Content provided in partnership with
Chinese American Poetry: An Anthology. - book reviews
MELUS, Fall, 1993 by George Uba
Chinese American Poetry: An Anthology. L. Ling-chi Wang and Henry Yiheng Zhao, eds. Santa Barbara: Asyan American Voices. Distributed by University of Washington Press, 1991. xxx + 242 pages. $19.95.
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
Some two decades after-the first national appearances of Asian American literary anthologies, editors L. Ling-chi Wang and Henry Yiheng Zhao have assembled a useful yet at times perplexing collection of twenty-two Chinese-American poets. The existence of such a specified anthology is important in itself, for it reminds us of the sheer quantity of serious literature being produced by Chinese (as well as other Asian) Americans today. With poets representing multiple geographic locales, aesthetic perspectives, and cultural and linguistic backgrounds, the book also serves as an index to the diversity of Chinese America. There are poets from Massachusetts and Hawaii, from Alabama, New Mexico, and California, and from Jakarta, Hong Kong, and Malacca. Some learned Mandarin or Cantonese as a first language, while others have known only English. Given such diversity, it is not surprising that the poems themselves should range from the traditional to the experimental and from brief, concentrated lyrics to versions of playful, postmodern discursiveness.
The editorial apparatus includes thumbnail biographical sketches and a series of brief statements of individual poetics. By allocating on average about three times the meager 3-4 pages usually afforded contributors to a poetry anthology, the book allows us to follow the development and changes occurring in an individual writer's work, although including dates of composition or publication would have helped even more in this regard. For those less familiar with Asian American poetry, let it be said that Wang and Zhao have amassed a high profile field of contributors, with such fifes as Marilyn Chin, Carolyn Lau, Li-Young Lee, and John Yau arguably being among the more inventive poets to be found anywhere in the country at present. The sly wit of Laureen Mar, the ceremonial nostalgia of Stephen Liu, the linguistic subversions of Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, and the scientific inquisitiveness of Arthur Sze further hint at the range and elasticity of contemporary Chinese-American poetry.
Yet curiously the high name recognition of the majority of contributors also points to one of the book's shortcomings. As editors, Wang and Zhao seem excessively dutiful in their selection of poets. Where, I found myself wondering, are the lesser known talents that more daring anthologies somehow manage to find? Why shouldn't the construction of the latest Asian American poetic canon, which anthologies such as this one contribute to, foreground the possibilities of its own eventual reconstruction? Considering the fact that the poetry contained herein is at times disappointingly uneven, surely what's wanted is a book that challenges the status quo rather than preserves it.
The book's introduction poses additional problems. Although outwardly they agree that these poets "are going in very different directions" from one another (xxvii), the editors secretly wish to present a coherent vision of Chinese-American poetry. Toward this end they attempt to graft these poets to China's "three thousand years of poetic tradition" (xvii), a strategy that surely underestimates vital differences. Perhaps the editors were influenced by the fact that a Chinese language version of this anthology was to be published almost simultaneously in China. Whatever the case, situating a writer like Carolyn Lau, for example, squarely within China's philosophical tradition may be true as far as it goes but undeniably devalues her powerful attraction to particular Western writers like Beckett, Woolf, and Kafka, as well as to postmodernism generally, while eliding the question of her precise relationship to Asian American cultural experiences. Attempting to have it both ways by averring that the poets in this anthology write with a "sensitivity uniquely Chinese-American" (xxviii) only makes matters worse. Even apart from the risk of essentializing Chinese America, how unique can such sensitivity be if it is fashioned, directly or indirectly, from sources dating back to Chinese antiquity?
In addition to these inconsistencies, the introduction does not adequately appreciate the internal divisions that have marked the production of Asian American literature. In maintaining that Chinese-American poetry retains powerful links to traditions of Asian American social protest, the editors fail to see that they have not resolved a conflict as much as rediscovered one. The "implicit criticism of the American way of life" (xxi) that they locate in a number of these poets does not assimilate into existing traditions of social protest as readily as they imply. By emphasizing the easy connections, they minimize the historic dispute: the tradition of Asian American activist poetry-- the dominant tradition of the 1960s and early 1970s---demanded that poetry be raw, rancorous, confrontational, and explicitly reformist in impulse. It was never enough for poets like Nellie Wong or Merle Woo (both included in the anthology but notable for their oppositional stances to the majority of poets here) that an implicit criticism might be teased from a poem. On the contrary, for them the poem had to reach a mass audience in a direct and forceful way; it had to incite reform and galvanize change. But the fact is that the majority of poems in this book do not subscribe to such an agenda where action, not perception or feeling, is ultimately at stake. The failure to understand the difference between, say, political consciousness and social activism leads to the gross confusion of placing Marilyn Chin among the "militant poets" (xxviii).
