Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity (Global Asias)

FOREIGN ACCENTS

GLOBAL ASIAS Eric Hayot, Series Editor

Foreign Accents Steven G. Yao

FOREIGN ACCENTS Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity

STEVEN G. YAO

2010

Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2010 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Yao, Steven G., 1965– Foreign accents : Chinese American verse from exclusion to postethnicity / by Steven G. Yao. p. cm. – (Global Asias) Includes index and bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-19-973033-9 1. American poetry—Chinese American authors—History and criticism. 2. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Chinese Americans in literature. I. Title. PS153.C45Y36 2010 811′.5098951073—dc22 2009052980

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In writing Foreign Accents, I have benefited from the generosity of numerous institutions and individuals. To begin, I wish to express my appreciation to the American Council of Learned Societies and to the Stanford Humanities Center for fellowships that enabled me to devote substantial, concentrated time to this project at a crucial point in its development. I also wish to thank Hamilton College for its continuing support of my efforts as a teacher and a scholar. I am particularly grateful to the libraries and their staff at Hamilton College, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley, especially Reid Larson and Wei-chi Poon. This project first took shape at Ohio State University, where initial work was made possible by a Seed Grant from the Office of Research. During my time in Columbus, I gained immeasurably from discussions with the following colleagues and friends: Patricia Sieber, Kirk Denton, Marjorie Chan, Bill Tyler, Judy Wu, Christopher Reed, Julia Andrews, Dick Davis, Jeredith Merrin, Elizabeth Renker, Jared Gardner, and Beth Hewitt. Gratitude also goes to Paul and Debra Hyman, Lisa Clark, and Eric Augis. Hamilton College in central New York has proven to be a remarkably congenial place to live and work. I am especially thankful to Deans of Faculty David Paris and Joseph Urgo, as well as to chairs of the English department, Nat Strout, John O’Neill, and Catherine Kodat, for their unwavering support. In addition, Carol Young, Kelly Walton, Linda Michels, and Carolyn Mascaro have each provided invaluable assistance. I also wish to acknowledge the encouragement and friendship of Doran Larson, Margie Thickstun, Vincent Odamtten, Patricia O’Neill, Onno Oerlemans, Naomi Guttman, Tina Hall, Martine Guyot-Bender, Larry Bender, Tom Wilson, April Oswald, Kevin Grant, Lisa Trivedi, Chris Georges, Sarah Goldstein, Bonnie Urciuoli, Patrick Reynolds, Damnhait McHugh, Masaaki Kamiya,

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Anne Lacsamana, Joyce Barry, Michelle Lemasurier, Renae Bowman, Carl Rubino, Barbara Gold, Hong Gang Jin, De Bao Xu, Steve Goldberg, Susan Goldberg, Katherine Terrell, Aishwarya Lakshmi, Austin Briggs, Bunny Serlin, and Mary Mackay. In addition, special gratitude goes to Edward Wheatley and Kirk Pillow for their professional advice and mentorship. Thanks are also due to my student Laura Oman who assisted with some of the preliminary research for chapter two under the auspices of an Emerson Foundation Collaborative Research grant during the summer of 2005. In addition to material support, the Stanford Humanities Center also provided a warm and stimulating intellectual environment where I spent a remarkable year working on this project. I am indebted for their collegiality, conversation, and friendship to David Palumbo-Liu, Gordon Chang, Johannes Fabian, Steven Justice, Wendy Larson, Carlo Caballero, Bob Royalty, Jennifer Roberts, Rob Polhemus, Carol Schloss, Paula Moya, Keith Baker, Jennifer Paley, David Holloway, Purnima Mankekar, Yoshiko Matsumoto, Bryan Wolf, Arnold Zwicky, Jehangir Malegam, Marcus Folch, Joann Kleinneiur, Maya Ma, Christen Smith, Blake Stevens, Roberta Strippoli, Miri Nakamura, and Steven Lee. The efforts of John Bender, Chiyuma Elliot, Nicole Coleman, Matthew Tiews, Najwa Salame, and Susan Sebbard, among others, made the Center an easy and wonderful place to be. While in the Bay Area, I also enjoyed and learned much from discussions with Colleen Lye, Sau-ling Wong, Ling-chi Wang, Dan O’Neill, Rob Wilson, Madeline Hsu, Jon Jang, Xiajun Lin, Soo-hwa Yuan, Diana Chiang, and Jaideep Singh. Particular thanks go to my brother, Spencer Yao, and Han Pham for their consistent hospitality in ways both large and small. Numerous other colleagues have provided extremely helpful feedback and suggestions at various points along the way. These include Jing Tsu, Wai Chee Dimock, Peter Nicholls, Sabina Knight, Dorothy Wang, Timothy Yu, Josephine Park, Joseph Jeon, Laura Chrisman, Stephen Sumida, Shirley Lim, Shu-mei Shih, Xiaomei Chen, Evelyn Hu-Dehart, K. Scott Wong, Yunte Huang, Ming Xie, Lisa Yun, Nick Kaldis, Rolland Murray, Jose Benki, Anand Pandian, Sanchita Balachandran, Andrea Riemenschnitter, Debra Madsen, Pheng Cheah, P. K. Leung, Prasenjit Duara, Helen Siu, Mae Ngai, Rebecca Walkowitz, Pericles Lewis, Susan Stanford Friedman, Mia Carter, Kurt Heinzelman, Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, Tom Garza, Keijiro Suga, Yoshiaki Koshikawa, Michael Coyle, Kara Rusch, and Bernard Dew. I am thankful to have had the opportunity to present portions of this study to audiences at various institutions, including Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Texas at Austin, Penn State University, Meiji University, Sussex University, Northwestern University, Binghamton University, Middlebury College, Williams College, and the University of Zürich.

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I am thankful to Chris Huie for permission to reprint the photograph of the poem carved into the wall of the Angel Island Immigration Station Detention building. Particular appreciation also goes to Shannon McLachlan and Brendan O’Neill at Oxford University Press for their interest and assistance in bringing this book to publication. For the intellectual camaraderie and friendship that they have so generously provided over the years, I want to acknowledge several people in particular: Timothy Billings, Christopher Bush, Haun Saussy, and Colleen Lye. In addition, I am especially grateful and indebted to Eric Hayot for his sustained engagement with my work, as well as for his editorial suggestions that helped to improve the both the conception and the organization of this book. All remaining misjudgments and faults are my sole responsibility. Each of these friends has served as a model for combining intellectual curiosity with an easy collegiality. I hope one day to be equal to the example that they have collectively set. I dedicate this book to my mother, Marjorie Yao, and to the memories of my grandmother, C. T. Yu, and father, Sin Ping Yao. My entire life has been shaped by the cadences of the accents they thankfully never lost. Through their tremendous efforts and sacrifices, they have opened doors for me that, in any other place or moment in history, would have almost certainly been closed. Finally, I would like to thank Kyoko Omori for all the love and patience that she has shown during the time I have written this book. It is because of her that I know first-hand the poetry that can come from feats of transpacific exchange. A portion of the introduction appeared as “Taxonomizing Hybridity” in Textual Practice 17:2 (2003); a version of chapter 1 appeared in Representations 99 (Summer 2007); a version of chapter two appeared in the volume, Sinographies: Writing China (Minnesota 2008); and a version of chapter 3 appeared in Lit: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 12:1 (2001). I am grateful to these journals and to the University of Minnesota Press for permission to reprint that material here.

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CONTENTS

Introduction: To Be (or Not to Be) the Poet: The Cultural Politics of Verse in Asian American Literature, 3 1. Toward a Prehistory of Asian American Verse: Pound, Cathay, and the Poetics of Chineseness, 39 2. Chinese/American Verse in Transnational Perspective: Racial Protest and the Poems of Angel Island, 63 Interchapter: From the Language of Race to the Poetics of Ethnicity: The Rise of Asian American Verse, 95 3. “A Voice from China”: Ha Jin and the Cultural Politics of Antisocialist Realism, 109 4. The Precision of Persimmons: Li-Young Lee, Ethnic Identity, and the Limits of Lyric Testimony, 143 5. “Are You Hate Speech or Are You a Lullaby?”: Marilyn Chin and the Politics of Form in Chinese/American Verse, 187 6. “The Owner of One Pock-Marked Tongue”: John Yau and the Logic of Ethnic Abstraction, 231 Conclusion: Chinese/American Verse in the Age of Postethnicity?, 265 Notes, 271 Bibliography, 305 Index, 319

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FOREIGN ACCENTS

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Introduction To Be (or Not to Be) the Poet: The Cultural Politics of Verse in Asian American Literature

I

The publication in 2002 of Maxine Hong Kingston’s William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University seemingly marked a turning point in the field of Asian American letters. It did so in part because the event suggested the possibility of a seismic shift in the established valuation of different expressive modes within that larger cultural terrain. For in this series of lectures, appearing under the title To Be the Poet, the acknowledged doyenne of Asian American literature gives formalized public announcement of her rather startling intention to write only poetry for the remainder of her career. Turning away from the genres through which she not only achieved her own canonical status but also did arguably the most of any single writer of Asian descent in the United States to make Asian American literature itself a widely recognized (and indeed recognizable) cultural category, Kingston opens her lecture/essay with a vision frankly astonishing for its display of ingenuous hope and longing anticipation: “I have almost finished my longbook. Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem. Poets are always happy. I want to be always happy”1 A bit later in her testimonial, Kingston elaborates upon her conception of what this “life of the Poet” entails: The Poet’s day will be moment upon moment of gladsomeness. Poets do whatever they like. They take off whenever they please—to the garden or the shops or the park for strolling or rollerblading. They dine with friends. They 3

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go dancing. They go to the library, and read a book that has nothing to do with research. They nap in the hammock, cook, have tea and cookies, invite people over, visit them, pick up the ringing telephone. The Muse will find you, and hand over poems. The writing down will be short, and the day long, hardly any of it spent actually writing. The poem comes unworked for. You just pick up the gold fountain pen or the glass pen with the spiral nib, dip it in ink, touch the fine linen laid paper, and out flows the poem.2

Whatever one ultimately makes of this idyllic picture of the poetic life that Kingston draws with such apparent enthusiasm and naïveté (a picture to which we will return shortly), the real import of her declaration lay in its potential at once to inspire and to sanction a new dedication to poetry within Asian American literature among both writers and readers alike. For the sheer magnitude of her reputation alone would seem to lend greater cultural moment to what might otherwise be taken (and subsequently dismissed) as merely an individual decision, one stemming, as Kingston herself suggests in her essay, from the personal trauma of the catastrophic loss of her home and her then-current manuscript in prose to the Oakland Hills fire of 1989.3 Events following in the wake of her declared preference for “the life of the Poet” seem to indicate that, if she did not directly authorize it, at the very least Kingston anticipated an upsurge in the visibility of verse within the domain of Asian American letters. Two years after the appearance of To Be the Poet, for example, the anthology Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, edited by Victoria Chang, ventured at once a generic and a generational realignment in the structure of values that has historically shaped both the reception and even conception of Asian American literature as a cultural field. Subsequently, in 2006, the volume of criticism, Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits, bolstered this incipient trend by featuring an entire section of four essays devoted to “Poetry.”4 That same year, Xiaojing Zhou published her The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry, the first book-length study of Asian American verse as a distinct cultural formation. And in the wake of this important milestone, Josephine Park’s Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (2008) and Timothy Yu’s Race and the AvantGarde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965 (2009) have each sought to delineate the logic of Asian American verse in relation to different strains comprising the (racially) dominant American poetic tradition, namely modernism and Language poetry, respectively. Within the arena of literary criticism especially, then, scholars have begun to take up the opportunity presented by Kingston’s public conversion to “the easiness of Poetry” to focus more systematic attention on the history, development,

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internal logic, and broader cultural meaning of verse by people of Asian descent in the United States. Foreign Accents seeks to accelerate this transformation of familiar tendencies within the domain of Asian American literary studies in particular through its own examination of verse by writers of Chinese heritage in the United States from the early twentieth century to the present. For until these very recent developments, Asian American literary studies has overwhelmingly privileged prose narrative in the analysis, historicization, theorization, and even critique of literary production by writers of Asian descent in the United States.5 Despite the value and even necessity of the attention that general readers and scholars alike have already and will undoubtedly continue to devote to narrative prose, however, such a narrow purview ignores the constitutive role that other literary forms and modes, most especially poetry, historically played in the very political and cultural struggles that gave rise to the Asian American movement itself, struggles that in turn helped to make possible the increased production, as well as the heightened visibility, of such narratives in the first place.6 Indeed, at least from the early part of the twentieth century onward, poetry has operated simultaneously in concert with and in contrast to fiction and memoir as a parallel, yet distinctive mode of response to the range of historical, material, and ideological conditions faced by people of Asian descent in the United States. Yet notwithstanding the recent studies mentioned above, poetry remains insufficiently historicized and undertheorized as a distinct mode of Asian American literary production. Equally significant, also due at least in part to the sustained dominance of English in the ongoing articulation, as well as even the very conceptualization of Asian American culture, critics have thus far largely overlooked the tremendous range of formal techniques developed and employed by different writers to register at the level of language itself the complex relationship among the various particular cultural and linguistic traditions that have informed literary production by Asian Americans. Ironically, perhaps, even the most trenchant critiques of Asian American critical practices from within the field by scholars such as Susan Koshy, Jinqi Ling, Viet Nguyen, and Lisa Lowe have been grounded in the analysis of prose narrative in English. In addition, the vastly disproportionate methodological skewing toward narrative in literary, cultural, and historical studies examining the dynamics and processes of Asian American racialization has led to a failure to address adequately the underlying conceptual logic by which the social and discursive construction of categories of racial and ethnic difference has operated, made its appeals, and repeatedly gained assent. Participating in the effort to rethink these established critical practices, Foreign Accents discusses works by a selective group of poets in and from

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the United States (all but one of specifically Chinese heritage), each of whom bears a distinctive relationship to the cultural and linguistic tradition he or she seeks to depict. More particularly, I analyze the range of rhetorical and formal strategies by which these writers have sought to represent or employ elements of Chinese culture and especially language in striving to articulate a cultural or ethnic subjectivity, including writings entirely in Chinese. Admittedly partial, this organization nevertheless presents several advantages as a strategy for charting the uneven terrain of “Asian American poetry.” In particular, it creates the possibility of adding a much-needed historical dimension to the uniformly contemporary emphasis of recent other studies, which have focused almost exclusively on poetic production since the establishment of “Asian American” as a cultural and identity category. Combining such analysis with relevant social contextualization, Foreign Accents thus delineates a historical poetics of Chinese/ American verse from the era of exclusion to the ascendancy of liberal multiculturalist ideology, including the recent emergence of a discourse on “post-ethnicity” in our contemporary moment.7 As an integral part of its interest in literary history, then, the present study tracks developments in poetry against changes in the dominant U.S. juridical and cultural approaches to constructing the notion of “Chineseness,” first by means of the category of race, and subsequently through that of ethnicity, efforts that themselves resulted in discursive formations advancing their own tropologies of Chinese culture and identity in contrast to hegemonic “American” ideological norms, thereby serving to justify various ongoing forms of discrimination. More than just the detached characterization of a specific “minority” or “cross-cultural” poetics, such an effort intervenes in several areas of concern within the wider field of Asian American studies. Most immediately, it contributes to the study of Asian American literature in particular by establishing a conceptual framework that has the capacity to distinguish between the aesthetic, critical, and even broader political logic and significance of works by writers as different from each other in their respective styles and strategies of ethnic poetic representation as the Angel Island poets, Ha Jin, Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, and John Yau. To clarify, I focus on writers operating in relation to a specifically Chinese cultural tradition and heritage neither in order to perpetuate a narrowly exclusivist conception of the category “Asian American,” nor to enact a return to an older form of normative criticism based upon a notion of “authentic” cultural knowledge. Rather, I do so based on the limits of my own experience and training, as well as, even more important, because of my conviction that comparativist analytical techniques and especially linguistic knowledge remain crucial to the further advancement of Asian American

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literary and cultural studies as a whole. By means of such grounded comparisons, Foreign Accents participates in the ongoing effort to map the manifold “transpacific” exchanges that underwrite the growth of “American” literature, a project to which, in addition to Park, scholars such as Yunte Huang, David Palumbo-Liu, Colleen Lye, Eric Hayot, and Christopher Bush have contributed over the last decade or so. Throughout, my focus will not be on authorial knowledge or lack thereof so much as on what any given work knows, or shows that it knows, as well as upon how it arranges that knowledge against an epistemological field of its own construction.8 Part of my interest in the poets considered here stems from the question of what it means to write in English today. It is, of course, the language that this book is written in, a fact that signals the nearly inescapable contradictions produced by the complex ties that bind together politics, identity, history, and desire. But it is also perhaps because I write in English that I feel a responsibility to consider what writing in English means, especially for those subjects of this study who, by virtue of migration, globalization, and other movements of people and ideas have a particularly historicized relationship to another major world language, namely Chinese. That mainland China today boasts the world’s largest number of English speakers should cast no doubt, however, on the relative importance of those two languages to the contemporary global economy, and to the ideologies of comprehensibility and universality that attend them. To put it plainly: English today is as close as the world comes to a global language. The remaining distance between that globalness and the possibility of universalism is a gap separating the material from the ideal. Nonetheless, the power of the Anglophone world, particularly the United States, exerts a strong pressure to slide imperceptibly from a (perhaps unconscious) recognition of the former (the planetary range of English’s comprehensibility and utility as a communicative medium) into to an unreflective assumption of the latter (which subtends a sense of English as a universally or ideally transparent mode of expression) and not just on those individual Americans who see no reason to learn a second language. To be sure, the potentially universal, or universalist, quality of language has long been a matter of particular interest to poets. They have never been the only ones, of course; and furthermore their own relationship to language has rarely been one of idealized clarity. Still, as I have suggested, Chinese American poets in particular who write in English today operate in a linguistic context that calls for a heightened sensitivity to the ways in which the dream of universal communicability—which not so long ago Europe fantasized through Chinese!—also abets theories of the end of history or the new world order that are absolutely coincident with American triumphalism and military power.

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Accordingly, in the analyses undertaken here, I pay particular attention to the degree to which certain kinds of obviously “foreign” material do and do not get incorporated into verse in English, and to the ways in which a poetics of representation and form articulates a theory of the relationship between experience, intention, and communicability. The Anglo-Saxon author of “The Seafarer” or even Chaucer may have been charting new expressive paths for a language that was, at those respective points in time, simply the local expression of a geographically limited community and its boundaries. But poets writing in English today must contend with the continuing legacy of the American power to represent the world, to the United States and to itself, as a function of Americanness, and in turn of English. To write poetry without acknowledging that fact, especially at the level of form, seems to me likely to constitute an egregious error of awareness and understanding, one with profound effects on the final meanings of the poems so produced. And to write poetry that announces and evinces the complex agons of bi- or multilingualism, and the limits of English as a universal language, will, in what follows, strike me as an interpretive and formal decision likely to help us better understand the complexity of contemporary global life, rather than a reification of its ideological underpinnings. In these ways, Foreign Accents seeks to map both a new methodology and an expanded textual arena for Asian American literary studies that can be used and further explored by scholars who possess knowledge of other traditions and different linguistic competencies. In doing so, it enacts an approach to “Asian American literature” that not only takes into account the substantive differences among the various distinct linguistic and cultural traditions underlying the very category of “Asian American,” but one that also seeks to explain how the specificities constituting those differences help to shape the parameters, dynamics, and significance of literary production by people of Asian descent in the United States under the evolving conditions of its production and reception. The sharpened focus of this approach also helps to situate Asian American literature more clearly and precisely in relation all at once to the dominant (Anglo-European) American literary tradition, to the various Asian national cultural and linguistic traditions out of which it in part arises, as well as to other domains of American minority expression such as African American and Latino/Latina literature. 9 For as a cultural field, the category of “Asian American” encompasses more axes of diversity than either “African American” or “Latino/Latina” culture, including nationality, ethnicity, and, perhaps most important of all, language. Slavery coerced a relative ethnic and linguistic homogeneity among African Americans and the terms of African American culture. Comparably, the

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extent and duration of colonial domination by Spain throughout Latin America has made Spanish into a cultural medium that overrides, or at least mitigates, a range of national distinctions and ethnic affiliations.10 By contrast, the particular historical circumstances surrounding Asian immigration into the United States have preserved the importance of original nationality, ethnicity, and language as mutually reinforcing factors differentiating among various strands within the fabric of Asian American “society” and their respective feats of cultural production. The ongoing significance of these differences within the broad range of Asian American culture underscores the fundamental limitations of existing views of the defining contours of minority discourse. Indeed, the very classification of “Asian American” reflects the enshrinement of “race” as the foundational category informing the conceptualization of minority culture in the United States.11 Consequently, a linguistically informed examination of both the diversity and the dynamics of the rhetorical and formal strategies by which different writers have sought to articulate in verse the terms of a specifically Chinese cultural or ethnic subjectivity makes it possible finally to improve upon the established model of “hybridity” that has served as the dominant theoretical framework for the study of Asian American literary and cultural production ever since Lisa Lowe first advanced the notion in 1991. As I shall discuss presently, the very generality of this model has constrained its utility to a broadly descriptive, rather than sharply analytical, function. This same limitation applies to the conception of “hybridity” developed by Homi Bhabha and deployed in the arena of postcolonial studies, another field in which scholars have sought to address the complexities and stakes of expressly cross-cultural and even multilingual literary and cultural production. Thus, Foreign Accents also contributes to ongoing theoretical debates about the logic and constitution of minority expression more generally. Lastly, a detailed consideration of Chinese/American poetry also provides the means for resolving a lingering paradox in the study of “race” by shedding new light on the history of Asian American racial formation in the United States. For insofar as existing approaches to the social and discursive construction of racial identity and difference have privileged narrative as both the effective means and the conceptual structure for the process of racialization, they have yet to provide a sufficiently compelling account of the particular conceptual operations by which such a logically incoherent, yet still instrumentally rational, notion has managed and continues to secure wide assent from a diverse array of audiences. In setting forth their own respective (counter)poetics of minority difference, the writers of Chinese descent examined here highlight the importance of expressly figural operations to the particular (il)logic by which dominant constructions of racial

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and ethnic difference in the United States have at once functioned and achieved their hegemony.

II. THE MODES OF ASIAN AMERICAN VERSE: RACIAL PROTEST, LYRIC TESTIMONY, AND ETHNIC ABSTRACTION

Any potential surprise generated by Kingston’s recent embrace of the genre notwithstanding, people of Asian descent in the United States have written poetry for quite some time, a small but nevertheless vital portion of it even produced long before her appearance on the American literary scene and the subsequent consolidation of “Asian American literature” as both a market niche and an academic field.12 Since then, Asian American verse has shown a slow, albeit steady, growth, both in terms of its sheer volume and in the scope and variety of its thematic concerns and formal strategies. Poetry, with its roots in oral expression, has widely operated in various historical and geographical contexts as a means for reaching and mobilizing people without access to the privileges of literacy. The general brevity and intensity of lyric form has made it especially apt as a means of reaching out to a mass audience of large-scale rallies and other live contexts that foreclose the possibility of sustained engagement with a narrative text. During the course of the Asian American movement in particular, poetry occupied an important place within the sphere of what was coming to be identified specifically as “Asian American culture,” as witnessed by the tradition of popular protest and performance poetry exemplified in the work of writers such as Carlos Bulosan, Lawson Fusao Inada, Genny Lim, and others, and that continues to play an important role in both the reception and conception of Asian American literary production. Furthermore, periodicals arising in close connection with the Asian American movement such as Gidra, Rodan, Amerasia Journal, and the New York–based publication Bridge all regularly featured poetry and even solicited reader submissions from the very inaugural issue of their respective runs.13 Historically, moreover, long before even the earliest beginnings of the Asian American movement, immigrants to the United States from different Asian countries frequently produced verse in their native languages as a means of response to the various expressions and structures of American nativist racism that they confronted, including the very regime of immigration itself. As the respective textual recovery and editorial efforts of Marlon Hom, Him Mark Lai, and others have shown in no uncertain terms, among Chinese Americans and immigrants in particular, both

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vernacular and classical verse forms served as important channels for the articulation of (minority) cultural identity.14 Yet for a variety of reasons, including a lack of the necessary linguistic skills, critics of Asian American literature have thus far given precious little attention to these early feats of poetic production by people of Asian descent in the United States. At the same time, however, poetry has, for a variety of reasons, also been cast as an elitist form in which minority poets are generally assumed to ape the tastes and imitate the practices of a dominant cultural tradition, especially those of the modernist poets who stand as the most proximately authoritative historical predecessors of writers now operating in English and even other languages, a matter that Josephine Park addresses in her discussion of the career of the Chinese American poet David Hsin-Fu Wand.15 Through the combined effects of the enduring influence of an activist ethos on Asian American studies in general, the recuperative critical practices that such an ethos has inspired, and the constraints of popular taste, then, poetry has been relegated to a curiously bifurcated space, situated simultaneously as the most demotic and the most arcane form of literary expression by Asian Americans. Such a bifurcation of the place of poetry within the developing cultural arena of Asian American literature provides one explanation for why it has not received the same degree of popular and critical attention as fictional(ized) narrative. Protest and orally based expression has seemed too straightforward or unnuanced, as well as transparent in its political motivation, to merit or require the interpretative intricacies of scholarly attention; and overtly “literary” poetic production by writers of Asian descent has often carried with it a reputation for abstruseness and pretension that causes audiences to resist or even to ignore poetry altogether. Nevertheless, over and above its sustained record of practical investments, verse has also long enjoyed a special, though sharply constrained and constraining, theoretical significance among Asian American writers, based at least in part on the established valuation of poetry as a privileged mode of personal expression that, among other things, comprises one aspect of the Romanticist legacy in English. Consider, for example, the crucial role that poetry plays in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, a work that has secured its own place in the established canon of Asian American literature. Significantly, the novel’s autobiographical protagonist, Carlos, first attains to the condition of literary productivity through the avenue of poetry, and the experience has a transformative effect on his conception of himself in relation both to his own psychological development and to his entry into an expressly hostile social and political economy, in short, on his identity as a minority subject:

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I did not stop to analyze why my thoughts and feelings found expression in poetry. It was enough that I was creating. I was like a little boy who had suddenly come upon a treasure of gold. I felt the words come to my mind effortlessly. I wrote ten or fifteen poems in one sitting. Then I knew surely that I had become a new man. I could fight the world now with my mind, not merely with my hands. My weapon could not be taken away from me any more. I had an even chance to survive the brutalities around me.

In thus narrativizing an event that was surely an important personal experience as well, Bulosan effectively adumbrates an informal theory of poetry. According to the terms of this decidedly asystematic theorization, poetry enjoys a privileged status as a means for both individual ethnic subject formation and agential, if antagonistic, social and political action. It signifies a state of mind that supersedes the limits of self-alienated analytical rationality. Hence, he “did not stop to analyze why [his] thoughts and feelings found expression in poetry.”16 Moreover, the experience of poetic creation thrusts “Carlos” into the discovery of cultural capital, thereby enabling him at least to perceive himself as an equal participant within the social market because he now (self-)possesses the means of resistance. Tellingly, the imbedded narrative of development (the transformation from “little boy” to “new man”) gets obviated by the power of verse. Resting upon a thoroughly referential view of language, this theory also presumes complete accord between subjective intention and linguistic signification. Basically realist in its stance toward language and the task of representation, Bulosan’s conception delineates one version of a “minority poetics”; and the epistemological assumptions shaping his views also underwrite the mode of what I call “racial protest” within the larger body of verse by Asian Americans. The first to emerge in the history of Asian American poetic production, this mode developed as a response initially to the harsh reality and then to the haunting legacy of formal racial exclusion. It finds early, paradigmatic expression, at least among writers of Chinese descent in the United States, in the classical Chinese poems inscribed into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station detention building between 1910 and 1940, as well as in the English-language, vernacular socialist anthems of H. T. Tsiang, which were published in a privately printed volume in 1929, Poems of the Chinese Revolution.17 Almost sixty years before Kingston’s conversion to verse in To Be the Poet, then, Bulosan attributes to poetry a unique significance as a mode of literary production. Interestingly, moreover, in each of their respective characterizations, both writers find poetry more amenable and easier to produce than narrative prose, ironically the main arena of their own achievements. Given such approbation by these luminaries, the lack of attention given to poetry

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by critics and general readers of Asian American literature alike seems all the stranger. No doubt, the reasons for this asymmetry between the status of fiction and poetry within the reception history of Asian American literature are manifold and have at least something to do with broader trends affecting literary culture in the United States on the whole; but just as surely, some of the reasons for its neglect also lay in the implicit assumptions about poetry in particular as a medium of ethnic expression and about language in general and its relation to the processes of cultural signification that shape the views of these canonical figures and thus underwrite the discursive field of Asian American literature in its current formation. For through the very terms they use to sing the praises of poetry, these writers sharply delimit its potential wider social or political significance by consigning it to an idealized space of natural, unlabored creativity and personal inspiration. Thus, for example, note the implications of the principal images Kingston employs as she first declares her desire for “the life of a Poet,” saying, “I won’t be a workhorse anymore; I’ll be a skylark.”18 The obvious allusion to Shelley here situates her conception of poetry and the poetic life firmly within a simplified, popular version of the Romantic tradition and its emphasis on emotion and individual expression as the source of poetic production. Such an appeal to a decidedly traditional Romanticist individualism sustains a belief in the notion of a cultural identity prior to language, one that finds its most “authentic” expression in the shape of personal lyric utterance. In doing so, Kingston promulgates a logic that underwrites our current ideological regime of “liberal multiculturalism” and its emphasis on individual “experience” as both the proper subject and the validating conceptual premise for “ethnic” literary production. As Rey Chow, David Palumbo-Liu, and others have convincingly argued, this regime has become the latest dominant means for managing the disruptive potential of minority “difference” in the United States, embodying a strategy of commoditization and containment as a replacement for the historical apparatuses of exclusion.19 Moreover, Kingston’s articulated preference for the poetic life rests upon a series of distinctions between the “gladsomeness” of poetry and the “work” of fiction that not only result in divergent phenomenologies of creation, but which also imply different conceptual spaces that bear their own political relation to dominant culture and its norms. So, in To Be the Poet, Kingston describes the labor of fiction in the following terms: I want days as a Poet. Not the workaday life of the prose-writer. I am still on the longbook job. The workhorse day is never over. You can make yourself write prose into the evening and into the night. Rise before dawn to elude the people you live with. Think, think, think, plot, plot, plot, write, write,

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write. Faithfully go at it. Apply yourself to a question, explain things, follow the characters wherever they go. Labor away and there will be yield—the longbook.20

By contrast, “one becomes a Poet by grace . . . beauty and truth [again Kingston’s popularized Romanticist predilections manifest in the preciousness of her diction] hap upon the Poet . . . all gift, no labor . . . the Muse flies over, and drops jewels in the Poet’s head and into open hands . . . I will go about lifting an empty basket to the air.” Within this imaginative economy of genres, poetry constitutes the (super)natural crystalline product of an idealized anterior world, whereas fiction entails the painstaking construction of an alternative space or reality, one that, because of the labor involved in the production of cultural value, implicitly attains to a higher degree of social respectability. The contrast between the strenuous exertions of a fiction writer and the easy receptivity enjoyed by the poet resembles the difference between laborer (“coolie”?) and medium. Put yet another way, the difference between fiction and poetry is the difference between work and visitation. For Kingston, then, to write poetry is to gain freedom from the accumulative process of rational labor (“Apply yourself to a question, explain things, follow the characters wherever they go”), and instead to await and subsequently receive the congealed benefits (“all gift, no labor”) of a transcendental economy of cultural production.21 Whatever effects it might ultimately have on the future of Asian American literary production and study, Kingston’s embrace of poetry and the poetic life as she conceives them in To Be the Poet at once reflects and reinforces an aesthetic ideology that has come to dominate both the production and reception of verse by Asian Americans in our current cultural milieu. And in her emphasis on the untainted authenticity of personal experience as both the source of poetry and the ultimate guarantor of its value, she gives voice to the theoretical terms that shape the existing hegemonic mode in the production of Asian American verse, namely what I call “lyric testimony.” In this mode, the minority subject typically relates events from a personalized history that exemplify racial/ethnic identity as a traumatic condition of either problematic difference from mainstream society or debilitating cultural loss that necessitates an act of recuperation, usually undertaken by means of the poem itself. And while it typically eschews a posture of explicit grievance, in affirming the primacy of individual experience lyric testimony nevertheless remains bound to a politics of redress that accepts, rather than interrogates or challenges, the basic terms informing established discriminatory constructions of ethnic identity as a problematic condition of cultural loss or difference from dominant norms.22 Growing out of the earlier period of racial protest verse and gaining ascendancy in the wake of the

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Asian American movement and the cultural possibilities opened up by Kingston’s own success since the 1970s under the rise of liberal multiculturalism, this general mode characterizes the work of the vast majority of contemporary Asian American poets such as Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, Cathy Song, Arthur Sze, and David Mura, among many others of various particular cultural heritages, who have all earned their reputations (largely through the social process of anthologization) primarily by adopting a testimonial pose or other comparable rhetorical stance and narrating the trauma of their own engagement with and estrangement from dominant mainstream society. Starting in roughly the late 1980s or so, the third and most recently emergent mode of verse production among writers of Asian descent in the United States began to take coherent shape, namely what I call “ethnic abstraction.” Expressly departing from the terms underwriting both racial protest and lyric testimony, writers operating in the mode of ethnic abstraction largely reject the notion of individual subjectivity giving voice to personal experience as the conceptual ground for poetic expression. At the same time, however, neither have they entirely abandoned the category of ethnic or minority identity as a matter for dedicated exploration through verse. Instead, they have cultivated various “experimental,” nonrepresentational strategies, thereby expanding both the formal and thematic reach of Asian American poetry, oftentimes in order to interrogate the very condition of ethnicity itself precisely as a social and discursive formation. Thus, in an essay from 1994 published in Amerasia Journal, John Yau gives one articulation of the general aesthetico-philosophical stance that underwrites the mode of ethnic abstraction: I do not believe in the lyric I—the single modulating voice that names itself and others in an easily consumable narrative—writing in a language that is transparent, a window overlooking a world we all have in common. It is not a world which includes me. It is a bubble handed down by others. It has modern written all over it. At the same time, I do not subscribe to the death of the author, the postmodern belief that there is no self writing. That injunction is the most recent way for the academy to silence the Other, keep the Other from speaking and writing. Je un autre, wrote Rimbaud. I am the Other—the chink, the lazy son, the surrealist, the uptight East Coast Banana, the poet who is too postmodern for the modernists and too modern for the postmodernists. You have your labels, your falsifying categories, but I have words. I—the I writes—will not be spoken for.23

This informal manifesto makes clear that ethnic abstraction has arisen in direct challenge to what is seen to be the exclusionary dimensions inscribed

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within both the tenets of the prevailing liberal multiculturalist order and the more recent post-identitarian attacks on those very assumptions. Accordingly, then, Yau sets forth an approach to verse as a radically oppositional cultural practice, one that carries with it a distinctively counter-dominant ethical and political charge: Writing as resistance. Writing as a way to reach imagination, that place outside order and reason, that place made of words. Writing as a way of staying open to the flux. Writing as an attempt to hear the Other, the Others. Writing as a form of attention and responsibility.24

As we shall see, in his own poetry Yau employs various techniques of estrangement and defamiliarization in pursuit of this aim, in many instances to such an extent as to render nearly impossible any representational or mimetic interpretation. In doing so, he illustrates some of the ways in which ethnic abstraction seeks to transform familiar protocols of “ethnic” signification in an effort to rethink existing conceptions of identity and difference, as well as to trouble the arrangements of power that have fostered their constitution and ongoing maintenance. Other poets of Asian descent in the United States writing in this broad vein include Tan Lin, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, and Myung Mi Kim, as well as the Chinese Canadian writers Roy Miki, Fred Wah, and Ho Hon Leung.25

III. THE LIMITS OF HYBRIDITY

The great disparities in conception, characteristic features, and even reception among the three major rhetorical modes within the larger body of verse by Asian Americans also entail a considerable diversity of formal techniques by which writers have sought to incorporate or represent elements from a range of cultural and linguistic traditions in their efforts to articulate the terms of an “ethnic” identity. And this combined variety in turn underscores the need to reconsider existing theoretical models for cultural (and especially literary) articulations of Asian American and other forms of “minority” difference. For some time now, the notion of “hybridity” has occupied a central role in discussions of “ethnic” or “minority” cultural production within both Asian American and postcolonial studies. Though employed somewhat differently and evoking distinct overtones within each respective context, the idea of “hybridity” has nevertheless served a similar pragmatic function in both cases, helping to solidify the establishment of Asian American and postcolonial studies as relatively new fields of

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academic inquiry. For all its considerable disciplinary utility and significance, however, the notion suffers in either of its current usages serious conceptual limitations as a model that adequately accounts for both the complexity and the diversity, as well as the generative possibilities, displayed throughout the range of expression in these fundamentally cross-cultural arenas. Fortunately, with its etymological and historical roots firmly grounded in a biologistic model of (re)productive interaction, “hybridity” contains the seeds of a more robust theoretical framework for considering works that explicitly draw from, cut across, or otherwise operate in the interstices between multiple cultural, and especially linguistic, traditions. Accordingly, then, I want in this section first to engage in a critique of established conceptions of “hybridity,” and subsequently to suggest a way to refine and extend the notion as an analytical and heuristic tool for understanding both the variety and the complexity of expressive dynamics at work within cross-cultural (and especially Chinese/American) texts by sketching out a taxonomy of various strategies or modes of “hybridization” that at once more clearly reflects and takes fuller advantage of the term’s inescapably biologistic conceptual infrastructure. Within Asian American studies, Lisa Lowe first introduced the idea of “hybridity” in her groundbreaking 1991 essay “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences.”26 As she employs it, the term serves to underscore the vast range of differences, including those of country of origin, generation, class, gender, and historical circumstances of immigration, among others, contained within the very designation “Asian American” as a cultural and discursive category. In this way, she emphasizes the “dynamic fluctuation and heterogeneity of Asian American culture.” Up to this point, to be sure, Lowe’s model of “cultural hybridity,” her conception of “Asian American culture as nomadic, unsettled, taking place in the travel between cultural sites and in the multivocality of heterogeneous and conflicting positions,” has fulfilled a number of important critical functions.27 Most immediately, perhaps, it has provided a means by which to challenge “mainstream” essentialist and static notions of Asian American cultural production that tend simplistically to conflate it with Asian culture generally, and in particular with such broad national or linguistic traditions as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, and so on. Indeed, such an achievement takes on all the more significance when one considers the extent to which these broad categories themselves contain profound rifts and internal divisions, including, for example, those of caste, dialect, or political ideology. In addition, Lowe’s work has helped to put Asian American studies as a whole on a closer par with other, more established fields of minority or ethnic studies, most notably African American and Latino studies, by offering an encompassing theoretical framework for the discussion

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of Asian American culture, one roughly comparable in scope to Henry Louis Gates’s idea of “signifying” or Gloria Anzaldua’s concept of “the borderlands.”28 While the idea of “hybridity” has served a similar function as one of the foundational concepts for postcolonial studies, its actual meaning within that context differs somewhat from Lowe’s usage of the term. Rather than historical circumstances, Homi Bhabha grounds his conception in a heady combination of deconstructionist and psychoanalytic theory brought to bear on the cognitive “logic” of disavowal that operates within colonial domination: Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities; it is the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the “pure” and original identity of authority). Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects. It displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination. It unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power but reimplicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power. For the colonial hybrid is the articulation of the ambivalent space where the rite of power is enacted on the site of desire, making its objects at once disciplinary and disseminatory—or in my mixed metaphor, a negative transparency.29

For Bhabha, in other words, “hybridity” designates a basic condition of excess inscribed within the very process of the exercise of colonial power generally, one that necessarily carries with it an innate capacity for “enabl[ing] a form of subversion, founded on the undecidability that turns the discursive conditions of domination into the grounds of intervention.” A fundamental contradiction imbedded within apparently univocal expressions of colonial authority such as discursive classifications and other constructed knowledges, “hybridity represents that ambivalent ‘turn’ of the discriminated subject into the terrifying, exorbitant object of paranoid classification—a disturbing questioning of the images and presences of authority. ” It “is a problematic 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—its rules of recognition.”30 Within their respective systems of thought, then, the notion of “hybridity” comprises for Lowe and Bhabha an attempt to theorize the political significance of “minority culture” as a potential site or mode of resistance against

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the dominating forces of capital and power, most especially, as Lowe puts it in a later formulation, in the capacity of cultural formations such as “literary” and other texts to “alter, shift, and mark possible resistances to those forces [of domination] by representing not only cultural difference, but the convergence of differences, thereby producing new spaces and alternative formations.”31 A reflection of their shared debt to deconstruction, in these formulations minority and postcolonial subjects gain their subversive power in coming to resemble linguistic signifiers through embodying a fundamental indeterminacy. Also clearly inspired to a significant degree by the writings of M. M. Bakhtin on the novel as a literary form, Lowe and Bhabha have each cleverly adapted aspects of that critic’s generically focused theory and transposed them onto markedly different sociocultural circumstances and phenomena. Lowe’s deployment of the term to characterize Asian American cultural production bears closest resemblance to Bakhtin’s notion of “organic” or “unconscious hybridity,” which he considers a quality or feature of individual languages themselves in their ongoing process of historical development: Unintentional, unconscious hybridization is one of the most important modes in the historical life and evolution of all languages. We may even say that language and languages change historically primarily by hybridization, by means of a mixing of various “languages” co-existing within the boundaries of a single dialect, a single national language, a single branch, a single group of different branches, in the historical as well as paleontological past of languages.32

By contrast, Bhabha’s conception owes something to the more directed idea of the “intentional hybrid,” or the self-conscious use of language by an author to undermine the seemingly univocal authority of a given utterance, though in his particular usage of the term Bhabha displaces subversive agency from the domain of authorial intention to the broader field of “discourse” generally. Bakhtin himself defines this form of “hybridity” in the following terms: What we are calling a hybrid construction is an utterance that belongs, by its grammatical [syntactic] and compositional markers, to a single speaker, but that actually contains mixed within it two utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two “languages,” two semantic and axiological belief systems. We repeat, there is no formal—compositional and syntactic—boundary between these utterances, styles, languages, belief systems; the division of voices and languages takes place within the limits of a single sentence. It frequently happens that even one and the same word will belong simultaneously to two

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languages, two belief systems that intersect in a hybrid construction—and consequently, the word has two contradictory meanings, two accents.33

In their efforts to develop a critical vocabulary for the fields of Asian American and postcolonial studies, respectively, then, Lowe and Bhabha have built upon a solidly established theoretical foundation. But in adapting Bakhtin’s ideas about “hybridity” to their own domains of concern, they have each taken elements from a theory premised specifically on a conception of the novel as a particular literary form, one that derives its subversive potential, moreover, largely under authorial control, and applied these ideas in an overly generalized fashion to entire fields of cultural production defined primarily along historical and/or social lines. In doing so, they stretch the term beyond the limits of its original analytical capacity. Hence, despite their considerable renown and even influence, both Lowe’s and Bhabha’s approaches to “hybridity” ultimately simplify more than they reveal about the dynamic complexities exhibited throughout a variety of “minority” cultural expressions. Whereas Bakhtin’s idea of “hybridity” enables subtler analyses of monolingual or seemingly univocal novelistic texts, Lowe’s conception simply amounts to an acknowledgment of the expressly multiple linguistic and cultural determinants for Asian American cultural productions, as well as the uneven material circumstances giving rise to them.34 Comparably, Bhabha merely names an ostensibly intrinsic quality of colonial discourse as such, apparently irrespective of any differences in language, explicit statement, or even the conditions of genesis.35 Accordingly, then, the notion of “hybridity” as it has been developed and applied in Asian American and postcolonial studies really only identifies in the broadest terms a general condition of “ethnic” or “colonial” culture. In their very breadth, the established usages of the term elide important differences, both at the level of technique and that of any potential political significance, between the vast range of possible strategies for joining together and negotiating those various cultural resources that inform, as well as animate, “minority” expression. Consequently, the model of “hybridity” in either of its recently articulated versions serves more of a descriptive than a sharply analytic function. This limitation becomes especially apparent when one recalls the various controversies that have arisen over the broader social and political meaning of works by such renowned Asian American and postcolonial writers as Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Salman Rushdie. Even more telling, perhaps, the established conceptions of “hybridity” entirely lack the analytical capacity to distinguish between, let alone assess the political significance of, formal differences between texts within a field of cultural production such as Asian American verse, where matters of stylistic presentation carry

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at least as much signifying weight as the actual subject or theme of representation. The remarkable variety of “transpacific” combinatory aesthetic strategies and domains of cultural reference displayed in Asian American literary works, and especially poetry, demands a more subtly nuanced critical vocabulary to address them adequately. For Asian American texts, merely noting the presence of multiple cultural elements or languages and declaring them “hybrid” (and thus by association through synonymy with the theories of Bakhtin, intimating that they necessarily possess subversive qualities) falls far short. Rather, in order to address more fully the political and/or social meaning of such works, we must examine by what strategies and to what ends these different cultural strands and languages are brought together to represent Asian American ethnic identity or experience. Toward this effort, a closer consideration of both the biologistic conceptual foundations and the attendant technical implications of the notion of “hybridity” can point the way to delineating a more refined “taxonomy” of expressive or combinatory strategies that enable substantive distinctions to be made between the formal, as well as larger political, significance of differences among specific approaches to ethnic representation with the sphere of Asian American cultural, and especially poetic, production.

IV. TAXONOMIZING HYBRIDITY

As Robert J. C. Young has usefully pointed out, the English word hybrid stems from the Latin term hybrida, meaning “the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar,”36 or more generally according to another source, an “animal whose parents belong to different varieties or to different species.”37 Hence the word also meant a “person whose parents belong to different ethnic groups, probably of non Indo-European origin. ”38 Going back even farther, a commonly held etymology relates the term hybrid to the Greek word ηυβρισ, or the quality of overweening pride or arrogance most closely associated with the heroes of classical tragedy. More specifically, ηυβρισ implies going beyond one’s proper station, as in presuming to the status of a god or committing rape.39 Based on its historical development, then, the term hybridity carries with it a sense of sexual, and implicitly violent, transgression of “natural” categories that produces a new entity with a complex and multiply determined lineage. Hence the notion entails a necessarily biologistic conception of (re)productive interaction between categorically separated or distinct “types.” This inherent biologism finds its clearest expression, moreover, in the strictest current botanical sense of “hybridity,” which designates the union of genetic material from parents of two different

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genotypes that results in the simultaneous expression of traits from both within a single organism.40 Transposing this idea of generative fusion to the domain of culture implies mutually constitutive and interactive signification between different cultures and traditions. Needless to say, perhaps, all texts within the diverse and evolving field of Asian American literature by no means attain uniformly, or even consistently, to this seamless cross-cultural expressivity, either as entire works or at different individual moments. Rather, Asian American writers have employed, or invented, a wide array of techniques and strategies for deploying elements from different cultural and linguistic traditions, each with its own particular set of operative parameters, as well as broader critical and even social implications. In order both to account for and to enable finer assessment of this formal diversity within Asian American literary expression, I propose a new “taxonomy” of hybridization strategies that at once explicitly acknowledges and, more important, builds upon the ineluctably biologistic foundations of the concept of “hybridity.” Differentiating among various techniques for combining or bringing together separate cultural traditions and/or their respective linguistic systems, this taxonomy includes the following categories: “cross-fertilization,” “mimicry,” “graft ing,” “transplantation,” and “mutation.” Among these different techniques, “cross-fertilization” represents a particularly significant strategy because in these instances new possibilities of meaning arise from the interaction between different cultures. Consider, for example, Marilyn Chin’s lyric “First Lessons,” a poem in four sections, “(dedicated to the character 好 or ‘goodness’). ”41 Operating under the general terms of lyric testimony, this poem relates the autobiographical speaker’s bicultural difficulties as a child forced both to suffer physical abuse at the hands of dominant white society because of her cultural difference and to actively maintain that difference through learning the language of her Chinese heritage. Section 2 of the poem reads: This is how I remember goodness. A woman whose lipstick smells of lilac leans over a child. She says, “Have you been good?” The child, kneels like a supplicant, looks up, whispers, “always.”42

In this passage the poet dissects the Chinese character for “goodness,” hao (好), into its component radical parts and employs these as a conceptual impetus for the images of the section. According to the Han dynasty scholar Xu Shen (訏慎) in his treatise on the Chinese written language, the Shuowen Jiezi (說文解字), the character hao (好) derives from putting

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together the radicals for “woman” (女) and “child” (子) to represent the abstract concept of “goodness.” Xu further identifies hao (好) as a “huiyi” (會意), or “joined meanings” character, “huiyi” being one of the traditional six principles of character formation in Chinese, also commonly referred to in the West as “ideograms. ”43 In his own highly controversial translations of Confucian works, Ezra Pound proceeded from the mistaken assumption, derived from the writings of Ernest Fenollosa, that all Chinese characters operate according to the “huiyi” or “joined meanings” principle, or in other words as “ideograms,” when in fact only a small fraction (less than 3 percent of the modern-day lexicon) was actually formed in this manner.44 Consequently, his renderings have undergone frequent criticism for their idiosyncratic departures from the accepted lexical equivalents for various key terms. Nevertheless, despite their demonstrable “inaccuracies,” Pound’s versions of Confucian texts offer powerful illustration of a generative exchange between Chinese and English. Based on this stanza alone, it remains uncertain whether Chin herself actually understands the etymology of the character hao (好) and the complex history and operation of written Chinese. Even so, the method she employs to arrive at the images in this section remains potentially applicable by others. Whether based on conventional linguistic understanding of the language or not, at this moment in the lyric Chinese shapes the poetic articulation of English, thereby constituting an instance of generative cultural interaction. In contrast to the factual accuracy underlying these instances of “crossfertilization,” “mimicry” entails the mistaken apprehension or deployment of culturally specific information in a cross-cultural context. Examples of such “mimicry” include Amy Tan’s perhaps now-famous solecism in The Kitchen God’s Wife of translating the Chinese term “tang jie” (堂姊) inaccurately as “sugar sister,”45 a matter that Sau-ling Wong has thoroughly discussed in her impressive essay “‘Sugar Sisterhood’: Situating the Amy Tan Phenomenon. ”46 Comparably, in The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston confuses two characters with a similar sound, but different tones, and mistakenly renders a Chinese term for “frog” as “tianji” (天雞), or “heavenly chicken,”47 when in fact the actual words are “tianji” (田雞), or “field chicken.” I raise these concerns of semantically accurate translation not in order to resurrect the problematic issue of “authenticity” that has for so long plagued Asian American literary debates, but rather in an effort to establish general criteria by which to assess the broader significance of particular strategies of ethnic cultural representation.48 For although Chinese and English do come into some form of explicit contact in these imaginative constructions, they nevertheless fail to achieve a genuinely productive exchange between cultures because they neither convey culturally accurate information nor do they generate new possibilities of expression in one language by building

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creatively upon the signifying capacities of another. Instead, they merely simulate specific cultural information without revealing it as a simulation. The issue here goes well beyond simply the moral question of whether different writers can or should engage in this sort of literary representation. Clearly they have and will no doubt continue to do so. Rather, the matter at stake concerns the larger critical and political implications of certain types of cultural depiction. For although these examples from the work of Tan and Kingston obviously constitute a form of expressly Asian American cultural production, the fact that they rest on the authority of an individual writer’s idiosyncratic (mis)perception makes them deeply troubling as demonstrations of a strategy of ethnic cultural production because they facilitate the establishment of a cult of personality as the conceptual foundation for the reception, as well as the assessment, of minority expression, something at once compounded and underscored by their wide popularity among audiences without the ability to assess that authority for themselves due their own lack of knowledge. The third type of Asian American cultural production that I want to delineate here, “grafting,” represents probably the most common approach to the challenge of combining elements from different traditions in order to establish the terms of an ethnic culture or identity. Roughly related in concept to the first level of “surface features of style” in Shirley Lim’s scheme for an “ethnopoetics,”49 this category involves the simple deployment of images, customs, or ideas clearly identifiable with a given Asian culture in association or origin, but without fundamentally adding to the signifying capacity of the dominant medium of the work. Where Lim’s “ethnopoetics” attempts to lay out the conditions necessary for the accurate interpretation of ethnic works, however, the categories I delineate here concern the significance of different strategies of production. For the case of “grafting,” this includes the casual, or even reverent, invocation of such details as jade, the Moon Festival, tofu, mahjongg, calligraphy, and even historico-cultural figures like Confucius, Li Po, or even Chairman Mao. In their use, however, these elements contribute little or nothing of their meaning in the original culture to the formal articulation of the new, cross-cultural text. Instead, they function merely as exotic decoration and simple markers of ethnic difference. In aesthetic and critical terms, “grafting” fails to match the transformative potential of either “cross-fertilization” or “mimicry” as a strategy for synthesizing different cultural traditions because it falls short of actually challenging or expanding the established norms of signification in a given expressive medium or cultural system, which probably helps to explain its enormous popularity among writers and readers alike of Asian American literature. Moreover, this relative conservatism in terms of redefining entrenched protocols for generating meaning arguably compromises its broader political possibilities as a strategy of cultural production.

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A fourth approach to combining elements from different cultural traditions I identify as “transplantation.” Perhaps the most obvious example of this strategy would be that of “code-switching,” or the use of different languages in their original form without any concessions to potential incomprehensibility such as internal glosses or translations. As I shall discuss at greater length in chapter 3, another form of “transplantation” might be seen in the early work of Ha Jin, whose first book of poems, Between Silences (1990), carries the rather conspicuously evocative subtitle “A Voice from China.” In this volume Jin writes English in an apparently unselfconscious way to “present some experience of the 60s and 70s in China,”50 giving various monologues and meditations by various characters or personae about the Cultural Revolution. Whether English suffices to represent a specifically named “Chinese” experience never explicitly arises as an issue, but the work as a whole insistently raises the implicit question of linguistic commensurability, since few of the speakers are identified as capable of themselves employing the language used by the poet. Take for example the bitterly ironic poem “My Knowledge of the Russian Language,” in which a former (or current) Chinese soldier loses face to a woman he tries to seduce. Having claimed to know “a little Russian,” the speaker suffers embarrassment upon seeing the woman’s enthusiasm and hearing the torrent of “Russian words” that she lets forth in response to his overture. The soldier’s dejected reaction concludes the poem: I could not answer you in Russian. You must have thought I was a fake, for you released my hand, lowered your eyes, and let silence prove my guilt. But I do know a little Russian. The first sentence I learned was: “Put Down Your Arms!” The last sentence I could shout was: “Hands Up! Follow me!”51

Needless to say, perhaps, Jin’s real interest here lies in exposing the personal cost to different individuals of the larger tensions between the Soviet Union and China as geopolitical entities. But the fact that a relatively uneducated Chinese solider reveals his ignorance of Russian in perfectly idiomatic English, a language for which there is no internal evidence that he can actually speak, adds yet another layer of irony to this poem. Taken at face value, however, Jin’s work attempts to “transplant” a specifically “Chinese” set of experiences and historical events into a culturally

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distinct medium of linguistic representation. In doing so, it not only arguably constitutes a form of cross-cultural literary production but it also suggests the need to expand the definition of the category of “Asian American” beyond the parameters of national citizenship. Still, in formal and conceptual terms, Jin’s early work presents fewer challenges to the dominant conventions of poetic expression in English than either Chin’s multilingual verse, or even Pound’s before her. Hence, the category of “transplantation” provides a way to address the formal dimensions of such expressly cross-cultural work as that of Chin and Jin. By contrast, the more established notions of the “transnational” and the “diasporic” identify historical, geographical, and political conditions of authorship, rather than illuminating the internal, expressive logic of individual texts themselves. Finally, work by Asian American writers operating within the mode of ethnic abstraction further demonstrates the importance of establishing a robust taxonomy that differentiates between various strategies or techniques of ethnic cultural production. For the broadly experimental, often surrealist writing in this vein defies easy categorization under any of the rubrics I have laid out thus far. Thus, for example, in John Yau’s brief poem “Shanghai Shenanigans,” the Chinese city mentioned in the title serves no discernible material or historical function within the body of the poem itself, operating neither as a concrete physical setting nor as a direct referential impetus for the chain of surrealistic images: The moon empties its cigarette over a row of clouds whose windowsills tremble in the breeze The breeze pushed my boat through a series of telephone conversations started by perfume Perfume splashed over the words of a nomad who thought it was better to starve than to laugh To laugh at the administration’s most recent mishap will make the guests stay until the party Until the party is bundled in chatter I will count the pearls lingering around your neck52

While the invocation of such things as a “cigarette,” a “boat,” “perfume,” the “administration,” and a “party” may well arise from and successfully conjure exotic visions of life in a colonized, international metropolis during the 1920s, the poem craftily evades definitive placement in either time or space. Instead of identifying an actual place or physical location, then, the “Shanghai” in the

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title seems primarily to designate a sequence of sounds matching that in the term shenanigans, and together these words serve as an aural emblem for the sequential logic of association that governs the progression of couplets in the poem. Thus, rather than an instance of “grafting,” this work employs a Chinese name (or at least its Anglicization) for sonic, rather than clearly identificatory, purposes. Even this brief example from Yau’s sizable body of work underscores the need to establish a category of hybridization, one termed mutation, that identifies techniques of cross-cultural production that resemble, but depart in conceptually distinguishable ways from, established methods and strategies. In terms of its broader political significance, “mutation” represents a radically oppositional type of cross-cultural production because it necessarily upsets the familiar relationships and dynamics of exchange between different traditions and domains of reference informing “minority” or “ethnic” expression. As this final category of “mutation” hopefully suggests, the taxonomy of hybridization strategies I have set forth here remains open to further refinement and even extension. Nevertheless, it offers both greater heuristic and sharper analytical utility than existing models of “ethnic” or “minority” cross-cultural production. Rather than a single, all-encompassing term, such as “hybridity,” that describes an entire, and in most cases still-evolving tradition, the categories I have proposed enable us to differentiate among various writers (and other cultural producers) and the range of compositional strategies they employ, as well as to consider the broader social or political implications of those strategies. Building positively upon the biologism inherent in the very notion of “hybridity,” each type or mode of hybridization I have laid out here identifies different degrees of synthesis or interaction between various traditions and expressive resources, based on the assessment of concerns carrying wider purchase than those of authorial intent, personal experience and knowledge, or individual ethnic background. Perhaps its most significant limitation, the model I have set forth here takes linguistic expression as paradigmatic for cultural production generally. This assumption features the advantage of making it possible to distinguish clearly among the provenance of various respective cultural forms and references. After all, relatively speaking, languages and their attendant verbal and written conventions differ from one another in readily identifiable ways. Moreover, despite internal divisions and heterogeneities, cultural and linguistic rubrics such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Indian, and so forth still maintain a relational coherence when employed in contrast to such equally expansive and generalizing categories as “American” or “the West.” Accordingly, then, it seems both conceptually viable and practically

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useful to continue observing such broad, admittedly ontologically problematic, distinctions when speaking of certain forms of cultural production, most especially Asian American verse.

V. POETICS AND RACIALIZATION

Its limitations notwithstanding, the biologism underwriting the formal taxonomy set forth in the previous section also illuminates a relation between the tradition of verse by writers of Chinese descent in the United States and another historical discourse for articulating Asian American “difference,” namely that of “race.” For, if Chinese American poets in particular can be understood as having variously striven to establish their own “(counter)poetics” of difference in response and challenge to existing dominant constructions of Chinese racial and ethnic identity from the early twentieth century to the present, then their efforts reflexively indicate the poetic or figural conceptual foundations of those very same dominant constructions. And in doing so, they point to the utility of “poetics” itself as a system of analysis for clarifying the particular (il)logic by which prevailing ideologies of “difference” in the United States have at once operated and achieved their influence. Within the growing body of scholarship on Asian Americans and Asians in the United States, historians and literary and cultural critics have traced the origins and dissemination of numerous discriminatory constructions of Chinese identity, from the racialized figure of the coolie and the image of the “Yellow Peril” in the latter part of the nineteenth century and beyond, to the ethnic stereotype of the model minority in the late twentieth.53 Following a trend that has and continues to shape the humanities more generally, practically all of these accounts focus on narrative as the primary vehicle through which these constructions have attained their influence and currency. In doing so, they have virtually without exception taken theoretical inspiration from the work of sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant, whose concept of “racial formation” offers a model for understanding “race” precisely as a social construction. Yet for all their insights and richness of detail, as a result of the privileging of narrative as both the effective means and the conceptual structure for racial formation, within these accounts certain crucial aspects of the process of racialization have remained distinctly under-theorized. To make such an assertion is by no means to dispute either the power or the pervasiveness of narrative in the dissemination of racial ideology, but rather to focus more closely on the conceptual underpinnings of that power.

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Narrative arguably succeeds when the linearity of its basic structure manages to imply some kind of causal relationship among the elements it addresses: for example, because Chinese people look and act differently from others (in particular, “whites”), then they therefore must be fundamentally different in kind. Categorical difference becomes the explanation for differences in behavior, appearance, and culture, and narrative-based analyses of the discursive construction of “race” have demonstrated both the pervasiveness and flexibility of this strategy. But because “race” is not causally tied to these differences, as the array of recent philosophical and other critiques have shown, narrative only identifies the mechanism of systematization for the idea of “race,” not the underlying conceptual (il)logic by which it operates and has repeatedly gained assent. Consequently, Omi and Winant’s notion of “racial formation” establishes a powerful framework for recognizing the historicity of “race,” but it lacks the capacity to illuminate the particular conceptual dynamics that have enabled its repeated articulation and modification over time within U.S. politico-cultural discourse. In their own historical and cultural analyses of different discriminatory constructions of Chinese identity, recent scholars have inherited this limitation as part of the “racial formation” framework. So, for example, in his wonderfully nuanced history of Chinese racial formation through the discourse of public health in San Francisco from the late nineteenth-century to the mid-twentieth, Nayan Shah discusses how the vivid and visceral narration of the midnight journey through Chinatown became one of the standard forms of knowledge used in both medical and popular accounts [which were also narratives] to establish the truth of Chinatown as the preeminent site of vice, immorality, degradation, crime, and disease.

He also notes that health officials readily conflated the physical condition of Chinatown with the characteristics of Chinese people. They depicted Chinese immigrants as a filthy and diseased “race” who incubated such incurable afflictions as smallpox, syphilis, and bubonic plague and infected white Americans.54

As compelling and insightful as it is, however, Shah’s discussion raises the question of what particular conceptual operations made such a conflation possible. Bringing the analytical capacity of poetics to bear on the situation helps to clarify the dynamics that underwrite this otherwise mysterious operation in the process of Chinese racial formation in the United States. For insofar as it asserts an identity or equivalence between the characteristics

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of Chinese people as a “race” and the physical condition of their contiguous living environment in Chinatown, this conflation functions through the conceptual operation of metonymy. The pervasiveness of this strategy across several different historical and cultural contexts, most especially in the numerous “environmental” arguments about the origins and compatibility of different “races,” attests to the utility of metonymy as a conceptual and rhetorical device within the larger discursive process of racialization. Comparably, the emphasis on germs and plague as features defining Chinese racial identity rests upon the dynamics of synecdoche. Indeed, to the extent that it seeks to define and situate in relation to one another whole identities precisely through the judicious selection of representative constituent parts, the very act of classification itself arguably rests upon the conceptual operation of synecdoche. This sort of figural analysis allows for acknowledging the material reality of the basis for stereotypes, but it helps to explain the specific conceptual process by which certain aspects of that reality come to stand in for or signify the entirety of racial identity. Not surprisingly, perhaps, literary and cultural critics have by and large been more attentive to the figural or poetic dimensions of Chinese racialization in the United States; and the best of these studies have succeeded in tracing the various cultural and ideological functions of different constructions of Chinese racial identity. Yet even here, the focus has been on the effects and functionality of racialization, rather than upon its enabling conceptual dynamics. So, for example, in America’s Asia Colleen Lye has shown how the figure of the “Asiatic” constituted “a paradoxical racial form”55 that functioned to mediate the ideological and cultural challenges brought on by the rise of monopoly capitalism and U.S. expansion into the Pacific. In doing so, she nuances the generality of Omi and Winant’s framework by invoking Etienne Balibar’s more precise concept of social “form” as a “privileged terrain of the management of social struggle, ”56 thereby establishing a way to explain the historical shift from the “yellow peril” to the “model minority” in the racial construction of “Asiatics” and Asian Americans in general, most especially the Chinese. But whereas her account and others emphasize the ideological functionality of “Asiatic racial form,” my own interest here lies in developing a way to understand the conceptual operations by which that form made its appeal. By considering poetics not just as a set of (classically defined) literary and rhetorical strategies of persuasion, but rather more significantly as identifying different forms of reasoning that circumvent the constraints of logic, we can perhaps begin to shed new analytical light on the conceptual dynamics informing the process of racialization. Such a perspective helps to make legible the particular, constitutive significance, and possibly even the inevitability, of those moments in the historical construction of Chinese

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racial identity in the United States when the discourse seems to crack under the pressure of its own claims toward logical systematicity, and in order to solidify the “reality” of “race” as a category of human difference, it openly violates the tenets of what Edward Said has characterized as the “radical realism” of Orientalism57 by resorting to expressly irrational claims. So, for example, in the enormously popular work Chinese Characteristics, the American missionary Arthur Smith identified “The Absence of Nerves” as one of the defining traits of the Chinese.58 Contrasting the stoic Oriental to the “nervous” modern Anglo-Saxon, he enumerates various ways in which the Chinese enjoy “freedom from the tyranny of nerves.” Among various qualities, he cites their ability to remain in one position for extended periods of time, to sleep even in the most inhospitable and noisy conditions, and “to bear without flinching a degree of pain from which the stoutest of us [Anglo-Saxons] would shrink in terror. ”59 But over and above these visibly behavioral expressions of Chinese identity, Smith repeatedly finds it necessary to consolidate the notion of specifically racial difference through expressly poetic forms of reasoning that simply disregard the constraints of logic. Thus the figure of hysteron proteron and its reversal of cause and effect underwrite his claims about the paradoxically invisible, yet obvious distinctiveness of Chinese neural anatomy: It is not very common to dissect dead Chinese, though it has doubtless been done, but we do not hear of any reason for supposing that the nervous anatomy of the “dark-haired race” differs in any essential respect from that of the Caucasian. But though the nerves of a Chinese as compared with those of the Occidental may be, as the geometricians say, “similar and similarly situated,” nothing is plainer than that they are nerves of a very different sort from those with which we are familiar.60

In addition, elaborating the process of racialization by means of poetics has the added benefit of establishing strong points of contact with other fields of inquiry that have also addressed the historical construction of “race” in the articulation of human difference, most notably postcolonial studies, wherein Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak have each at least implicitly recognized the utility of the terminology of poetics in their respective theories of colonial discourse. Consider, for example, Bhabha’s well-known discussion of the logic of stereotype in his essay “The Other Question,” which opens in the following manner: Fixity, as the sign of cultural/historical/racial difference in the discourse of colonialism, is a paradoxical mode of representation. . . . Likewise, the

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stereotype, which is its major discursive strategy, is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always “in place,” already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated . . . as if the essential duplicity of the Asiatic or the bestial sexual license of the African that needs no proof, can never really, in discourse, be proved. . . . For it is the force of ambivalence that gives the stereotype its currency: ensures its repeatability in changing historical and discursive conjunctures; informs its strategies of individuation and marginalization; produces that effect of probabilistic truth and predictability which, for the stereotype, must always be in excess of what can be empirically proved or logically construed.61

Here Bhabha explicitly invokes psychoanalysis as a theoretical frame to try and illuminate the curious (il)logic of the notion of “fixity” as a “paradoxical mode of representation” within colonial discourse, as well as to explain the productive “ambivalence” of its “major discursive strategy,” the stereotype, that in his view “must always” exceed the limits of empirical proof and logical argumentation. Yet the language of paradox, logical excess, and ambivalence that Bhabha employs also bears a striking affinity with some of the foundational concepts informing the New Criticism—paradox, logical contradiction, and ambivalence’s close lexical neighbor, ambiguity—therewith suggesting that a conceptual armature of poetics lies not too far below the surface. This apparent affinity finds a degree of validation when, in seeking to justify his psychoanalytic “reading of the stereotype in terms of fetishism,” Bhabha in turn characterizes the fetish through the terminology of classical poetics: “Within discourse, the fetish represents the simultaneous play between metaphor as substitution (masking absence and difference) and metonymy (which contiguously registers the perceived lack).62 Within Spivak’s work, the terminology of (classical) poetics plays an even more explicit and pivotal role in her analysis not just of colonial discourse and its construction of racial difference in the form of the “native informant” or “Aboriginal” but also of the formation of the modern (i.e., since Kant) “European ethico-political subject” that underwrites that discourse. Thus, in deconstructing Kant’s discussion of the sublime as the ground for moral judgment, Spivak writes: To claim that the moral impulse in us is cognitively grounded is, then, to fail to recognize that its origin is a supplement. And uncritically to name nature sublime is to fail to recognize the philosophical impropriety of the denomination. Yet these cognitive failures are a part of developed culture and can even have a functional role in them. As Kant will argue later, they may be “wholesome illusions” (CJ 313). Only the cultured are susceptible to these particular errors and to their correction. The metalepsis that substitutes

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respect for the object for respect for humanity (in the subject) is a normative catachresis, a “wholesome” abuse of a figurative move.63

Most important for my concerns here is the simple fact that Spivak invokes the language of poetics in order to characterize the means by which Kant establishes the notion of the sublime in nature as the guarantor of human moral judgment, despite the “philosophical impropriety of the denomination.” In her analysis, catachresis—which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as the “improper use of words; application of a term to a thing which it does not properly denote; abuse or perversion of a trope or metaphor”64—designates the (poetic) conceptual operation that enables a logically incoherent idea to achieve the status of a foundational category, a kind of cognitive fiat based on the intensification or deformation of an existing figural procedure. Accordingly, then, the concept of catachresis functions as a kind of “master trope” within the system of Spivak’s thought, and she repeatedly deploys the term in critiquing a range of logically contradictory or paradoxical operations that nevertheless comprise the ground for different discursive formations. Thus, she writes of the very idea of an “original Indian nation”: The catachresis involved in “original Indian nation” is not just that there is no one “tribe” including all aboriginals resident in what is now “India.” It is also that the concept “India” is itself not “Indian,” and further not identical with the concept of Bhārata, just as “nation” and jāti have different histories. Furthermore, the sentiment of an entire nation as place of origin is not a statement within aboriginal discursive formations, where locality is of much greater importance.

And she goes on to generalize, “Even the most hegemonic identity would show itself to be catachrestic under close scrutiny.”65 The sheer breadth of her claim here clearly reflects Spivak’s commitment to the practice and critical posture of deconstruction. And precisely in doing so, it not only attests to the specific utility of poetics as a system for analyzing the dynamics of expressly nonlogical conceptual operations but it also indicates the potential critical significance of the oft-remarked microoperational similarity between New Critical and deconstructive modes of reading. For the great strength of the New Criticism lay in its explicit attention to the formal expression and underpinning of discursive paradox, logical contradiction, and ambiguity; and by decoupling these concerns from the limited goal of simply demonstrating the aesthetic unity (or lack thereof) of a given verbal artifact, we might recuperate some of the capacities of this critical tradition and put them to use in addressing the “poetics” of racialization and

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ethnicization in the United States. From this perspective, we can perhaps understand the apparent contradiction between the simultaneous incoherence and effectivity of American racial categories in general as the logically inevitable result of the catachresis enacted by the 1790 Naturalization Act, which defined eligibility for naturalized citizenship in the United States according to the terms “free white person.” For it was this act that bestowed upon the logically incoherent notion of “whiteness” a significance with expressly political consequences, which in turn necessitated the various cultural, juridical, and other efforts by different groups both to challenge and to defend a limited definition of “whiteness,” as well as to articulate the terms of other racial categories, through decidedly nonlogical conceptual operations that together comprise so much of the long and tortured history of American racial formation.

VI. CHAPTER OUTLINE

In focusing on the history of verse by writers of Chinese descent in the United States, then, this study touches upon concerns ranging from Asian American cultural theory to minority and dominant American literary history to the dynamics of American racialization. Chapter 1 discusses Ezra Pound’s Cathay as a necessary foundation for understanding the significance of later attempts to give poetic expression to a specifically Chinese cultural or ethnic subjectivity. For this renowned set of renderings of medieval Chinese lyrics not only challenged overtly discriminatory constructions of the Chinese such as the “Yellow Peril” that prevailed in the United States at the time; in subsequently attaining to canonical status, the collection successfully defined the dominant conception of both the thematic and formal terms by which Chinese culture, identity, and even language have since been poetically represented in English. Chapter 2 examines the classical Chinese verse produced by immigrants detained on Angel Island. Composed between 1910 and 1940 by largely uneducated Chinese commoners attempting to enter the United States under the regime of formal exclusion, the poems written on and carved into the walls of the immigration station detention building have garnered attention primarily as sociological and historical, rather than literary or cultural, documents. By contrast, this chapter shows how these works arise from and reflect a still largely unremarked, obverse dimension of the explicit internationalism shaping “American” literary culture at the time. Moreover, this period not only marked a new stage in the development of the United States into a world political and cultural power but it also witnessed the emergence of a distinctly American musical form,

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namely jazz, that has its roots both in the experiences of an oppressed people and in the cultural traditions and practices they brought with them in their movements to another part of the world, as well as in the frequently vexed interactions among these people and traditions with others in their new land of residence. In their striking temporal and structural parallels with, as well as in their more readily evident differences from, both the canonical works of dominant, English-language American modernism and the more renowned achievements of African American musical expression during the period, the Angel Island poems comprise an expressly transnational example of literary production by people of Asian descent in the United States. And as such, they underscore the need to develop a more complex conception than currently available of both “Asian American” and “American” culture that cuts across entrenched national and linguistic boundaries by addressing the significance of works in languages other than English, as well as by considering their relation to the different cultural traditions they both engage and confront. A brief interchapter traces the history of verse by writers of Chinese descent in the United States during the period between 1940 and the rise of the Asian American movement alongside the shift from “race” to “ethnicity” as the principal category of “difference” in U.S. politicocultural discourse. Keeping with the dynamic of form and language that governs the analyses in the first part of this study, succeeding chapters take up work by various contemporary poets of specifically Chinese heritage and examine their efforts to articulate the terms of an ethnic identity. Accordingly, this second section of the study elaborates a broad historical trajectory—one that is not strictly chronological, but generally descriptive nonetheless— from realism to abstraction within the larger body of Asian American verse since the establishment of that category as a recognized and indeed recognizable cultural formation. This sequence aims among other things to highlight the degree to which these major Chinese American poets can be located along a formal continuum that clarifies the particular cultural and theoretical sites of their address. In analyzing their work, therefore, I am as much interested in the problems these poets make central to the production of poetry (and ethnicity, and ethnic poetry) as in the formal choices they make. Or rather, I understand the formal choices they make as at least partly an effect of the problems they see—if by “see” here I can mean something like “address, articulate, inhabit, assume, express, and, finally, believe in.” Each of the poets I discuss in section 2 has a different answer to the handling of these problems, and thus a different sense of how poetry becomes possible through the network of form and language (and how authenticity as a being, as a poet, and as an ethnic subject is articulated in that relationship). Individual chapters work to not only explain these strategies

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and to locate them both in the specific material of the poems under consideration and in the four overlapping histories of Chinese/American, Asian American, ethnic American, and American verse; equally important, they assess the literary historical and contemporary political significance of these different strategies within the context of our current ideological regime of liberal multiculturalism and its efforts to contain the disruptive force of ethnic “difference” through the strict management of identity. They do so by paying close attention to how these precise configurations of authenticity, form, and language—mediated to be sure by the long history of particularly Chinese languages in the West—function within the history of the ethnic and the poetic in the United States. So, chapter 3 examines the verse of Ha Jin, a recent immigrant to the United States from China who has gained considerable renown for his poetry and prose works about the Cultural Revolution and Chinese society under communism. More specifically, I explore the particular logic and the contemporary political significance of the posture he adopts as a “foreign” writer operating through a starkly realist mode in English. For like the Angel Island poets, Jin writes from the perspective of a self-identified “Chinese” subject engaging with the alternative political realities of another culture. Unlike his co-ethnic predecessors, however, Jin employs the dominant language of that culture to expose in seemingly transparent fashion what he sees as the hypocrisies of Chinese society, as well as to relate the travails of exile from his homeland. He does so out of a strong habit of realistic interpretation borne of his attempt to solve a number of political and poetic problems, and out of a firm belief that the production of his own autobiography—as a biography, also, of the relation between Chineseness and Americanness, immigration, history, and subjectivity—in writing (and this is true of his poetry and his prose) as a function of realism best addresses the complexities of our current moment. At the same time, however, the course of both his individual development as a writer and his public reputation delineate a trajectory of thoroughgoing assimilation to dominant American values. Still, his work not only constitutes a form of transpacific literary production; but in doing so, it suggests the need to expand the definition of the category of “Asian American” beyond the parameters of national citizenship. Chapter 4 addresses the work of a writer who has come to represent the field of “Asian American poetry” within the wider sphere of contemporary U.S. culture: Li-Young Lee. Employing a testimonial mode that currently dominates both the production and reception of Asian American poetic expression, Lee has garnered several awards and even a measure of mainstream popular attention. His verse displays, and indeed self-consciously plays upon, an incomplete knowledge of the cultural traditions to which he lays

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claim in his attempts to articulate his own ethnicity. In thus presenting ethnic identity as a personal condition of trauma and cultural loss, for which the project of any given poem is to discover some kind of (belated) compensation, Lee exemplifies the strategy of lyric testimony as the hegemonic mode of ethnic verse expression under the present liberal multiculturalist order. For all its popularity and even incipient canonicity, however, his work reveals the cultural and political limitations of a poetic, as well as a critical, practice that rests upon the conceptual foundation of a unified subjectivity giving affective voice to individual experience. The subject of chapter 5, Marilyn Chin’s poetry, openly addresses questions of gender alongside ones of cultural identity. Moreover, she complicates the reading process itself by incorporating through different strategies of cross-fertilization and transplantation various Chinese language elements, including characters, into some of her poems. Throughout her body of work, Chin not only explores the intersection between the ethnic and the feminine but she also enriches the textual and sonic fabric of her verse beyond the familiar protocols of legibility for minority expression. She thus unites a frankly activist agenda with a drive toward formal experimentation that reformulates established semiotic and linguistic codes underwriting the very process of (American) “ethnic” signification. And by doing so, she tests the conceptual limits of a personalized notion of ethnic identity, urging instead a recognition of both its volatility and historicity as a product of structural asymmetries within society. Finally, chapter 6 discusses the achievement of John Yau, who eschews the testimonial mode in favor of a poetic that, on the one hand, lays bare the condition of “Asian” ethnic identity itself as a social and discursive construction, while on the other hand, explores the systematicity of language itself, and in particular the possibilities that arise from a forced interaction between Chinese and English as distinct systems of signification. Among the poets considered herein, Yau has been the one most thoroughly and successfully to abandon the notion of a broadly coherent subjectivity giving affective voice to individual (though implicitly representative) experience as the authorizing conceptual premise for “ethnic” poetic enunciation. Instead, he takes on questions of ethnicity in an abstract fashion that nevertheless constitutes a significant form of ethnic cultural production. His parodic invocations of Asian figures and traditions function not as an attempt to recuperate a specific cultural inheritance, but rather as a means for critically interrogating established notions about both “Asian” and “American” cultures, as well as the boundary between them. Through its manifold departures from what remain the hegemonic signifying protocols for American “ethnic” verse expression today, his work powerfully illustrates both the logic and the broader cultural stakes of the third and most recently

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emergent mode comprising the tradition of poetry by writers of Chinese descent in the United States set forth in this study, namely, ethnic abstraction. He thereby helps to usher in a new stage in the historical development of Chinese/American verse by defying the pressures of the reigning liberal multiculturalist order and pursuing instead the articulation of an idiom that flatly rejects any simple legibility based upon assimilationist formal gestures and the presumption to linguistic transparency. Maxine Hong Kingston’s recently established devotion to verse may well herald new developments for both Asian American literature and Asian American literary studies alike. In reality, however, not only has poetry long served as an important avenue of expression for various groups of Asian immigrants to the United States but it also played a crucial role in the constitution of the very idea of Asian American (literary) culture. This study seeks to contribute to an understanding of what it has already meant “to be the poet” among Asian Americans by focusing on the efforts of Chinese American writers. In doing so it stands as a beginning, as well as, one hopes, a spur to the establishment of a more comprehensive literary history of verse by other writers of Asian descent in the United States and their own respective “counterpoetics” of difference, a task that demands and deserves both the skills and the determined efforts of other critics in order to be written.

1 Toward a Prehistory of Asian American Verse Pound, Cathay, and the Poetics of Chineseness

I

While Ezra Pound’s foundational role in the establishment of a sustained current within American poetry of engaging with different East Asian cultural forms, practices, and traditions has been both long acknowledged and well documented, the question of his significance at once for and in relation to verse produced by Asian Americans remains in many ways sharply vexed.1 For on the one hand, his complicity with and even active participation in the long and troubling history of dominant Anglo-American Orientalism rendered Pound deeply problematic at best for poets during the earlier stages of the Asian American movement as they sought to confront and pursue alternatives to that painful history in their efforts at cultural production. And on the other hand, the sheer magnitude of his achievement and the remarkable extent of his influence on poetry in the United States and elsewhere continue to make him the single most successful example of an American writer who redefined the established protocols of verse (in English) precisely through deriving both inspiration and challenge explicitly from various East Asian cultural expressions, at least as he understood them, including classical Chinese poetry, the Chinese written character, Confucian philosophy, and Japanese Noh drama. Consequently, as Josephine Park has rightly observed, “Ethnic nationalists forged their art against a tradition of Orientalism in American letters, and contemporary Asian American literature continues to react to an ongoing American Orientalism with deep roots in the modernist era.”2 In fact, the very establishment of a distinctively modern poetic idiom in English during the early decades of the twentieth century coincides precisely 39

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with, and indeed develops in substantial measure specifically through, a sustained and assorted engagement by some of the most renowned writers of the period with different particular Asian cultural forms, traditions, and languages, particularly those of China and Japan.3 Notions about both classical Chinese verse and the ostensibly innate poeticity of the Chinese written character played especially vital roles in the Anglo-American modernist poetic revolution undertaken by Pound and others. Thus, while during the late nineteenth century in the United States perceptions of China and the Chinese were intertwined with concepts of labor and the prospects of America’s relationship to the idea and possibility of economic modernization, during the modernist period the notion of “Chineseness” in particular, and “Asianness” more generally, came to be fundamentally connected with the project of specifically literary aesthetic modernization.4 In turn, this engagement helped to shape various trends within the larger body of dominant American poetic expression over the course of the twentieth century and up to the present, including, as Park has discussed, the Beat movement, as well as the subsequent efflorescence of Buddhist-inspired verse by writers such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jane Hirshfield, and Sam Hamill, among others.5 More fundamentally, however, in effectuating the definitive break from established Victorian poetic norms and conventions, the Orientalist efforts of so many AngloAmerican modernists set the prevailing formal terms for virtually the entire subsequent development of American (as well as, indeed, Anglophone) poetry as a whole, including verse by writers of Asian descent in the United States. Indeed, Asian American verse has repeatedly confronted a technical challenge shared by the dominant American poetic canon, namely, how to give formal expression in English to different particular Asian cultures and languages? In this respect, the dominant American poetic lineage and Asian American poetry each owes a segment of its defining contours to a constitutive interaction with different particular Asian cultural and linguistic traditions, even though their respective articulations of these cultures and languages arise out of decidedly asymmetrical social locations and aim at different purposes. Accordingly, then, these two cultural formations exist in a relation whose complex structure exceeds the linearity of a model of influence, whether positive or negative (though obviously in various specific instances clear lines of emulation and opposition can readily be identified). Rather, they share something closer to that of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of a “family resemblance,” with a common antecedent in the accomplishments of the Anglo-American modernists who successfully redefined the operative protocols for poetic expression in English through their explorations and representations of certain traditions and languages of Asia.

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Within this extended “pre-history” of Asian American verse, Ezra Pound remains the most prominent example of an American writer whose engagements with different East Asian cultural forms, practices, and traditions aided in transforming the established conventions of poetry in English. Indeed, he played a fundamental role in helping to establish the very conceptual and discursive foundations for the production, as well as the general cultural legibility, of the category of “Asian American poetry” as a whole. For as I will discuss in this chapter, a text from the early, “pre-ideogrammic” phase of Pound’s Orientalist career stands out as arguably the most crucial text for fully delineating the broader cultural context, and therefore the literary historical meaning, of Asian American verse in general, and Chinese/ American poetry in particular. This work, Cathay, the renowned set of renderings of (mostly medieval) Chinese lyrics first published in London in 1915,6 remains important for assessing the cultural significance and even logic of Asian American poetic production not, however, because it contains any fundamental or essential insight into the ideals, forms, and experiences of the Chinese literary tradition and subjects it seeks to represent by means of translation into English. Rather, Cathay remains so important because of the role it played in shaping, or perhaps more accurately reconfiguring, the very conception of Chinese culture in the United States and Europe from the early twentieth century onward by virtually establishing the very category of Chinese poetry as a discursive field within the English-speaking world, as well as even throughout “the West” more generally.7 For in garnering widespread acclaim and subsequently attaining to canonical status as a founding document of literary modernism, Pound’s collection of exquisitely rendered Chinese lyrics served as the avenue through which Chinese poetry came for the first time to be acknowledged as a significant art form within the wider sphere of AngloAmerican culture. And in doing so, it initiated the very discursive possibility in English of individual affective subjectivity among the Chinese, a quality they had been consistently denied in other, more popular discourses from the period and earlier. Thus, by successfully advancing a notion of individual Chinese subjectivity, Cathay helped to lay the conceptual, cultural, and discursive foundations for the subsequent emergence of the very ideas of Asian American identity in general and Chinese American ethnic identity in particular, which together at once reflect and comprise important elements within our current regime of liberal multiculturalism. In earlier centuries, of course, Chinese cultural practices and commodities such as gardens, textiles, ceramics, and even foodstuffs had exercised a fascination among Anglo-American and European audiences at various points in history; but not so poetry.8 Thus, other translations of Chinese poetry into English, most notably by the British sinologists (or, to use a more

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historically appropriate term, Orientalists) Herbert Giles and Arthur Waley (including renderings of some of the very same poems appearing in Cathay) failed to gain any significant notice beyond the realm of academic scholarship. Concomitantly, earlier and even relatively contemporaneous popular and other narrative depictions of “China” and “the Chinese” generally ignored the subject of Chinese literary (and especially poetic) production altogether. Indeed, as scholars such as Robert Lee, David Palumbo-Liu, Colleen Lye, and others have shown in extensive detail, the reigning discourse of the “Yellow Peril” that predominated since at least the middle part of the nineteenth century in the United States and elsewhere had sought systematically to deny the very possibility of individual expressive subjectivity among the Chinese as a means of justifying various forms of discrimination, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and its several extensions.9 By contrast, Cathay gives comparatively sympathetic portrayal to a series of individual speaking Chinese subjects, each of whom displays an intense, if stylistically understated, emotionalism. Accordingly, then, Pound’s achievement marks a distinctive moment in the process of what Palumbo-Liu calls the “introjection” of Asians and Asian traditions into the U.S. cultural imaginary, specifically within the domain of “high” culture as embodied in literary verse.10 At the same time, however, coming in turn to define and consolidate the dominant, high cultural conceptualization of “Chinese” culture and identity in “America,” Cathay performs its own set of recognizably Orientalist epistemological operations. Most immediately, by contemporizing through the use of modernist diction and form poems explicitly identified as ancient and medieval, the collection perpetuates in its own way the belief in a timeless Chinese cultural “essence.” In doing so, it also promotes an ahistorical, racialist notion of Chinese identity. Furthermore, as we shall see, the unique idiom of the poems conflates differences between Chinese and Japanese as distinct languages, thereby enacting an early, textual version of Asian American racialization in the form of what sociologist Yen Le Espiritu has called the phenomenon of “racial lumping,” or categorization that “ignores subgroup boundaries, lumping together diverse peoples in a single, expanded ‘ethnic’ framework.”11 Nevertheless, through its historically innovative representation of Chinese (poetic) culture and identity, Cathay not only departed from existing, overtly discriminatory views of Asians in general and the Chinese in particular, but in its manner of doing so the collection also continues to inform the aesthetic and ideological dimensions—that is, the conditions of cultural possibility—of our current moment along a number of conceptual vectors. In broad terms, Pound’s acclaimed renderings redefined the operational parameters of translation as a mode of literary production in English by obviating intimate

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knowledge of the source language as a requirement for the practice, a matter that I have discussed at length elsewhere.12 Moreover, it has become something of a critical commonplace to note that the collection, in the words of George Steiner, “altered the feel of the language [English] and set the pattern of cadence for modern verse.”13 Thus, Pound’s slim volume of “translated” Chinese poems not only reshaped the practice of bringing poetic works from other languages into English, but, arguably in doing exactly that, it also recalibrated and even extended possibilities within English itself as a poetic medium as it had operated up to that point, thereby helping to initiate the phenomenon of literary modernism as a whole in its particular Anglo-American formation. If Cathay provides evidence in support of Palumbo-Liu’s contention that “managing the modern was inseparable from managing Asian America”14 in early twentieth-century U.S. history, then it also at once further particularizes and extends that claim by indicating the degree to which the making of modernism was inseparable from the making of Chinese poetry in English. As an entirely unintended consequence of these achievements, Cathay also thereby establishes the horizon of expectation against which other, different articulations of a “Chinese,” and more broadly an “Asian,” ethnic or cultural sensibility in poetry at once gain part of their meaning and have been and will continue to be understood in the wider realm of AngloAmerican, and even Anglophone, culture. Because it lays claim to the status of “translation” (whatever its “actual” relationship to the original Chinese poems it purports to convey), Cathay sets forth terms—tonal, rhetorical, thematic, and formal—for giving poetic expression in English to “Chineseness,” as well as, due to the tendency toward “racial lumping” at different historical moments in U.S. politico-cultural discourse, to “Asianness.” Furthermore, because of the extensive role of the collection in shaping the subsequent development of poetry in English, or in other words due to its canonicity, its terms have come to embody the authority of the cultural dominant in defining the framework of evaluation for other voicings of “Chinese” and “Asian” cultural heritage, whether or not specific individual poets write explicitly in response to or reaction against Pound himself.15 Hence, any effort to take full measure of Asian American poetic achievement must begin by examining Cathay for the way it maps how the categories of “Asian,” and in particular “Chinese,” intersect with the category of “poetry” within the dominant U.S. cultural imaginary. From the outset, let me be as clear as possible: I do not consider Pound’s Cathay an authentic depiction of Chinese poetry, culture, or subjectivity based on its status either as a “translation” or as a canonical work in the larger body of Anglo-American literature. As will become clear over the course of this study, I reject the notion of “authenticity” altogether as a useful

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analytical category.16 Instead, I consider it more revealing to examine both the ways in which different writers lay claim to “authentic” expression and the reasons why they are perceived as having achieved (or failed to achieve) such a nebulous, ill-defined quality. But the fact that a majority audience continues generally to accept, and even to perpetuate, the claims to both accuracy and canonicity lends a greater authority within the larger sphere of U.S. (literary) culture to the collection in the treatment of its chosen subjects of concern. Accordingly, then, interrogating the strategies of representation in Cathay, as well as addressing the relationship of the collection to the different historical and cultural contexts of its production and reception, remain necessary, though by no means sufficient, conditions for understanding the broader significance of efforts by Chinese American writers to give poetic articulation to the terms of their “own” cultural heritage. Like it or not, we must acknowledge the precedence and take deeper measure of the cultural dominant in order to gauge more fully the meaning of minority expression.

II

At practically every stage of its emergence and dissemination—from its famously idiosyncratic origins in the manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa, to its publication in London and subsequent appearance in the United States, to its eventual canonization as a founding document of Anglo-American modernism—Cathay at once develops out of, engages with, and in turn leaves its own mark on the long-established discursive tradition in English, as well as various other European languages, about China, its people, civilization, and culture. Particularly in English, this rich and variegated discourse cut across several social registers, found expression in various media, and has endured with strategic modifications over a considerable span of time. Initially, the text had its roots in the tradition of late nineteenth-century eastern U.S. and British late imperial Orientalism as both a cultural taste and academic practice. Upon publication of the collection first in Britain in 1915 and later in the United States in 1917, however, the unique representation of Chinese culture and subjectivity in Cathay offered a subtle critique of, as well as an alternative to, the terms underwriting the particularly American cultural and political discourse of Asian (and specifically Chinese) exclusionism that operated throughout the country from the mid-nineteenth- to the early twentieth centuries, though it found its most virulent expressions primarily on the West Coast, especially in California.17 And finally, through the process of attaining to canonical status, Cathay itself became part of the dominant

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discourse on China in English, thereby shaping the cultural terrain that Asian American writers, in particular Chinese American poets, would subsequently have to navigate. The established narrative about the textual origins of Cathay has been ably told by others, most notably Hugh Kenner.18 But the principal events of that history bear repeating here in order to clarify the relationship of the collection itself to the larger, already long-established tradition of discursive and ideological constructions of Chinese culture and subjectivity in the United States and England up to that point. As the story goes, shortly after their initial meeting in London during the early autumn of 1913, Pound received from Mary McNeil Fenollosa a set of manuscripts produced by her late husband, Ernest, who had died suddenly of a heart attack in 1908 after a distinguished, if not entirely unblemished, transpacific career as a philosopher, cultural reformer, and historian and advocate of “Oriental” art in Japan and the United States.19 These manuscripts, which have come to be referred to collectively as “the Fenollosa notebooks,” record the efforts that Ernest Fenollosa made in studying various East Asian literary traditions, including both classical Chinese poetry and Japanese Noh drama, during his final visits to Japan between 1896 and 1901. In particular, the notebooks contain detailed, character-by-character semantic glosses of some 150 ancient and medieval Chinese poems, along with transliterations of the Japanese readings of these poems and stilted renderings into English.20 Working on this rough material while serving as W. B. Yeats’s secretary at Stone Cottage in Sussex, England, during the winter of 1914, Pound fashioned Cathay, therewith not only altering the course of his own career but also establishing new terms for the development of modernist poetry in English more generally, as well as initiating unprecedented possibilities for the practice of translation as a mode of literary production.21 In many ways, these notebooks represent a logical culmination of the efforts Fenollosa made over the course of virtually his entire professional life exploring, engaging with, and advocating the significance of different Asian artistic and intellectual traditions as part of a larger attempt to bring about a “fusion of East and West,”22 a grand synthesis that would unite the best aspects of both cultures, therewith ushering in a new epoch of human development and the achievement of a truly “world” civilization. Thus, he considered Asian civilizations not just the moral, intellectual, and spiritual equals of Western societies; even more important, he viewed the accomplishments of the East as necessary complements to those of the West, if humanity were to be able to achieve the next stage in its historical development. Indeed, he repeatedly warned that the then-current views about “the Orient” were so misguided that, if left unrevised, they would lead to a misapprehension of the dangers inherent in such an inevitable “fusion,” thereby resulting in the

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subordination of the “Anglo-Saxon” race to the “Asiatic.” Accordingly, then, Fenollosa’s interest in Japanese and Chinese literature (as well as Asian art more generally) itself stemmed from a deeply held ethical commitment to “Asiatic” difference and its ostensibly crucial importance for the political and racial future of “the West.” Such beliefs set him apart from the conceptions of Asian peoples and cultures that informed the exclusionist discourses operating in the United States and Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which had long characterized Asians in general as inscrutable, barbaric, and insuperably “alien,” and therefore unfit for inclusion in the national body politic. As numerous scholars have already discussed, these more popular, hegemonic conceptions comprised elements in a discursive process of racialization that helped both to motivate and to justify the passage of overtly discriminatory legislation in the United States (as well as in other white settler nations, including Canada and Australia) such as the California Foreign Miners’ Tax (1850), the federal Page Law against the “importation” of “Oriental” women for the purposes of prostitution (1875), and the national Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), as well as the subsequent Immigration Act of 1917, which extended the policy of exclusion to all Asian peoples through the delineation of a geographically defined “Asiatic Barred Zone.” More particularly, as Colleen Lye has shown, the discourse of “Yellow Perilism,” which underwrote the ongoing push for Asian exclusion during the late nineteenth century and afterward in the United States, focused on three characteristics in its construction of Chinese racial and cultural identity: economic efficiency, abstract labor power, and the sheer force of numerical abundance. Such a Chinese identity in turn served as one of its strategies for negotiating the contradictions of monopoly capitalism and U.S. neocolonial expansion into Asia.23 The accompanying tropes of inscrutability, a soulless commercialism, the nerveless coolie, and the faceless mass, among others, together worked to elide the possibility of individual subjectivity among Chinese people, thereby helping to mitigate the ideological inconsistencies, within an American context, of designating a single group for exclusion from the nation based solely on the category of race. By contrast, in various articles written for popular magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Magazine during the 1890s, Fenollosa repeatedly touted his admiration for Asian civilizations, as well as his active opposition to various elements within the established, dominant discourse in the United States about those cultures and peoples. Among other things, he vigorously asserted the historical existence of Chinese “individuality,” at least leading up to and during the supposed high point of Chinese civilization during the Tang and Sung dynasties. Thus, in “Chinese and Japanese Traits” (1892), Fenollosa presents China as “the classic source of inspiration” for

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Asia. “To Chinese art and culture at their best in the Tang and Sung dynasties,” he writes, “we must yield the palm for power, dignity, truth, and spiritual earnestness.” He goes on to analogize: Just as all that is classic and supreme in the inspiration of Western literature and art and philosophy comes down the ages to us from its creative centre at Athens, so all that is vital and classic in Oriental culture radiates from Loyang and Hangchow; and just as frankly as Rome borrowed her models from Greece, so did Japan borrow hers from China.24

And he explains China’s currently debilitated state (in both senses of that word) as the ultimate result of foreign invasion by the Mongols in 1279, “the death-knell of Chinese individuality,” since which time “babbling Confucians of the narrowest commentating school have monopolized power and education for the last five hundred years, and have covered the glow of native genius with such a crust of literary formalism that intelligence has become stunted and government itself petrified.”25 Largely glossing over (perhaps strategically) the ongoing exploitation of China by various Western powers at the time, Fenollosa defends Chinese civilization against continued denigration through invoking the glories and tragedies of its cultural and political past. This emphasis on at least the historical existence of “individuality” in China directly contradicts various facets of “Yellow Peril” discourse that applied specifically to the Chinese. Most notably, perhaps, during this period a discourse of “nervelessness” had arisen to explain the apparently inhuman capacity for physical labor on the part of the Chinese, as well as their ability to thrive in living conditions that no white person could or, more important, should have to endure.26 Thus, in the enormously popular work Chinese Characteristics (1894), the American missionary Arthur Smith identified “The Absence of Nerves” as one of the defining traits of the Chinese.27 Various scholars have already noted that, particularly in the United States, this ostensible quality of “nervelessness” played an important role in the construction of the image of the “coolie” as a threat to the dignity, as well as even the economic viability, of white, Anglo-Saxon American labor, which in turn gave rise to increasing nativist sentiment and anti-Chinese political agitation during the early twentieth century, especially in California.28 And as Lye has aptly summarized, “By definition the coolie lacks individuality.”29 Thus, Fenollosa’s insistence on at least the historical existence of “individuality” within Chinese culture works directly against various features of the dominant anti-Asian discourse of the period by restoring the possibility of individual subjectivity among the Chinese, something they had been consistently denied since at least the mid-nineteenth century through a range of

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different rhetorical strategies. Most significantly for our concerns, insofar as individual subjectivity implies the capacity for unique affect, such insistence provided the foundation for Pound’s achievement in Cathay and the successful (i.e., both linguistically and culturally legible) depiction of Chinese emotions in that collection. To be sure, in his conception and promotion of Chinese achievement as epitomized during the Tang and Sung dynasties, Fenollosa remained bound by certain conservative intellectual forces, including a Spencerian, racialist notion of identity and its organically determinative relationship to culture, as well as a Meiji-era Japanese nationalist version of Chinese cultural history.30 Nevertheless, his cultural advocacy functioned within a U.S. context to restore (or perhaps more accurately, assert) at least the theoretical possibility of an individual subjectivity among the Chinese. Accordingly, the views he expressed in his various published writings from the 1890s collectively delineate the immediate conceptual motivation, as well as the broader ideological stakes, for the efforts he made in studying Japanese Noh drama and classical Chinese poetry, efforts that in turn resulted in the notebooks that were eventually given to Pound, thereby providing the textual foundation for Cathay, among other things. With detailed notes, glosses, various explanatory comments, transliterations of the Japanese pronunciation, and usually (though not always) the actual written characters themselves for some 150 specific Chinese poems, the notebooks display Fenollosa’s considerable intellectual labor in attempting to engage as fully as possible with classical Chinese poetry on its own terms, given the resources available to him, which included instruction from renowned Japanese scholars of canonical Chinese literature. Additionally, Fenollosa’s notes provide concrete expression of his sustained commitment to promoting the very notion of an individual Chinese subjectivity. Amounting to much more than simply exercises in an Orientalist fascination with the exotic East, they also contain drafts for several public lectures Fenollosa eventually gave. In doing so, they together at once crystallize and reflect his larger cultural ambition of demonstrating both the intrinsic value of different Asian artistic traditions and their ongoing significance for the establishment of a “world civilization.” In this light, Fenollosa’s focus in the notebooks on canonical lyric poems from the ancient and medieval periods takes on a particular significance, over and above the cultural conservatism deriving from the ideological leanings and influence of his Japanese teachers. For within the history of Western poetics at least, the lyric mode at once effectively presupposes and has functioned as the principal means in verse of articulating an individual, affective subjectivity. Unfortunately for Fenollosa, he died before having the chance to put these notes to use in pursuit of his larger goal of transforming established Western perceptions of Chinese culture and identity. As it turned

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out, that opportunity fell to someone with considerably less knowledge of Asia, but who possessed correspondingly greater poetic gifts. Ironically, what Fenollosa urged, thematized, and sought to achieve over the course of his career, Ezra Pound enacted in Cathay. In saying “enacted,” I do not mean simply that he performed a voice or developed an idiom for “accurately” conveying Chinese culture and identity. Rather, I mean that he successfully established a new “poetics” for representing Chinese subjectivity in English, thereby reconfiguring the terms by which such a category would henceforth be understood within the dominant U.S. cultural imaginary, most especially in the arena of literary verse. In this sense, Cathay presents an instance of “high culture” functioning to articulate a “counter-poetics” of difference in relation to both juridical formulations and more popular treatments of the same general, racialized subjects.

III

When he received the notebooks in 1913 and 1914, of course, Pound shared little, if anything, of Fenollosa’s knowledge, experience, or larger goals regarding Asian cultures and peoples. To be sure, over the course of his own career, he would come to develop a profound admiration for, as well as a broad, if deeply idiosyncratic, familiarity with certain Asian artistic and cultural traditions, most especially classical Chinese poetry and Confucian philosophy, both of which he continued to promote through a variety of means over the remainder of his life, including in his own poetry and through additional “translations.31 But at the time, his interests remained focused mainly by a desire to explore new possibilities for poetic expression in English, which in 1914 meant primarily the Imagist movement. Part of that effort involved producing various minor imitations of “Orientalia,” either wholly invented or derived from existing scholarly translations of Chinese poetry, but in any case decidedly not through any sort of generative engagement with poems in their original language or form. Nevertheless, in working from the notebooks to produce Cathay, Pound not only encountered Chinese poetry in an entirely new way through Fenollosa’s meticulous examinations. The remarkable success he achieved helped to advance the overarching cultural project that motivated those examinations in the first place, namely, to reconfigure dominant Anglo-American conceptions of Asian cultures and peoples. Indeed, so successful has it been in defining the very notion of Chinese poetry in English that even as recently as 2003, one scholar posed the question, “Cathay: What Sort of Translation?” thereby indicating the extent to which the collection continues to enjoy an authority

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based on the perception of its status precisely as a “translation,” of whatever sort.32 And as such, Cathay sets forth terms—tonal, rhetorical, thematic, and formal—for articulating the categories of Chinese culture and identity in English. Pound came to the task, of course, operating under his own host of assumptions, stereotypes, and blind spots that made no less of a contribution than his acknowledged talents as a writer in shaping the poetics of Chinese culture and identity in Cathay. In fact, each comprises in its own way a fundamental aspect of that talent. Foremost among these, perhaps, was his total lack of formal exposure to the Chinese language in its written, or indeed any, form. Due to this basic linguistic ignorance, Pound had to rely through Fenollosa almost entirely on Japanese pronunciations for the sound structure of the Chinese poems and their constituent characters.33 And such reliance, in turn, resulted most significantly in the extensive use throughout the collection of Japanese versions for Chinese proper and place names. Pound employed this practice at every level within Cathay, from its overarching historical frame as a collection of works by specific Chinese writers down to the rhythmical texture of individual poems and even lines. Thus, names of the Chinese poets featured in the collection include “Rihaku” in place of Li Bai (李 白), “Omakitsu” for Wang Wei (王 維), “Kakuhaku” for Guo Pu (郭 璞), “Roshōrin” for Lu Zhao Lin (盧 照 鄰), and “To-Em-Mei” for Tao Yuan Ming (陶 淵 明).34 Comparably, both the titles and the actual text of different poems present names in their Japanese forms. So Pound gives titles such as “Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin,” “Leave-Taking Near Shoku,” “Sennin Poem by Kakuhaku,” and “Old Idea of Chōan by Roshōrin,” among others. Similarly, “Exiles Letter” opens with the salutation “To So-Kin of Rakuyō, ancient friend, Chancellor of Gen,” and “Separation on the River Kiang” begins “Ko-jin goes west from Kō-kaku-ro.”35 Numerous additional examples could be easily adduced, and together they help to create the distinctive rhythm of the collection. As philosophers ranging from J. L. Austin to Jacques Derrida and others have frequently noted, the special status of names as linguistic signs makes them resistant to semantic conversion into another language, and Pound largely retains the transliterated form in which he encountered them in the Fenollosa notebooks.36 Consequently, these designations function as especially potent signifiers of individual and cultural identity, which in this case the headnote to the collection specifically identifies (or perhaps more accurately, asserted) as being “from the Chinese.” Ironically, then, Pound’s treatment of one of the principal linguistic elements for signifying “Chineseness” in Cathay happened to contribute to the formation of an idiom that both in part stems from and more closely resembles the phonetic properties of Japanese. Up to this point in the history of critical commentary on the collection, such a practice has generally been

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regarded either as a sign of Pound’s ignorance or, somewhat more generously, as a strategy for acknowledging his own place in a line of cultural transmission of Chinese poetry that includes not only Fenollosa but also Japanese efforts in the form of “the decipherings of the professors Mori and Ariga.”37 But this culturally imprecise method of nomination and its textual genealogy matter for our purposes not so much because they illustrate yet again Pound’s well-known limitations as a reader of Chinese or his historical awareness as a translator. Rather, their significance stems from the role they played in shaping the distinctive idiom of Cathay, which elides real differences between the sound structure, rhythm, and other phonetic qualities of the two East Asian languages into a lumped English discourse that signifies “Chinese” in this instance but, due to numerous points of intersection, also “sounds like” Japanese in certain crucial ways. Thus, whatever else it reveals about Pound himself as a reader and translator of “Chinese poetry,” the unique idiom of Cathay reflects his own participation in the tendency toward “racial lumping” within dominant U.S. discourses about East Asian peoples and traditions. Even more important, perhaps, this aspect of his achievement also perpetuates that tendency by blurring real distinctions between Chinese and Japanese languages into a kind of generic “Oriental” tonality in English. And in doing so, it underscores the relevance of Pound’s accomplishment not just for verse by writers of specifically Chinese descent in the United States but also for the very “pan-ethnic” category of “Asian American poetry.” Alongside this tone and its attendant, distinctive rhythm, through his selections from and treatment of Fenollosa’s notes, Pound both inherited and built upon the latent historical association in the West between the lyric mode and the category of individual subjectivity in establishing the primary rhetorical posture of the collection. Indeed, ten of the sixteen poems appearing in the final version of Cathay highlight the presence of an individual speaking subject through the explicit use of singular or plural first-person pronouns, while the remaining six feature third-person narrators who either describe a human subject in the poem itself (as in “The Beautiful Toilet,” “Sennin Poem by Kakuhaku,” and “Ballad of the Mulberry Road”) or convey perceptions arising from an individual personal experience (as in “Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin,” “Leave Taking Near Shoku,” and “South-Folk in Cold Country”). It has by now become fairly widely known that classical Chinese poetry frequently specifies subjects and referents without the use of pronouns, the conventions of the tradition being so strong as to make them unnecessary. Yet in his practice of rendering Fenollosa’s rough notes into verse, Pound repeatedly inserted personal and third-person pronouns where none existed in the originals. To be sure, an examination of the notebooks shows that in many instances Pound simply followed his source in adding

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pronouns to clarify the relationships among the various elements in the poems. But in others, as with the notes for “The Beautiful Toilet,” Fenollosa hewed so closely to the Chinese originals that he did not include specifying pronouns, which provided Pound considerable liberty in deciding how to present them in English.38 Thus, in deploying the rhetoric of individual subjectivity so consistently for his “translations,” Pound offers both an implicit critique of and an alternative to the terms underwriting dominant constructions of Chinese racial and cultural identity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States. For by presenting such a sequence of unique speaking subjects (or, to use an expressly Poundian term, personae), the collection foregrounds the idea of distinctive individuality among the Chinese, a quality they had been consistently denied within the dominant discourses of the period. So, in The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter, for example, the speaker not only engages in direct second-person address to her husband throughout the poem, thereby highlighting their individual identities, she also emphasizes the development of that individuality by relating events from their personal history together, as in the opening stanza: While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead I played about the front gate, pulling flowers. You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse, You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums. And we went on living in the village of Chokan: Two small people, without dislike or suspicion. (251)

If such a claim appears to overemphasize the significance of a seemingly natural, and perhaps even necessary, rhetorical choice for poetry in English, we need only recall that in his other engagements with and depictions of Chinese literary culture, Pound expressly sought ways of moving beyond the trope of individual subjectivity as the enabling condition for poetic production.39 For example, three of the four “Chinese-inspired” lyrics that he produced only a few months before Cathay as part of his efforts to illustrate and thereby promote the tenets of Imagism—“Liu Ch’e,” “Fan-Piece, for Her Imperial Lord,” and “Ts’ai Chi’h”—together represent Pound’s attempt to discover an approach to poetry that does not rest primarily upon the conceptual foundation of an individual subject giving voice to personal experience or perception.40 Thus, “Ts’ai Chi’h” strives to achieve poetic expressivity through the presentation of a spare sequence of images, rather than by narrating the response to these images on the part of an apprehending subject: The petals fall in the fountain, The orange-coloured rose-leaves Their ochre clings to the stone. (286)

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And in “Liu Ch’e” the ideas of loss and of the haunting power of memory arise not from an affective declaration by an identifiable speaker, but rather through the suggestiveness of the final, culminating image: The rustling of the silk is discontinued, Dust drifts over the court-yard, There is no sound of foot-fall, and the leaves Scurry into heaps and lie still, And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them: A wet leaf that clings to the threshold. (286)

Comparably, in The Cantos, Pound would come to invoke Chinese political, literary, and philosophical history, and use Chinese characters themselves within the textual fabric of his epic as part of an effort to articulate a form of poetic authority that transcends the limits of an individual subjective voice, as in the sequence of “Chinese History Cantos” and the development of what he called “the ideogrammic method.”41 These more overtly “experimental” or “avant-garde” strategies have, of course, left their own marks on the cultural terrain subsequently navigated by Asian American poets, especially those, like John Yau, operating in the comparatively recently established mode of what I call “ethnic abstraction,” which employs different nonrepresentational strategies, oftentimes to interrogate the very condition of ethnicity precisely as a social and discursive formation. Yet the poetics arising out of Pound’s engagement with Chinese culture and language in his “poem including history” depend in large measure on the controversial views about written Chinese that Fenollosa laid out in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. And by his own account, Pound did not fully consider the implications of Fenollosa’s ideas about the Chinese written character until well into the 1930s; and in any event he did not undertake any serious editorial work on the drafts until after Cathay had already appeared, though by 1915 he was already praising the essay as “a whole basis of aesthetic.”42 Accordingly, then, the expressly personalized (and therefore more conventionally legible) representation of Chinese culture and identity in Cathay represents a transitional stage in Pound’s Orientalism, one that departs methodologically and stylistically from his earliest imagist engagements, but that also serves as the conceptual and aesthetic foundation for his later, perhaps more critically (if not popularly) familiar, efforts at achieving a modernist “impersonality” though the deployment of Chinese history and language in The Cantos. Indeed, the readier legibility of Cathay as poetry in English helps to explain why it has enjoyed more widespread attention among both general readers and critics than either his earlier engagement with Chinese poetry or his later efforts at incorporating elements of Chinese culture and history into his modern verse epic.

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Pound’s depiction of individual Chinese subjectivity in Cathay also brought with it a sustained focus on the theme of affect, to the extent that the emotional tenor of the collection has long since become its defining (or at least its most recognized) feature. Thus, despite varying interpretations of the broader meaning of the text as a whole, critics have repeatedly and consistently focused on the themes of isolation, loneliness, disappointment, loss, and other such affective states, whether they consider the relevant context for Cathay to be the consequences of World War I (e.g., Hugh Kenner) or the difficulties attendant upon Pound’s own early pursuit of a career in poetry (e.g., Sanehide Kodama, Ronald Bush, and Ann Chapple). 43 Even more significant, precisely through making the expression of emotion by the speakers of the poems at once linguistically and culturally legible to a Western (i.e., English-language) audience, Pound delineated the possibility of imagining Chinese identity in ways that challenged the dominant discourses of the period. Now Chinese subjects in English had affect, and they made clear their sentiments, as in these concluding lines from the opening poem of the collection, “The Song of the Bowmen of Shu”: When we set out, the willows were drooping with spring, We come back in the snow, We go slowly, we are hungry and thirsty, Our mind is full of sorrow; who will know of our grief?

Or these from one of the acknowledged masterpieces of the collection, “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”: The paired butterflies are already yellow with August Over the grass in the West garden; They hurt me. I grow older.

Or these, from “Lament of the Frontier Guard”: A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn, A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom, Three hundred and sixty thousand, And sorrow, sorrow like rain. Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning.

Or these from Cathay’s other consensus master work, “Exile’s Letter”: And if you ask how I regret that parting: It is like the flowers falling at Spring’s end Confused, whirled in a tangle. What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking, There is no end of things in the heart.

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Or, finally, these from “The City of Choan”: Now the high clouds over the sun And I can not see Choan afar And I am sad.44

In more closely adhering to the rhythms of “natural” spoken English, the spare diction and prosodically variable, largely end-stopped lines throughout Cathay foreground the expression of emotion among the Chinese, even as they also reflect Pound’s famous rejection of Victorian literary norms. In the light of such comparatively frank declarations of feeling, then, even the traits of obliquity and verbal concentration for which Cathay has been widely and justly praised appear as something more than merely the result of technical innovation or a departure from Victorian poetic conventions of fixed meter and heavy rhyme in favor of the tenets of imagism. Nor do they amount simply to Pound’s remarkable success in conveying or capturing some “essential” qualities of the poems in the original Chinese. Instead, they emerge as expressions of the establishment of a veritable grammar for the very idea of Chinese emotion in English. Thus, the famous syllogistic explanatory “Note” appended to “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance” carefully lays out the expressive logic that underlies the otherwise opaque surface of the poem: Note.—Jewel stairs, therefore a palace. Grievance, therefore there is something to complain of. Gauze stockings, therefore a court lady, not a servant who complains. Clear autumn, therefore he has no excuse on account of weather. Also she has come early, for the dew has not merely whitened the stairs, but has soaked her stockings. The poem is especially prized because she utters no direct reproach.45

Moreover, it confidently asserts the value placed on such reticence within a Chinese cultural tradition. In doing so, the note quietly insists upon the existence of affect among Chinese subjects, even if such affect might not be immediately visible or legible to Western perception. To be sure, the quality of “indirection” had already long been associated with the Chinese. Arthur Smith, for example, identified “A Talent for Indirection” as another of his twenty-six defining Chinese Characteristics.46 And insofar as the note calls attention to this quality within both the poem itself and native Chinese assessments of it, the representation of Chinese culture and subjectivity in “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance” overlaps with dominant discourses of the period. Yet in explaining the particular emotional syntax within the poem, the note works against another, more pernicious Western stereotype that implied a virtually complete and distinctly threatening absence of expressive

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affect among Chinese subjects, namely that of “inscrutability.” By depicting and explicating the logic of Chinese emotion, then, Cathay not only asserted the presence of affect among the Chinese but it also worked to make that affect at least potentially “scrutable” to readers of English. Moreover, precisely through its conveyance of emotion, the collection actively promotes a sympathy for the Chinese subjects it portrays, which range from soldiers, poets, exiled court officials, and a religious recluse among the men, to abandoned wives, a court lady, and a rural gentry girl among the women. As numerous scholars have shown, exclusionist discourse from the late nineteenth century in the United States consistently focused on the image of the Chinese prostitute as a threat to the health of the nation in order to justify the passage of discriminatory immigration laws.47 Similarly, as Karen Leong has argued, exclusionists also employed a variety of strategies to stress the lack of Chinese manhood.48 Accordingly, then, over and above simply cultivating sympathy for the individual protagonists of the different poems, Cathay counters the expressly gendered constructions of exclusionist discourse by presenting a range of more familiarly masculine and feminine social positions occupied by Chinese subjects. My point here is not to try and redeem Pound as some kind of unintentional, progressivist cultural advocate on behalf of oppressed Chinese immigrants during the early part of the twentieth century in the United States. Rather, I want to suggest some of the consequences that Cathay and its subsequent canonization as literary historical events have had for the category of Chinese/American verse, as well as for Asian American poetry more generally. The emphasis on emotions such as isolation, social estrangement, and personal loss both in Cathay itself and in the tradition of critical responses to it have together arguably helped at once to establish and to validate, over and above any direct line of positive or negative influence, the ideological conditions that have resulted in the dominance of the currently hegemonic mode within the larger body of Asian American verse, namely what I have called “lyric testimony.” As I discussed in the introduction, in this hegemonic mode the minority subject typically relates events from a personalized history that work to construct racial/ethnic identity as a traumatic condition of either problematic difference from dominant (that is, “white”) social norms or debilitating cultural loss that necessitates an act of recuperation, usually undertaken by means of the poem itself. Gaining ascendancy in the wake of the Asian American movement during the late 1960s, as well as arising in part out of the cultural possibilities opened up by the remarkable success of Maxine Hong Kingston since the mid-1970s, this mode characterizes work by the great majority (as well as the most recognized) of contemporary Asian American poets.

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In addition to the rhetorical and thematic terms that it sets forth, Cathay also establishes a distinctive sense of form as part of its representation of Chinese poetry and cultural identity in English. Solidifying its place amid the pantheon of canonical Anglo-American modernist texts, Hugh Kenner has famously asserted that the “real achievement” of the collection “lay not on the frontier of comparative poetics, but securely within the effort, then going forward in London, to rethink the nature of an English poem.”49 Attempting strategically to shift the terms of debate about the collection away from the question of its “accuracy” (or lack thereof) as a putative translation, he goes on to specify that such successful rethinking involved “maximizing three criteria at once, criteria hitherto developed separately: “the vers-libre principle, that the single line is the unit of composition; the Imagist principle, that a poem may build its effects out of things it sets before the mind’s eye by naming them; and the lyrical principle, that words or names, being ordered in time, are bound together and recalled into each other’s presence by recurrent sounds.” (199)

In other words, focusing on lineation, imagery, and prosody, Kenner attributes the success (as well as the significance) of the collection to Pound’s invention of a stichic organization and a sonic texture that match the visual intensity of his depiction of China. Needless to say, perhaps, Kenner’s assessment completely ignores the implications of Pound’s achievement for the subsequent development of Asian American poetry in general, and Chinese/ American verse in particular. Even so, his analysis remains instructive for our purposes because it underscores the technical innovation of Cathay, which has historically served as arguably the principal justification for its canonization as a major work of modernist poetry in English, and therefore also as both a source and expression of dominant, high cultural perceptions of Chinese poetry, as well as, by extension, culture and identity. Whatever his other limitations, to this day Kenner remains the critic who has most effectively illuminated the formal and sonoric intricacies of Cathay. In terms of its imagery, Cathay adopts a familiar Orientalist stance, reproducing a decidedly exoticist, and therefore conservative, vision of the Chinese landscape and culture. To be sure, part of the appeal of the collection lies precisely in the abundance of delights that it presents to the (mind’s) eye. Even a cursory survey of the poems reveals numerous alluring details such as “blue” grass in “The Beautiful Toilet” and “ivory arrows and/quivers ornamented with fish-skin” in “Song of the Bowmen of Shu.” Similarly, boats of “shato-wood” with gunwales of “cut magnolia,” “jeweled flutes,” “pipes of gold,” purple and crimson houses, and an emperor’s “jeweled car” populate “The River Song.” Even a poem as brief as “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance” has

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its “jewelled steps” and “crystal curtain.” Such exoticism finds its most intense expression, perhaps, in the reception recalled by the speaker of “Exile’s Letter.” Certainly a festive occasion, this party included “Red jade cups, food well set on a blue jeweled table,” “courtezans, going and coming without/hindrance,” “vermillioned girls” and “Eyebrows painted green.” For the most part, these and other comparable visual details like a “canopy embroidered with dragons” (“Old Idea of Choan by Roshorin”) do appear in the original Chinese poems that Fenollosa studied. But both Pound’s taste for and his manner of presenting such images in Cathay index the extent to which the collection at once participates in and carries forward the long tradition of Western exoticization of Asian cultural difference. Through its technical and prosodic invention, however, Cathay established entirely new formal terms for the poetic representation of Chinese culture and identity in English. Take for example “The Beautiful Toilet”: Blue, blue is the grass about the river And the willows have overfilled the close garden. And within, the mistress, in the midmost of her youth, White, white of face, hesitates, passing the door. Slender, she puts forth a slender hand; And she was a courtezan in the old days, And she has married a sot, Who now goes drunkenly out And leaves her too much alone.50

As Kenner has shown, Pound employs remarkably subtle means to convey the reduplication of the initial characters in the first six lines of the original poem, including the internal rhyme of “willows” and “overfilled” in the second line of his rendering, the assonance of short i sounds in the third, a brief anaphora with “And” in lines two and three, and the split repetition of the word slender in the fourth.51 Moreover, Pound entirely dispenses with rhyme and fixed stress counts, with the second stanza modulating to shorter lines than in the first. In short, the techniques and paradoxical discipline of modernist free verse provide the formal, structuring logic for this poem, as well as, indeed, for all poems throughout the collection. One effect of this achievement has been to make expressly modernist diction and technique in English seem entirely adequate and transparent vehicles for the conveyance of (even ancient and medieval) Chinese cultural and linguistic particularity. Pound himself touted this aspect of his translations when, in an explanatory note appended to the first edition of Cathay, he referred to the contents of the volume as “these unquestionable poems.”52 For him, not even the process of converting them into a contemporary English idiom could render “questionable” in some way these classical Chinese poems.

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By contrast, other translators with stronger scholarly credentials, like Herbert Giles before Pound and Arthur Waley after him, followed conventional academic criteria for semantic and syntactic fidelity in their own renderings, at the expense of formal and rhythmical invention. Thus, Giles not only adhered to Victorian standards of poetic taste (as Fenollosa himself did in his own poetic writings in English) but he also emphasized the strict formalism, including rhyme, of traditional Chinese poetry. His version of the Chinese poem that has become most widely known in English as “The Beautiful Toilet” reads as follows: Green grows the grass upon the bank The willow-shoots are long and lank; A lady in a glistening gown Opens the casement and looks down The roses on her cheek blush bright, Her rounded arm is dazzling white; A singing-girl in early life, And now a careless roué’s wife. . . . Ah, if he does not mind his own, He’ll find some day the bird has flown!53

Comparably, Waley’s rendering of this poem, which was first published in 1918, three years after the appearance of Cathay, attempts to mimic more precisely the syntactic structure of the original. Employing some of the free verse techniques that Pound had already used to such great effect in Cathay, Waley focuses more on the reduplications in the Chinese poem than did Giles: Green, green, The grass by the river-bank. Thick, thick, The willow trees in the garden Sad, sad, The lady in the tower, White, white, Sitting at the casement window. Fair, fair, Her red-powdered face. Small, small, She puts out her pale hand. Once she was a dancing-house girl, Now she is a wandering man’s wife. The wandering man went, but did not return. It is hard alone to keep an empty bed.54

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While each of these treatments exhibits its own structural logic, the dated stiffness of Giles’s version and the stuttering awkwardness of Waley’s help to explain why their renderings have achieved neither an enduring appeal, nor, therefore, canonical status. Indeed, the sheer clarity of their aesthetic limitations in comparison to “The Beautiful Toilet” attest to how thoroughly Cathay has come to define the dominant formal terms for giving poetic articulation to Chinese culture and identity in English. And yet precisely in their failure to achieve canonical status themselves, the formal strategies and signifying protocols employed by Giles and Waley arguably maintain a sense of the foreignness and distance of Chinese culture and identity from contemporary English and American standards and expectations.55 Hence, their more conventionally scholarly approach to the representation (in English) of Chinese linguistic and cultural difference reflects a distinctly exoticist mode of Orientalism, whereas Pound’s more familiarizing Orientalism in Cathay implicitly promotes an assimilationist cultural politics. As a conclusion to this chapter, I want to reflect briefly on some of the broader implications of Cathay’s canonization for the stilldeveloping category of Chinese/American verse in English. Most significant among these, perhaps, the unique combination of expressly “modernist” formal and sonic organization with exotically foreign cultural imagery in Cathay naturalizes or domesticates the ideas of Chinese identity and culture to the rhythms and sonorities of modern poetic English. In the collection, Chinese subjects not only convey affect, but they do so in English, though in an expressly heightened, “poetic” English to be sure. As a result, the collection promotes a view of English itself as a transparent and fully adequate vehicle for articulating Chinese difference, a view that the majority of Asian American writers continue to share in their tendency to operate strictly within the confines of English, even when attempting to convey the particularities of their own respective heritage traditions. Thus, the success of Cathay and its approach to representing Chinese culture and subjectivity has contributed to the rise of our current ideological regime of liberal multiculturalism; and in doing so it has furthermore helped to underwrite the ongoing hegemony of “lyric testimony” within the larger body of Asian American poetic production. In thus eliding the problem of linguistic incommensurability for the process of cultural exchange and representation, Cathay accomplishes a number of things in the context of dominant U.S. politico-cultural discourses about the Chinese. Most straightforwardly, it facilitates the notion of complete communicability across languages and even cultures, thereby implicitly undercutting assertions about the fundamental “inassimilability” of the Chinese to established “American” norms. At the same time, however, precisely by contemporizing through the use of “modernist” diction and

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form poems explicitly identified as ancient and medieval, the collection perpetuates the conception of an unchanging, timeless Chinese cultural “essence.” In this regard, Cathay at once accepts and promotes a sharply ahistorical, even racialist notion of Chinese identity. Moreover, the subsequent canonization of Cathay has not only helped to sanction “lyric testimony” as the primary poetic means for articulating the terms of Asian American cultural subjectivities. In doing so, it has also had the unfortunate consequence of forestalling wider consideration by writers and readers of Asian American poetry alike of the signifying possibilities that arise from the interaction between different languages. This is a particularly ironic situation, given Pound’s attention to precisely this issue in his later engagements with Chinese literary and philosophical texts, as well as in the later Cantos more generally. In making such an assertion, I do not mean to suggest that knowledge of heritage languages constitutes a requirement for ethnicity. But in recognizing how the notion of linguistic transparency that underwrites Cathay has shaped and continues to shape approaches to representing Chinese identity and culture, we can better assess the broader significance of other expressive strategies that depart from the conventions that Pound inaugurated. The sheer magnitude of its status as a canonical work of Anglo-American modernism makes Cathay an important touchstone for any attempt to evaluate the critical and historical significance of attempts by Chinese American writers to articulate the terms of their ethnic and cultural identity. In producing the collection, Pound at once perpetuated and departed from different aspects of existing dominant conceptions about Chinese culture and subjectivity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States and elsewhere. And over the course of the twentieth century, Cathay has in turn become part of that dominant discourse. One major effect of Pound’s work and its success, then, has been to establish, both for modernism and (given racial lumping) for Asian American poetry, a particular set of relationships between form, cultural authenticity, and language. Here, I have not sought to judge the validity of his particular configuration of these relationships so much as simply to note that he places these three things into conversation and establishes a framework in which their interconnections generate the meaning and value of the poem as an expression of social life and of the history of form. The point is not that there is a right way or wrong way, necessarily, to create that arrangement; the point is that since Pound the history of Asian American verse has been structured by the arrangement that he set up, so that to be a Chinese American poet is, de facto, always to be writing in the shadow—not only of Pound’s arrangement, but of the fact that this arrangement is constitutive at all. The poets whose work I read in this book are—with the possible exception of the Angel Island

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poems, which will provide a startling counterexample, both at the moment of their production and at the moment of their consumption by the field of Asian American studies—all engaged in thinking through that relationship, which is a relationship whose implications in the long run are far larger than simply the question of “Chinese”; more broadly, and especially in an immigrant poetic tradition like that of the United States but also in a global poetic tradition that is increasingly multilingual, the question of form’s relation to language and to authenticity (both linguistic and ethnic) is, finally, at the core of how we can understand the work poetry does.

2 Chinese/American Verse in Transnational Perspective Racial Protest and the Poems of Angel Island

I

Composed in virtually total anonymity between 1910 and 1940 mainly by Chinese commoners attempting to enter (mostly unsuccessfully it seems) the United States under the regime of formal exclusion, the poems written on and carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station detention building have occupied an obscurely central place within the field of Asian American studies. Central because, as one of the earliest feats of expressly literary cultural production by people of Asian descent in the United States, they have constituted a crucial milestone for the ongoing attempt to establish a canon of Asian American literature that can boast the authority of historical depth. And obscure since, in their operative medium of written Chinese, the Angel Island poems fall neatly in between the methodological predispositions of two generations of Asian Americanists. On the one hand, those with the ability to read the poems in their original language have tended to ignore developments in literary and cultural theory that might help to clarify their broader significance; on the other hand, more recent, theoretically inclined scholars have simply lacked the necessary linguistic skills to read them at all. Concomitantly, though for an entirely different set of disciplinary and ideological, rather than methodological, reasons, scholars of modern Chinese literature, as well as sinologists more generally, have completely ignored these works of early twentieth-century written Chinese cultural production. Put simply, the Angel Island poems have not been “American” enough (from a monoglot English-language perspective) for

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Asian American literary scholars, and not “Chinese” enough for those engaged in the more traditional discipline of sinology. Consequently, these poems, which in general exhibit a strained adherence at best to classical Chinese poetic principles, have received attention almost exclusively as sociological and historical, rather than literary or cultural, documents.1 Thus, the editors and translators of the first group of these poems collected in the volume, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940, tellingly declare: “The poems are a vivid fragment of Chinese American history and a mirror capturing an image of that past.”2 Similarly, in his renowned history of Asian Americans, Strangers from a Different Shore, Ronald Takaki quotes extensively from these poems as a way to give compelling voice to the experiences of the middle wave of Chinese immigrants entering the United States between 1910 and 1940.3 More than a decade after the initial appearance of Takaki’s seminal work, recent scholars have continued to follow his lead, viewing the Angel Island poems as immediate expressions of personal historical experience. Nayan Shah, for example, has characterized them as part of a “textual historical record” that “offers rare insight into the subjectivity and perspective of the detainees.”4 Likewise, in her discussion of Chinese immigration during the Exclusion Era, Erika Lee summarizes the basic thematic content of the poems, asserting that they “document not only protest but also the futility and folly of the exclusion laws themselves.”5 Even a new effort to uncover and preserve a host of heretofore undocumented poems recently rediscovered on the barrack walls has emphasized historical thematic considerations over literary and formalist ones, with a corresponding approach to language as an undistorted mirror of reality, or as a thoroughly transparent medium for the conveyance of emotion. Thus, as one of the scholars involved with this undertaking emphasizes, “the poems are a part of the historical piece of Angel Island. Our responsibility is to impart the history of the immigrants and their feelings and their hardships.”6 To be sure, such an approach has much to offer, and we can learn a great deal from the Angel Island poems simply by attending to them as sources of important, and often even productively surprising, historical information. Take, for example, the poem printed as the cover illustration to the volume Island, and which was actually carved into the walls of the detention building with a clearly skilled, if not exactly masterful, hand (see figure 2.1): Detained in this wooden house for several tens of days, It is all because of the Mexican exclusion law, which implicates me. It’s a pity heroes have no way of using their powers. I can only await the word so that I can snap Zu’s whip. From now on, I am departing far from this building. All of my fellow villagers are rejoicing with me.

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Figure 2.1. Poem carved into a wall of the Detention Building at the Angel Island Immigration Station

No matter that everything within is Western styled. Even if it is built of jade, it has turned into a cage.7

A few things of genuinely historical significance that stand out in this poem include the second line, which underscores that the United States was not the only Western country to enact racist exclusion laws against Asian immigrants in a benighted attempt to curtail the entry of cheap labor into their country. It also reminds us that Chinese, as well as other Asians, went on to emigrate to and eventually settle in various countries throughout the Americas, including those in Central and South America. In broader disciplinary terms, then, this line points to the need to continue expanding the focus of Asian American studies beyond the strict boundaries of the United States in order to address the experiences and expressions of people of Asian descent throughout the Western Hemisphere, and even elsewhere across the globe. Such a challenge not only represents an enormous area for potential future research but it also constitutes an opportunity to build bridges with other fields of ethnic, and even area, studies based on the solid intellectual foundation of demonstrable historical interaction in other places, rather than just the shared experience of oppression here in the United States, as fundamentally important as that common experience remains for people of

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color even today. Other revealing details include the fourth line, which alludes to a Chinese historical figure, Zu Di (組 逖), from the period of the Western Jin (晉) Dynasty (265–316 a.d.), who gained renown as a fierce, ambitious, and dedicated military strategist.8 This line tells us something, perhaps, about the levels of culture and education of at least some of the Chinese immigrants from this period, as well as about how they saw themselves undertaking a journey of heroic proportions. One estimate posits “at least four to five years of private tutoring”9 as an average, though, as we shall see, both the range in quality of the poems as a whole and the various lexical mistakes they contain suggest considerable variation within this average.10 Finally, the irony expressed in the last two lines of the poem attests to the bitterness of having one’s dreams snuffed out by the cold reality of a racist national immigration policy that sanctioned the imprisonment of a select group of people based primarily on their race and country of origin. Yet for all its proven utility and even necessity, the mainly content-based approach that has thus far dominated discussions of the Angel Island poems overlooks arguably their most distinctive characteristics specifically as verse written in Chinese. And in doing so, it neglects a vital, constitutive dimension of their manifold significance. Consequently, thematic analysis alone of the Angel Island poems simply cannot provide a sufficiently robust account of their historical and cultural logic as the collective articulation of a counterpoetics of Chinese difference developed and given over time in direct response not just to the exclusionary legal and bureaucratic governmental apparatus of immigration that the detainees confronted in their efforts to enter the United States but also, therefore, to the range of popular, political, medical, and other discriminatory discursive formations that helped give rise to and justify that apparatus by successfully connecting Chinese racial and cultural identity with economic, biological, and even moral threats to the health of the nation. Both the logic and the terms of that response, including its distinctive formal qualities, shall be the overarching subject of this chapter. As part of that larger analytical framework, I want also to situate these works in relation to other feats of both dominant and minority cultural production appearing in the United States during the early decades of the twentieth century as a way of challenging established, monolingual (i.e., English-language) conceptions of “Asian American” literature, as well as of “American” literature more generally.11 For at the same time that they simultaneously encode and comprise the response of Chinese immigrants attempting to gain entry into the United States between 1910 and 1940 in their confrontation with the discursive and institutional regime of exclusion, the Angel Island poems also coincide in an uncannily precise way with the traditional period of canonical Anglo-American high modernism. As we saw in the previous chapter, in the initial decade of that thirty-year span, Ezra

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Pound published his renderings of classical Chinese poetry in Cathay, therewith establishing new terms for the representation in English of Chinese culture and identity, at least within the realm of dominant “high” literary verse. And this achievement, in turn, at once participated in and demonstrably helped to instigate a wider undertaking by other social elites, including writers such as T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and Amy Lowell, along with Pound himself, to expand the dimensions of literary expression in English specifically by engaging with other world cultures and especially languages, most notably East Asian traditions such as classical Chinese poetry and philosophy and Japanese Noh drama. Arising out of an entirely different set of material, political, and even geographical circumstances, the Angel Island poems thus reflect a still largely unremarked, obverse side of the explicit internationalism shaping “American” literary culture at the time. Indeed, the startling temporal coincidence between Cathay and the Angel Island poems, combined with the very enormity of their differences, together point not only to the diversity inherent within the category of “American” culture but also to a proportionate increase during the period in the influence of China, through both its human and literary expressions, in the constitution of that diversity.12 Moreover, this period not only marked a new stage in the development of the United States into a world political and cultural power but it also witnessed the emergence of a distinctly American musical form, namely jazz, that has its roots both in the experiences of an oppressed people and in the cultural traditions and practices they brought with them in their movements to another part of the world, as well as in the frequently vexed interactions among these people and traditions with others in their new land of residence.13 In their striking temporal and structural parallels with, as well as in their more readily evident differences from, both the canonical works of dominant, English-language American modernism and the more renowned achievements of African American musical expression during the period, the Angel Island poems comprise an expressly transnational example of literary production by people of Asian descent in the United States.14 And precisely as such, they underscore the need to develop a more complex conception than currently available of both “Asian American” and “American” culture that cuts across entrenched national and linguistic boundaries by addressing the significance of works in languages other than English, as well as by considering their relation to the different cultural traditions they both engage with and confront. Within the terms of the taxonomy of hybridization strategies that I set forth in the introduction, the Angel Island poems constitute a particularly intense form of “transplantation,” one in which entire works in a language other than English serve as a means for articulating a (counter)poetics of difference in response to dominant constructions

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of Chinese racial and cultural identity in the United States. Equally important, when considered against the perhaps more readily expected horizon of “Chinese” cultural history, these poems also demonstrate that not all those who responded in literary terms to the forces of modernity as a “Chinese” (along whatever axes such an identity is conceived) did so from a relatively socially authoritative position of class or educational privilege. By the term transnational, I mean imbedded within and arising through a complex web of political, socioeconomic, and other forces that exert their effects across and between boundaries defined and maintained by different nation-states, even as nation-states have functioned and arguably continue to function as crucial nodes in the (uneven) distribution of those forces in various places around the world. Composed in Chinese, but on avowedly American “soil,” by migrants held in legal detention during their efforts to travel from China to the United States, the Angel Island poems occupy just such a liminal cultural space. In recent years, theories about the phenomenon of globalization and the related effort to rethink the idea of cosmopolitanism have come to offer a powerful conceptual framework for discussing the dynamics of culture as it travels across and in between boundaries traditionally defined by the category of the nation-state. Most notably, perhaps, Arjun Appadurai has offered a spatially based configuration of five different dimensions to address the complexities of contemporary transnational cultural production: The new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order, which cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models (even those which might account for multiple centers and peripheries). Nor is it susceptible to simple models of push and pull (in terms of migration theory), or of surpluses and deficits (as in traditional models of balance of trade), or of consumers and producers (as in most neo-Marxist theories of development). . . . The complexity of the current global [cultural] economy has to do with certain fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture and politics which we have only begun to theorize. I propose that an elementary framework for exploring such disjunctures is to look at the relationship between five dimensions of global cultural flow which can be termed: (a) ethnoscapes; (b) mediascapes; (c) technoscapes; (d) finanscapes; and (e) ideoscapes.15

Structurally comparable to the notion of manifolds in mathematics, Appadurai’s framework defines a multidimensional space within which to map the complex dynamics of contemporary global cultural phenomena. Despite its insistent contemporaneity, however, this model also offers a useful way to approach certain historical events and expressions that reveal their full meaning

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only from the vantage of a rigorously transnational perspective. Within such a framework, the Angel Island poems can be productively understood in broad terms not just as isolated expressions of protest by different anonymous individuals but also as the collective result or trace of large-scale asymmetries in the distribution of resources between, at least, China and the United States within the global economy or world “finanscape.” Precisely as such, moreover, these poems also record changes in at least two distinct, localized “ethnoscapes” by reflecting the movement of a particular group of people to an entirely different geographic and ethnic region of the world. At the same time, they reveal patent inconsistencies and contradictions within the articulated ideology, or “ideoscape,” of the United States as a nation-state and its differentially applied policies of immigration, which stem at least in part from the images, or “mediascape,” connected with Asians (or, to use a more historically relevant term, Orientals) in general, and Chinese in particular at this time. And as for the “technoscape,” the creation of these poems obviously remains grounded in the domain of analog, and even premechanical, rather than digital practices. Yet, as we shall see, various aspects of their language specifically connect them with a particular region in China, even as they only arise at once within and in response to the United States as a geopolitical entity. Accordingly, then, the Angel Island poems in turn indicate the extent to which the process of globalization can be productively understood as a historical, and not just a contemporary, phenomenon. In an endeavor related to that of Appadurai’s, another anthropologist, Aihwa Ong, has proposed the idea of “flexible citizenship” as a way to conceptualize the fluid and diverse strategies of cultural, political, and financial engagement at various sites within “the shifting discursive terrains of the global economy” specifically by members of the Chinese diaspora. Attempting to articulate a framework for examining the political economy of diasporic identities, she defines this notion in the following way: I use the term flexible citizenship to refer especially to the strategies and effects of mobile managers, technocrats, and professionals who seek to both circumvent and benefit from different nation-state regimes by selecting different sites for investments, work, and family relocation.16

Together, these thinkers have successfully helped to define new approaches for research on world-scale movements and activities, especially those by groups or individuals identified in some way as “Chinese.” More particularly, they have established fresh paradigms by which to address the complex meaning of such expressive feats as the Angel Island poems, paradigms going beyond traditional conceptions of international exchange and interaction. At the same time, however, inasmuch as the Angel Island poems represent an early manifestation of a distinctly “transnational” cultural production

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by economically and politically disempowered peoples, various aspects of their manifold significance remain outside the articulated scope of the models of globalization and cosmopolitanism put forth by Appadurai and Ong, respectively. For, despite early disclaimers to the contrary, Appadurai develops his theory as a response to explicitly contemporary phenomena, based on the ostensibly “self-evident” claim that “today’s world involves interactions of a new order and intensity.”17 Yet as I have already suggested, various historical events and expressions only reveal their full import when seen in the light of world-scale interactions between apparently distinct nations and cultural traditions. Thus, Appadurai’s model for global cultural flow can be usefully extended by including an additional temporal dimension in order both to recognize the phenomenon of globalization as also a historical process and to enable consideration of the particular significance of linguistically specific cultural practices such as classical Chinese poetic expression in different contexts around the world. Comparably, Ong focuses exclusive attention on an elite class of Chinese (im)migrants who bring with them in their travels to various parts of the world relatively high levels of human, financial, and cultural capital. More particularly, she attends primarily to the various economic, familial, and political negotiations by these elites specifically as a form of culture. The Angel Island poems, however, not only constitute an expressive achievement that significantly predates the period of Appadurai’s concern and its attendant technological, financial, and other infrastructures. Equally important, they also arise out of the social and cultural circumstances of an entirely different class of people than those capturing Ong’s theoretical imagination. Accordingly, then, I want in what follows to trace through the intricate weave of diverse historical, social, and cultural contexts in both China and the United States against which the Angel Island poems gain their complex significance, as well as to situate them in what I hope will be a provocative relation to other, more familiarly “American” cultural achievements from the same time. Along the way, I also hope to suggest some possibilities for expanding the temporal and socioeconomic range of current approaches to globalization and cosmopolitanism, to show how historical and linguistically particular Asian American literary studies can help complicate or refine models of transnational interactions involving people negotiating between different cultures.

II

Modeled after the renowned Ellis Island in New York, the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay has become (in)famous as the site of entry for, among others, the vast majority of the roughly 175,000 Chinese

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immigrants who entered the United States between 1910 and 1940.18 As Erika Lee has noted, the facility symbolizes the institutionalization of the policy of Chinese exclusion in American immigration law.19 Officially begun with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 and remaining continuously in place through periodic extensions and modifications until its formal repeal in 1943, this policy arose from, depended for its justification upon, and in turn contributed to the larger “Yellow Peril” discourse that dominated late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century constructions of Chinese difference in America.20 Among the many strands of this larger discursive fabric, the trope of biological threat in the form of contagious diseases and filth played an especially important role in the establishment of the Angel Island facility, as well as, indeed, the development of its operational procedures, which in their turn shaped the experiences of immigrants and prompted the poetic responses from detainees. As Nayan Shah has shown in extensive detail, during the nineteenth century, white journalists, anti-Chinese labor organizations, health officials, and other members of dominant society in San Francisco collectively produced a multifaceted discourse that “depicted Chinese immigrants as a filthy and diseased ‘race’ who incubated such incurable conditions as smallpox, syphilis, and bubonic plague and infected white Americans.” More specifically, Shah writes, “In the racial formation of [the] Chinese and Chinatown, medical discourses employed and adapted prevailing political and social discourses of Chinese ‘vice,’ ‘criminality,’ ‘immorality,’ ‘slavery,’ and ‘subversiveness’ and, in turn, informed these popular discourses with the threat of Chinese dirt and disease.” Such depictions led to the institution of medical examinations as a mechanism of exclusion at the Angel Island Immigration Station, particularly for Chinese arrivals. These examinations included visual inspection of naked bodies to discover conditions such as bubonic plague, leprosy, and hernia, eversion of eyelids to detect signs of trachoma, and the collection and examination of stool samples to diagnose parasitic infestations such as hookworm (ankylostomiasis), threadworm (filariasis), and liver fluke (clonorchiasis). Furthermore, as Shah points out, “These medical examinations were part of an emerging worldwide network of quarantine and health inspection that served as the ‘imperial defence’ against the potential invasion of epidemic diseases into metropolitan ports in North America and Europe.”21 Thus, they reflected anxieties about the ostensible dangers stemming from increasing levels of interaction among nations and the attendant movement by different peoples to various parts of the globe during the early twentieth century. Like the discursive and material conditions that they confronted upon their arrival at Angel Island, the journeys undertaken by Chinese immigrants to the United States in this period and earlier were also reactions to

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events and forces operating on a global scale. As a number of historians have already discussed, this immigration came as a response to the worsening economic and political turmoil in China at the time, conditions that themselves arose from the widespread effects of Western imperialism throughout Asia since at least the middle of the nineteenth century.22 With its roots in the establishment of Canton as the major site of Chinese trade with Western countries beginning in the mid-1700s, this imperialism reached perhaps its most visceral and obvious expression in the series of military conflicts between China and various Western powers, including the first Opium War, fought with Great Britain between 1839 and 1842, and the Anglo-Chinese War, waged with the assistance of the French, from 1856 through 1860.23 On a smaller scale, uneven trade relations between China and the West led to increased taxes. In addition, ethnic conflicts between the minority Hakka and majority Han people in the Pearl River Delta region, overpopulation, and various natural disasters exacerbated conditions for residents.24 Early in the twentieth century, a series of political crises produced further economic and political instability, with attempts to restore order under the Qing Empire failing and China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95). As a result, European imperialism in China intensified as different nations took control over more territory and port cities. In 1911, the Chinese Revolution led by Sun Yat-sen held out the hope of improvement, but it failed to achieve any long-term stability. And in the decades that followed, civil conflict between the Nationalist and Communist parties in the late 1920s and another war with Japan in the 1930s continued to create conditions that inspired Chinese to leave their country. On one level, then, such large-scale movement of people constitutes a reaction to the advent of sociopolitical modernity in China. Within Appadurai’s terms, these events comprise the broader “finanscape” against which the Angel Island poems at once signify and gain their greater cultural meaning. In this respect, the social, political, and economic processes and events that gave rise to such migration represent the same forces that contributed to the entire range of indigenous responses to the forces of Western modernization in China, as well as throughout Asia more generally. These include, most notably, perhaps, the renowned May Fourth movement in literature, as well as the other cultural activities now grouped under the general rubric of Chinese modernism.25 But whereas the works of such well-known Chinese modernists as Chen Duxiu (陳獨秀, 1879–1942), Lu Xun (魯 迅, 1881–1936), Yu Dafu (郁 達 夫, 1896–1945), Ding Ling (丁 玲, 1904–86), and others in the metropolitan centers of Beijing and Shanghai embody the cultural production of a socially privileged, highly educated stratum of elite Chinese society, the persons responsible for the poems carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station detention

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buildings came from a considerably different geographical area and socioeconomic group. As Lai, Lim, and Yung note in their introduction to the collected poems, like the vast majority of Chinese immigrants from this period and earlier, “These poets of the exclusion era were largely Cantonese villagers from the Pearl River Delta Region in Guangdong Province in South China.”26 The socio-geographic origins of their authors constitute one of the important contexts, what Appadurai would call part of their “ethnoscape,” for grasping the broader significance of the Angel Island poems. For they indicate a set of both cultural and linguistic (or perhaps more usefully in this case, dialectal) parameters within which the poems operate. And this context, in turn, helps to clarify their relation to both traditional Chinese literature, especially poetry, and other expressly literary texts written in Chinese during roughly the same period. As anyone with knowledge about China and its internal linguistic diversity already recognizes, people originating from Guangdong Province speak as their native tongue various forms of the Yue language, more widely known as the Cantonese dialect. And while the written language remains thoroughly comprehensible across different mutually unintelligible regional vernaculars or dialects, the Angel Island poems contain many colloquialisms and transliterations of English words particular to this form of spoken Chinese.27 For example, in addition to several attributive tags identifying authors from regions in Guangdong (廣 東) Province such as Taishan (台 山) and Xiangshan (香 山), numerous poems include the specifically Cantonese colloquial terms Ai Lun (埃 崙) for Angel Island itself, fan nu (番 奴) for Westerners in general, Tang Shan (唐 山) for China, and Hua Qi (花 旗), or “the land of the flowered banner” for the United States.28 These and other markers of Cantonese situate the Angel Island poems in a slightly different register or channel of articulation from other more famous examples of Chinese literary production from around this time, virtually all of which were grounded in Mandarin, the northern dialect or language that has exerted a pervasive cultural hegemony since at least 1913 when it was established by the Republican government as the national standard.29 Such linguistic or dialectal specificity constitutes one of the several axes along which these poems differ from the established canon of “modernist” Chinese literature, which has focused almost exclusively on cultural production based in urban metropolitan centers. At least indirectly, therefore, the Angel Island poems suggest the need to address broader regional considerations in order to gain a more detailed picture of the full range of literary expression in Chinese during this time. For the people who composed the poems carved into and written on the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station detention building did so partly in response to the same social and

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economic forces of modernity that drove such canonical Chinese modernists as Lu Xun (魯 迅) and others to produce their more widely renowned cultural achievements. Consequently, the dialectal elements of these poems indicate the extent to which the designation “Chinese” itself requires some attention to regional and internal dialectal differences so as to recognize the considerable diversity within such a broad category.30 Such attention, in turn, necessitates further refinement to the conception of “ethnicity” in discussing the movements of peoples and cultural expressions identified under such rubrics to other areas of the globe and their attendant social, political, and historical contexts.31 Likewise, within the terms of Appadurai’s model for global cultural flow, the “ethnoscape” must be recognized as itself a complex space constituted by various dimensions of potentially significant differences. Even more, perhaps, than the geographic origins of their authors, the formal aspects of the Angel Island poems signify their complex cultural meaning as feats of an expressly transnational literary production by politically and economically disempowered peoples. Such concerns matter because of the chosen genres of these poems, which, as I mentioned earlier, attempt to follow the conventions and principles of classical Chinese verse. Lai, Lim, and Yung offer a general accounting of the styles of these poems: All of the poems are written in the classical style [wen yan (文 言)]. Of these, about half are written with four lines per poem and seven characters per line. About a fifth have eight lines per poem and seven characters per line. The remainder consist of verses with six or more than eight lines and five or seven characters per line. There are also a few poems with lines of four characters each, as well as several couplets and one long composition written in the pianwen style (a euphuistic style utilizing parallel-constructed couplets with antithetical meanings), published in a San Francisco Chinese newspaper.32

To expand somewhat on the significance of these chosen styles within the domain of Chinese culture and the meaning of their deployment in this alternative context: all of the poems written by Angel Island detainees represent different types of classical verse forms, among them qiyan jueju (七 言 絕 句) or “seven-character abbreviated verse,” qiyan lushi (七 言 律 詩) or “sevencharacter regulated verse,” gu shi (古 詩) or “ancient verse” and “four syllable verse” patterned after works in the Shi Jing (詩 經) or The Book of Poetry, dating roughly from between the twelfth though the seventh centuries b.c.e. Well before the writing of the Angel Island poems, all of these styles already represented traditional, expressly “high-art” forms, ones with strict rules of composition that have over the course of history come practically to embody

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the very idea of “poetry” in China.33 Consequently, Chinese people of practically all socioeconomic and educational levels would have had some acquaintance with their conventions, though, as we shall see, this familiarity does not imply a mastery of their rules in terms of composition. Some Western codified forms enjoying an even remotely comparable degree of prestige or cultural capital might be the sonnet, the sestina, and the villanelle. In choosing to employ these canonical, highly regulated forms, the Angel Island poets departed in important ways from others writing in Chinese at the time, both in the United States and in China itself. On the one hand, a tradition of vernacular writing about various aspects of the immigration experience already existed among the residents of San Francisco Chinatown and their families in China. In its poetic dimension, this tradition featured various established Cantonese vernacular forms, including folk songs and the genre of rhythmic narrative chants known as muk yu go (木 魚 歌), or “wood-fish songs.”34 Numerous verses of these sorts appeared regularly in different Chinatown newspapers since at least the early part of the twentieth century, as well as in collections compiled in other Chinese-language locations. According to Marlon Hom, the Chinatown daily Chung Sai Yat Po (中 西 日 報) instituted in 1908 “a daily supplement that frequently printed historical writings, prose, fiction, poetry, and popular Cantonese vernacular rhymes and satires.”35 But while they certainly followed specific rules of composition for rhyme and syllabic counts, these vernacular genres operated under much less rigid strictures than those governing the forms chosen by the writers of the Angel Island poems. On the other hand, the elite cultural figures associated with Chinese modernism at the time were vigorously proclaiming these older, traditional poetic forms obsolete, and they sought to find new modes of expression more compatible with specifically “modern” and Western values. For example, in the enormously influential essay, “Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature” (文 學 改 良 芻 議) (1917), Hu Shi (胡 適, 1891–1962) asserted the need to leave behind the entire wen yan (文 言) tradition as an antiquated and culturally retrograde anachronism. He urged instead the adoption of the vernacular, or bai hua (白 話), form of spoken Chinese as the basis for “modern” literary production.36 Taking an even more polemical, even revolutionary, stance, in “On Literary Revolution” (文 學 革 命 論) (1917), Chen Duxiu (陳 獨 秀) laid out “the three great tenets” of the new literary movement: “(1) Down with the ornate, sycophantic literature of the aristocracy; up with the plain, expressive literature of the people! (2) Down with stale, pompous classical literature; up with fresh, sincere realist literature! (3) Down with obscure, abstruse eremitic literature; up with comprehensible, popularized social literature!”37 Taking up Hu’s and Chen’s provocations, Xu Zhimo (徐 志 摩, 1897–1931) employed everyday spoken-language patterns

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as the foundation for developing a new “free-verse” conception of poetry.38 In fact, the ostensibly populist move of adopting the vernacular bai hua (百 話) form of spoken Chinese over the specifically written wen yan (文 言) style as the appropriate medium for literary expression has long been considered one of the defining characteristics, if not the primary defining characteristic, of Chinese modernism.39 Thus, even though they were responding to the same forces of “modernity” and Western influence as their more elite modernist counterparts, the Angel Island poets chose to express themselves through long-established poetic forms, forms that in other circles were considered decidedly outmoded. In part, this decision reflects their relatively lower levels of education and cultural exposure. For it seems entirely possible, and indeed even likely, that the predominantly rural Cantonese villagers immigrating to the United States through Angel Island had no knowledge whatsoever of the various literary innovations promulgated by different movements in Beijing and Shanghai.40 Nevertheless, precisely because these older poetic forms still enjoyed considerable prestige at the time, their use by the Angel Island poets constitutes a form of cultural resistance to the duress of immigration to and subsequent incarceration in America, a defensive response to their confrontation with the ideological landscape of the United States and its attendant legal, bureaucratic, and penal machinery. Indeed, inasmuch as poetry itself long occupied a place of enormous importance within a Chinese cultural hierarchy, as revealed and reinforced by its historical use in the imperial examination system, they might reasonably be said to have epitomized the highest possible expression of Chinese culture as a whole in the minds of these villagers.41 Though almost surely unknown to one another and certainly motivated by a different set of concerns entirely, the Angel Island poets shared with their dominant American modernist counterparts Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound a preference for classical literary forms over developing modernist expressive strategies in Chinese. Accordingly, rather than merely the product of a reactionary aesthetic, these poems represent a culturally conservative response to the experience of confronting the ethnic chauvinism, racism, and blatant cultural condescension that marked the U.S. policy of Chinese exclusion, and that found concrete expression at the time on Angel Island. In fact, they might best be seen as a formally or generically strategic attempt to maintain a proud sense of “Chinese” cultural identity within a decidedly hostile, yet in many ways still economically attractive, environment in which such an identity was systematically devalued. Or to put it in more explicitly theoretical terms, in striving to negotiate the fundamental disjunctures between their experiences of the financial or economic and ideological terrains of the United

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States, these commoner immigrants resorted to expressly traditionalist forms of literary composition. Thus, the Angel Island poems embody a different type of populism than that pursued in the works of Chinese modernism. And in doing so, they indicate the need to broaden the parameters informing the study of literary production in Chinese during this period. Such populism also finds unintended expression in the many “flaws” of composition displayed in these poems, violations of the rules for rhyme and tone distribution, as well as even more basic errors of character usage. While a complete accounting of the numerous departures from the established rules for classical Chinese verse composition in these poems goes beyond the scope of this discussion, it suffices to say that, as a whole, the Angel Island poems exhibit a tremendous range of quality in relation to traditional measures of poetic achievement in Chinese. As the editors note in their introduction, “The style and language of some works indicate that the poets were well-versed in the linguistic intricacies of poetic expression, while others, at best, can only be characterized as sophomoric attempts.”42 For a useful gauge, consider the couplet selected as the winner in a competition held by the Angel Island Immigration Station Historical Advisory Committee and inscribed on a granite monument dedicated in 1979, “to commemorate the immigrants, their endurance, perseverance, and courage” (see figure 2.2). 別井離鄉飄流羈木屋 開天闢地創業在金門 [Parting wells and leaving homes, (they) drifted and floated into confinement in this wooden house; Opening skies and breaking ground (also a phrase used to describe the creation of the world), they founded a livelihood at the Golden Gate] [translation mine]

If this couplet hardly attains to a sublimity of poetic expression, nevertheless, as befits its purpose as a formal commemoration in the manner of a stele,43 it adheres to an orthodox pattern of tone distribution for classical Chinese verse. In addition, it exhibits a strict grammatical parallelism between its two lines, with the first four character phrases in each line following a Verb-Noun-Verb-Noun pattern, a central binomial verb as the next two characters, and a Verb-Adj-Noun pattern for the final three characters. The couplet also achieves a degree of formality and compression by omitting any explicit subjects, as often happens in classical Chinese verse. And if it employs stock phrases as in the first part of the second line, it achieves a certain economy of expression precisely through the use of such phrases.

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Figure 2.2. Commemorative Stele on Angel Island

As an illustrative contrast, poem 28 from the appendix to Island exhibits considerably greater verbal ingenuity, while still demonstrating a strong command of tonal rules, as well as a facility for economy and compression:

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西施盡住黃金屋 泥璧蓬窗獨剩儂 寄語樑間雙燕子 天涯可有好房隆 [A XiShi always lives in a house of yellow gold; Only mud walls and portholes are left for me. I send a message to the paired swallows in the rafters, Perhaps a soaring room awaits me over the horizon.]44

In addition to a clear mastery of tonal rules and a thoroughly orthodox use of rhyme, this poem also achieves an impressive economy through the clever use of a pun based on a historical allusion. The initial two characters of the poem, 西 施, refer to a famous woman of great beauty from the late Spring and Autumn Period (723–484 b.c.e.). Here the allusion serves as an oblique reference to Westerners, and Americans in particular, since the character 西 (xi) denotes the West, and 西 施 (xishi) is a beauty, or 美 人 (meiren), which also happens to be the term for “American,” based on the Chinese term for the United States, 美 國 (meiguo). Other signs of literary erudition include the use of the character 儂 (nong), an expressly classical form of the firstperson singular personal pronoun, which rhymes with the final character of the fourth line. Exhibiting a comparable degree of sophistication and knowledge of the Chinese literary tradition, poem 34 ends with a clever parody of the final line of Wang Han’s (王 翰, exact dates uncertain, but he thrived during the early eighth century) famous Tang Dynasty poem 涼 州 詞 (“Song of Liangzhou”), a work canonized as poem number 267 in the renowned collection 唐 詩 三 百 首(Three Hundred Poems of the Tang).45 A wry lament about the prospect of having to go off to war in the far western reaches of the empire, Wang’s poem concludes with the rhetorical question: 古來征戰幾人回 [Since ancient times, how many people have returned home from waging war?]

Substituting basic synonyms for the initial and final characters of this line, the latter in order to maintain the rhyme scheme for his own poem, the author of poem 34 similarly asks: 從來征戰幾人還 [How many people have ever come back from waging war?]

Such deft allusive play illustrates the higher end of traditional literary skill among the Angel Island poets, and it suggests that, just as the Western steppes represented the “frontier” and zone of contact with uncivilized but

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powerful “barbarians” for the Tang, so in modern times the Pacific and the U.S. shoreline occupy the same position in relation to China. On the other end of the scale, poem 19 from the appendix displays a number of glaring aesthetic limitations. Not only does it fail to adhere in any way even to the most basic principles of tone distribution and rhyme but this work also lacks a traditional structural symmetry in that it features only one semantically paired couplet comprising the middle two lines, rather than the first and second and then the third and fourth lines forming two matched couplets that balance each other. Moreover, it employs relatively casual diction, overt affective statement, and explicit declaration of the speaking subject through pronominals (i.e., 自 己 and 我), rather than classically compressed language and suggestion, to convey its distraught feelings of isolation and misery: 自 己 想 來 真 苦 楚; 蒼 天 今 日 因 如 何, 困 我 鄙 人 在 木 樓? 音 信 無 跡 實 難 過. [I think to myself, “This is really miserable; For what reason does the blue sky today Imprison me, this humble person, in a wooden building?” Without a trace of news, it is truly hard to bear.]46

The loose rhythm, informal tone, and attendant prolixity here at once clearly derive from and more closely follow the conventions of a spoken vernacular, rather than the rigid, compressed ones of the expressly written wen yan (文 言) tradition. In fact, the spoken qualities of its syntax, diction, and stichic organization stand in marked tension with the staid formality of the highly canonical form of the poem. More than simply signifying its limited aesthetic achievement, however, that tension highlights the tremendous compensatory value placed upon the very form of the poem by the writer in his deliberate choice of it as the means through which to voice his sentiments. In addition to displaying such a tremendous range of skill in relation to traditional standards of literary quality in Chinese, the Angel Island poems also exhibit a variety of problems in the more basic arena of character usage. The editors of the volume have painstakingly sought to correct as many “errors” as possible in the printed version of these poems, in order that their significance as historical documents can more easily be appreciated and apprehended. Yet as Yunte Huang has rightly argued, such “mistakes” themselves remain a fundamental aspect of their larger cultural meaning, as well as a key to their particular expressive logic. Moreover, in their zeal to normalize the language of the Angel Island poems, the editors have in some instances gone arguably too far, offering “corrections” that obscure the kind

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of “historical” information they sought to preserve. So, for example, in the seventh line of poem 24 from the appendix, the editors give the corrected line as 嗰 啲 利 息 重 重 叠, which they translate as “The interest piles one on top of another.” In the original, however, the first two characters read 哥 的, which have the same pronunciation as the ostensibly more “correct” replacement characters, but with the resultant change in the semantic meaning of the line, “Older brother’s debts pile up one on top of the other.” The meaning of the original line accords with what we already know about the economics of emigration from China to the United States at this time, namely that older family members often took loans to finance the voyages of siblings or other relatives. Consequently, the original line offers an entirely plausible historical scenario that the editors have obscured through their “corrections.”47 Hardly a crucial matter in and of itself, I mention this problematic emendation not to criticize the editors of Island, who have done a tremendous service in bringing these poems into print and normalizing their language. Rather I have drawn attention to such an example simply to underscore that, when read through a grid defined by a motive other than that of grammatical regularization, the various “mistakes” or “errors” contained in the original poems themselves take on a meaningful significance. Most important, a significant number of these “mistakes” constitute the use of incorrect characters in place of ones with the exact same, or at least phonetically similar, pronunciation, though with different radical components to indicate an entirely different semantic meaning. For example, in the second line of poem 4 of the collection, the author originally used the character 椎 (zhui in Mandarin), meaning “hammer” or “mallet,” instead of 錐 (also zhui in Mandarin), meaning “awl,” which is required in the phrase 錐 股 (zhuigu) that alludes to Su Qin (蘇 秦), the scholar of the Warring States Period (403–321 b.c.e.) who sought to make himself study diligently throughout the night by devising a contraption that would drive an awl into his thigh whenever he began to fall asleep. The phrase itself has come to mean metaphorically “to study with great diligence and determination.” A pragmatic equivalent in English might be to “keep one’s nose to the grindstone.” Likewise, in poem 13, the original concluding line included the character 椅 (yi in Mandarin), meaning “chair,” which the editors have corrected to the character 倚 (also yi in Mandarin), meaning “to lean on or against,” in order to make the final phrase 倚 窗 邊 (“lean beside the window”) grammatically comprehensible. Similarly, in poem 36, the original author used the character 掉 (diao), meaning “to turn” or “to move” or “to fall,” instead of the character 棹 (zhao), meaning “oar,” which completes the binomial phrase 買 棹 (maizhao), which means “to hire a boat for a journey.” Comparable mistakes in English would be the use of “their” in place of either “there” or “they’re,” or the substitution

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of “wait” for “weight.” Similar instances occur in poems 21, 57, and 68, as well as in appendix poem 7, while simpler errors in the form of mistaken characters appears in poems 3, 24, 44 (which merely employs an alternative form of the character 佔), and 63. Considered through a motive besides that of grammatical normalization, these and other similar errors represent an important dimension along which the Angel Island poems as a whole convey their complex cultural meaning. For whereas the many violations of classical rules for rhyme and tone distribution constitute mistakes of a fairly high order, ones undoubtedly stemming at least in part from an understandable lack of rhyme books and other such reference material, these errors reflect a more basic limitation, demonstrating an incomplete grasp on the part of their authors of written Chinese and its complexities. The various linguistic idiosyncrasies of these poems, then, collectively suggest a significantly oral (or perhaps more accurately, an aural) dimension in the process of composition, which in turn underscores the relatively nonelite status of their authors. Hence, these poems embody a distinctively cultural attempt by commoners immigrating to the United States from China, driven by the political and economic forces of modernity, to negotiate the trauma of entering a new social formation in which they no longer constituted an ethnic or cultural majority, but rather occupied a distinctly inferior position within a racialized hierarchy. And in doing so, the Angel Island poems at once attest to, and illustrate the importance of, verse as a cultural and social practice in providing a means for even relatively uneducated people of Chinese descent in the United States to assert a counterpoetics of Chinese difference in response to their confrontations with the discursive and bureaucratic regimes of American racial discrimination, including the machinery of Chinese exclusion. As one of the Angel Island poets tellingly laments: 日處埃崙不自由 蕭然身世混監囚 牢騷滿腹憑詩寫 [Many days on Island without freedom; Living in loneliness and desperation, thrown in amongst prisoners; Grievances filling my belly; I rely on poetry writing (to express them).]48

III

Up to this point, I have focused on the various overlapping Chinese historical and cultural contexts in relation to which the Angel Island poems gain part of their meaning. In some ways, this might seem merely to belabor the

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obvious, demonstrating the extent to which these works are “Chinese.” After all, what could make something any more “Chinese” than being composed in Chinese written characters and operating within the parameters of Chinese grammar? But the significance of these poems goes beyond the limits of any single national or cultural designation, even if they function semantically within the terms of a particular identifiable, though still multiply determined, language. For as any number of the Angel Island poems make abundantly clear, the United States both as a desired ideal and as an actual geopolitical entity remains fundamental to the production of these works, constituting all at once the immediate occasion or cause and site of their composition, as well as an important thematic location in the expression of their sentiments. Thus, as one poet writes: 千 愁 萬 恨 燃 眉 間; 望 登 美 洲 難 上 難. 番 奴 把 我 囚 困 此; 列 士 英 雄 亦 失 顏. [A thousand sorrows and ten thousand hatreds burn between my brows; Hoping to alight on the American continent is the hardest of hardships. The barbarians have imprisoned me here; Even a martyr or hero would lose his demeanor.]49

A poem such as this one makes especially apparent the limitations of Ong’s otherwise useful notion of “flexible citizenship” for conceptualizing expressly transnational or global cultural production. For it is precisely the category of “citizenship” to which these members of the Chinese diaspora, along with other Asians, had no access due to the codification of racial discrimination in U.S. immigration and naturalization law at the time. Furthermore, because of their straitened capital circumstances, they also lacked the capacity for any sort of additional economic or geographic “flexibility.” In other words, Ong’s notion depends upon a considerable degree of economic, social, and political privilege that simply does not apply for people throughout a significant range of different historical circumstances, most notably those surrounding the entry of the vast majority of Asians into the United States before 1952, when the McCarran-Walter Act nullified the racial restriction of the earlier 1790 naturalization law, which had reserved naturalized citizenship for “whites” only. As I discussed in the introduction, it was this early provision that created the legal necessity, as well as the opportunity, of articulating and repeatedly reconfiguring a poetics of difference for various racialized minority groups in the United States as a way to justify and maintain ongoing discrimination and white domination. In compiling and editing their collection, Lai, Lim, and Yung have grouped the Angel Island poems under five broad rubrics that identify their

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basic thematic concerns: “The Voyage,” “The Detainment,” “The Weak Shall Conquer,” “About Westerners,” and “Deportees, Transients.” Reflecting the emphasis of the editors on the importance of these works primarily as historical documentary evidence, this retrospectively conceived arrangement effectively highlights the different aspects of the immigration experience addressed in the Angel Island poems. In doing so, such an organization also indicates the specifically American conditions of their genesis. Moreover, recent historical scholarship tracing both the transnational dynamics and the domestic impact of immigration from China to the United States during the early twentieth century underscores the significance of the Angel Island poems as a collective response to the discriminatory poetics of Chinese racial and cultural identity that underwrote the American immigration system and its policy of Chinese exclusion. The recent historical accounts of Chinese immigration to the United States by Hsu, Shah, and Lee, respectively, have each discussed at varying levels of detail how, in the ongoing effort to enforce the policy of Chinese exclusion, federal Bureau of Immigration officials developed a variety of measures such as physical examinations, interrogations, and detentions designed to separate Chinese seeking to enter the country illegally from those who enjoyed “exempt” status under the terms of the original Chinese Exclusion Act passed in 1882 and its subsequent modifications.50 These so-called exempt classes included merchants, students, diplomats, and travelers, as well as, following successful court challenges to the terms of the original law, American citizens of Chinese descent and the wives and children of merchants.51 Importantly, however, official Bureau of Immigration regulations dictated that Chinese were to be considered “excludable until they could be proven otherwise.”52 Furthermore, the pervasive practice among Chinese immigrants of forging papers to claim citizenship that developed after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed all municipal records documenting the status of Chinese residents of the city not only reinforced established stereotypes about Chinese “treachery” but it also provided further justification for the presumption of excludability codified in bureau regulations and assumed by officials. Consequently, as Erika Lee has noted, the procedures employed by immigration officials, guided by the principle of exclusion rather than admission, “served as subsequent exclusion acts that further restricted Chinese immigration.”53 Thus, an entire bureaucratic apparatus premised on and operating through a hermeneutic of doubt confronted the Angel Island poets regarding their assertions of identity in attempting to gain entry to the United States. In fact, given the specific site of their inscription on the walls of the detention barracks, where individuals were confined for periods of up to two years as they awaited deportation depending on the final outcome of their cases, these poems embody the responses of a group of Chinese people whose claims to identity were actively challenged.

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Together, these conditions comprise the immediate discursive and material scenario for the composition of the Angel Island poems. As responses to a confrontation with the discriminatory regime of American immigration and its underlying poetics of Chinese racial and cultural identity, the Angel Island poems adopt a variety of rhetorical postures. These include simple declarations of emotion: 牢 騷 滿 腹 甚 難 休, 默 默 沉 沉 祇 自 憂. 時 望 山 前 雲 霧 鎖, 恰 似 更 加 一 點 愁. [Discontent fills my belly, profoundly difficult to rest, I can only worry silently and deeply to myself. At times I look to the mountain front locked in cloud and fog, Which only seems to add yet another bit of sadness.]54

sententious admonitions directed at fellow detainees to retain hope in the face of their adversity, typically either by remembering past heroes who also encountered hardships or by envisioning a future in which they could enjoy a position of privilege and even power: 特 勸 同 胞 不 可 憂; 只 須 記 取 困 木 樓. 他 日 合 羣 興 邦 後; 自 將 個 樣 還 美 洲. [I especially urge my compatriots not to worry; We need only to remember the hardships of the wooden building. One day after we have united the masses to uplift our nation; Then we can repay in kind to America.]55

and determined expressions of protest against the treatment endured at the hands of immigration officials, who serve as synecdoches for the United States government, as well as America as a whole: 詳 恨 番 奴 不 奉 公, 頻 施 苛 例 逞 英 雄. 凌 虐 華 橋 兼 背 約, 百 般 專 制 驗 勾 蟲. [I completely hate the barbarians, they do not respect justice, Constantly passing harsh laws to show off their heroism. Cruel and insulting to overseas Chinese, they back out of treaties, With a hundred sorts of tyrannies, they examine for hookworm.]56

Correspondingly, the governing tone of different individual poems ranges from despair and nostalgia for the conditions of life as they existed before

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emigration, to resigned acceptance of the author’s currently diminished fortunes, to anxiety and indignant outrage against the aff ronts suffered by detainees. These features together indicate yet another way in which the Angel Island poems expressly work to counter the discriminatory conceptions of Chinese identity that inspired and underwrote the American immigration system and its practices of exclusion. For, in direct contradiction to existing dominant views in the United States, these poems declare repeatedly, if neither publicly nor always skillfully, the existence of affect, cultural refinement, and distinctive individuality among the Chinese. Indeed, for all the sense of technical detachment implied by the choice of traditional, highly canonical forms by the Angel Island poets, the very absence of skill displayed in the poems themselves frequently makes for particularly overt, sometimes even violent, assertions of individual identity, as in the use of abundant vernacular personal pronouns57 or the assumption of a stance of protest. In addition, a number of poets asserted their identities through expressions of affiliation to family clan, home village, native region, and, not infrequently, even China itself as a nation. Thus, employing several of these strategies, one of them writes, 黃 家 子 弟 本 香 城, 挺 身 投 筆 赴 美 京. 買 棹58 到 了 金 山 地, 誰 知 撥 我 過 埃 崙. 我 國 圖 强 無 此 樣, 船 泊 岸 邊 直 可 登. 民國十三廿肆晨 逍遙子鐵城閒筆 [A child of the Huang family originally from Xiangcheng, I raised my body, threw away my brush, and pushed on to the American capital. Purchasing an oar, arriving at the land of Gold Mountain, Who knew they would transfer me across to Island? If my country had planned to be strong, it would not have been this way, And when the ship anchored we could have alit directly on shore. Dawn of the 20th, 13th year of the Republic From the Idle brush of a Wanderer from Iron Town]59

As these and numerous other examples amply show, none of the Angel Island poets regarded themselves as “American” in any way. Such a sentiment would have been all but impossible given the institutional prejudice they faced as a condition of their arrival. Nevertheless, they did possess a sense of their lives as determined by larger political and economic forces

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then shaping the world, forces defined by and channeled through various nation-state regimes and their existing relations of power; and this marks the Angel Island poems as early manifestations of a global cultural dynamic. Indeed, a number of the poets explicitly connect their desire to enter the United States and the treatment they received upon arrival to the fate of their home country. So one of them laments, 為 乜 來 由 要 坐 監/ 祇 緣 國 弱 家 貧 [“For what reason must I sit in prison?/Merely because my country is weak and my family poor”]; and another ends his poem upon a similar note of complaint, 國 弱 華 人/ 嘆 不 自 由 [“Chinese people of a weakened nation,/can only sigh at not being free”]. Comparably, the writer quoted previously who declared his reliance on verse to endure his ordeal gives voice to the same idea, though in a rather more elaborate fashion, which conveys a sense of the enormous range of skill and tone throughout the body of these poems: 理 悟 盈 虛 因 國 弱; 道 參 消 長 為 富 求. 閒 來 別 有 疏 狂 想; 得 允 西 番 登 美 洲. [I have awakened to laws of gain and loss because my country is weak: I have realized rules of decay and growth since I sought after wealth. In idle moments, I have another sort of wild, crazy thought: That I have gained consent of the western barbarians to alight in America.]60

And still others expressed anger and exhortation as they looked to the future and dreamed of a different fate for themselves and for their home country in a reconfigured arrangement of world power: 倘 若 得 志 成 功 日/ 定 斬 胡 人 草 不 留 (“If the day comes that I win success and complete my mission,/I will definitely mow down these savages and not even spare the grass.”); or even more openly militant: 特 勸 同 胞 不 可 憂; 雖 然 被 困 在 木 樓. 他 日 中 華 興 轉 後; 擅 用 炸 彈 滅 美 洲. [I strongly urge you, my compatriots, not to worry; Even though you’ve been imprisoned in this wooden building. On that day after China arises and turns around, She will without permission use bombs to annihilate America.]61

Such hortatory strains run throughout the body of the Angel Island poems, making it clear that many individual writers had in mind as their principle audience both fellow and future detainees. And this expressly

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social quality in turn reveals a crucially performative dimension to these poems, one registered in the material conditions of their production. Here, their inscription on the walls of the detention building connects with the time-honored literati tradition in China of tibishi (題 璧 詩), or poems written on walls, which, as Judith Zeitlin has discussed, “first emerged as a sub-genre during the Six Dynasties but really only came into vogue during the Tang dynasty” (74).62 Moreover, the expressly nationalist sentiments marking so many of these poems demonstrate the capacity (or perhaps function) of nationalism itself to serve as a primarily defensive strategy for shoring up the terms of a cultural identity in response to systematic discrimination and naked displays of power that have their roots in world-scale political and economic asymmetries.63 In addition, as the editors point out, “The poets borrowed liberally from one another, repeating each other’s phrases and allusions. . . . There are also indications that some poems might have been written by one person and revised by another at some later date.”64 In fact, a few poems even comment explicitly on the abundance of verses already inscribed on the barrack walls, drawing inspiration from them and, in turn, offering their own words of advice: 璧 墻 題 詠 萬 千 千, 盡 皆 怨 語 及 愁 言. 若 卸 此 牢 升 騰 日, 要 憶 當 年 有 個 編. 日 用 所 需 宜 省 儉, 無 為 奢 侈 誤 青 年. 幸 我 同 胞 牢 繄65 念, 得此微利早回旋 [Written on the walls, thousands upon thousands upon ten thousand poems, All of them statements of sadness and words of complaint. The day I am rid of this jail and attain prosperity, I must remember the year of this chapter. In my daily requirements, I must be frugal, Needless luxury leads youths astray. All my compatriots please must thou rememberest, Once you achieve a small profit, return soon.]66

These facts cast the Angel Island poems as a substantially collective achievement, one that not only conveys the private experiences of different beset individuals but that also stands as a potential model for collaborative cultural endeavor. And this collaborative dimension, in turn, distinguishes the Angel Island poems from virtually all of contemporary Asian American poetic, and indeed more broadly literary production, which remains premised

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on a conception of poetry as the unique expression of a private self, or in other words, on an individualistic notion of authorship. Such a view underwrites, for example, not only the work of testimonial poets writing today like Li-Young Lee but also even the efforts of those like David Mura, Marilyn Chin, and John Yau, who, in the words of George Uba, recognize “problematics of language and event both as a way of approaching identity and of renouncing its stability.”67 In reflecting, and perhaps even modeling, a collective cultural enterprise, the Angel Island poems remain a vital literary achievement, their various linguistic challenges and traditional aesthetic limitations notwithstanding. For they offer a glimpse into the possibilities of a mutually inspiring and supportive cultural production in which different individual voices explicitly address and respond to one another, combining to produce a collective significance that goes beyond the limitations of a singular perspective or lone point of articulation. Ultimately, this collaborative dimension, along with the performative impulse behind both the admonitory rhetoric and the actual writing of the Angel Island poems suggests a kind of structural parallel between the Angel Island poems and another distinctively “American” cultural tradition or practice that emerged and established itself during this period, namely that of jazz, and it arguably provides a better rationale than sheer historical facticity for maintaining their continued importance within the arena of our contemporary culture. If a comparison between the Angel Island poems and the more familiarly “American” tradition of jazz seems too contrived, let me be clear in saying that I do not assert any kind of actual historical relationship of influence or communication between these two types of cultural expression that appeared in the United States in the early years of the twentieth century. Obviously, the relative physical and cultural isolation of the Angel Island poets, and indeed of Asian immigrants to the United States during this period generally, together with the geographic origins and movement of jazz at this time from New Orleans to Chicago and then first toward the eastern regions of the country, make the claim to any sort of direct or even intentional connection between the two, at the very best, highly speculative. At the level of expressive structure, however, the Angel Island poems exhibit a range of features generally associated with jazz (especially in its historical and formal connection with the “blues”) as a distinctively “American” cultural practice. Like jazz, the Angel Island poems as a group feature different individual voices frequently in direct conversation or reaction to one another across both space and time. Consequently, they also contain a significantly improvisatory element, taking previously articulated themes or figures and adapting them to different individual situations. In addition, like so much of blues-related jazz, they at once arise out of and explicitly address

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specifically political concerns and the desire for social justice. Moreover, the Angel Island poems embody an expressly demotic or popular cultural production, one that employs traditional “high-art” forms in an entirely new setting and to a distinctive purpose. In their manifold cultural negotiations, then, the Angel Island poems indicate the need to enrich our discussion of so-called “ethnic” literature both through expressly comparative cultural analysis, as well as by further particularizing the theoretical terms of ethnic culture itself.

IV

Insofar as their particular idiom brings expressly dialectal and aural conditions to bear on an intensely written cultural tradition to produce a curiously mixed language, the Angel Island poems map an aesthetic economy comparable to that of jazz during its early development in that they deploy foreign traditional cultural forms in an expressly “American” setting, and in the process transform the terms of their social and cultural meaning. Pushing this admittedly rough syllogism somewhat, we can in turn perhaps usefully consider the development of jazz itself as an early instance of culture that came into being as a result of forces operating on a global scale. After all, like the Angel Island poems, early jazz too arose out of the migration, deployment, and adaptation of culturally specific musical traditions and forms by people facing systematic oppression and exploitation due to the physical displacement caused by complex, world-scale economic and cultural interactions, or in other words out of dynamics fundamental to conditions accompanying the global spread of modernity. The promise of such a structural parallel finds contemporary fulfillment, moreover, in recent achievements by Asian American artists operating in different expressive media. Thus, for example, well-known Japanese American poet Lawson Inada has pursued a sustained engagement with jazz as a foundation for his own expressly ethnic poetics, citing this musical tradition/practice as his strongest influence. More specifically, in his Legends from Camp (1992), a volume of poems that, in the words of Juliana Chang, “inscribes Japanese American racial subject formation in the trauma of wartime internment,” Inada undertakes both a thematic and a formal exploration of jazz history and the possibilities of its musical style so as to “work to redress the pain of racial trauma by enacting an alternative to the dominant time of the nation.” “Inada’s poetics of repetition and improvisation,” Chang further argues, “enable restagings and reworkings of a troubled past, and his poetics of syncopation enact the rhythm and status of the racially marginalized subject as outside of standard

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national historic time.”68 Notwithstanding the tremendous differences in historical subject, operative language, and cultural heritage between the Angel Island poets and Inada, Inada’s jazz-inspired poetry about Japanese American internment during World War II helps to validate the link between the Angel Island poems and jazz as structurally parallel responses to the trauma of racialized minoritization. Moreover, Chang’s provocative insight into the disjunctive temporality of Inada’s verse offers a way in turn to understand the pervasive concern with time throughout so many of the Angel Island poems as something more than just documentary evidence. Instead, whether marking the length of detainment, or the moment of composition according to either the lunar calendar or the founding of the Chinese republic, the Angel Island poems also display the traces of a clash between two distinct national and cultural temporalities.69 In addition to Inada’s jazz-inspired poetics, the recent growth of a new form of jazz that explicitly incorporates various elements from different specific Asian musical traditions also elaborates a parallel between the classical Chinese poems of Angel Island poems and jazz as transnational cultural expressions. Works by such composers and musicians as Francis Wong, Fred Ho, Jon Jang, and Vijay Iyer, among others, have helped to extend the boundaries of this ostensibly prototypical “American” idiom even further by reformulating the terms under which it explores new possibilities through an engagement with other musical styles, forms, and traditions. And just as jazz practices have continued to evolve over time, so the Angel Island poems also continue to inspire new achievements and to expand the range of “American” cultural expression. In Island: Immigration Suite No. 1, pianist and composer Jon Jang has created (and performed) an extended composition that memorializes the experiences and efforts of the Angel Island poets and other immigrants who passed through the immigration station. Organized into five movements, the piece expressly cuts across a range of conventional cultural boundaries. At the basic level of instrumentation alone, Jang’s Island: Immigration Suite No. 1 employs such traditional Chinese instruments as the pipa (a four-stringed vertical lute), the zhonghu and erhu (both two-stringed instruments bowed in the manner of a fiddle), the guanzi (a double-reed bamboo flute), and various percussion instruments such as cymbals, together with the standard “Western” instruments piano, tenor and soprano saxophones, English horn, alto flute, and even a cello. Moreover, the piece includes blues-inflected spoken word recitations by Chinese American poet Genny Lim (not coincidentally, perhaps, one of the editors of the Island collection). Lim also plays a Tibetan “singing” bowl and a dhamaru, in addition to reciting two of her own poems and two poems from the Angel Island collection translated into English. 70 Structurally, jazz devices such as calland-response, variable tempo, and improvisational segments complement

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and complicate established Chinese musical forms. So, for example, based on naamyam, a Cantonese narrative song form, the first movement, “Burial Mound,” opens with a pentatonic melody played by the zhonghu lead and accompanied by pipa, guanzi, and clopping percussion that explicitly invokes Cantonese musical style. After approximately thirty-six measures, at one minute fifteen seconds, a solo tenor saxophone enters, playing a lyrical blues variation of the original melody, and Lim recites her titular poem. At three minutes ten seconds, the original trotting melody returns, this time played on both zhonghu and tenor saxophone, and Lim again recites her poem, but more lyrically, adapting her intonations to the tonal modulations of the original pentatonic melody. The second movement, “First Interlude/Yellow Woman,” combines a Western dissonant melodic line and improvisation on piano and tenor saxophone with Chinese instrumental accompaniment. It then moves into a dirgelike section featuring both erhu and piano as accompaniment for Lim, who chants her poem, “Yellow Woman,” in which she constructs an ethnic heritage by connecting herself to previous immigrants and the various occupations they filled, therewith exemplifying the logic of the mode of Asian American verse that I have called lyric testimony: I am the daughter of seafarers, gold miners, quartz miners railroad workers, farmworkers garment workers, factory workers restaurant workers, laundry man houseboys, maids, scholars rebels, gamblers, poets paper sons. . . . 71

The remaining movements attempt to develop a distinctive musical idiom through similar combinatory strategies, and the suite as a whole insistently explores different techniques for bringing together two distinctive musical cultures in order to achieve cross-cultural expression. Indeed, such an interest constitutes a persistent strand throughout Jang’s overall career. As he himself declares in the liner notes to the work, “Tiananmen!72 used Chinese sorrow songs within the context of post-modern jazz/improvisational music. Island represents a transitional period for me where post-modern jazz/ improvisational music is put into a Chinese musical context.” Unfortunately, it goes beyond the scope of this chapter to offer a detailed discussion of the rest of Island: Immigration Suite No. 1, and so it remains for others both to assess the significance of Jang’s own description of his approach to bridging Asian musical and jazz traditions, as well as to analyze the formal mechanisms throughout the remainder of the composition. Nonetheless, Jang’s work in Island: Immigration Suite No. 1 underscores how the Angel Island

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poems represent not just a historical, but a living part of Asian American (which is to say significantly transnational and transpacific) culture, demonstrating how these literary works by immigrant Cantonese commoners from the Pearl River Delta remain a vital cultural force, inspiring new feats of Asian American cultural production, despite the assumptions and methodological challenges that have limited our understanding of them.

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Interchapter From the Language of Race to the Poetics of Ethnicity: The Rise of Asian American Verse

While the Angel Island poems have successfully gained recognition as an important milestone within the ongoing effort to delineate an Asian American literary canon, not insignificantly, they only came to a decidedly belated public visibility almost two decades after the heyday of the Asian American movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s. They did so, moreover, as a direct result of what Josephine Park rightly calls the “project of cultural reclamation”1 inspired by the movement, which aimed at establishing through recovery a previously ignored (or suppressed) textual tradition by racialized writers of Asian descent in the United States. Along with the varied poetry of Japanese internment that has been their sad companion in this sustained scholarly effort, the Angel Island poems exemplify in especially transpacific fashion the logic of what I have called racial protest. And as such, they testify to the enduring legacy of an earlier phase in the historical development of verse by people of Asian (and especially Chinese) descent in the United States. At the same time, however, their distinctive linguistic and formal specificity also signal the magnitude of our present distance from the ideological, cultural, and even material conditions of that earlier phase by standing out in stark relief against the current hegemony of lyric testimony within the contemporary discursive terrain of Asian American poetry in its current academic and more popular formations. The establishment and growth of this distance has taken place alongside a larger historical shift from the regime of formal exclusion to our current reigning ideology of liberal multiculturalism. Crucially, this broader transformation has itself been accompanied and enabled by a corresponding movement from the language of race to the poetics of ethnicity within the wider discourse 95

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about Asian and specifically Chinese “difference” in the United States. And this development, in turn, represents a vital context for more fully apprehending the significance of the transition from racial protest to the rise of lyric testimony within the history of Asian American verse production. Ironically, perhaps, despite its generative conceptual and practical role in the establishment and subsequent dissemination of the very idea of “Asian American culture” during the late 1960s and afterward, very little poetry by those who would come retrospectively to be grouped under the rubric of “Asian American” actually ever achieved broadly available public circulation prior to the advent of the Asian American movement itself. In fact, probably the most notable (and noticeable) feature of published verse (in English) by people of Asian descent in the United States before 1970 is its stark paucity. According to the systematic bibliography of Asian American literature compiled by King-Kok Cheung and Stan Yogi, as well as to the additional information presented in Juliana Chang’s Quiet Fire, only a very few books of verse by racialized writers of Asian heritage in North America managed to attain publication of any sort prior to the formal assertion of the expressly pan-ethnic designation “Asian American” as a politico-social identity category.2 Japanese Americans, for example, produced a mere twenty-eight volumes of poetry by an individual author from the years 1897 to 1970. Of these, fully ten were written by Yone Noguchi alone between 1897 and 1926, and five by [Carl] Sadakichi Hartmann from 1904 to 1926. Additionally, the Japanese Canadian writers Joy Kogawa and Roy Kiyooka together account for four more volumes within the larger body of twenty-eight appearing before 1970. Furthermore, five of the twenty-eight volumes were either self-published or privately printed, and three were published in Japan, leaving a total of only seven books of verse by poets other than Noguchi and Hartmann that appeared under the imprint of a commercial publishing house in the United States. Comparably, Filipino Americans published a total of eighteen volumes of poetry in English between 1932 and 1967, with eight of these by José García Villa, three by Carlos Bulosan, two by Epifanio San Juan Jr., and two by Marcelo de Gracia Concepción. Moreover, eight of these eighteen volumes were published in the Philippines, with only ten brought out by U.S. firms, including such notables as Putnam’s, Viking, and New Directions. No books of poetry by Korean Americans appeared before 1972, the earliest documented example being Willyce Kim’s volume Eating Artichokes, brought out that year by the Women’s Press Collective based in Oakland, California. By contrast, writers of South Asian heritage in North America managed to publish a dozen poetry volumes in the period before 1970, though only one of these, G. S. Sharat Chandra’s Will This Forest, appeared originally in the United States. The remaining volumes were published by concerns based in

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India, England, or Canada. Finally, and most directly relevant to my concerns in this study, the total published work in English by Chinese American poets before 1970 amounts to only ten books of verse, with at least one, H. T. Tsiang’s Poems of the Chinese Revolution, privately printed in 1929, and two by the Chinese Canadian writer Fred Wah. At the most basic level, of course, these publication statistics, as well as the differential among them, simply reflect in broad terms the respective historical conditions of immigration to the United States and other places in North America faced by the various particular ethno-racial groups from Asia that together comprise the larger pan-ethnic category “Asian American.” The relative success at achieving publication by writers of Japanese heritage, along with the existence of prolific figures such as Noguchi and Hartmann, together arguably stem at least in part from the comparatively better perception of Japanese immigrants and Japanese culture in the United States during the late nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. And these circumstances themselves in turn derived from the higher stature of Japan in relation to other Asian nations within the international political arena during that same period.3 Similarly, the perhaps surprising number of publications by Filipino Americans and the accomplishments of writers such as Villa and Bulosan during the middle decades of the twentieth century register in combination some of the consequences of the U.S. colonization of the Philippines beginning in 1898 and the subsequent relegation of Filipinos to a liminal sociopolitical status as “U.S. nationals.”4 Not surprisingly, the relatively late arrival to the United States by Koreans in any significant numbers helps to explain the complete absence of published verse by Korean Americans before 1972; likewise, the legacy of British colonialism throughout South Asia provides an obvious reason why writers of South Asian descent in North America before 1970 found publication exclusively either in England or in the former British colonies Canada and India. And lastly, the startling lack of substantial poetic publication in English by Chinese Americans before 1970, a mild surprise given the historical existence of a sizable Chinese population in the United States since at least the middle of the nineteenth century, testifies to the cultural effects of an enduring and specifically directed policy of Chinese exclusion. In short, then, the general scarcity of published verse in English by racialized people of Asian descent in the United States before the emergence of the Asian American movement attests to their collective (though by no means identical) status as, in Mae Ngai’s felicitous phrase, “impossible subjects.”5 Concomitantly, it also signifies the constraining absence of cultural opportunity that attended upon such a politically and socially marginalized condition. Of course, simply because they failed to publish much verse in English before 1970 does not mean that poetry played an insignificant role as a means of

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both personal expression and broader cultural engagement for racialized peoples of Asian descent in the United States throughout the course of their respective histories in this country. As we saw in the preceding chapter, between 1910 and 1940 numerous Angel Island detainees “relied upon” various classical Chinese verse forms and poetic production in general both to convey their sentiments and their grievances, as well as to establish solidarity with other and future inmates, as they sought to negotiate the travails of immigration under exclusion. Furthermore, as Marlon Hom has documented, immigrants to the United States from the Pearl River Delta region in China also wrote and published a substantial body of Cantonese vernacular poetry based on folk forms, which appeared in various Chinese-language newspapers and other periodicals, primarily in San Francisco, but elsewhere as well.6 Indeed, a considerable amount of verse by immigrants from Asia to the United States exists in other languages, most notably Japanese. During the early decades of the twentieth century, for example, sugar cane workers in Hawaii developed and sang a form of Japanese folk rhyme, the “horehore-bushi,” as a cultural response to the difficulties they faced as plantation laborers.7 Additionally, numerous informal societies devoted to the production of traditional Japanese poetic forms such as tanka, haiku, and senryu thrived in various places around the continental United States, with particularly high levels of activity from the early to the mid-twentieth century.8 Both vernacular and traditional poetic production in other Asian languages by immigrants before 1970 awaits recovery. In fact, the entire tradition of non-English-language verse by people of Asian descent in the United States comprises arguably the single most neglected domain within the larger arena of Asian American cultural production. Significantly, poetry in English by people of Asian descent in the United States that did see publication of whatever sort prior to the rise of the Asian American movement by and large assumes the posture of giving voice to a distinctively foreign culture and identity. In this sense, they arise out of and belong to what Park identifies as the tradition of American Orientalism that has left its own imprint on the formal and thematic contours of Asian American verse. So, for example, in 1910, Japanese native Yone Noguchi published in the United States his volume of poems, From the Eastern Shore, a work whose title alone refers explicitly to the origins of its author (as well as presumably its contents) outside U.S. national boundaries in Japan. Comparably, [Carl] Sadakichi Hartmann, a son of German and Japanese parents who arrived in the United States in 1882 and subsequently became the secretary of no less than Walt Whitman, produced volumes with expressly foreign titles such as Tanka and Haiku: 14 Japanese Rhythms (1915) and Japanese Rhythms: Tanka, Hai{kai}, and Other Forms Translated, Adapted, or Imitated by Sadakichi Hartmann (1926). And in 1923, Jun Fujita advertised his status as a foreign national in Tanka: Poems in

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Exile (1923). Among writers of Chinese descent in the United States, Moon Kwan published A Chinese Mirror: Poems and Plays in 1932, thereby reflecting the notion that the volume depicts the terms of a specifically foreign difference. Even into the late 1960s, the writer Walasse Ting published volumes or collections with exoticist titles such as China Moonlight: 63 Poems by 33 Poets (1967) and Hot and Sour Soup (1969). Even H. T. Tsiang, whose socialist anthems in English illustrate the tradition of racial protest by focusing on ideological critique and the promotion of labor solidarity among racialized workers, presented his work as stemming out of a nationally and culturally specific historical event that took place outside the boundaries of the United States, titling his privately printed book of verse Poems of the Chinese Revolution (1929). While no single historico-political or cultural occurrence adequately serves to mark an “official” starting point for the category of “Asian American poetry,” the notion first began to achieve a certain discursive coherence at least in the years immediately following the Asian American movement during the late 1960s. In the early 1970s, community- and campus-based periodicals such as Gidra, Rodan, Bridge, Aion, Amerasia Journal, and others emerged, and they regularly featured poetry as part of their efforts to promote “Asian American” as both a politico-social and cultural identity category.9 Furthermore, several groundbreaking anthologies presented poetic and other writings by people of Asian descent in the United States specifically under the previously nonexistent designation of “Asian American.” These include Roots: An Asian American Reader (1971), edited by Amy Takichi, Eddie Wong, Franklin Odo, and Buck Wong; Asian-American Authors (1972), edited by Kai-yu Hsu and Helen Palubinskas; Asian-American Heritage: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry (1974), edited by David Hsin-fu Wand;10 and, most (in)famously perhaps, Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974), edited by Jeffrey Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Hsu Wong. Josephine Park has elegantly traced the consequences of the substantial ideological differences that separate these (especially the last two) projects of Asian American canon formation. Furthermore, she astutely observes that the ethnic nationalist version of this project led by the editors of Aiiieeeee! which ultimately prevailed over Wand’s, “insisted upon a racialized identity as ‘yellows’ which registered the hard limits of assimilation process understood to be a false and ultimately doomed aspiration for whiteness.”11 During this period, the notion of “Asian American poetry” coalesced around pan-ethnic cries of protest against a collective tradition of exclusion and discrimination, together with the reconstruction of a lost heritage. Despite the early dominance of this racial protest ethos within the Asian American movement itself, however, the cultural category of “Asian American

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poetry” retained a certain volatility precisely as it began to secure further recognition and discursive solidification into the late 1970s. For example, more mainstream literary journals such as Greenfield Review and Sunbury each devoted special issues to poetic production by people of Asian descent in the United States in 1977 and 1979, respectively. Driven at least in part by the momentous entry of Maxine Hong Kingston onto the American literary scene in 1976, this emergence into broader public legibility signaled the expansion of “Asian American poetry” beyond the strict confines of its originating activist dispensation. More specifically, due to the ascendancy of Kingston’s emphasis on individual apprehensions of Asian American minority culture and experience, lyric testimony began during this time to supersede racial protest as the hegemonic mode of verse production by people of Asian descent in the United States. As a result of such increased popular recognition, “Asian American poetry” necessarily began to lose some of its harder edges as an avant-garde formation, even as it opened up dramatically to new thematic and referential possibilities in accommodating a continuously expanding set of potential subjects and rhetorical postures. By the early 1980s, the idea of “Asian American poetry” had attained even broader recognition within the dominant American cultural establishment, as indicated by a series of specifically literary events. In 1982, Korean American poet Cathy Song earned the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for her volume Picture Bride; in 1983, the volume Corpse and Mirror by Chinese American writer and art critic John Yau was selected for inclusion in the National Poetry Series; and in that same year, Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian-American Poets, the first anthology of verse by writers of Asian descent in the United States edited by a non–Asian American, Joseph Bruchac, was published by Greenfield Review Press. Since that pivotal time, the category of “Asian American poetry” has witnessed steady growth in terms of both its sheer textual magnitude and its broader social visibility. Over the last quarter-century or so, not only has verse by people of Asian descent in the United States gained wider recognition and acknowledgment (including scholarly attention) within dominant American culture but also poetry as a form of cultural production has enjoyed continuously increasing interest among Asian Americans themselves, leading up to and extending beyond Kingston’s public announcement of her conversion to verse in To Be the Poet. Thus, in 1989 the volume After We Lost Our Way by Japanese American writer David Mura was chosen for the National Poetry Series. Likewise significant, Japanese American Garrett Hongo earned the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1987, followed by Chinese American writer Li-Young Lee, who garnered the same award in 1990. Additionally, since 1985 literally hundreds of books of poetry by people of Asian descent in the United States have achieved publication, including many by writers with historical,

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linguistic, and cultural ties to groups from Asia that only comparatively recently arrived in America, groups such as Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Thai, Hmong, and others. In basic demographic terms, of course, this efflorescence and expansion of Asian American poetic production correlates with the sharp rise in the number of people of Asian descent in the United States since 1965, when the national origins quotas on immigration that undergirded previously existing law were finally and formally abolished.12 Contrary to its intended effects, this fundamental change in the operative principle of American immigration law resulted in dramatically higher levels of entry into the United States by people from throughout Asia. As Ronald Takaki has noted, from 1965 to 1985, “there were nearly four times more Asian immigrants during this twenty year period than during the entire span of more than a hundred years between the gold rush of [18]’49 and the passing of the new immigration law.”13 Furthermore, as suggested above, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act also changed the proportions among the different nationally and culturally specific subgroups that together comprise the larger “Asian American” population, with Filipinos, Koreans, and South Asians arriving in substantially greater numbers. Moreover, it made possible the entry of entirely new groups of Asian immigrants, predominantly from different places in Southeast Asia. At the same time, the increased recognition of and interest in verse (in English) both by and among people of Asian descent in the United States also coincides with the ascendancy of liberal multiculturalist ideology within dominant American politico-cultural discourse over the latter decades of the twentieth century. From a broader historical vantage point, the rise of lyric testimony and its focus on the expression of individual subjectivity, as well as on the articulation of culturally specific markers of minority identity, takes place over roughly the same period during which “ethnicity” comes to displace “race” within U.S. political and cultural discourses as the predominant category for conceptualizing differences among evidently distinct groups of people. As we saw in chapter 1, even though he departed from and even explicitly opposed established dominant views about Asian peoples and cultures during the 1890s and earlier, Ernest Fenollosa nevertheless fully adhered to the underlying racialist beliefs of his time in addressing the “race characteristics” not only of the Chinese and the Japanese but also of the English and other “Western” peoples and civilizations. In 1910, when Chinese detainees first began inscribing their classical verses on the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station Detention Center, the notion of “race” still held sway in the United States and elsewhere as the dominant discursive means for conceiving (and explaining) human difference, including differences of geography, religion, culture, and, of course, skin color and other morphological characteristics.

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As Elazar Barkan has discussed, during the 1920s and 1930s, however, this dominance began to wane in the face of developments in biological and social research fields that undercut any “scientific” foundation for the concept of “race.”14 The work of Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas and his students, for example, successfully decoupled “race” from “culture.” In doing so, they invalidated the presumptions of racial hierarchy that had guided physical anthropology since at least the late nineteenth century. Comparably, Robert E. Park and other sociologists at the University of Chicago challenged the biological basis of social differences by attributing conflict among distinct groups not to physical differences themselves, but rather to the perception or awareness of those differences, thereby offering, in the words of Henry Yu, “culture as an explanation for race.”15 And within the realm of biology, British scientists such as J. B. S. Haldane, Julian Huxley, Lionel Penrose, and Lancelot Hogben collectively disputed existing interpretations of scientific data that were claimed to support a genetic basis for “race.”16 Instead, they emphasized environmental factors as the cause for human variation. And as a result, they managed to destabilize ongoing eugenicist assertions in both Britain and the United States about the scientific objectivity of “race” as an immutable biological fact. The rise of Nazism in Germany starting in the mid-1930s and its pursuit of policies based on an ideology of Aryan racial superiority created a political environment that further eroded intellectual and cultural support for the concept of “race.” Concern over Fascist aggression and growing horror at the abuses to which “race science” was being put by the Nazis galvanized efforts begun in the 1920s to refute any kind of scientific basis for racism. Furthermore, within the political realm, anxieties over charges leveled in Japanese war propaganda that U.S. policies were overtly racist and expressly anti-Asian led to the repeal by Congress of specifically Chinese exclusion in 1943. The term ethnicity first appeared in print in 1941, and its emergence provided an alternative means for both conceptualizing and designating differences among groups, one that enjoyed a certain freedom from the taint of overt discrimination that attended upon the notion of “race.” 17 Subsequently, the events of World War II helped to further lay the foundation for the ascendancy of “ethnicity” over “race” as the preferred term for characterizing and explaining diversity among humans. As Werner Sollors has succinctly noted, “In fact, the Nationalist Socialist genocide in the name of ‘race’ is what gave the word a bad name and supported the substitution of ‘ethnicity.’ ”18 Following the war, the concept of “ethnicity” gained additional ground, largely through the sanction of the discourse of cultural pluralism in the United States, which experienced a brief resurgence during the immediate

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postwar years. Thus, in 1948 Oscar Handlin asked, “What Happened to Race?” flatly declaring “that the only meaningful basis upon which one can compare social and cultural traits is in terms of the ethnic group.”19 First arising in the 1910s and 1920s as a critical response both to expressly racist Anglo-Saxon nativism and to calls from other Anglo-American elites for complete assimilation by immigrants and minorities to the established hegemonic norms of U.S. society, cultural pluralism celebrated cultural differences and diversity as fundamentally constitutive of America. The advent of the cold war and its attendant form of political liberalism, however, subordinated the valorization of cultural difference by cultural pluralism within a binary framework that opposed American democratic capitalism to the evils of Soviet communist tyranny. Even so, “ethnicity” had entered even further into select U.S. social discourses of the late 1940s and 1950s, as indicated by the use of the term in an essay from 1953 by David Riesman published in the American Scholar.20 During the 1960s, group-specific identification among Americans and the celebration of differences reemerged even more forcefully as a reaction to continued calls for complete assimilation on the part of minorities. The civil rights movement and other progressive and radical initiatives during the decade, including the Asian American movement, again heralded the fundamental importance of diversity for American political and cultural life. Most important, the insistence during this period on the intrinsic value, dignity, and significance of specifically minority practices and identities created a space, as well as a need, for a way to acknowledge and address differences among groups without necessarily resorting to a logic of biological determinism. In concert with the rise of the category of “Asian American poetry” (as well as, indeed, of “Asian American literature”) itself, “ethnicity” came into its discursive own during the 1970s, gaining entry into mainstream cultural parlance through a variety of channels. So, for example, in 1970 the sociologist and Catholic priest Andrew M. Greeley published an essay in The New York Times Magazine titled, “Intellectuals as an ‘Ethnic Group.’ ” And in 1974, he published the volume Ethnicity in the United States: A Preliminary Reconnaissance. Similarly, in 1972 public commentator Michael Novak published The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, in which he affirmed the importance of specifically ethnic identity and heritage. And to follow their landmark volume from 1963, Beyond the Melting Pot, academic sociologist Nathan Glazer and civil servant and eventual U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan published in 1975 the influential collection Ethnicity: Theory and Experience. That these were all socially conservative thinkers underscores the extent to which “ethnicity” had come during the 1970s not just to challenge, but to supersede “race” as the dominant category of specifically minority difference across the spectrum of mainstream American social and political discourses.

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Additionally, the increased visibility and levels of various forms of cultural production during this period by people of African, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian descent in the United States, among others, laid the foundation for the formal establishment of liberal multiculturalist ideology, which in turn further secured the ascent of “ethnicity” within the American lexicon of difference, most especially in the realm of culture. Of course, none of the preceding, (very) brief history of the discursive emergence and rise to prominence of the notion of “ethnicity” should be taken to suggest that “race” somehow ceased to operate in the United States as a meaningful and significant social category in the years following World War II. Since then, “race” has obviously continued to function within American society as the basis for various sorts of both discrimination and political mobilizations, as well as for different governmental and institutional strategies aimed at the amelioration of ongoing social injustice and economic inequality. Most notable among these strategies, perhaps, has been the policy of affirmative action, with all its advances, setbacks, and modifications over time. To be sure, scholars ranging from Ronald Takaki, to Michael Omi and Howard Winant, to Cornel West, to Henry Louis Gates, to name only five, have compellingly demonstrated the diverse ways in which “race matters” in the United States, both historically and also leading up to and including the contemporary moment in American society. Indeed, as I mentioned in the introduction, the very identity category of “Asian American” indexes the extent to which the notion of “race” continues not just to enjoy widespread popular assent, but also thereby to shape the social field, its long-established invalidation as an accepted scientific concept notwithstanding. Still, in relation to the domain of culture, and most especially that of literary production, “ethnicity” has come to overshadow “race” as the dominant category within the larger discourse of difference in the United States. Some indication of the degree of this dominance can be gleaned from the stark nonexistence— indeed, the practical discursive impossibility—within our current ideological environment of a critical notion of “racial literature” (as opposed to the “literature of race”), which stands in marked contrast to the popularity and pervasiveness of “ethnic literature,” a category that enjoys both commercial and academic sanction.21 Nor should the acknowledgment of such sanction imply that “ethnicity” somehow possesses any greater or more “objective” reality than “race” as a category for designating (and explaining) human difference, that its relatively recent discursive emergence and rise to prominence amount to the “discovery” of some previously unrecognized, but independently existent and timeless quality or feature of distinct cultural groups. Efforts among sociologists, historians, literary critics, and other scholars to clarify the meaning of the term have produced interpretations of “ethnicity” ranging

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from essentialist to circular to functionalist definitions. Thus, sociologists Pierre van den Berghe, Andrew Greeley, and Michael Novak have considered “ethnicity” a primordial and enduring “sociobiological” power that binds groups of people together across time and space. In their important volume Ethnicity: Theory and Experience, Glazer and Moynihan define the notion in a remarkably self-confirming fashion as “the character or quality of an ethnic group.” And Werner Sollors, certainly one of the strongest advocates on behalf of “ethnic literature” in the United States, deploys the terms ethnicity and ethnic only “hesitantly” and “in the absence of a better vocabulary . . . as vehicles which make it easier to talk about conflicts between consent and descent.”22 The significant variations among these and other definitions, and even more so the incompatibilities among them, underscore the cultural construction of “ethnicity” as a category of difference among humans, its status as no less “invented” than other such categories as “race,” “class,” “gender,” “sex,” “nation,” “caste,” and so on. Sollors himself has drawn attention to this aspect of “ethnicity” in both the title and introduction to his edited volume The Invention of Ethnicity (1989). In addition, practical confusion has persisted since the 1970s about whether the category of “ethnicity” can apply to dominant groups and their practices, or whether the term refers strictly to groups other than those enjoying social and political power. Recent scholarship has convincingly argued for the application of “ethnic” and “ethnicity” to all groups, irrespective of their place in a given social hierarchy, thereby participating in the denaturalization of both the concept of “ethnicity” itself and established arrangements of dominance and privilege. Yet, as various scholars have already noted, part of this contradictory legacy inheres in the very etymology of the word ethnicity itself, which derives from the Greek work εθνοσ, meaning people in general, but more specifically “others” or non-Greeks. Within the history of English, “ethnic” first referred (through Bible translation) to non-Israelites and then shifted to designate “non-Christians,” a meaning that it retained from the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Furthermore, such definitional and referential confusions have led to ongoing uncertainty about the actual content of “ethnicity,” about exactly what practices and traditions actually comprise this category of group difference. Indeed, sociologists have been notoriously unable to arrive at a consistent set of behaviors or customs that constitute “ethnicity.” Some have even gone so far as to empty “ethnicity” of any particular practical meaning, characterizing it instead as a largely affective phenomenon. Thus, Talcott Parsons has asserted that “however strongly affirmative these ethnic affiliations, the ethnic status is conspicuously devoid of ‘social content.’ ”23 At the same time, however, others have emphasized “ethnicity” as a strategy of establishing boundaries through constrastive identity formation. In the words of Christopher Bush, “Ethnicity is

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not a property of any given particular, but is rather something produced relationally.”24 In either case, however, both the definition and the particular content of “ethnicity” continue to exhibit a remarkable malleability. As Irving Howe wryly observed, “No one knows what ethnicity means: that is why it’s so useful a term.”25 Not surprisingly, perhaps, these fundamental instabilities with regard to both the meaning and the actual content of “ethnicity” have had a range of expressly generative effects. At the simplest level, of course, they have helped to promote the ongoing discursive survival and even success of the term as a signifier of human difference while scholars, intellectuals, politicians, and others persist in their disputes over the definition, substance, and significance of “ethnicity.” Moreover, through the agency of these ongoing debates, “ethnicity” continues to enjoy broad assent and thereby to function as an alternative to “race” as an operative category for characterizing difference among apparently distinct peoples, one grounded primarily within the domain of culture (however loosely understood) rather than that of biology. Even with the outlines of a “post-racial” discourse in politics beginning to take shape in the wake of Barack Obama’s election as president, “ethnicity” shows few signs of losing its dominant position within the contemporary American social and cultural imaginaries. Most important for my concerns in this study, the lack of general agreement over any determinate meaning and substance of “ethnicity” has helped to establish a social and ideological environment especially receptive to repeated and varied expressions of “ethnic” difference precisely by persons considered (for whatever reasons and in whatever ways) to embody that difference, or in other words, to our current regime of liberal multiculturalism and its individualist poetics of ethnic identity. Such a situation helps to explain why notions of personal “experience” and “authenticity” continue even now to figure so largely all at once in the assertion and reception of, as well as disputes over, different claims to particular “ethnic” identities. Thus, for all their initial heat and bluster, both the feud between Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston over the terms of Chinese American identity and the controversy surrounding Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s depiction of Filipinos in Hawaii in her novel Blu’s Hanging hinge on disagreements over the putative “accuracy” of representation. Each side in these respective debates has staked claim to, and based its ensuing arguments and critiques of the other on, its own conception of what constitutes “authentic” ethnic identity as validated by the “experience” of different individuals.26 Put another way, the emergence and rise to prominence of “ethnicity” within American politico-cultural discourse over the last half-century or so has underwritten the growth of expressly liberal multiculturalist ideology in the United States by creating both the possibility of and, even more important, a market for theoretically

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infinite articulations of specifically “ethnic” difference by individuals identified as exhibiting in some way the condition of “ethnicity” themselves. And these conditions, in turn, helped to create the phenomenon of American “ethnic literature” in general and to fuel its meteoric rise during exactly this same period. Within the domain of poetry more specifically, this situation has not only led to the explosion since the late 1970s of published verse in English by people of Asian descent in the United States with personal experiential or familial historical ties to particular linguistic and cultural traditions such as Chinese, Thai, Japanese, Korean, and so on; it has also authorized the development of lyric testimony and its subsequent displacement of racial protest as the dominant expressive mode within the larger discursive field known as “Asian American poetry.” And in turn, such repeated and varied articulations at once work reflexively to validate the notion of “ethnicity” as a meaningful category of human difference, and they also contribute to the consolidation of diverse particular “ethnic” identities in the United States themselves through their deployment of various strategies of representation, most especially the depiction of select, emblematic details and events or experiences that serve to convey those identities in their entirety, or in other words through the conceptual operation designated by synecdoche. The contradictory logic and dynamics of “ethnicity” have been extensively probed by others.27 As they have variously shown, despite carrying less burdensome connotations, “ethnicity” shares with “race” a fundamental instability that has made each notion a site of contestation over the terms and meaning of perceived human “difference,” as well as “identity.” Here, my interest lays not so much in further exploring “ethnicity” per se as in more simply acknowledging the role the notion has come to play in shaping the ideological and conceptual terrain within which contemporary verse by writers of Asian descent in the United States has taken shape and at once intervenes and currently operates. For despite steady interrogation from various quarters in recent years, “ethnicity” remains the prevailing catachrestic figure for naming the source of human difference and identity, even as the outlines of a new “post-racial” discourse gather uncertainly on the horizon of the American political and cultural landscape. As such, “ethnicity” and its accumulated apparatus of conventions and stereotypes together provide the broader discursive background in relation to which Asian American writers in general have sought to formulate their own (counter)poetics of minority culture and identity. In the remaining chapters of this study, I discuss verse in English by four contemporary poets in the United States of specifically Chinese heritage, each of whom bears a distinctive relationship to the linguistic and cultural

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tradition he or she seeks to represent. More precisely, I examine the range of rhetorical and formal strategies by which these different writers have striven to incorporate Chinese cultural elements, especially language, in their efforts to construct (or interrogate) the terms of a particular cultural or ethnic subjectivity. As we shall see, the considerable variety of these strategies, as well as their broader cultural and political implications, together attest to both the intense dynamism and the equally significant constraints that inform not just Chinese/American verse in particular but also Asian American poetry more generally as a developing cultural formation.

3 “A Voice from China” Ha Jin and the Cultural Politics of Antisocialist Realism

I

Having come to America in 1985 to pursue graduate study in English literature at Brandeis University, Ha Jin (pen name of Jin Xuefei [金雪飛]) has achieved considerable renown as a writer of specifically Chinese descent in the United States. He has earned that notoriety mainly for his fictional prose narratives about life in the People’s Republic of China, particularly during the tumultuous period of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). His first collection of short stories, Ocean of Words, for example, won the PEN/Hemingway Award in 1996, while his second volume, Under the Red Flag, garnered the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction from the University of Georgia Press in 1997. Most notably, his second novel, Waiting, earned the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. Since that highly visible and significant success, Jin has published two additional short story collections, The Bridegroom: Stories (2000) and A Good Fall: Stories (2009), as well as three novels, The Crazed (2002), War Trash (2004), and A Free Life (2007), all to consistent acclaim. In fact, War Trash, which relates the travails of a soldier in the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army captured by opposition forces during the Korean War, brought another PEN/Faulkner Award, while also gaining a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. Such recognitions, along with the frankly astonishing pace of his literary production, together arguably make Ha Jin the single most accomplished contemporary writer of Chinese descent working in the United States today, at least as gauged by the measures of successful commercial publication and acknowledgment from the dominant American cultural establishment. Indeed, such renown has even led to opportunities within other artistic arenas. Thus, in 109

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collaboration with acclaimed Chinese composer Tan Dun, Jin co-wrote the English-language libretto for the recent opera, The First Emperor, which debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City on December 21, 2006, with no less than Plácido Domingo singing the title role. Ironically, perhaps, his recent foray into the more socially rarefied domain of opera libretti represents something of a return to generic origins. For alongside his remarkable accomplishments in prose, Ha Jin has also published over the last two decades or so three books of verse, an output that matches the levels of production by all the contemporary Chinese American poets examined in this study, with the notable exception of John Yau. In fact, Ha Jin actually began his writing career in English specifically as a poet. Appearing a full six years before his inaugural, prize-winning short story collection, Ocean of Words, Jin’s first substantial publication in the United States was a book of verse titled Between Silences (1990), brought out by the University of Chicago Press in its Phoenix Poets series.1 And his second volume of poems, Facing Shadows, appeared in 1996, the same year that Ocean of Words was published. Moreover, even as he began to write and then came quickly to achieve steadily expanding notice for his prose fiction, Jin continued to produce verse, with a third book of poems, Wreckage, seeing publication in 2001, fully two years after he won the National Book Award for Waiting. To be sure, given the general lack of interest in verse within contemporary American (literary) culture more broadly, it comes as no surprise either that Jin would take up prose narrative following his initial, poetic debut, or that his considerable reputation has derived almost entirely from his already substantial and still-growing body of fiction. Even so, within the trajectory of his individual career, poetry stands out as the avenue by which he first emerged as a writer in English, as well as a steadily maintained practice over the course of his development thus far. Accordingly, then, Ha Jin’s efforts as a poet offer a unique vantage on both the logic and the broader stakes of his overall accomplishment as a writer of Asian (and specifically Chinese) descent in the United States. In this chapter I want to consider through the distinctive lens of his verse the significance, as well as the specific ideological functioning, of Ha Jin’s project as a writer within the context of our current regime of American liberal multiculturalism. More particularly, I think through the structural irony or contradiction that underwrites his entire body of work, which sets forth in English the terms for an explicitly named “Chinese” ethnic and cultural subjectivity. By doing so, I seek to understand the reasons behind his meteoric rise to prominence during the decade of the 1990s. Crucially, this period witnessed the reemergence of “China” and “the Chinese” as both political and looming economic threats to continued American global dominance. For at that point in recent U.S. political history, mainland China stood out as at once

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the largest remaining socialist nation after the collapse of the Soviet Union and as an emerging economic competitor of the United States, an apparent trend forebodingly punctuated by the return of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic in 1997.2 The political, governmental, and media hysteria surrounding both the campaign finance scandal involving John Huang in 1996 and the woeful miscarriage of the Wen Ho Lee spy case beginning in 1999 testify at once to the intensity and the pervasiveness of this perceived threat.3 Ha Jin’s linguistically transparent depictions of Chinese “humanity” struggling within and against the restrictions of a totalitarian communist state apparatus first appeared and subsequently came to enjoy steadily increasing acclaim, then, in the wake of the end of the cold war and immediately before radical Islam gained temporary ascendancy as the most pressing threat to global “American interests” following the events of September 11, 2001. Curiously, despite all the positive notice that Ha Jin has received from mainstream readerships in the United States and elsewhere, critics of Asian American literature and culture have for the most part remained conspicuously quiet on the matter of his accomplishments.4 Such comparative neglect contrasts with the steady and abundant attention already paid to other contemporary American writers of Asian descent in the United States who have also enjoyed the approbation of the dominant American literary establishment, including writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Gish Jen, Changrae Lee, as well as even Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. A number of factors have contributed to this collective reticence. Most immediately, perhaps, as a relatively recent and adult immigrant to the United States from the People’s Republic of China, Jin occupies a social location that deviates from prevailing conceptions of “Asian American” ethnic identity, which have historically privileged American-born citizens of various Asian cultural heritages, or at least those who arrived to this country from different parts of Asia at a fairly young age.5 Such an emphasis has resulted in the great incidence of Bildungsroman narratives of individual minority subject formation within the established Asian American literary canon. Hence, Jin’s biography departs from the familiar patterns of recognition for Asian American ethnic and cultural identity. In addition, he writes about subjects and events that fall outside the conventional scope of interests animating the great majority of literary production by “Asian Americans,” with their focus on the articulation of minority experiential and cultural “difference” in the United States through the treatment of themes such as the travails of immigration, simultaneous alienation from both a heritage cultural tradition and the values of dominant (i.e., “white”) American society, intergenerational conflict, and so forth. Thus, in his narratives as well Jin has been seen to operate outside the sanctioned boundaries of Asian American studies in its current formation. Contributing to his neglect further still, the basic simplicity of his realist style has

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worked to make any extended historical or cultural explication seem largely superfluous.6 And finally, the depth and breadth of the mainstream acclaim that he enjoys has apparently obviated any need for cultural advocacy or ideological recuperation. Yet, like the Angel Island poets who are his co-ethnic predecessors, Jin advances his own poetics of specifically Chinese cultural identity partly as a result of and in traumatized response to the experience of immigration to the United States. Of course, he has done so under a markedly changed set of geopolitical, economic, and social conditions both domestically and internationally. Some sense of the magnitude of those changes can be gleaned from the stark disparities in theme and operative language, as well as reception, of the poetry by these writers. Still, Jin’s work represents the latest in a long line of expressly transpacific literary production to achieve visibility across the broader American cultural landscape. And as such, notwithstanding existing methodological biases within Asian American literary studies, it fits squarely within the historical poetics of Chinese/American verse that I have been tracing in this study. Indeed, Jin’s achievement underscores the need to continue expanding the notion of “Asian American” beyond the conceptual boundaries of national citizenship and the referential domain of the United States to better account for the current variety of signification ventured in contemporary cultural production by people of Asian descent in the United States. For his work and its spectacular success among mainstream audiences together illustrate the extent to which both the dynamic process of immigration itself and the variously distinctive feats of cultural representation to which that process gives rise together continue to inform and reshape the evolving contours of the category of “Asian American” itself. At the same time, precisely the renown that Jin has achieved for his depictions of Chinese identity under the conditions of a totalitarian political regime indicates that his work also reveals something about the role that notions of specifically Chinese “difference” continue to play within the dominant American cultural imaginary. Seeking in just this manner to challenge the established limits of Asian American studies, a very few critics have addressed Jin’s work, navigating the issue of his “foreign” political identity and subject matter in various ways. Rey Chow, for example, has situated his accomplishment within an expressly international context by discussing the negative reaction in the People’s Republic of China to a proposed translation of Jin’s National Book Award–winning novel, Waiting. More interested in the contemporary logic of ethnicity as such, however, she abstains from ever actually discussing the content of the work itself. Instead, she explains the accusations of cultural treachery and betrayal leveled at Jin by his fellow Chinese nationals, theorizing them in terms of what she calls postcolonial “ethnic ressentiment.”

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Elaborating on “the unbearable lightness of postcolonial, postmodern ethnicity,” she explains this phenomenon as the “psychic structure of a reaction to injustice created by the coercive and unequal encounter with the white world, a reaction that, in the course of postcoloniality, ends up directing rancor toward certain members of one’s own ethnic group—that ends up, as it were, ethnically profiling, shaming, and scapegoating these members.”7 For all its insight into the dynamics of ethnicity as a contemporary global phenomenon, her assessment declines to interrogate either the logic or the domestic stakes of the National Book Award itself, thereby neglecting to consider the cultural meaning of Jin’s transpacific literary production within the ideological and social environment of the United States, the site for the original composition, publication, primary readership, and subsequent cultural endorsement of both his prose and verse. Consequently, her model ignores the possibility of a substantive critique developed in relation to the intertwined contexts of American liberal multiculturalism and the literary history of “minority” (and especially ethnic “Chinese”) expression in English. More recently, Xiaojing Zhou has discussed Jin’s poetry in particular and its putatively ethical potential from a loosely transnational perspective as a way to address the expressly “foreign” subject matter of his verse. In her view, “Ha Jin has produced compelling poetry about China, which contributes to altering Eurocentric characterizations of American literature and broadening the spectrum of Asian American literature, while showing possibilities of writing about a people and culture of the East without falling into the trap of Orientalism.” Because he situates specifically identified Chinese subjects presented in his verse within their particular historical and social contexts, she argues, Jin’s depictions of Chinese interiority through the form of lyric work against both various historical discriminatory constructions of Asian identity in the United States and elsewhere, as well as the tendency to hypostatize ethnic or cultural “difference” that marks traditional ethnographic writing by Asian natives for a Western readership. Thus, she asserts, “Ha Jin’s writings constitute a transformative force in American literature, as well as Asian American literature, not so much because he locates his characters and narratives outside the U.S. national borders, or performs a geographical juxtaposition and exchange between the United States and China, but because of the way he handles his materials.”8 But for Zhou, that “way” remains limited to matters of rhetorical stance and thematic content, rather than including those of formal signification and cultural semiosis. Moreover, she focuses on Jin’s articulated interest in conveying “universals” rather than ethnic or national cultural “difference,” and she further sees that posture as the key to his writing as “other than as a native informant.” Largely accepting at face value Jin’s own conception of his aims and methods as a

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writer, Zhou’s analysis proceeds in isolation from the longer history in the United States of poetic representations of Chinese culture and identity. As we saw in chapter 1, this tradition stretches back to the very beginnings of the modernist poetic dispensation in the early twentieth century with Pound’s unschooled but inspired depiction of individual Chinese affect in Cathay, an accomplishment whose formal and conceptual terms continue to define the lineaments of the cultural field in which all subsequent efforts at giving verse representation to Chinese “difference” in English have sought, whether implicitly or explicitly, to intervene. By excluding this crucial literary historical dimension, Zhou fails to question the import of either the formal conservatism of Jin’s plainly realist style or his belief in a decidedly traditional liberal humanist universalism. In other words, her analysis neglects to consider the broader social meaning of Jin’s appeal as a poet who operates in a readily comprehensible and familiarly idiomatic English free verse that critiques a totalitarian communist regime primarily for consumption by an audience in the United States, where the demonization of Chinese governmental policy and practices continues as part of a manifold response across numerous social and cultural domains to the steadily recurrent perception of China as a political and especially economic threat, an ideological tradition that stretches back to the middle of the nineteenth century and the discourse of the “Yellow Peril.” Zhou’s assessment loses much of its force when one considers how easily such a thematic agenda fits into the larger aims of dominant American political ideology and its aggressive rhetoric of “freedom” and “opportunity” deployed in the pursuit of both a domestic and an international hegemony through capitalism. As a result she vastly overestimates, in my view, the transformative ethical potential of Jin’s literary (and especially poetic) achievement. Significantly, for all the substantial differences between them in both focus and method, neither Chow nor Zhou addresses the implications of the extravagant structural conceit upon which Jin’s entire body of writing rests, namely, to employ English in a thoroughly transparent way to depict specifically named Chinese historical settings and subjectivities, including his own, in a lyric testimonial fashion. This foundational catachresis, which undergirds his efforts in both prose and verse, in turn depends upon two assumptions. First, it presumes a complete separability between language as such and the historical events or individual experiences that it at once mediates and partially structures. And second, it subscribes to a notion of total and unproblematic equivalence among individual languages themselves (e.g., between Chinese and English). Based on these assumptions, Jin attempts to “transplant” a specifically designated “Chinese” set of experiences and events into English, a representational medium that, according to the denotation of the poems themselves, bears no connection to the historical,

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social, and cultural matrix of their occurrence. In its circumstances of production, to be sure, Jin’s work resembles that of the Angel Island poets insofar as both arise quite literally out of particularly intense feats of physical transplantation in the shape of (attempted) immigration to the United States. Yet, in stark contrast to his historical co-ethnic predecessors, Jin lays claim through a prodigious feat of poetic authority to making available in English events and subjectivities expressly identified as Chinese. And in doing so, he accommodates Chinese cultural identity and experience, however much historically and socially contextualized at the level of theme, to the basic formal terms currently sanctioned by the American cultural dominant. More precisely, then, Jin’s effort at “transplanting” Chinese subjectivities and experiences into English operates through a process of wholesale “remediation” or “recoding” of those phenomena. I want to stress here that the stakes of Jin’s accomplishment do not turn on the moralistic question of his “authenticity” or integrity as a writer. Indeed, any recognizable disingenuousness on his part would make his representations of Chinese culture and identity less suitable for the ideological interests to which they have so successfully appealed. Rather, the matter at hand involves the cultural politics of Jin’s antisocialist realism viewed in relation at once to the conditions of its production and reception, as well as to the deeper currents of (Asian) American literary history. From this stereoscopic vantage, the overarching logic of both his individual development as a writer and his public reputation delineate a trajectory of thoroughgoing assimilation to dominant American values through validating the cornerstone notions of “freedom” and “opportunity” that uphold the rhetorical infrastructure of U.S. cultural and political ideology. For the very assumptions out of which his efforts proceed at once reflect and reinforce existing asymmetrical structures of cultural privilege among different groups in the contemporary United States.

II

In her discussion of Jin’s verse, Zhou has usefully drawn attention to his articulated belief in a traditional humanist universalism. As she has noted, “Differing from predominant claims and strategies of identity politics, Ha Jin insists on common humanity.” “Unlike most academics,” he has declared, “I do believe in universals and that there is truth that transcends borders and time.”9 Herein lays the validating principle behind his distinctive realist style, as well as his commitment to the related notion of linguistic transparency. For the investment in such a liberal humanist ideology that “at heart we are all the same” makes it conceptually viable to disregard as artistic concerns

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the material specificity of languages and their intimate relation to cultural identity, and even to history itself.10 While Zhou is certainly correct to distinguish Jin’s verse from the auto-ethnographic essentialist tendencies of a poet such as Wang Ping, his work still operates through an idealized gesture of disclosure of Chinese culture and subjectivity. The idealism of that disclosure simply functions on the plane of language itself. Equally significant, Jin’s traditional humanism accords with the prevailing mainstream liberal multiculturalist ideology of the American literary establishment and its politics of “recognition.”11 Furthermore, such a posture conveniently abets the entrenched monolingualism of that establishment, as well as of dominant American culture more generally. For in its emphasis on “recognition” as the means to empowerment, such a politics privileges the quality of legibility across the range of articulations of ethnic (or other) “difference.” And this demand for ethnic legibility, in turn, explains the continuing strong bias toward representational realism both in and among the varieties of cultural production by people of Asian descent in the United States.12 Somewhat paradoxically (though not surprisingly), Jin’s traditional humanist universalism coexists alongside an equally fierce commitment to his own cultural and historical particularity. And by this other conceptual means as well, he has at once expressed and sought to neutralize the apparent formal contradiction that lies at the heart of his efforts to delineate in English a “poetics” of Chinese culture and identity. He has done so by flatly dismissing any potentially meaningful significance arising from the logical incongruities and historical incommensurabilities that might attend upon his project as a writer precisely because, he claims, the disjuncture between subject matter and operative medium in his work stems not from personal choice, but rather from historical and cultural exigencies specific to China and the existing political climate of his country of origin. For Jin, it seems, the forces of his particular individual history trump, and therefore render irrelevant, the significance of differences among languages and the question of form more generally. Thus, he has vigorously declared, “Without question, I am a Chinese writer, not an American-Chinese poet, though I write in English. If this sounds absurd, the absurdity is historical rather than personal . . . since I can hardly publish anything in Chinese now.” Elaborating further, he has explained, “After June 1989 [i.e., the brutal and murderous repression of the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square by the Chinese Communist government] I realized that I could not return to China in the near future if I wanted to be a writer who has the freedom to write.”13 One need not question either the validity or the sincerity of Jin’s assessment of his individual circumstances and motivations to recognize just how effectively such an account also serves the ideological interests of a larger, dominant discourse in the United States produced in response to a felt crisis in

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the surety of American world domination during the 1990s. It does so, most obviously, through validating a perception of the United States under its current conditions as a bulwark of individuality and creative liberty, one that further stands in opposition to any and all repressive regimes across the globe, most especially that of one of the more historically enduring “Others” to haunt its political and cultural imaginary.14 Such a bimodal conceptual absolutism as Jin adopts as a writer, and especially as a poet, establishes a singularly attractive, as well as convenient, set of possibilities for a dominant American audience in particular. For on the one hand, the insistence on the immutability of his historical and cultural specificity holds out the promise of affording direct and accurate knowledge of Chinese “difference” guaranteed by the authority of a “genuine” source. While on the other hand, the invocation of universalism or appeal to common humanity endorses the ultimate legibility and immediacy of that knowledge by sanctioning a belief in the adequacy of English itself as a medium for the articulation of such “difference.” Not coincidentally, furthermore, this universalism also has the added effect of obviating the need to alter or reconfigure existing signifying protocols in English to gain special access to Chinese culture and identity, thereby tacitly endorsing established structures of cultural privilege in the United States. Both Jin’s own claims about his identity and the related matter of how he has been marketed as a writer of Chinese descent in the United States employ this conceptual bimodalism. Thus, his first book of poems, Between Silences, calls conspicuous attention to a determinate national, cultural, and, in the context of its publication in the United States, ethnic identity as speaking subject through its subtitle, “A Voice from China.” Notably, however, the text hedges on this declaration of foreignness, taking pains to mitigate any concerns of potential incomprehensibility on the part of mainstream American readers by mentioning twice that all the poems in the volume “were written in English.” Comparably, in his preface to the work, Jin opens with a gesture that combines the promise of intimate and culturally specific revelation with an accommodation to the conventional signifying norms of English. Thus, he forthrightly discloses the invented status of his authorial designation, while also giving his original Chinese name in transliterated form. In doing so, however, he departs from standard practice in Chinese. Instead, he follows the conventions of Western languages in general, and of English in particular, by putting his family name last: “ ‘Ha Jin’ is my pen-name; my true name is Xuefei Jin.”15 Certainly a minor accommodation to English naming practices in itself, this bold declaration and its confessional structure serve a more important function in setting the framework for the remainder of the preface, wherein he sets forth the overarching project of the volume. At the level of rhetorical

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conception, Jin articulates this project in terms that join a traditional humanistic emphasis on the expression of individual affect with the invocation of an authenticating personal history. This combination, in turn, establishes the parameters for a distinctly liberal multiculturalist ethical transaction by which the poet enables readers of English to perform feats of compensatory recognition or acknowledgment of heretofore suppressed and culturally inaccessible Chinese subjectivities. Jin’s dedication to a linguistically transparent poetics of narrative realism stems in part from the legibility of this style as a manner of historical representation, as well as from its utility in helping him fulfill the role he stakes out as a kind of sympathetic documentarian of the distortions in human feeling and relationships wrought by the Cultural Revolution and the legacy of communism in China more generally: The poems contained in this book mainly present some experiences of the 60s and 70s in China. The experience is not strictly personal, although in most cases I was stimulated by my memory of those hard facts which cannot be worn away by time. There were many things more terrible in the Cultural Revolution. I do not mean to tell horrible stories in this book, and instead I want to present people’s feelings about and attitudes towards these events. The people in this book are not merely victims of history. They are also the makers of the history. Without them the history of contemporary China would remain a blank page. . . . Among my generation I am one of the most fortunate. Unlike millions of people my age who went to the countryside to be “re-educated,” I went into the army, which was a privilege that I could have only because my father was an officer then—although I was also ready to die like other soldiers at the border area between Russia and China. . . . As a fortunate one I speak for those unfortunate people who suffered, endured or perished at the bottom of life and who created the history and at the same time were fooled or ruined by it. If what has been said in this book is embarrassing, then truth itself is cold and brutal. If not every one of these people, who where never perfect, is worthy of our love, at least their fate deserves our attention and our memory. They should talk and should be talked about.16

Admirably, Jin at once recognizes and responds in a conscientious fashion to the asymmetrical structures of privilege that have placed him in a position to be able to memorialize less fortunate Chinese men and women who underwent the same historical trauma as he. And within the context of his native country, with its uncertain political climate that has oscillated regularly since 1949 between periods of comparative toleration followed by harshly

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repressive backlashes, the program of poetic recuperation that he lays out would surely constitute, and be seen as, an act of counter-dominant protest against official narratives of the Cultural Revolution. It would thus be almost certain to evoke outrage and criticism from various influential quarters, just as his subsequent fiction has done. One need only recall the fate of other Chinese writers of Jin’s generation, most especially those who did not manage to find a way out of the People’s Republic, to understand both the reality and the degree of risk entailed in such an act. Indeed, the closing poem of the volume, “Because I Will Be Silenced,” invokes precisely this danger, even as it paradoxically links the presence of political threat to both the urgency and even the very possibility for effective poetic expression. As a kind of defiant apologia for the dark tone and doggedly political focus of the volume as a whole, Jin lays out a poetic vision suffused with violence at once destructive and liberatory in which he explicitly abjures the temptations of writing what could be judged by the historically dominant norms of his original country as decadent individualist verse about objects for sensory and aesthetic pleasure: Once I have the freedom to say my tongue will lose its power Since my poems strive to break the walls that cut off people’s voices, they become drills and hammers. But I will be silenced. The starred tie around my neck at any moment can tighten into a cobra. How can I speak about coffee and flowers?

Within the social context of the site of publication for Between Silences in the United States, however, the ambivalently nostalgic and unidirectional orientation of the ethical bargain struck in the volume reproduces the terms of a liberal multiculturalist politics of recognition. Most notably, it lacks an imperative to venture any sort of contemporary intervention, whether political or otherwise, in the affairs of China itself or in the conditions facing people of Asian descent in the United States. Instead, the poems ask readers of English to acknowledge through a sharply delimited sympathy the travails of a historically and geographically distant national Chinese population.17 And in turn, such acknowledgment functions recursively to foster an obligation to appreciate the undeniably greater liberties, political and otherwise, enjoyed by residents of the United States, not least those of Chinese descent. It thus declines to challenge existing asymmetrical relations of social and cultural power that continue to shape the lives of a people in both

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locations, most especially those “at the bottom of life.” In other words, the poetic compact laid out in the preface scrupulously honors the ideological status quo in the United States by casting Chinese “difference” as something to be apprehended with sympathetic but disinvested attention (i.e., “recognized”) through expressions of individual affective subjectivity and cultural particularity, rather than as something to be interrogated and critiqued as a feature of historically constituted structural asymmetries in the distribution of social power and privilege. Equally significant, Jin pointedly refrains from drawing attention to the fundamental irony shaping his chosen role as poetic spokesman for the oppressed Chinese masses in Between Silences, namely, that he employs a representational medium historically and culturally removed from the experiences and subjectivities on whose behalf he solicits the sympathetic attention of an Anglophone audience. He thus obscures the wholesale act of recoding or remediation inscribed within his stylistically realist depictions of Chinese culture and identity during the period of the Cultural Revolution. By eliding the traces of such removal, he demonstrates a belief in the ahistorical notion of total transparency among languages as part of his bid to win acknowledgment for a Chinese claim on the condition of universal humanity. In this regard, to be sure, Jin participates in the long tradition of anti-discriminatory verse articulations in the United States of specifically Chinese culture and identity that I have been tracing in this study. At the same time, however, he knowingly sacrifices a considerable measure of the historical and cultural particularity of his depictions in exchange for readier legibility among mainstream American audiences. And in doing so, he effectively reinforces an uncritical acceptance of the belief in English itself as a universal medium of cultural expression, a situation that at once reflects and underwrites existing hierarchies of privilege among different groups of people both within the United States and around the world more generally. By thus posing no challenge to established signifying and interpretive conventions in the United States for the apprehension of specifically Chinese “difference,” Jin assimilates his poetic representations of Chinese culture and identity to the values of prevailing American liberal multiculturalist ideology. He thereby sharply delimits the potential transformative efficacy of his verse by constraining it to an act of culturally, linguistically, and historically removed recuperation based on the sole authorizing principle of individual poetic fiat. Occupying a crucial position in the text as a kind of headpiece preceding the main body of poems in the collection, the work that opens the volume, “A Dead Soldier’s Talk,” powerfully illustrates this dynamic of belated redemption and the affinity of Jin’s verse for an American liberal multiculturalist status quo. As an introductory note explains, this poem presents the

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monologue of an idealistic young soldier in the People’s Army who drowned while trying to save a plaster statue of Chairman Mao during a shipwreck in September 1969, that is, during the early years of the Cultural Revolution. Posthumously awarded a citation for merit by the Chinese Communist government, the dead soldier addresses from beyond the grave one of his sisters, who has come to visit his neglected burial site. The poem begins in decidedly sentimental fashion, with the speaker expressing feelings of loneliness and nostalgia for home, as well as delight at the arrival of his sister. He declares in the second stanza, I saw you coming just now Like a little cloud wandering over grassland. I knew it must have been you, For no other had come for six years.18

Significantly, the final line here locates the poem in 1975, one year before the end of the Cultural Revolution and a moment when Mao’s failing health and the disastrous consequences of his policies had come to be widely recognized. However, insulated by death from any such realization occasioned by the march of history, the soldier stubbornly holds fast to his belief in the values of the revolution. Hence, he proceeds to chide his sister for continuing to observe traditional funerary customs, asking instead for the volume of collected sayings by the Great Helmsman, Mao. The idiom here signifies cultural particularity through the hybridiation strategy that I have called “grafting,” as in the mention of ritual practices and the awkwardly direct translation of stock phrases in Chinese: Why have you brought me wine and meat and paper-money again? I have told you year after year that I am not superstitious. Have you the red treasure book with you? I have forgotten some quotations. You know I don’t have a good memory. Again, you left it home. How about the statue I saved? Is it still in the museum? Is our Great Leader in good health? I wish He live ten thousand years!

In the next stanza the soldier continues to stage his attachment to sentimental pieties of nation and family as he relates to his sister a dream he recently had about their mother and her continuing pride in his

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achievement. He also inquires about how their youngest sister has fared over the years since his death. Evoking the untainted idealism of his arrested youth, this strophe builds to a moment of sharp pathos, one made all the more compelling for the intimacy implied by its frankly mundane concern: “Has she got a boy friend?” The concluding stanzas raise the emotional stakes of the poem yet again as they present a rapidly deteriorating scenario, laden with a highly condensed narrative about the worsening debacle of the Cultural Revolution, in which the soldier reacts with growing hysteria and desperation to the dawning realization of his own utter helplessness and disconnection from events that have taken place in the land of the living since he provided the ultimate demonstration of his commitment to China: Why are you crying? Say something to me. Do you think I can’t hear you? In the early years you came and stood before my tomb swearing to follow me as a model. In recent years you poured tears every time. Damn you, why don’t you open your mouth? Something must have happened. What? Why don’t you tell me!

This dramatic monologue skillfully employs historical irony to critique the injustices perpetrated by a regime that cynically betrayed the dead solder’s idealistic sacrifice, a sacrifice that has since been proved by the known, but conspicuously unspecified, failures of the Cultural Revolution to be a pointless one. The pathos here derives from a structured differential in knowledge between reader and speaker. This constitutive asymmetry makes it the affective work of the poem to provoke sympathy from an Anglophone audience in the United States for a Chinese subject across the twin dimensions of history and culture. Effective at accomplishing such labor as the poem might be, such second-order removal also thereby confines the cultural politics of “The Dead Soldier’s Talk” to a feat of recognition, since one cannot engage in any other way with specters from a completed past. Furthermore, American readers in particular enjoy historical and cultural insulation from the threat of political complicity with the corruption of ideals commented upon in the poem. Likewise, the counter-factuality of its basic rhetorical conception at once reflects and reinforces this logic of unencumbered detachment. Because the speaker remains doubly circumscribed by his suspension in death and his resulting ignorance of subsequent events, his plight lies beyond

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the reach of human agency. It thus obliges nothing on the part of its principal audience except an acknowledgment of his former humanity, which, precisely by virtue of his death, requires no change to the structure of existing material and hermeneutic relations between a dominant readership and the category of Chinese subjectivity. This condition, in turn, transforms the dead soldier from a historical subject into a (stereo)type, though, to be sure, one determined by its own distinctive historical sedimentation. By implication, all the personae that follow in the volume occupy this same status. This tendency toward disembodiment helps to explain the profusion of schematic titles such as “A Page from a Schoolboy’s Diary,” “A Thirteen-Year-Old Accuses His Teacher,” “The Young Worker’s Lament to His Former Girlfriend,” and “A General’s Comments on a Politician,” as well as numerous others from each section of the collection. On the back cover of Between Silences, Frank Bidart writes in a blurb that, “at its best, Ha Jin’s language is as accessible, penetrating, and mysterious as Pound’s Cathay.” For all its convenience and even predictability, this assessment remains instructive for at least two reasons. First, it confirms the significance of Pound’s achievement in continuing to define the dominant horizon of expectation for verse articulations in English of Chinese culture and identity. Second, in doing so, it establishes the relevant benchmark for considering the significance of Jin’s achievement, specifically in relation to “American” literature in general and verse by writers of specifically Chinese descent in the United States in particular. Certainly, the two works share evident similarities, over and above their common “ethnic” subject matter. Indeed, the extent of these similarities suggests a self-conscious engagement with Cathay on Jin’s part, thereby complicating any simple interpretation of his claim to being a Chinese writer who only happens by historical compulsion to write in English.19 As we have glimpsed, for example, like its predecessor, Between Silences features poetic monologues evoking the travails and sacrifices of Chinese soldiers in thrall to an oppressive and deeply ossified power structure. Furthermore, the collection likewise also explores the gendered impact of a rigidly regimented (in this case, nominally socialist rather than feudal) society through feminine personae in poems such as “A Hero’s Mother Blames Her Daughter,” “Not Because We Did Not Want to Die,” “Our Date on the Bridge,” “A Young Woman Scientist Writes to Her Three-Year-Old Son,” and possibly “A Photograph from China.” It also develops a coherent thematic structure around the trope of a highly turbulent and militarized period in Chinese history. And finally, as Bidart emphasizes in particular, Jin employs an idiom grounded in the rhythms and diction of modern colloquial spoken English, though, as well shall see, one accented at points by his particular linguistic and cultural heritage.

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To these basic elements, Jin brings his own distinctive concerns as well, of course. Thematically, he organizes Between Silences into four distinct sections, each one pursuing a different aspect of the overarching theme of the unspoken costs of the Cultural Revolution. The first of these, “Towards a Batttlefield,” expands upon the opening gambit of “A Dead Soldier’s Talk” by focusing primarily on the experiences of soldiers in the People’s Army. More specifically, the poems in this section depict the toils, physical and emotional, occasioned by military service to the Chinese Communist government. As he points out in the preface, Jin himself underwent this service, and so these lyrics resonate with the documentary authority of autobiography. In the opening poem of the section “Again, These Days I Have Been Thinking of You,” for example, the speaker describes his life as a soldier with imagery and spare language that clearly evoke Pound’s manner in “Song of the Bowmen of Shu” (not coincidentally, the poem that begins Cathay) and “Lament of the Frontier Guard.” Thus, in section 2 of Jin’s poem, an infantryman describes his mounted patrol at the tail end of winter near the Russian-Chinese border: On the Northern land our foot-prints disappeared in the snow. The hard ice was slowly losing its layers. We didn’t have to wear fur hats on our patrols along the borderline, and watered our horses at little springs.20

Thematically, poems such as “A Battalion Commander Complains to His Secretary” and “My Knowledge of the Russian Language” depict the affective legacy of military service in the People’s Army as a source of ironic embarrassment rather than pride or accomplishment. The following section, “The Dissolution of a Kingdom,” presents the moral decline of a formerly great society under the yoke of communism and the ruinous idolatry of the Mao cult as registered through the ironized perspectives of different personae, the great majority of which, tellingly, are children. Most illustrative of the basic emotional tenor and rhetorical posture of this section, perhaps, its initial poem, “My Kingdom,” allegorizes the steady disintegration of Mao’s China through the remembrance of a childhood game. Along the way, Jin demonstrates a thorough familiarity with the dominant American modernist poetic canon, especially as it relates to the articulation of Chinese culture and identity, as well as to that of an adolescent male subjectivity. For in its opening scenario, the lyric performs a

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variation on a scenario from one of Pound’s most well-known accomplishments in Cathay, “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”: When we played house you all assigned me to be the king since there wasn’t another boy among us. But I was a small and clumsy king who did not know how to conduct myself imperially, or how to rule my harem in our dormitory, or how to treat the queen differently from the concubines, or how to command all the amazons to defend our building, or how to employ my maids to look after my food and my bed. Yet I was the king, a small peacock in a large flock.

And by the end of the poem, “My Kingdom” arrives at an ethnically “accented” and fused version of two of the most famous images from Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: My kingdom was a little paper ship launched into the Pacific Ocean. It sank every minute, but it went down slowly for many years, and none of us was aware of its sinking. It disintegrated step by step losing you one after another who swam away from my ship and changed into the mermaids serving the Dragon of Fate in the Water Palace until finally my princess deserted her boyish father until at the bottom of the dark sea I was crawling as a lonely crab.21

In section 3, “No Tears for Love,” Jin focuses on affective bonds between men and women buckling under the pressure of government indoctrination and corruption. Here in particular, Jin first broaches a concern that he would eventually come to explore to such great acclaim in Waiting. So, for example, the poems “A Young Worker’s Lament to His Former Girlfriend” and “An Editor Meets His Former Girlfriend in a Fish House” both turn explicitly on a narrative of frustrated male desire transformed to bitterness. Likewise, most clearly anticipating the drama at the heart of Jin’s award-winning novel, the eponymous protagonist of “An Old Novelist’s Will” addresses a woman he has loved since his youth, and whose cremated remains he has brought

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home with him “to stay at the top of the chest in my room.” Prevented from marrying and subsequently separated from her for many years due to a combination of traditional custom, political upheaval, and individual fear, the speaker at last enjoys the company of his true love. At once poignant and sharply ironic, the closing lines of the poem find the weary, aged artist looking forward to their ultimate union following his death: Now we are together and I am satisfied. I know you are hungry, but please wait. I have told my daughter that after I am dead She must put half my ashes In your box and the other half with her mother. I said to her, “If I commit bigamy, Let the King of Hell punish me.” She has promised. Please be patient, My dear. Be a good girl.22

And lastly, the section titled “Ways” closes out the volume on a somewhat more positive note, exploring different avenues of negotiation with the constraints and hypocrisies of Chinese society under communism. These various responses to a repressively totalizing governmental system include a self-affirming sympathy for a mendicant in “Begging”; surrender to and active maintenance of an unjust system of privilege in “An Older Scholar’s Advice”; the unabashed use of violence as an instrument of power in “A General’s Comments on a Politician”; the exhausted cynicism of “An Old Red Guard’s Reply”; and escape through emigration in “A Photograph from China.” Through this final section of Between Silences in particular, Jin tacitly allegorizes his own development as a writer within this context as another such avenue of freedom, or at least endurance, one that carries with it both opportunities and responsibilities. The early stages of this process appear in the opening poem that gives the section its name, “Ways.” Staging its own version of Frost’s most famous dilemma, in this apparently personal lyric utterance an unidentified speaker confronts a choice between two starkly different figurative paths: “One leads to an orchard full of pears and apricots,/and the other to a gallery which has a movie-room.” Unable to choose, his body splits itself to pursue both directions at once. Thus confronted with an impossible decision, the speaker shifts to a surrealist register to evoke a desire for transcendence through the distortions of the imagination: “By having taken both ways/I have turned my head into a red balloon/which pursues an upward way.”23 More conventionally, in “To an Ancient Chinese Poet,” Jin lays claim to his own organic connection to the canonical Chinese poetic lineage through an apostrophe to perhaps its most famous representative, Li Bai.

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Responding to the existential doubt of his predecessor, who cries in drunken despair, “ ‘What’s the use of fame as a poet?’/ . . . ‘It’s a silent affair a thousand years after me,’ ” Jin’s speaker ends the poem by asserting the capacity of verse to sustain through the maintenance of a cultural tradition meaningful connection between people, even those separated across the divides of time and space, as well as, by implication, language: It is a thousand years now. Today, I put my hand into another river whose water is clear and warm. Tadpoles and apple blossoms are flowing through my fingers while the cold passion of your poems is penetrating through my arm.24

The sentimentally bucolic imagery here celebrates not simply Jin’s own emergence as a poet but also the cultural and social conditions that afford such an opportunity, namely the English language and the United States in particular. At the same time, the poem as a whole completes a gesture of ethnic cultural identification first made in the preface with Jin’s selection of a quotation from the canonical modernist Chinese writer, Lu Xun, as an epigraph.25 Finally, as mentioned above, “Because I Will Be Silenced” completes the developmental narrative embedded within the section as it assumes a posture of ethical defiance in justifying both the moral urgency and the particular manner of the role Jin has chosen for himself, therewith also concluding the volume. Collectively, then, the sections comprising Between Silences together chart a trajectory that begins under the shadow of death in “Towards a Battlefield,” passes through the purgatories of ideological disillusionment and personal loss in “The Dissolution of a Kingdom” and “No Tears for Love,” and emerges into the wan light of measured redemption from, or at least survival of, the stultifying restrictions of a repressive political regime and its rapidly decaying society in “Ways.” At this point in his career, Jin seems to have focused mainly on what he left behind following his departure from China. Thus, the underlying personal and structural narratives that shape the significance of the volume situate the United States as the teleological endpoint of a journey toward political and expressive freedom. In doing so, they corroborate a deeply cherished and vigorously upheld myth of American national self-identity. In addition to telling a familiar and ideologically gratifying story about the United States through his articulations of Chinese culture and identity during the Cultural Revolution, Jin also employs a formal idiom strategically legible to a dominant American cultural audience. I have already mentioned

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three quite evident allusions to canonical works by Pound, Eliot, and Frost in different individual poems. Such engagements help to explain Jin’s obvious affinity for a highly conventional free verse technique that has its roots in the modernist poetic dispensation first inaugurated by the success of Cathay. Jin handles competently the principal features of this idiom— using unrhymed, largely end-stopped lines of varying duration, employing the rhythms of colloquial spoken language as a prosodic base, and operating rhetorically more through suggestion and evocation than explicit declaration—though for understandable reasons, he does so with less successful lyricism and invention than his American models. In poem after poem throughout Between Silences, Jin scrupulously adheres to the protocols of an early modernist free verse technique that has long since become the dominant form for poetic expression in English. His general facility with this manner, along with the accumulated weight of its naturalized authority, help secure the effect of linguistic transparency in his verse. In fact, given its subject matter and subtitle, the volume exhibits a remarkably uniform linguistic surface of conventional English. The few distortions in this surface happen with different momentary instances of “grafting” such as in the mention of personal and place names (“Wang Yong” and “Hunchun County”), culturally particular terminology (“pipa”), and, most significantly, calqued translations of fixed slang expressions from Chinese such as slogans and curses (“Iron Girl Team” and “an egg of a turtle”). For all their evocativeness, however, these gestures toward the historical and linguistic specificity of Chinese cultural identity in Jin’s verse finally amount to little more than minimal concessions to the parallel demands of his coextensive antisocialist realism. The aesthetic conservatism of Jin’s style, then, his efforts at complete assimilation to prevailing norms of poetic expression in English, remains essential to the ideological project that Between Silences seeks (and has been made) to accomplish. At the level of style, as well as theme, Jin trumpets the liberal multiculturalist values of the American literary establishment. Indeed, Between Silences ultimately endorses a familiar ideological status quo by recursively confirming some of the most cherished myths of America as a model land of unparalleled (and ethically normative) equality and opportunity. The fundamental limitation of such a poetics of ethnic “difference” appears most conspicuously in its easy compatibility with a larger, more obviously pernicious discourse that regularly deploys the language of “universal human rights” against the communist government of the People’s Republic in an effort to shape to its own advantage the structural conditions of engagement with an ever-beckoning market of more than one billion individual Chinese consumers. As we shall see presently, Jin’s subsequent development specifically as a poet of Chinese descent in the United States at once confirms and further pursues the assimilationist cultural logic of his first published volume.

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III

Following his debut with Between Silences, Ha Jin has become much more widely known for his prose fiction accounts of life in China under different phases of communist rule over an increasingly greater span of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, he has remained committed to poetry as an important mode of literary production, a fact that underscores the depth of his personal investment in the genre. As its title suggests, in his second volume of poetry, Facing Shadows (1996), Jin shifts his rhetorical posture from the mainly retrospective stance of his first collection. Notably, he begins to take up themes that have long been staple topoi within canonical “Asian American” literary production as that category has been conventionally understood. In fact, the first poem of the volume marks the stirrings of just such an “ethnic” awareness as it looks ambivalently back to a former cultural identity. Practically declaring through its title a personal, conceptual, and historical continuity with the final section of Between Silences, “Ways of Talking,” condenses different figurative “escapes” from communism into the structure of a classic immigration narrative. In Jin’s particular biographical and verse articulation of this story, however, the United States conspicuously occupies a position as the teleological endpoint of a journey toward greater affective (and by thinly veiled implication, political) liberation. Thus, the poem opens by ironically elegizing an outdated cultural self that not only harkens back to the anonymous collective of Yellow Peril “coolie” discourse in evoking the erased individuality of communism but also already suggests the necessity of its own abandonment in favor of something less obsessively maudlin: We used to like talking about grief. Our journals and letters were packed with losses, complaints, and sorrows. Even if there was no grief we wouldn’t stop lamenting as though longing for the charm of a distressed face.26

Adding considerable bite to what begins as frank, if affectionate self-mockery here, the second stanza even more aggressively disavows such expressive tendencies through the sharpened effects of irony. It does so by invoking the implacable power of history and its destructive capacity to undermine the range of human effort. Such invocation comes in the form of a litany of traumas that clearly refer to the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution.27 Significantly, however, Jin attempts a kind of humanist

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universalization of these events and experiences through employing a poetic idiom in English at once idiomatically transparent and dotted with specifically American diction: Then we couldn’t help expressing grief. So many things descended without warning: labor wasted, loves lost, houses gone, marriages broken, friends estranged, ambitions worn away by immediate needs. Words lined up in our throats for a good whining. Grief seemed like an endless river— the only immortal flow of life.

The final stanza confirms both the underlying immigrant narrative structure of the poem, as well as its tacit valorization of the United States as an idyllic land of redemptive freedom, even as such freedom entails the voluntary forfeiture of heritage language as a constituent of cultural identity: After losing a land and then giving up a tongue, we stopped talking of grief. Smiles began to brighten our faces. We laugh a lot, at our own mess. Things become beautiful, even hailstones in the strawberry fields.

In its overarching thematic organization, Facing Shadows oscillates between an emergent “ethnic” or diasporic awareness and a stubbornly residual commitment to revisiting the past, with a historical vision by turns anachronistic and personally contemporary in its focus. “Ways of Talking” also gives its name to the initial section of the volume. The other poems in this grouping also explore the first of these concerns by charting the formation of an ethical subject distinctly in tune with and conveniently legible to American liberal multiculturalism. Thus, “My Mother Also Ate” employs a familiar psychoanalytic conceptual lexicon in narrating a childhood family drama involving cherries that results in the speaker’s shameful realization of his mother as a separate being who willingly sacrifices her own pleasure on his behalf. Comparably, in the epistolary lyric “To My Grandmother Who Died in Manchuria Fourteen Years Ago” the same speaker seeks expressly to authenticate a claim to ethnic identity by reclaiming, and thereby making available to his audience, his “pre-American” past. He does so through relating a dream in which his long-deceased grandmother “came home/and cooked us Mid-Fall meal.” Uncannily, the old woman speaks to him in English; yet, as the “shocked” speaker responds, “Before you died, neither you

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nor I/had ever heard an English word.” Through such a scenario, of course, Jin reflects upon the fundamental irony of his own poetic efforts as a writer of specifically Chinese descent in the United States. The conclusion of “To My Grandmother” attempts to resolve to this contradiction through the familiar individualist logic of psychic internalization: how did you learn English so well? How come you drank coffee and ginger ale? No, no, you couldn’t pick up foreign stuff over there. You must have been here, here, in me.28

As even these brief examples show, the poems in Facing Shadows collectively testify to Jin’s growing comfort in his adopted language, which is also to say that he increasingly conforms to the signifying codes and conventions of the cultural dominant in the United States. Thus, the volume includes fewer dramatic monologues than its predecessor, with a corresponding increase in the proportion of poems employing the lyric testimonial structure of an autobiographical ethnic subject giving affective voice to individual experience. Indeed, following on such an overt appeal to individualism as in the conclusion of “To My Grandmother,” frankly American cultural values also come to shape even more explicitly the formal terms of Jin’s developing idiom. Thus, in the initial poem of the second section, “I Sing of an Old Land,” Jin departs from his normally subdued register, and instead adopts an obviously Whitmanian rhetorical stance. Instead of celebration, however, a heavy opening anaphora serves to amplify the force of a withering critique against the speaker’s homeland as poetic subject: I sing of an old land where the gods have taken shelter underground, where the human idols eat human sacrifice, where the hatred runs the business of philanthropy, where blazing dragons eclipse the wronged ghosts, where silence and smiles are the trace of wisdom, where words imitate spears and swords, where truth is always a bloody legend.

Emphasizing the primordiality of this dystopian site through primitivist and exoticist imagery, the speaker resurrects notions about the stagnancy of China that have pervaded the West at least since the time of Hegel. Moreover, the exaggerated stylistic manner seems designed not only to demonstrate a fealty to recognizably mainstream “American” expressive protocols

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but also to assure a dominant audience of their adequacy for conveying a particular ethnic “difference.” In doing so, Jin reinforces assumptions about the universality of English itself that underwrite our existing multiculturalist dispensation and its emphasis on linguistically transparent, affective expressions of individual subjectivity as the privileged mode for articulating ethnic identity and culture. Not coincidentally, then, the poem concludes with an effort to ensure the ethical motivations for such a negative portrayal through the assertion of a sympathetic identification: I weep for the old land. for its vast narrowness, for its profound stupidity, for its chaos and tenacity, for its power to possess those of my kind to devour us to nourish itself to seize our hearts and throats and mix our moans with songs— songs of monstrous grandeur and merciless devotion, songs crazed by the cycle of that land.29

The paradoxical oppositions here emblematize the ambivalence that infuses the volume as a whole, and the poems of sections 2 and 3, named “They Come” and “At Midnight,” respectively, develop the other main thematic posture Jin assumes in the volume, namely, as a liberal political conscience at once deploring the eccentricities and moral failings of his culture and nation of origin, while also, crucially, affirming the innate humanity of individual “Chinese” subjects. Thus, on the one hand, in a poem such as “A Child’s Nature,” the unidentified speaker appeals to a humanist universalism in narrating the events of a reunion with his son after a three-year separation and a twenty-hour journey for “a six-year old flying from China alone.” This conspicuously sentimental episode takes on an increasingly ideological cast as it proceeds, with the parents correcting their young child’s perceptions of the Chinese government and its propaganda efforts, most especially about the violence surrounding the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989. Disabused from his naive faith in the benevolence and righteousness of the communist regime, the boy nevertheless refuses to sanction a punitive form of justice based on revenge against a particularly violent Army soldier who “killed five innocent people.” “Even for that,” he declares, “people shouldn’t kill each other.” Talking with his wife in bed later that evening, the speaker concludes the poem with a frank attempt to ground Chinese American ethnic subjectivity upon a notion of essential childhood innocence and intrinsic moral rectitude:

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“Cast into Chinese we are too old to become American. But Tantan must never go back. He has too kind a nature and could not survive there.”30

On the other hand, poems such as “June 1989” and “A Former Provincial Governor Tells of His Dismissal” openly condemn the abuses of Communist Party–rule in China. Understandably, both works return to the spectacular disaster of the Tiananmen tragedy. The former addresses “a poet in China,” therewith at once recounting and expressing outrage at the violence perpetrated at government order against civilian demonstrators. In lodging its own protest against state repression, this poem invokes perhaps the most iconic image (at least in the United States) stemming from the event: “Some blocks away/a young man stopped eighteen tanks/with two bags of groceries.” And it concludes on a note of compensatory foreboding whose ghastly imagery and register, finally, validate for speaker and readers alike the ethical sufficiency of denouncing violence and hypocrisy in China from the relative safety of “the foreign land,” America: Everyone says, “Nobody expected Such an end!” An end? Who knows when it will end? From fresh stumps hidden in sleeves Deadly hands are growing. From curses behind doors, from groans in dreams, An eyeless typhoon is gathering. June 198931

Pursuing a similarly direct antisocialist realism, “A Former Provincial Governor Tells of His Dismissal” likewise takes up the injustice surrounding the “Beijing Riot” to launch a broader critique against the prevailing regime in China. This work revisits the dramatic monologue convention that Jin relied on so heavily in Between Silences, staging itself as an intimate letter from father to son in which a seasoned and faithful Party-veteran speaker relates the causes for both his recent ouster from government office and his ensuing health troubles, while also exhorting his son to “Study hard and obtain more experience” as a student in the United States. The speaker’s misfortunes, it turns out, all derive from a betrayal by a long-time friend and former political ally over a moment of unguarded, yet righteous outrage against the actions of “the Gang of Old Men,” who “dared send in field armies/ to kill civilians!” Crucially, in presenting this drama of paternal sentiment, “A Former Provincial Governor . . . ” evokes the possibility of a Chinese

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nation liberated from the corruption and violence that have become endemic to its existing communist state formation: Don’t waste your time with those there Who only talk of empty democratic theories. A billion people must be fed. An impoverished country must be developed. Only we Chinese ourselves can solve these problems. The country needs not those who can only shout slogans but those who know sciences and have skills. Whatever happens, please remember our country’s future depends on you, so you will never get lost. When it’s time to come home I will let you know. Words of Your Father September 4, 198932

As with Jin’s more renowned efforts in fiction, this affective expression of a dedicated Chinese nationalism not only corroborates liberal multiculturalist notions about the individual character of ethnicity; it also sustains older, less politely racialist notions about the essential “foreignness” of specifically Asian difference in the United States. Indeed, the idealized narrative of a return to China by the son at some unspecified point in the future tacitly figures such difference as a transient, rather than constitutive, element of American society. Such reinscription of an “alien” Chinese subjectivity happens even as, rhetorically, Jin collapses the distinction between his Englishspeaking audience and the expressly identified, though never voiced, addressee of the poem. For all its humanizing emotion, then, this poem has achieved legibility in the first place not so much because it challenges overtly racist stereotypes as because it affirms dominant liberal notions about Chinese culture and identity. If monologues such as these show a lingering investment in a specifically national Chinese identity, though one crucially decoupled from the specter of the communist state apparatus, in other poems of Facing Shadows Jin more typically explores the shifting terrain of his own identity formation specifically as a writer of Asian descent in the United States, a process partially shaped by what Yen Le Espiritu has called “imposed ethnicity.”33 Within this larger discursive and ideological context, the most directly accommodationist to dominant norms among these is surely “Gratitude,” which relates the speaker’s first exposure to the primal scene of the literary profession “at

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an MLA convention.” By doing so, this poem conveys a nascent commitment to expressly “American” cultural values. For at first linking and then humbly differentiating his own experience from the suffering of both “Chinese coolies shoveling along/the railroad across the American continent” and the canonical Chinese poets Tu Fu and Li Bai, in the end the speaker tellingly deploys a familiar metaphorics of personal liberty and capitalist exchange, however ironically, to describe the ethical bargain entailed in his choice of career: Yet do not mention again the beauty of this free land. Freedom here is not a way of living but a way of selling and buying. To survive one has to learn how to sell oneself and how to trim oneself into a bolt or a nut to match the machine of a profession. Still, I cannot but feel grateful for being allowed to stay or go, for knowing one price of freedom.34

And subsequently, poems such as “Astrological Signs and Marriage” and “On Receiving a Calendar” in the third section of the volume enact a disaffiliation from certain aspects of Jin’s heritage tradition. The former ironizes the quaintness of Chinese astrology and the folk beliefs that have developed around that system of divination in order to disavow the patriarchal domination that has historically shaped the protocols of marriage and sex in China. While in the latter, the gift of a calendar containing images of dogs “all painted by G. Castiglione,/an Italian monk who went to Peking/two hundred years ago” occasions the assertion of a unique subjectivity, one crucially freed from the constraints of a traditional Chinese system of symbolic interpretation. Thus, as the poem progresses, its scope of reference narrows rapidly from the historical figure of Castiglione, who allegorizes the long tradition of cultural interaction between East and West, to the speaker’s own individual past and the idiosyncratic meaning the different canine images possess only for him: “To me alone [the calendar] sings of a town/and the laughter of a ‘queen,’/who remains to me as a beautiful dog.”35 Together, these poems set forth a conception of Chinese ethnic “difference” in the United States that validates frankly liberalist values of gender equality, modern rationality, and the primacy of personal affect over established social or historical consensus. Moreover, such emergent individualism not only reflects Jin’s ongoing negotiation over the terms of his identity as a writer of specifically Chinese descent in the United States; it also helps underwrite the discernible shift toward a more conventional lyric testimonial mode throughout the remainder of Facing Shadows. Equally important, as the

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expression of personal affect becomes a more prominent theme for Jin, he remains fully adherent to dominant signifying protocols for the articulation of ethnic “difference” by holding fast to the readily legible poetics of a linguistically transparent realism that shaped his earlier poetry (as well as his more renowned writings in prose) and its historical and documentary antisocialist agenda. The fourth and final section of the volume, “Nets,” follows the increasingly self-conscious trajectory of this individualizing logic. Here, as its title suggests, Jin ruminates upon the manifold ambiguities and ethical dilemmas entailed in the effort at articulating the terms for a “Chinese” identity within the uncertain contexts of a different culture and another language. Thus, in the opening poem of the section “War,” a social experience grounded in the physical gives way to individual moral combat as the clearly autobiographical speaker begins by relating his training in the People’s Army, “Back there,” in China during a time when “War was a public compass.” He then proceeds to contrast the ideological simplicities of this former existence with his current situation “Here” in America, where: Small supple hands toting tiny bundles of cash stroke my throat and pat my hair, ready to pin me to the ground and turn me into a happy worm. A secretive voice rasps, “Live in the flesh only!”

In defiant response to the allure of such material and sensual gratification, the speaker reclaims his former military identity in order to attest all at once to the determination and the rectitude, as well as even the broader urgency behind his poetic labors: “So I spur my soldier/with songs.”36 Such ambivalent self-reflection culminates in what is by far the longest poem of the section, the epistolary “To Ah Shu,” which provides a kind of apologia for Jin’s career up to that point as a writer of Chinese descent in the United States. Expressing a deep, but conflicted nostalgia, the speaker is writing a letter to his “dearest old friend” in China, the eponymous addressee. The opening scene thematizes both the persistence and the inevitable transformation of the past and its significance under the pressure of displacement: Again, I took out your letters and read them one after another. Some I had remembered well, a few I found bear new meanings.37

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While the closing one sounds a highly sentimental note through its range of images evoking a sensory richness and affective intimacy. At the same time, however, this sentimentality gets immediately inflected by a certain measure of regretful irony directed at the faded idealism of former youthful enthusiasm and (presumably) political naïveté: So often echo in my ears those distant horses’ hooves clattering upon the asphalt road when we walked under your umbrella in the rain talking about our youthful aspirations and that never finished manifesto.

Within this larger structural and emotional frame, the speaker initially expresses an ongoing connection to a specifically Chinese identity conceived in relation to his geographical place of origin. He does so both in recounting his recent dreams of an idyllic meeting “in Harbin” between his family and that of his friend, as well as in his dutiful assent to the admonition to go back to his homeland: “I agree, I should return./Hard life is never a problem,/ since we Chinese are used to hardship.” In response to the affective pull of this nationalistic call, he successively pleads fear of political turmoil (“What worry me are the political storms/that can arise from a few coughs”), bemoans the contradictions of writing in English, and expresses a felt obligation to uphold a normative conception of “Chinese” ethnic identity grounded in a patriotic linguistic nativism: This is why I feel So miserable writing in English Which I love but wish not to use, Since we ought to labor in our own tongue, To keep it from decay and make it great.

For all this anguished self-reflection and even recrimination, the matter finally comes down for the speaker to psychological and material necessity, as articulated through the values of the personal liberty to choose a career, as well as a dedication to family: “But I must survive as a writer./Also, I’m a father and want my child/to live a better life than my own.” The climax of this second longest poem of the collection stages in particularly dramatic fashion the fundamental catachresis that grounds the logic of Jin’s efforts to set forth a poetics of specifically Chinese ethnic and cultural “difference” in the United States. And in doing so it underscores the assimilationist cultural politics of his achievement. For at this point in the letter to his friend in China the speaker relates some casual gossip about different contemporary literary figures already enjoying considerable reputations in America, including Czeslaw

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Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Gary Snyder, and Robert Bly. Given in a tone of disillusionment, his judgment tacitly, though no less clearly for all that, functions as an assertion of his own equivalence to such luminaries: “Their poetry is fine, but as human beings/they are not so sacred as we imagined.” On one hand, the boldness of this gesture can be understood as a perhaps necessary hyperbole for the sake of self-authorization. On the other, however, such audacity nevertheless also serves to highlight the abiding logical tension between the operative medium of the poem and the repeated thematic and affective claims it stakes to expressing a Chinese cultural specificity. More than just a concession to practical social realities, as the speaker himself earlier asserts, this act of wholesale linguistic recoding to accommodate dominant American signifying norms (an act upon which Jin’s entire poetic is based) reveals its thoroughly ideological foundations as the poem arrives at its most telling moment of simultaneous discovery and self-disclosure: We’ve taken many Western poets to be models Or masters who are actually our own fantasy. Very often at those gatherings, I feel lonely Finding myself unrelated to what is read. I prefer to stay home, reading Chekhov, Or writing a letter, or learning a few words.

For in the effort at self-assertion through admitting to a prior Occidentalism, the speaker conveniently elides the historical asymmetries of power between China and the West that differentiate the political significance of their respective tendencies to misperceive the other.38 And by thus casting such misperception as simply an individual phenomenon, one to be transcended, moreover, through the efficacy of personal experience, he ultimately absolves dominant American readers in particular of their structural complicity with the accumulated material and epistemological advantages that underwrite the tradition of western Orientalism. Little surprise, then, that at this crucial juncture in the poem the speaker seeks finally to secure the assertion to ethnic particularity through an extravagant declaration of his personal alienation from mainstream literary and social values. More than just reiterating here a familiar individualism, the subsequent invocation by the speaker of Chekhov and his other stated preference for “learning a few words” (which, by the epistolary logic of the poem as a whole, must be in English) together also uphold a notion of total transparency among languages as different from each other as Russian, Chinese, and English. Most significantly, perhaps, the very operative medium of the poem itself thus turns out ultimately to reinforce established hierarchies of cultural privilege in the United States by validating dominant presumptions to the universality of conventional English as a medium for representing ethnic “difference.” In other words, over the course of his development

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as a poet of specifically Chinese descent in the United States, Jin arrives in Facing Shadows at a point where he steadfastly gratifies the expectations and preferences of a liberal multiculturalist audience by observing the most simplified conceptual and formal conventions of a lyric testimonial mode.

IV

With his third and most recent volume of poems, Wreckage (2001), Jin at once confirms and fulfills the accomodationist teleology of his poetic achievement. As we have already seen, he began his career in English with the expressly antisocialist realism of Breaking Silences, prosecuted through the instrument of various transparent individual dramatic monologues. More than any other writer considered in this study, Jin has remained committed over the course of his development to the legibility of an unproblematized and even conspicuously plain poetic idiom, observing (even simplifying) dominant conventions for the representation of Chinese culture and identity in English set down in Cathay nearly a century ago. Along with such adherence to the established signifying protocols of the American cultural dominant, Jin has come increasingly to reproduce the compensatory gestures by which more renowned poets of specifically Asian descent in the United States, such as Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, Timothy Liu, and others, have earned their reputations. As I have discussed, such writers have together helped to solidify a conception of “Asian American” ethnic identity as a traumatic condition either of estrangement from dominant norms or of haunting cultural loss, which in turn necessitate an act of recuperation undertaken by the rhetorical agency of the lyric utterance itself. Not coincidentally, the opening poem in Wreckage ventures precisely this gambit. In doing so, it initiates the dynamic of nostalgia that structures the entire volume as an ambivalently felt meditation on the experience of migration and displacement. Thus, in “Yu the Great: A Legend” Jin reaches all the way back to the realm of myth in an effort to establish a putatively stable (i.e., essential) bedrock upon which to ground his articulation of Chinese cultural and ethnic identity. Celebrating the accomplishments of one of the three great legendary emperors of China, this poem tellingly concludes: He realized the river was a divine animal that would run tempestuous if bridled, so he opened three mountains for a new channel and widened waterways to guide the water toward the ocean.

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The river was calmed. We had land to sow and populate— villages emerged, then towns, then cities, then a country. Yu’s deeds made him our king. Thus began our first dynasty.39

And in the final work of the collection, “Departure,” the themes of diaspora and continuing displacement from home become explicit concerns. Here Jin imagines an early group of what have come to be called in Chinese “overseas students” (留學生) and their patriotic pledge to: study hard to master all the knowledge in the West so that their Motherland would not need to send youths abroad again.

But the poem, as well as the volume as a whole, closes with the following ironic lament: Their tears were shed only for the wind. None of them knew that this was just the beginning— That their children would travel The same seas.40

In between the opening and closing works of Wreckage, Jin presents numerous monologues from different personae at various points in Chinese history, all in the transparently plain English style that has become his trademark. Through their broad historical sweep, together with their unwavering commitment to linguistic transparency, the poems in the volume appear intent on fulfilling the liberal multiculturalist ideal of providing privileged and total access to Chinese “difference” without the need to alter in any way the established reading practices of a dominant American audience. And lest such a thoroughly accommodationist cultural politics seem merely the inevitable consequence of the various necessities imposed upon a Chinese national subject in exile (as Jin himself has argued), rather than an entirely contingent result of deliberate aesthetic, and so also ideological, choices, I want to conclude this chapter by commenting briefly on the work of another writer from China whose English-language verse has enjoyed a decidedly less spectacular reception than that of Ha Jin. In his anthology Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry, editor Tony Barnstone relates that the contributor, Chou Ping, arrived in the United States for graduate study at Indiana University in 1991, though he studied and began writing poetry

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in English while still in China.41 Since then, he has completed a PhD in Asian literature at Stanford University and earned a measure of public recognition as co-editor with Barnstone of two substantial collections of Chinese poetry in translation.42 Born one year later than his more touted countryman, Ping approaches the representation of Chinese culture and identity in English through a different set of strategies and values than Ha Jin. Rather than operating through an ironic and linguistically transparent realism, Ping combines a wry selfreflexivity and penchant for surrealistic imagery, as well as paying stronger attention to the systematicity internal to English itself. So, in “Drinking Alone in My Mountain Hut on a Rainy Night,” he invokes the tradition of reclusive and drunken Chinese poets in a sonically intricate stanza that turns on the dense interplay between internal and external perception of the speaker to produce an effect of both mental and physical disorientation: As the candle flickers in my cup an inner light snowblinds me— I feel as dizzy as a window hanging on a broken hinge. The rain slips into my hut Through zigzag cracks in the rock wall Or from under the windowsill Until my shoes sail out from under me.43

Moreover, at least among the poems appearing in Out of the Howling Storm, Ping has expressly confronted canonical American figures such as Wallace Stevens in the fourteen-stanza “Ways of Looking at a Poet,” and the inventor of American free verse in “O Walt Whitman—‘Whispers of Heavenly Death Murmur’d I Hear!’ ” Based on biographical events that ground this exploratory bicultural synthesis, “9 Flights Between 2 Continents” depicts different stages in the experience of migrating between China and the United States. This poem of immigration ends conventionally enough with the speaker’s dramatic alienation from an American social and cultural gathering, precisely the same narrative arc that Jin deploys in “To Ah Shu.” Still, the idiom he develops to convey this experience of ethnicization exhibits a distinctive formal attentiveness as it veers between oddly opposed images. Consider, for example, section 2 of the piece: Do you smell a shooting star or a decaying boat? Can you touch the dividing line between day and night on the world map?

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Wind keeps rubbing dirt into my eyes. Suddenly I recall I’m an abacus bead pushed up and down the eighty-one steps and I’m grateful like a still tree with a load of singing fruit or dying birds. This is my own darkness, darker than a dog hidden in a cave licking its mossy wounds.44

Whatever else they do, in their dreamy ambiguities, these lines decline to sustain the notion of a completely transparent and digestible expression of a representative Chinese cultural identity. Overdetermined a phenomenon as it certainly is, Ping’s near total neglect by an American readership derives at least in part from such a refusal. More significantly, perhaps, these brief examples also hint at the wide variety of possible approaches already undertaken by writers of Chinese descent in the United States to the task of representing an “ethnic” identity and culture in verse through orchestrating different arrangements of form and language(s). Thus, Ha Jin’s celebrated dedication to a plain and readily legible realist aesthetic in support of a traditional humanist universalism defines one end of a formal and ideological spectrum whose dimensions map the uneven terrain of contemporary Asian American poetry. Delineating the general historical trajectory and significance of Chinese/American verse in particular as a minority cultural formation, the chapters that follow chart successive points along that dynamic continuum. They do so by examining the work and careers of the three distinctive poets of specifically Chinese descent in the contemporary United States, beginning with one whose verse epitomizes the currently hegemonic mode of lyric testimony, Li-Young Lee.

4 The Precision of Persimmons Li-Young Lee, Ethnic Identity, and the Limits of Lyric Testimony

I

Among writers of Asian descent in the contemporary United States who have gained recognition mainly for their efforts in verse, Li-Young Lee has earned arguably the most widespread reputation, garnering not only consistent acclaim from the American poetic establishment but also even a measure of mainstream popular attention. His first volume of poems, Rose (1986), won New York University’s Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry award in 1987, and his second book of verse, The City in Which I Love You, became the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets for 1990. In 1988, Lee won a Whiting Writer’s Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, and in 1995 he received a Lannan Literary Award for poetry. In addition, he has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the Illinois Arts Council. Furthermore, his initial foray into prose, a memoir titled The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (1995), was selected for an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Even more telling of his broad notoriety as a poet, Lee has been featured in an interview with journalist Bill Moyers for the PBS broadcast series and companion volume The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets (1995). Most significant of all, perhaps, his poems have appeared in numerous anthologies. These have included ones dedicated specifically to different configurations of the category of “Asian American” literature, such as L. Ling-chi Wang and Henry Yiheng Zhao’s Chinese American Poetry: An Anthology (1991) and Rajini Srikanth and Esther Iwanaga’s Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Writing 143

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(2001), as well as those focusing more broadly on the genre of poetry itself in English, like The Norton Introduction to Poetry (9th edition, 2006). Indeed, Lee has even taken the first, tentative steps in the uncertain journey toward canonization, having been for some time already included in influential texts that at once reflect and help to authorize the sanctioned canon of national “American” literature such as The Norton Anthology of American Literature (6th edition, volume E, 2002) and The Harper American Literature (3rd edition, 1999). His considerable critical success and relatively broad popular appeal have together made Li-Young Lee one of a very small number of poets of Asian descent in the United States who, for better or worse, have come to represent the discursive field of “Asian American poetry” within the wider sphere of contemporary American culture.1 Significantly, though entirely not surprisingly, however, the ground of his acclaim has been decidedly split. On one side, during the early stages of his career, advocates like Gerald Stern viewed Lee in thinly veiled Orientalist terms, presenting and promoting his poetry as offering Western audiences an unmediated glimpse into the mysteries of Chinese culture. Thus Stern writes in his complimentary foreword to Rose that, among other purely personal qualities, a “pursuit of certain Chinese ideas, or Chinese memories, without any self-conscious ethnocentricity” characterizes Lee’s verse.2 Similarly, in reviewing the same volume, B. Weigl figures Lee’s achievement as intimately connected to and even stemming from a distinctive and timeless Chinese poetics, asserting that “Clearly Lee’s Chinese heritage has contributed to these poems a kind of cunning and wit seen in ancient Chinese poetry.”3 For readers such as these, Lee merits his significance as an Asian American poet because he gives artfully transparent expression to his “foreign” cultural heritage. On the other side, with the institutional solidification of Asian American studies as a formal academic field during the 1990s and the attendant increase in the critical sophistication of strategies for conceptualizing cultural production by people of Asian descent in the United States, a small but steadily growing number of critics have begun to argue expressly against the previously dominant tendency to read Lee, as well as, indeed, all Asian American poets, merely as conduits for the eternal wisdom of the East. So, for example, Juliana Chang has called attention to the essentialist assumptions and limitations implicit in “positioning ‘Asian’ or ‘Chinese’ as a monolithic cultural essence detached from historical change, unmarked by processes of migration and displacement, and unproblematically (mystically?) transmitted through and into anyone of Asian descent.”4 Instead, they have sought to affirm and authorize a specifically “Asian American” (as opposed to simply an “Asian”) cultural production by insisting upon the diversity of origin, background, and interest among Asian American writers themselves.5

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Indeed, ever since Lisa Lowe introduced the notion of “cultural hybridity” as a model for Asian American cultural production, Asian Americanist critics have emphasized the generative importance to his poetry of Lee’s experience as a refugee and immigrant, and his consequent “feeling of disconnection and displacement” from his Chinese heritage, together with the influence of such foundational Western texts as the Bible, especially the book of Exodus.6 Thus, emphasizing the poet’s individual history of diaspora, Xiaojing Zhou argues that Lee’s “position of straddling different cultures and histories” endows him with a genuinely “bi-cultural” sensibility, and his poems “enact and embody the processes of poetic innovation and identity invention beyond the boundaries of any single cultural heritage or ethnic identity.”7 Similarly, more recent commentators have discussed Lee’s treatment of themes such as sexual desire and food as sites through which he conveys and constructs his identity variously as an immigrant, ethnic, Asian diasporic American, and Chinese American poet.8 Despite their important differences, however, critics and scholars on both sides of the debate have thus far shared a more basic set of assumptions, derived from the prevailing ideology of liberal multiculturalism, in using a range of methods to delineate the conceptual structure of Lee’s “proper” identity as a writer, and thereupon tracing the ostensible political or ethical implications of his presentation in verse of that identity. For in persisting to read his work through a hermeneutic of authenticity, they have alike performed a de facto reification of the categories “ethnicity,” “identity,” and “experience,” treating them as meaningful entities that enjoy an existence independent of or prior to their formal articulation, mediation, and even reception through different modes of discourse.9 So, for example, in her discussion of the frequently anthologized lyric, “Persimmons,” Wenying Xu has asserted that “Lee seems to establish the speaker’s ethnic authenticity via his relationship with persimmons,” and that “this nondiscursive identification evinces how culture inscribes even our taste buds and metabolism.”10 And in turn, such interpretative tendencies have at once reflected and facilitated the ongoing hegemony of predominantly thematic approaches to Lee’s verse in particular, as well as to literary production by people of Asian descent in the United States more generally. Yet, as I discussed in the interchapter, the very notion of “ethnicity” itself inhabits its own distinctive historicity, having emerged only comparatively recently over the latter decades of the twentieth century. Furthermore, this emergence has constituted not so much the “discovery” of some hitherto unrecognized category of human difference, but rather the at once invested and contested “invention” of such a category by means of a broad range of discursive channels and procedures. To be sure, such sweeping and basic textualism regarding the invention of “ethnicity” as a category of human difference hardly suffices as a warrant for

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disputing the demonstrably shaping effects that this discursively constituted relation of power has had and continues to have on the lives of individual members of both different minority and dominant groups in the United States and elsewhere. As Xu rightly notes, such effects have reached down even to the minutest details of everyday material and sensory existence, such as in the bodily inscription of gustatory taste. To this extent, I have no substantial disagreement with the positions taken by her and others who have expended considerable effort on illuminating both the conditions and the dynamics of Lee’s “ethnic” identity as part of the attempt to assess the significance of his literary production. Nevertheless, in affording the category of “identity,” together with the related notions of “ethnicity” and “experience,” privileged status as foundational hermeneutic assumptions, existing criticism has thus far consistently failed to advance very far beyond the stages of thematic explication and the isolated discussion of particular individual poems. Furthermore, such practices adhere to what Rey Chow has called a “coercive mimeticism” in the analysis of “ethnic” expression, therewith perpetuating the subdisciplinary segregation of literary and cultural production by people of Asian descent in the United States more generally by considering both their logic and their import virtually exclusively in relation to the concerns of ethnic “identity” and “experience” themselves.11 As a result, discussion of Lee’s achievement has yet to begin evaluating in any sustained or systematic way the broader historical, cultural, political, and critical significance of the particular rhetorical and formal strategies that he employs in giving expressly poetic articulation to the terms of his identity as a writer in the United States who lays claim to a specifically Chinese descent at the levels of both personal history and cultural heritage. Accordingly, then, in this chapter my discussion shall concentrate not simply on establishing the different parameters of Lee’s identity as an “ethnic” writer, nor on explicating his treatment of themes such as discrimination, displacement, immigration, cultural loss, and so on. Rather, I focus on assessing and interrogating the formal logic and meaning, as well as the wider literary historical and politico-cultural significance, of the different poetic strategies by which he strives to represent in English specifically Chinese language and cultural practices and traditions in the process of setting forth a Chinese American subjectivity in verse. If such an approach departs from the established tendencies of existing criticism, it also at least implicitly challenges Lee’s own conception of his goals and ambitions as a writer; for he has consistently rejected the label of “ethnic” or “Asian American” poet, oftentimes in starkly idealistic terms. Thus, in an interview conducted in 1996 and eventually appearing in The Kenyon Review, he echoes a familiar sentiment that has been voiced by numerous American minority writers since at least the early decades of the twentieth century. Assuming a posture strikingly

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similar to the one taken by Countee Cullen during the Harlem Renaissance (at least as reported by Langston Hughes in the renowned essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”), Lee has declared: The fine print of that question—“Where do you stand as an Asian-American writer”—is a question about one’s dialogue with cultural significance. I would say the answer is nil; I have no dialogue with cultural existence. Culture made that up—Asian-American, African-American, whatever. I have no interest in that. I have an interest in spiritual lineage connected to poetry—through Eliot, Donne, Lorca, Tu Fu, Neruda, David the Psalmist. But I’ve realized that that is still the culture. Somehow an artist has to discover a dialogue that is so essential to his being, to his self, that it is no longer cultural or canonical, but a dialogue with his truest self. His most naked spirit.12

Notwithstanding such a spirited disavowal of any sort of identification with established categories of American ethnic identity, Lee nevertheless repeatedly and even reverently invokes throughout his writing a specifically Chinese familial and cultural affiliation or lineage as a fundamental part of his “dialogue with his truest self.” In addition, premised on the basic conceit of an individual subjectivity giving voice to emblematic or representative experiences, his achievement affords a paradigmatic illustration of what I have been calling lyric testimony, the poetic mode that first emerged during the 1970s in the wake of the Asian American movement, and which has come to dominate the production, as well as the reception, of verse by people of Asian descent in the United States. Exemplifying this hegemonic mode, Lee relates in his poetry a varied array of both traumatic encounters with discrimination and compensatory perceptions and memories from a personalized history as an immigrant of Chinese parentage who arrived in America while still a child.13 By doing so, he thus in effect advances a version of Chinese American ethnic identity as a simultaneous condition of, on the one hand, problematic difference from the reigning norms of dominant (i.e., “white”) American society, and on the other hand, generative but grievous separation from a cultural and linguistic tradition to which he formerly belonged in an effortlessly organic way. And as both an expression and a result of this separation, his poetry displays, and indeed self-consciously plays upon, an incomplete knowledge of the cultural and linguistic traditions with which he affiliates himself in setting forth the terms of his identity. At the level of explicit theme, then, Lee offers a critique of various dominant stereotypical constructions of Asian Americans in general, and Chinese Americans in particular. Moreover, structured as personal recollections or monologues in free verse that build through associative connections up to moments of emotionally charged

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revelation, his poetry collectively aims to enact a resolution to the twin dilemmas that characterize his conception of Chinese American ethnic identity. Significantly, however, that attempted resolution finally comes to rest upon an appeal to a “deeper” knowledge of ethnic cultural heritage that finds its deepest grounding in the essentialist terrain of the body and the logic of biological descent. Consequently, his work ultimately reveals the limitations (under the current ideological regime of liberal multiculturalism) of a poetic, as well as a critical, practice built upon the conceptual foundation of a unified ethnic or minority subjectivity giving affective voice to individual experience.

II

Within Lee’s still relatively modest but steadily growing body of work, the early lyric “Persimmons” stands out as the cornerstone upon which his reputation as an Asian American poet has been built and continues to develop. Indeed, this poem serves a doubly paradigmatic function in terms of both its own operation and Lee’s broader reputation as a poet of Asian descent in the United States. First, it has almost invariably been included in anthologies featuring Lee, most notably such expansive, nationally configured ones as the Norton and the Harper. Second, it exhibits in microcosm the principal concerns and strategies that characterize his work. Serving both these roles simultaneously and in a mutually reinforcing way, the poem offers the rare opportunity to gauge all at once the underlying cultural logic of Lee’s current renown, together with both the extent and the equally significant limitations of his achievement as part of the specifically poetic tradition in the United States of representing Chinese culture and identity that we have been following over the course of this study. In short, “Persimmons” has effectively achieved the status of a “representative” Asian American poem. And in many ways understandably so. In “Persimmons,” Lee earnestly relates various aspects of immigrant and/or ethnic experience in the United States, including the trauma associated with learning (or failing to learn) English pronunciation; the ambivalence attendant upon cultural assimilation, most powerfully emblematized in the form of an interracial sexual relationship; the sense of profound alienation and otherness that arises from a confrontation with mainstream ignorance and cultural insensitivity; and finally the anxiety over a loss of connection with an original or parent(al) culture. In addition to addressing such concerns frequently thematized in Asian American texts, Lee orchestrates them in an expressly “high” literary

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fashion, employing an associative structure that circulates around the central organizing image of persimmons, which unifies the series of otherwise disparate episodes depicted in the poem. Thus “Persimmons” joins expressly ethnic content with a sophistication of expression in English that not only gives apparently “authentic” voice to (an) Asian American experience, but also implies a triumphalist narrative of integration and synthesis wherein the poet overcomes all the difficulties posed by his cultural heritage and enters fully into (indeed, contributes to the formation of) multicultural American society by mastering its operative language, as evidenced by the poem itself. Such neatly complementary signification between the levels of subject matter and style helps to explain the remarkable popularity of “Persimmons” as a representative Asian American poem under our current liberal multiculturalist regime. For even as he celebrates Chinese gustatory habits and art forms such as yarn tying and brush painting as sources of enduring value, Lee conveys his sentiments in a thoroughly Americanized poetic idiom that, as we have seen, at once owes part of its very legibility and gains its wider literary historical meaning in relation to the dominant conventions for representing Chinese culture and identity set forth by Ezra Pound in Cathay. Significantly, this idiom operates through a paired logic of disclosure and reconstruction so that the poem offers English-language audiences the appeal of a seemingly intimate glimpse into Chinese culture, while at the same time compensating for any ignorance on the part of those audiences about Chinese language or cultural practices. (Indeed, the poem depends in large measure for its overall effect precisely on such ignorance.) On the surface, then, “Persimmons” artfully combines aspects of two distinct cultural traditions into a gloriously synthetic expressive form. Yet for all his gestures toward synthesizing the two cultural traditions to which he lays claim, Lee actually manages only a partial integration of Asian, or more specifically Chinese, and American cultural and linguistic elements in “Persimmons.” In doing so, he not only illustrates several of the formal strategies for representing Asian cultures and languages that appear in the work of numerous writers of Asian descent in the United States but also their particular literary historical meaning and broader cultural politics. In its overarching trajectory, “Persimmons” attempts at once to present and to resolve the contradictions of Asian American identity in general and Chinese American identity in particular; and from the outset, the poem presents cultural contact (or, perhaps more accurately, conflict) as a matter of explicit concern. Thus it begins with an account of an early, unpleasant encounter with the subtle distinctions of English pronunciation and one of its more zealous enforcers:

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In sixth grade Mrs. Walker slapped the back of my head and made me stand in the corner for not knowing the difference between persimmon and precision.14

The system of Chinese phonotactics does not include the complex syllable onset of the pr- at the beginning of the word precision as an allowable sequence.15 Thus, as would be consistent with a native speaker of Mandarin in the process of learning English, Lee’s youthful poetic persona has difficulty reproducing the sequence of sounds that differentiates between the first syllables of “persimmon and precision.”16 Through his use of italics, Lee asserts the sonic similarity of these words by distinguishing them graphically from the rest of the early part of the poem, thereby giving a visual representation of the difference between standard English, or American, pronunciation and his own early accented attempts. In this way he gestures toward the foreign source for his poetic idiom. By calling attention to these words precisely as conventionalized signs rather than as transparent or natural signifiers, the visual difference in printing here denotes a nonnative relationship to or distance from “proper” spoken English. This device remains consistent throughout the poem. At later points, as we shall see, Lee employs italics for transliterations of Chinese words, as well as for translations of speech in Chinese. By means of this strategy, he neatly sidesteps the problem of incorporating Chinese characters into the poem and thereby closing off much of his meaning to readers without the benefit of knowing (or being able to read) his own native language.17 More to the point, perhaps, this strategy also enables him at once to depict and to avoid the compositional problems stemming from his own limited knowledge of Chinese, an issue that arises explicitly later in the poem. At the level of narrative, moreover, Lee’s early difficulty in learning English pronunciation not only indicates his cultural heritage but also elicits both physical punishment and social isolation. Thus, these initial lines establish the body as the site upon which the issue of ethnicity, in its personal as well as social dimensions, will play out over the course of the poem. In addition, they undertake through sharp irony a critique of dominant intolerance and discrimination, since Mrs. Walker punishes the young Lee18 “for not knowing the difference” between two English words, thereby marking herself as someone grossly insensitive to the very category of “difference,” as a poor teacher, in other words, who both fails to recognize and neglects to practice the import of her own lesson. These opening lines of “Persimmons” constitute a significant achievement in what I have called in the introduction cross-fertilization, or the combining or setting against one another of elements or features of

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different traditions in such a way as to generate new possibilities of signification in one or the other of the contributing cultures, while still accurately depicting the unique particularity of both. Consequently, the broader significance of this achievement stems not simply from the fact that Lee has represented a traumatic childhood event that illuminates one of the many facets of Asian American identities in the United States; rather, it lies in the formal innovation of the particular strategy used in the effort to depict that event. For here, the “mistakes” in English pronunciation that arise directly as a result of the speaker’s Chinese linguistic heritage at once serve as the explicit subject of Lee’s concern as a poet and enable a distinctive, and largely unprecedented (at least within the tradition of verse by people of Asian descent in the United States), poetic strategy, one that establishes the ground for the series of semantic contrasts, between the word pairs “persimmon and precision,” as well as later “fight and fright, wren and yarn,” that drives the entire poem. Here the phonological properties of Mandarin Chinese, and the types of aural perception and articulatory tendencies they condition, intersect with English in such a way as to create new poetic possibilities in the latter language, providing a basis for coupling words that would otherwise be clearly distinct for native speakers. Such a strategy vividly illustrates one of the ways that the effort to voice ethnic difference in verse helps to expand the formal repertoire of American poetry more broadly. That Lee’s childhood difficulties were merely ones of pronunciation and not semantic comprehension becomes clear in the lines immediately following, which illustrate the precision with which he understands both the meanings of the words themselves, as well as the proper method for enjoying persimmons. This demonstration entails specific procedures for selecting, preparing, and consuming the fruit: How to choose persimmons. This is precision. Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted. Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one will be fragrant. How to eat: put the knife away, lay down newspaper. Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat. Chew the skin, suck it, and swallow. Now, eat the meat of the fruit, so sweet, all of it, to the heart.

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Such lovingly exact detail accomplishes at least three things. First, it underscores the injustice of Mrs. Walker’s treatment of Lee by demonstrating his practical comprehension of the meaning behind the English word precision. Second, inasmuch as the persimmon represents an “exotic fruit” by conventional American agricultural and grocery standards, Lee’s knowledge of “How to eat” one establishes his credentials as an “authentic” Asian. Tellingly, Lee eliminates the indeterminate pronoun in this locution, perhaps alluding to the tendencies of a Chinese speaker of English as a second language. And finally, the suggestive vocabulary in this passage, the charged concentration of words such as “bottoms,” “lay,” “skin,” “suck,” “swallow,” “eat,” “meat,” and “heart,” transforms these instructions into an erotics of consumption that proves the speaker capable of adult sexual pleasure and thus works against the long-standing historical stereotype of Asian men as feminized, or even asexual, beings. In this regard, “Persimmons” advances its own counterpoetics of specifically Chinese difference in the United States. This implicit sexual agenda anticipates the appearance of “Donna” in the third stanza of the poem, the second instance when Chinese language elements contribute to the textual fabric of “Persimmons.” In this section, Lee depicts an intimate encounter with the ultimate object and symbol of assimilationist desire, a white woman. Here, language (or, perhaps more properly, language difference) functions as the marker of ethnic difference, while the body serves as the avenue for negotiating that difference: Donna undresses, her stomach is white. In the yard, dewy and shivering with crickets, we lie naked, face-up, face-down. I teach her Chinese. Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I’ve forgotten. Naked: I’ve forgotten. Ni, wo: you and me. I part her legs, remember to tell her she is beautiful as the moon.

Shifting to the present-tense narrative mode, this episode completely revises the traumatic pedagogical scene that opens the poem, thus indicating the extent to which the speaker has successfully integrated into American society, as well as, presumably, mastered the subtleties of English pronunciation. Instead of suffering a punitive relationship with the matronly, cruel “Mrs. Walker” (her patronymic designation not only serves to distance her as a figure but also connotes by means of a verbal pun the demeaning character of her behavior, i.e., she walks on him), the speaker enjoys an expressly

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sexual one with the naked, obliging “Donna,” a name that, its clear biographical source notwithstanding,19 evokes the archetypal feminine through its etymological source in the Italian word donna, meaning “lady.” Indeed, throughout the first part of “Persimmons,” the Anglo-feminine mediates Lee’s approach to American language culture, and the change in his treatment by and of white women figures emblematizes the transformation in his relationship to English itself. Hence, rather than being “slapped [in] the back of my head/and made [to] stand in the corner,” Lee underscores his own agency in these lines, explicitly stating, “I part her legs.” Moreover, such intimacy occasions some educational pillow talk, with the speaker providing some erotically charged instruction in his native tongue. But in assuming the teacherly position himself, he reveals that he has forgotten almost all of his original language, remembering correctly only the most rudimentary terms for “self ” and “you” (a form of “other”).20 Indeed, the scene achieves its effects largely through the contrast between the speaker’s overtly poetic English description of the yard in which the lovers lie as “dewy and shivering/with crickets” and the glaring paucity of his Chinese vocabulary. The grammatically ambiguous referent and strategic line break of this appositional phrase (does “dewy and shivering/with crickets” apply to the yard or the lovers?)21 only heightens the self-conscious poeticity of these lines. The speaker apparently retains enough cultural knowledge from his origins, however, to “remember” to invoke the image of the moon, traditionally associated with the feminine in Chinese symbolism, as a strategy and prelude to consummating his adult encounter with a female embodiment of social and linguistic norms. Thus, Chinese language (or, more properly, transliterations of Chinese words) and Chinese cultural reference function in this scene as indicators of a fading (yet still persistent) ethnic difference based in cultural inheritance, but ones that, paradoxically perhaps, facilitate the overcoming of that difference at the level of the body. In other words, Lee presents cultural knowledge, on the one hand, as the cost of entry into dominant society, and on the other, as a mechanism for overcoming the bodily (i.e., racial) dimension of ethnic difference. Within the evolving narrative of the poem, then, these lines depict both the speaker’s entry into the mainstream American sociosexual economy, as figured in his intercultural and interracial verbal and sexual intercourse with the white, English-speaking “Donna,” and the cost in terms of ethnic identity of that successful assimilation in the consequent separation from his original or parental culture. This scenario encapsulates one of the fundamental dilemmas at once motivating and haunting “Persimmons,” as well as so much of self-consciously “ethnic” cultural production more generally, namely, how to manage the weight (whether as burden or as birthright or as gift) of a minority cultural

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inheritance in the articulation of an ethnic identity. As critics have generally understood, the scene gives voice to Lee’s individual “feeling of disconnection and displacement” from his cultural heritage. Indeed, Tim Engles has gone so far as to assert that Lee suggests “the speaker’s attraction to white America has involved a prostitution of sorts of his heritage,”22 with the deployment of the Chinese association of the moon with the feminine constituting a form of exoticization. Within the developing logic of the poem itself, this scene introduces a thematic of personal cultural loss, for which the remaining lines seek to offer compensation in the figures of the speaker’s mother and father and their respective practices of the Chinese arts of yarn tying and brush painting. The very next stanza begins the process of arriving at a solution to the dilemma of cultural loss, marking the second major section of the poem. Here, Lee reverts to the mode of pained recollection, once again relating his early difficulties with English pronunciation. In doing so he manages not only to convey additional childhood affronts to his body but also to invoke the contrasting, happy memory of his mother: Other words that got me into trouble were fight and fright, wren and yarn. Fight was what I did when I was frightened, fright was what I felt when I was fighting. Wrens are small, plain birds, yarn is what one knits with. Wrens are soft as yarn. My mother made birds out of yarn. I loved to watch her tie the stuff; a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.

The series of simple, primer-like sentences in this passage nicely evokes the speaker’s early efforts at learning English, while at the same time both indicating other kinds of “trouble” he faced as a child and identifying a Chinese art practice that holds enduring personal meaning. Thematically, then, this stanza serves as an extension of the opening scene of the poem, elaborating upon Lee’s boyhood difficulties with English pronunciation together with the consequences he suffered as a result of his ethnic difference. In addition, it expressly presents parental art as a source of emotional comfort and cultural validation in the face of a dominant socio-educational regime at best woefully insensitive to and at worst openly dismissive of his heritage. At the level of technique, moreover, Lee employs the same kind of “poetics of mistake” as in the initial lines, playing on the semantic difference between phonetically similar word pairs. In their specific depiction of

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the speaker’s early pronunciation problems, however, these lines reflect a distinct shift in the dynamics of interaction between the Chinese and English elements in “Persimmons,” a subtle but definite modulation in both the extent and the manner in which the languages, together with the respective cultures they represent and convey, contribute to the operative idiom of the poem. And this change, in turn, delineates the conceptual horizon, as well as, indeed, the deeply gendered focus, of the particular vision of Chinese American ethnic identity that the poem sets forth. For “fight and fright” constitute only two elements of a minimally differentiated set of three words in English that would pose problems for native Chinese speakers to distinguish each from the other. Because it too features a complex onset syllable, the word “flight” also presents a challenge for speakers of Mandarin. Indeed, since the Chinese sound inventory contains the lateral liquid l, but lacks the rhotic liquid r, the greater, and arguably more plausible, difficulty for a native Mandarin speaker in the process of learning English would lie in pronouncing the difference between “flight and fright.”23 Depicting this particular problem, however, would dramatically alter the articulation of Asian American ethnicity in “Persimmons,” completely reversing the terms of the speaker’s masculine identity from an emotionally informed bravery into simple cowardice. To appreciate the implications of such a seemingly minor alteration, one need only substitute “flight” for “fight” in the poem and consider how the lines might read: Flight was what I did when I was frightened, fright was what I felt when I was fleeing;

or perhaps less strictly trochaically and more in keeping with the free verse rhythms of the poem as a whole: Flight was my response to being frightened fright was my feeling when I fled.

As written, then, Lee’s lines aim less at conveying a precise linguistic verisimilitude than at promoting a conception of Asian American ethnic identity that encompasses both the traditional Western masculine characteristic of physical aggression and the decidedly more contemporary American value of a capacity to express emotional vulnerability. In terms of the way in which Lee orchestrates the two cultures (and languages) out of which he seeks to construct an ethnic identity, this section marks the precise moment in the poem when semantic concerns in English come decisively to outweigh the influences of Chinese phonology in determining the verbal and, as we shall see presently, the symbolic idiom of “Persimmons.” Within the developing gender dynamics of the poem, moreover, the speaker’s mother and her art practice directly counterbalance the actions of

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the other female figures and their effects on him in his attempt to establish the terms of an ethnic identity. For instead of either punishing him for his difference from a narrowly conceived, Anglo-American standard of culture, or exposing his separation from his linguistic origins, the mother functions in the poem as the agent through which the speaker first experiences an intimate connection with his ethnic heritage. Put another way, Lee deploys the maternal in “Persimmons” as a strategy for resolving his problematic relationship to the feminine as it intersects with the articulation of an Asian American masculine identity. The redemptive capacity of the maternal operates most forcefully in the very next segment of the poem, which contrasts Mrs. Walker’s insensitive and even misinformed treatment of a persimmon and the mother’s overtly metaphorical description of the fruit. Her observation at once valorizes a cultural perspective specifically identified as “Chinese” and recuperates the image of persimmons as a vehicle for expressing an Asian American ethnic identity: 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. My mother said that every persimmon has a sun inside, something golden, glowing, warm as my face.

Reiterating the earlier example of her insensitivity to cultural difference, the first stanza here depicts Mrs. Walker’s broader ignorance of Asian gustatory practices. With an impressive subtlety, the lineation underscores the ways in which she violates the procedures for selecting and preparing a persimmon detailed previously in the poem. Rather than attempting to “Peel the skin tenderly,” she employs a knife to “cut it up.” Even worse, perhaps, she mistakenly terms it “a Chinese apple,” and the enjambment of this line with the next not only emphasizes the ironic contrast between Mrs. Walker’s provincialism and the speaker’s condition of “Knowing” about the fruit. It also highlights her choice of a persimmon that “wasn’t ripe or sweet.” In addition to these practical blunders, by misnaming the persimmon, Mrs. Walker further casts the speaker’s cultural difference in a negative light, since by calling it “a Chinese apple” she explicitly connects him with the obviously unpleasant experience of consuming the unripe, unsweet, exotic fruit, which manifests on the faces of his classmates. Thus, the speaker’s early encounters with the feminine only highlight and demean his condition of ethnic difference.

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By contrast, the mother’s explanation in the second stanza redeems the persimmon as a symbol of nature, light, and familial connection combined, with her invocation of the sun modulating into the image of her son’s face. Again, the lineation here nicely reinforces the locution at the end of the first line that draws attention to the pun in English between “sun” and “son,” which in turn further naturalizes the persimmon as a positive emblem of family relation and cultural identity rather than merely as either a marker of ethnic difference or an exotic, strange fruit. Through the figure of the mother and her cultural knowledge, then, the speaker begins to reformulate his relationship to the condition of his own ethnicity. To be sure, in the very next stanza he demonstrates his own awareness, in stark contrast to Mrs. Walker, of what to do with unripe persimmons. Nature itself seems to attest to his apparently latent, yet implicitly enduring, ethnic knowledge by echoing the wisdom of his mother in response to his actions: Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper, forgotten and not yet ripe. I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill, where each morning a cardinal sang, The sun, the sun.

Up to this point and throughout its remaining lines, the poem operates exclusively within the terms of a lyrically articulated realism, depicting only strictly plausible events and interactions, personal memories, and concrete objects. The appearance here, then, of an overtly figurative (or, perhaps better, fantastical) element, even one as decidedly traditional, not to say mundane, as the singing cardinal constitutes an anomaly in the conceptual fabric of “Persimmons.” As such, it indicates the strain underlying Lee’s particular effort in the poem to incorporate Chinese cultural, and especially linguistic, threads into an English matrix, thereby attempting to express and validate his ethnic heritage. For in depicting the bird’s song as a repetition of his mother’s comforting words, Lee employs a strategy decidedly unfamiliar within the tradition of Chinese poetics and its attendant conception of the relationship between poetic expression and Nature. In this tradition, as Stephen Owen writes, “Meaning is not discovered by a metaphorical operation,” as in translating a bird call; rather, “the empirical world signifies for the poet” because “significance can appear in the forms of the sensible world through the presumption of a correlative structure of the universe.”24 While Owen’s broad statement entails the inevitable simplifications and even the essentialist, quasi-Orientalist generalizations marking traditional sinological scholarship, it nevertheless serves to point out a disjunction between Lee’s claim to a Chinese cultural heritage and the cultural roots of the poetic strategies he employs to validate that claim.

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By contrast, in the history of English poetry, speaking birds as an emblem for the lyric voice itself boasts a tradition that stretches, most obviously at least, from Frost’s oven bird to Poe’s raven, back to Keats’s nightingale and Shelley’s skylark. Thus, even as he strives to articulate and endorse an ostensibly Chinese sensibility, Lee demonstrates his ignorance of the Chinese poetic tradition and its underlying conceptual foundations. Instead, he employs a poetic strategy grounded in an expressly anglophone tradition, thereby revealing a crucial asymmetry between the “Asian” and the “American” elements in “Persimmons.” Furthermore, the italicization of the rationalized cardinal song establishes a visual connection with the transliterations of Chinese words, the translations of Chinese speech, and the examples of “incorrect” English in other parts of the poem. This association between animal sounds and the speaker’s rapidly disappearing native language at once reflects and reinforces a notion of the disparity between Chinese as a viable medium of poetic articulation and the actual, “proper” English idiom of “Persimmons.” Here, then, the hybridization strategy that shapes the idiom of the poem definitively changes from the generative cross fertilization apparent in the opening stanza to the more common and formally conservative mode of grafting. Within the ongoing narrative, persimmons continue to accrue further weight as a symbol of familial intimacy. Indeed, they come to serve as the vehicle by which Lee establishes the grounds for an expressly masculinized ethnic identity. Concluding the second major section of the poem, the next stanza records how the speaker forges a link with his masculine heritage by giving the discovered and subsequently ripened fruit to his father, whose response to his own impending loss of sight aptly evokes his son’s sense of cultural displacement: Finally understanding he was going blind, my father sat up all one night waiting for a song, a ghost. I gave him the persimmons, swelled, heavy as sadness, and sweet as love.

At this point, the third and final section of the poem begins with another switch in narrative modes: This year, in the muddy lighting of my parents’ cellar, I rummage, looking for something I lost. My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,

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black cane between his knees, hand over hand, gripping the handle. He’s so happy that I’ve come home. I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question. All gone, he answers.

The shift to the present tense here moves the poem out of the domain of particular historical recollection and into a perpetual, overtly symbolic time frame, wherein the actions of the speaker resonate as emblems for the process of establishing the terms of an ethnic identity. Hence the portentous imprecision contained in his effort of “looking/for something I lost.” In his search, however, he makes a discovery: Under some blankets, I find a box. Inside the box I find three scrolls. I sit beside him and untie three paintings by my father: Hibiscus leaf and a white flower. Two cats preening. Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.

Having gone blind, however, the father must ask which of the three paintings his son has unrolled before him. Printed entirely in italics, the final lines undoubtedly represent the exchange in Chinese between father and son: He raises both his hands to touch the cloth, asks, Which is this? This is persimmons, Father. Oh the feel of the wolftail on the silk, the strength, the tense precision in the wrist. I painted them hundreds of times eyes closed. These I painted blind. Some things never leave a person: scent of the hair of one you love, the texture of persimmons, in your palm, the ripe weight.

As a conclusion to the poem, the father’s detailed, emotionally charged reflections on his own efforts as an artist and on the “things [that] never leave a person,” the perceptions and memories that endure despite any form of geographical, linguistic, or even sensory displacement, embody an attempt

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to resolve the various tensions established earlier in “Persimmons.” Most obviously, at the level of diction this passage effects a resolution by reversing the speaker’s (and presumably the reader’s) negative association with the words “persimmon and precision.” In broader narrative terms, moreover, it serves to alleviate the speaker’s sense of “disconnection and dislocation” from his roots as an Asian American by presenting his father’s brush painting as a source of meaning and enduring cultural connection in the effort to establish an ethnic identity. Indeed, in specifying that the father painted these persimmons after having gone blind, the poem suggests that his connection to the tradition of Chinese brush painting exists regardless of his perception, as if it were an innate part of his being. The father’s claim to having “painted them hundreds of times/eyes closed” notwithstanding, the somatic details in his discussion of the art itself, his focus on “the strength, the tense/precision in the wrist,” grounds cultural achievement even more firmly in the terrain of the body. Consequently, Lee implicitly claims a virtually biological connection to this cultural tradition through his own condition as a son. By collapsing the difference between cultural practice or knowledge and bodily condition, Lee thus finally presents an essentialized conception of ethnicity as a solution to the problematic of cultural loss. In addition, the poem’s demonstrated ignorance of the tradition of Chinese brush painting in “Persimmons” further suggests an appeal to the logic of biological descent, rather than acquired knowledge or other form of cultural practice, as the ultimate foundation for ethnic identity. For each of the images painted by the father possesses its own symbolic meaning and value within a Chinese symbolic and iconographic economy. For example, according to Wolfram Eberhard, through a pun on its name in Chinese, fu-rong (芙蓉), the hibiscus “symbolizes fame (rong) and riches (fu); or by extension, fame and splendour.” Similarly, a cat symbolizes an “octogenarian.” Most important, again through the mechanism of a pun on its name in Chinese, shi (柿), persimmons signify “affairs,” “business,” or “matters” in general. 25 Correlatively, in the Chinese literary tradition, persimmon trees embody a distinct set of seven characteristics. Himself quoting from an ancient source, a character in the great Chinese novel Xi You Ji (西 游 記), or Journey to the West, relates that “there are seven types of extreme characteristics of the persimmon tree. They are: long-lasting, shady, without birds’ nests, wormless, lovely leaves when frosted, hardy fruits and large luxuriant branches.”26 Yet in invoking the cultural practice of Chinese brush painting and its associated tradition of symbolism in his search for the terms of an ethnic identity, Lee makes no reference whatsoever to any of these meanings in the conclusion of the poem. Indeed, none of the images the father has painted make any discernible contribution of their symbolic meaning in Chinese culture to the overall poetic effect. For all intents and purposes, then, they amount simply to exotic decoration, ornaments merely

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grafted to, rather than constitutive of, the governing idiom of the poem. Thus, despite his explicit thematic concern with and rhetorical gestures toward synthesizing different cultural and linguistic traditions at the end of the poem to establish the terms of a specifically Chinese American ethnic subjectivity, Lee manages at the levels of form and signifying medium only a limited interaction between Chinese and American cultural traditions in “Persimmons.” Somewhat ironically, perhaps, this incomplete accord between the formal logic and the expressly ethnic cultural subject matter of “Persimmons” helps to explain why it, more than any other of Lee’s lyrics, has garnered so much critical and popular attention, and thereby attained to the status of a representative Asian American poem. And in turn, this very acclaim points more generally to the broader political limitations of lyric testimony as the dominant poetic mode among contemporary writers of Asian descent in the United States. For in “Persimmons” Lee sets forth a conception of ethnicity based upon a purely personal set of experiences and family history, as well as upon a strictly idiosyncratic knowledge of his heritage tradition that informs the deployment of Chinese cultural reference and symbolism in the poem. Moreover, he does so in a largely unproblematized and thoroughly legible poetic idiom in English that presumes to convey in a transparent manner the particularity of an expressly “foreign” language and cultural tradition. As a result, the poem at once conforms to and validates the terms of a liberal multiculturalist ideology and its attendant emphasis on the individual expression of ethnic difference over formal interrogation and structural critique of the very mechanisms and conditions helping to constitute the category of ethnicity itself. To be sure, the mere fact of representing difference at the level of a minoritized identity does have an expressly political resonance. Most obviously, it works against overt forms of prejudice that arise out of nakedly exclusionary conceptions of national or social belonging, such as in the discourse of white supremacist racism that underwrote the policy of Chinese exclusion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But in grounding ethnic difference solely in the isolated terrain of personal experience and an essentialist somatic dimension, “Persimmons” occludes the history of structural discrimination and its wide-ranging effects in the United States that established the conditions of emergence and development for the very ethnic identity that Lee seeks to articulate. These conditions run the gamut from the pre-1965 regime of immigration based on strict quotas under which Lee himself entered the country as a child to the intervening cultural milestone of the civil rights movement in general and the Asian American movement in particular to the rise of “multicultural literature” as a both a commercial and an academic niche market. Furthermore, by employing an expressive idiom that adheres to the established signifying conventions of the cultural dominant, the poem accepts beforehand and operates within a conceptual and linguistic

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infrastructure that has at once arisen from and contributed to the perpetuation of asymmetrical relations of power among different subject positions and social locations. Consequently, in its reliance on the tropes of depicting individual experience and delineating the parameters of a unique, though ostensibly representative, minority identity, the mode of lyric testimony declines to challenge discrimination at the systemic level. That is, it remains fundamentally averse to interrogating the historical and ongoing structural asymmetries that produce differential access to social and material privilege. In the end, then, “Persimmons” implicitly promotes at the level of form an assimilationist cultural politics that ultimately envisions the complete domestication of specifically foreign difference to the established terms of the cultural dominant, thereby resulting in the idealized possibility of total integration into mainstream society on the part of the minority subject. Such a position correlates with and explains, for example, Lee’s stated desire to transcend ethnic categorization, and instead “to discover a dialogue . . . that is no longer cultural or canonical.” In addition, an episode from Lee’s prose memoir of his relationship with his father, The Winged Seed, confirms the utopian presumptions that underwrite his vision as an Asian American poet. In this section of the narrative, Lee revisits the traumatic experience of acquiring another language that inspired the opening scene in “Persimmons.” After relating his own difficulties in learning to speak English as “a boy who’d just arrived on the continent with my parents,” Lee relates a recent encounter with a new fellow immigrant, “a Chinese boy, seven years old,” whom his own sons have just befriended. He goes on to describe their halting conversation, as well as his own nostalgic reaction to it: I speak to him in Mandarin, but he tells me he doesn’t speak Chinese, which I take to mean he doesn’t speak the same dialect as me. He says this in English and as he speaks, as he struggles to make the very sounds, lowering his head and mumbling like a whipped boy, fingering his lower lip, I am suddenly returned to my own early attempts at making American sounds, and I remember my own deliberate slurring and mumbling in order to hide my mouth, to make my accent less discernible. I want to move my mouth with his, and I don’t know if I want to tell him, Don’t worry, the accent wears off, no one will know you’re an alien then, or tell him how I sometimes miss my own sound.27 (italics in the original)

Significantly, Lee expresses ambivalence over whether to tell this doppelgänger of his own youth about the affective cost of learning to speak American English; and this wavering between the goal of successfully overcoming social alienation due to verbal difference (duly italicized for emphasis) and a persistent, though intermittent, longing for a former, less self-alienated and

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domesticated state comprises arguably the central drama behind Lee’s poetic vision. In any event, the notion that the disappearance of a foreign accent alone suffices to assure that “no one will know you’re an alien” clearly indicates his belief in both the possibility and the desirability of total cultural assimilation, an accomplishment enabled, moreover, solely by a mastery of the expressive norms and signifying conventions of the social dominant. Yet for all its liberal appeal, such a view of immigration and the dynamics of ethnicity in the United States fails to recognize either the existence or the extent of ongoing structural discrimination in various forms (most especially “race”-based or phenotypic or optical) as a fundamental feature of contemporary American society. More important, perhaps, it also ignores the degree of its own complicity in the very maintenance of such asymmetries by extolling the possibility of overcoming difference as such. And in turn, this ideological horizon helps to explain both the relative formal conservatism of Lee’s style and the broader logic of his appeal as a representative Asian American poet.

III

Within “The Cleaving,” Lee’s next extended effort in verse to resolve the conceptual dilemma of a specifically Chinese American ethnic subjectivity, these basic assumptions and predilections remain largely in place, though in this poem the idealized process of “assimilation” takes a decidedly inverse trajectory in the form of the speaker’s will to a transcendental capacity for consumption. The capstone work in Lee’s second volume of poems, The City in Which I Love You, “The Cleaving” runs to 335 free verse lines. In its very scale and ambition, this sustained lyric amounts to one of the more impressive poetic accomplishments thus far among writers of Asian descent in the United States generally. Over the course of this span, the poem at once complicates and advances upon the thematics of “Persimmons” by presenting a figuratively indiscriminate voracity as the ultimate solution to the contradictory challenges that attend upon Chinese American identity in particular. While this extended poetic meditation has yet to achieve either the consideration or the acclaim that “Persimmons” has enjoyed, it has begun to draw justifiable attention both as the next substantial achievement in Lee’s evolving body of work and as another foundation in the developing edifice of his reputation as a representative Asian American poet. Up to this point, a small number of critics have offered some preliminary readings as part of an effort to situate Lee’s achievement within the tradition of American transcendentalism, most especially the examples of Whitman

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and Emerson, the latter of whom makes an explicit appearance in “The Cleaving.” Thus, Jeffrey Partridge has argued that in this work, “eating becomes both a sign of cultural communion with other Chinese immigrants (i.e., the larger cultural community) as well as an aggressive weapon against racism in American society and American literature.”28 Comparably, Wenying Xu has asserted that “the trope of eating figures for appropriation, incorporation, and assimilation, all that we take in through our senses and becomes us.”29 These analyses have usefully explicated Lee’s overarching concerns and the logic of his use of gustatory imagery in the poem. Despite their insights, however, Partridge and Xu have largely assumed both the determinacy and the independent existence of Lee’s ethnic identity apart from its formal articulation in verse. And in doing so, they have continued to premise their discussions upon a hermeneutics of authenticity. As a result, they have generally overlooked the authoritarian implications of the rhetorical and formal strategies by which Lee strives in this work at once to articulate and to resolve the terms of a specifically Chinese American ethnic identity. As previous commentators have rightly understood, through his use of a contranym in the very title of this poem, Lee cleverly and forcefully presents the condition of Chinese American ethnicity as a kind of abiding paradox or contradiction, invoking simultaneously the opposed senses of the verb “cleave,” which means both “to part or divide by a cutting blow; to hew asunder; to split” and “to stick fast or adhere,” or somewhat more broadly, “to cling or hold fast to.”30 The first stanza elaborates most obviously upon the transitive meaning of the titular verb by describing an ambivalently sumptuous and visceral scene in an ethnic Chinese market that features the handiwork of a butcher who serves as the initial object of Lee’s interest in “The Cleaving.” At the same time, however, the speaker’s opening comparison of the butcher to his grandmother, as well as the rhetorical gesture of somatically based co-ethnic identification that immediately follows, together hint at the intransitive sense of “cleave,” suggesting a clinging or holding fast to both cultural practice and an essentialist biological makeup in the shape of familial descent as the grounds for ethnic identity. This nicely evoked dynamic of a generative internal tension not only operates simultaneously on and among the various referential and figurative levels of the poem as a whole but it also therefore animates the structure of the conception of ethnicity and ethnic identity that the poem seeks to establish: He gossips like my grandmother, this man with my face, and I could stand amused all afternoon in the Hon Kee Grocery, amid hanging meats he

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chops; roast pork cut from a hog hung by nose and shoulders, her entire skin burnt crisp, flesh I know to be sweet, her shining face grinning up at ducks dangling single file, each pierced by black hooks through breast, bill, and steaming from a hole stitched shut at the ass.31

Clearly, the speaking subject here celebrates an explicitly named “Chinese” cultural location and tradition in the site and contents of the ethnic market.32 Moreover, in an intensely anatomized deployment of the strategy of grafting, the poem enumerates a series of culinary details that work to both register and reproduce (i.e., signify) the category of “Chineseness.” This signification, in turn, depends upon the poetic operation of additive synecdoche, which accretes in the form of the various animal parts identified with such enthusiastic clarity and concentration. And the speaker of the poem lays claim to membership in this category not only explicitly through the assertion of a preexisting experiential and conceptual understanding of the exotic foodstuffs (e.g., the “flesh” he “know[s]/to be sweet”) but also implicitly in the tone of relish and familiarity with which he describes these delicacies. But in this poem, as in “Persimmons,” what goes unsaid in the construction of ethnic identity reveals at least as much as that which achieves explicit articulation. Significantly, the transplanted name of the grocery, Hon Kee, clearly indicates a Cantonese linguistic origin, just as the luscious carcasses hanging in the window reflect a Cantonese culinary style. As a native speaker of Mandarin, Lee would not necessarily have the ability to understand what appears to be the operative dialect of the store, and this difference helps to explain the underlying tone of disconnection and incomprehension that colors his depiction of the ensuing, largely one-sided verbal exchange with the butcher, which closes the opening stanza: I step to the counter, recite, and he, without even slightly varying the rhythm of his current confession or harangue scribbles my order on a greasy receipt, and chops it up quick.

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At the most obvious level, of course, the social distance or gap between these two figures evokes one kind of “cleaving” designated by the title of the poem. And this separation seems to stem principally from a differential relationship to a “Chinese” heritage culture, the speaker apparently more distant from that condition than the butcher, as suggested by the occupation and the indeterminately reported speech of the latter. Within the larger narrative organization of “The Cleaving,” this constitutive gap or cleft serves to instigate the lyrical reflection and performance that comprise the remainder of the poem, which can perhaps be best understood as a rhetorical attempt to suture this cleaving, to overcome the gap between the speaker and the nostalgic condition of “Chineseness.” Yet, that retrospectively conceived notion of a “Chinese” heritage culture too remains thoroughly textually articulated, both in its verbal commissions and omissions; and Lee explicitly elides any mention of the distinction between his native dialect of Mandarin and the Cantonese of the store and of his garrulous, though apparently incomprehensible (or perhaps more accurately, uncomprehended), interlocutor. Importantly, this failure to recognize, or at least to mark, specifically intra-ethnic or regional (and dialectal) differences among people of Chinese descent in the United States is enabled by the assumption of a higher (or perhaps more accurately, deeper) level of “Chinese” identity that serves as a foundation for solidarity and collectivity across the barrier of language (at least understood in terms of mutual comprehensibility) and symbolic culture more generally. As a result, this omission shifts the terrain of “ethnicity” to the realm of the body, its processes, and most tellingly, its morphology. It thus takes the initial step toward its own version of “racial lumping.” And in doing so, it signals the reliance of the poem itself on an underlying essentialist biologism as a fundamental part of its effort to construct an ethnic identity. Moreover, like the would-be immigrants who composed the Angel Island poems, native speakers of the Cantonese dialect come from southern China, particularly the regions near Hong Kong and the surrounding province of Guangdong. Picayune though it might seem, such a detail about Chinese cultural geography highlights both the extreme compass and the explicit artifice of Lee’s ethnic imagination in “The Cleaving.” For in the stanza that follows, the poem spans a remarkable spatial and temporal distance in describing the various features of the butcher, which come to assume the proportions and behavioral lineaments of various stereotypical representatives from several different regions in China. Through the power of Lee’s poetic will, then, this figure attains to the status of a kind of generic everyman of Chinese identity in general, and Chinese ethnicity in the United States in particular. Indeed, he even gets associated rhetorically with

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the speaker’s own male relatives, including his grandfather, who apparently underwent his own difficulties as a sojourner in America during the early twentieth century: Such a sorrowful Chinese face, nomad, Gobi, Northern in its boniness clear from the high warlike forehead to the sheer edge of the jaw. He could be my brother, but finer, and, except for his left forearm, which is engorged, sinewy from his daily grip and wield of a two-pound tool, he’s delicate, narrowwaisted, his frame so slight a lover, some rough other might break it down its smooth, oily length. In his light-handed calligraphy on receipts and in his moodiness, he is a Southerner from a river-province; suited for scholarship, his face poised above an open book, he’d mumble his favorite passages. He could be my grandfather; come to American to get a Western education in 1917, but too homesick to study, he sits in the park all day, reading poems and writing letters to his mother.

These basic strategies for establishing the terms of a Chinese American ethnic identity persist as the poem continues, with the two stanzas that immediately follow vividly describing the butcher “cleaving” a roast duck into smaller parts for consumption, as well as the speaker’s meditative response to this brutal but appetizing act. In elaborating upon this particular method of preparing the Chinese dish, the poem reaches an especially charged moment in its depiction of the fowl’s butchered head: The head, flung from the body, opens down the middle where the butcher

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cleanly halved it between the eyes, and I see, foetal-crouched inside the skull, the homunculus, gray brain grainy to eat.

This perhaps gruesome morsel then prompts a series of observations and questions on the part of the speaker that not only connect him with the dead bird but that also raise the issue of his intimate connections with others, thereby elevating the poem into the realm of expressly philosophical concerns. The preponderance of initial capitals in these lines not only reflects a serendipitous sequence of grammatical constructions. More important, it underscores the high drama of this moment within the larger rhetorical architecture of “The Cleaving” by drawing attention to three instances of what amounts to arguably the major affective posture of the work as a whole, namely love in its maternal, devotional, and sexual expressions: This is also how I looked before I tore my mother open. Is this how I presided over my century, is this how I regarded the murders? This is also how I prayed. Was it me in the Other I prayed to when I prayed? This too was how I slept, clutching my wife. Was it me in the other I loved when I loved another?

Immediately following this sequence of reflective questions, the poem returns to the more mundane environment of the grocery, where the butcher shares a moment of ethnic connection with his eager and expansively minded customer: The butcher sees me eye this delicacy. With a finger, he picks it out of the skull-cradle and offers it to me. I take it gingerly between my fingers and suck it down. I eat my man.

Wenying Xu has detected in this association of the duck’s brain with a “foetalcrouched” “homunculus” or “man” an allusion to the legend surrounding the

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historico-cultural figure of Yue Fei, a renowned military figure from the Sung Dynasty in China. As Xu relates, according to the traditional story, Yue Fei “defeated foreign invaders but was unjustly punished by the emperor under the advice of a corrupt courtier. Afterward, everywhere the courtier went, people spat and threw stones at him. Hated and chased by people, he could find no better refuge than inside a chicken’s skull. Since then, the Chinese eat fowls’ brains with glee.” Such an allusion testifies, of course, at once to the range and specificity of the cultural sources and traditions from which Lee draws in seeking to establish the terms of both his idiom and identity as a Chinese American poet. As Xu puts it, in light of the regret and ambivalence he has expressed in “Persimmons” and elsewhere over the loss of his Chinese cultural heritage and especially language, “The reference to the legend of Yue Fei provides a measure of redemption in establishing [Lee] himself as a cultural insider.”33 Correspondingly, within the evolving narrative of the poem itself, this episode helps to underwrite the ethnic credibility of the speaker through illustrating his familiarity with, and indeed enthusiasm for, a decidedly “exotic” (at least by mainstream American standards of taste) Chinese delicacy, thereby confirming the significance of ethnic identity itself as an abiding concern throughout “The Cleaving” as a whole. More important still than serving to validate “an impression of the speaker’s ethnic authenticity,”34 or even Lee’s own as a writer, however, this act of consumption initiates the second movement of the poem as a whole. In this section, the physical process of eating achieves expressly metaphysical significance as a sustained figure for the means by which to overcome the traumas and resolve the contradictions of Asian American ethnic identity. In addition, accompanying such an enlargement in the conceptual scope of “The Cleaving,” the rhetoric of the speaker modulates from a simple descriptive realism into a higher register of charged and expansive philosophical meditation. Thus, in developing this basic poetic conceit of an indiscriminate appetite, Lee reverses the valence of long-standing stereotypes in the United States and elsewhere about Chinese dietary customs, which have found their most nakedly discriminatory expression, perhaps, in the widespread history of accusations about Asians in general and Chinese in particular as “dogeaters” and “rateaters.”35 Throughout the remainder of “The Cleaving,” by contrast, this breadth of appetite signaled by the relish for “ethnic” food such as duck brains becomes a spiritual asset, rather than simply a negative marker of problematic difference from dominant American norms and gustatory habits. In the stanza that immediately follows, the speaker reveals the stakes of this distinctive capacity for consumption by explicitly tying his own desire for familial connection to the act of sharing a meal, which features a variety of “ethnic” dishes:

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These are the faces I love, the bodies and scents of bodies for which I long in various ways, at various times thirteen gathered around the redwood, happy, talkative, voracious at day’s end, eager to eat four kinds of meat prepared four different ways, numerous plates and bowls of rice and vegetables, each made by distinct affections and brought to table by many hands.

Crucial to the essentialist “bio”-logic of Lee’s ethnic imagination in “The Cleaving,” the speaker articulates this desire for connection not only in familial terms, but even more explicitly by delineating various stereotypically “Chinese” morphological features and the different culturally specific behaviors to which they correspond. As an indication of his own development toward a transcendentally redemptive ingestion, the speaker expresses his love for these individuals and individual features, despite their deviations from some unexpressed, but apparently divine or prelapsarian, standard: Brothers and sisters by blood and design, who sit in separate bodies or varied shapes, we constitute a many-membered body of love. In a world of shapes of my desires, each one here is a shape of one of my desires, and each is known to me and dear by virtue of each one’s unique corruption of those texts, the face, the body: that jut jaw to gnash tendon; that wide nose to meet the blows a face like that invites; those long eyes closing on the seen; those thick lips to suck the meat of animals or recite 300 poems of the T’ang;

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these teeth to bite my monosyllables; these cheekbones to make those syllables sing the soul. . . . ... All are beautiful by variety.

Subsequently examining a fish in the market, the speaker then goes on explicitly to link the acts of eating and poetic production as two intimately related forms of existential celebration. In this way, Lee raises the basic conceit of a voracious ethnic appetite in “The Cleaving” to the level of both a figure and an enabling condition for his own achievement as a poet. Such a recursively structured, self-validating gesture not only pursues the individualism of lyric testimony to a logical extreme; but in doing so it points to the implicitly authoritarian dimensions of this poetic mode, which has come to dominate both the production and reception of verse by people of Asian descent in the United States: I take it as text and evidence Of the world’s love for me, And I feel urged to utterance, Urged to read the body of the world, urged To say it In human terms, My reading a kind of eating, my eating A kind of reading, . . . ... What is it in me would devour the world to utter it? What is it in me will not let the world be, would eat not just this fish, but the one who killed it, the butcher who cleaned it. I would eat the way he squats, the way he reaches in to the plastic tubs and pulls out a fish, clubs it, takes it to the sink, guts it, drops it on the weighing pan. I would eat that thrash and plunge of the watery body in the water, that liquid violence between the man’s hands, I would eat

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the gutless twitching on the scales, three pounds of dumb nerve and pulse I would eat it all to utter it.

Most immediately, however, the authority that this conceit makes possible leads simultaneously to an embrace of specifically Asian American history conceived as a series of deadly traumas, as well as to an effort at overcoming the tradition of dominant American racism that contributed to such a history. Yet, even as he critiques the overt racism of American society and even American literature as embodied in the figure of Emerson, the speaker invokes expressly racialist terminology in identifying the ultimate objects of his poetic desire. And in doing so, he ironically lays bare the essentialist foundations of Lee’s vision as an ethnic poet: The deaths at the sinks, those bodies prepared for eating, I would eat, and the standing deaths at the counters, in the aisles, the walking deaths in the streets, the death-far-from-home, the deathin-a-strange-land, these Chinatown deaths, these American deaths. I would devour this race to sing it, this race that according to Emerson managed to preserve to a hair for three or four thousand years the ugliest features in the world. I would eat these features, eat the last three or four thousand years, every hair. and I would eat Emerson, his transparent soul, his soporific transcendence.

Others have rightly drawn attention to this passage in their discussions of “The Cleaving,” and the sheer magnitude of Lee’s gesture here ought not to be overlooked. Wenying Xu, for example, has elaborated upon the connotations of “eating” in a Chinese (and specifically Mandarin) semantic tradition; and for her this explanation serves to highlight the culturally specific roots of Lee’s poetic idiom, thereby confirming his ethnic authenticity. As she puts it, “In this poem, the eating trope creates a cross-cultural site in which Lee performs his Chinese American self.”36 At the same time, as Jeffrey Partridge observes, “The quotation from Emerson’s journals is the point at which Lee most explicitly enters into a conversation with the American literary tradition.” In challenging

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the overt racism of that tradition by setting forth his own counterpoetics of Chinese difference, Lee “responds with a discursive feast modeled after the big-eating heroes of Chinese legend.”37 While these and other commentators have usefully explicated the specifically “Chinese” cultural roots of this hyperbolic figure of appetite, I want here to draw attention to a different, yet equally evident, poetic affiliation; for the direct invocation of Emerson hints at an even deeper engagement with the tradition of American transcendentalism. Indeed, through the assertion of a voracity capacious enough to ingest (and thereby at once “assimilate” and transcend) the racism of Emerson, Lee not only “explicitly enters into a conversation with the American literary tradition”; even more significant, perhaps, he also implicitly lays claim to a place within that very tradition by boasting a figurative cultural appetite distinctively Whitmanesque in its massive proportions. And in turn, such a posture reflexively affords the conceptual and rhetorical means by which to critique the tradition of overt racism in the United States that helped to justify the historical exclusion of immigrants from Asia such as Lee himself, the speaker of “The Cleaving,” and the various other denizens of the Cantonese grocery store, including the redemptive butcher, from full and equal participation in American society. Lee’s particular innovation here lies in the development of a conceptual strategy of figurative consumption that at once references and synthesizes the possibilities of two distinct cultural traditions. For he not only successfully deploys identifiably “Chinese” signifiers in the development of an expressly ethnic idiom in English. Equally important, he also adapts a strategy from the dominant “American” poetic tradition and revalues it specifically as part of the means by which to constitute an ethnic poetic subjectivity. Accordingly, then, this central passage dramatizes the dilemma of ethnicity as a kind of paradox or contradiction by revealing the extent to which the speaker’s rejection of dominant racism itself operates through a reliance on formal and rhetorical strategies that derive a substantial portion of their legibility, and therefore also their power and authority, for a mainstream audience precisely as part of that very tradition. At the level of literary history, moreover, Lee’s accomplishment here marks a crucial point within the ongoing tradition in the United States of striving to give poetic representation in English to specifically “Chinese” culture and identity that I have been tracing over the course of this study. For in setting forth not just a cohesive, but an encompassing, ethnic persona within the ideological context of liberal multiculturalism, “The Cleaving” at once builds upon and advances the cultural possibilities first initiated by Cathay and the affective counterpoetics of Chinese difference that Pound’s collection first established during the era of formal “Asiatic” exclusion in the United States. At the same time, however, in seeking to resolve the contradictory dilemma of Chinese

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American ethnic identity through the rhetorical agency of that single, encompassing (and therefore transcendentally representative) poetic subjectivity, Lee’s poem pursues those possibilities to one sort of conclusion, a conclusion that remains grounded in an authoritarian expressive logic. Within the evolving dynamic of “The Cleaving” itself, this rhetorical figure of a redemptive appetite assumes even greater proportions through the third and final movement of the poem. Explicitly connecting eating with death, the speaker raises the contradictory problem of ethnic identity to the status of an existential dilemma. Ironically, however, such a gesture ultimately serves to confirm the assimilationist impulses underwriting both Lee’s approach to ethnic expression, as well as his broad appeal among a range of audiences. For in shifting to the register of the metaphysical, the poem finally arrives at a point of working to elide the expressly social and material dimensions of ethnicity itself precisely as the constituted effect of an asymmetrical relation of power. Tellingly, moreover, such adherence to the established values of the cultural dominant also helps to explain the particular style of this section, which builds to a frank rhythmical and lexical echo of Eliot. This echo resonates unmistakably, despite the distinctiveness of Lee’s own generally terser lineation and looser sense of form overall: What is my eating, rapt as it is, but another shape of going, my immaculate expiration? O, nothing is so steadfast it won’t go the way the body goes. ... O, the murderous deletions, the keening down to nothing, the cleaving. All of the body’s revisions end in death. All of the body’s revisions end.

If the stylistic idiom here highlights the underlying assimilationist formal politics of “The Cleaving,” then the conclusion to the poem reveals the implicit authoritarianism that also attends upon Lee’s particular approach to lyric testimony in pursuing his vision as an ethnic poet. Coming finally to meditate on the paradoxical dependence of life on death itself (“our deaths are fed/that we may continue our daily dying,/ . . . As we eat we’re

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eaten”), the speaker attempts to resolve this existential contradiction, and therefore the overarching problematic of ethnic identity in the poem as a whole, by embracing it. Importantly, however, this attempt at transcendence derives its authority from the sheer force of Lee’s poetic will. Hence, the thematic resolution to the poem takes the shape of a rhetorical question that not only presupposes its own affirmative response but that also in its very grammatical construction pushes toward the status of a declarative sentence. The emblematic actions of the speaker that follow further emphasize the importance of the poetic self as the site wherein the contradiction of ethnicity achieves ultimate resolution through the operation of individual affect: What then may I do But cleave to what cleaves me. I kiss the blade and eat my meat. I thank the wielder and receive, while terror spirits my change, sorrow also.

In its stunning reach across the limits of time and space, moreover, the final image of the poem confirms that the transcendentalist logic of “The Cleaving” rests upon the power of a poetic fiat that, in the end, serves to consolidate the authority of the speaker himself by universalizing the dimensions of his own facial morphology: The terror the butcher scripts in the unhealed air, the sorrow of his Shang dynasty face, African face with slit eyes. He is my sister, this beautiful Bedouin, this Shulamite, keeper of Sabbaths, diviner of holy texts, this dark dancer, this Jew, this Asian, this one with the Cambodian face, Vietnamese face, this Chinese I daily face, This immigrant, This man with my own face.

Openly departing from the realist conceptual foundations that ground the basic scenario of the poem as a whole, the speaker here connects the butcher, explicitly identified as a “Chinese,” not just with his ostensible “roots” in an ancient Chinese dynasty but also with various others characterized in terms

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of different (and incommensurate) ethnic, national, racial, and even religious designations. Indeed, cutting across conventionalized demarcations of history, geography, ethnicity, culture, religion, race, and even gender, the face of the butcher comes to embody the range of human variety itself. At the broadest level, of course, this universalizing gesture reflects Lee’s own expressed desire to move beyond the constraints and expectations associated with his status as an “ethnic” or “Asian American” poet. Within the terms of “The Cleaving” itself, moreover, it functions to resolve the contradictory dilemma of ethnic identity through an appeal to a kind of transcendental humanism that enables the speaker at once to recognize and to overcome the limits of human difference through an act of identification with the figure of the butcher and his diversely configured features. Yet, insofar as the butcher also possesses the speaker’s “own face,” this descriptive hyperbole works by the principle of transitivity also to consolidate the authority of the speaker himself by elevating him to the status of a universal representative for human difference. And this authority, in turn, functions retroactively to validate the construction of a transcendentalist Chinese American subjectivity set forth in the poem. Accordingly, then, “The Cleaving” ultimately seeks to resolve the dilemma of ethnicity through a circular appeal to a morphologically based essentialist universalism that itself rests upon the sheer rhetorical force of Lee’s poetic will. And by achieving its final resolution exclusively through the idiosyncratic perceptions of the speaker, the poem illustrates the authoritarian logic of his approach to articulating the terms of a specifi cally Chinese ethnic identity in verse.

IV

This drive toward consolidating an increasingly personal and individualized form of authority helps to explain the subsequent development both of Lee’s particular poetic vision, as well as of his broader reputation as a writer in the time since the appearance (and general acclaim) of his first two volumes of verse. Most notably, perhaps, in recent years he has expanded into the domain of prose, publishing originally with the commercial press Simon and Schuster an intensely personal, fluidly configured memoir about his childhood and relationship with his family. A highly “poeticized” work to be sure both in its associative structural organization and overarching lyrical style, The Winged Seed pursues within the context of another generic environment many of the concerns and techniques of Lee’s verse. In doing so, it not only demonstrates his increasing range but also testifies to his

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growing renown both as an individual and as a representative “Asian American” writer. At the same time, that both Lee himself and the broader market for his work would shift toward prose also underscores its status as the dominant medium throughout the literary sphere more generally, and most especially within the arenas of “ethnic” and “minority” cultural production. While it remains beyond the scope of this chapter to address the work fully, Lee’s memoir warrants attention here, as we have seen, for the way it elaborates on the persistent themes that he first began exploring in his poetry. Foremost among these, of course, are the complexities of his familial relationships, especially the one with his father, followed by the various facets of ethnic cultural identity. Equally significant, moreover, The Winged Seed also happens to mark the last time that Lee has addressed in a sustained and direct way the condition of ethnicity in general and the dynamics of his own identity in particular as a writer of Asian descent in the United States. In his recent verse, by contrast, Lee has apparently turned away from any obvious engagement with the conditions and contradictions of specifically Chinese American ethnic identity and experience. And this change arguably represents the fulfillment of a long-standing goal on his part. As previously mentioned, in various interviews Lee has repeatedly expressed his desire to free himself and his poetry from the constraints of ethnic “labels.” In an interview from 2000, for example, Lee conveys this ambition in terms that at once echo and corroborate the universalizing impulse animating the final moments of “The Cleaving”: I don’t know if it’s possible or not, but it’s important for me to live in a state of “nobodyhood.” The culture we live in offers or imposes versions of “somebodyhoods” that are really shallow and false. . . . If I can attain a state of “nobodyhood” which is the same thing as the state of “everybodyhood,” that’s much richer and more full of potential than some false, made-up, Hollywood magazine, university or cultural version of “somebodyhood.” I don’t know if that’s possible, but that’s where I’m headed.38

In the poetry he has written since, this aspiration has translated into a general diminishment of any overt references to Chinese culture and identity as he has continued to explore his evolving interests. Such a shift in focus does not mean, however, that Lee has entirely left behind any concern with his ethnic cultural and familial heritage. Rather, that involvement has become increasingly personalized in the logic of its representational engagement. And in doing so, it ultimately highlights the distinct political limitations of lyric testimony as a counterpoetic mode for the articulation of difference in response to dominant, and oftentimes expressly discriminatory, constructions of Chinese ethnic culture and identity in the United States.

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Probably the clearest illustration of the problems associated with Lee’s evolving approach to specifically ethnic expression lies in the ways that language difference in general and the Chinese language in particular have come to figure in his work. In The Winged Seed, Lee has described his understanding of the asymmetrical ways in which specifically linguistic difference shapes the perception of ethnic minorities in the United States: When I was six and learning to speak English, I talked with an accent anyone could hear, and I noticed early on that all accents were not heard alike by the dominant population of American English speakers. Instead, each foreigner’s spoken English, determined by a mother tongue, each person’s noise, fell on a coloring ear, which bent the listener’s eye and, consequently, the speaker’s countenance; it was a kind of narrowing, and unconscious on the part of the listener, who listens in judgment, judging the speaker even before the meaning or its soundness were attended to. While some sounds were tolerated, some even granting the speaker a certain status in the instances of, say, French or British, other inflections condemned one to immediate alien, as though our gods were toys, our names disheveled silverware, and the gamelan just gonging backward.39

We have seen that a concern over the loss of a heritage culture, especially as embodied in language, comprises a persistent theme in the poetry for which Lee has become most famous. And we have further seen that he has sought through various techniques to represent in English both the particularities of his original language and the affective dimensions of his ever-increasing distance from it. Lee continues to pursue this basic theme throughout The Winged Seed, and later in the work he narrates an episode that not only underscores the importance of this concern but that also helps to explain the particular trajectory and logic of his subsequent poetic development. In this particularly charged moment of his memoir, Lee ties together the experience of ethnic cultural difference with the alienation he felt as a child: I’m waiting for my father, and the clock says I have hours before day. Here, as in childhood, it is the same solitude. Here as in childhood, I practice my Chinese, writing right to left, while my mother walks back and forth saying the words I write. My father’s name was Perfect Country, which I write by drawing a spear enclosed in a heart and piercing the heart from within. My mother’s name is House of Courage, and as she paces back and forth, uttering, as my grandmother’s cane taps past the window, down the redbrick path, my head bends to the task, making the pictures that are the words my mother says, the words which are the pictures of the infinite versions of the

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insect sun. Here, as in childhood, it is the same, I make the strokes and say the sounds to myself; say jia for home, and put the pig under a roof (家); say heng for constancy, and set the boat adrift (恒); I stand the bearded wheat to the right of an elder ear. I plot the progress of the seed into summer and innumerable leaves, and set a three-spoked wheel beside the lotus; I give you morning glory. I let two birds descend to braid the lightning; I write my father’s name, Perfect Country (国 元); I write my mother’s, House of Courage (家 英). I make the sign for what (什 么), for who (谁), and again (再); here as in childhood, I count the cloves of fire under horse (马).40

The presentation here of Lee’s effort to maintain his Chinese language skills contributes substantially to both the intense lyricism and the expressly poetic imagery of this passage, as well as to the overall impression of ethnic credibility that it seeks to promote. To achieve these effects, Lee employs a variety of strategies aimed at conveying in English the particularity of his heritage language. Not only does he offer apparently calqued renderings of the names of his parents (“Perfect Country” and “House of Courage”); he also describes different Chinese written characters in terms of their component radical parts, the semantic meanings of which he subsequently gives in English. Hence, the inclusion of such colorful phrases as “the pig under a roof,” “a spear enclosed in a heart and piercing the heart from within,” and, perhaps most evocative of all, “the cloves of fire under horse.” Within their immediate environment, of course, these efforts at cross-fertilization function both to produce the dense texture of Lee’s prose style and to signify his specifically Chinese ethnic cultural heritage. At the same time, however, these strategies also follow an obvious precedent within the dominant American literary tradition, namely the infamous views of the Chinese language advocated by Ernest Fenollosa and subsequently promoted and employed by Ezra Pound.41 In the decades following the appearance of Cathay, furthermore, Pound applied these views both in his own verse and in the translations of classical Chinese philosophical texts and poetry that he undertook beginning in the late 1930s.42 Elsewhere, I have discussed at length the significance of these later, highly unconventional renderings both within the arc of Pound’s individual career and in the broader history of translation as a mode of modernist literary production in English.43 Here, it suffices to note that the precedent itself serves as a useful gauge to help assess both the specifically literary historical meaning and the broader cultural politics of Lee’s efforts to represent “Chinese” culture and language in pursuing his vision as a writer of Asian (and specifically Chinese) descent in the United States. From this wider perspective, the cultural logic and appeal of Lee’s achievement (as well as of lyric testimony more generally) come into sharpened

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focus. For in purely formal and conceptual terms, the poetics of Chinese linguistic difference set forth in the above description observes techniques and conventions already firmly established within the repertoire of the cultural dominant. This strategic deployment of familiar procedures for signification correlates with Lee’s general investment both in the basic conceit of a unified subjectivity giving affective voice to individual (though representative) experience and in the liberties of a free verse technique that operates according to the terms of a poetic dispensation established nearly a century ago. Collectively, these elements work to articulate a liberal multiculturalist conception of ethnic difference as principally a cultural and affective condition expressed at the level of the individual subject, for which verse serves as an especially privileged vehicle. Lee’s efforts not only attest to his command of the dominant American poetic tradition in English. They have also thereby further helped to make his work more readily legible to a wider, mainstream audience interested in learning aspects of a particular “ethnic” culture from an apparently “authentic” and authoritative source. And in turn, such ready legibility has also arguably contributed to the remarkable and continuing growth of his reputation. Yet in adhering to a range of established conventions and techniques for representing “Chinese” culture and identity in English, Lee accepts, rather than challenges or interrogates, the terms for signifying such difference already set by the dominant cultural regime. As we shall see in chapter 6, the task of challenging those terms has been taken up most forcefully and compellingly by writers, like John Yau, operating in the mode of ethnic abstraction. Lee’s distinction lies, of course, in applying these established techniques to the articulation of an ethnic Chinese American identity, rather than to the rendering (or, less charitably, the domesticating) of a canonically foreign “Chinese” classical text as in the case of Fenollosa and Pound. And to the extent that he has come successfully to give sanctioned poetic representation to that identity and generic experience, Lee has broken new thematic ground. Moreover, as an immigrant to the United States who has made that experience a staple of his poetry, Lee has navigated a historically deep and pervasive system of political and cultural discrimination, partly in response to which the current ideological regime of liberal multiculturalism has arisen. By contrast, as a member of the American cultural elite (however personally estranged and politically discredited he eventually became), Pound enjoyed a position of comparative privilege in relation to Lee, never confronting such systematic structural marginalization. Even so, the distinction between the respective sites of enunciation or social locations of these writers does not by itself make Lee’s work transgressive or counterdominant in toto. In fact, I contend that an awareness of Lee’s debt to established protocols for signifying “Chineseness” necessarily tempers any claims

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about the radicalism or transformative potential of his achievement within the broader sweep of American literary history. Even more significant than the formal conservatism indicated by Lee’s deployment of established strategies for representing aspects of the Chinese language in English, his elaborations upon different written characters in the above passage contain a number of basic factual errors and other misleading information. For example, Lee inaccurately describes the second character of his father’s name as being composed by “drawing a spear enclosed in a heart and piercing the heart from within.” While this character guo in its traditional form (國) does in fact contain the radical for a “spear,” it nowhere includes a radical designating “heart” (心). Similarly, though he correctly analyzes the character for home as “the pig under a roof ” (家), the next character he describes, heng (恒), does not include a radical for a “boat.” In addition, it remains unclear what (if any) character Lee intends by his image of “stand[ing] the bearded wheat to the right of an elder ear.” And finally, while he imprecisely but evocatively refers to the “cloves of fire under horse,” the text actually employs characters in their simplified forms, which in the case of “horse” (马) substitutes a horizontal line in place of the four strokes in the traditional character (馬) that are more conventionally understood as signifying equine legs. At issue here is not so much the “factual” (in)correctness of these representations of Chinese language appearing in the text as it is the broader implications of the particular cultural logic that this constellation of language(s) at once observes and promotes in setting forth a conception of ethnic identity. Ultimately, Lee’s presentation of Chinese linguistic and cultural difference comes to rest upon a deeply idiosyncratic apprehension of those traditions; and in some instances it even conveys simply inaccurate information. At the most basic level, of course, this situation attests to the general condition of “hybridity” that has served as the principal theoretical framework for discussing “Asian American” cultural production. Thematically, such “hybridity” appears most familiarly in expressions by numerous artists in various media of affective and cognitive ambivalence about their relationship to their respective heritage traditions. And in formal terms, “hybridity” has often been used to explain and even make a virtue of inaccurate or idiosyncratic representations of those traditions. As we have witnessed in the opening scene of “Persimmons,” this manifold ambivalence has led in some instances to the development of unprecedented expressive possibilities through cross-fertilization of different operant linguistic traditions and their signifying capacities and protocols. Yet, insofar as Lee represents some Chinese characters in verifiably idiosyncratic and even inaccurate ways, his descriptions in the passage above simulate culturally specific information without revealing them as a simulation. Exemplifying the hybridization

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strategy of mimicry, then, they finally rely upon a distinctly authoritarian expressive logic that gains its power though the force of individual (mis) perception. In addition to its internal authoritarian dimensions, such a gesture also implicitly endorses an assimilationist cultural politics. For the investment of authority in a representative ethnic subjectivity whose principal claim to that authority lies in an individualized and even idiosyncratic construction of the heritage culture prioritizes unique, rather than collective, expression, protest, and challenge against existing structures of discrimination. And since any challenge that does emerge remains at the level of the individual subject, it is all the more easily contained or assimilated into the value system of the cultural dominant as an exception that ultimately proves the capacity of the system itself to both recognize and respond to expressions of marginalization by different ethnic or racial minorities. It thereby forestalls deeper, structural challenge. Given the inescapable fact of a (literary) market and all its attendant opportunities and constraints, the predominance of a poetics (and cultural politics) of individualist representativity, that is, a mode of lyric testimony, may well be inevitable among poets of Asian descent in the United States, and perhaps even among “minority” cultural production in general. Even so, it remains essential to grasp the underlying logic and political implications of this mode in order to understand more fully both the variety and the broader literary historical significance of “Asian American” poetic production throughout its range of expressions. Finally, Lee’s intensely personalized representations of Chinese linguistic difference help to explain recent developments in his verse. Thus, for example, in his third volume of poems, Book of My Nights (2001), the lyric “A Table in the Wilderness” pursues the idiosyncratic logic of his approach to a kind of surrealistic conclusion.44 Like other poems throughout the collection, this work avoids any explicit treatment of obviously ethnic subject matter; and in this regard it exemplifies Lee’s stated ambition of getting beyond categorization as an ethnic poet, or as he puts it himself, achieving “a state of nobodyhood.” Nevertheless, “A Table in the Wilderness” arguably builds upon the possibilities of Lee’s particular conception of Chinese written characters by presenting a series of evocative images that operate according to a clearly “ideogrammic” or Fenollosan expressive procedure. These images not only resemble Chinese “ideograms” in their manner of construction but the speaker also relates the unique meaning that each of them holds for him. In fact, the explication of these personal signs, or what might best be termed “idiograms,” serves as the rhetorical occasion for the act of poetic utterance. The voice of the poem exhibits Lee’s growing confidence as a poet; no childhood trauma or external reference to the mundane world of ethnic commerce need sustain the opening gambit:

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I draw a window and a man sitting inside it. I draw a bird in flight above the lintel. That’s my picture of thinking. If I put a woman there instead of the man, it’s a picture of speaking. If I draw a second bird in the woman’s lap, it’s ministering. A third flying below her feet. Now it’s singing. Or erase the birds, make ivy branching around the woman’s ankles, clinging to her knees, and it becomes remembering.45

Having laid out the terms of such an individualized signifying system, the poem proceeds explicitly to adopt a particular ethical posture. Importantly, in the stanza that immediately follows, the speaker invokes the same intensely personalized logic of what amounts to his own unique epistemology, but in reverse. Shifting into a direct, second-person address to readers, the voice practically leaps forth from the plane of the page: You’ll have to find your own pictures, whoever you are, whatever your need.

In calling here for an individualist expressivity driven explicitly by the demands of desire, Lee pursues the implications of lyric testimony to one (il)logical extreme; and in doing so he at once highlights the considerable power and the equally profound limits of this mode of Asian American poetic production. For on the one hand, he forcefully authorizes both his own and a theoretically infinite number of other unique sign systems, an expansive poetic gesture that atomizes difference by embracing a relativist epistemology. On the other hand, at the same time that he expands the field of potential signification precisely through such atomization, he thereby empties difference of any particular critical meaning by occluding its specifically structural dimensions. Put another way, Lee’s appeal to such individualism enacts a liberal construction of difference as a set of personal qualities simply to be celebrated through enumeration rather than critically interrogated as the discursively constituted result of asymmetrical relations of power.

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This privileging of individualized difference affords one explanation for the increasingly surreal imagery and idiosyncratic hermeneutic reasoning set forth in the remaining stanzas of “A Table in the Wilderness,” which build to the articulation of a kind of transcendental anonymity that finds its ultimate expression in the referential ambiguity of two concluding, foundational interrogatives. Together with this steady emptying of conventional subjectivity (undertaken primarily through different variations on the trope of parentage), both the strange and difficult chain of images and the droning sonority of Lee’s careful diction generate a hypnotic quality that contributes substantially to the overall effect: As for me, many small hands issuing from a waterfall means silence mothered me. The hours hung like fruit in the night’s tree means when I close my eyes and look inside me, a thousand eyes span the moment of my waking. Meanwhile, the clock adding a grain to a grain and not getting bigger, subtracting a day from a day and never having less, means the honey lies awake all night inside the honeycomb wondering who its parents are. And even my death isn’t my death unless it’s the unfathomed brow of a nameless face. Even my name isn’t my name except the bees assemble a table to grant a stranger light and moment in the wilderness of Who? Where?

Even as they clearly attest to Lee’s continuing growth as a poet, these lines exemplify the limitations of lyric testimony and its reliance upon the

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authority of a unified subjectivity giving affective voice to individual experience. For in elaborating such an avowedly personal set of images and meanings, Lee finally elevates his own unique perceptions and system of signification over any common or collective frame of reference. And in doing so, he pointedly undercuts the foundations for any potential claim to ethnic representativity, apparently working toward the extinction of subjectivity itself. Needless to say, perhaps, the cultivation of this broadly transcendentalist strategy at once corresponds with and arises from Lee’s own stated ambitions to get beyond cultural “labels.” Understandable and even admirable in its way as it is, however, such a goal reflects an unquestioning investment in the assimilationist possibilities of our current ideological regime of liberal multiculturalism. In this idealized scenario, the minoritized ethnic subject finally attains to an unmarked status through demonstrating a unique mastery of the established codes of the cultural dominant. Yet the pursuit of such an individualist poetic approach not only ignores the larger social and ideological forces that continue to shape Lee’s acclaim specifically as an ethnic writer. Even more significant, perhaps, it comes at the cost of constraining poetry to a strictly personal domain of expression, thereby at once observing and reinforcing the ideological and aesthetic status quo. As a result, in this conception verse loses its critical capacity to serve as a means for articulating a counterpoetics in response to dominant constructions of ethnic or minority difference, adhering instead at both the conceptual and technical levels to established values and signifying procedures. Accordingly, then, the logic that underwrites both Lee’s essentialized constructions of ethnic identity in poems such as “Persimmons” and “The Cleaving,” as well as the aesthetic conservatism and idiosyncrasy of his representations of various Chinese written characters in The Winged Seed, finds its ultimate issue in the tacit assimilationist politics enacted by the surreal individualism of “A Table in the Wilderness.” And in turn, the trajectory of his continuing development highlights the broader stakes of his incipient canonization as an Asian American writer. Lee’s achievement and its celebrated reception together exemplify the hegemony of lyric testimony within contemporary Asian American verse under the terms of liberal multiculturalism. In the remaining chapters of this study, we shall consider different sustained challenges to that prevailing ideological dispensation by examining works of two other poets of Chinese descent in the United States. Through the conceptual, rhetorical, and formal departures that each enacts from the protocols of a lyric testimonial mode, these poets, Marilyn Chin and John Yau, offer their own distinctive orchestrations of language(s) and poetic form in articulating the notion of ethnic difference. For this reason alone, they

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have enjoyed less widespread notoriety than Lee. Nevertheless, such efforts warrant our attention here because they demonstrate the ongoing vitality of Chinese/American verse as a minority counterpoetic formation through their respective efforts to rethink the very dimensions of ethnic identity itself.

5 “Are You Hate Speech or Are You a Lullaby?” Marilyn Chin and the Politics of Form in Chinese/ American Verse

I

While Li-Young Lee has certainly enjoyed greater popular (as well as critical) acclaim among contemporary Asian American poets, another writer of specifically Chinese descent in the United States, Marilyn Chin, has thus far arguably produced the more innovative and culturally significant poetic achievement overall, at least within the terms of the currently hegemonic mode of lyric testimony amid the larger body of verse by Asian Americans. In fact, Chin’s accomplishment powerfully demonstrates both the basic utility and the inevitable particular limitations of the different categories that I have set forth and employed throughout this study to characterize the three main rhetorical postures at work within the field of Asian American poetic expression more generally. For in the startling breadth and complexity of her achievement, she maintains, on the one hand, deep conceptual and ideological affinities with the previously dominant mode of racial protest in Asian American verse by persistently and unapologetically pursuing a “political” agenda in her own poetry. She has done so most obviously through taking up a host of concerns long shared among writers of specifically Asian descent in the United States, subjects such as dominant racism, immigration, minority or “ethnic” identity, and gender oppression. Moreover, she has frequently adopted something of a(n East Asian) “panethnic,” and sometimes even a “cross-racial,” poetic stance, which has involved drawing both inspiration and challenge explicitly from a range of distinct cultural, as well as linguistic, traditions, including classical Japanese and African American vernacular verse forms. Thus, in an interview 187

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from 2002, Chin gives voice to her staunchly activist motivations as a poet: “I write poetry to give my mother justice, and by extension, to give justice to others like her who were victimized and misunderstood; they were trapped in the cogs of history.”1 Two years later, she repeated this basic position, though in somewhat more holistic, and less overtly polemical, terms: “My ‘urge’ to take on women’s issues, identity issues, minority issues etc., is deeply integrated in my work. I believe that, for my life to have meaning, I must have that integrative whole between my social consciousness and creative production.”2 On the other hand, however, at the same time that she openly pursues a recognizably “activist” agenda in her poetry, Chin also explores a range of concerns and techniques more typically associated with the emergent mode of ethnic abstraction. Not only does she challenge, for example, any stable or unified notion of ethnic subjectivity, having “talked often about how our identities are not static. ”3 More significant still, perhaps, her ongoing commitment to formal exploration, as well as experimentation, has entailed sustained efforts at different strategies of cross-fertilization, and even the transplantation of Chinese language elements into various poems, including actual written characters. By thus enriching and complicating the textual and sonic fabric of her verse, Chin at once interrogates and expands the established semiotic and linguistic codes that underwrite the very process of (American) “ethnic” signification, therewith challenging established liberal multiculturalist conceptions of ethnicity itself. And finally, an eclectic but dedicated scholasticism also animates her work. With the benefit of an undergraduate degree in Chinese literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and considerable experience as a translator of both classical and modern Chinese literary production, she not only makes abundant references to various figures and events across Asian (though mostly Chinese) cultural and social histories but she also includes explanatory notes for different poems to help clarify these allusions. The combination of these seemingly disparate, and possibly even divergent, aspects of Chin’s poetic achievement afford at least one potential explanation for her comparative neglect (at least in relation to Li-Young Lee) among general and professional audiences alike. In other words, it is perhaps precisely because she so variously exceeds the terms of a range of different conventions (and their accompanying expectations) for “ethnic expression”—or in Rey Chow’s terminology, because she defies the manifold pressures of dominant “coercive mimeticism”—that Chin has yet to attain a level of recognition more commensurate with the cultural and literary historical significance of her accomplishment as a poet of Asian, and specifically Chinese, descent in the United States. Of course, Chin has by no means gone entirely unnoticed by the American poetic establishment. Her first book of poems, Dwarf Bamboo (1987),

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was nominated for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award; her second volume, The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty (1994), won the PEN/Josephine Miles Award; and her third and most recent collection of verse, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (2002), earned the Paterson Book Prize in 2003. She has also been selected for a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University (1984), two National Endowment for the Arts grants (1984– 85, 1991), a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan (1999), a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship (2002), and a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard University (2003–4). Furthermore, she has won residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Djerassi Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Centrum, Blue Mountain Center for the Arts, and Villa Montalvo, as well as four Pushcart Prizes. Finally, like Li-Young Lee, Chin has been featured in journalist Bill Moyers’s The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets PBS television series and companion volume. Collectively, these awards and recognitions testify to Chin’s solid reputation within the contemporary professional world of poetry. Moreover, as professor of English since 1996 and former director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at San Diego State University, she occupies a position of institutional visibility and security within that world, something she has with repeated irony referred to as her “iron rice bowl. ”4 These numerous and varied successes notwithstanding, Chin has still yet to attain fully “representative” status as an Asian American, or even Chinese American, poet across the broader U.S. market for ethnic or minority expression. To be sure, as her list of honors clearly indicates, she has enjoyed substantial acclaim within particular segments of that market, most especially among Asian American(ist) readers themselves. Nonetheless, she continues to await proper acknowledgment from a wider audience that comprehends both the range of formal invention and the technical sophistication, as well as the attendant literary historical significance, of her achievement in verse, particularly in relation to the tradition of efforts at establishing a counterpoetics of specifically Chinese difference that I have been tracing in this study. Revealingly, while her work has been recognized to a degree through inclusion in authoritative, generically focused mainstream anthologies in the United States such as The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry and The Norton Introduction to Poetry, for a variety of reasons she has so far failed to gain entry into expressly nationally configured collections that both reflect and help to define an established canon of “American literature. ”5 These reasons, I argue, have principally to do with the ways in which she consistently pushes against the established norms and expectations for lyric testimony (as exemplified in the work of Li-Young Lee), which has been the most sanctioned mode of Asian American verse under the current regime of liberal multiculturalism.

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For in thematic terms, Chin adopts an expressly politicized stance, one that has involved openly questioning the ultimate benevolence of the U.S. nation-state. Moreover, she addresses ethnicity as a product of structural asymmetries within American society, and not just as a feature of personal identity. Formally, her verse presents a dense textual surface, which from the beginning and with steadily increasing command and daring has included other languages than English, as well as explanatory notes. Together, these features of Chin’s verse point consistently to the irreducible specificity of the ethnic (Chinese) cultural heritage that she seeks to represent. In this way, she repeatedly challenges the assumptions about linguistic transparency and the adequacy of English as a medium for the representation of individual ethnic subjectivity in particular that underwrite the hegemonic mode of lyric testimony. Together, these different concerns and strategies have contributed to making her achievement less readily legible to mainstream audiences. At once partly arising from and in turn reinforcing this situation, scholarly discussion of her work has so far remained conspicuously sparse, though recently things have begun to improve slightly in this arena. As with Asian American literary studies more generally, existing criticism has tended largely to operate at the level of thematic explication, with a concomitant emphasis on issues that reflect a privileging of the notion of ethnic experience as the principal hermeneutic category for the analysis of literary production by people of Asian descent in the United States. So, for example, Mary Slowik has addressed Chin’s treatment of the theme of immigration.6 Comparably, George Uba, John Gery, and Adrienne McCormick have each discussed her destabilization of individual identity.7 And most recently, Xiaojing Zhou has considered the ethical dimensions of Chin’s approach to conveying ethnic “alterity. ”8 In focusing on such concerns, these critics have understandably held fast to an analytical framework deriving from the oppositional identitarian political values that underwrote the rise of the Asian American movement itself during the late 1960s, as well as informed the previously dominant mode of racial protest in verse by writers of Asian descent in the United States that held ideological sway during that period and earlier. Furthermore, these approaches have enjoyed a readily available authorial sanction through Chin’s own expressly (and repeatedly) declared activist commitments. In just such a declaration, for example, this self-described “post-colonial, Pacific Rim, feminist Chinese American poet” explains her commitment to addressing the theme of “displacement,” first in terms of a conceptual category that unites historically distinct immigrant “experiences,” and then in terms of “quintessential American”-ness itself by means of a wellestablished counter-hegemonic discursive strategy, namely undercutting

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the cultural hierarchy that rests upon the nativity mythos of dominant “white” culture: Displacement is of course a profound immigrant issue. Any immigrant poet must address this issue; it’s in the forefront of her consciousness. The nature of displacement changes with each succeeding group. A displaced Vietnamese poet will have a totally different take on her predicament than, let’s say, a Japanese American poet, whose parents were interned . . . or a Bosnian poet who fled from the Balkan massacre. The story of leaving one’s motherland to be absorbed by a new culture is a quintessential American one, for this is a country where nobody is indigenous except for the American Indians. Ideally the turf belongs to everybody and nobody.9

For all the value and even necessity of these discussions, however, critics have yet adequately to consider the manifold cultural, political, and literary historical significance of her varied formal engagements and explorations. Indeed, this sustained interest in form as such comprises a crucial dimension of Chin’s own self-conception as a poet. Thus, she has related: I consider myself a political poet, yes, but I am also crazy about formal experimentation. I love the genre of poetry thoroughly: yes, haiku, sonnets, villanelles, ballads. I want to try everything. . . . And then there are all the possibilities with hybridization/cross-fertilization. How exciting to have this great opportunity to make a “political” statement about my bicultural identity by exacting my ideas with hybridized forms. . . . I often put a drop of yellow blood in conventional form to assert my bicultural identity. It’s all the same “urge” to stir up the pot a bit. To disrupt the canonical order. To piss on the establishment tree. To make the world view the subject through a minority lens.10

As these remarks make evident, Chin herself considers the matter of poetic form not merely as a detached, purely aesthetic concern. Rather, it constitutes for her a vitally important channel of signification through which she has pursued her expressly counter-dominant cultural politics. In fact, the distinctiveness of her accomplishment within the larger body of Asian American poetry in general, and Chinese/American verse in particular, lies precisely in the range and technical sophistication of its formal articulation. Accordingly, then, in this chapter I want to elucidate the specific logic of Chin’s diverse formal engagements, as well as to elaborate their broader meaning within the context of liberal multiculturalism. More particularly, I will focus on the different strategies by which she has strived to represent elements of specifically Chinese culture and language in the

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process of setting forth her own counterpoetics of Asian American ethnic “difference.” For Chin stands out among writers of Asian descent in the United States as the poet who has most effectively and compellingly united an expressly oppositional “political” agenda with an equally intense and innovative attention to the signifying capacities of established poetic forms, as well as to the potential of formal experimentation more generally.

II

As I have already indicated, in the simplest terms Chin’s verse functions in accord with the basic conventions of lyric testimony. However, over the course of her development as a poet thus far, she has come increasingly both to challenge and to stretch the capacities of this expressive mode along a number of different fronts. Beginning with her first volume of poems, Dwarf Bamboo, and then with progressively greater formal variety and technical invention, she has operated from the rhetorical and conceptual foundation of an individual subjectivity giving affective voice to a range of (implicitly representative, revelatory, or otherwise significant) experiences and perceptions. In doing so, she has set forth a considerable array of personae or versions of the ethnic self. Mainly, though never exclusively, autobiographical, these selves together elaborate a complex vision of Asian American identity in general and Chinese American ethnicity in particular as manifold, traumatic, and generatively ambivalent conditions that at different times and in diverse expressions involve some mix of the following features: physical displacement or exile from a former (or imagined) homeland, simultaneous cultural estrangement from both a heritage tradition and mainstream (American) society, and a consequent psychological and cognitive fragmentation, typically brought about as a result of dominant prejudice and the legacies of historical exploitation. So, for example, in her early lyric, “A Chinaman’s Chance,” Chin poses a question that figures for her one of the abiding dilemmas of Chinese American ethnic subjectivity: “The railroad killed your great-grandfather./His arms here, his legs there. . . . /How can we remake ourselves in his image?”11 Moreover, her focus on feminine articulations of ethnic identity in particular brings with it a persistent concern specifically with the oppression of women in both Chinese and American historical and social contexts. In pursuing these themes commonly addressed throughout Asian American cultural production more generally, Chin aims at a number of interrelated and complementary goals. Most obviously, of course, she seeks imaginatively to inhabit and consequently to document various historically

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marginalized subject positions, as well as in doing so to expose and critique the social and discursive conditions of their marginalization. Herein lays her primary connection with the earlier tradition of racial protest verse in the larger body of poetry produced by people of Asian descent in the United States. Beyond their documentary and critical impulses, her poems also strive both individually and collectively to dramatize the contradictions arising from the constitutive displacements, alienations, fragmentations, and other traumas that help form American ethnic or racial (and specifically Chinese American) subjectivity. And in this way, they attempt at once to validate such identities and “experiences,” as well as to offer partial redress or consolation for those contradictions through different feats of discursive sympathy or identification enacted on the plane of culture in the form of expressly “artful” or “high” literary poetic representation. Through such representations, furthermore, Chin pursues an additional twopronged strategy. On the one hand, she advances her own counterpoetics of minority (and specifically Chinese American) “difference” in response to existing discriminatory constructions; and on the other, she endeavors to “re-form” the dominant American literary tradition precisely by means of such a counterpoetics. Or, in her own inimitable phrasing, she seeks “to disrupt the canonical order. To piss on the establishment tree. To make the world view the subject through a minority lens.” Thus, in its structural organization Dwarf Bamboo tacitly relates an elaborately segmented narrative about the travails of immigration and assimilation, with the volume divided into four sections marking distinct points in the trajectory of that implied narrative: “The Parent Node,” “American Soil,” “Late Spring,” and “American Rain.” And by giving expressly poetic articulation to such a narrative, the collection as a whole works to expand the boundaries of the category of “American literature” itself to include the perspectives and concerns of writers of specifically Asian (and especially Chinese) descent in the United States. Importantly, Chin’s very conception of what constitutes the “poetic” as it relates to ethnic expression in particular has developed through a deliberate engagement with the established American literary canon. In addition to drawing a measure of ideological inspiration from comparatively recent “political” women poets such as Muriel Rukeyser and Adrienne Rich,12 she has also declared an explicit, though necessarily conflictual, allegiance with the American modernist tradition and its legacy of formal experiment. In her interview with The Seattle Review, for example, she articulates her vision of the contemporary American poetic scene, and in doing so lays direct claim to the dominant modernist American poetic heritage. Tellingly, moreover, her polemical gesture of affiliation also entails a sharp critique of the currently sanctioned poetic order, which by implication she casts as ossified and moribund:

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I believe that we are in a multicultural renaissance right now, that women and poets of color are writing the best poetry in America. I’m not just being “politically correct” when I say this. I believe that deep inside, we all know this . . . the burgeoning of Asian American, Latino American, African American, Native American, etc., talent and how women poets have taken over the modernist legacy left over by Eliot, Frost, Pound, Williams, etc. We are the ones who are “making it new.”13

Needless to say, perhaps, the validity of Chin’s claim about the state of contemporary poetry in the United States remains open to substantial debate and even dispute.14 But the terms of her obviously polemical assertion provide especially clear testament to the relevance of the modernist American poetic canon for understanding both the signifying logic and the broader meaning at least of Chin’s verse in particular, as well as arguably by extension that of Asian American (and especially Chinese/American) poetic production more generally. As I discussed in chapter 1, within that canon Pound’s Cathay remains the hegemonic cultural reference point against which to assess the line of efforts at giving poetic representation in English to specifically Chinese culture and identity. For by virtue of its ongoing canonization as a modernist masterwork, the collection continues to define the dominant discursive and aesthetic terms in relation to which subsequent attempts at giving verse expression to “Chineseness” gain part of their manifold, and especially literary historical, significance. In Chin’s particular case, she herself has both recognized and reinforced the canonicity of Pound’s achievement in this arena by praising “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” as “one of the best poems of the Modernist generation.” Elaborating upon this judgment, she continues, “Pound was able to transcend his own ego and voice and inhabit the voice of an ancient Chinese woman. ”15 Given her poetic training at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and her current professional environment as an academic, this deeply canonical literary taste hardly comes as a surprise. More significantly, however, aside from the question of direct influence, Chin’s aesthetic endorsement confirms the importance of Cathay in particular as a crucial monument in the extended prehistory of Chinese/American verse. And in doing so, it helps to make legible not just the literal referential meaning but also the literary historical and contemporary politico-cultural semiosis of her achievement, most especially at the levels of style and conception in her effort to set forth a counterpoetics of Chinese difference in response to dominant constructions. Consider, for example, “Li Qing, Heart of Han,” “The Landlord’s Wife,” and “The Politician’s Wife,” a suite of three consecutive poems from “The Parent Node” section of Dwarf Bamboo. Each of these early lyrics clearly at

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once builds upon and responds in different ways to Pound’s foundational achievement in Cathay generally, as well as more particularly in “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” one of two consensus poetic masterpieces of the collection.16 The titles themselves of the latter two of this group of Chin’s poems make their engagement with Pound obvious. For its part, “Li Qing, Heart of Han” not only treats comparable themes of feminine affect as shaped by love, abandonment, and especially war, but it even invokes a distinctly “Poundian” diction, imagery, and general aesthetic of obliquity. Thus, the poem begins with a straightforward, if emotionally charged, scenario: “Li Qing sat under the willow./Chinese and inconspicuous, she wept,/gouged her name in the moist bark. ”17 At the basic levels of rhetoric and technique, this opening tercet stanza exploits numerous conventions first established in Cathay. Most simply, of course, it develops the notion of a Chinese feminine subjectivity through the capacities of standard English free verse, a discursive possibility that Pound inaugurated through the success of his collection. Less immediately evident, perhaps, but no less important, the plain diction of the initial line and its explicit association of a “willow” with a woman in despair recalls the precedent of “The Beautiful Toilet” and “the willows [that] have overfilled the close garden” where the abandoned wife of Pound’s rendering resides. Comparably, in a later depiction of the tawdry and climactic seduction scene of the poem, the voice relating the events of “Li Qing, Heart of Han” employs an idiom practically demure in the extent of its adherence to the values of modernist indirection, an aesthetic quality that has gained both its broad cultural authority and its specifically “Chinese” aspect in the United States through the ongoing effects of Pound’s accomplishment: “He pulled out a fox-hair brush/from his long sleeve. First came talk,/then the scrambling of lilies. ”18 In similar fashion, “The Landlord’s Wife” features a female speaker who addresses her absent husband and recounts with ambivalence the course of their relationship, which has spanned China’s war with Japan in the early twentieth century, communist revolution, and a long separation due to his immigration to the United States, where he now lives apart from her, “straddling/The three forked rivers of Pittsburgh. ”19 And “The Politician’s Wife” depicts the sharply ironic and ironized monologue of another female persona. In this poem, the spouse of a Communist Party official employs wheedling political rhetoric and thinly veiled threats in urging her audience to support her husband in his bid to become “Executive Vice Chairman of the Labor Organ.” If these foregoing examples illustrate Chin’s skill as a poet in having mastered the basic terms of the dominant idiom in English for (feminine) Chinese subjectivity and affect established by Pound in Cathay, then her departures from and modifications to his example underscore even more

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forcefully the significance and ambition of her efforts. For together, these poems present a condensed narrative of twentieth-century Chinese history related from the perspectives of different imagined female participants. “Li Qing, Heart of Han,” for example, narrates the sexual exploitation a la Madame Butterfly of a village girl (“Like all war heroes he went home/to his wife”) sometime during the conflict between Nationalist and Communist forces for control of China. In “The Landlord’s Wife,” the eponymous speaker relates the causes for her material and emotional deprivation as someone who suffers under the Chinese Communist regime. Once “the wealthiest woman in Guang Dong,” she now endures very different circumstances due to her undesirable class designation, which stems from her former status as a landowning capitalist during the pre-revolutionary period. And in “The Politician’s Wife,” a woman who has benefited from the establishment of communist rule after 1949 seeks to improve her station even further by promoting the ambitions of her Party official husband. But in relating how “just last year Comrade Wu was exiled to Outer Mongolia, ”20 she ironically reveals the travails and rapid shifts in fortune that she has also confronted as part of their pursuit of political power. In addressing such comparatively recent events, these poems bring a critical historical dimension to the poetic representation of Chinese “difference” in English. Where Pound managed through the remarkable success of his aesthetic achievement to reinforce a timeless, and therefore essentializing, conception of Chinese culture and identity in presenting ancient and medieval lyrics by means of a definitively “modern” poetic idiom, one whose basic terms continue to shape poetic expression today; and where Ha Jin cultivates a spare and seemingly transparent presentation of Chinese cultural identity in the service of a validated antisocialist realism; and where Li-Young Lee elaborates in his expressly artful verse a consistently personalized and increasingly idiosyncratic notion of his heritage culture fixed in the amber of individual memory, Chin underscores in these poems the historicity of Chinese identity and affect, their variations across time, circumstance, subject position, and social location. Moreover, by addressing with sympathy a historical period that has been largely ignored within the dominant American cultural imaginary of China, namely the time that saw the rise of communism on the mainland, she draws attention to the expressly political aspects of individual subjectivity and emotion among the Chinese. While this focus certainly reflects her more radicalist political leanings, it also stands in marked and productive contrast to (especially literary) engagements with Chinese culture and identity on the part of the social dominant in the United States, which have tended since Pound to concern themselves with matters like religion (mostly in the forms of Taoism and Buddhism), a system of aesthetic value based on subtlety and

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indirection, a distinctively unified view of the relationship between nature and human society, and other such ostensibly apolitical and largely dehistoricized (i.e., Orientalist) stereotypes.21 As a crucial feature of their expressly temporalized and politicized approach to representing Chinese “difference” in English, Chin’s triptych of poems also displays an informed scholasticism that underwrites their commitment to historical specificity. For example, they each employ standard pinyin transliterations for Chinese personal and place names, a strategy that accords with their geographical setting on the mainland. Additionally, they make precise references to particular historical Chinese practices and figures such as calligraphy, embroidery, dress, political rhetoric, and even Chairman Mao. Most explicitly, “The Landlord’s Wife” even includes explanatory notes that clarify three potentially obscure historical allusions made in the poem: to a derogatory phrase used during the anti-Japanese resistance in China for the foreign invaders themselves and for Chinese collaborators (“Japanese four-legged, traitor-hound”), to a style of calligraphy (“Their running grass”), and to Mao Zedong (“The man from above, from Yenan”). No doubt partly the result of her formal academic training in Chinese literature, as well as her sustained practice as a translator of both classical and modern writing in Chinese, this scholasticism pervades the entire body of Chin’s work, deepening the way she both understands and presents elements of her heritage tradition. More important, such a commitment to historico-cultural specificity extends the conceptual spectrum of both poetic concern and logic beyond the strictly personal focus of lyric testimony in its currently most sanctioned form. By doing so, moreover, such an achievement stakes a broader, potentially more participatory epistemological claim than the contained authoritarianism of the current liberal multiculturalist order by grounding her constructions of Chinese American ethnic identity in something other than the vagaries of personal experience and a predominantly idiosyncratic apprehension of her heritage tradition. Put another way, in these poems Chin responds to the trauma of displacement and exile through active feats of historically engaged imagination, rather than through the exoticist sympathy of Pound, the reassuring antisocialist realism of Ha Jin, the nostalgic remembrance of Lee, or, as we shall see in the final chapter of this study, the acidic parody and verbal opacity of John Yau. More than just serving to clarify various historically and culturally specific references in the poem, the explanatory notes for “The Landlord’s Wife” also gesture toward disrupting the seamless fabric of the text in its effort to convey Chinese identity, or “difference.” By doing so, furthermore, they implicitly draw attention to the fundamental, though partial, incommensurability between Chinese and American cultural semiotics, as well

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as between the Chinese and English languages more generally. Accordingly, then, even as they strive on the surface to mitigate or overcome such incommensurabilities through the provision of relevant historical information, the notes also therewith tacitly undermine the presumption to transparency for the act of (specifically “Chinese”) ethnic representation in English. To be sure, Pound already did something similar in Cathay, including explanatory notes for some of his renderings, most notably for the poem he called “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance. ”22 But the scope and depth of her knowledge of Chinese history and culture distinguish Chin’s use of this strategy from his precedent. Indeed, as I will discuss in greater detail below, the intensely scholastic foundation that anchors Chin’s engagement with history in these early poems also has wider consequences for both the basic textuality and the broader cultural politics of her verse as she has continued in her poetic development. Of course, Chin does not limit the range of her concerns as a poet of Asian (and specifically Chinese) descent in the United States to evoking the tumultuous political and psychological landscape of twentieth-century mainland China. Already in Dwarf Bamboo, for example, two poems, “The Narrow Road to Oku” and “Unreal Dwelling,” take explicit inspiration from the renowned seventeenth-century classical Japanese poet Bashō. And in her most recently published book of verse, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, Chin draws directly from African American vernacular musical expression in the form of the blues to establish the structure of the opening poem of the volume, “Blues on Yellow,” as well as for different rhythmical effects and references throughout the collection as a whole. Furthermore, she has repeatedly engaged the dominant Western (and especially American) poetic canon. In addition to Pound, she has made both reverent and ironic allusions at different moments in various poems to William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, John Berryman, and even the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, to name only the most obvious. At the simplest level, such wide-ranging eclecticism reflects Chin’s deep aesthetic investment in poetry itself. As she has declared, Most of all, I want to exploit all the rich formal and stylistic possibilities of the genre [of poetry]. So, in any given book of mine, you will find short lyrics and long mediations, haiku and sonnets, elegies and lullabies, prose poems and fragments, long Whitmanesque lines, short controlled Dickinsonian lines, and lots of weird Chinese stuff.23

At another level, however, the breadth of her literary engagements attests to the expansiveness of her minoritarian cultural politics, her sense of solidarity with members of other ethnic and racialized minority groups in

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the United States over their common marginalization by the social dominant. Thus, she has explained both her interest in and debt to the African American cultural tradition in the following terms: We all know that the true indigenous American art is African American music. Nobody can deny this. It’s the best of American culture. I would be a fool not to pay homage to African American culture in my work. I am an American poet; it’s part of my heritage. Furthermore, African Americans have shed blood for other minorities. I wouldn’t be teaching in the university; I would still be working in a Laundromat if my African American forebearers [sic] hadn’t shed their own blood for social equality.24

Moreover, for Chin, poetic production by minorities necessarily involves an element of resistance to or critique of the dominant cultural order: “We minority poets have a lot ‘to write about, to bitch about.’ It’s a part of our nature to be an oppositional voice in the literary world. Our voices are necessary. We keep the literature honest. ”25 Though she employs the essentialist terminology of “nature” here, the logic of her argument indicates a grasp of the structural dimensions of “difference,” of minority status not primarily as an ontological condition, but rather as a discursively and materially constituted relation to power and the capacity to establish cultural norms. Such a flexible conception of “ethnicity” or “difference” helps to explain both the scope of cultural reference and the attendant variability of poetic form accompanying her use of the basic figure or conceit of an individual “ethnic” subjectivity giving voice to personal experience that underwrites the mode of lyric testimony in verse by writers of Asian descent in the United States. To be sure, the most sustained and productively complex of Chin’s diverse cultural engagements as a self-consciously “ethnic” (and specifically Chinese American) poet has been the one she has pursued with her personal heritage tradition, and in particular with the classical Chinese literary canon. Such an engagement shapes the entire body of her verse, and it has taken place at virtually every level of poetic signification. So, for example, Dwarf Bamboo cites as its epigraph an English translation of a line from a poem by the canonical Tang dynasty poet, Po Chu-yi (白居易, 772–846). Similarly, the title of Chin’s second book of verse, The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty, comes from the second line of a poem by the most famous of Tang poets, Li Bai (李白, 701– 62).26 On a more local level, she repeatedly invokes in numerous different particular poems Chinese cultural figures such as Confucius, another Tang poet Tu Fu, and the Taoist philosopher Laozi, among many others, as well as quoting or alluding directly to canonical texts like The Analects, the Dao De Jing (道德經), and the Shi Jing (詩經) or “The Book of Odes.”

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Crucially, this pervasive engagement specifically with the Chinese literary and cultural tradition reaches beyond simply the strategy of grafting, or the explicit reference to or invocation of identifi ably “Chinese” personages, images, practices, or works within the context of verse written in English. Rather, it has come to shape the very formal articulation of Chin’s distinctive idiom as she seeks in different instances to configure ethnic poetic production in English according to the established structural conventions of a poetic tradition from another language entirely. Thus, in the sequence “Chinese Quatrains (The Woman in Tomb 44)” from Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, Chin adapts the classical Chinese four-line poetic form known as jue jü (絕句), or “abbreviated” or “cut verse,” in presenting a series of brief, linked funerary quatrains that collectively elegize her “mother’s life story” of patriarchal domination and maternal sacrifice.27 Within classical Chinese poetry, the jue jü form observes the basic prosodic requirements for lü shi (律詩), or “regulated verse,” with individual lines comprising either five or seven syllables, and strict rules for tone distribution and rhyme. In addition, pentasyllabic lines feature a medial caesura after the first two characters or syllables, and heptasyllabic lines contain two such pauses, with an additional caesura after the second pair of characters and before the final three in a given line.28 Even loosely applied as in the case of Chinese Quatrains, these formal constraints clearly inspire the tersely insistent cadence and condensed imagery of Chin’s poem. The opening and closing pairs of stanzas effectively illustrate how her engagement with the classical Chinese poetic tradition has led to a new principle for structuring what has by now become almost a stock narrative in ethnic (and especially Asian American) literary production: The aeroplane is shaped like a bird Or a giant mechanical penis My father escorts my mother From girlhood to unhappiness A dragonfly has iridescent wings Shorn, it’s a lowly pismire Plucked of arms and legs A throbbing red pepperpod ... My grandmother is calling her goslings My mother is summoning her hens The sun has vanished into the ocean The moon has drowned in the fen

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Discs of jade for her eyelids A lozenge of pearl for her throat Lapis and kudzu in her nostrils They will rob her again and again29

Comparably, according to her own explanatory notes, in “Get Rid of the X,” Chin alludes to a canonical poem by Li Bai titled “Drinking Wine [Alone] with the Moon” (月下獨酌); in “Variations on an Ancient Theme: The Drunken Husband,” she adapts the imagery and thematics of traditional Chinese folk songs contained in the Yue Fu (樂府); the rhythm of “Folk Song Revisited” stems from another folk tune contained in the Yue Fu, “Her Door Opens to the White Waters”; and “Rhapsody in Plain Yellow” parodies the traditional Chinese poetic form known as fu, which employs extended and typically rhapsodic exposition as its rhetorical posture. Most significant, perhaps, Chin’s engagement with her heritage cultural tradition has also involved imaginatively incorporating different elements of the Chinese language itself into her verse, a strategy that underwrites the distinctiveness of her achievement among poets of Asian (and specifically Chinese) descent in the United States. In the introduction to this study, I briefly discussed Chin’s early lyric, “First Lessons,” and the way in which the formation of the written character for “goodness,” hao (好), drives the selection of images in the second section of that poem, thereby amounting to an instance of “cross-fertilization,” or the expressly generative union of different cultural traditions or even languages in their particular historical and material specificity. As she has continued to pursue her concerns as an avowedly ethnic poet, Chin has come increasingly to incorporate specifically Chinese language elements into her verse. Most simply and commonly, of course, numerous individual poems include by means of transliteration names and other brief fragments of spoken Chinese (in both Mandarin and Cantonese dialects) as part of their textual articulation. More recently and distinctively, though, Chin has even gone so far as to transplant actual Chinese written characters into the textual fabric of several poems, therewith expanding the number of signifying codes she employs in her verse. The title works from both The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty and Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, for example, open with Chinese characters as vital signifying elements. So, the former begins with a four-character line, 川流不息. This phrase, which Chin accurately and immediately renders into English as “The river flows without ceasing, ”30 gestures both visually and thematically to the poem by Li Bai from which her lyric (as well as volume) takes its title; and in doing so it calls attention to the expressly “foreign” source for Chin’s idiom as a poet of Asian (and specifically Chinese) descent in the United States.

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Comparably, “Rhapsody in Plain Yellow” features in its initial line the character 言, meaning “speech,” “to speak,” or “a language” more generally. Through its starkly contrastive visuality within the text, this character at once emblematizes and reinforces the anaphoric repetition of the imperative verb “Say” that structures the rhetorical and formal dimensions of this poem, an elegy for her lost “love, Charles”: Say: 言 I love you, I love you, I love you no matter your race, your sex your color. Say: the world is round and the arctic is cold. Say: I shall kiss the rondure of your soul’s living marl. Say: he is beautiful, serenely beautiful, yet, only ephemerally so.31

And in “To Pursue the Limitless,” Chin further enriches the linguistic fabric of her verse. Here, she not only includes the original phrase for the “Chinese paradox” that she addresses in the poem, “美言不信 信言不美//“Beautiful words are not truthful/The truth is not beautiful;” even more significant, she subsequently explores the unique sonic intersection between English and Chinese as distinct languages. She does so by playfully inserting at strategic points the Chinese characters for the numbers two and five into a couplet otherwise given entirely in English. The pronunciation in Mandarin of these respective characters roughly matches the sonic qualities of the key verbs in these lines, but their semantic meaning remains entirely unrelated to the sense of the lines in which they are embedded: To (二) err is human To (五) woo is woman32

From the standpoint of literary history, Chin’s incorporation of Chinese characters into her verse follows a precedent first established by Ezra Pound beginning as early as the “Chinese History” sequence in The Cantos. For him, of course, the Chinese characters woven into his “poem including history” served to emblematize the allegedly transcendental political wisdom of an idealized system of government based in Confucianism. By contrast, Chin here employs Chinese characters to signify the constitutive multiplicities and internal divisions of a specifically ethnic cultural identity. In fact, the sound of these characters apparently provides the conceptual impetus by which she transforms a familiar Christian aphorism into a wry comment on feminine vulnerability within the context of ethnic romance. The generative importance of specifically (Mandarin) Chinese phonology in “To Pursue the Limitless” becomes even clearer in the lines

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that immediately follow, where Chin ironically emphasizes the differences between the Chinese and English languages and their respective systems for semantic differentiation: Mái mā Buried mother Mài má Sold hemp Măi mă Bought horse No, not the tones but the tomes33

I will discuss this poem in particular at greater length below. For now, it suffices to note that, collectively, such techniques for incorporating elements of the Chinese language into her verse highlight both the cultural particularity and the formal distinctiveness of Chin’s approach to “minority” poetic production. Even more significant, the depth and precision of knowledge about her heritage tradition in general that her verse demonstrates in setting forth a counterpoetics of ethnic cultural identity and difference expands the basis of its authorization beyond the limits of merely individual, idiosyncratic perception or remembrance. Chin herself has explained both the breadth and specificity of her varied cultural engagements as a self-consciously ethnic poet in terms of a fusionist aesthetic. As she has noted, “I try to keep my esthetics dancing between the boundaries of east and west, ancient and street contempo. ”34 For her, moreover, such aesthetic syncretism unites her enthusiasm for formal experimentation with her equally deep commitment to an oppositional, minoritarian cultural politics. Thus, she has declared, “How exciting to have this great opportunity to make a ‘political’ statement about my bi-cultural identity by exacting my ideas with hybridized forms. How wonderful to have the riches from east and west, from two vastly different histories. ”35 As these comments suggest, Chin’s enthusiasm for a fusionist aesthetic remains grounded in a strongly identitarian conception of poetic production, a view that she has confirmed in another interview: “The cross-fertilization in my work is mimetic of my diasporic heritage and my ability to synthesize multiple worlds. ”36 In thus holding to a belief in the expressive mimeticism of her wide-ranging cultural engagements, Chin adheres to the basic assumptions underwriting the mode of lyric testimony within the larger body of verse produced by people of Asian descent in the United States. At the same time, however, the logic of her different formal experiments and innovations pushes against the established conventions of this hegemonic mode. For by so aggressively expanding the number of signifying codes and formal structures at work in her verse, she tacitly challenges the presumed adequacy of English and its existing poetic capacities for conveying ethnic difference. Consequently, in its expressly multilingual textuality her work

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shares an affinity with the mode of ethnic abstraction and its critical focus on the discursive constitution and logic, rather than the experiential “reality,” of Asian American culture and identity. Herein lays, then, the overarching, literary historical significance of Chin’s accomplishment as a “minority” (and specifically Chinese American) poet: to have successfully developed an approach to setting forth a counterpoetics of ethnic Chinese difference that manages to unite the most distinctive features from all three principal modes of Asian American poetic expression, supplementing the focus on personal affect of lyric testimony with both the oppositional political engagement of racial protest and the subversive conceptual interrogations of ethnic abstraction. As we shall see in the following section, through this approach Chin has recently produced some of the most compellingly innovative individual poetic formulations yet seen within the larger body of verse produced by writers of Asian (and specifically Chinese) descent in the United States.

III

Of all her poems, Chin’s lyric “How I Got That Name” from her second volume of verse, The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty, has thus far received the most extensive critical attention. Subtitled “an essay on assimilation,” this work has drawn nearly undisputed acclaim for the way it not only critiques dominant constructions of Asian American identity such as the model minority and other stereotypes but also challenges static or simplistically unified notions of an ethnic self. So, for example, John Gery has celebrated how Chin’s poem “ruptures her identity as ‘woman, native, other’ through an ironic, even parodic ‘dis-play’ of self-consciousness capable of linking her internal divisions, as well as connecting her past to her present.” Similarly, Adrienne McCormick praises the way “the poem embodies a series of contradictions which Chin positions herself in the middle of to disrupt them.” And most recently, employing the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas as a theoretical framework, Xiaojing Zhou has argued that “in articulating the socially constructed otherness of the self, Chin’s persona rejects the transcendence of the Cartesian self without eliminating the agency of the self ’s subjectivity.”37 Through their various discussions, these critics have usefully illuminated the sharp tonal irony and the constitutive ambivalence toward both her family heritage, as well as dominant (i.e., “white”) American culture, that together comprise two distinguishing features of Chin’s overall achievement specifically as an Asian American poet.

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Made up of four separate sections, each of which touches upon a different aspect of “minority” experience, the poem begins with a gesture of defiant insouciance. In the opening lines, the speaking persona boldly declares her (specifically Chinese) ethnic identity. Immediately thereupon, however, she proceeds to undercut any transcendental certainty for such an identity by relating the volatile mix of historical, cultural, and individual psychological forces that gave rise to her distinctive name: 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.” Of course, the name had been changed somewhere between Angel Island and the sea, when my father the paperson in the late 1950s obsessed with a bombshell blonde transliterated “Mei Ling” to “Marilyn.”38

In its second section, “How I Got That Name” modulates to an expressly collective register, assuming a first-person plural voice to ironize dominant cultural conceptions of Asian Americans in general, and to expose, and thereby subvert, the divisive ideological function of the model minority stereotype in particular: 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. But the “Model Minority” is a tease. We know you are watching now, so we refuse to give you any!

Also engaging in a critical self-mockery, though, this section closes by admitting to an affectively vexed investment in the conventional values underwriting dominant American culture as expressed in a popular soap opera. At the same time, the speaker attempts to establish a redemptively ironic distance from those values through witty invocations of the acknowledged American poetic canon in the form of droll echoes of William Carlos Williams and John Berryman:

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History has turned its stomach On a black polluted beach— Where 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.” Oh God, where have we gone wrong? We have no inner resources!39

The third section again shifts point of view, this time to the expressly imagined perspective of the deceased father, who “peered down from his kiosk in heaven.” An expression of her own anxieties about failing to meet oppressive paternal expectations, from this vantage, the speaker appears as little more than a great disappointment, being both “his least favorite” and “too listless to fight for my people’s destiny.” As a result, the father’s combined legacy of domination and indifference leaves her to suffer the trauma of a liminal existence, incapable of fully embracing the literal reality of either life or death: So, I wait for imminent death. The fact that this death is also metaphorical Is testament to my lethargy.40

To resolve this constitutive psychic dilemma, the poem concludes through the rhetorical strategy of a “projected epitaph”41 that closes with a carefully balanced assertion of joyous equanimity and acceptance of the productive disjunctions that she has undergone. In their virtuosic display of syntactic elegance and plain but emotionally charged diction, the closing lines recall the quiet delicacy of Pound’s achievement in Cathay. On the other hand, the wry self-mockery and humorously exaggerated imagery of this last section testify to the ways in which Chin has also departed from his example for giving poetic voice to Chinese (ethnic) subjectivity: So here lies Marilyn Mei Ling Chin, married once, twice to so-and-so, a Lee and a Wong, granddaughter of Jack “the patriarch” and the brooding Suilin Fong, daughter of the virtuous Yuet Kuen Wong and G. G. Chin the infamous, sister of a dozen, cousin of a million, survived by everybody and forgotten by all. She was neither black nor white,

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neither cherished nor vanquished, just another squatter in her own bamboo grove minding her poetry— when one day heaven was unmerciful and a chasm opened where she stood. Like the jowls of a mighty white whale, or the jaws of a metaphysical Godzilla, it swallowed her whole. She did not flinch nor writhe, nor fret about the afterlife, but stayed! Solid as wood, happily a little gnawed, tattered, mesmerized by all that was lavished upon her and all that was taken away!42

The rhetorical daring and tonal complexity that Chin exhibits in “How I Got That Name” together provide ample justification for the positive critical attention that it has received. Amid the chorus of praise for this poem, however, Charles Altieri has stood out as a lone dissenting voice; and his more restrained and formally focused assessment highlights the limitations of other critics, who have continued to operate almost exclusively at the levels of thematic explication and ideological endorsement. For him, even the distinctive variations on a familiar ethnic family drama enacted in Chin’s poem “leave nothing but the constant verbal revision of what seems a psychic landscape entirely defined by external forces.” Consequently, he concludes, “Resignation to such passivity allows as its active correlate only this elegance and play [of the final lines], so that Chin seems forced to continue the role of charming and submissive daughter, altering only the periphery of her condition. ”43 The stark, even incommensurable, opposition between the evaluations of Altieri and the other, more sanguine commentators highlights an abiding problem that continues to trouble discussions of ethnic literary production in general and Asian American verse in particular, namely, how properly to weigh(t) the matter and meaning of form in considering the broader significance of minority expression. Revealingly, the dispute among these critics over the magnitude of the achievement in “How I Got That Name” seems to turn on questions of both the specific arena, and therefore the extent, of Chin’s innovations as a poet of Asian descent in the United States. Certainly, at the levels of theme and rhetorical conception, she departs from the predominant tendencies of most popular contemporary Asian American poetry (as exemplified in the work of Li-Young Lee) by striving impressively to supersede the established convention of a unified individual subjectivity

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as the enabling condition for poetic enunciation. As the admirers have convincingly argued, she largely succeeds in doing so through maintaining a distinctive tonal consistency across several modulations of voice and dramatic scenario. Indeed, she demonstrates considerable imaginative power in effecting the shifts from the naked self-assertion of the opening lines through the two pained and ironic middle sections to arrive, finally, at the symmetrically expressed equanimity of the concluding lines. Yet, as Altieri also rightly points out, in seeking to resolve the contradictions of ethnic identity through the basic tropes of a vexed family dynamic and a problematic relationship to dominant culture, the poem adheres to a well-established narrative pattern within Asian American cultural production in general, one that has become virtually paradigmatic following the success of Maxine Hong Kingston and her renowned prose works. At the levels of form and stylistic technique, moreover, the signifying strategies employed to delineate the terms of (a specifically Chinese American) ethnic identity in “How I Got That Name” operate strictly within the existing limits of English and the established protocols of the dominant American poetic canon. Not only does the detailed attention paid to particular grammatical forms in the opening lines, for example, indicate the reliance of the poem for its expressive logic on the specific linguistic structure of English, but in her efforts at establishing a knowing self-mockery, Chin makes reference to the solidly canonical figures of Williams and Berryman. In addition, the poem as a whole simply accepts, rather than challenges or interrogates, the assumption that contemporary English free verse (with its own roots grounded firmly in Pound’s achievement in Cathay) suffices as a means for conveying the multiplicity and internal divisions of a particular ethnic cultural identity. Or, to use the terms of this study, in its efforts at hybridization, the poem resorts only to the basic strategies of grafting and the transplantation of Chinese names by means of transliteration. Put another way, as Aliteri’s critique suggests, despite the clear skill that Chin demonstrates with existing protocols for ethnic poetic expression and established poetic values in “How I Got That Name,” the basic formal conservatism of her style in this poem compromises the force of its transgressive cultural and political ambitions. For all the rhetorical power demonstrated by the poem through its existing and steadily increasing renown, at the level of form, it effectively assimilates ethnic expression to existing prosodic norms of the dominant American poetic orthodoxy. Where the one set of critics has failed to take full measure of the broader cultural political logic and significance of Chin’s poem by largely ignoring its formal dimensions in their analyses, for his part Altieri exhibits a different, yet equally substantial, critical limitation. For he develops his formalist critique in light of what he takes to be the dynamics of her individual

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psychology as a representative ethnic subject, as the recourse to psychoanalytic figures and terminology throughout his essay clearly indicates. In addition, his reservations stem as much from his understandable skepticism toward the transgressive possibilities of lyric testimony, as well as from his clear preference for work in the mode of what I have called ethnic abstraction, as from any shortcomings specific to “How I Got That Name” itself. As a result, Altieri overlooks the ways in which Chin’s explicitly declared commitment to an activist oppositional politics, and therefore her allegiance to the tradition of racial protest in Asian American verse and its investment in a realist conception of linguistic representation, shape the logic of cultural engagement in the poem. Through this affiliation she has arguably taken the politicized, often stridently anthemic energy of verse from the period of the Asian American movement and earlier and transformed it into her characteristic embracing irony as a way of sharpening the confessional foundations of lyric testimony with a biting rhetorical edge. Accordingly, then, if “How I Got That Name” fails to match the conceptual sophistication and complex formal hybridization of her best, most recent work, it nevertheless demonstrates the underlying drive toward an inventive syncretism that distinguishes her efforts at articulating a counterpoetics of ethnic (and specifically Chinese American) “difference.” As the concluding effort in The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty, Chin’s extended lyric “A Portrait of the Self as Nation, 1990–1991” marks an important transition in her ongoing poetic development thus far. For in this work she presses the logic of lyric testimony nearer to its conceptual limits by contesting an autonomous notion of individual minority identity. She does so by dramatizing the constitutive role that historical, political, and economic forces operating on an expressly global scale play in the formation of a particular ethnic subjectivity. Moreover, the text of the poem includes two epigraphs, one a Latin proverb and the other a translated quotation from the modern Greek poet George Seferis, as well as explanatory notes to clarify various culturally and historically precise references made in the work. With these elements, Chin visibly adds a further measure of semantic and sonic dimension to the poem, thereby gesturing toward broadening the formal and linguistic range of her idiom beyond the strict confines of English. By its very title, of course, “A Portrait of the Self as Nation, 1990–1991” announces an attempt to undo the conventional separation between the personal and the political as distinct, even unrelated, categories. The inclusion of specific dates, furthermore, precisely situates the poem against the historical and ideological context of the first Persian Gulf War, an event that subsequently gets figured as a contemporary restaging of the military and economic imperialism perpetrated by various Western powers throughout

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Asia during the nineteenth century. In keeping with the evidently feminist conceptual agenda indicated through its title, the poem also specifically addresses the matter of gender oppression as an aspect of both the history of Western engagement with Asia and the tradition of Chinese (literary) culture. It does so by thematizing seduction and expressly interracial romance inflected by historical patterns of political domination among nations as the overarching scenario for the poem. Importantly, however, Chin declines simply to rehearse any sort of familiarly dichotomized drama of victimization. For as the epigraphs to “A Portrait” clearly suggest, she seeks in this poem to discover a possibility for freedom (or at least acceptance) within the system of asymmetrically distributed power that underwrites ethnic subjectification by at once admitting to her own complicity within that dynamic and exploring the paradoxically reciprocal interplay of dominance and submission. The first of these epigraphs, an expressly contradictory Latin proverb, appears both in its original language and translated into English: “Fit in dominata servitus/In servitude dominatus/In mastery there is bondage/In bondage there is mastery”; and the second, taken from Seferis though given only in English, emphasizes the fundamental identity between the self and two of its ostensibly antagonistic “others”: The stranger and the enemy/We have seen him in the mirror.” As an opening to the poem proper, the speaking persona continues the theme of inverting conventional hierarchies of power by adopting the rhetorical posture of an extravagantly provocative schoolgirl, who addresses her male institutional superior with a teasing, almost lurid, admission of her sartorial impropriety: Forgive me, Head Master but you see, I have forgotten to put on my black lace underwear, and instead I have hiked my slip up, up to my waist so that I can enjoy the breeze. It feels so good as to be salacious. The feeling of flesh kissing tweed. If ecstasy had a color, it would be yellow and pink, yellow and pink Mongolian skin rubbed raw.44

This overtly sexualized tone quickly assumes even greater license as the speaker explicitly raises the question of her most recent intimate liaison. And in enumerating different possibilities, she first ironically exaggerates the duration of her abstinence by listing a variety of temporally distant and increasingly impossible candidates, who collectively represent a range of distinct cultural types from nineteenth-century China. Importantly,

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however, through such hyperbole she collapses the distinction between her own individual circumstances and the larger national history of her ethnic heritage tradition: When was the last time I made love? The last century? With a wan missionary. Or was it San Wu the Bailiff? The tax collector who came for my tithes? The herdboy, the ox, on the bridge of magpies?

The second section of the poem undertakes to explain and extend the sexual bravado of the first. It does so by relating in plainly suggestive diction and rhythm the emotional isolation the speaker has endured as a result of her commitment only to verse: It’s not so much the length of the song but the range of the emotion—Fear has kept me a good pink monk—and poetry is my nunnery.

Following an obliquely depicted masturbation scene, the speaker finds herself “Reading ‘Ching Ping Mei’ in the ‘expurgated’/where all the female protagonists were named/Lotus.” And this encounter with the moralistic censorship of a Chinese erotic novel leads to a sustained diatribe against the repression of women in traditional Chinese society, which, the speaker angrily notes, was historically justified on expressly political grounds: Those damned licentious women named us Modest, Virtue, Cautious, Endearing, Demure-dewdrop, Plum-aster, Petal-stamen. They teach us to walk headbent in devotion, to honor the five relations, ten sacraments. Meanwhile, the feast is brewing elsewhere, the ox is slaughtered and her entrails are hung on the branches for the poor. They convince us, yes, our chastity will save the nation—Oh mothers, All your sweet epithets didn’t make us wise! Orchid by any other name is equally seditious.

That the speaker concludes this charged critique against the gendered repression of her heritage tradition by ironically echoing Shakespeare indicates the depth of her ongoing investment in the authority of the cultural dominant. More than just signaling a complete assimilationism, however, this investment and the ambivalence attendant upon it become subjects of

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explicit concern throughout the remainder of the poem, therewith adding to its overall thematic and tonal complexity. Indeed, underscoring such complexity, as an opening to the third section the speaker even ventures to exert control over her own interpolation into the system of dominant cultural values by reversing the conventional dynamics of that process within the unfolding of the poem. She does so by means of a direct second-person comment to the initial addressee, the “Head Master,” who now gets refigured as a violent and overtly racist seducer: Now where was I, oh yes, now I remember, the last time I made love it was to you. I faintly remember your whiskers against my tender nape. You were a conquering barbarian, helmeted, halberded, beneath the gauntleted moon, whispering Hunnish or English— so-long Oolong went the racist song, bye-bye little chinky butterfly.

Significantly, this second-person address not only continues the sexual tease of the opening rhetorical gambit, by which the speaker has sought to gain a measure of power within the limits of her structural subordination; equally important, it subsequently enables her to broaden the scope of that effort through seamlessly shifting to another direct address, this time to an imagined reader who appears as a somewhat disheveled and decidedly liberalized (though fundamentally no less privileged) version of the Head Master. In this way, the speaker momentarily redirects the flow of representational power that has been a crucial aspect of her cultural domination as an ethnic subject, even as she admits to her own willing, though materially motivated, participation in that process. Notwithstanding this admission, however, her ensuing description of such complicity restages the basic scenario of Madame Butterfly, thereby highlighting the larger, expressly political dimensions of her seemingly personal attraction to and even embrace of dominant cultural values: You, my precious reader, O sweet voyeur sweaty, balding, bespeckled, in a rumpled rayon shirt and a neo-Troubadour chignon, politics mildly centrist, the right fork for the right occasions, matriculant of the best schools—

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herewith my last confession (with decorous and perfect diction) I loathe to admit. Yet I shall admit it: there was no colonialist coercion; sadly we blended together well. I was poor, starving, war torn, an empty coffin to be filled, You were a young, ambitious Lieutenant with dreams of becoming Prince of a “new world order,” Lord over the League of Nations.

In the fourth section of the poem, the speaker further develops the Madame Butterfly topos. Here, she does so as a way of both ironically dramatizing her own ambivalent embrace of Western values and exposing the duplicitous, even necrophiliac, desire for domination lying behind the rhetoric of freedom and opportunity that has served to justify U.S. imperialist expansion around the world (especially in Asia), and that continues to define its official ideological stance toward immigration. Thus, this section opens with a scene that combines intimacy and violence: Lover, destroyer, savior! I remember that moment of beguilement, one hand muffling my mouth, one hand untying my sash— On your throat dangled a golden cross.

And it closes with a direct critique against the hypocrisy of dominant culture. The charged tone and imagery of this passage vividly illustrate Chin’s continuing allegiance to the more confrontational expressive strategies of racial protest: This is the way you want me— asleep, quiescent, almost dead, sedated by lush immigrant dreams of global bliss, connubial harmony.

Building on the overarching themes of ambivalence and memory, which have shaped the poem from its outset, in section 5 the speaker vows that “I shall always remember/and deign to forgive” the asymmetrical conditions of her relationship to dominant American society and its presumption to know exactly “what it means to be free.” As part of that twin vow, she next recalls the time when she consummated, as it were, that relationship by becoming an American citizen. Here, the poem again emphasizes the

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mutual imbrication of personal identity with larger structures of political power by revealing the name of the speaker precisely at the moment that she acquires legally sanctioned national citizenship, an event that she clearly understands as at least a material improvement over her former existence: Said the judge, “Congratulations, On this day, fifteen of November, 1967, Marilyn Mei Ling Chin, application #z-z-z-z-z, you are an American citizen, naturalized in the name of God the father, God the son and the Holy Ghost.” Time assuages, and even the Yellow River becomes clean. . . .

Yet, the impulse to forgive also evokes, and therefore hazards, the risk of forgetting. Consequently, in response to the preceding scenario of legal inclusion, section 6 opens with the declaration that “Meanwhile we forget/ the power of exclusion.” And it goes on to enumerate various groups that have historically been barred from legal entry into the United States. Significantly, this list of social “undesirables” includes precise references to “the hookwormed and tracomaed,” as well as “the Hibakushas.” Chin’s use here of obvious neologisms for the first two designations and a transliterated term from Japanese for the second seem to testify to her at least latent recognition in this poem of the limits of English for representing the particularity of Asian “difference” in its various expressions.45 For all its expressly moral force, however, this list of the formerly excluded cannot overcome the ambivalent allure that attends upon the privileges of an (even vexed) engagement with the social dominant. Hence, in section 7, the speaker exclaims: Oh, connoisseurs of gastronomy and keemun tea! My foes, my loves, how eloquent your discrimination, How precise your poetry.

And to amplify the sense of her own complicity in ongoing structures of domination and acts of American global expansion, she tells of watching in bed with her lover the onset of the First Persian Gulf War. As an expression of her own ambivalent conflation of love and violence, the speaker describes in detail the fiery spectacle of war, while eventually tying these observations to the admission that “Ecstasy made us tired.”

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The final section of “A Portrait of the Self as Nation, 1990–1991” reads as follows: Sir, Master, Dominatrix, Fall was a glorious season for the hegemonists. We took long melancholy strolls on the beach, digressed on art and politics in a quaint warfside café in La Jolla. The storm grazed our bare arms gently . . . History has never failed us. Why save Babylonia or Cathay, when we can always have Paris? Darling, if we are to remember at all, Let us remember it well— We were fierce, yet tender, fierce and tender.

In concluding the poem, these lines seek to resolve, or at least neutralize, the abiding contradictions facing the speaker as an immigrant (Chinese) American ethnic subject, one who has, furthermore, openly avowed her willing participation in a frankly asymmetrical personal romance that itself serves as a figure for the more grandly scaled imperialist tendencies shaping both U.S. foreign and domestic politics. Most immediately, for example, the slippage from masculine to feminine gender for the nominal designations that comprise the opening apostrophe of this section (perhaps too) subtly asserts the power wielded by the speaker herself within the dynamic of her interracial romance, despite the structurally subordinate position that she occupies. Yet that power also carries with it the irony of implicating her even more deeply in continuing efforts by the United States at political domination around the globe. Hence, the “glorious season for the hegemonists” turns out to have involved the highly romanticized events of a personal affair. And, for all the seeming detachment from the larger troubles of the world suggested by the series of clichéd images, the memories of the speaker reveal the inescapable touch of “politics” upon the ostensible purity of her intimacy in the way “The storm grazed our bare arms gently,” a detail that Adrienne McCormick has read as an oblique reference to the First Persian Gulf War and Operation Desert Storm.46 Accordingly, then, the conditional injunction “to remember it well” that closes the poem leads to an elegantly modulated repetition (similar to the ending of “How I Got That Name”) by which the speaker strives to unite two seemingly incompatible, and even opposed, modes of behavior: ferocity and tenderness. Significantly, the marked shift from the adversative conjunction “yet” to the expressly additive “and” in the final pair of lines registers the overarching

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goal of the poem to arrive at an affective and cognitive state that allows for the embrace of these opposites, a position from which to encompass, rather than merely lament, the contradictions and complicities of minority status in the United States. Such an effort to subsume logical contradiction culminates Chin’s attempt in this work to extend the purview of lyric testimony beyond its narrow focus on individual (though implicitly representative) affect as the primary subject of poetic utterance for contemporary verse by people of Asian descent in the United States. Still, as this closing rhetorical gesture underscores, for all its complex tonal irony, thematic ambivalence, and overall conceptual daring, “Portrait of the Self as Nation, 1990–1991” stops short of fully challenging the existing Asian American poetic orthodoxy. For in seeking to resolve the fundamental contradictions of (Chinese) American ethnic subjectivity, the poem ultimately relies solely upon a subtle semantic distinction enabled by the internal systematicity of English itself. By contrast, in her most recently published book of verse, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, Chin has come to expand further the signifying capacities of her idiom through the distinctive effects she achieves by expressly incorporating elements of the Chinese language into different poems, therewith contesting the tacit assimilationist formal politics of the currently most sanctioned versions of lyric testimony within the larger body of Asian American poetic production. Indeed, the volume as a whole displays newly heightened levels of confidence as well as technical sophistication in the various strategies of cultural engagement that it pursues. Such advancements can be most readily seen, for example, both in the epigraph and in the blues sequence that serves as a prelude to the collection. Through the epigraph—a three-line passage from “Love Song” by William Carlos Williams: “The stain of love/Is upon the world/Yellow, yellow, yellow”—Chin confronts again the canonical American modernist poetic tradition, thus continuing to demonstrate a generative ambivalence toward the authority of the cultural dominant. But unlike in her previous engagements with such a tradition, as we have seen above in the invocations of Williams and Berryman in “How I Got That Name,” here Chin even more plainly wrests that authority and turns it to her own avowedly “ethnic” purpose. She does so by opening possibilities of overtly racial signification within what was originally an eroticized presentation of the natural world as an expression of longing.47 And for the prelude work, “Blues on Yellow,” she undertakes a simultaneous act of cross-racial solidarity and appropriation, employing the principal vernacular poetic form for articulating minority “difference” within the American cultural imagination and giving a highly observant, but hardly slavish, rendition that voices in its imagery, diction, and reference an identifiably Asian racial (and historically, culturally, and linguistically Chinese ethnic) subject position.

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Even more telling of Chin’s growth as a poet, the lyric that begins the body of the volume, “That Half Is Almost Gone,” advances new ways for incorporating elements of her heritage cultural tradition, therewith adding to the repertoire of available strategies within Asian American verse for representing specifically Chinese ethnic “difference.” Rhetorically and thematically, this work covers familiar territory within the mode of lyric testimony by employing the basic conceit of an individual minority subject giving affective voice to personal experience as a means for depicting the variety of losses that attend upon assimilation into dominant culture. At the level of formal technique, however, Chin explores new stylistic ground in “That Half Is Almost Gone,” successfully achieving greater expressive intensity by broadening the visual and sonic scope of her idiom. Thus, from its initial stanza, the poem establishes a staggered poetic line that visually dramatizes the increasing disconnection felt by the speaker from her particular ethnic cultural heritage: That half is almost gone, the Chinese half, the fair side of a peach darkened by the knife of time, fades like a cruel sun.48

Thereupon, the speaker relates an occasion from her recent past that exemplifies and apparently validates the pained observation of the opening stanza. Ironically, however, the recollection of this event immediately prompts an even grander, contrary assertion about the enduring and viscerally affective influence that her ethnic heritage continues to exert, despite her rapidly diminishing familiarity with the language of that cultural tradition. Here again, the jagged lineation emphasizes an abiding and generative tension at work within the poem by focusing particular attention on the speaker’s patently contradictory understanding of such influence as at once necessary and atavistic: In my thirtieth year I wrote a letter to my mother. I had forgotten the character for “love.” I remember vaguely the radical “heart.” The ancestors won’t fail to remind you the vital and vestigial organs where the emotions come from.

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Significantly, this episode pointedly raises the matter of the speaker’s fading language abilities in Chinese. Such a trope functions, of course, as a synecdoche for the larger problematic of ethnic subjectivity and its constitutive displacement from a heritage culture. But within the evolving dynamic of the poem itself, Chin nevertheless manages to achieve here a cross-fertilization between Chinese and English. Such an accomplishment not only complicates the rhetorical posture of the poem as a whole; at least as important, it belies the threat of complete assimilation into the idiom of the cultural dominant. For though the speaker confesses to having “forgotten the character for ‘love’, ” the logic of this basic figure and the etymologically correct details about the construction of that character (愛) and its semantic “radical ‘heart’ (心) together provide the conceptual impetus for the primary images of this passage, most notably the overtly metaphorical invocation of “the vital and vestigial organs.” Comparably, at the same time that the speaker bemoans the loss of connection to her ancestral tradition signaled by her failing linguistic memory, the progression of English verb tenses from simple past (“wrote”) to past perfect (“had forgotten”) to present (“remember”) to future (“won’t fail”) cunningly indicates the ongoing potential of ethnic heritage to exert its force across the spectrum of temporal frames. As a result, the poem again undercuts the assimilationist suggestion of the speaker’s opening declaration to evoke ethnicity as an enduringly contradictory dilemma. The next stanza continues this dynamically generative tension, with the speaker reiterating her sense of steadily advancing cultural loss, while the poem expands its signifying capacities to include the sonic dimensions of (Mandarin) Chinese: But the rest is fading. A slash dissects in midair. ai, ai, ai, ai, more of a cry than sigh (and no help from the phoneticist).

Just as with the previous stanza, the visual appearance of the Chinese written character for “love” shapes the articulation of the second line here. For as Chin’s explanatory note to the poem makes clear, the image of the “slash” refers to one particular stroke in the formation of this character, even as it serves to evoke again the speaker’s felt separation from her heritage cultural tradition. Going a step further, the repeated exclamations of the third line in this passage play upon the pronunciation in Mandarin of the word for “love,” therewith explicitly incorporating a Chinese phonetic strand into the sonic fabric of the poem.49 Remaining

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unglossed within the body of the text itself, these exclamations signify in English and Chinese simultaneously. Accordingly, then, on the one hand they serve to convey the pain of the cultural loss attendant upon assimilation; and on the other, they signal the fundamental irreducibility of specifically “Chinese” ethnic “difference,” powerfully, if only momentarily, puncturing the broadly accepted liberal multiculturalist assumption of English as a fully adequate and transparent linguistic medium for conveying that “difference.” As a result, Chin’s expressly multivalent transplantation here of an identifiably Chinese phonetic element into the poem definitively opens new expressive possibilities for the mode of lyric testimony within the larger body of verse by people of Asian descent in the United States. More locally, such complex and even contradictory signification helps to clarify the necessity behind the speaker’s ensuing and otherwise largely inexplicable description of these exclamations as “more of a cry than a sigh,” as well as her ironic reference to an unhelpful phoneticist. Furthermore, this attention given to various elements of Chinese in “That Half Is Almost Gone” arguably clarifies the emphasis in the subsequent section on differences in semantic meaning produced by modulations in tone: You are a Chinese! My mother was adamant You are a Chinese? My mother less convinced. Are you not Chinese? My mother now accepting. As a cataract clouds her vision, and her third daughter marries a Protestant West Virginian who is “very handsome and very kind.”

Thus, even as the speaker continues to lament the cultural loss due to assimilation in this portrayal of her mother’s steadily growing sense of alienation from her children, the poem paradoxically demonstrates in its signifying logic the ongoing influence of that heritage through Chin’s culturally informed and specific poetic strategies. Hence, in the ensuing lines, the matter of the speaker’s relation to her cultural heritage gets figured precisely as an enduring question:

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The mystery is still unsolved— the landscape looms over man. And the gaffer-hatted fishmonger— sings to his cormorant. And the maiden behind the curtain is somebody’s courtesan.

In response to these stock images from the iconography of traditional Chinese brush painting, which themselves have made extensive appearances in dominant American representations of Chinese culture and identity, the speaker reacts with a familiar withering irony that highlights her own sense of disconnection from her heritage by contrasting the exoticist romance of these images against the decidedly more mundane frustrations of ethnic life in the United States. Yet, even in its jaded realism, such irony ends up reiterating the persistence of a larger mystery: Or, merely Rose Wong’s aging daughter Pondering the blue void.

As a conclusion to the poem, the speaker initially seeks to resolve this abiding uncertainty through a mediated act of rhetorical fiat, which comes in form of a definitive statement by the mother about her daughter’s ethnic and cultural identity. Significantly, the authority for this act apparently stems from the moral force of her expressly traumatic historical experience of physical displacement: You are a Chinese—said my mother who once walked the fields of her dead—

Yet the poem ultimately questions the validity of this maternal sanction as it closes with an admission by the speaker that, as she has continued to mature, so too has her knowledge of Chinese further deteriorated. And this loss has only intensified her sense of separation from her ethnic and familial heritage, leaving her unable now apparently even to begin another letter to her mother: Today, on the 36th anniversary of my birth, I have problems now even with the salutation.

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Ending on such a deeply ambivalent note, “That Half Is Almost Gone” ultimately refuses any easy, authoritarian solution to the problem of establishing the terms for a particular ethnic (and specifically Chinese American) identity. Instead, it dramatizes the affective tension between a biological and a cultural conception of minority “difference.” For through its intricately counterpointed formal and rhetorical structure, the poem oscillates between, on the one hand, the allure of an essentialist notion of belonging premised on the idea of an organic, even familial, relation to a heritage tradition; and on the other hand, the impending threat of total cultural loss brought about by individual displacement from that tradition through the inexorable process of assimilation into the norms of dominant society, which in turn renews the conceptual necessity for an appeal to essentialist biologism as the ground of ethnic identity. As a poet, Chin negotiates precisely the pull of these two extremes; and the significance of her achievement in “That Half Is Almost Gone” lies in the distinctive invention and potential broader applicability of the various hybridized signifying strategies that she employs to represent elements of her heritage tradition and especially language, even in the midst of declaring their loss. More important still, the cultural precision and expressive logic of these strategies extend beyond the limits of merely a personally idiosyncratic and fading grasp of that heritage. If this poem fails to arrive at a coherently unified conception of ethnic subjectivity, then, it nevertheless achieves a greater success in demonstrating the capacity of verse to serve as a means for at once interrogating and helping to constitute the very terms of ethnicity itself as a category of minority “difference.” The impulse toward greater formal experiment, as well as cultural and linguistic particularity, initially displayed in “That Half Is Almost Gone” persists throughout the larger body of Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, therewith highlighting Chin’s ongoing poetic development. Significantly, this formal exploration coincides with a broadening of thematic focus beyond simply the affective expression of personal experience, though the conceit of an individual speaking subject remains central to their rhetorical operation. In “Cauldron,” for example, the autobiographical speaker interweaves a personal meditation on different traditional Chinese art objects (a brushpainted scroll and the ceremonial bronze vessel of the title) with a vividly imagined narrative about her grandmother saving her daughter (the speaker’s mother) from being sold “for a finger of opium. ”50 By means of this culturally particular ekphrasis, Chin strives to delineate a collectively constituted and historically grounded notion of ethnic identity by blurring any clear separation between personal experience, familial lore, and the broader sweep of Chinese social and cultural history. Taking off from the canonical example of Keats and his urn, Chin aims in “Cauldron” not so

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much to trumpet the timelessness of art as to underwrite the terms for a specifically Chinese American cultural subjectivity. And in doing so, she seeks to reshape the contours of the dominant poetic tradition in English under the force of her culturally informed ethnic imagination, adding an expressly visual dimension to the poem:51 The cauldron is heavy— our bones will flavor the pottage, our wrists will bear its signature. As the kingdom’s saga trills on, familial and personal, the great panorama of Loyang blusters in its silent gallows and the war-torn vermilion glow of eternal summer.

More indicative still of the various ways that Chin has come increasingly to stretch the established technical protocols of conventional lyric testimony, the poem “To Pursue the Limitless” even broadens the range of signifying codes employed to represent specifically Chinese American cultural identity as part of emphasizing the particularity, as well as the basic irreducibility, of ethnic “difference.” Again taking up the theme of maternal hardship, the speaker here adopts the rhetorical posture of sympathizing over the numerous difficulties that her mother faced, both in her apparently unhappy marriage to a neglectful husband and as an immigrant to the United States, where she endured displacement from her native Chinese cultural environment and especially language. Notably, the poem eschews the straightforward narrative style typically employed in ethnic confessional or domestic lyric. Instead, Chin elaborates a sequence of syntactically discrete strophes that together present immigrant ethnic experience as a condition marked by fragmentation and discontinuity. Furthermore, in setting forth this disjointed portrayal, she makes extensive use of infinitive constructions, which serve as a witty grammatical correlate to the suggestion of endless possibility contained within the title of the poem. As a result, this work opens with a return to the staccato cadences of “Chinese Quatrains.” Like in that earlier poem, here the jagged rhythm and unpredicated syntax of the initial stanzas gesture at the level of form to the specifically “foreign” dimensions of Chinese American cultural identity, as well as to the distinctiveness of an experience constituted outside the boundaries of English: To pursue the limitless With a hare-brained paramour To chase a dull husband With a sharp knife

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To speak to Rose About her thorny sisters Lock the door behind you The restaurant is on fire You are named after Flower and precious metal You are touched By mercury Your birth-name is Dawning Your milk-name is Twilight Your betrothed name is Dusk To speak in dainty aphorisms To dither In monosyllables Binomes copulating in midair52

These opening lines present a highly condensed depiction of the insistent frustrations and disappointments suffered by the mother under the twin pressures of Chinese patriarchal tradition and the economic travails of an immigrant life, themes more typically undertaken in the mode of racial protest. In particular, the progression of the fourth stanza delineates a trajectory of steady decline. And the ironically picturesque representation of Chinese speech in stanza 5 emphasizes the incompatibility of her native language practices with the requirements for communication in the United States. Together, these features enact an evident departure from the teleology of dominant, redemptive narratives of American immigration that stress social freedom, eventual cultural and linguistic assimilation, and the opportunity for material prosperity. On a larger scale, then, “To Pursue the Limitless” tacitly critiques from its outset the assumptions underwriting the prevailing American ideology of liberal multiculturalism. Even more significant, perhaps, the idiom of the poem marks a distinctive stylistic accomplishment within the larger body of verse by writers of Asian (and specifically Chinese) descent in the United States. For Chin achieves an impressively hybridized poetic density by strategically employing the respective signifying capacities of both English and Chinese as distinct languages to evoke the liminal cultural space occupied by the mother. The punning oppositions that animate the initial pair of stanzas (“sharp knife” against “dull husband” and “Rose” against “her thorny sisters”), for example, exploit a set of idiomatic expressions particular to the

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historical development of English, even as they seek to characterize interactions almost certainly taking place in another language. Similarly, the startling combination of images in the third stanza derives from calqued renderings of a plausible Chinese naming convention, thereby investing the idiom of the poem with the metaphoricity of another linguistic and cultural tradition. And this feat of cross-fertilization, in turn, helps give rise to the subsequent description of the mother being “touched by mercury,” which includes its own range of attendant associations specific to English. In addition, the fanciful ceremonial designations of stanza 4 not only imply the mother’s diminishing fortunes as she matures; they also exude an air of Orientalist exoticism. And lastly, the bold diction of stanza 5, its audacious mixing of registers in the move from the ironized nicety of “dainty aphorisms” to the technicality of “binomes” and “monosyllables” to the vulgar detachment of “copulating,” registers Chin’s success in elaborating the poetic possibilities that stem from the intersection between the language of her ethnic cultural heritage and that of the American social dominant, as enacted in the effort to represent in English certain structural features of Chinese. Collectively, these stylistic elements contribute to the formation of an idiom which steps beyond the predominantly realist, as well as uncritically anglophone, conventions of lyric testimonial free verse in its currently most sanctioned form. Subsequently, as the poem continues in its efforts to depict the tribulations facing the mother as an immigrant to the United States, issues of language and, in particular, language difference come to play an even greater role in “To Pursue the Limitless.” Not only do they persist as ongoing thematic concerns; more significant still, they go so far as to shape the very textual articulation of the verse itself. Thus, in seeking to dramatize a fundamental conflict inscribed within Chinese American ethnic experience through the speaker’s continuing address to her mother, Chin makes a bold formal departure from the existing protocols of conventional lyric testimony by including actual Chinese characters as vital signifying elements in the fabric of the poem: To teach English as a second Third, fourth language You were faithful to the original You were married to the Chinese paradox 美言不信 信言不美 Beautiful words are not truthful The truth is not beautiful

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Though Chin immediately and accurately translates the phrase in Chinese, such a formal gesture pointedly, if only momentarily, confronts monolingual readers with an opaque textual surface. And in doing so, it explicitly dismantles the prevailing liberal multiculturalist assumption of English as a fully adequate and transparent vehicle for representing specifically Chinese American ethnic identity in verse. Moreover, this expansion in the number of linguistic codes comprising the poem slyly asserts an irreducibly partial commensurability between Chinese and English as distinct representational media, which in turn gives rise to the theme of problematic translation that animates the subsequent lines: You have translated “bitter” as “melon” “Fruit” as “willful absence” You were mum as an egg He was brutal as an embryo Blood-soup will congeal in the refrigerator You are both naturalized citizens You have the right to a little ecstasy

At the level of simple reference, of course, the chain of surrealistic equivalences here delineates a domestic scenario of emotional suffering, filial abandonment, and perhaps even physical violence endured by the speaker’s mother under the depredations of a traditional system of patriarchal domination. Such deeply personalized syllogisms thereby advance the narrative of maternal hardship for which the poem as a whole seeks to function as an act of compensatory sympathy, an aim underscored in these lines by the explicit mention of “rights” accruing to the acquisition of naturalized American citizenship in the last couplet of this section. Moreover, the particularity of the images comprising these associations cunningly reflects the specific ethnic heritage of the speaker and her family through allusions to identifiably (though not exclusively) Chinese dietary habits, most especially in the evocation of “bitter melon” (species name Momordica charantia). To be sure, the device of idiosyncratic or simply inaccurate translation from a heritage language has long enjoyed recognition as a staple feature in the construction of Asian American (and specifically Chinese American) cultural subjectivity under the current dispensation of liberal multiculturalism, ever since Maxine Hong Kingston employed this hybridization strategy to widespread acclaim in The Woman Warrior. Yet, as I discussed in the introduction, by simulating culturally specific information without revealing it as a simulation, this technique of ethnic representation rests solely on the authority of an individual writer’s (mis)perception, thereby

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facilitating the establishment of a cult of personality as the conceptual foundation for both the reception and assessment of minority expression. In “To Pursue the Limitless,” by contrast, Chin avoids the tacitly authoritarian dimensions of what I have called mimicry as a method of ethnic cultural production, enacting instead a formal politics arguably more challenging to the epistemological assumptions of liberal multiculturalism and its emphasis on a simple acknowledgment of “difference” by the social dominant, one that conspicuously lacks an accompanying investment in transforming the structures of inequality historically justified by such “difference.”53 For not only does she attribute the idiosyncratic “translations” of these lines specifically to the individual linguistic negotiations of the mother, rather than to “Chinese culture” in general; even more significant, precisely through these surrealistic equivalences, she highlights the ways in which an effort to convey a sensibility grounded in the distinctive logic of another language has the potential to reshape established norms of expression within English itself. At this moment in “To Pursue the Limitless,” then, Chin initiates an expansion of her poetics beyond the familiar conceptual boundaries of lyric testimony, taking up concerns and strategies more typically explored by writers operating in the mode of ethnic abstraction. In the ensuing lines, the poem enacts an even greater formal challenge to the prevailing conventions of ethnic lyric testimonial verse. For Chin adds another layer of complexity to the signifying strategies that she employs in the effort at once to represent and to redeem through sympathy the marital trauma of her mother. More than, as earlier in the poem, simply adding a discrete phrase in Chinese to enrich the linguistic texture of the verse both visually and referentially, Chin at this point in “To Pursue the Limitless” breaks the uniformity of what have heretofore been linguistically homogeneous poetic lines, inserting Chinese characters to form a bilingually expressive unit: To (二) err is human To (五) woo is woman

Thematically, the speaker articulates in these lines a wry compassion for the sufferings of the mother through the invocation of Pope’s famous aphorism from “An Essay on Criticism,” modified in its unfolding to comment ironically upon the affective predilections of a diasporic feminine subjectivity. Sonically, moreover, the line enacts an interlingual homophony between the operative verbs of the modified quotation and the approximate pronunciation in Mandarin of the numbers “two” and “five.” In fact, the transplanted Chinese characters here not only visually highlight the puns themselves but their placement before the verbs in English suggests an increasing

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importance for Mandarin Chinese both in the semiotic articulation of the poem and in the very logic of its conceptual operation. For in their capacity as functioning verbal signs that carry determinate semantic and phonetic meaning, these characters explicitly introduce Chinese linguistic values as integral to the dynamic of the poem. By their specific position preceding the verbs in these lines, furthermore, they establish a principle of sound as the validating force behind the transformation of the line by Pope. Accordingly, then, these characters register the parallel systematicity of the Chinese language, thereby serving as a metonymy for “Chinese culture” more broadly. And in doing so, they dramatize the potential of an ethnic heritage tradition to provide the means for reconfiguring, at least locally, the established terms of the dominant poetic canon in English. At the level of formal technique, of course, Chin deploys an existing tactic within the dominant American poetic repertoire, one inaugurated by Pound in his later engagements with the Chinese literary and philosophical tradition.54 Significantly, though, she does not simply reproduce the gesture of her modernist predecessor. Rather, she employs the strategy of transplantation here both in her own way and to her own decidedly “ethnic” purpose of representing Chinese American culture and identity. Most distinctively, whereas Pound incorporated Chinese characters primarily for what he understood to be their visual significance, Chin builds her poetic effects instead out of their auditory value. In literary historical terms, then, her real achievement here lays in opening American ethnic verse to expressive and signifying possibilities deriving from the phonetic structure of Mandarin Chinese, without also functioning only in that language. And, in turn, such an accomplishment sharpens the oppositional dimension of the overarching cultural politics of “To Pursue the Limitless.” For it challenges the monolingualist epistemological presumptions of the cultural dominant in the United States and the terms of its preference for conventional lyric testimony by tacitly demonstrating the limitations of English as a medium for ethnic representation. Correlatively and in more positive terms, the poem pushes the existing formal boundaries of that poetic mode, insisting on the constitutive importance of a heritage language in both the textual articulation and the conceptual function of verse that seeks to represent a Chinese American cultural subjectivity or experience. Such an accomplishment also has the effect of reshaping the ethical structure of reading minority literature in general as the poem stakes a claim both to knowledge about ethnic (racial) “otherness” as well as to knowledge from its different potential audiences to grasp the full meaning of its disclosure. Indeed, this heightened emphasis on the generative specificity of Mandarin and its phonological organization becomes even more pronounced in the section that immediately follows, with Chinese assuming primary status

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among the languages that form the operative idiom of the poem. Here, Chin incorporates a series of transliterated binomes that sonically resemble the English phrase “my ma,” but which differ from one another in their distribution of tones, and therefore also in their semantic reference. Despite their differences in meaning, however, these binomes each ironically evokes a separate aspect of the trauma undergone by the mother: Mái mā Buried mother Mài má Sold hemp Măi mă Bought horse No, not the tones but the tomes

In addition, the cryptic final line of this section not only highlights the different principles for semantic differentiation in Chinese and English, respectively, as I noted earlier; equally important, it also thereby cunningly suggests that a full accounting of the difficulties faced by the mother specifically as an immigrant could fill volumes. Most significant, perhaps, the reciprocal interplay between Chinese and English in these lines vividly illustrates the way in which Chin has come to employ the distinctive structure of her heritage language to shape the conceptual development of her verse, thereby opening new formal and expressive possibilities within the mode of lyric testimony. Throughout the remaining lines, “To Pursue the Limitless” resorts back to English as its primary linguistic medium, though the tonal structure of Chinese and the sorts of misunderstanding that it enables continue as thematic concerns. While Chin pulls away from further formal exploration, the impulse to challenge existing conventions and expectations plays out at the level of narrative development, one whose uncertain trajectory seems already inscribed in the very title. As a conclusion, the speaker imagines a vexed courtship scenario between her parents that functions as a kind of retrospective omen for the difficulties the mother would come to face over the course of her doomed relationship with the uncomprehending, selfish father: You said My name is Zhuang Mei Sturdy Beauty But he thought you said Shuang Mei Frosty Plum He brandished his arc of black hair like a coxcomb He said Meet me at the airport travelator His back door was lovelier than his front door A smear of bile on your dress Proved his existence

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In its pointed, even hyperbolic, viscerality, the final image nicely culminates the different manifestations of “bitterness” that have shaped the speaker’s diction and tone over the course of the poem. Such a highly stylized closing rhetorical gesture not only illustrates Chin’s considerable poetic abilities; it also testifies to the intensity of her repeatedly expressed desire to redeem the experience of her mother through the agency of her verse. At the same time, however, in finally arriving metaleptically at the point when the mother will begin enduring the hardships depicted earlier in the poem, Chin confronts the inevitable limitations on the potential efficacy of such an aim, gesturing obliquely to the larger structural causes for feminine suffering and mandated sacrifice, as well as even for the condition of ethnicity itself. In the lean sobriety of its vision, then, “To Pursue the Limitless” ultimately refuses any simple affective resolution to the dilemma of an immigrant ethnic (and specifically Chinese American) identity, opting instead for an uneasy posture of elegiac ambivalence from which to undertake the task of ideological critique. Through such a strategy, together with her linguistically and historically informed deployments of a Chinese cultural tradition, Chin strives in her most recent verse to overcome the authoritarian logic of lyric testimony and its reliance on the trope of an individual subjectivity as the means for delineating the terms of ethnic cultural identity, enriching that mode with both the expressly oppositional stance of racial protest and the overtly disruptive formal experimentalism of ethnic abstraction. While this poem may harbor a nostalgia for an idealized pre-immigrant state, it also challenges the recursively self-validating optimism of liberal multiculturalism and the teleology of redemption informing dominant American conceptions of immigration that emphasize freedom, opportunity, and equality for immigrants. Such a teleology relates in particular to people of Asian descent in the United States, of course, specifically through the vehicle of the model minority stereotype and the different ideological functions that construction continues to serve in helping mitigate the contradictions of liberal multicultural American society and its quietist politics of recognition, a politics that in its emphasis on individually and experientially grounded expressions of ethnic identity neatly forestalls deeper inquiry into the structural dimensions of ongoing inequality and continuing asymmetries in the various conditions facing different American minority groups. The culturally and linguistically specific knowledge at once featured in and therefore required fully to understand Chin’s best poems confront monolingual readers with a host of challenges. And the difficulty of these challenges, in turn, has arguably worked to limit the scope of her reputation among both minority and mainstream audiences alike, particularly in relation to poets, like Li-Young Lee, who employ strategies of “ethnic”

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representation more readily legible to a predominantly anglophone readership. Yet, as I have shown, such specificity, along with the varieties of expressly cross-cultural signification that it enables, remain crucial to the ways in which Chin has come to redraw the boundaries of poetic taste and even possibility in setting forth a Chinese American cultural subjectivity in verse, at least within the terms of what has been the most widely sanctioned mode of ethnic poetic production, namely lyric testimony. Accordingly, then, if Chin’s work has enjoyed less recognition than it deserves, that situation was obtained at least in part due to her refusal of what Rey Chow has termed the “coercive mimeticism” of ethnic representation. In Chow’s articulation, this “third level of mimeticism in postcolonial cultural politics” involves a process (identitarian, existential, cultural, or textual) in which those who are marginal to mainstream Western culture are expected, by way of what Albert Memmi calls “the mark of the plural,” to resemble and replicate the very banal preconceptions that have appended to them, a process in which they are expected to objectify themselves in accordance with the already seen and thus to authenticate the familiar imaginings of them as ethnics.55

Throughout her career, Chin has sought to transgress the established limits of poetic decorum in “ethnic” verse. While in this chapter I have focused on the logic and meaning of her distinctive use of elements from her heritage language and cultural tradition, an entire essay waits to be written on the significance of Chin’s eroticism, an aspect of her work that appears not only through the deployment of an energetically demotic register that includes words like fuck, cock, and screw but also in her tendency to approach her various concerns through the metaphorical armature and rhetorical scenarios of sexuality. Even so, the stylistic range, formal sophistication, literary historical significance, and cultural political logic of her verse that I have discussed here together arguably make Chin’s the most substantial achievement among contemporary Chinese American poets, most especially those operating in the currently dominant mode of lyric testimony. She warrants greater attention.

6 “The Owner of One Pock-Marked Tongue” John Yau and the Logic of Ethnic Abstraction

I

With an enormous and diverse body of writing already to his credit, John Yau occupies a singular position within the history of Chinese/American verse, as well as, indeed, within the evolving Asian American literary canon more generally. In particular, among the contemporary poets of specifically Chinese descent in the United States examined here, he stands out as at once the most formally distinctive and the most conspicuously ignored by the dominant American literary establishment. Ironically (though not surprisingly), furthermore, the comparative neglect that he has faced over the course of his long and varied career has occurred despite, or perhaps more accurately, precisely because of, the literary historical significance of his achievement. For among the group of writers undertaking to represent a Chinese cultural tradition or heritage in verse that we have considered thus far, Yau has been the one most thoroughly and successfully to abandon the notion of a broadly coherent subjectivity giving affective voice to individual (though implicitly representative) experience as the authorizing conceptual premise for “ethnic” poetic enunciation. He therewith maps a novel economy of transpacific signification for Asian American poetry. And in doing so, he has helped to delineate the terms of a new counterpoetics of Asian racial and ethnic difference, one that has arisen partly both in response and challenge to the established dominance of lyric testimony within the discursive arena of Asian American poetry under the terms of our current ideological regime of liberal multiculturalism. Through its manifold departures from what remain the hegemonic 231

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signifying protocols for American ethnic verse expression today, his work powerfully illustrates both the logic and the broader cultural stakes of the third and most recently emergent mode comprising the tradition of poetry by writers of Asian descent in the United States that I have been setting forth in this study, namely, ethnic abstraction. To be sure, on the grounds of productivity alone Yau warrants consideration in any effort to develop a historical poetics of Chinese/American verse. For beginning in 1976 with his debut collection, Crossing Canal Street, and continuing all the way to his most recent book of poems, Paradiso Diaspora (2006), Yau has maintained a steady output across three decades, publishing a total of sixteen volumes of poetry. Furthermore, these works have appeared with publishing houses ranging from very small coterie presses to the important but now defunct Black Sparrow to commercial and cultural behemoths like Holt and Penguin. Such a range of venues indicates at once the durability and the evolving significance of his accomplishment. For a sense of proportion, recall that Ha Jin has thus far published three books of poetry since his first in 1990, Li-Young Lee four since 1986, and Marilyn Chin three since 1987. Thus, not only has Yau been working over a longer period, publishing verse since the very establishment of “Chinese American literature” as an operative cultural category, but the scale of his achievement as a poet quite simply dwarfs that of his more broadly renowned co-ethnic contemporaries.1 Like Ha Jin in particular, moreover, Yau has also produced a sizable body of work in prose, though he has, if anything, received even less attention for this aspect of his writing than for his poetry. Thus far, he has published one novel, Hawaiian Cowboys (1995), and three collections of short fiction: The Sleepless Night of Eugene Delacroix (1980), My Symptoms (1998), and My Heart Is That Eternal Rose Tattoo (2001). Indeed, Yau has actively blurred in his writing any simple distinction between verse and prose, having consistently employed the prose-poem form since at least as early as his fourth volume, Sometimes (1979). Additionally, ever dedicated to mining the potential of interactions across different artistic and cultural boundaries, Yau has repeatedly collaborated with visual artists on mixedmedia texts that feature both writing and visual artwork or photographs. These innovative joint efforts include Poem Prints (1987) with Norman Bluhm, Giant Wall (1991) with Jürgen Partenheimer, Postcards from Trakl (1994) with Bill Jensen, Berlin Diptychon (1995) with Bill Barrette, Piccadilly or Paradise (1995) with Trevor Winkfield, and, most recently, Ing Grish (2005) with Thomas Nozkowski. And finally, alongside these more obviously “literary” efforts, Yau has also made a long and ongoing career as a professional art critic, publishing essays in literally dozens of art volumes, as well as several book-length studies, including A. R. Penck (1993), In the

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Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol (1993), and The United States of Jasper Johns: An Essay (1996). Testifying to his growing (yet still belated) recognition within this arena in particular, Yau has most recently published a volume of collected critical essays, The Passionate Spectator: Essays on Art and Poetry (2006). As even this (highly) condensed overview suggests, then, John Yau has produced a body of work whose vast scope and range easily outstrips that of any other writer of Chinese descent in the United States, including Maxine Hong Kingston, therewith making him arguably the preeminent figure within contemporary Asian American letters. More important, of course, than either the sheer magnitude or even generic variety of his output, Yau explores new conceptual and formal territory among poets of Chinese descent in the United States through his interrogations into the social and discursive constitution of Asian (American) “racial” and “ethnic” difference. Most evidently, he departs in numerous ways from the host of familiar tropes and conventions entailed in assuming a rhetorical posture of protest or testimony, and subsequently narrating in more or less transparent fashion the trauma of a personal engagement with and estrangement from the values of dominant mainstream society. Certainly, Yau confronts issues of alienation and estrangement in his verse; but he does so more performatively than thematically. Over time, he has employed a diverse array of poetic strategies aimed at laying bare the condition of “Asian” ethnic identity itself precisely as a social and discursive construction, one situated, moreover, within an uneven grid of power relations. These strategies include parodically redeploying and thus exposing the means through which especially Asian ethnic and racial identity have been produced and disseminated within dominant American society via such catachrestic figures as stereotypes, stock characters, and the like. Additionally, Yau at once exploits and draws attention in various ways to the unrelenting promiscuity of languages themselves in their capacity for multiplying and destabilizing, rather than fixing, meaning and the terms of identity. In particular, he has sought to mine a new vein of transpacific signifying possibilities that arises from the force of a poetically enacted collision between “Chinese” and (American) English as distinct, though never entirely separate or even separable, systems of linguistic and cultural semiosis. Put another way, he disentangles language and its use apart from the usual tasks of narrating a traumatic process of individual ethnic identity formation and the “authentic” representation of minority cultural and experiential difference, away, in other words, from the dominant conventions of personal realism that have shaped Chinese/American verse as a cultural formation since its beginnings in the mode of racial protest during the late 1960s and earlier. Through his varied and distinctive efforts, Yau decisively confirms the vitality of abstraction as an

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aesthetic principle for Asian American poetic production. He thereby helps to usher in a new stage in the historical development of Chinese/American verse in particular by defying the pressures of the reigning liberal multiculturalist order and pursuing instead the articulation of an idiom that flatly rejects any simple legibility based upon assimilationist formal gestures and the presumption to linguistic transparency. In doing so, he gestures toward the possibility of rethinking the very terms of ethnicity by at once challenging and charting alternatives to the sedimented logic of its historical constitution. For Yau, ethnicity does not constitute a natural category of human difference, one capable of being illustrated by various traits, practices, or personal histories and experiences, and so on. Rather it names a (subordinated) location in the social order that thereby affords a critical perspective on existing hierarchies and apparatuses of cultural privilege. Consequently, such an identity-position also serves as a potential point of leverage from which to disrupt, and potentially even reconfigure, the values and assumptions underwriting established protocols for “minority” representation and their sanctioned patterns of recognition. Thus, as we saw earlier, Yau expressly rejects the limitations of both the traditional poetic ego and the more recent theoretical and philosophical attacks on that construction. For its vivid economy alone, his statement warrants repeating here: I do not believe in the lyric I—the single modulating voice that names itself and others in an easily consumable narrative—writing in a language that is transparent, a window overlooking a world we all have in common. It is not a world which includes me. . . . At the same time, I do not subscribe to the death of the author, the postmodern belief that there is no self writing. That injunction is the most recent way for the academy to silence the Other, keep the Other from speaking and writing.2

Despite the apparent logical opposition between these respective conceptual regimes, Yau finds in each a form of exclusionary hegemony and even repression. In contrast to their authoritarian dimensions, he seeks to define an alternative economy for poetic enunciation that gives voice to “difference,” but without recourse to the constraining apparatus of the traditional speaking subject as both the vehicle for such utterances and the ultimate source of their epistemological legitimacy. This economy takes shape expressly against the dominant legacies of Romanticism and postmodernism in part by scrutinizing “ethnic” identity and the various discursive mechanisms of its constitution precisely as opportunities for contesting the power of entrenched social and political asymmetries. Hence, in response, he has set forth an agenda for writing in general and verse in particular as means not just for staying receptive to the opportunities presented by linguistic and historical

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contingency but also for actively redefining the very structural terms of what constitutes an ethical relation to minority difference: Writing as resistance. Writing as a way to reach imagination, that place outside order and reason, that place made of words. Writing as a way of staying open to the flux. Writing as an attempt to hear the Other, the Others. Writing as a form of attention and responsibility.3

As I shall discuss presently, the demands placed upon readers by such a stance help to explain his comparative neglect by the mainstream American literary establishment. For the moment, a unit or installment from the extended sequence, Giant Wall: A Notebook, offers a glimpse into the overarching concerns and explosive aims of this frankly oppositional counterpoetic agenda: “Words or images or what detonates them/when they no longer point to the events they name/their trajectories splitting the sky implanted in his cranial orbit.”4 Announcing a desire to obliterate imposed mental constructs that have been taken for natural physical limits, these lines chart a poetic course precisely through the range of slippages and breaks in the operations of language that attend upon the very process of (ethnic) signification. In the introduction, I illustrated the hybridization strategy of mutation with Yau’s brief poem “Shanghai Shenanigans,” because in that enigmatic work he at once focuses attention on and reformulates the operative logic of the basic signifying “code” for representing ethnic identity and culture in the United States, most especially in his pointedly nonreferential use of English and Chinese language elements.5 In a comparably refractive way, the brief poem “Sam Spade Haiku” juxtaposes evocative clichés associated with the tradition of the hard-boiled detective story in a vaguely “Oriental” paratactic conceptual organization: Perfect oval Unlaced leather smile Tall drink of water Fist full of trouble

Dark intermissions Satin waist nipper Coal blue lips Pink alabaster burden6

Despite the direct invocation of the title, however, this poem quite obviously does not adhere to the formal three-line, 5–7–5 syllabic pattern of traditional Japanese haiku.7 As Josephine Park has recently documented, this form enjoyed widespread popularity within the dominant modernist American poetic lineage, which in turn rendered it suspect for many Asian American poets during the beginnings of the Asian American movement, most especially writers of specifically Japanese descent in the United States.8 For his part, in a post-Poundian, post-Beat, post-Snyderian poetic era, Yau overcomes

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any anxiety associated with this traditional Japanese poetic form mainly by flaunting the misalignment between the title and the structural organization of the ensuing poem. Thus the act of reference in the title accomplishes little more than merely to frustrate expectations. In doing just that, however, it serves as a challenge to the very idea of perfect cultural transmission or the seamless adaptation of foreign cultural practices. At the same time, the horizontal arrangement of lines establishes a spatial relationship among the fragmentary images in lieu of a narrative one, thereby imbuing the “scene” with the murky atmosphere of an Orientalist sexual fantasy. This substitution reverses the conventional direction of exchange between its cultural “sources,” assimilating identifiably “American” subject matter to a famously “Asian” formal structure. As a whole, then, “Sam Spade Haiku” exploits a self-conscious irony in order to reconfigure the conventional parameters of cross-cultural exchange within Asian American poetic expression. Unfortunately, space limits preclude a complete assessment of Yau’s massive and varied literary output. Indeed, as the range of his publications amply attests, ethnic identity and culture have never been his sole concerns as a writer.9 Yet there is growing consensus about their fundamental importance to the overarching contours of his imaginative vision. Accordingly, then, I want here to elaborate upon the discussion broached earlier about the significance of Yau’s achievement specifically as an “ethnic” poet. I will do so in part by focusing attention on the economy of transpacific exchange shaping the formal articulation of his verse, including his most compelling and sustained effort to date wherein he directly engages with the subject of Chinese American cultural identity, namely the extended “Genghis Chan: Private Eye” sequence of lyrics. With the earliest of them first published in 1989, the thirty episodes or installments of this sequence have appeared in different groupings and evolved across four individual volumes of verse, as well as more than a decade of Yau’s career: I–VII in Dragon’s Blood, VIII–XX in Edificio Sayonara (1992), XXI–XXVIII in Forbidden Entries (1996), and XXIX–XXX in Borrowed Love Poems (2002). Not insignificantly, then, the work as a whole has unfolded over exactly the same period that witnessed the broader emergence and solidification of ethnic abstraction as a distinctive mode of verse production among writers of Asian descent in the United States. Along with delineating the logic of Yau’s poetic achievement, I also hope to make clear the reasons behind his decidedly uneven reputation. For on the one hand, Yau has earned a sharply delimited but enthusiastic acclaim among certain Asian American(ist) audiences, as well as among a particular segment of the broader American reading public, with numerous interviews and other articles about him appearing in the so-called experimental or avant-garde poetics journal Talisman.10 In addition, he has enjoyed as much or more attention from literary scholars and academic critics than any other

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poet of specifically Chinese descent in the United States over the last thirty years. But on the other hand, despite both the duration and variety of his accomplishment, Yau still has yet to gain a commensurate level of acknowledgment from the dominant American literary establishment, as indexed by the awarding of prizes and fellowships, together with the general absence of his work from mainstream, nationally and generically configured anthologies such as those that have regularly featured other poets of Chinese descent in the United States whom we have already examined here.11 More than just confirming the hegemony of lyric testimony within our current ideological environment, this asymmetry in particular highlights a basic limitation of dominant hermeneutic approaches to minority writing in general and Chinese/American verse in particular. For in privileging a liberal notion of difference, they lack the analytical capacity to address a growing body of work that unapologetically declines to bid for any sort of conventional “recognition,” and instead strains against the premise of an individual subjectivity giving affective voice to experience, whether in protest or testimony, as the conceptual ground for “ethnic” (poetic) enunciation.12 Not surprisingly, then, because Yau departs so openly in his verse from the prevailing realist conventions for thematizing minority culture and identity, both the logic and broader significance of his disruptive approach to the notion of ethnicity have been unevenly apprehended over the course of his career. More specifically, dominant audiences have thus far generally struggled to discern the “ethnic” content of his verse through the referential opacity of its textual surface. As a result, even admiring readers in so-called avant-garde circles have largely focused their attention elsewhere than the question of Yau’s treatment of ethnic culture and identity, while, as I have already noted, the more mainstream literary establishment has simply avoided recognizing him altogether.13 Asian American(ist) audiences, by contrast, have embraced Yau based precisely upon his heritage affiliation, though even here such acknowledgment has come rather belatedly given both the extent and the duration of his literary output. Thus, he appears substantially in both Garrett Hongo’s important, widely discussed anthology The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America (1993) and in Walter K. Lew’s more experimentally inclined Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry (1995). He also figures with some prominence in the ethnically particularist collection Chinese American Poetry: An Anthology (1991), edited by L. Ling-chi Wang, Henry Yiheng Zhao, and Carrie L. Waara. Tellingly, however, Yau did not gain entry into previous attempts at articulating an Asian American literary and poetic canon during the 1970s and 1980s through anthologies such as Aiiieeeee! (1974) or Joseph Bruchac’s Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Poets (1983).

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Over and above the critical judgment of their respective editors, these collections and their omissions of Yau signal the reigning cultural ideologies shaping the parameters of “Asian American verse” as an evolving cultural formation at different moments in recent literary and cultural history. The former at once arises from and expresses the dominance of a racial protest aesthetic during the earliest stages in the discursive emergence of “Asian American literature” following in the wake of the larger Asian American movement during the late 1960s and continuing on into the early 1970s. Appearing ten years later and edited by a non-Asian American, the latter marks an early point in the wider acceptance of Asian American poetry by the cultural mainstream in the United States under the ascendancy of liberal multiculturalism. Bruchac’s volume thus helped to solidify the subsequent rise of lyric testimony and its emphasis on what Timothy Yu has called “the rhetoric of subjectivity and history”14 as the prevailing aesthetic and ideological regime for ethnic, and especially “Asian American,” literary production. For nearly the first two decades of their mutual development, then, Yau’s work held at best a tenuous and largely occluded place within the evolving Asian American literary canon as it was simultaneously being constituted and institutionalized. During the past fifteen years or so, Yau at last began to attract some attention, mainly from scholars of Asian American literature and poetry. Such a development represents a certain maturation in the field of Asian American literary studies generally in its nascent awareness of ethnic abstraction as a distinct, newly emergent expressive mode among poets of Asian descent in the United States. Not surprisingly, perhaps, this small but growing body of scholarship has focused with particular intensity on explicating his engagements with the issue of Asian American racial and ethnic identity. Dorothy Wang, for example, has discussed Yau’s extensive use of parody as a calculated response to dominant American racial stereotypes about Asians and the experience of ethnic minoritization.15 Based on a similar constellation of critical and ideological commitments, George Uba and Juliana Chang have touched upon his departures from the presumed unity or stability of the ethnic subject.16 Building usefully on these earlier efforts, Timothy Yu has helped to clarify the distinctiveness of Yau’s accomplishment by at once relating and contrasting his approach to the issue of identity with that of writers connected with the Language poetry movement.17 And most recently, Xiaojing Zhou has adopted a Levinasian theoretical framework to examine Yau’s treatment of ethnic “alterity.”18 As a result of their accumulated insights into particular poems, these and other scholars have initiated the process of bringing to proper light this major figure of Asian American and, indeed, American letters. However, each has also conceived of Asian American literary production in general as an entirely contemporary phenomenon. Consequently,

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despite their collective approbation, the full measure of his significance has yet to be taken. Through considering Yau’s verse in relation to the longer transpacific legacy of poetic representations of Chinese culture and identity that we have been following here, I seek to advance to this growing conversation by offering a more expressly historicized and linguistically attuned examination of his accomplishment as a poet of Chinese descent in the United States.

II

As we have seen, in pursuing his own counterpoetics of minority difference, Yau rejects both the prevailing liberal and avant-gardist regimes of poetic enunciation in the United States as inadequate and even discriminatory. For all the apparent intensity of his opposition to these dominant cultural norms, however, such a rejection arguably gains much of its acuity through a deep familiarity with the established American poetic tradition, especially as that tradition relates to the representation of Chinese culture and identity in verse. For like Marilyn Chin, Yau has openly testified to an early, formative encounter with the accepted modernist poetic canon. More specifically, he has spoken of this early engagement in ways that confirm the importance of Pound’s Cathay in particular as an authoritative model not just for the production of verse, but even for the formation of an individual ethnic identity capable of affect: Certainly the imagist Pound is something I read quite carefully when I first discovered him, but I went on to read Personae, which contained his “Cathay” poems, and I was certainly intrigued by them. Pound’s Chinese poems were very, very meaningful to me then. I just read them over and over again. For me, they were about being Chinese, about some kind of identity; they were something I could get ahold of, or at least had the illusion I could get ahold of. And I like the way they moved forward through the use of language and line, and all the feelings that came through those images and lines.19 (emphasis added)

In his published work, of course, Yau has long since moved beyond the conceptual parameters of this initial experience of discovery, which closely resembles a moment of Althusserian interpellation into cultural (and specifically poetic) subjectivity by the aesthetic and ideological force of Pound’s textual hail. Hence, the significance of this acknowledgment lies not so much in its naming of a particularly important influence. Rather,

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such a declaration underscores Yau’s self-conscious participation in a literary tradition that takes on the representation of Chinese culture and identity as always also a formal problem (“the use of language and line”), in addition to an ideological, ethical, and political one; that recognizes poetic form, in other words, as a guiding principle of historicization. Yau’s recollection again confirms Cathay as the dominant textual and technical landmark in relation to which Chinese/American verse has taken shape as an evolving counterpoetic formation. More important, however, it also calls attention to the extent and variety of his own subsequent departures from the operative terms of that defining achievement, which, as we have seen, helped to create the conditions underwriting the current dominance of lyric testimony for both the production and reception of American ethnic verse expression in general. As others have recognized, Yau has drawn (and freely acknowledged) more readily evident poetic and professional inspiration from the example of his early mentor, John Ashbery.20 He does so most obviously in his standing concern with the subject of visual art both as a poet and a critic, as well as in his development of a densely textured verbal style that exploits a shifting ground for poetic enunciation and thereby often focuses attention on the mechanics of language itself. Unfortunately, it goes beyond the scope of this discussion to trace in any detail the particularities of that debt. But whatever import one finally attributes to this more recognizably direct “influence,” Yau’s distinctiveness and literary historical significance as a poet together derive from the way he has taken these general dispositions and successfully brought them to bear on the subjects of “ethnic” culture and identity. In his sustained and varied engagement with these issues in particular, Yau launches a dual assault unmatched in either invention or incisiveness against the prevailing conceptions and cultural expressions of Asian American ethnic identity in the United States. On the one hand he satirizes the process of Asian racialization as performed within dominant American culture. To this end, he often draws from the arena of popular culture, most especially characters from film and other common stereotypes. While on the other hand, he repudiates the assimilationist formal tendencies exhibited in the kind of verse by writers of Asian descent in the United States that currently enjoys hegemonic sanction under the auspices of liberal multiculturalism. In pursuing these twin aims, Yau’s most notable accomplishment has been to demonstrate the power of abstraction as a strategy for Asian American literary production, therewith dramatically expanding both the conceptual reach and potential of “ethnic” poetic expression. For throughout his writing, Yau seeks to move beyond the limits of conventional reference in the service of a cultural politics of recognition, limits that attend upon a

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testimonial posture. Instead, he foregrounds the abundance of signifying possibilities that arise from exploiting the various material dimensions of language itself, including sound and visual appearance, as well as its internal systematicity. By thus mutating the operative logic of “ethnic” signification through transforming the normal functioning of its basic code, Yau recomposes ethnicity as a location from which to disrupt or estrange prevailing regimes of legibility that have arisen from and in turn help to reinforce long-standing asymmetries of material and cultural privilege among racialized groups in the United States. And through such estrangements, his verse offers new possibilities for challenging those asymmetries by repeatedly demonstrating the instability of their conceptual foundations. As a result, he sets forth a counterpoetics of minority “difference” that not only operates outside the terms of both racial protest and lyric testimony and their shared investment in a unified ethnic subject. Arguably even more important, his work at once illustrates and confirms the significance of a distinctive mode of Asian American poetic expression, namely ethnic abstraction, that conspicuously challenges established signifying protocols rather than simply accommodating the representation of ethnic “difference” to familiar dominant norms. As we have seen in previous chapters, by observing norms such as the presumption to linguistic transparency and assuming the rhetorical posture of individual affective disclosure, some poets and writers of specifically Chinese descent in the United States have achieved considerable visibility and even “representative” status. Yet, as I have also argued, such recognition has generally at once reflected and reinforced the commoditization and containment of Asian American identity and culture, most obviously through the establishment of a sharply delimited “ethnic” canon. Under the terms of the prevailing liberal multiculturalist compact, then, minority “difference” loses its capacity to serve as a site from which to interrogate, rather than simply abide by and reproduce, dominant signifying protocols and the asymmetrical relations of power inscribed within their very formal structures. In developing the logic of ethnic abstraction, John Yau has done more than any other poet of Chinese descent in the United States thus far to realize that potential. As Dorothy Wang has rightly seen, parody comprises a central feature of Yau’s counterpoetic idiom. This dimension of his achievement appears most obviously in the titles of poems such as “No One Ever Tried to Kiss Anna May Wong” from the early collection Dragon’s Blood, as well as those presented in the “Hollywood Asians” section of the volume Forbidden Entries. These latter include “Peter Lorre Improvises Mr. Moto’s Monologue,” “Peter Lorre Dreams He Is the Third Reincarnation of a Geisha,” and “Peter Lorre Confesses His Desire to Be a Poet,” along with installments 21–28 of the “Genghis Chan: Private Eye” sequence. The obvious

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tonal irony of these titles and their almost absurdist mixture of stock figures, discriminatory stereotypes, and even a Hungarian-born American actor who famously performed in “yellow-face” together already demonstrate the mockery that Yau aims at dominant (and especially popular) constructions of a generically conceived, racially lumped “Asian” culture and identity. Hence, rather than adopting the familiar strategy of disputing or lamenting a particular incident of marginalization, whether personal or historical, Yau works in a different register to undermine the very presumed stability or internal coherence of individual ethnic subjectivity that informs prevailing notions of minority “difference” in the United States. Not only do the titles explicitly invoke themes of impersonation, fakery, and fantasy, but these works insistently strive to undo a signifying economy premised on an appeal for recognition by the social dominant. For they repeatedly invite an appropriative spectatorial interest by employing the rhetorical conventions of individual disclosure, as well as offering various exoticist details; yet they also constantly frustrate that interest through their pervasive use of surrealistic imagery and illogical syllogisms, thereby refusing to offer any sort of conventionally legible cultural or personal revelation for readerly consumption. In doing so, furthermore, they manage through the suggestive and evocative effects of their refractory verbal surface to critique traditional forms of “ethnic” representation based on the fundamental asymmetries of power that have shaped their historical emergence and continue to delimit their cultural function. For example, “Peter Lorre Dreams He Is the Third Reincarnation of a Geisha” equates dominant popular representation of Asianness in American film with a culturally sanctioned form of sexual domination practiced in Japan. It does so by making use of a standard confessional structure together with a range of sexual and Orientalist tropes, only to subvert the presumed exchange of (intimate) knowledge. Emblematically, this parodic monologue concludes on a note of vague eroticism and a haunting pair of apparently nihilistic questions: Basho wrote, the journey itself is the home. And then highways and the theory of eminent domain ousted him from his solitude. My place in history is a mark left on a shirt. I was a waddling pug, then I was plugged by rubber ballots. I made stone ducks gasp. I was a mulberry leaf the wind tugged loose from a branch, a ginko in a gazebo. My skin glistened on cue in the calculated light. I quivered until the audience mopped their brows with thick fingers. I live in a porous wall of moist projections. I am a dog oozing sweet oil in a butcher shop, a hatless traitor strung up by his heels. Bear claws are a necessary ingredient. Grind the rhinoceros horn to powder, lick the candle wax from your sleeve. Why spawn progeny? Why not choose extinction?21

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Even more aggressively, perhaps, in “Movies as a Form of Reincarnation: Boris Karloff Remembers Being Chinese on More Than One Occasion” from the 2002 collection Borrowed Love Poems, Yau not only levels a critique against Hollywood representations of Chinese culture and identity such as those portrayed by the titular speaker. He also takes the subject as an opportunity to restructure the very transaction between reader and speaker in ethnic verse. Thus, in number 8 from this prose-poem in twelve sections, Karloff frankly implicates dominant audiences (readers) in the exploitative representation of ethnic difference based on their own unrecognized desire precisely for the ideological and ethical comforts that such distortions afford. What Yau concedes to normal standards of referential clarity here, he gains in the satiric force of his accusation and its (momentary) reversal in the conventional direction of poetic scrutiny: How could they not know that I had once been a shadow that pulled the gestures of others back, until they became mine. In such a manner, I had passed time an as an ex-con and a spiritualist, a spy and a surgeon. In each life I lived, the mask I wore was my own face. It resembled your dreams of how such a face should look when peering through a torn curtain, a fogged-over windshield, a martini glass filled with blood. It was a face you knew because you knew the outcome. This was how I was able to become Chinese so often, more times than anyone else who set out from a town or village, toward the paved driveways and marble bathrooms of Pacific Palisades.22

Overall, Yau’s works in this vein take the shape of the individual monologue so familiar to mainstream (i.e., sanctioned) ethnic verse only to restructure several key terms of its operation. Through a combination of strategies such as a verbal surface that remains referentially opaque to varying degrees, the use of frankly surrealistic images and associations, a thematic concern with false identity and the very logic (as well as erotics) of representation, and cunning inversions of voice in the basic scenario of poetic enunciation, this series takes a form that has conventionally served as a vehicle for personal “ethnic” protest or disclosure and turns it into a means of interrogating and even reordering existing relations of cultural privilege. Alongside this impulse to parody, Yau also employs a range of proceduralist formal strategies that at once explore the signifying possibilities embedded within and draw attention to the operations of language itself. Herein lies his most evident connection to the Language poetry movement and its spectrum of concerns within the wider arena of contemporary American verse. Yet as Timothy Yu has convincingly argued, in his particular deployment of these strategies, Yau resolves “some of the strains and

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limits in the political project of Language poetry, particularly around the issues of race and identity.”23 Yu thus hints at the distinctive contribution that continues to be made both by Yau himself specifically as a writer of Chinese descent in the United States and by ethnic abstraction as an emergent formation more generally to the larger course of American literary history. For together they map the terms of a critically generative, rather than merely imitative or complicit, counterpoetics of minority “difference” offered in calculated response to the long-standing dominant tradition of the representation of so-called ethnic (and especially “Asian”) culture and identity. In elaborating such a response, furthermore, they stretch the limits of existing conceptions not only of ethnic or Asian American literary production, but also of American literature more broadly. Yau’s proceduralist strain appears with particular force and clarity in works such as “Variations on a Sentence by Laura (Riding) Jackson” and “Mon Alias, Mona Lisa,” both again from Forbidden Entries. In the second of these especially, he presents a dizzying meditation on the enigma of individual identity. Or rather, through the systematic logic of permutation, he renders the very notion of individual identity into an enigma by steadily eroding its familiar contours and conventions. He achieves these effects, moreover, with an impressive degree of both verbal economy and signifying density. Thus, from the outset, the title of the work cleverly suspends the question of identity between uncertainty and contradiction. It does so by closely following a declared theme of fakery (“Mon alias”) with an invocation of a visual icon that has literally achieved paradoxical status as arguably the most famous (Western) emblem for the condition of anonymity (“Mona Lisa”). Grammatically, such ordering seems to fix the apparent disclosure of the opening phrase with the determinate name of the second. “Mon alias” is “Mona Lisa.” Yet upon further reflection, the cultural legacy of Da Vinci’s painting and the ongoing mystery of its subject complicate the seeming transparency of meaning here, pointing farther back toward a historically constitutive indeterminacy undermining the supposed certainty of selfrevelation, not least one about an admittedly false name. At the same time, the permutative equivalence among the constituent letters of these two phrases in the title semiotically asserts the intimate proximity between these ostensibly distinct signifiers and their referents. And such semiosis, in turn, casts identity and anonymity simply as paired consequences arising from the very structure of language. Already by its four initial words, then, “Mon Alias, Mona Lisa” challenges the stability of individual identity by staging an act of self-disclosure that steadily evaporates into an ever-receding horizon of deception and referential indeterminacy. Further underscoring the sheer technical prowess in evidence here, the title also establishes the principle of development for the poem as a whole,

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conspicuously abandoning even the semblance of any recognizable narrative progression. The first phrase (“Mon alias”) fixes a sharply delimited set of eight letters that comprise the full stock of alphabetic signs to be used in various permutations and combinations over the course of the work; and the second establishes the acrostic pattern for the stanzaic organization of the remaining seventy-two lines into nine sections of two quatrains each. These two quatrains spell out MONA LISA with the first letter of each constituent line in repeated succession. Thus, the opening section flaunts the multiplicity of possible answers to the question of (false) identity, even as it repeats one name in particular through following the alphabetic sequence that it defines. Presenting examples that range from the simply humorous to the banal to the linguistically and culturally plausible, this poem opens with a subtle audacity by framing a paradoxical structure upon which identity hangs suspended in indeterminacy between the poles of singularity and infinity: Mon alias Osama Nila Nasal Moi Aims Loan Lois Nama Ia Salmon Salam Ion Asa Limon24

Following an operational, rather than any discernible expressive, logic, the poem achieves its vertiginous affects through accretion, echo, and evocation, thereby creating a dynamic that invites a collective and unprescribed participation in the construction of meaning. Within this taut matrix of visual, sonic, and semantic interconnections, each line carries its own particular (though by no means necessarily clear) denotation. Any fixity of sense, however, quickly disappears beneath a building wave of broader resonances. The poem as a whole nevertheless succeeds in commenting obliquely, though no less corrosively for all that, on a subject that in some ways has remained a defining issue for “ethnic” or “minority” verse. Additionally, as the sequence of lines and stanzas proceeds, the poem manages to dissolve any clear boundary between English and various other (Western) languages as it takes on a quality of infinite regress and the unlimited proliferation of meaning: 2. Maison Al Oils Amna No Salami

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Ails Noma Limo Sana Ilsa Mano Siam Nola Alamo Sin 3. Mia Salon Omni Alas Noa Islam Ala Simon Los Anima Isla Omna Soil Mana Al Simona

As these stanzas show, amid the welter of accumulating, idiosyncratic signification, moments of (relative) clarity emerge; and lines such as “Alamo Sin,” “Omni Alas,” “Los Anima,” “Soil Mana,” and, later in section 5, “Noli Masa,” together lend an additional wry humor and even a measure of pathos to the poem. By the arrival of the ninth and final section, “Mon Alias, Mona Lisa” has traversed a considerable cultural range, and a surprising emotional one as well, all without recourse to the convention of an individual speaking subject. Hence, the poem approaches language not as an instrument of expression or mimesis, but rather as a field of semiotic, sonic, syntactic, and other relations that paradoxically at once create the possibility and generate the instability of identity. 9. Misa Lona Onas Mila Naso Lima Asno Amli Lias Noam Isal Onam Salo Nami Alon Amis

In the face of such instability, it seems especially meaningful and poignant that this final section should trace the outlines of an affective arc by beginning with the hint of isolation (“Misa Lona” sounding loosely like

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“Miss Alone-ah”) and ending with a reference to the comforts of sociality in the “friends” of “amis.” Still, if this condensed emotional trajectory fails to provide a conventionally satisfying answer to the question of identity, it is partly because such a highly formalized idiom tacitly refuses the terms of such a question in the first place, therewith ultimately detaching the poem from an organic model of poetic enunciation. Instead, it suggests that this plethora of signifying possibilities arises out of a recalcitrant promiscuity inscribed within the systematicity of language itself, a source for the generation of meaning that operates beyond the constraints of an individual subjectivity. Just as he engages in parody to critique the process of Asian racialization within dominant American culture, then, so Yau adopts an array of proceduralist strategies to interrogate one of the basic conceptual foundations underwriting the production and reception of mainstream American ethnic verse in general, most especially that by writers of Asian descent in the United States.

III

The parodic and proceduralist aspects of Yau’s poetic imagination each shapes his approach to issues of ethnic “difference,” and together they distinguish him from all the other writers of Chinese descent in the United States considered in this study. As I have already mentioned, such distinctiveness has arguably cost him wider acknowledgment from the general American literary public, despite the formidable extent, variety, and duration of his verse production alone. Ironically, though, in Yau’s particular case, this partial illegibility actually both stems from and registers the historical significance of his literary achievement specifically as an “ethnic” poet. For in so thoroughly developing an alternative to the established protocols of racial protest and lyric testimony as means of addressing issues of minority culture and identity, he proves the vitality of the most recently emergent counterpoetic formation—what I have called ethnic abstraction—within the ongoing tradition of efforts at giving verse representation to Asian (and specifically “Chinese”) “difference” in the United States. And within Yau’s already massive body of work, no single poem more fully illustrates either the logic or the possibilities of this break with the prevailing liberal multiculturalist representational order and its (early) Poundian focus on the lyrical and transparent expression of individual affect than the extended “Genghis Chan: Private Eye” sequence. As noted above, this landmark series has now reached a total of thirty episodes. These units have accrued over the course of a considerable span,

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appearing in different groupings across four volumes and more than a dozen years of Yau’s career between 1989 and 2002. Thus, “Genghis Chan: Private Eye” has taken on something of the scale and even ambition of a long poem in its agglutinative structure and continuing development over time. Furthermore, the poem definitively puts to rest any lingering doubts about either the intensity or duration of Yau’s concern specifically with issues of ethnic culture and identity. Indeed, the very textual and temporal dimensions of the work mark it as the most extensive and sustained engagement with the notion of ethnic “difference” so far amid the rapidly expanding body of verse by people of Asian descent in the United States.25 More important still, both thematically and formally, the work as a whole illustrates the evolving terms of a new conceptual and aesthetic response to the tradition of racialized and discriminatory constructions of Asian identity within dominant American culture in particular, as well as to questions of the treatment of ethnic “difference” in verse more generally. For in “Genghis Chan: Private Eye,” Yau pointedly does not seek either recognition or redress for the trauma of (his own) individual experience as a minority subject. Rather, through various techniques of estrangement and defamiliarization, the poem stages the volatility of “ethnic” identity precisely as a discursive construction, as well as flaunts the systemic instability of language. In doing so, it openly defies the pressure toward ideological and formal assimilation to dominant norms in the service of readier legibility that continues to shape the current liberal multiculturalist poetic mainstream in the United States and its prevailing ethnic canon. Hence, the poem aims at nothing less than to redefine both the operative premises and ultimate stakes of “ethnic” signification itself. From the outset, “Genghis Chan: Private Eye” at once confirms Yau’s twin talents for verbal density and humor, while at the same time demonstrating his interest in probing the terms and dimensions of a specifically Asian American masculine identity. More specifically, the first part of the title synthesizes references to two notorious versions of “Asian” manhood that have each stood out at different moments in U.S. cultural history—the marauding barbarian conqueror Genghis Khan and the inscrutably clever, largely desexualized Charlie Chan. Each embodying distinctly opposed qualities in relation to the other, these stock figures crystallize the contradictory systems of fear, exaggeration, and prejudice about Asian (and specifically Chinese) racial identity that help make up the historical discourses of the Yellow Peril and the model minority myth, respectively, in the United States. Hence, the very name “Genghis Chan” sets forth a conception of Asian masculinity that openly courts paradox; and by doing so, it reflexively highlights the logical incommensurability between these two stereotypes as manifestations of “Asianness.” The extravagance of this pairing thus not only generates the

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basic humor of the name itself but it also refers obliquely to two specific historical examples that starkly illustrate the apparently infinite malleability of the category of (racialized) Asian “difference.” Pressing this initial combinatory gambit a step further toward the surreal, the second part of the title situates the frankly catachrestic figure of Genghis Chan, already wobbling under the pressure of internal contradiction, inside the historically “American” discursive milieu of the hard-boiled detective story and its attendant atmosphere of highly charged sexual intrigue. More than simply humorous for its incongruity, this trope emblematizes the challenge of the poem to the assimilationist formal and cultural values of mainstream lyric testimony. For it slyly mocks the notion of the “private I” that remains the primary figure of poetic enunciation within the regime of liberal multiculturalism. The resultant, characteristically satirical pastiche of racial stereotypes and popular conventions accomplishes two important effects simultaneously. First it establishes a completely novel frame for the staging of Asian American culture and identity, thereby extending the demonstrated imaginative and tonal reach of literary production by writers of Asian descent in the United States more broadly. And second, it confirms the scope of Yau’s ambition in the work to forge an entirely new approach to the articulation of Asian (and specifically Chinese) ethnic “difference” in verse. The grouping of sections 1–9 launches the sequence, and together they comprise the initial interlude of the work, which elaborates the conceit of the title in a highly condensed narrative form and an equally stylized verbal idiom.26 With each episode presenting the disjointed, idiosyncratic response of the eponymous protagonist to a sequence of events that follows the recognizable arc of a failed romance, this interlude opens onto a scenario at once comfortably familiar and yet ideologically charged as a setting for the counterpoetic articulation of an expressly “Asian American” ethnic identity. It immediately emphasizes sexuality as a central matter, concentrating on the stereotype of the femme fatale figure rather than on any crime or mystery. Or, perhaps more accurately, it presents the female client precisely as a mystery. It thus also activates the cliché of Asian exoticism only to reverse the direction of its application. So, the very first poem in the series begins with the unmistakable tone of tight-lipped, tough-guy eloquence, combined with surrealistic, language-driven imagery that effectively evokes the intoxication of desire. It also prefigures, as we shall see, some later thematic and formal developments in the poem by broaching from the outset the inadequacy of conventional language and the overlooked generative potential of other forms of signification: I was floating through a cross section with my dusty wine glass, when she entered, a shivering bundle of shredded starlight.

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You don’t need words to tell a story, a gesture will do.

These motifs remain prominent as this entirely conventionalized introductory scenario plays itself out over the course of section 1. Indeed, the fragmentation of narrative finds expression as an explicit thematic concern as well as formal principle: “She began: a cloud or story/broken in two maybe four places,/wooden eyelids, and a scarf of human hair.” Until, by the end of this opening episode, language begins to escape the containment of intention under the mounting pressure of physical attraction. Here, the abstracted, yet still suggestive, imagery conveys with particular effectiveness the speaker’s ambivalence toward both this attraction and its polysemous consequences: It was late and we were getting jammed in deep. I was on the other side, staring at the snow covered moon pasted above the park. A foul lump started making promises in my voice.

In section 2 the issue of the racial difference between the central persona of the poem and his female client arises in an explicit, if still oblique, fashion: I looked down, more slender than I expected She was wearing white under white gray blond curls dropped back turned into a block

The poem thus summons the specter of miscegenation as part of its effort at once to interrogate and to reconfigure the established terms of Asian “ethnic” masculine identity, playing ironically on the status of the alluring white female client as the ultimate symbolic marker of successful assimilation. Extending this trope a step further, section 3 concludes on a note of building, but frustrated, desire: I wanted to tell you about the gizmo pit and kinds of sludge I have cataloged during my investigation I wanted to tell you about how the sun dissolved all of this long ago

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leaving us in different rooms registered under different names

Section 4 magnifies these erotic overtones through a comical amplification of hard-boiled metaphors: She was a farm of concrete cleanly poured, and I — the quarantined flash — was tilting above Newt Falls, its glossy stanzas of imitation snow Hours of sigh practice loomed ahead

Significantly, in the confessional monologue of section 6, the speaker suggests that such frustration arises from, among other things, a problem with language. As a result, the poem here boldly transposes the problem of racial difference and its rigid social boundaries onto the domain of culture, even as the imagery here blurs any simple distinction between the two realms. Already by this early point in its development, then, “Genghis Chan: Private Eye” challenges the ongoing legacy of the racialization of human difference in the United States through enacting the instability of “race” as a biological category: I am the owner of one pockmarked tongue I park it on the hedge between sure bets and bad business

By means of a pun that arises through the internal dynamics of English, one that marks other Romance languages as well, the speaker casts both a part of his body and his operative medium as a scarred and, by extension, recalcitrant object. In doing so, he muddies the distinction between the domains of the private and the public as they manifest in perhaps their most intense forms, namely that of the material substrate of the self and the unremittingly promiscuous instrument of language. The twin tropes of a body and a language both understood in some way as problematic, whether characterized in racial terms or more simply as culturally “foreign,” have, of course, long served as central loci for efforts to ground the notion of ethnic identity. Hence the assertion of ownership here signifies, among other things, an attempt at once to lay claim to and to challenge the governing logic underwriting established strategies for articulating the condition of Asian American masculine ethnic identity. Sections 7, 8, and 9 chart the inevitable decline of this ill-fated union. Section 7 offers an accusatory litany of predicted regrets following the

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failure of romance; while sections 8 and 9 provide a denouement of sorts, with Chan returning to his normal routine. The ingrained legibility of this stock scenario from American pulp fiction and cinema makes it possible to recognize the tinge of bitterness and regret that burdens the protagonist, despite the increasingly opaque and elliptical language as section 9 comes to a close: I was babbling before I started My mouth glued to the lips Floating above monkey clouds. Foam spilled from its huddle of frozen intentions, each drop armed with an emblem. Lucky, no gun is glistening beside the puddles drifting down Happy Avenue.

Altogether, this highly stylized application of the hard-boiled detective scenario establishes the loose narrative frame for the poem as it has continued to unfold and develop over time. It also thereby serves as a background against which to recognize the outlines of other aims as they arise over the course of the work. Beginning in section 10, Yau undertakes to expand the scope of his engagement with the subject of a specifically Asian American “difference” beyond the available possibilities of a plot that turns on the complications of interracial desire. The language becomes noticeably denser, the form largely congealing into tightly woven couplets. In addition, the increasingly absurdist images and fragmentary strings of meaning appear to coalesce around a motif of surveillance as a different aspect of the detective conceit. Most significantly, perhaps, the intransigent effects of sound come to play an even greater role in determining the texture of the verse. Yau employs with greater frequency puns and other playfully destabilizing substitutions based on sonic resemblance as he explores new terms for the representation of Asian American ethnic identity and culture in verse. Thus, section 11 begins with a disorientating accumulation of surrealistic word chains. Through various subtle linkages to the conventions of the stakeout, these chains cast ethnic “difference” not so much as a condition as a historically variable position or structural relation. In addition to marginalization from mainstream society, however, this location affords a privileged, though tedious, glimpse into the seedier underbelly of dominant American society and the quotidian betrayals of its expressed ideals, including the cherished myths of equality and opportunity:

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Small hunks drift tumble across their shoes Porous metal scrapes top rung of hired dreamers Surrounded by clumped tongues fenced-out eyes Insistent paddle drifter Smeller of candles I patrol the mattress stained windows twiddle down hours until the next shifter releases me from my solemn valves

Despite their stubborn refusal to convey any conventionally legible sense, lines such as these generate a polyvalent significance through echoes of familiar phrases and clichés. This polyvalence, in turn, steadily dissolves any sense of the fixity of identity as implied, evoked, and other possible meanings proliferate. Thus, Yau here stages the dissolution of an ethnic self (the repeated “I” of the series) into the systematic indeterminacies of English. If the emergence of these more abstract pursuits threatens to make issue of ethnic identity seem anything less than central to the poem, section 13 brings it back to the forefront of concern through the frankness of its diction: It’s hard to keep pretending You’re a dusty chink In a hall of yellow linen You begin believing You’re just another handkerchief Wiping away the laundresses’ tears

And subsequently, section 19 underscores the developing impulse in the sequence to interrogate the various established conventions of minority difference. It does so as it takes up that staple subject of (especially popular) ethnic cultural production, the maternal relationship and its role in personal identity formation. Again, Yau uses the proliferating effects of substitution based on sonic resemblance to mock idealized conceptions of maternity and to question parentage more broadly as a guarantor of ethnic affiliation.

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This pivotal poem in the series begins with the recollection of a nostalgic childhood scene, though one comically distorted so that the comforting, but hackneyed image of (immigrant) maternal song gets transformed into a more unsettling hint of violence and pervasive misfortune: My stamped mother used to fling to me All stones lead to home Go easy on the turtle pie gored down at doom temperature

The poem then appears to make a direct reference to the first line of Yeats’s famous epitaph from “Under Ben Bulben.” But it breaks off that allusion abruptly and widens the scope of the verbal gesture to ironize a poetic “style” bearing obvious resemblance to imagism. The imagery of the sixth stanza in particular cleverly mocks the undercurrent of sexual desire coursing beneath the (Poundian) modernist fascination with the Orient and its putatively mystical relationship to Nature, a fascination exemplified most enduringly in Cathay.27 Hence, building on the satirical agenda of the opening scene, the next three couplets enact a general disavowal of early modernist aesthetics. Cast a cold and dirty style on every yellow leaf of lassitude glistening beneath the grappled fly

Otherwise apparently unrelated, these two opening trios of stanzas share a commonly ambivalent, yet no less central, concern with (poetic) instruction and the attainment of voice. The first evokes maternal song precisely in order to reject it as a contradictory form of aggression; while the second, in an effort to critique the patriarchal legacy of poetic modernism, imitates one of its most recognizable idioms. This emergent theme of linguistic “parentage” points to the increasing conceptual stakes that Yau ventures by this point in the “Genghis Chan: Private Eye” sequence as he sets forth the distinctive terms of his own counterpoetics of Asian American “difference” and of ethnic abstraction more broadly.

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The second half of section 19 opens by repeating the initial couplet, but this time with a critical variation or elision that substantially amplifies the hint of violence implied by the substitution of “sing” for “fling”: “My stamped mother/used to fling me.” Subsequently, the temporal frame of childhood and early speech remains in place as the speaker engages in further mocking confession of his own traumatic experiences as a youth. Here, the distortion of a familiar phrase of endearment into one of mockery not only deromanticizes the self; it also challenges the fetishization of an idealized conception of familial relations. So that the idyllic scene of a mother singing peacefully to her child becomes thoroughly undermined by the suggestion of conflict and futility: and I her lump of muck would fling back all the riveted bones I could dandle on my wasted plea

If the word bones here only hints in the most oblique way at the “tones” of the Chinese language, the final two stanzas confirm the importance of this particular “ethnic” identity to the logic of the poem. For section 19 closes with a sequence of strategically polyvalent words and images that highlight all at once the inescapable allure, the logical absurdity, and the transience of “ethnic” affiliation (as well as of “difference”) grounded in the terrain of the body: the chink of meat we knew that linked us to the junk going by

Ultimately, section 19 reads like nothing so much as a refractory elegy for the idea of a biologically grounded concept of ethnicity, even as it testifies to the powerful ideological comfort that such a notion has historically provided. The unique section 23 marks a significant point in the development of the “Genghis Chan: Private Eye” sequence. For beginning here, Yau almost entirely abandons the familiar discursive protocols for signifying individual “ethnic” identity, venturing even further into the terrain of abstraction. To be sure, the established trope of the private eye remains in place, but narrative itself largely recedes into the background as the sonic and systematic dimensions of language

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come to shape even more conspicuously than before the very articulation of the verse. At the same time, subtitled “(Haiku Logbook),” this section lays claim to some measure of “Asian-ness” explicitly at the level of form, however loosely executed. Thus, this episode raises the conceptual stakes of the sequence as a whole in its bid to delineate a new counterpoetics of specifically Asian “difference” in the United States. More specifically, thirty numbered tercets of minimal, though variable, syllabic count make up this longest of installments from the sequence. Collectively, these tercets chart the rough outlines of a narrative based on various conventionalized plot points from the film noir genre. Yet each individual stanza or micro-episode itself only affords the vaguest glimpse, or perhaps more accurately, echoic resonances, of different events or features from this stock scenario. So, for example, the first two “entries” in this quasi-diaristic sequence evoke a Miranda reading and an attenuated image of handcuffs, respectively. But the highly compressed and ambiguous syntax of the surrounding stanzas tacitly deride the notion of a fixed identity, dramatizing it instead precisely as an incessantly constructed artifact of language. They do so through obliquely evoking the possibility of its determination or figurative “arrest,” only to frustrate the fulfillment of that expectation through the generative indeterminacy of the tightly woven textual surface: 1. Feed him his lights Poke down wallet sniffer Probe hoisted tar dispute 2. Silk crave Worn buckles slipped tight Crawl on tide rock

Clearly, these lines eschew normal semantic reference in favor of suggestive echo and punning substitutions as part of their attempt to rewrite or mutate the code of “ethnic” signification. Still, as the tercets accumulate, familiar themes emerge, most notably those of desire and frustration: 6. Could feel the flute in his glands Young wild sputtering into his cursed zone Savage hex in retail lobby 7. Investigate domestic squirrel

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Donkey liner puddling his horse Horizontal rain delay

Exploiting a carefully orchestrated divergence between sonic semiosis and semantic reference, these lines consistently gesture in at least two directions simultaneously, thereby proportionally multiplying the signifying capacity of each stanza. An impressive technical accomplishment in its own right, such a densely orchestrated proliferation of meanings only further exacerbates, rather than helps to resolve, the question of “ethnic” identity. Through such foundational irresolution, then, the poem pointedly refuses to participate in a familiar economy of individual or personal disclosure. Instead, it repeatedly enacts identity as an ongoing conundrum. For Yau, this volatility apparently represents not so much a problem as simply the commonplace state of affairs. So that, by the final two stanzas, the figure of “Genghis Chan” remains, if anything, even more elusive, obscured behind a veil of language. Under the terms of this acutely ironic counterpoetic vision, moreover, the artistry (craft) of self-invention becomes in the end simply a form of petty corruption (“graft”), while the conventionalized point of narrative closure, death, gets displaced by a traditional image for the origins of both life and poetry: 29. Bank clobber miss lap Spotted race crack lasher Earned his graft 30. Returned gift plodder Tall signs Point to sudden breath

Collectively, the thirty tercet stanzas of section 23 present a densely opaque verbal surface that flouts conventional legibility in favor of a syntax so intensely compressed and idiosyncratic that the constituent lines continuously verge on disaggregating into isolated verbal units. Within the poetic tradition of representing a specifically “Chinese” culture and identity in the United States that we have been tracing here, the language of the resulting stanzas bears closest (family) resemblance to the informally fragmentary idiom of Fenollosa’s Chinese poetry notebooks, upon which Pound so famously built in producing Cathay. As I argued in chapter 1, this literary historical relationship obtains irrespective of any intentional engagement or awareness on the part of Yau, though the designation of the section itself as a “logbook” seems to validate such a connection.28 Hence,

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the significance of “Genghis Chan: Private Eye” section 23 lies partly in the way it secures its own alternative lineage to the hegemonic Poundian legacy for the poetic representation of specifically Chinese “difference.” Intensifying this explicit concern with the sonic texture and systematicity of language, sections 24–26 feature an idiom even more stringently denuded of normal syntactical relations and other markers of a speaking subject. Comprising sequential couplets of binomial lines (lines that are themselves linked through different proceduralist substitutions), these sections further defy the assimilation of ethnic identity and cultural production to dominant signifying norms. Thus, in addition to the tacit aggression of its severely distilled formal manner, section 24 evokes states of economic struggle, social alienation, emotional abjection, and physical opposition. And in doing so, it complicates the tenor of some conventionally exoticist indicators of Asian “ethnic” difference: Grab some Grub sum Sub gum machine stun Treat pork pig feet On floor all fours Train cow chow lane Dice played trade spice Makes fist first steps

Likewise, section 26 lampoons, among other things, the instrumental commercialization of various Orientalist clichés and other “ethnic” signifiers with its minimalist string of permuted verbal pairs: Honking Hong Kong Road map Toad face Hong king “store lord”

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Dead cold Unload Old gold Smoke gripe Fan stamp Dance step Stamp fan Sampan Gunk junk Lug wretch Wrench nut Cut stench

This building impulse at once to dismantle, and thereby to challenge, familiar linguistic protocols for the depiction of ethnic identity finds perhaps its most inventive expression in section 27. As a result, this tersest of installments has stood out as one of the acknowledged highpoints of the sequence.29 For here, Yau opens unprecedented signifying possibilities through forcefully (if only momentarily) eroding the boundary between English and Chinese as distinct languages in the articulation of the poem. Prioritizing a relation along the axis of sound rather than that of semantic meaning, he generates playfully demotic images out of nonsense phrases in English that themselves derive from their sonic similarity to a transliteration of the Cantonese name for a dish commonly found in Chinese restaurants in the United States: Moo goo Milk mush Guy pan Piss pot

More than just a humorously absurdist matrix of juxtapositions, this poem exhibits a remarkable signifying density. In fact, within the brief span of eight words, it scripts an entirely new logic for “ethnic” literary production. For Yau not only takes as his point of conceptual departure a pair of phonemic sequences historically identifiable as Cantonese, therewith reversing the usual order of linguistic priority in American ethnic verse. Furthermore, in the process of transposing this sequence onto the system of English phonology, he reshuffles the established relationship between semantic sense and

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sound, freeing the latter to serve as a distinct, though still largely unexplored, dimension of contact between different languages and the traditions they at once mediate and make possible. In other words, rather than assimilating or domesticating these “foreign” linguistic strings to dominant American norms via conventional semantic rendering, section 27 opens new poetic terrain by using elements of Cantonese to reshape the operative parameters of English itself based upon a principle of sonic association rather than one of semantic equivalence. At the same time, this poem continues to address the issue of Asian American masculine identity through the interplay between the Cantonese phrases and their conceptual rendering into English. The two stanzas cunningly map a trajectory of development from the infant diet of “milk mush” to the adult male excretory paraphernalia of “piss pot,” and together they constitute another example of the strategy of cross-fertilization that I discussed in the introduction. Yet because it operates completely outside the larger organizing trope of personal identity formation, the poem defies the dominant conventions of, as well as expectations for, “ethnic” cultural production. Indeed, Yau’s work arises from an entirely different conceptual premise than the implicit model of recovering, or creating, a minority cultural heritage that underwrites the efforts of more renowned Chinese American writers and poets such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Li-Young Lee, among others who have enjoyed considerable mainstream acclaim under the auspices of liberal multiculturalism. Consequently, his invocations of Asian (and specifically Chinese) cultural traditions and forms function not as an attempt to recuperate a specific inheritance, but rather as a means for critically interrogating established notions about both “Asian” and “American” cultures, as well as the boundaries between them. In this way, Yau’s work also avoids the tacitly authoritarian logic of conventional lyric testimony and its tendency to ground ethnic identity and culture in the undiluted expression of individual affect, a logic that finds its clearest and most unsettling expression in the hybridization strategy of mimicry. Appearing in 2002, sections 29 and 30 mark the current endpoint of the “Genghis Chan: Private Eye” sequence, and at this moment it remains unclear whether Yau will produce any additional episodes. Whatever ultimately happens in the future, these sections rather pointedly do not conclude the poem as a whole in any clear aesthetic sense, so much as they revisit various thematic strands in pursuit of an ever-deepening formal abstraction. In doing so, they testify to the distinctiveness of the sequence itself, as well as to that of Yau’s broader counterpoetics of ethnic difference as a writer of specifically Chinese descent in the United States. So, section 29 presents a rhetorically spare arrangement of fourteen threeword lines made up of forty-one nouns and only one clear adjective. As

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the skewed composition of this word inventory alone might suggest, these lines conspicuously lack any obvious syntactical relationship other than mere sequence. Consequently, they designate strings of images rather than conveying any sort of recognizable narrative or affect. Unconventionally widened spacing intensifies the effect of verbal atomization. And the complete absence of verbs further spatializes the poem into a flattened textual surface. The subtitle of the section, “(Fourteen Ink Drawings),” helps to explain the impulse behind these various formal idiosyncrasies by signaling one principal aspiration of the poem, namely to attain to the condition of visual art. Through such an emphasis on image and the visuality of language, Yau continues to chart new signifying protocols for American “ethnic” verse. He does so by making words in English take on some of the characteristics of a visual sign, or in other words, to function like Chinese “ideograms,” or at least like the myths about Chinese characters that have prevailed within the dominant American poetic imaginary since their promulgation by Pound (from Fenollosa) during the early twentieth century. At the same time, the fourteen-line structure inescapably resonates with the formal tradition of the sonnet: Mirror film stain Gown tiger glass Canopy powder bell Mulberry blister festival Boat portrait box Vermillion chestnut cloud Milk shadow moon Breeze identical face Ink ladder jar Orchid chimney tongue Parachute sword wave Groom motel coffee Anvil clock hair Condom audience dog

Ranging from emblematically “Asian” vegetation and colors to the barest hints of a gritty, hard-boiled detective scenario, the staccato progression of disconnected images here repeats the main themes of the sequence. Formally, though, the spatial distension of the lines stresses the visual iconicity of the constituent words over their semantic value. Hence, coming at this late stage of the work as a whole, section 29 definitively rejects a politics of recognition based upon the personal affective disclosure of conventional lyric testimony. Instead, any familiar semblance of “ethnic” identity dissolves into the

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estranged and estranging operations of an English that has been visually materialized. Where section 29 concentrates on the opacity of language as a visual medium, section 30 seems more focused on its auditory instability. Hence, in a return to the previous form of tautly related couplets, the opening and closing stanzas suggest how easily the unusual intonations of ethnic “difference” can be rendered into accusations of damaged or embittered speech: shoo war torn talk ... wig maw mustard tongue

The intervening stanzas track a movement from popularized Chinese syllables to famous examples of American regional slang, a form of English that carries its own burden of social opprobrium: ping towel pong toy salted sap yellow credit hubba doggo bubba patootie

Here again, rather than lament or protest the travail of ethnic “difference,” Yau demonstrates its volatility as part of a larger cultural and ideological undertaking to redefine the protocols for ethnic verse production. If these last two sections do not immediately rank among the most successful episodes from the “Genghis Chan: Private Eye” sequence, neither do they detract from the broader literary historical significance of the poem as a whole. For they extend a series that already stood out as the most sustained, ambitious, and formally disciplined poetic engagement with the notions of “ethnic” culture and identity so far within the rapidly growing body of verse by writers of Asian (and specifically Chinese) descent in the United States. Moreover, subjecting identity and language both to the estranging powers of parody and different proceduralist operations, these thirty installments relentlessly expose ethnicity itself as a discursive construction. In doing so, they systematically challenge the basic epistemological assumptions underwriting our current ideological regime of liberal multiculturalism. As a result, the sequence charts an alternative to the assimilationist formal tendencies of conventional lyric testimonial realism and its investment

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in a politics of simple recognition. Accordingly, then, “Genghis Chan: Private Eye” not only confirms Yau’s stature as an individual writer; more important, in its distinctive approach to the representation of Chinese ethnic and cultural “difference,” the sequence marks the advent of a new phase in the historical poetics that we have been tracing here.

IV

In pursuing the distinctive and refractory logic of ethnic abstraction, the “Genghis Chan: Private Eye” sequence exemplifies the latest mode to appear within the historical development of Asian American verse. Significantly, this mode has emerged in reaction to the ascendancy of lyric testimony as the sanctioned means for giving voice to (especially Asian) American “ethnic” culture and identity in the United States under the auspices of liberal multiculturalism. As we have seen, that hegemonic mode centers on staking a bid for “recognition” from dominant audiences according to terms already set in place by existing arrangements of accumulated social and symbolic power. By contrast, the latter seeks to challenge the hegemony of those very arrangements. It does so in part by transforming established protocols and conventions for the representation of minority “difference,” protocols and conventions that have arisen from and in turn helped to maintain the uneven distribution of material and cultural privilege among different historically constituted U.S. racial and ethnic groups. Hence, in their engagements with the notions of “Asian American” culture and identity, John Yau and other writers of Asian descent in the United States operating in the mode of ethnic abstraction have deployed various strategies to confound any expectation of ready legibility based upon assimilationist formal gestures and the presumption to linguistic transparency. In variously redefining the established arrangements between form, language, and ethnic difference, they not only chart fresh poetic terrain but also thereby serve to call forth new ways of conceiving and responding to such difference. By now, my enthusiasm for the nonrepresentational poetics of estrangement and defamiliarization that characterize ethnic abstraction will have long since become clear. This enthusiasm stems from two main convictions: first, that disrupting and subsequently redefining the established formal logic of “ethnic” signification (including the unquestioned hegemony of English itself) remain necessary and pressing tasks for Asian American verse as part of a larger aim to transform the prevailing discriminatory social and cultural orders; and second, that poetry in particular has played and continues to play a unique role in the tortuous process of reimagining the very

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terms of minority “difference” in the United States, not least because, more obviously than any other type of cultural production, it focuses attention on the figurative conceptual operations that underwrite the very process of identity construction and shape its relation to a larger social field. Importantly, these convictions also inform recent studies by Josephine Park and Timothy Yu, both of which theorize Asian American verse as an inheritor of the avant-garde tradition in American verse.30 As the differential reception among the poets of specifically Chinese descent examined here clearly shows, however, under current circumstances, it is through the formal and conceptual interrogations of ethnic abstraction that this counterpoetic formation most insistently and effectively plays such a role by venturing beyond the premise of an individual ethnic subject. Accordingly, then, despite ongoing delays in the growth of a wider reputation, the unmatched duration, scale, conceptual sophistication, and formal invention of Yau’s poetry together make his achievement an important milestone within the transpacific history of Chinese/American verse, as well as, indeed, that of both Asian American and American literature more broadly.

Conclusion Chinese/American Verse in the Age of Postethnicity?

Racial protest, lyric testimony, ethnic abstraction: these three modes define the broad history of Chinese/American verse over the time since its limited and decidedly informal emergence during the early decades of the twentieth century all the way up to its current flowering in our present moment. In this study, I have tried to show how these basic modes or enunciative postures, evolving successively and with notably increased coherence and momentum following the transformative social movements of the late 1960s, have shaped the arrangements of language, form, and identity that organize the poetic presence and force of Chinese/American verse as a minority cultural formation. Crucially, this tradition develops in both reaction and response to the shifting terrain of dominant strategies for managing specifically Asian “difference” in the United States, beginning with the discourse of the “Yellow Peril” and the official policy of racial exclusion that it successfully instigated and continuing on to our prevailing ideological regime of liberal multiculturalism, which includes the recent stirrings of a nascent but still inchoate discourse on “post-ethnicity.” Not surprisingly, furthermore, these latest discussions in particular have intensified and expanded following the election of President Barack Obama. As part of thus setting forth a historical poetics of Chinese/ American verse, Foreign Accents also identifies a range of expressly transpacific hybridization strategies employed by writers of Chinese descent in the United States in their efforts at voicing a cultural identity (location) that has historically undergone various degrees and means of social and political marginalization. Attending in particular to the textual dynamics, formal semiosis, and cultural genealogies of these various hybridization strategies, I examine the political logic of different approaches to the task of representing a specifically “Chinese” difference in verse. 265

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As discussed in chapter 1, Ezra Pound’s Cathay stands out as a crucial moment within the broader pre-history of Chinese/American verse. For in addition to fundamentally altering the parameters of translation as a mode of Anglo-American literary production, this renowned set of renderings from mostly medieval Chinese lyrics also defined both the prevailing thematic and formal terms by which Chinese culture, identity, and even language have since been poetically represented for Anglophone audiences. By successfully establishing an expressly modern poetic idiom in English that effectively validates individual affective subjectivity among the Chinese and makes it readily legible instead of “inscrutable” or insuperably “foreign,” Cathay itself departed from and eventually came to replace the conventions of more overtly discriminatory, racialized constructions of Chinese identity, such as in the discourse of the “Yellow Peril” from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Through its very success (i.e., canonicity), in turn, this collection has become the primary document within dominant American culture against which Chinese/American verse at once emerges and gains part of its significance as a (counter)poetic formation over the course of the twentieth century. Indeed, by establishing authoritative terms for the individual expression of an “Oriental” or Asian subjectivity more generally by means of its own participation in a poetically enacted racial lumping, Cathay underwrites the current dominance of lyric testimony within the larger body of Asian American verse more broadly. The first to appear historically among the three major modes of Chinese/American verse, racial protest finds early, paradigmatic expression in the Angel Island poems. Through their laments and denunciations articulated in classical Chinese verse forms against the manifold apparatus of exclusion, these works highlight the transpacific roots, as well as routes, of a Chinese/American poetic tradition. In doing so, they embody an expressly transnational version of Asian American literary production that bespeaks the need to develop a more complex conception of both “American” and, more particularly, “Asian American” culture that cuts across the boundaries between nations and languages. Moreover, composed in almost total anonymity between 1910 and 1940 by largely uneducated commoners from Guangdong Province in southern China who were attempting to enter the United States, these poems carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station detention buildings together exhibit an unschooled formality that encodes a collectivized, culturally nativist response of defiance against the pathologization of Chinese identity during the era of formal exclusion. With a de facto policy of Asian racial exclusion remaining firmly in place until the Immigration Act of 1965 officially abolished national-origins quotas, this poetics of collectivized opposition against the prevailing American discriminatory order eventually culminates

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in the tradition of activist verse, including efforts by Chinese American poets such as Genny Lim and others, that comprises such an important feature of the various, sustained agitations undertaken by the racial nationalist movements of the civil rights era, most especially the Asian American movement. In this way, the history of Chinese/American verse intersects with the very establishment of Asian American literature itself as a recognized, and indeed recognizable (if still contested), textual entity, thereby helping to secure fundamental changes to the American cultural and social landscape. Taking shape during the 1970s in the wake of these momentous transformations, liberal multiculturalism has since emerged as the latest dominant strategy for managing ongoing challenges to entrenched arrangements of cultural and material power. Replacing the policy of formal exclusion, this ideological regime has developed alongside and helped to solidify the larger discursive shift over the course of the mid-twentieth century in the United States from “race” to “ethnicity” as the predominant category for conceptualizing minority difference. Despite the apparent retreat from a biological essentialism entailed in this lexical shift, however, liberal multiculturalism nevertheless works to reinscribe minority difference onto the terrain of the body through its emphasis on ethnic identity as an individual condition of loss, displacement, and estrangement grounded in the authority of personal experience. Through an attendant cultural politics of limited representation, it has thereby attempted to contain the disruptive significance of such difference by strictly defining both the dimensions and the protocols for its legibility. Among its most significant consequences, this regime has not only sponsored a tremendous growth in the sheer textual volume of Chinese/American verse; it has also permanently expanded the accepted canon of American literature so that writing by minorities in general now comprises an indelible part of the national cultural heritage. One particularly relevant indicator of that success has been the inclusion starting in the early 1990s of a select number of poets of Chinese descent in the United States within different nationally configured mass-market anthologies. Also integral to that achievement, such recognition has firmly installed lyric testimony and its emphasis on the transparent expression of individual affective subjectivity as the hegemonic mode of Chinese/American verse in its current formation, as well as throughout Asian American poetry more broadly. An important figure within that terrain due to the remarkable extent of his acclaim among mainstream audiences, Ha Jin attests to the role that immigration continues to play in shaping the contemporary material and thematic dimensions of Chinese/American verse. Significantly, throughout his writing Jin scrupulously observes familiar dominant American protocols of

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signification in an effort to assert the complete legibility of Chinese culture and subjectivity in English as part of a bid for the recognition of Chinese humanity under the yoke of communism. Likewise growing out of and addressing a personal situation of traumatized arrival to the United States directly from China, the antisocialist realism of his verse in particular enacts a wholesale formal assimilation of Chinese culture and identity to dominant American norms. In doing so, it thereby bolsters cherished myths about democracy, freedom, and economic opportunity in the United States. Accordingly, then, Jin’s poetry illustrates one role that Chinese/American verse has come to play under our current liberal multiculturalist order. Also enjoying substantial recognition from the dominant American cultural establishment, the verse of Li-Young Lee has even attained to representative status within the larger discursive arena of Asian American poetry. In presenting ethnic identity as a simultaneous condition of problematic difference from dominant society on the one hand, and grievously generative separation from a parent cultural tradition on the other hand, his verse exemplifies the logic of lyric testimony as the hegemonic mode of Chinese/ American verse under the auspices of liberal multiculturalism. Yet by seeking to resolve that twin dilemma through an appeal to a “deeper” knowledge of ethnic cultural heritage that finds its final ground in the essentialist terrain of the body and the logic of biological descent, Lee demonstrates the limitations of an approach to ethnic expression that rests upon the conceptual foundation of a unified subjectivity giving affective voice to individual experience. For his achievement finally endorses, rather than challenges, the liberal multiculturalist status quo based on the authoritarian structure of his increasingly idiosyncratic personal articulations of Chinese ethnic culture and identity. By contrast, Marilyn Chin and John Yau both open fresh terrain in developing their own distinctive economies of ethnic signification. As a result, neither has yet received a level of recognition commensurate with the literary historical significance of their achievements. Nevertheless, their works together vividly illustrate the ways in which Chinese/American verse continues to evolve and to chart new possible configurations for minority identity and difference. For her part, Chin has most effectively explored the possibilities of an overtly politicized form of individual affective utterance. In her verse, she infuses the basic conventions of lyric testimony with the collectivist ethos of racial protest in the creation of an idiom that partakes of multiple cultural and even linguistic traditions in their historical specificity. Consequently, she has not only expanded the referential and tonal range of Chinese/American poetry. She has also successfully enlarged its formal repertoire for the representation of minority difference through steadily defying the pressures toward both realism and linguistic transparency. By doing so, she simultaneously

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interrogates and reformulates the established semiotic and linguistic codes that have come to shape the process of (American) ethnic signification. Through its distinctive formal articulation, in particular, her achievement challenges established liberal multiculturalist conceptions of ethnicity itself. Of all the writers of Chinese descent in the United States considered here, John Yau has been the one most thoroughly and successfully to abandon the notion of a broadly coherent subjectivity giving affective voice to individual (though implicitly representative) experience as the authorizing conceptual premise for ethnic poetic enunciation. With a massive body of work that has grown in size, scope, and variety over more than three decades now, he employs a range of parodic and proceduralist strategies to erode in systematic fashion the assumptions and signifying mechanisms through which the very idea of ethnic identity has been established and continues to enjoy assent. Yau thus inaugurates abstraction as an aesthetic principle within the tradition of Chinese/American verse. By decoupling language and its deployment away from the long-standing tasks of depicting a traumatic process of individual ethnic identity formation and the “authentic” representation minority difference, he sets forth terms for a newly emergent counterpoetics of difference—namely ethnic abstraction—that has taken shape across the field of Asian American verse more generally in recent years to contest the values underwriting liberal multiculturalism and its demonstrated preference for the assimilationist formal gestures and linguistic transparency of conventional lyric testimony. The duration, extent, and variety of Chinese/American verse collectively testify to both its distinctiveness and its significance as a minority cultural formation. In examining this literary tradition and its uneven reception, Foreign Accents has not only sought to provide a fuller account of both the historical range and development of poetic production by writers of Chinese descent in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. In addition, through focusing at once on the formal operation and the variety of transpacific signifying strategies employed to represent a specifically Chinese ethnic culture and identity in verse, this study further aims to promote a critical method that enables both a deeper historicization of Asian American literary achievement more generally, as well as a nimbler responsiveness to the rapidly multiplying diversity of heritage cultures and languages among writers of Asian descent in the contemporary United States. For its ultimate fulfillment, of course, this broader goal awaits the future efforts of scholars who possess knowledge of other Asian heritage cultural traditions and different linguistic competencies. Finally, in delineating a historical poetics of Chinese/American verse, this study has also necessarily undertaken its own project of ethnic canon (re)formation. Though obviously and admittedly a partial one, such a

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project still matters because the burden of representativity due to social marginalization itself persists as a condition of minority identity in our contemporary moment. That burden finds no clearer demonstration than in the wealth of claims made recently about the attainment of a “post-racial” and even “post-ethnic” America following the election of President Barack Obama in 2008. Hyperbolically extolling the significance of this unprecedented accomplishment, these discussions have asserted that the elevation to the presidency of a multiracial citizen of African descent from a multiethnic family suffices to confirm the end of racial and ethnic discrimination in the United States. In taking such an achievement by a single minority person as a synecdoche for larger political and social transformations, this extravagant calculus ultimately works to uphold existing patterns of domination by obscuring the ways in which structural inequalities based on precisely these axes of human difference continue to shape the very fabric of American society. Accordingly, then, these assertions collectively testify to the resilience of liberal multiculturalism as a strategy for containing the disruptive potential of minority difference through its emphasis on ethnic identity as a strictly individual condition. This broader context, in turn, underscores the stakes of attending to writers such as Chin and Yau. For through their respective challenges to the conventions of lyric testimony within the tradition of Chinese/American verse, these poets in particular highlight the volatility of ethnicity precisely as a discursive construction. They thereby call attention to potential alternative configurations of minority identity and difference. Because they depart from familiar protocols of legibility for ethnic expression, these poets of Chinese descent in the United States currently await their proper audience. Yet in so waiting, they stake out a role for Chinese/American verse not simply as an instrument for the maintenance of existing discriminatory hierarchies through the limited disclosure of individual grief and grievance, but as a herald for the possibility, however uncertain, of a more just and egalitarian future.

NOTES

Introduction 1. Maxine Hong Kingston, To Be the Poet, 3. 2. Ibid., 6. 3. This work subsequently appeared in reconstructed form as The Fifth Book of Peace. 4. The essays on poetry in this volume include discussions of the Korean American poets Kimiko Hahn and Myung Mi Kim, as well as analyses of the work of comparatively recent immigrant writers Agha Shahid Ali from Kashmir and Ha Jin from the People’s Republic of China. The appearance of this volume also coincided with a resurgence of interest more generally in the “aesthetic” as it relates to minority cultural production. For more on this issue, see the collections of essays, Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, ed. Emory Elliot, Lou Freitas Caton, and Jefferey Rhyne; and Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing, ed. Joseph Conte, Rocio Davis, and Sue-Im Lee. Also see Anne Anlin Cheng, “Wounded Beauty: An Exploratory Essay on Race, Feminism, and the Aesthetic Question.” 5. As Timothy Yu has pointed out, “Asian American poetry is still sufficiently overlooked that a panel was convened at the 2007 Modern Language Association convention to inquire into the neglect of poetry in Asian American studies” (15). Even an ethnically specific study such as that by Xiao-huang Yin in Chinese American Literature since the 1850s concentrates overwhelmingly on prose in both English and Chinese after discussing the early poetic efforts by Chinese immigrants to the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The principal exception to this overall tendency, Shirley Lim has delineated what she calls an “ethnopoetics”; but her scheme seeks to articulate the necessary conditions for the accurate interpretation of ethnic poetic expression, rather than addressing the particular logic and strategies of its production. Thus, her scheme would be more appropriately termed an “ethno-hermeneutics.” See Shirley Lim,

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“Reconstructing Asian American Poetry: A Case for Ethnopoetics.” For a related discussion of the theorization of Asian American poetry, see Josephine Park, Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics, 127–30. 6. For a discussion of this period in the early formation of Asian American poetry, see Timothy Yu, 73–99. 7. Following David Palumbo-Liu’s practice in Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, I use the solidus in this designation to “mark both the distinction installed between [‘Chinese’] and ‘American’ and a dynamic, unsettled, and inclusive movement” (1), or in other words, to indicate the uncertain and shifting border between these respective terms of cultural identification within the evolving tradition of verse by writers of Chinese descent in the United States. For the sake of simplicity, I use the more conventional designation of “Chinese American” when referring to actual people, whether as individuals or as a group. 8. I am grateful to Eric Hayot for suggesting this formulation. 9. Similarly, an adequate theory of “postcolonial culture” must be able not only to recognize but also to articulate the significance of, and the differences between, the works of such writers as Bharati Mukherjee, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie in relation to an Indian historical and cultural context; or Nadine Gordimer, Athol Fugard, J. M. Coetzee, Bessie Head, and Njabulo Ndebele in relation to a South African context; or Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, Wole Soyinka, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Cyprian Ekwensi, and Amos Tutuola in relation to a Nigerian one. 10. To be sure, the concept of mestizaje and the influence of indigenous tribal cultures and languages generally on “Latino/Latina” culture complicate this admittedly simplified picture. Still, no single Asian language or culture, not even Chinese, exerts the same degree of dominance in an Asian American context as Spanish does in a Latino/Latina one. With respect to the cultural and linguistic diversity inscribed within the categories themselves, “Asian American” and “Native American” stand in the closest relation among the various traditions of American “minority” expression. 11. In response to this legacy, Mae Ngai and Kandice Chuh have, respectively, sought to theorize Asian Americans as “impossible subjects” and to conceive Asian American studies as a “subjectless” discourse. For a discussion of this recent trend and its limitations, see Eric Hayot’s essay, “The Asian Turns.” 12. For a historical bibliography of Asian American literature that specifically addresses the genre of poetry, at least up until 1988, see King-Kok Cheung and Stan Yogi, Asian American Literature: An Annotated Bibliography. At least implicitly recognizing the anachronism of the pan-ethnic designation of “Asian American” as a cultural category before 1970 or so, Cheung and Yogi organize their bibliography not only according to genre but also according to ethnically specific rubrics such as Chinese American, Japanese American, Korean American, and so on. 13. For example, Gidra featured a poem titled “My Sad People” by a writer named Harumi in its first issue from April 1969. Similarly, the inaugural issue of Amerasia Journal from March 1971 featured a poem by one Ray Lou titled, “A Poem for the People”

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(64), and one by Paul Suarez Jr. titled “Desperation” (68). The short-lived Rodan featured a poem titled “Hiroshima Revisited” by Foo Gwah in its second issue from August 1970, and Bridge included an entire section devoted to Asian American cultural production in the form of “Art, Poetry, Fiction, Films,” including an untitled poem by Eleanor S. Yung (19), in its inaugural issue from July/August 1971. For a more detailed discussion of these journals and their role in defining the notion of Asian American poetry, see Timothy Yu, Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965, 73–99 14. See Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown, ed. Marlon Hom; and Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940, ed. Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung. 15. Josephine Park, Apparitions of Asia, 91–100. 16. All quotations from Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History, 224 17. As cited in Juliana Chang, ed., Quiet Fire: A Historical Anthology of Asian American Poetry, 1892–1970, 152. 18. All quotations are from Maxine Hong Kingston, To Be the Poet, 3. 19. David Palumbo-Liu usefully contrasts the practice of “critical multiculturalism,” which he characterizes as the ongoing “critique of the ideological apparatuses that distribute power and resources unevenly among the different constituencies of a multicultural society,” to “an understanding of multiculturalism as a synonym for pluralism” that remains bound to “the general paradigm of liberal humanistic understanding,” which “vacate[s] the term ‘multicultural’ of its progressive intellectual, pedagogical and social goals.” See the introduction to The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, Interventions, ed. David Palumbo-Liu, 2. 20. Maxine Hong Kingston, To Be the Poet, 6. 21. All quotations are from ibid., 3–4. 22. On the matter of “grievance” in contrast to “grief ” in Asian American literature, see Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, especially 3–29. For a very different interpretation of the cultural and political significance of the lyric “I” in Asian American poetry, see Xiaojing Zhou, The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry, 3–13. 23. John Yau, “Between the Forest and Its Trees: Where we are is in a sentence. Jack Spicer,” 40. 24. Ibid., 41. 25. For a recent discussion of Leung’s work in particular, see Josephine Park, “ ‘A Loose Horse’: Asian American Poetry and the Aesthetics of the Ideogram,” 123–36. 26. For a reprint of this essay, see Lisa Lowe, “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences,” in Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, 60–83. 27. All quotations are from ibid., 68, 76, 82. 28. Each of these concepts has served a similar function in its respective field as a master trope for the range of expressive and formal strategies employed by minority writers. The flexibility of the performative and geographic metaphoricity of these respective notions has made them especially influential due precisely to their ready adaptabililty for a range of different particular examples.

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29. Homi Bhaba, The Location of Culture, 112. 30. All quotations from ibid., 112–114. 31. Lisa Lowe, “Work, Immigration, Gender: Asian ‘American’ Women,” in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, 369. For a longer version of this essay, see Immigrant Acts, 154–73. 32. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, 358–59. 33. Ibid., 304–05. 34. For a related critique of Lowe’s notion of “hybridity,” see Jinqi Ling, Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature, 5–9. 35. Thus Bhabha argues, “Resistance is not necessarily an oppositional act of political intention, nor is it the simple negation or exclusion of the ‘content’ of another culture, as a difference once perceived. It is the effect of an ambivalence produced within the rules of recognition of dominating discourses as they articulate the signs of cultural difference and reimplicate them within the deferential relations of colonial power—hierarchy, normalization, marginalization and so forth” (110–11). For Bhaba, then, colonial discourse itself creates the conditions of its own resistance largely due to the fundamentally refractory nature of language and the “[il]logic” of discrimination. 36. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race, 6. 37. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, 1106. 38. Ibid., 1106. 39. I owe this etymological insight to Haun Saussy. Interestingly, more conservative historical linguistics disputes this etymological relation between hybrid and hubris. Nevertheless, it remains a commonly held belief among classicists, which suggests the possibility of a conceptual, if not necessarily historically demonstrable, connection between the terms and the development of hybridity as a term throughout various Western languages. For more information on hybrida, see A. Ernout and A. Meillet, Dictionnaire Etymologique de la Langue Latine: Histoire des Mots, 302. As for the etymology of ηυβρισ the very conservative Pierre Chatraine simply notes: “Inconnue.” See Dictionnaire Etymologique de la Langue Grecque: Histoire des Mots. 40. Another philosophical concept grounded in a biological metaphor is Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblance,” which I take up in chapter 2. 41. Marilyn Chin. Dwarf Bamboo, 36. 42. Ibid. 43. Hsü, Shen, Shuo wen chieh tzu zhu ([32 chüan, Hsü Shen chuan) Tuan Yü-ts`ai chu. T`ai-pei, I wen yin shu kuan, Min kuo 44 (1955). The other five principles of character formation are: 1) zhishi (指事), or “indirect symbols”; 2) xiangxing (像形), or “pictographs”; 3) xingsheng (形聲), or “semantic-phonetic characters”; 4) jiajie (假借), or “phonetic loans”; and the most controversial category, 5) zhuanzhu (轉注), or “mutually interpretative symbols.” Thanks for this reference and elaboration of the six categories are due to Marjorie Chan and Mark Halperin. 44. For further elaboration on the distribution of different character “types,” see John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, 84.

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45. Amy Tan, The Kitchen God’s Wife, 154. 46. This essay is contained in David Palumbo-Liu, ed., The Ethnic Canon, 174–210. See especially 180–83. 47. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, 77. 48. For a brief summary of this debate with regard to The Woman Warrior in particular and a defense of Maxine Hong Kingston on the basis of the specifically Chinese American, as opposed simply to Chinese, thematic concerns of the work, see Sau-ling Cynthia Wong’s essay, “Autobiography as Guided Chinatown Tour?: Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and the Chinese American Autobiographical Controversy.” For a more recent discussion of the debate between Kingston and Frank Chin and its relation to Asian American poetry, see Josephine Park, Apparitions of Asia, 124–29. 49. Shirley Lim, “Reconstructing Asian American Poetry,” 53. 50. Ha Jin, Between Silences: A Voice from China, 1. 51. Ibid., 25. 52. John Yau, Radiant Silhouette: New and Selected Work, 1974–1988, 106. 53. See, for example, Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture; Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown; and Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945, to name only three. 54. All quotations from Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides, 29; 1–2. 55. Colleen Lye, America’s Asia, 5. 56. Ibid., 256 n.8 57. Said, Orientalism, 72. 58. Arthur Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 5. 59. All quotations from ibid., 90, 94. 60. Ibid., 92. 61. Homi Bhaba, The Location of Culture, 66. 62. All quotations from ibid., 74–75. 63. Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, 13–14. 64. “Catachresis,” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 11 March 2010. . 65. Gayatri Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 141n–142n.

Chapter 1 1. This critical tradition begins at least with Hugh Kenner and has continued all the way up to the present in the work of Zhaoming Qian. Among several possibilities, see Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era; Robert Kern, Orientalism, Modernism and the American Poem; and two works by Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of

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China in Pound and Williams; and The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens. For a more recent discussion of this engagement, see Josephine Park, Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics, especially chapters 1 and 2. 2. Josephine Park, Apparitions of Asia, 19. 3. For a discussion of the interest among American writers, including the now decanonized Amy Lowell, in Chinese literature and language in particular during the early twentieth century, see Yunte Huang, Transpacific Pacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature, especially chapters 1–3. 4. For a discussion of the “coolie” as “modernization rendered visible” (94) and “Asiatic racial form” in nineteenth-century American literature, see Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945, especially 54–58 and 91–95. For a very fine recent elaboration on the particular (il)logic of that figure, especially as it played out in American speculative fiction from the late nineteenth century, see Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain, especially 135–71. 5. For a discussion of Beat Orientalism and its affinity for Zen culture in particular, see Josephine Park, Apparitions of Asia, 57–90. For a recent collection of American Buddhist–inspired poetry, see The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry, ed. Andrew Schelling. 6. Cathay was first published in 1915 in London by Elkin Matthews and included a rendering of “The Seafarer.” Cathay first became available in the United States in 1917 as part of Pound’s collection, Lustra, the first public American edition of which was published by Knopf. For a detailed bibliography of Pound’s massive published work, see Donald Gallup, Ezra Pound: A Bibliography. 7. For example, Brecht read Pound’s Cathay before undertaking his own attempts to engage with the idea of “China.” For a discussion of this relationship, as well as of the pervasiveness of an interest in China and Chinese culture in early to mid-twentiethcentury American, German, and French culture, see Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel. 8. See, for example, Lydia Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making. Also see two articles by David Porter, “Monstrous Beauty: EighteenthCentury Fashion and the Aesthetics of the Chinese Taste;” and “A Peculiar but Uninteresting Nation: China and the Discourse of Commerce in Eighteenth-Century England.” For a discussion of the phenomenon of “chinoiserie” in European art, see Madeleine Jarry, Chinoiserie: Chinese Influence on European Decorative Art, 17th and 18th Centuries. For a synoptic, though perhaps necessarily somewhat broad discussion of Western perceptions of China since the thirteenth century, see Jonathan Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds. On the related matter of japonisme in the nineteenth-century United States, see Christopher Bush’s essay, “The Ethnicity of Things in America’s Lacquered Age.” 9. For a discussion of popular representations of Asians in general and Chinese in particular during the late nineteenth century, see Robert Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans

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in Popular Culture. For a discussion of “Yellow Peril” discourse in the 1920s and 1930s in the United States, see David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, especially 35–48. For an excellent recent discussion of late nineteenthcentury to early twentieth-century realist and naturalist narrative engagements with “Asia,” see Collen Lye, America’s Asia, especially 12–46. 10. David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American, 18. For a more general discussion of the movement of specifically Chinese literary forms across the Pacific during the modernist period, see Yunte Huang, Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature. 11. Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities, 6. This is not to say that distinctions have not been made at the political level at different, pivotal times in U.S. history. Obviously, differences between Japanese, Chinese, and Korean people and culture have been invoked, often by Asian Americans themselves, at crucial moments, such as during World War II. But within the larger domain of the U.S. cultural imaginary, East Asian cultural and linguistic traditions have generally been lumped together to the same degree that people from these traditions have been indiscriminately mistaken for one another. 12. See my Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language, chapter 1, especially 26–29. 13. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 358. 14. David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American, 17. 15. In contrast to The Cantos, Cathay has, from the moment of its publication, enjoyed nearly universal acclaim within the Anglo-American cultural sphere. Historically, then, the magnitude of Cathay’s canonical status has exceeded that of The Cantos, despite the steadily growing reputation of Pound’s “poem including history” over the course of the twentieth century and its demonstrable influence on the work of writers ranging from William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson to more recent figures such as Charles Bernstein and Bob Perelman. In fact, due to the success of Cathay in establishing “the pattern of cadence for modern verse,” its influence has come to seem less obvious precisely because of the extent to which its terms have defined the very legibility of poetic expression in the years following its initial publication in 1915. 16. For an interesting recent discussion about the persistent desire for authenticity in a variety of different (including Asian American) cultural traditions, see Vincent Cheng, Inauthentic: The Anxiety over Culture and Identity. 17. For an excellent recent discussion of specifically Californian exclusionist discourse in popular, journalistic, and more traditionally literary expression, see Colleen Lye, America’s Asia, especially 47–140. For a recent history of Chinese immigration that makes the case for the importance of California within the larger development of exclusionism as an American national policy, see Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943, especially 23–109. 18. See Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era, 197–98.

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19. For discussions of Fenollosa’s life and his relations to other intellectuals of his period, see Van Wyck Brooks, Fenollosa and His Circle; and Lawrence W. Chisolm, Fenollosa: The Far East and American Culture. For a more recent discussion of Fenollosa’s transpacific career and his advocacy of Asian cultural traditions, especially as they inform the logic of his most renowned work, see Haun Saussy’s very fine essay, “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination,” in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein. 20. The notebooks are currently housed in the Beinecke Library of Yale University in their Ezra Pound collection. 21. For a discussion of Pound’s relationship with Yeats during the three winters they spent at Stone Cottage, see James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism. 22. This phrase serves as the title for an essay by Fenollosa published in Harper’s, wherein he lays out his visionary conception of the future of East–West cultural relations. See Ernest F. Fenollosa, “The Coming Fusion of East and West,” Harper’s Magazine 98 (1898): 115–22. For a recent discussion of Fenollosa and his place within the tradition of American Orientalism, see Josephine Park, Apparitions of Asia, 7–14. 23. See Colleen Lye, America’s Asia, 51–58. 24. All quotations from Ernest Fenollosa, “Chinese and Japanese Traits,” The Atlantic Monthly 69 (1892): 769–770. 25. Ibid., 771. 26. For an excellent recent discussion of this discourse about the endurance of the Chinese and the significance of their relation to pain in late nineteenth-century American discourse, see Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin, 135–47. 27. Arthur Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 5. This phrase serves as the title for chapter 11 of Smith’s work. The other twenty-five “characteristics” of the Chinese in Smith’s scheme are as follows: Face, Economy, Industry, Politeness, Disregard of Time, Disregard of Accuracy, Talent for Misunderstanding, Talent for Indirection, Flexible Inflexibility, Intellectual Turbidity, Contempt for Foreigners, Absence of Public Spirit, Conservatism, Indifference to Comfort and Convenience, Physical Vitality, Patience and Perseverance, Content and Cheerfulness, Filial Piety, Benevolence, Absence of Sympathy, Social Typhoons, Mutual Responsibility and Respect for Law, Mutual Suspicion, Absence of Sincerity and Polytheism, Pantheism and Atheism. The popularity of Chinese Characteristics can be gauged by the fact that the volume went through at least five editions. In the introduction to the work, Smith notes that the book began as a series of articles for the English-language periodical North-China Daily News, initially appearing in book form in Shanghai in 1890. In this manifestation, it apparently circulated “throughout China and the East.” He further explains that since some of the articles excited so much interest “not only in China, but also in Great Britain, in the United States, and in Canada, that the author was asked to reproduce them in a permanent form” (11). Smith’s views, then, enjoyed wide appeal, and therefore currency, throughout the English-speaking world during the latter years of Fenollosa’s stay in Japan and the early part of his return to the United States. It is entirely possible, and arguably even probable, that he was familiar with

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Smith’s views at the time he wrote “Chinese and Japanese Traits” for the Atlantic Monthly. In The Clash of Empires, Lydia Liu notes that Smith’s work was widely considered the authoritative text on the Chinese in English until the publication of Pearl S. Buck’s Nobel Prize–winning novel, The Good Earth, in 1931. 28. Of course, the image of the coolie had already functioned in the earlier antiChinese movements that had led to the original Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, as well as to its extension in 1892. But such agitation took on fiercer tones as the years progressed, leading to the permanent renewal of the act in 1902. Similar, but not identical concerns about other Asians, including the Japanese and Filipinos, also led to the Immigration Act of 1924, which set quotas on immigration from Asian nations, as well as the TydingsMcDuffie Act of 1934, the purpose of which, as Ronald Takaki notes, “was Filipino exclusion” (Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, 331). 29. Colleen Lye, America’s Asia, 54. 30. For a discussion of this period in Japanese historiography, see Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History, especially 115–52. During the Meiji period, Japanese historians sought to differentiate themselves at once from China and from the West in order to validate their claim to equivalent (though not equal) status as an expressly “modern” nation and culture. Their efforts resulted in a variety of interpretations of the Asian past and Japan’s position both in that past and in the contemporary world. But all of them cast China, or shina as it came to be referred to pejoratively in Japanese history of the time, as the now decrepit source of specifically “Asian” values and ideals that stood in opposition to those of the West. As Tanaka points out, this effort continued well into the twentieth century. 31. Thus, not only did Pound incorporate his extremely limited understanding of Chinese political history in “The Chinese History Cantos” but he also later published complete translations of three of the four “Confucian classics,” which he titled The Great Digest (1947), The Unwobbling Pivot (1947), and The Analects (1951). In addition, he produced a complete rendering of the Book of Odes, or the Shi Jing (詩 經), which he called The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius (1954). For a discussion of these translations, see Mary Patterson Cheadle, Ezra Pound’s Confucian Translations. For a study devoted entirely to Pound’s rendering of the Odes, see L. S. Dembo, The Confucian Odes of Ezra Pound. For a discussion of how these “Confucian translations” shaped the evolving poetics of The Cantos, see chapter 5 of my Translation and the Languages of Modernism. 32. This is the title of an essay by Barry Ahearn, in Ezra Pound and China, ed. Zhaoming Qian, 31–48. 33. Contrary to established critical views that have consistently assumed that Fenollosa ignored the sonic dimensions of Chinese poetry, Saussy offers compelling evidence to show that he did in fact understand this aspect of the tradition. See Saussy’s essay, “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination,” especially 32–33. 34. This situation has been “corrected” somewhat in more recent editions and reprintings of the collection through the addition of transliterations of the more conventional

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Chinese names of the writers included. But these additions were absent from the first edition, and in any event, the names employed in the titles and the texts of the poems have remained unchanged. 35. Ezra Pound, Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth, 254, 257. 36. For a discussion of proper names in the Austin tradition, see John Searle, “Proper Names,” in Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, 162–74. See also Jacques Derrida, “Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name.” For additional philosophical discussion in the analytical tradition on proper names, see Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity; and Gareth Evans, “The Causal Theory of Names.” 37. Ezra Pound, Poems and Translations, 247. This description of the source for Cathay comes from the headnote of the collection. 38. For a transcription of Fenollosa’s notes for this poem, see Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era, 193; or for a transcription that includes the relevant Chinese characters, see my Translation and the Languages of Modernism, 39–40. 39. Indeed, Kenner notes that “much of the work of Pound’s twenties, including work he later chose not to reprint, was a search for poems that should have some structural principle other than the writer’s mood or the strophe’s requirements” (The Pound Era, 200). 40. In contrast to Cathay, these poems arose not out of any sort of (even mediated) encounter with classical Chinese poetry in its original language, but rather from Pound’s reading of existing translations by Herbert Giles in A History of Chinese Literature. 41. For an excellent explanation of this “method” and some of its more significant limitations as a poetic strategy, see Michael Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic, 36–48. 42. As Pound notes in an essay on Mencius first published in The Criterion in 1938, “During August and the first half of September 1937, I isolated myself with the Chinese text of the three books of Confucius, Ta Hio, Analects and the Unwavering Middle, and that of Mencius, together with an enormously learned crib, but no dictionary. . . . Without knowing at least the nature of ideogram I don’t think anyone can suspect what is wrong with their current translations [of Confucian texts]. Even with what I have known for some time I did not sufficiently ponder it” (from the Pound essay “Mang Tsze [The Ethics of Mencius],” in Selected Prose, 1909–1965, 82). Pound praises Fenollosa’s essay in a letter from June 1915. See letter #71 from The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige. 43. Sanehide Kodama, “Cathay and the Fenollosa Notebooks,” 213; Ronald Bush, “Pound and Li Po: What Becomes a Man,” in Ezra Pound among the Poets, ed. George Bornstein, 35–62; Anne Chapple, “Ezra Pound’s Cathay: Compilation from the Fenollosa Notebooks,” 11. 44. All poetry citations from Ezra Pound, Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth, 249, 252, 254, 257, 258. 45. Ibid., 252.

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46. Arthur Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 65–73. 47. See, for example, Robert Lee, Orientals, 89–91; and Erika Lee, At America’s Gates, 26–27. 48. Karen Leong, “ ‘A Distinct and Antagonistic Race’: Constructions of Chinese Manhood in the Exclusionist Debates, 1869–1878,” in Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the United States West, ed. Matthew Basso, Laura McCall, and Dee Garceau, 133. 49. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era, 199. 50. Ezra Pound, Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth, 249–50. 51. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era, 193–95. 52. This “Note” is included in the recent Library of America edition of Pound’s poetry and translations. See Ezra Pound, Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth, 260. 53. Herbert Giles, A History of Chinese Literature, 97–98. 54. Arthur Waley, trans., A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems, 40. 55. For discussions of translation, “foreignness,” and their relation to the constitution of a distinctive “national” culture in entirely different contexts, see Antoine Berman, The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany; and Vicente L. Rafael, The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines.

Chapter 2 1. The sole exception to this practice is Yunte Huang’s recent discussion of the Angel Island poems in Transpacific Imaginations, wherein he addresses the “Poetics of Error” through which these works signify their complex cultural and historical significance, as well as their relation to the traditional form of Chinese travel writing known as tibishi (題 璧 詩), or “poetry inscribed on the wall.” Here, I elaborate on Huang’s notion and further contextualize the Angel Island poems as feats of an expressly transnational cultural production by writers of Chinese descent in the United States. See Huang, Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics, 101–15. 2. Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung, eds., Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940, 28. 3. Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, 231–39. 4. Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown, 181–82. 5. Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943, 219. 6. This statement was made by Xing Chu Wang, poet and editor of East West Forum. As quoted in the article “Chinese Poetry Scholars Visit Immigration Station,” Passages: The Newsletter of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation 5, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 2002): 2.

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7. Poem 69, Lai, Lim, and Yung, Island, 134; translation mine. All subsequent translations of Chinese poetry are mine from the edited Chinese text unless otherwise indicated. 8. According to editors of Island, “When non-Chinese people seized control of the Yellow River Valley in the 4th century and the Chinese court had to retreat to the south, Zu Di swore to recover this lost territory. One of his friends, also a general, once said, ‘I sleep with my weapon awaiting the dawn. My ambition is to kill the barbarian enemy, but am always afraid that Zu will crack the whip before me.’ Thus, the reference means to try hard and compete to be first” (90n49). 9. Ibid., 2. 10. Madeline Hsu has shown that Taishan County, from which the majority of Chinese immigrants came to the United States during the early part of the twentieth century, enjoyed relatively high numbers of schools and teachers in comparison to neighboring counties in Guangdong Province. She traces this comparative prosperity to remissions from overseas by Taishanese, who continued to feel ties to their place of origin. According to statistics she cites, in 1935, Taishan County boasted 66,645 children actively pursuing an education out of a total population of 89,136 school-age children, or a 75 percent school attendance rate. By 1934, Hsu points out, Taishan had 1,010 lower-level elementary schools, 268 elementary schools, 9 middle schools, a county teacher’s college, and a women’s teacher’s college. See Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882–1943, 45–47. 11. In this respect, I share an intellectual commitment with Werner Sollors and the Languages of What is Now the U.S. (LOWINUS) group. But whereas they have concentrated mostly on works produced by foreign elites in languages other than English that were actually published and intended for a small, but definite, public sphere, the Angel Island poems comprise a decidedly vernacular, even subaltern, expression. Thus, they record the responses by writers of a very different social order than those that have been addressed by LOWINUS proponents. 12. For another discussion of the increased “influence” of China on the West during the modernist period, see chapter 5 in Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain, 172–206. 13. This was also the period that saw the emergence of the Chicago school of sociology that developed at least partly in response to the “Oriental Problem.” For a discussion of this phenomenon, see Henry Yu’s acclaimed study Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact and Exoticism in Modern America. 14. For a historical study that attempts to bridge Asian American and Asian studies by employing just such a transnational approach to the immigration of Taishanese to the United States, see Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home. 15. Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 328. Appadurai defines the various “scapes” collectively as “the building

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blocks of what (extending Benedict Anderson) I would like to call imagined worlds, that is, the multiple worlds which are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe” (329). More specifically, he defines them in the following terms: a) “By ethnoscape, I mean the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guestworkers and other moving groups and persons constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of (and between) nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree” (329); b) “by technoscape, I mean the global configuration, also ever fluid, of technology, and of the fact that technology, both high and low, both mechanical and informational, now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries” (329); c) the “finanscape” involves “the disposition of global capital” that operates through such instruments as “currency markets, national stock exchanges and commodity speculations” (330); d) “Mediascapes refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, television stations, and film production studios), which are now available to a growing number of private and public interests throughout the world, and to the images of the world created by these media” (330); and e) “Ideoscapes are also concatenations of images, but they are often directly political and frequently have to do with the ideologies of states and the counter-ideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it” (331). 16. All quotations from Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, 136. Emphasis in the original. 17. Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” 324. 18. For a detailed history of Angel Island that includes discussion of its role as the point of entry into the United States for immigrants from other Asian countries, including Japan, Korea, and India, see Jennifer Gee, “Sifting the Arrivals: Asian Immigrants and the Angel Island Immigration Station, San Francisco, 1910–1940” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1999). 19. Erika Lee, At America’s Gates, 126. Also see Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 370–78. 20. As Takaki notes, the repeal of the Exclusion Laws in 1943 did not signal a major change in the American stance toward Chinese immigration, since Congress set a quota of merely 105 individuals annually to be allowed to enter the country. In the first ten years of its operation, on average only fifty-nine Chinese came to the United States under the auspices of the new law. Furthermore, though it conferred the right to naturalization on Chinese immigrants, it required documentation of legal entry into the country, as well as tests of English competency, American history, and the Constitution, such that “between 1944 and 1952, only 1,428 Chinese were naturalized” (Takaki, ibid., 378). 21. All quotations from Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides, 2, 44, 179. 22. See, for example, Erika Lee At America’s Gates; Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home; Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore; and others.

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23. For more information on these conflicts and the effects of Western imperialism generally on the migration of Chinese people from this region to the United States, as well as to other parts of the world, see Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History, 5–8. Also see Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich, Labor Immigration under Advanced Capitalism: Asian Immigrant Workers in the United States before World War II, 16–29. 24. For a discussion of the conflicts between the Hakka minority and Han majority in the Taishan area, see Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home, 22, 27–29. 25. For general discussions of the May Fourth Movement, see, among others, Tse-tsung Chow, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China; Joseph Chen, The May Fourth Movement in Shanghai; Merle Goldman, ed., Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era; Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers; and Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919. For discussions of the broader topic of Chinese modernism, see Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity, 1900–1937; and Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937. For an anthology of Chinese critical writing during the period, see Kirk A. Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945. 26. Lai, Lim, and Yung, Island, 23. Scholars generally concur in their estimates that during the nineteenth century over 70 percent of the Chinese living in California came from the four counties of Toisan, Sunwui, Hoiping, and Yanping alone. Moreover, as Erika Lee notes, “More than 60 percent of the Chinese in the United States today trace their roots to the districts of Namhoi, Punyu, Shuntak, Sunwui, Sunnning (renamed Toisan), Hoiping, Yanping, and Heungshan in the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province” (112). 27. John DeFrancis, among others, has argued that the different major versions of spoken “Chinese” should be designated as separate languages, or at least by the term regionalect, since they are mutually unintelligible. This seems a sensible distinction, but in popular usage the term dialect still serves as the general term marking the linguistic divisions between Mandarin, Wu (the form of Chinese native to Jiangsu and Zhejiang), Yue (Cantonese), Xiang (Hunanese), and other varieties of spoken Chinese. See John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, 57. 28. For use of these phrases, see poems 2, 7, 9, 10, 13, 27, 30, 31, 36, 46, 63, and appendix poem 11. 29. This decree took place at a meeting of the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation sponsored by the Guomindang (國 民 黨) regime, and it formalized the adoption of Mandarin as a governmentally sanctioned medium. The previous imperial regime (the Qing Dynasty) employed Mandarin as the basis for “guanhua” (官 話) or “official’s speech,” that is the language of officials or “mandarins,” which explains how this northern dialect of Chinese came to be known in English as Mandarin. 30. See also Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies.

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31. For a similar view focusing on writings by other authors in Chinese, see Werner Sollors, ed., Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, especially the articles “Redefining Chinese-American Literature from a LOWINUS Perspective: Two Recent Examples,” by Te-hsing Shan, 112–23; and “Worlds of Difference: Lin Yutang, Lao She, and the Significance of Chinese-Language Writing in America,” by Xiao-huang Yin, 176–87. 32. Lai, Lim, and Yung, Island, 25. 33. For a discussion in English of the rules for these various forms, as well for principles of tonal distribution and rhyme, see James J. Y. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry. For a discussion in Chinese, see Li Wang, Hanyu Shilü xue [A Study of Chinese Poetics]. 34. For a study of this vernacular form, see Pui-chee Liang, Wooden-Fish Books: Critical Essays and an Annotated Catalog Based on the Collection in the University of Hong Kong. 35. Marlon Hom, ed., introduction to Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown, 31. For a more detailed accounting of the history of Chinese newspapers in the United States and Canada since the middle of the nineteenth century, see Karl Lo and Him Mark Lai, Chinese Newspapers Published in North America, 1854–1975. 36. In this essay, Hu Shi presents a total of eight proposals for the reform of Chinese literature: “1. Writing should have substance; 2. Do not imitate the ancients; 3. Emphasize the technique of writing; 4. Do not moan without an illness; 5. Eliminate hackneyed and formal language; 6. Do not use allusions; 7. Do not use parallelism; and 8. Do not avoid vulgar diction.” This last proposal contains the claim that writers should henceforth use spoken Chinese as the basis for literary composition. For an English version of this canonical essay, which in many ways initiated the May Fourth Movement in Chinese literature, see Kirk A. Denton ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945, 123–39. The original essay was published in the journal New Youth (新 青 年) 2, no. 5, in January 1917. 37. Chen, Duxiu, “On Literary Revolution,” in Denton, ibid., 141. This essay was also originally published in New Youth (新 青 年) 2, no. 6, in February 1917, only one month after the appearance of Hu’s reformist, rather than revolutionary, program. 38. Of course, this does not mean that Chinese modernists completely abandoned wen yan in their literary efforts. Even Lu Xun consistently wrote classical verse throughout his career, even as he composed his renowned vernacular stories. Rather, their promotion of bai hua constituted an attempt both to modernize and to popularize literature within Chinese culture; but they also maintained their engagement with older, more elite forms. For a study of Lu Xun’s classical poetry, see Jon Kowallis, The Lyrical Lu Xun: A Study of His Classical Style Verse. 39. For a particularly noteworthy attempt to complicate this admittedly simplified and conventional picture of Chinese modernism, see David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911. 40. Marlon Hom makes a similar point regarding San Francisco Chinatown’s resident literati, who were mostly Cantonese and traditionally educated, and who had little

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interaction with the non-Cantonese literary reformers. See Hom, ed., Songs of Gold Mountain, 37. 41. For centuries, the imperial examination system was the only means of entry into the government bureaucracy for men of letters. The system was not abolished until 1905. For a comprehensive study of this system, see Siyu Deng, Zhongguo kaoshi zhidu shi [A History of the Chinese Examination System]. 42. Lai, Lim, and Yung. Island, 25. 43. For a discussion of an entirely different approach to Chinese poetry written on steles, see Haun Saussy’s discussion of Victor Segalen’s Stèles, “Impressions de Chine; or, How to Translate from a Nonexistent Original,” Steven G. Yao, 64–85. For a new edition of these remarkable poems, see the edition, compiled, edited, annotated, and translated by Timothy Billings and Christopher Bush, Victor Segalen, Stèles. 44. Lai, Lim, and Yung, Island, 156. 45. Thanks are due to Haun Saussy for bringing this example to my attention. 46. Lai, Lim, and Yung, Island, 154. 47. Lai, Lim, and Yung, Island, 155. Translation by the editors. For documentation about the historical scenario underwriting the alternative reading, see, for example, Erika Lee, 132. A similar overcorrection occurs in poem 43, where the editors have replaced the character 撫 ( fu in Mandarin), meaning “to touch” or “to stroke,” with the character 椎 (zhui in Mandarin), meaning “to beat,” even though the former is grammatically plausible, if not as forceful. Another instance occurs in appendix poem 30, where the editors have again replaced 椎, this time with 鋤 (chu in Mandarin), which is used in the stock phrase 鋤 奸 (chujian in Mandarin) meaning “to wipe or dig out the wicked elements.” 48. Poem 31, appendix, Lai, Lim, and Yung, Island, 157. 49. Poem 45, appendix, Lai, Lim, and Yung, Island, 162. For another poem expressing comparable sentiments, see poem 22, Lai, Lim, and Yung, Island, 58. 50. Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home, 68–71; Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides, 183–97; Erika Lee, At America’s Gates, 79–109. 51. Two of these cases were Look Tin Sing in 1884 and Wong Kim Ark in 1998. For a discussion of these cases, see Erika Lee, At America’s Gates, 100–107. 52. Rule 7, U.S. Dept. of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration, Treaty, Laws, and Regulations (1905), 47. As cited in Erika Lee, At America’s Gates, 77. 53. Ibid., 78. 54. Poem 17, Lai, Lim, and Yung, Island, 55. 55. Poem 37, appendix; Lai, Lim, and Yung, Island, 159. See also poems 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 59, 60 and appendix poems 8, 16, 41, 44, and passim. 56. Poem 48, Lai, Lim, and Yung, Island, 101. 57. See, for example, poems 3, 25, 31, 33, 36, 37, 47, 65, 67, as well as appendix poems 16, 19, 23, 39, 44, 46, 47, 49, 57, 59. 58. As I discussed above, this character was originally mistakenly written as 掉, meaning “to turn.” I have followed the editor’s emendation here for the sake of convenience and simplicity.

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59. Poem 36, Lai, Lim, and Yung, Island, 87. 60. Poems 34, 63, and 31 appendix, ibid., 85, 128, 157. 61. Poems 35, 41 appendix, ibid., 84, 160. 62. For a useful discussion of this phenomenon, see Judith T. Zeitlin, “Disappearing Verses: Writing on Walls and Anxieties of Loss,” in Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan, ed. Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia H. Liu, with Ellen Widmer, 73–132, specifically 74. Zeitlin addresses the practice during the Qing Dynasty, to which the Island poets had the most direct historical connection, of collecting tibishi by women as a response to “the recent violent events of the Qing conquest and the wholesale destruction of so much of the Ming cultural heritage” (107). Inasmuch as all of the Island poets were male, Zeitlin’s discussion raises profoundly interesting gender issues as they relate to the production of the poems carved onto the walls of the Angel Island station. See also Huang, Transpacific Imaginations, especially 105–7. 63. Likewise, the political turmoil within China itself during this time that came about as a result of the fall of the Qing dynasty and tenuous establishment of the republic in 1911, together with the decades-long struggle between various powers (including the Nationalists, the Communists, and the Japanese) until 1949 to define the terms of China’s existence as a modern nation-state, also arguably helped to make the Angel Island poets prone to imagining China as a nation, especially at some unspecified point in the future. 64. Lai, Lim, and Yung, Island, 24. See also, for example, similarities between poem 63 and poem 44 of the appendix. 65. This character is an archaic initial phrase particle, and so a marker of the author’s attempt at achieving a tonal gravity. Thus, I have used an archaic verb construction in my translation to try and match the tone in English. 66. Poem 31, Island, 67. See also poem 2, Island, 63. 67. George Uba, “Versions of Identity in Post-Activist Asian American Poetry,” 35. 68. All quotations from Juliana Chang, “Time, Jazz, and the Racial Subject: Lawson Inada’s Jazz Poetics,” 134–36. For additional discussion of Inada’s jazz-inflected poetry see Josephine Park, Apparitions of Asia, 112–121; and Yunte Huang, Transpacific Imaginations, 116–30. 69. For references to time in terms of length of imprisonment or suffering due to travel, see poems 5, 19, 28, 53, 63, 64, 66, as well as appendix poems 9, 17, 21, 22, 24, 31, 47, 53, and 57. For references to the time of composition according to cultural traditions associated with the lunar calendar, see poems 5, 12, and 14, as well as appendix poems 3, 25, and 53. For references to time measured from the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1911, see poems 36, 57, and appendix poem 62. And for poems that record a concern with time expressed in terms of age, see poems 3 and 54. 70. These are appendix poem 31 and poem 39, Island, 157, 88. 71. As quoted in Jon Jang, Island: Immigration Suite No. 1, liner notes, 12. 72. Ibid., 5–6. Jang’s album from 1993 was produced as a response to the massacre of students and other democracy demonstrators by the Chinese Communist government in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

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Interchapter 1. Josephine Park, Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics, 100. 2. See King-Kok Cheung and Stan Yogi, eds., Asian American Literature: An Annotated Bibliography; and Julianna Chang, ed., Quiet Fire: A Historical Anthology of Asian American Poetry, 1892–1970. In an implicit recognition of the problematic status of “Asian American” as a cultural category, Cheung and Yogi organize their bibliography according to the ethnic-specific categories “Chinese American,” “Japanese American,” “Filipino American,” “Korean American,” and, in a notable departure from their established practice that points to a distinct asymmetry among the terms forming the larger category of “Asian American,” “South Asian American.” In addition, Cheung and Yogi organize their bibliography according to genre. For their bibliography of poetry by Chinese Americans in particular, see Asian American Literature, 53–57. 3. On the elevated perception of Japan in this period, and particularly the effect this status had on American “Yellow Peril” discourse, see especially Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945, 16–18, 30–32, 37–38. Also, as Park has discussed, the disappearance of Sadikichi Hartmann from the literary scene following the outbreak of war with Japan in 1942 further indicates the ways in which the careers of writers of Asian descent in the United States were tied to the vagaries of larger geopolitical relations across the Pacific. For more on Hartmann and his role in the formulation of an Asian American literary canon, see Josephine Park, Apparitions of Asia, 96–98. 4. For a discussion of this category as it applied to, and indeed was invented for, Filipinos following the annexation of the Philippines by the United States, see Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, 315–54. 5. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Immigrants and the Making of Modern America. 6. See Marlon Hom, ed., Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown. In particular, see Hom’s introduction for a useful discussion and contextualization of this tradition. 7. For a discussion of these songs, see Yukuo Uyehara, “The Hore-Hore-Bushi: A Type of Japanese Folk Song Developed and Sung among the Early Immigrants in Hawaii,” Social Process in Hawaii 28 (1980–81). Also see Jiro Nakan, “History of Japanese Short Poems (Tanka, Haiku and Senryu) in Hawaii,” unpublished manuscript (as cited in Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 513n13). 8. On the haiku as a vexed form for Asian American poets, see Park, Apparitions of Asia, 105–6. 9. For additional discussion of these journals and their role in the establishment of Asian American verse, see Timothy Yu, Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965, 73–81. 10. On the weirdly exemplary career of Wand, see Park, Apparitions of Asia, 91–94. Also see Hugh Witemeyer, “The Strange Progress of David Hsin-fu Wand.”

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11. Josephine Park, Apparitions of Asia, 100. 12. National origins quotas were instituted by the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924. For a discussion of this law and its effect on racial categories in the United States, see Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects, especially chapter 1. 13. Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 420. 14. Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars. 15. Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact and Exoticism in Modern America, 45. 16. For a much more detailed discussion of these British scientists and their milieu, see Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism, especially 228–76. 17. The first appearance of this term came on p. 220 in the first volume of W. Lloyd Warner and Paul Lunt’s renowned five-volume study of Newbury, Massachusetts, The Social Life of a Modern Community. For additional discussion, see Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture, 23. 18. Sollors, ibid., 38. For a more nuanced treatment of this basic narrative about antiNazism as the impetus for the critique of scientific racism, see Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism, 279–85. 19. Oscar Handlin, Race and Nationality in American Life, 191. The question raised by Handlin serves as the title for chapter 8 in the study. 20. David Riesman, “Some Observations on Intellectual Freedom.” 15. 21. The principle exceptions to this phenomenon can be seen in the persistence in some instances of the category of “black literature,” as well as in the relatively recent emergence of the notion of “mixed-race” literature. In the case of the latter, it seems that the notion of “mixing” has mitigated the negative associations of applying the category of “race” to literary production by nonwhite peoples. 22. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Ethnicity: Theory and Experience, 1; Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 39. 23. Talcott Parsons, “Some Theoretical Considerations on the Nature and Trends of Change of Ethnicity,” in Ethnicity: Theory and Experience, ed. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 85. 24. Christopher Bush, “The Ethnicity of Things in America’s Lacquered Age,” 86. Similarly, Rey Chow has argued that “ethnicity is not simply a static space occupied by ethnics who are, somehow, always already there but, more important, also a relation of cultural politics” ( The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 22). 25. Irving Howe, “The Limits of Ethnicity,” 18. 26. For an excellent discussion of the debate between Chin and Kingston, see Josephine Park, Apparitions of Asia, 122–26. For a discussion of the Blu’s Hanging controversy, see Mark Chiang, “Aesthetics and the Crisis of Asian American Cultural Politics in the Controversy over Blu’s Hanging,” in Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing, ed. Rocio Davis and Sue-Im Lee, 17–34.

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27. Among many possibilities, see, for example, Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Sprit of Capitalism.

Chapter 3 1. This series seems to have focused on developing what one might term an identity poetics. Its list features poets from numerous marginalized groups who happen to operate in a highly personal and confessional mode, elaborating socially occluded subjectivities. The house might usefully be thought of, then, as a dominant cultural venue for extending the hegemony of “lyric testimony” in contemporary American poetry. 2. For a discussion of this anxiety as expressed in cultural realms of science fiction and virtual gaming during the 1990s and earlier, see Eric Hayot, “Chineseness: A Prehistory of Its Future,” in Sinographies: Writing China, ed. Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven G. Yao, 1–33. 3. That both Huang and Wen Ho Lee emigrated to the United States from Taiwan, but were accused of being operatives the People’s Republic of China further testifies to the conceptual amorphousness of the “Chinese” threat. Such confusion inarguably involves at least some measure of racial essentialism as a guiding conceptual force. For additional discussions of the John Huang scandal and the Wen Ho Lee case during the Bill Clinton era, see L. Ling-chi Wang, “Race, Class, Citizenship, and Extraterritoriality: Asian Americans and the 1996 Campaign Finance Scandal,” in Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader, ed. Min Zhou and James V. Gatewood, 518–34; Robert Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture, 223; and David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, 287–92. 4. One exception to this general silence is Xiaojing Zhou’s discussion in her article, “Writing Otherwise Than as a Native Informant: Ha Jin’s Poetry,” in Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits, ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim et al., 274–94. 5. Within the parameters of this study, consider by comparison, for example, the biographical narratives of Li-Young Lee and Marilyn Chin, both of whom came to the United States as children, from Indonesia and Hong Kong, respectively. This tendency to consider as “Asian American” mainly those individuals who spent at least their childhood and adolescent years in the United States began with the rhetorical and political establishment of the category of “Asian American” in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Of course, people of Asian descent who arrived in the United States as adults before the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (i.e., before the final dismantling of the era of legally sanctioned Asian exclusion and therefore also before the general possibility of achieving naturalized American citizenship), have long been subjects of interest within Asian American studies more broadly. Yet they have only been retrospectively designated as “Asian American,” since historically it would have been impossible for them to identify or be identified in such a manner. Hence, terms such as “sojourners,” “migrants,” and so forth have been used to acknowledge the historical and cultural conditions that differentiate these groups of

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people of Asian descent in the United States from those who originally worked to establish “Asian American” as a cultural and political identity category. 6. Most notably, perhaps, both Kingston and Cha have generated precisely this sort of critical explication as a substantial segment of the overall critical response to their more stylistically elaborate and even “experimental” work. 7. All quotations from Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 183, 186, 191. On “ethnic ressentiment” and the uproar over Ha Jin in the People’s Republic of China, see especially, 183–91. As she relates, Jin’s novel was “attacked in the Chinese media as ‘a tool used by the American media to slander China.’ A Beijing University Professor, Liu Yiqing, was quoted as accusing Ha Jin of ‘selling out his country in order to win the National Book Award.’ The book’s success, Liu reportedly wrote in a book review, was ‘part of a plot by the American media to demonize China by showing China’s backwardness and the stupidity of the Chinese people” (186–87). 8. See Xiaojing Zhou, “Writing Otherwise than as a ‘Native Informant’: Ha Jin’s Poetry.” All quotations from this source are found on pages 275–76. The awkwardness of the formulation in the title of this article indicates just how ad hoc her theorization of the “transnational” as an analytic category remains. Tellingly, moreover, Zhou excludes Ha Jin from her recent book-length study of Asian American verse, The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry, despite the fact that she also employs the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas as a theoretical frame for discussing his poetry. The only difference between Jin and the other poets of Asian descent in the United States that Zhou discusses in her study seems to be the content of his verse and its focus on lives lived outside American borders. For a useful discussion and theoretical elaboration of the recent “transnational turn” in Asian American Studies, see Erika Lee and Naoko Shibusawa, eds., Journal of Asian American Studies 8, no. 3 (2005), especially the editors’ introduction. 9. Xiaojing Zhou, “Writing Otherwise than as a ‘Native Informant’: Ha Jin’s Poetry,” 275. Ha Jin, interview by Cynthia W. Liu, “Writing in Solitude.” As cited in Zhou, “Writing Otherwise than as a ‘Native Informant,’ ” 275. For additional interviews, see Paula E. Geyh, “An Interview with Ha Jin,” Boulevard 17, no. 3 [51] (2002): 127–40; and Liza Nelson, “Ha Jin: An Interview with Liza Nelson,” in Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art 5, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 52–67. 10. Quotation from Rich Rennicks, “A Conversation with Ha Jin.” As quoted in Zhou, “Writing Otherwise than as a ‘Native Informant,’ ” 275. 11. On the liberalist politics of ethnic “recognition,” see Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 28–29. 12. Rey Chow has addressed a related topic in her notion of “coercive mimeticism.” See ibid., 103–8, and passim. 13. All quotations from a personal letter to Tony Barnstone, as quoted in Barnstone, ed., Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry, 35. Ellipsis in the quoted text. 14. For a related critique of recent American translations of contemporary Chinese poetry, especially from the People’s Republic, see especially chapter 6 of Yunte Huang,

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Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in TwentiethCentury American Literature, 164–82. 15. All quotations from Ha Jin, Between Silences: A Voice from China, iv, 1, and back cover. 16. Ibid., 1–2. 17. On the historically persistent connection in the West between sympathy and the Chinese, see Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain. 18. “A Dead Solider Speaks,” in Ha Jin, Between Silences, 5–6. All subsequent citations of this poem come from this source. 19. Thus, for example, one might easily read in Jin’s critique of communism through the image of the plaster statue of Chairman Mao in the introductory note to this poem a discreet reference to another of Pound’s contributions to the category of “American literature,” namely the mass-produced “mould in plaster” that “the age demanded” and the “two gross of broken statues” for which there “died a myriad” of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). 20. “Again, These Days I Have Been Thinking of You,” Ha Jin, Between Silences, 9–10. 21. All poetry citations from “My Kingdom,” ibid., 29–30. 22. All poetry citations from “An Old Novelist’s Will,” ibid., 57–58. 23. All poetry citations from “Ways,” ibid., 63. 24. All poetry citations from “To An Ancient Chinese Poet,” ibid., 65–66. 25. This quotation, “Silence, and silence—either you erupt in/silence, or you perish in silence,” from which Jin has apparently drawn inspiration for the title of Between Silences, appears in the preface to Call to Arms by Lu Xun. 26. “Ways of Talking,” Ha Jin, Facing Shadows, 11. All subsequent citations of this poem come from this source. 27. Further demonstrating the thematic consistency of his work, these traumas set forth in “Ways of Talking” comprise the main themes of Jin’s fiction. 28. All poetry citations from “To My Grandmother Who Died in Manchuria Fourteen Years Ago,” ibid., 12. 29. All poetry citations from “I Sing of an Old Land,” ibid., 19–20. 30. All poetry citations from “A Child’s Nature,” ibid., 22–24. 31. All poetry citations from “June 1989,” ibid., 26–27. 32. All poetry citations from “A Former Provincial Governor Tells of His Dismissal,” ibid., 29–31. 33. For an elaboration of this notion, see Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities, 5–7. 34. All poetry citations from “Gratitude,” Ha Jin, Facing Shadows, 38–40. 35. All poetry citations from “On Receiving a Calendar,” ibid., 45. 36. All poetry citations from “War,” ibid., 53. 37. “To Ah Shu,” ibid., 65–67. All subsequent citations of this poem come from this source.

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38. I take the term Occidentalism from Xiaomei Chen. For an elaboration of this term, which serves a contrastive function to Orientalism, see her Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China. 39. “Yu the Great: A Legend,” Ha Jin, Wreckage, 12. 40. All poetry citations from “Departures,” ibid., 109. 41. See information contained in “Biographical Notes” on Chou Ping and in the introduction to the volume “Chinese Poetry through the Looking Glass” in Tony Barnstone, Out of the Howling Storm, xxi, 35. Barnstone notes that only one other poet in the collection wrote poems originally in English, Ha Jin, who also appears in this anthology. Though, by the time of its publication he had already published Between Silences and won a Pushcart Prize for his fiction, already having been recognized by a dominant American audience. 42. These collections are found in Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping, eds., The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry; and Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping, eds., Chinese Erotic Poems. 43. “Drinking Alone in My Mountain Hut on a Rainy Night,” Chou Ping, Out of the Howling Storm, 111. 44. “9 Flights Between 2 Continents,” ibid., 112.

Chapter 4 1. Basing such assessments on their appearance in mainstream anthologies such as the Norton and Harper anthologies, the other Asian American poet who clearly serves such a “representative” function is Cathy Song. Garrett Hongo and David Mura were also featured in Bill Moyers’s Language of Life: A Festival of Poets and so may also be considered among this group, but their popularity seems less broad. 2. Gerald Stern, foreword to Rose, by Li-Young Lee, 9. 3. B. Weigl, Review of Rose. By Li-Young Lee. Choice 25 (September 1987): 125. 4. Juliana Chang, “Reading Asian American Poetry,” 89. 5. Ibid. See especially 89–94. 6. The quotation comes from Lee’s interview with Bill Moyers, in Moyers, The Language of Life, 258. 7. All quotations from Xiaojing Zhou, “Inheritance and Invention in Li-Young Lee’s Poetry,” 116, 117, 131. 8. On the subject of immigration in Lee’s verse, see Mary Slowik, “Beyond Lot’s Wife: The Immigration Poems of Marilyn Chin, Garrett Hongo, Li-Young Lee, and David Mura,” 221–42. On the subject of eros, see Douglas Basford, “Sexual Desire and Cultural Memory in Three Ethnic Poets,” 243–56. On Lee’s treatment of food and its relation to ethnicity, see Wenying Xu, “Transcendentalism, Ethnicity, and Food in the Work of Li-Young Lee,” 129–57. 9. Dorothy Wang was one of the earliest critics to devote sustained attention to Lee in her PhD dissertation. Moreover, she was among the earliest to try and move beyond

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principally thematic readings of poetic production by writers of Asian descent in the United States. Yet the title of her study, “Necessary Figures: Metaphor, Irony, and Parody in the Poetry of Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, and John Yau,” illustrates the extent to which a hermeneutics of authenticity and the fetishization of “experience” have continued to dominate the treatment of Lee in particular, since she presents the poetic tropes of the title as “necessary.” Of course, this position raises the question of what, precisely, constitutes the “necessity” of these figures, or, in other words, why these particular tropes, rather than any others, remain necessary to represent different ethnic “experiences.” The strongest defenses of “experience” and “identity” as vital categories for reading ethnic literature have come from critics operating within the school of “post-positivist realism,” which has been most closely associated with the work of Satya Mohanty. 10. All quotations from Wenying Xu, “Transcendentalism, Ethnicity, and Food in the Work of Li-Young Lee,” 148. 11. See Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, especially 95–127. 12. Tod Marshall, “To Witness the Invisible: A Talk with Li-Young Lee,” 132. For additional discussions with Lee, see the interview conducted by James Kyung-Jin Lee in Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers, ed. King-Kok Cheung, 270–80; and another conducted by Dianne Bilyak published in Massachusetts Review: A Quarterly of Literature, the Arts and Public Affairs 44, no. 4: 600–612. 13. What might be understood as the “standard” basis for Lee’s developing biographical sketch as a writer, which has served as the foundation for discussions of his life and achievement in reference works such as Asian American Writers (ed. Deborah Madsen), and the Dictionary of Literary Biography 165: American Poets Since World War II, Fourth Series (ed. Joseph Conte), first appears on an untitled page of Rose (71) and repeats again in a structurally identical location in The City in Which I Love You (89). It reads as follows: “Li-Young Lee was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, of Chinese parents. In 1959, his father, after spending a year as a political prisoner in President Sukarno’s jails, fled Indonesia with his family. Between 1959 and 1964 they traveled in Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, until arriving in America.” The content and the trajectory of this description together tacitly reproduce a familiar neoliberal narrative wherein the United States serves as the teleological destination and embodiment of a universal desire for personal and political liberation by constructing Lee’s individual history as one of escape from political oppression in Asia to freedom in America, which gains circular confirmation of its redemptive capacities through the evidence of the books of verse themselves. Moreover, it grounds Lee’s “ethnic” credibility or “authenticity” as an Asian American upon the twin pillars of a specifically named ethnic lineage of biological descent (Chinese) and birth location (Jakarta, Indonesia). Interestingly, this sketch has disappeared entirely from the description presented on the explicitly titled “About the Author” (67) page of his most recent book of poems, My Book of Nights. Completely eliding any direct mention of Lee’s expressly “foreign” pedigree, the new sketch understandably emphasizes his growing list of achievements, replete with scrupulously precise publication information: “Li-Young Lee

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is the author of two previous books of poems, Rose (BOA Editions) and The City in Which I Love You (BOA Editions) and a book-length prose poem, The Winged Seed (Simon and Schuster, cloth; Ruminator, paperback). He has been the recipient of many literary awards, most recently the Lannan Foundation Literary Award, The American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and The PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award. He lives with his wife and sons in Chicago, where he works in a warehouse.” The transformations from the initial description in this newer biographical sketch reflect a number of significant features of Lee’s career so far. First, they most clearly indicate his elevation to the status of an “author” within the realm of contemporary literary production in the United States. Second, they also undoubtedly, in part, reflect Lee’s own explicitly stated desire to transcend the constraints of “ethnic” identity to achieve an untainted “dialogue with his truest self[, h]is most naked spirit.” And third, they implicitly observe and reproduce the conventions of the long-established ideal narrative of achieving total assimilation into the cultural mainstream that has for so long underwritten dominant approaches to questions of ethnicity and ethnic identity in the United States. Thus, the developmental arc of Lee’s poetic career thus far adheres to the ideology of a basic liberal multiculturalist narrative wherein problematic differences such as linguistic difficulty eventually fade, but others features of an “ethnic” heritage get preserved and even valorized as contributing to the cultural breadth and vitality of the nation, as long as they do not pose any fundamental challenges to the established protocols and assumptions of liberal U.S. society and its existing citizens. 14. “Persimmons,” Li-Young Lee, Rose, 17–19. All subsequent citations of this poem come from this source. 15. The term phonotactics refers in linguistics to the system of rules governing sounds and sound patterning in a given language. In Chinese, there is no pr sequence and so it makes perfect sense that Lee as a child would have had difficulty articulating the word precision, pronouncing it instead as percision. Hence the possibility that he could have mistaken it for the word persimmon. Indeed, there are no syllables in Mandarin like CrV, where C = consonant, r = rhotic, V = vowel. English has many: pry, try, cry, etc. For more information on sounds in Mandarin, see P. Ladefoged and I. Maddieson, The Sounds of the World’s Languages. 16. For an account of poetry that foregrounds the role of phonetic mistakes in the work of Korean American poet Myung Mi Kim, see Joseph Jonghyun Jeon, “Speaking in Tongues: Myung Mi Kim’s Stylized Mouths,” 127–48. 17. The ability to speak and understand spoken Chinese differs considerably from the ability to read it. The question of linguistic ability not only shapes the textual fabric of the poem, but it constitutes one of its underlying themes. 18. Of course Lee is not necessarily identical to the subject of the poem. But clearly Lee seeks to articulate an autobiographical lyric subject, so it makes sense to speak of Lee himself as the speaker, while nevertheless keeping in mind the theoretical distinction between the poetic subject and the actual autobiographical subject. 19. Lee’s wife is named Donna, and Rose is dedicated to her.

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20. Tellingly, the transliteration Lee employs for “crickets” is technically incorrect. According to contemporary dictionaries, the standard Mandarin pronunciation of “cricket” in Wade-Giles transliteration is chü1-chü1. In Pin-yin, it is qu-qu. 21. Based on grammar alone, it is impossible to determine to what the phrase applies. Idiomatically, it seems most likely that the yard would be “dewy” and that Lee, through the word shivering, is attempting to collapse the distinction between the environment and its inhabitants. But it could simply be that the line operates via inverted diction, that it is the bodies themselves that are “dewy” and it is with the crickets in the yard that they are “shivering.” Either way, it is a moment of nakedly poetic language. 22. Tim Engles, “Lee’s Persimmons,” 191–92. 23. Though the Pinyin system of transliteration employs an r, the sound it designates in Chinese is a voiced retroflex fricative, rather than a rhotic liquid. This aspect of Chinese phonology is one of the linguistic sources for the stereotype that Asians habitually confuse l’s and r’s in English. For Japanese speakers the problem is even worse, since the sound inventory of that language contains no liquids, but only an alveolar tap. Hence Japanese speakers have even greater difficulties with l’s and r’s than do Chinese speakers. This difference suggests the ways in which the range of Asian languages create different possibilities within so-called “Asian American poetry.” In other words, possibilities for Asian American poetic expression differ precisely according to the specific semantic, phonetic, phonological, and syntactic characteristics of a given Asian language and the way in which they intersect with the characteristics of English. 24. Stephen Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics: Omen of the World, 34. 25. All quotations from Wolfram Eberhard, A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols: Hidden Symbols in Chinese Life and Thought, trans. G. L. Campbell, 58, 146, 232–33. 26. Anthony Yu, trans., The Journey to the West, vol. 3, 272. According to Yu, this character quotes from another, ancient source, the Yu-yang tsa-tsu, which indicates the depth of the tradition surrounding persimmons in Chinese culture. See also 446n1. 27. All quotations from Li-Yong Lee, The Winged Seed, 76–78. 28. Jeffrey F. L. Partridge, “The Politics of Ethnic Authorship: Li-Young Lee, Emerson, and Whitman at the Banquet Table,” 107–8. 29. Wenying Xu, “Transcendentalism, Ethnicity, and Food in the Work of Li-Young Lee,” 151. 30. “cleave, v.1” and “cleave, v.2”, The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989, OED Online. Oxford University Press. 11 March 2010 . 31. “The Cleaving,” Li-Young Lee, The City in Which I Love You, 77–87. All subsequent citations of this poem come from this source. 32. Clearly, in a historically referential sense, this market is more accurately thought of as “Chinese American” in that it operates within the United States, and therefore owes a certain part of its very existence as an “ethnic” market, rather than just as a “market,” to the prevailing social, cultural, and economic environment. But within the context of the poem, the linguistic signifier, “Hon Kee,” remains identifiably “Chinese,” and more specifically, “Cantonese.”

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33. Wenying Xu, “Transcendentalism, Ethnicity, and Food in the Work of Li-Young Lee,” 151. Xu usefully observes the intertextuality among different Chinese/American literary works centered around the legend of Yue Fei. As she points out, the words of revenge tattooed on the back of the female protagonist in “The White Tiger” section of The Woman Warrior stem from this legend. In his controversial essay, “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake” (in The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature, 1–93), Frank Chin criticizes Kingston for “inaccurately” feminizing this legend. For a different critique of Kingston’s deployment of this legend, one that resonates with my own position, see Yunte Huang, Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature, 154–59. 34. Wenying Xu, “Transcendentalism, Ethnicity, and Food in the Work of Li-Young Lee,” 151. 35. See also Eric Hayot’s discussion of American anxieties during the nineteenth century over Chinese dietary habits in The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain, 141–44. 36. Wenying Xu, “Transcendentalism, Ethnicity, and Food in the Work of Li-Young Lee,” 154. 37. All quotations are from Jeffrey Partridge, “The Politics of Ethnic Authorship: LiYoung Lee, Emerson, and Whitman at the Banquet Table,” 111. 38. Interview with Li-Young Lee, conducted by James Kyung-Jin Lee, in Words Matter Conversations with Asian American Writers, ed. King-Kok Cheung, 275–76. Furthermore, in this interview, Lee confirms Whitman as both an influence and a spur to his own goals as a poet. This admission supports the argument made above about the relevance of Whitman to the rhetorical posture and conceptual fabric of “The Cleaving.” 39. Li-Young Lee, The Winged Seed, 76. 40. Ibid., 144–45. 41. Fenollosa’s now widely discredited views of the structure and development of written Chinese appear most famously in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: For an updated and contextualized presentation of this seminal work, see the recent critical edition of Fenollosa’s famous essay edited by Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein. 42. These translations include his highly unconventional renderings of three of the “Four Books” of the Confucian philosophical tradition, The Great Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, and The Analects (in Pound’s unorthodox renderings), as well the Book of Odes, or as Pound named it, The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius. 43. See my Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language, especially 153–88. 44. Most recently, Lee published his latest volume, Behind My Eyes: Poems, in 2008 by Norton. 45. “A Table in the Wilderness,” Li-Young Lee, Book of My Nights, 3–5. All subsequent citations of this poem come from this source.

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Chapter 5 1. Marilyn Chin, “Meridians Interview with Marilyn Chin,” Meridians, 68. 2. Marilyn Chin, “An Interview with Marilyn Chin,” The Indiana Review, 112. 3. Ibid., 119. 4. Tarisa Matsumoto, “Foxtrot with Marilyn: An Interview,” Page to Page: Retrospectives of Writers from The Seattle Review, ed. Colleen McElroy, 217. See also Thom Tammaro and Kristin Garaas-Johnson, “The Rigorous Muse: A Conversation with Poet Marilyn Chin,” 19. 5. Interestingly, Chin has appeared in the Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry. Though this volume presents a national configuration, its focus on poetry also distinguishes it from other anthologies that strive to encompass the category of “American literature” throughout its generic variety. 6. Mary Slowik, “Beyond Lot’s Wife: The Immigration Poems of Marilyn Chin, Garrett Hongo, Li-Young Lee, and David Mura,” especially 226–32 and 237–38. 7. George Uba, “Versions of Identity in Post-Activist Asian American Poetry,” in Reading the Literatures of Asian America, ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling; John Gery, “ ‘Mocking My Own Ripeness’: Authenticity, Heritage, and Self-Erasure in the Poetry of Marilyn Chin”; and Adrienne McCormick, “ ‘Being Without’: Marilyn Chin’s Poems as Feminist Acts of Theorizing,” at http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/ chin/mccormick.htm (accessed August 1, 2009). 8. Xiaojing Zhou, The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry, especially chapter 2. 9. All quoations from Tarisa Matsumoto, “Foxtrot with Marilyn: An Interview,” 204, 210. 10. “An Interview with Marilyn Chin,” The Indiana Review, 113. 11. “A Chinaman’s Chance,” Marilyn Chin, Dwarf Bamboo, 29. 12. Chin mentions her connection with Adrienne Rich in Matsumoto, “Foxtrot with Marilyn: An Interview,” 210. For a useful discussion of Chin’s affiliation and relation with feminism and especially women of color feminism, see McCormick, “ ‘Being Without.’ ” 13. Tarisa Matsumoto, “Foxtrot with Marilyn: An Interview,” 211. 14. Not insignificantly, this formulation accords with Josephine Park’s and Timothy Yu’s conception of the relationship between American modernism and Asian American poetry as avant-garde formations. 15. “An Interview with Marilyn Chin,” The Indiana Review, 116. 16. For a discussion of the treatment of femininity in Cathay, see my Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language, especially chapter 1. 17. “Li Qing, Heart of Han,” Marilyn Chin, Dwarf Bamboo, 9–10. 18. Ibid. 19. “The Landlord’s Wife,” Marilyn Chin, Dwarf Bamboo, 11–12. 20. “The Politician’s Wife,” Marilyn Chin, Dwarf Bamboo, 10, 12, 13. 21. For a discussion of the interest in Buddhism among the Beat writers in particular, see chapter 2 in Josephine Park, Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics.

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22. Other poems in the collection that feature brief explanatory notes include “South Folk in Cold Country” and “Sennin Poem by Kakuhaku.” Importantly, Pound’s footnotes tend to provide interpretive glosses on the poems, whereas Chin’s notes offer explanatory historical information. The difference in the content of the footnotes indicates the different goals motivating their respective representations of Chinese culture, history, and identity. 23. “An Interview with Marilyn Chin,” The Indiana Review, 114–15. 24. Ibid., 115–16. 25. Tarisa Matsumoto, “Foxtrot with Marilyn: An Interview,” 211. 26. The poem in question is titled in English “Climbing Phoenix Terrace in Chinling,” number 08569 in Takeo Hiraoka, Kokichi Ichihara, and Kiyoshi Imai, eds., Tōdai no shihen, Tang Civilization Reference Series, 11–12. The line reads in the original, 鳳去 臺空江自流, which translates roughly into, “the phoenix is gone, the terrace is empty; the river flows on by itself.” 27. This phrase describing the thematic content of Chinese Quatrains is Chin’s own, as related in “An Interview with Marilyn Chin,” 116. About this poem, she further notes that “the quatrains read like little epitaphs, and even are shaped like headstones” (117). 28. For additional information on this particular form in classical Chinese poetry, see James J. Y. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry, especially 26–29. 29. “Chinese Quatrains,” Marilyn Chin, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow: Poems, 24, 26. 30. “The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty,” Marilyn Chin, The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty, 46. 31. “Rhapsody in Plain Yellow,” Marilyn Chin, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, 96. 32. “To Pursue the Limitless,” Marilyn Chin, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, 86. 33. Ibid., 87. 34. Tarisa Matsumoto, “Foxtrot with Marilyn: An Interview,” 205. 35. “An Interview with Marilyn Chin,” The Indiana Review, 113. 36. Tarisa Matsumoto, “Foxtrot with Marilyn: An Interview,” 205. 37. John Gery, “ ‘Mocking My Own Ripeness’: Authenticity, Heritage, and Self-Erasure in the Poetry of Marilyn Chin,” 35; Adrienne McCormick “ ‘Being Without’: Marilyn Chin’s Poems as Feminist Acts of Theorizing,” 5; Xiaojing Zhou, The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry, 90. 38. “How I Got That Name,” Marilyn Chin, The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty, 16. 39. All poetry citations from ibid., 17. 40. All poetry citations from ibid., 17–18. 41. I take this term from Charles Altieri’s fine discussion of “How I Got That Name” in “Images of Form vs. Images of Content in Contemporary Asian-American Poetry,” 75. 42. “How I Got That Name,” Marilyn Chin, The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty, 18. 43. All quotations from Charles Altieri, “Images of Form vs. Images of Content in Contemporary Asian-American Poetry,” 76–77. In her study, Zhou takes explicit issue with Altieri’s assessment of “How I Got That Name.” See The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry, 91–92.

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44. “A Portrait of the Self as Nation, 1990–1991,” Marilyn Chin, The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty, 92–97. All subsequent citations of this poem come from this source. 45. As a kind of validation of this claim, both these references are specifically clarified by the explanatory notes that accompany the poem. As the notes to “A Portrait of the Self as Nation, 1990–1991” relate, hookworm and tracoma were “two diseases that kept many Chinese detained and quarantined at Angel Island” (97); and Hibakushas are the “scarred survivors of the atom bomb and their deformed descendants” (97). For additional discussion of the public health apparatus that underwrote the policy of Chinese exclusion, see Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown. 46. See Adrienne McCormick, “‘Being Without,’” 9. 47. See “Love Song” in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. 1, 107–108. 48. “That Half Is Almost Gone,” Marilyn Chin, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, 17–19. All subsequent citations of this poem come from this source. 49. In her notes to the poem, Chin explicitly mentions that “‘ai, ai’ is an exclamation homophonous with ai/love, punning love with pain” (“Notes,” Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, 105). 50. “Cauldron,” Marilyn Chin, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, 34–38. 51. In her notes to the poem, Chin relates that “the poem is shaped like a myriad of bronze, three-legged ceremonial cauldrons (ding) [鼎] one piled on top of another. The final shape should look like one large, abstracted cauldron” (“Notes,” Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, 105–6). 52. “To Pursue the Limitless,” Marilyn Chin, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, 85–87. All subsequent citations of this poem come from this source. 53. Rey Chow has usefully described this basic stance in The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism as a “politics of recognition.” 54. See, for example, Pound’s use of the character 莫 in Canto 84 and elsewhere. 55. Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 107. In the light of Chow’s analysis, it is tempting to regard variations in the levels of public acclaim for different “ethnic” poets as an indication of the degree of ideological complicity by any given writer with the existing values of the cultural dominant.

Chapter 6 1. I would also add to this event the solidification of “Asian American literature” as a cultural category. For the publication of Kingston’s The Woman Warrior in 1976 and its subsequent canonization specifically as an “ethnic” work confirmed the viability of both notions. Among the significant collections of poetry that Yau has published in addition to the two volumes mentioned above include Corpse and Mirror (1983); Radiant Silhouette: New and Selected Work, 1974–1988 (1989); Edificio Sayonara (1992); Forbidden Entries (1996); and Borrowed Love Poems (2002).

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2. John Yau, “Between the Forest and Its Trees: Where we are is in a sentence. Jack Spicer,” 40. 3. Ibid., 41. 4. John Yau, Edificio Sayonara, 39. 5. See the introduction, 26–7. 6. John Yau, Radiant Silhouette, 188. 7. For a discussion of Yau’s work and the significance of its formal inventiveness as an expression of Asian American culture, see Charles Altieri, “Images of Form vs. Images of Content in Contemporary Asian-American Poetry,” 71–91. 8. Josephine Park, Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics, 105–6, 118–21. 9. The erotic stands out as another of Yau’s primary themes, along with language itself. For a discussion of Yau’s eroticism, see Edward Foster, “John Yau and the Seductions of Everything That Used to Be,” 36–39. 10. In fact, Talisman has devoted an entire issue of the journal to “John Yau’s Poetics.” See Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 5 (Fall 1990). 11. So, for example, Yau does not appear in the most recent editions of mainstream anthologies such as the Norton Anthology of American Literature, and The Harper Anthology of American Literature, both of which have come to feature Asian American poets operating in the lyric testimonial mode. Similarly, in comparison to Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, and Ha Jin, Yau has been largely ignored by the awarders of prizes and fellowship. To date, he has only garnered one National Endowment for the Arts fellowship (1977–78), two Ingram Merrill Foundation fellowships (1979–80 and 1985–86), a New York Foundation for the Arts award (1988), and a handful of other small literary prizes. Tellingly, one exception to this general exclusion of Yau from nationally configured anthologies of “American literature” is The Oxford Book of American Poetry, 2006, edited by David Lehman. Included in this collection are the poems “Domestic Bliss” and “January 18, 1979.” 12. Other poets operating in this mode include Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Myung Mi Kim, Fred Wah, and others. 13. As Timothy Yu has pointed out, most reviews and interviews have focused on Yau’s efforts as art critic and his poetic influences over his engagement with issues of ethnic identity. Comparably, mainstream anthologies have generally included Yau’s work under the general rubric of postmodernism. See, for example, Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, edited by Paul Hoover (1994), which includes the lyrics, “Cenotaph,” “Chinese Villanelle,” and “Engines of Gloom and Affection,” rather than poems with a more evident “ethnic” theme. Also consider Yu’s observation regarding the uncertainty displayed even by interested readers from culturally dominant audiences about the relationship between Yau’s work and his ethnic identity. Thus, Yu notes, in her review of Forbidden Entries, Marjorie Perloff “could remark of Yau’s early work, ‘there was no indication, at this stage of Yau’s’ career, that the poet is in fact Chinese American” (39), while citing a book jacket description of him as “the most important Chinese American

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poet of our time’” (40). As cited in Timothy Yu, “Form and Identity in Language Poetry and Asian American Poetry,” 444–45. 14. Timothy Yu, “Form and Identity in Language Poetry and Asian American Poetry,” 433. 15. See Dorothy Wang, “Necessary Figures: Metaphor, Irony, and Parody in the Poetry of Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, and John Yau (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1998); and “Undercover Asian: John Yau and the Poetics of Ethnic SelfIdentification.” 16. See George Uba, “Versions of Identity in Post-Activist Asian America Poetry;” and Juliana Chang, “Reading Asian American Poetry.” See also Charles Altieri, “Images of Form vs. Images of Content in Contemporary Asian-American Poetry.” 17. See Timothy Yu, “Form and Identity in Language Poetry and Asian American Poetry,” and Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1985. 18. See “The I of Changes, the Destroying I, the Its of the I,” in Xiaojing Zhou, The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry, 196–228. 19. Edward Foster, “An Interview with John Yau,” 43. 20. Yau studied with Ashbery as a graduate student at Brooklyn College while earning his MFA. 21. “Peter Lorre Dreams He Is the Third Reincarnation of a Geisha,” John Yau, Forbidden Entries, 81–82. 22. “Movies as a Form of Reincarnation: Boris Karloff Remembers Being Chinese on More Than One Occasion,” John Yau, Borrowed Love Poems, 34–35. 23. Timothy Yu, “Form and Identity in Language Poetry and Asian American Poetry,” 424. 24. “Mon Alias, Mona Lisa,” John Yau, Forbidden Entries, 109–12. All subsequent citations of this poem come from this source. 25. As mentioned above, however, “Genghis Chan: Private Eye” is only one of Yau’s extended sequences, testifying to another one of his distinctions among writers of Asian descent in the United States in pioneering what is effectively a new genre within Asian American literary production. Other important sequences include “Angel Atrapado,” “Big Island Notebook,” and “Postcards from Trakl,” all in Edificio Sayonara along with “Genghis Chan: Private Eye.” 26. As noted previously, “Genghis Chan: Private Eye, 1–7” are currently most readily available in John Yau, Radiant Silhouette, 189–195; sections 8–20 appear in Edificio Sayonara, 73–87; sections 21–28 appear in Forbidden Entries, 92–106; and sections 29–30 appear in Borrowed Love Poems, 37–38. All subsequent citations of this extended poem come from these sources. 27. See also the early Chinese-inspired lyrics by Pound, “Liu Ch’e,” “After Ch’u Yuan,” “Fan-piece, for Her Imperial Lord,” and “Ts’ai Chi’h.” 28. However, familiarity with the notebooks on Yau’s part is an easily plausible scenario, since their contents have for some time been readily available in academic circles

NOTES TO PAGES 257–264

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for scholarly examination. This public dissemination of what started out as an entirely personal enterprise is due precisely to the publication and eventual canonization of Cathay. 29. Practically every critic who has written on Yau has discussed this section of Genghis Chan: Private Eye” in particular, though so far only briefly. In my discussion, I have built on the foundational work of Timothy Yu, Xiaojing Zhou, and Dorothy Wang in particular. 30. See Park, Apparitions of Asia, 95; and Timothy Yu, Race and the Avant-Garde, 1–10.

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INDEX

Asian American verse, 41, 56, 57, 61, 95, 142, 144, 189, 207, 209, 216, 236, 266, 268, 269 connections to romanticism, 11, 13–4, 158, 221, 234 development and theorization of, 10–16, 98, 99–101, 107–8, 217, 231, 263, 267 assimilation, 60, 115, 137, 162–3, 164, 174, 182, 204, 216, 234, 240, 248, 249, 250, 258, 262–3 Austin, J.L., 50 authenticity, 43–4, 106, 115, 145, 164, 169, 172, 269, 294n13

African American culture and literature, 8–9, 17–8, 35, 67, 89–90, 187 Ahearn, Barry, 279n32 Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of AsianAmerican Writers, 99, 237 Althusser, Louis, 239 Altieri, Charles, 207–9, 299n41, 299n43 America is in the Heart, 11–2 Angel Island Immigration Station, 12, 34, 63, 70–1, 101, 266 detainees, 65–6, 72–4, 76, 82, 86–9, 98, 101, 112, 115, 166, 266 Anglo-American modernism, engagement with Chinese and Japanese cultures, 40, 254 relation to Angel Island poems, 66, 67 Appadurai, Arjun, 68–70, 72, 74 Ashbery, John, 240 Asian American ethnic category, 97, 99, 111–2, 290n5 Asian American literature, 3–4, 6, 8, 10–11, 13–14, 22, 24, 38, 63, 66, 103, 238, 264, 267 Asian American movement, 10, 15, 35, 56, 95–9, 103, 147, 161, 190, 209, 235, 238, 267 Asian American studies, 5–6, 11, 14, 16, 17, 20, 62, 63, 65, 144

Bakhtin, M.M., 19–20 Balibar, Etienne, 30 Barkan, Elazar, 102 Barnstone, Tony, 140, 141, 293n41 Basho, 198, 242 Beat poetry, 40, 235 Berman, Antoine, 281n55 Bernstein, Michael, 280n41 Berryman, John 198, 205–6, 208 Bhaba, Homi, 9, 18–21, 31–2 Bidart, Frank, 123 bildungsroman, 111, Billings, Timothy, 286n43 birds in English poetry, 13, 158 319

320

INDEX

Boas, Franz, 102 Bruchac, Joseph, 100, 237 Bulosan, Carlos, 11–12, 96, 97 theory of poetry, 12 Bush, Christopher, 7, 105–6, 276n8, 286n43 Bush, Ronald, 54 Cantonese dialect, 73, 75, 165–6, 201, 259–60, 296n32 catachresis, 33–4, 107, 114, 137, 233, 249 Cathay, 41–62, 67 and authenticity, 43 depiction of Chinese emotion in, 48–9, 54–6, 60 distinctive idiom of, 50–1 and liberal multiculturalism, 60 and modern poetry 43, 45, 57, 277n15 and Orientalism, 42, 44, 57 origins of, 45–6, 48 racial lumping in, 43, 51, 61 relation to Asian American verse, 41–4, 56, 60–2, 149, 173, 194–8, 206, 239, 240, 254–7, 266 The Beautiful Toilet,” 57, 58, 60, 195 “The City of Choan,” 55 “Exile’s Letter,” 54, 58 “The Jewel Stair’s Grievance,” 55, 58, 198 “Lament of the Frontier Guard, 54 “The River Merchants Wife: A Letter,” 52, 54, 194, 195 “Song of the Bowmen of Shu,” 54, 57 Cavafy, C.P., 198 Chan, Charlie, 248 Chan, Sucheng, 284n23 Chandra, G.S. Sharat, 96 Chang, Juliana, 90, 91, 96, 144, 238, 288n2 Chang, Victoria, 4 Chapple, Ann, 54 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 8 Cheadle, Mary Patterson, 279n31 Chen, Xiaomei, 293n38 Chen, Duxiu 72, 75

Cheng, Anne Anlin, 271n4, 273n22 Cheng, Vincent, 277n16 Cheung King-kok, 96, 272n12, 288n2 Chiang, Mark, 289n26 Chin, Frank, 99, 106 Chin, Marilyn, 37, 89, 139, 187–230, 232, 239, 268–9 activist ethos, 188–90, 209 conception of ethnicity, 188, 190, 192–4 connection with racial protest, 187–8, 192–3, 209, 213, 223, 229 engagement with African American culture, 187–9, 216 engagement with dominant American modernist literature, 193–7, 198, 206, 208, 216, 227 engagement with Chinese literature, 199–203, 216 engagement with Japanese literature, 198 and feminism, 193, 210 poetic reputation, 188–9 relation to lyric testimony, 187, 192, 203–4, 209, 216–7, 219, 226, 228–30 scholasticism, 188, 197–8 self-description, 190–1 use of Chinese language elements, 201, 218–21, 223–30 works by, Dwarf Bamboo, 193, 199 “A Chinaman’s Chance,” 192 “First Lessons” 22–3, 201 “The Landlord’s Wife,” 194–7 “Li Qing, Heart of Han,” 194–7 “The Politician’s Wife,” 194–7 The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty, 201 “How I Got That Name,” 204–9, 215 “A Portrait of the Self as Nation, 1990–1991,” 209–16 Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, 198 “Blues on Yellow,” 198, 216 “Cauldron,” 221–2

INDEX

“Chinese Quatrains,” 200–1, 222 “Rhapsody in Plain Yellow,” 202 “That Half Is Almost Gone,” 217–21 To Pursue the Limitless,” 202–3, 222–30 Chinese/American verse, 6, 36, 38, 41, 56, 57, 60, 63, 108, 112, 142, 186, 191, 194, 231–4, 237, 240, 264, 265–70 use of solidus, 272n7 Chinese exclusion, 42, 44, 46, 56, 63, 66, 71, 76, 82, 84, 86, 95, 97, 98, 102, 161, 173, 265, 267, 279n28 Chinese modernism (See May Fourth Movement) Chow, Rey, 13, 112–3, 114, 116, 146, 188, 230, 284n30, 289n24 Chuh, Kandace, 272n11 civil rights movement, 161, 267 classical Chinese poetry, 74–7, 98 coercive mimeticism, 146, 188, 230 Concepción, Marcelo de Grazia, 96 coolie, 28, 46, 47–8, 129, 135, 276n4 counterpoetics, 8, 28, 38, 66, 67, 82, 107, 152, 173, 185, 186, 189, 192, 193, 194, 203–4, 209, 231, 235, 239, 240, 241, 244, 247, 254–6, 260, 264, 266, 269 cross-fertilization, 37, 150–1, 179, 181, 188, 201, 218, 224, 260 definition, 22 Cullen, Countee, 147 Cultural Revolution, 25, 36, 109, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 127, 129 DeFrancis, John, 284n27 Dembo, L.S., 279n31 Denton, Kirk A., 284n25 Derrida, Jacques, 50 Ding, Ling, 72 Domingo, Plácido, 110 Dun, Tan, 110 Eberhard, Wolfram, 160 ekphrasis, 221 Eliot, T. S., 67, 125, 128, 174, 194, 198

321

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 164, 172–3 Engles, Tim, 154 English language, and transparency, 7, 15, 38, 58, 60–1, 114, 115, 120, 130, 140, 161, 190, 198, 219, 225, 263 politics of, 8 as theme in Asian American verse, 149–55 universality of, 7–8, 117, 120, 132, 138 Espiritu, Yen Le, 42, 134, 277n11 ethnic abstraction, 38, 53, 180, 187, 203–4, 226, 229, 232, 236, 238, 241, 244, 247, 254, 263, 265, 269 definition of, 15–6, ethnicity, as category of difference, 6, 35, 74, 95, 101–07, 134, 145, 234, 264 etymology of, 105 initial appearance of, 102 ethnopoetics, 24 (see also Lim, Shirley) Evans, Gareth, 280n36 European imperialism in China, 47, 72, 209–10 family resemblance, 40, 257 Fenollosa, Ernest, 23, 44–9, 58, 59, 76, 101, 182, 261 notebooks of, 45, 48, 257 views of Asian civilizations, 45–8 The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, 53, 179 Filipino American verse, 96–7 flexible citizenship (See Aihwa Ong) Frost, Robert, 126, 128, 194 Fujita, Jun, 98 Gates, Henry Louis, 104 Gee, Jennifer, 283n18 Gery, John, 190, 204 Giles, Herbert, 42, 59–60, 280n40 Glazer, Nathan, 103, 105 grafting, 121, 128, 158, 165, 200, 208 definition, 24

322

INDEX

ideograms, 23, 182, 261 ideogrammic method, 53, imagism, 49, 52, 55, 254 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, 101, 266 Inada, Lawson Fusao, 10, 90–1, 99 Iwanaga, Esther, 143

Jarry, Madeleine, 276n8 Jazz and Asian American poetry, 35, 67, 84–93 Jeon, Joseph Jonghyun, 285n16 Jin, Ha, 25, 36, 109–12, 114, 116, 196, 197, 232, 267–8, 271n4 and humanist universalism, 115–6, 120 works by Between Silences, 110, 117–28, 129, 139 “A Dead Soldier’s Talk,” 120–3 “Again, These Days I have Been Thinking of You,” 124 An Old Novelist’s Will,” 125–6 “Because I Will Be Silenced,” 119, 127 “My Kingdom,” 124–5 “My Knowledge of the Russian Language” 25–6, 124 “To an Ancient Chinese Poet,” 126–7 “Ways,” 126 Facing Shadows, 110, 129–39 “A Child’s Nature,” 132–3 “A Former Provincial Governor Tells of His Dismissal,” 133–4 “Gratitude,” 134–5 “I Sing of an Old Land,” 131–2 “June, 1989,” 133 “On Receiving a Calendar,” 135 “To Ah Shu,” 136–9 “To My Grandmother Who Died in Manchuria Fourteen Years Ago,” 130–1 “War,” 136 “Ways of Talking,” 129–30 Waiting, 109, 110, 125 Wreckage, 110 “Departures,” 140 “Yu the Great: A Legend,” 139–40 Journey to the West, 160

Jang, Jon, 91–2 Japanese American verse, 96–7

Karloff, Boris, 242 Keats, John, 221

Greeley, Andrew M., 103, 105 haiku, 98, 235–6, 256, 288n8 Handlin, Oscar, 103 Hartmann, [Carl] Sadakichi, 96, 97, 98, 288n3 Hayot, Eric, 7, 272n11, 276n4, 276n7, 278n26, 282n12, 290n2, 291n17, 297n35 Hom, Marlon, 10, 11, 75, 98, 273n14, 285n40 Hongo, Garrett, 100, 237 Howe, Irving, 106 Hsu, Madeleine, 84, 282n10, 282n14, 284n24 Hu, Shi, 75 Huang, John, 111 Huang, Yunte, 7, 80, 276n3, 277n10, 281n1, 287n62, 287n68, 291n14 Hughes, Langston, 147 humanist universalism, 115–6, 117, 130, 132, 142 hybridity, critique of, 16–21, 27 dominance in Asian American studies, 9, 16–7, 20–1, 145, 181 etymology, 21–2 and postcolonial studies, 18–9, 20–1 as theorized by Bakhtin, 19–20 hybridization strategies, 17, 21–28 (see also cross-fertilization, grafting, mimcry, mutation, transplantation)

INDEX

Kenner, Hugh, 45, 54, 57, 58, 275n1, 280n39 Kern, Robert, 275n1 Khan, Genghis, 248 Kim, Willyce, 96 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 3–4, 10, 12, 15, 38, 56, 100, 106, 111, 208, 225, 233, 260, theory of poetry, 12–15 works by The Fifth Book of Peace, 4, 271n3 To Be the Poet, 3–4, 13–15, 100 The Woman Warrior, 23, 225, 300n1 Kiyooka, Roy, 96 Kodama, Sanehide, 54 Kogawa, Joy, 96 Koshy, Susan, 5 Kowallis, Jon, 285n38 Kripke, Saul, 280n36 Kwan, Moon, 99 Lai, Him Mark, 10, 64, 73, 74, 77, 83, 88, 273n14, 281n2, 285n35 Language poetry, 238, 243, 244 Latino/Latina culture and literature, 8–9, 17–8 Lee, Erika, 64, 71, 84, 277n17, 281n47 Lee, Li-Young, 36–7, 89, 100, 139, 142, 143–86, 187, 189, 196, 197, 232, 260 as representative Asian American poet, 144, 147, 163, 177, 183–5 knowledge of Chinese language, 150–3, 162, 164–6, 169, 178–81, 182 rejection of ethnic label, 16–7, 162, 176, 177–8, 182, 185 views of the body, 148, 150, 152, 160, 166 works by Book of My Nights, 182–85, 294n13 “A Table in the Wilderness,” 182–5 The City in Which I Love You,

323

“The Cleaving,” 163–176, 177, 185 and American transcendentalism, 163, 172–3, 175 and biological essentialism, 164, 166, 170 and ethnic identity, 164 and the legend of Yue Fei, 169 and liberal multiculturalism, 173–75 Rose, 143 “Persimmons,” 145, 148–162, 168, 181, 185 authenticity in, 149, 152 and Chinese symbolism, 160–1 as representative Asian American poem, 148–9 masculinity in, 155–8 the maternal in, 156–9 and politics of assimilation, 162–3, 164, 174, 182 The Winged Seed, 162 Lee, Robert G., 42, 275n53, 281n47 Lee, Wen ho, 111 Leong, Karen, 56 Levinas, Emmanuel, 204, 238 Lew, Walter, 237 liberal multiculturalism, 13, 16, 36–7, 41, 60, 95, 101, 104, 106, 110, 113, 116, 118, 119, 120, 128, 130, 134, 139, 140, 145, 161, 173, 180, 185, 189–90, 197, 223, 225–6, 229, 231, 234, 238, 240, 241, 247, 248, 249, 260, 262, 263, 265, 267, 268, 295n13 Lim, Genny, 10, 91–2, 267 Lim, Shirley, 24, 271n5 Ling, Jinqi, 5, 274n34 Liu, James J.Y., 285n33, 299n28 Liu, Lydia, 276n8, 279n27, 284n25 Longenbach, James, 278n21 Lorre, Peter, 241–2 Lowe, Lisa, 5, 9, 17–9, 20, 145 Lowell, Amy, 67, 276n3 Lu, Xun, 72, 74, 127, 285n38

324

INDEX

Lye, Colleen, 7, 30, 42, 46, 47, 275n53, 275n55, 276n4, 277n9, 277n17, 288n3 lyric testimony, 37, 56, 60, 61, 92, 95, 96, 100–01, 107, 114, 131, 139, 182, 226, 231, 237, 240, 241, 247, 260, 261–2, 263, 265, 266, 267, 269, 270, 290n1 definition, 14–5 in works of Li-Young Lee, 147, 161–3, 171, 174, 177–80, 182, 183–5 in works of Marilyn Chin, 187, 189, 190, 192, 197, 199, 203, 209, 224, 228–30 Madame Butterfly, 196, 212–3 Mandarin dialect of Chinese, 73, 150–1, 155, 162, 165, 201–2, 218, 226–7 Mao, Zedong, 121, 124, 197 masculinity, 56, 155–76, 248, 250, 251, 260 May Fourth movement, 72, 75–6 McCormick, Adrienne, 190, 204, 215 mimicry, 182, 226, 260 definition, 23–4 model minority stereotype, 28, 30, 204–5, 229, 248 Moyers, Bill, 143, 189 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 103, 105 Mura, David, 100 mutation, 6, 235, 256 definition, 26–7 narrative, dominance in Asian American studies, 5, 9, 29, 177 Native American ethnic category, relation to Asian American, 272n10 Naturalization Act of 1790, 34, 83 Nazism, 102 New Criticism, 33, Ngai, Mae, 97, 272n11, 289n12 Nguyen, Viet, Noguchi, Yone, 96, 97, 98 Noh drama, 39, 45, 48, 67 Novak, Michael, 103, 105

Obama, Barack, 106, 265, 270 occidentalism, 138 Omi, Michael, 28, 29, 104 Ong, Aihwa, 69–70, 83 orientalism, 31, 48, 60, 113, 144, 224, 236, 242, 258 and Anglo-American modernism, 39, 40, 44, 57, 98, 114, 138, 144, 197 Owen, Stephen, 157 Palumbo-Liu, David, 7, 13, 42, 43, 272n7, 273n19, 276n9, 277n10, 290n3 Park, Josephine, 4, 11, 39, 95, 98, 99, 235, 264, 272n5, 275n48, 276n2, 278n22, 287n68, 288n3, 288n8, 288n10, 289n26 Park, Robert E., 102 Parsons, Talcott, 105 Partridge, Jeffrey, 164, 172–3 Phoenix Poets series, 110 Ping, Chou, 140–2 Ping, Wang, 116 poetics, 28, 30–34 Pope, Alexander, 226 Porter, David, 276n8 postcolonial studies, 9, 16, 18, 20 (see also Bhaba, Homi and Spivak, Gayatri) post-ethnicity, 265, 270 postmodernism, 234 Pound, Ezra, engagement with Chinese literature, 41, 76 ignorance of Chinese language, 50 interpretation of Chinese characters 23, 53, 179, 261 relation to Asian American verse, 39, 43, 51, 56, 61, 123, 128, 149, 194–7, 227, 239 works by The Cantos, 53, 61, 202 Cathay, 34, 41–62, 67, 114, 123, 124, 125, 128, 139, 173, 179, 239 (see also Cathay) “Liu Ch’e,” 53 “Ts’ai Chi’h,” 52

INDEX

Qian, Zhaoming, 275n1 race, idea of, 6, 46, 267 relation to minority culture in the U.S., 9, 35, 101–02, 104 racial formation, 28, 29 racial lumping, 42, 43, 51, 61, 168, 242, 266 racial protest, 95, 96, 99–100, 107, 187, 190, 204, 209, 223, 233, 238, 241, 247, 265, 266, 268 definition, 12 racialization of Asians in the U.S., 9, 28–34, 42, 46, 83, 91, 95, 98, 240 and poetics, 28–34 Rafael, Vicente, 281n55 realism, 115, 116, 118, 120, 128, 133, 136, 139, 157, 169, 220, 224, 233, 237, 262, 268 recognition, politics of, 116, 119, 229, 237, 240, 242, 261, 263 Rich, Adrienne, 193 Riesman, David, 103 romanticism, and Asian American poetry, 11, 13–4, 221, 234 Rukeyser, Muriel, 193 Said, Edward, 31 San Juan Jr., Epifanio, 96 Saussy, Haun, 278n19, 279n33, 286n43 “The Seafarer,” 8, 276n6 Searle, John, 280n36 Seferis, George, 209–10 Shah, Nayan, 29–30, 64, 71, 84, 275n53 Shakespeare, William, 211 Shih, shu-mei, 284n25 Sino-Japanese war, 72 Slowik, Mary, 190 Smith, Arthur, 31, 47–8, 55, 278n27 Snyder, Gary, 235 Sollors, Werner, 102, 105, 282n11, 285n31

325

Song, Cathy, 100 Spanish as cultural medium, 9 Spence, Jonathan, 276n8 Spivak, Gayatri, 32–4 Srikanth, Rajini, 143 Steiner, George, 43 stereotype, 28, 30, 31, 32, 50, 55, 84, 107, 123, 134, 152, 170, 197, 204, 229, 233, 238, 240, 242, 248, 249 Stern, Gerald, 144 Stevens Wallace, 141 Sun, Yat-sen, 72 Takaki, Ronald, 64, 101, 104, 279n28, 283n20 Talisman, 236 Tan, Amy, 23 Tanaka, Stefan, 279n30 Ting, Walasse, 99 transplantation, 37, 67, 114–5, 188, 201, 208, 219, 227 definition, of 25 Tsiang, H.T., 12, 97, 99 Uba, George, 89, 190, 238, Villa, José García, 96, 97 Wah, Fred, 97 Waley, Arthur, 42, 59–60 Wand, David Hsin-fu, 11, 99 Wang, David Der-wei, 285n39 Wang, Dorothy, 238, 241, 293n9 Wang, L. Ling-chi, 143 Weigl, B., 144 West, Cornel, 104 Whitman, Walt, 131, 141, 163, 173 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 40 Williams, William Carlos, 194, 198, 205–6, 208, 216 Winant, Howard, 28, 29, 104 Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia, 23, 275n48 Xu Wenying, 145, 146, 164, 168–9, 172 Xu, Zhimo, 75–6

326

INDEX

Yamanaka, Lois-Ann, 106 Yau, John 15–6, 37–8, 53, 89, 100, 110, 180, 197, 231–264, 268, 269–70 career as art critic, 232–3, 240 conception of ethnicity, 234–5, 241 connection with Langauge poetry, 238, 243–4 influence of John Ashbery, 240 poetic reputation, 231, 236–8 relation to canonical modernism, 239 use of parody, 241–3, 262 use of proceduralist techniques, 243–7, 262 works by “Genghis Chan: Private Eye,” 247–62 publication history, 236 Giant Wall: A Notebook, 235 “Mon Alias, Mona Lisa,” 244–7 “Movies as a Form of Reincarnation: Boris Karloff Remembers Being Chinese on More Than

One Occasion,” 243 “Peter Lorre Dreams He Is the Third Reincarnation of a Geisha,” 241–2 “Sam Spade Haiku,” 235 “Shanghai Shenanigans” 26–7, 235 Yeats, W. B., 45, 67, 254 Yellow Peril, 28, 30, 34, 42, 46, 47, 71, 114, 129, 248, 265, 266 Yin, Xiao-huang, 271n5, 285n31 Yogi, Stan, 96, 272n12, 288n2 Young, Robert J.C., 21 Yu, Dafu, 72 Yu, Henry, 102, 282n13 Yu, Timothy, 4, 238, 243–4, 264, 271n5, 271n6, 288n9 Zeitlin, Judith, 88 Zhao, Henry Yiheng, 143 Zhou, Xiaojing, 4, 113–4, 115–6, 145, 190, 204, 238, 273n22, 290n4