japanese literature, 153, 154, 155, 180, 185, 190, 211 Johnson, Lyndon B., 23 jueju (poetic form), 184, 198, 199 Kahanu, Hina, 120 Kamada, Roy Osamu, 161 Kang, Laura Hyun Yi, 2, 114 Kang, Sooyoung, 19

310 kanji script (Japanese), 91 Karr, Mary, 183 Kashmiri Americans, 195 katakana script (Japanese), 91 Kawabata, Yasunari, “The Izu Dancer” 90, 92 Khatibi, Abdelkebit, 98 Kibria, Nazli, 13 Kim, Elaine, 14, 15, 16, 19, 22, 33, 57, 58, 62, 124, 125, 283 Kim, Myung Mi, 4, 110, 111, 112, 182, 216; Commons 110, 111; “Pollen Fossil Record” 110, 111, 112, 113; “Siege Document” 110, 111, 112 Kim, Suji Kwock, 3, 70, 71, 81, 93, 95; “Translations from the Mother Tongue” 81, 93; Notes from the Divided Country 93, 94 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 21 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 104, 276, 280, 281, 285, 295, 300 Kitano, Harry H.L., & Roger Daniels, 24 Kloss, Heinz, 98 Kono, Juliet, 100, 120 Korea, 111, 113, 114, 115, 133, 134, 157, 161

Korean Americans, 10, 13, 19, 23, 48, 58, 93, 110, 112, 113, 115, 116, 132, 133, 134, 156, 157, 158, 160, 276, 279 Korean culture, 94 Korean language, 80, 81, 93, 94, 111, 113, 114

Korean War, 110, 111, 112, 115, 158, 160 Kosanke, Suzanne, 225 Koshy, Susan, 2, 9, 14, 23, 33, 46 Kuortti, Joel, & Jopi Nyman, 35, 43, 46, 56

Kymlicka, Will, 173 Lacan, Jacques, 174 Lahiri, Jhumpa, 34

“SO THERE IT IS”



Lan Nguyen language, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 24, 25, 28, 31, 33, 40, 43, 45, 46, 47, 50, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 73, 74, 75, 77–22, 131, 136, 146, 160, 162, 172, 173, 181, 182, 183, 190, 192, 198, 205, 209, 222, 223, 225, 252, 254, 259, 265, 266, 267, 274, 279, 281, 284, 285, 286, 289, 290, 291, 298, 299, 300; language death, 80 Language poetry, 4, 15, 67, 181, 253 languages, Asian, 81 Laos, 10, 115, 139, 150; refugees from, 19; Laotian Americans, 139, 150 Lazarus, Emma, 41 Le Fave, Kelly, 194 Lee, Bruce, 276 Lee, Joann Faung Jean, 62 Lee, Li–Young, 3, 51, 70, 71, 88, 253, 268, 276, 279, 297; “Persimmons” 88, 89; Rose 88 Lee, Priscilla, 70, 151; “Chinese Girl in the Mirror” 152; Wishbone 152 Lee, Quentin, 80 Lee, Rachel C., 9 Lee, Robert A., 41 Lee, Robert G., 25, 38 Lee, Sue–Im, 2 Lefevere, André, 82 Lei–Lanilau, Carolyn, 182 Leonard, Simei, & George J. Leonard, 127

Leong, Russell C., 17, 146 lesbianism, 146, 147, 207, 273 Levertov, Denise, 193 Lew, Walter K., 4, 58, 59, 160, 161, 164, 179, 182, 183, 261, 268; “Leaving Seoul 1953” 160, 161; “Treadwinds” 160, 183 Li, David Leiwei, 14, 26, 278, 297 Li, Wenxin, 15, 104



311

Index

Lim, Shirley Geok–lin, 25, 107, 214, 216; “The Double” 214; “Nonya” 107; What the Fortune Teller Didn’t Say 107, 214 Lim, Shirley, 9 Ling, Amy, 3, 35, 38, 42, 97 lingua franca, 97 Linhart, Sepp, 16 Lionnet, Françoise, 44 Lipsitz, George, 33 Liquete, Karen Anne C., 102 Liu, Eric, 12, 18, 42, 281, 297 Liu, Timothy, 4, 70, 146, 148, 149, 150, 183, 217, 218, 280; “Getting There” 148, 149, 150; “Little Elegy in G Minor” 217; Of Thee I Sing 149, 183, 217; “Triptych in Black Lipstick” 183 Lorde, Audre, 29, 31, 56, 96, 98, 122; “Poetry Is not a Luxury” 29, 31 Love Works (Mirikitani), 154 Lowe, Lisa, 5, 6, 22, 23, 53, 54, 63, 64, 78, 174, 218, 219 Luconi, Stefano, 13 Lum, Darrell H.Y., 120 Lum, Wing Tek, 100 Luong, Francois, 90, 153 Lyon, Ben, 126 lyric ‘I’, 209 Mori, 81 Ma, Sheng–mei, 17, 20 macaronic poetry, 98 Machida, Margo, 63 McMillan, Terry, Disappearing Acts, 179 mainstream, American, 4, 5, 51, 53, 56, 58, 61, 62, 63, 80, 131, 152, 188, 206, 253, 255, 279, 283, 285 majority culture, 2, 7, 10, 11, 13, 19, 20, 23, 27, 28, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 41, 44, 50, 54, 57, 58, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 71, 73, 74, 81, 97, 98, 124, 131, 133,

137, 138, 149, 153, 173, 184, 188, 202, 212, 219, 225, 271, 272 Malay language, 107

Mandava, Bhargavi C., “Desert Haiku” 185

manichean allegory (JanMohamed), 43, 44

Manzanas, Ana María, & Jesús Benito, 49, 60 Marx, Edward, 68 media, 14, 16, 28, 29, 41, 113, 173, 295 Mehrez, Samia, 98 Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick 131 Mercer, Kobena, 27 meritocratic ideology (Yetman), 39 metaphor, 90, 139, 140, 171, 201, 253, 284

Mexico, 45, 158, 169, 193, 223 middleman minority, 22 migration, 30, 32, 36, 108 mimicry, 48, 49 Minh–ha, Trinh T., 37, 78, 109, 125, 129, 132, 149, 174, 285, 289 minority cultures, 6, 7, 13, 15, 18, 19, 21, 22, 28, 34, 44, 47, 50, 64, 66, 67, 98, 130, 146, 153, 173, 279, 281, 294, 295, 298

Mirikitani, Janice, 70, 300; Love Works 154; “The Storyteller” 154 miscegenation, 46, 279 Miyoshi, Masao, 47 model minority, 18, 19 model minority, Asian Americans as, 18, 129

modernism, 73, 288 Modood, Tariq, 39 monolingualism, 11, 20, 77, 79, 83, 111, 205

Monroe, Marilyn, 126, 127, 129 Mori, Toshio, 71 Morrison, Toni, 6, 50

312 Mower, Nancy Alpert, 225 Moyers, Bill, 131, 132 multiculturalism, 5, 11, 30, 32, 33, 41, 44, 54, 77, 80, 124, 173, 182, 192, 198, 209, 223, 225 multilingualism, 51, 77, 79, 80, 101, 117, 222

Mura, David, 4, 70, 74, 161, 162, 163, 164; After We Lost Our Way 161; Angels for the Burning 162; Colors of Desire, The 161; “Lan Nguyen: The Uniform of Death 1971” (Mura), 161, 162; Turning Japanese 162; Where the Body Meets Memory 162 Murayama, Milton, 276, 280 Mustafa, Nadia, & Jeff Chu, 23, 34, 35, 38

Naglfar, 156 Nakamura, Lisa, 29 narrative, in poetry, 5, 6, 7, 9, 73, 74, 110, 122, 123, 124, 130, 140, 157, 195, 197, 200, 201, 203, 210, 213, 262, 291 National Association of Asian American Professionals, 20 National Capital Immigration Coalition, 52

nationalism, 8, 9, 14, 17, 57, 60, 77 nationality, 41, 46, 72, 132, 217, 224 nationhood, 8, 30, 41, 97 Native Americans, 43, 47, 97, 136, 222 neo-formalism, 67, 183 New Orientalism (Liu), 18 Nezhukumatathil, Aimee, 4, 70, 136, 137, 196, 197, 198, 202, 296; At the DriveIn Volcano 137; “Fishbone” 137; Fishbone 137; Miracle Fruit 137; “Red Ghazal” 196, 197, 198 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 60 Nguyen, Phuong, 25 Nightingale, Florence, 215

“SO THERE IT IS”



Nimura, Tamiko, 154 Nishimoto, Keisuke, 154 Nishimura, Amy N., 120 Noguchi, Yonejiro, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72; Seen and Unseen 68 Nonaka, Miho, 70, 71; “Aubade” 208, 209

Nopper, Tamara, 51 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 136 ode (poetic form), 184, 215–16 Okimoto, Daniel, 40 Okin, Susan Moller, 173 Omatsu, Glenn, 21 one-drop rule, 12 Ong, Aihwa, 30, 79 Ono no Komachi, 144, 145, 274 Opfermann, Susanne, 128, 132 orality, 119, 120, 213, 214 Orientalism, 13, 16, 17, 20, 25, 28, 38, 48, 94, 109, 140, 141, 142, 193, 225, 238, 290 Ortiz, Fernando, 44 Other, the, 32, 54, 60, 67, 121, 150, 209 otherness, 5, 6, 37, 106, 152 Øverland, Orm, 96 Ow, Jeffrey A., 29 Pacific peoples, 8, 10, 14, 20, 25, 62, 80, 127, 174, 275, 279 paintings, 183 Palumbo–Liu, David, 30 panopticon (Bentham), 40 Papastergiadis, Nikos, 81 Park, Josephine Hock–Hee, 2, 17, 216 Patke, Rajeev S., 78, 196 Pearlberg, Gerry Gomez, 94 Pfeiffer, Paul, 65, 67 Pham, Vu H. et al., 21 phenotype, 5, 25, 140, 146



Philippines, 10, 23, 48, 62, 100, 102, 103, 179 physiognomy, 12, 13, 35, 38, 63 picture brides, 105, 134 pidgin languages, 61 Ping, Wang, “Syntax” 87, 118 poetic forms – see: aubade, ballad, couplet, elegy, ghazal, haiku, jueju, ode, renga, senryu, sonnet, zuihitsu polyglossia, 98 Porter, Darwin, 127 postcolonialism, 4, 5, 17, 30, 31, 42, 47, 48, 50, 58, 60, 77, 96, 102, 216, 293 post-ethnicity, 4 postmodernism, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 32, 169, 181, 182, 185, 189, 191, 202, 219, 290, 291

poststructuralism, 5 Pound, Ezra, 73 prejudice, 2, 39, 53, 61, 82, 255, 264, 265, 267, 282, 284, 286, 297, 299 preservationism, 36 Pueblo Indians, 222, 223 purity, 36, 60, 79, 81, 95, 196 race, 46 racialization, 6, 23, 219 racism, 2, 6, 8, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 23, 25, 33, 35, 38, 39, 41, 42, 51, 53, 57, 61, 65, 66, 79, 94, 95, 103, 145, 149, 160, 174, 271, 278, 282, 297 Radhakrishnan, R., 56 Rai, Amit S., 29 railroad, construction of, 23, 152 Ramanujan, A.K., 83 Rasiah, Dharini, 104 Reddy, Srikanth, 3, 70, 71, 153, 154, 296; “Corruption (II)” 153, 154; Facts for Visitors 153, 154; “Hotel Lullaby” 153 renga (poetic form), 180, 185, 186, 193, 223

313

Index

Rich, Adrienne, “Blue Ghazals” 193 Robles, Al, 70 Rohmer, Sax, 14 romanization (language), 91, 94, 104, 111, 113

Roosevelt, Theodore, 96 Rumi, Mewlana Dschelaleddin, 192 Russian alphabet, 94 Rydberg, Viktor, & Rasmus B. Andreson, 156 Sadoff, Ira, 183 Said, Edward W., 16, 17, 140, 141, 142, 290

Saldívar–Hull, Sonja, 101 Sandoval, Chela, 171 Sato, Gayle K., 1, 132 Scalapino, Leslie, 181 Schechter, Harold, 100, 153, 262 Schlote, Christiane, 177 Second World War, 22, 23, 26, 27, 69, 158, 159, 160, 213 segregation, 57 Senaga, Ryan, 120 senryu (poetic form), 185 Serrano, Richard, 146, 148 sexuality, 5, 16, 45, 49, 53, 72, 84, 91, 107, 108, 119, 123, 132, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 157, 166, 167, 168, 175, 181, 196, 203, 207, 276, 281, 294, 295, 301 Shah, Purvi, 164 Shantanu, DuttaAhmed, 27 Sharma, Prageeta, 215, 216, 280; Bliss to Fill 215; Infamous Landscapes 215; “Ode to Badminton”, 215; Opening Question, The 215 Shaughnessy, Brenda, 70, 71, 146, 147, 150, 183, 184, 206, 207; “Cinema Poisoning” 206, 207; Interior with Sudden Joy 147, 184, 207; “Interior

314 with Sudden Joy: After a Painting by Dorothea Tanning” 184; “Panopticon” 147

Shōnagon, Sei, 51, 186, 188, 202 Shu, Yuan, 29 Shuger, Dale, 106 Sikh Americans, 20 Sikh Coalition, 20 Silliman, Ron, 124, 181, 182 Singh, Amardeep, 195 Singh, Amritjit, 4; & Peter Schmidt, 4, 16, 49, 52 skin color, 25, 39, 41 Solar, Valerie, 10 Sollors, Werner, 12 Sommer, Doris, 34, 79, 98, 106 Song, Cathy, 3, 11, 47, 70, 71, 72, 100, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 183, 184, 253, 254, 268, 273, 274, 276, 281, 285, 296; “Blue and White Lines after O’Keeffe” 135, 136, 184; Cloud Moving Hands 133; “Girl Powdering Her Neck” 136; “Easter: Wahiawa, 1959” 133, 134, 135; “Ikebana” 136; Picture Bride 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 184; “Youngest Daughter, The” 134, 135

sonnet (poetic form), 180, 184, 192, 202– 207, 218 Soyinka, Wole, 60 Spahr, Juliana, 51 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 21, 39, 61, 109, 174, 175 Steegmuller, Francis, 141 stereotypes, 5, 8, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 26, 27, 28, 35, 39, 48, 93, 104, 122, 129, 140, 141, 142, 145, 150, 177, 225, 276, 282 strategic essentialism (Spivak), 39 subaltern, the, 37, 61, 175 sub-ethnicities, 10, 31, 159

“SO THERE IT IS”



subject-formation, 4, 7 subjectivity, 7, 15, 28, 29, 33, 34, 37, 40, 42, 59, 61, 79, 96, 103, 123, 124, 125, 130, 131, 140, 142, 147, 150, 157, 158, 171, 209, 210, 223, 224, 266 subject-positions, 5, 31, 132, 171 Suyemoto, Toyo, 69, 71 Swarns, Rachel L., 52 syncretism, 42, 43, 86 Sze, Arthur, 4, 64, 70, 183, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 254, 280; “Archipelago” 221, 222, 223; “Earthshine” 183; “June Ghazal” 224; “Kaiseki” 222; Quipu 64, 183, 221; Redshifting Web, The 221, 222, 223, 224; “Redshifting Web, The” 222; “Renga” 223; “Six Persimmons” 222 Tabios, Eileen, Black Lightning 161 Tachiki, Amy, 15, 16, 18, 19 Tagalog language, 80, 81, 100, 101, 102, 118, 263 Takagi, Dana Y., 146, 147 Tanaka, Ron, 70 Taniguchi, Yuko, 4, 88, 90, 216, 217, 218; “Elegy with Music” 216, 217, 218; “Foreign Words” 90; Foreign Wife Elegy 90, 216; The Ocean in the Closet 90

Taoism, 108 Tarling, Nicholas, 115 Thailand, 10, 139, 163 thick description (Clifford), 83 Third Space (Bhabha), 7, 28, 55, 57, 58, 59, 82, 122, 184, 202 Thompson, John, 193 Thongthiraj, Took Took, 124 Tomlinson, Charles, 193 Tonouchi, Lee, 120 Tran, Barbara, “Balance” 167; “Faith” 167; “Heat” 166; “Hope” 167; In the



Mynah Bird’s Own Words 165; “Measure” 168; “Rosary” 165, 168; “Safe” 166 transculturalism, transculturation, 9, 42, 44, 83, 160, 189 transdifference (Breinig & Lösch), 42, 44 translation, 74, 80, 81, 82–95, 116, 117, 123, 128, 138, 160, 193, 200, 284, 290, 291, 299 transnationalism, 8, 9, 14, 27, 29, 44, 47, 64, 108, 123, 158, 165 Tsiang, H.T., 69, 71, 280 Tuck, Patrick, 115 Twelbeck, Kirsten, 101, 102, 113 Ty, Eleanor, 9, 40 Uba, George, 21, 69 Uenlue, Huelya, 191, 192 Utamaro, Kitagawa, 136 Vietnam, 10, 48, 62, 115, 139, 158, 161, 163, 165, 166, 168, 264, 266, 280 Vietnam War, 139, 158, 161, 162, 163 Vietnamese Americans, 10, 23, 123, 165 Vietnamese language, 80, 165 violence, 14, 21, 49, 66, 91, 110, 119, 158, 173, 196, 297 Visayan (language in Philippines), 103 voyeurism, 71, 147 Wallinger, Hanna, 46, 106 Wallinger–Schorn, Brigitte, 89, 294 Walsh, James, 124, 125 Wang, Ping, 3, 4, 64, 84, 86, 87, 118; Magic Whip, The 64, 84, 86; Of Flesh and Spirit 64, 87, 118; “Ways to Ai 愛” 84, 85 Waters, Mary C., 12, 253 Wei, William, 21, 35, 70 Werbner, Pnina, 31, 32, 38, 39, 44, 57, 60

315

Index

whiteness, 12, 14, 22, 33, 36, 41, 44, 54, 57

Whitman, Walt, 68, 209 Wiegman, Robyn, 38, 40 Williams, William Carlos, “The Red Wheelbarrow” 130 Wilson, Rob, 118 Wong, Nellie, 159, 268; “Can’t Tell” 159

Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia, 8 Wong, Shawn, 11, 26, 35, 61, 71, 104, 268, 276, 280 Wong, Sunn Shelley, 59, 209 Woo, Merle, 31, 70; “Letter to Ma” 31 Woon, Koon, 4, 138; “Egg Tarts” 138; The Truth in Rented Rooms 138 Worra, Bryan Thao, 150, 151, 155, 156; “A Discussion of Monsters” 155; “The Ghost Nang Nak” 155;, “Ghidrah” 155, 156; “Golem” 156; “Lady Xoc” 156; Monstro 150, 155, 156; “Mothra” 155; “Naglfar” 156; “Oni” 155; “Surprises in America” 150, 151; “Temporary Passages” 156 Wright, Richard, 52, 193, 257 Yamada, Mitsuye, 26, 27, 70, 174 Yamamoto, Hisaye, 69, 71 Yamamoto, Traise, 16, 38, 71, 91, 268, 273, 274, 276, 280, 281, 285, 298 Yamanaka, Lois–Ann, 4, 70, 100, 118, 119, 120, 276, 285; “Empty Heart” 119; “Kala: Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre” 119; Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre 119 Yang, Kao Kalia, “Digging Up the Dead” 163; Latehomecomer, The 139; “Palm Trees in Ontario, California” 138, 139, 140; “To the Men in My Family Who Love Chickens” 163

316 Yau, John, 15, 70, 209; “Genghis Chan: Private Eye X X I V ” 15 Yee, Vincent, 20 Yellow Peril, 126 Yen, Xiaoping, 169, 170 Yetman, Norman, 12, 39, 46 Yin, Xiao–huang, 10, 24 Yogi, Stan, 68, 69 Yoshihara, Mari, 17 Youn, Monica, 70, 156, 157; Barter 156, 157; “103 Korean Martyrs” 157; “Titian’s Salome” 157

“SO THERE IT IS”



Young, Robert J.C., 46, 49, 60, 78 Yu, Timothy, 2, 4, 15, 182 Zapf, Harald, 128 Zarco, Cyn., 4, 179, 180; “Vanishing Act” 179 Zawinski, Andrena, 148 Zentella, Ana Celia, 79 Zhou, Min, & Carl Bankston, 5, 21, 80, 223

Zhou, Xiaojing, 2, 103, 188, 209, 223 zuihitsu (poetic form), 51, 180, 184–91, 202, 256, 262, 278, 284, 291, 292, 300