January 2002 Translating Self: Stealing From Wang Wei, Kowtowing To Hughes, Hooking Up With Keats, Undone By Donne by Marilyn Chin - Also visit the Workshop Archives

I am an autobiographical poet. That is to say, what I write always begins with my life, my ideas, my experiences, my concerns, and by extension, the poems are always about my family, my tribe, my people. My nation, my god. My, my, my, my, my. The challenge, then, is to write an autobiographical poetry that could trill on without boring myself or the reader. Though I can dress up in myriad ways and parade in front of the mirror, I love to garb myself in the varied baubles of two literary histories.

Here is a quintessential autobiographical "identity" poem. An identity poem is an American invention, born out of minority discourse. I must proclaim my identity, because the privileged majority, at best, has always misunderstood who I am and, at worst, wished to wipe me out of my existence. Therefore, I must button down my ethnic pride and assert myself with a clear, loud voice and claim my place on this land:

How I Got That Name
      an essay on assimilation

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."
And nobody dared question
his initial impulse for we all know
lust drove men to greatness,
not goodness, not decency.

My self, in this poem, is inextricably bound to my immigration history. The poem describes how the new immigrant arrived, noting Angel Island and my naming. How one is named is, of course, an important matter for anyone, but it was a real rite of passage in this case, as my name was changed from a quaint Chinese Mei Ling to the name of a bombshell American icon, Marilyn Monroe. Thus far in the poem I am carrying on the identity-poem convention; it is not until my father comes in, both reviled and lampooned in this passage (but with a light touch, in sync with the tone of the rest of the poem), that the confessional moment arrives. Then we can truly call this a contemporary American confessional lyric, obsessed with family secrets and transgressions.

I truly believe in identity poems. At one point or another, an immigrant poet must tell the audience where she came from. But even though "How I Got That Name" is currently my most anthologized poem, it is the kind of poem I could only write once. I must move on to find other vessels to tell my story, which, since I am a Chinese American woman, is complicated. So I love to take conventions from both the Eastern and Western side of my literary heritage and remake them into my own image (voila, the mirror, again!). The process is an ever-evolving one. My challenge as a poet is to find interesting ways to tell my complex tale.

I love, for example, to use the Chinese lyric model. Chinese poetry is predominantly lyrical. That is to say, short lyrics dominate over narrative and dramatic poetry. The Chinese poet uses the lyric, in a variety of forms and hundreds of different meters, to evoke her deepest feelings and most serious thoughts. Like the best Western lyrics, the best Chinese lyrics are intensely personal, but can emanate to a universal context. In the strongest poems, the poet is always aware of historical and cosmic forces. Yet whereas most Western poets since the Romantics yearn to be "original" and somehow defy the past, the Chinese have deep respect for antiquity; therefore, their work can be simultaneously personal and highly traditional. Tu Fu may write about the death of his infant daughter, but at the same time he alludes to images and lines of a famous mourning poem from the Shih Ching, incorporating that work more as homage than reckless borrowing.

As a Chinese American lyric poet, I feel that I have a lot of ammunition. For example, here is a simple Chinese-style poem, "Family Restaurant," from my book Rhapsody in Plain Yellow.

Family Restaurant

Empty Lotus Room, no patrons
    Only a telephone rings and rings
Muffled by an adjoining wall
    He murmurs to a distant lover
His wife head-bent peeling shrimp
    Hums an ancient tune about magpies
His daughter wide-eyed, little fists
    Vows to never forgive him
His shadow enters the deep forest
    Blackening the shimmering moss

If one had to categorize, perhaps this would be considered as much a narrative as a personal lyric. The narration is third person. But the poem is really about the daughter and, by extension, about myself. Thus it is in a real sense an autobiographical poem. It recounts a memory of an evening in 1966, in my uncle's restaurant in Roseburg, Oregon. Alhough the scene is self-explanatory, what's less apparent to a Western reader is that the poem alludes to a famous chueh-chu (quatrain) by Wang Wei:

Deer Park

Empty    mountain    no see    man
But    hear man language    sound
Returning    shadows enter    deep    forest
Again    shines green    moss/lichen     top

Thus my respectful homage to Wang Wei as Chinese ancestor is immediately subverted by my contemporary American class awareness: "Empty Lotus Room, no patrons." The tranquility of Wang Wei's mountain turns into off-hours in a Chinese restaurant. The family restaurant as a busy, difficult immigrant occupation is part of a particularly American iconography. Yes, there are Chinese restaurants all over the globe. Yes, I've eaten in bad chopsuey joints in New Zealand as well as in Switzerland. But, the Chinese American Take Out restaurant is a cultural artifact seared into our American childhood memories. Every family in the United States has its favorite Chinese restaurant. Sweet and Sour, fortune cookies, fried wontons are all Chinese American, not Chinese inventions.

In Wang Wei's poem, any human voices are drowned out. Perhaps Wang Wei was "sitting" and achieving enlightenment, so there is finally only the poet's consciousness and nature. The light seeks through the forest and finds that clump of moss. He finds the moss mesmerizing in his state of sitting, of deep contemplation. This is a kind of Zennish Chinese poem that many Western poets love to imitate.

My replacement of the forest setting with an empty restaurant scene obviously subverts the high idea of the poet's contemplative moment. Wang Wei's moment of enlightenment, however profound, gives way to my telling of my own story: this girl's father is talking to his lover while his wife is in the other room working hard for the restaurant. Thus, the theme of my father's betrayal takes over the "higher" theme of the poet's transcendent consciousness.

Reversals occur in the last two lines in my poem. Any enlightenment would be "blackened." The small child witnesses moral decay of the family, witnesses trouble, betrayal. This is an all too familiar and familial story in America. Already this personal experience has tainted this child. Family secrets. Broken homes. Family problems trapped within these Chinese restaurant walls. All happy families are happy in the same way, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy said.

And my way is Chinese American, of course, not simply Chinese. Wang Wei's "Empty Mountain" is not a lonely place, just a place where pure thought occurs, far from the troubled hubbub of humanity. In contrast, the empty off-hours rooms in "Family Restaurant" are where my truth is played out with all the dirt, the grit of human relationships. The "tune about magpies" alludes to that Chinese love story, where once a year the magpies build a bridge for the herd boy and the spinning maiden, where they meet in the cosmos in a romantic tryst. The irony in my poem is that the mother sings this tune while her husband—my father—is in the midst of betraying her. Both poems are intensely personal and autobiographical.

I have written about my father's betrayals over and over again. Obviously, it is an issue that I have not resolved to this day. As I will show later, it permeates my poetic identity.

As a Chinese American poet, I have always wanted to be in tune with both sides of my literary history. I am very aware of the history of the lyric in English, from Shakespeare to Donne to Keats to the contemporary lyrics by women poets. Early in my career, I wrote a lot of sonnets and sonnetish things with sometimes modern line breaks. For instance, I wrote a crown of postcolonial "unholy" sonnets subverting Donne:

Mother was the cross
mulish woman, who scrubbed her house bald.
Her floor, her child
must be clean, clean to impress.
Now the soap still sticks to the ceiling
of my mouth; what I say leaks out of the small apse
of my heart. They are all dead, my mother's half.
Who will marry me, the clean eyesore of spring?

Auntie Jade with the fat green face, the only one alive,
squats me in front of the mirror,
winds my hair up into a beehive,
"Be prepared to meet thy tall dark savior!"

Grandmother, tomorrow I must anoint my head
in white, the color of mourning,
white, the pallor of the dead.

From American women poets I learned psychological intensity. I learned the passion and fierceness that comes out of anger, outrage, dispossession, racism, repression, inconsolable angst, and sadness. I, along with many young women poets, was influenced by the confessional, over-the-top suicidal rage of Plath as well as the "witness" and social protest lyrics of Adrienne Rich. For me, the two influences are not contradictory. "Daddy, I have had to kill you." I can relate to that. "There is a cop who is both prowler and father." Yes, I can learn from that. Hostility can be a fine art. The autobiographer in me wants to sing about the sins of my father; the political activist in me wants to tear down the patriarchy.

I claim the entire lyric tradition as my own. Just as I have adopted and adapted the forms and styles of Wang Wei to my own purposes, I have at times taken Keats as my model, or Shakespeare, or Plath. Often, I use the shake-and-bake method of composition, creating my own hybrid lyric by sampling echoes and references from both East and West. "Reggae Renga" for instance, is a tumultuous marriage between a Martialian, moralistic epigram with an Issan haiku and a Marleyesque Reggae guitar. The hair on the caterpillar references an Issa poem. "Man (pronounced mon) you are no good" is in Jamaican accent. The last line is a perverted Keats line. "White" in place of "wight" turns a personal love poem about an abusive relationship into a political anthem:

REGGAE RENGA

A man flat on his back can't go to the doctor.
*
Let him die, woman, so that he will no longer beat you.
*
He says, "Meet me at the hallowed temple near the Buddha's topknot."
*
He is dying, dying fast. In his delirium he is ever so beautiful.
*
I am late and reach only as far as the earlobes where I hear he has gone.
*
There are trees on the mountains and branches on the trees.
*
My anger so clear—I can see the hairs on the caterpillar and the wind on the hairs.
*
I can tell the paths that he has violated by the bent lay of the grasses.
*
Within him is a worm that loves itself and forgets whom he is loving, his mouth or his asshole.
*
Near the tombstone is a plum tree; a cock crows upon it, saying, "Man, you are no good!"
*
The people of my country are baleful; they've sent me to accuse you!
*
What is your ailment, wretched white, your ailment, will no birds sing?

I also believe that it is important for me to pay homage to the African American tradition. It makes sense that I, a Chinese American poet, claim African American artists as my masters. First of all, Asian Americans owe a lot to the African American civil rights movement. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X sacrificed their lives for all of us. I have always looked up to African American leaders, intellectuals, and writers for instruction and inspiration. I learned from them that the self must represent a struggle that is larger than the self. I also learned that political protest is not anathema to the lyric; and indeed, together, they make a powerful art. A poem is not a place in which we negotiate with the oppressor, it's a place where we talk back. Nowhere will we find a chorus of voices more diverse and compelling as those in the African American community. I learned greatly from the uncompromising, in-your-face aesthetics of Amiri Baraka and June Jordan as well as from the formalized democratic anthems of Margaret Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks. Then, there are the Jazzy improvs and strong rhythms of Quincy Troupe and Yusef Komunyakaa. More recently, I've been studying the blues form, refined and codified by Langston Hughes.

I make reference to Keats, Donne, and Shakespeare every time I write a sonnet, but the blues is a homegrown form with a rich history that is equally alive to me. If I bow to Keats and Wang Wei, I must also bow to Langston Hughes. To be true to the selves that I am, I must keep my muse versatile and diverse.

Blues on Yellow

The canary died in the gold mine, her dreams got lost in the sieve.
The canary died in the gold mine, her dreams got lost in the sieve.
Her husband the crow killed under the railroad, the spokes hath shorn his
    wings.

Something's cookin' in Chin's kitchen, ten thousand yellow bellied sap
    suckers baked in a pie.
Something's cookin' in Chin's kitchen, ten thousand yellow bellied sap
    suckers baked in a pie.
Something's cookin' in Chin's kitchen, die die yellow bird, die die.

O crack an egg on the griddle, yellow will ooze into white.
O crack an egg on the griddle, yellow will ooze into white.
Run, run, sweet little Puritan, yellow will ooze into white.

If you cut my yellow wrists, I'll teach my yellow toes to write.
If you cut my yellow wrists, I'll teach my yellow toes to write.
If you cut my yellow fists, I'll teach my yellow feet to fight.

Do not be afraid to perish, my mother, Buddha's compassion is nigh.
Do not be afraid to perish, my mother, our boat will sail tonight.
Your babies will reach the promiseland, the stars will be their guide.

I am so mellow yellow, mellow yellow, Buddha sings in my veins.
I am so mellow yellow, mellow yellow, Buddha sings in my veins.
O take me to the land of the unreborn, there's no life on earth without pain.

This poem began as a dirge for my mother, who was very depressed in her latter years. She stopped eating and died. The blues, above all, is about pain. I'm working with this particular American convention to write about my mother's suffering and my own pain at her passing. Somewhere along the line, the dirge becomes a dark political anthem.

Just adding that drop of "yellow" blood gives the blues song a new social context: the gold mine and the railroad, a hot restaurant kitchen, traditional Chinese coolie jobs replace cotton fields, slave ships, and coal mines. I invoke "Buddha" instead of "the lord" or "Jesus." Yes, I borrow the traditional twelve bar, three line structure, just as I have learned from the wailing of Lightnin' Hopkins and others. But though I have heard the sliding bottlenecks, banjos, harmonicas, and scratchy emotive singing, in my mind I mix in a lute, an erhu, a butterfly harp, gongs, Chinese drums, and the screechy background falsetto of a Chinese operatic singer.

"O crack an egg on the griddle, yellow will ooze into white" is a political conceit about miscegenation, mixbreeding, the melting pot. Yes, once again I am using a Chinese American food trope. Food marks my immigrant beginnings as a daughter of a cook-turned-restaurant-owner. I freely use a food motif in my lyrics because moogoogaipan is more familiar to me in fragrance and character than, let's say, a nosegay of spring flowers. "Crack an egg on the griddle, yellow will ooze into white" came out of real experience as I used to stand on a stool and crack eggs on a greasy griddle for those 99-cent breakfast specials. Sunnyside up, over easy (my grandmother called an egg a purse because there's a gold coin in it), or scrambled. It is good artifice to take experience and turn it into a conceit. Donne must have been bitten by many fleas before he had the idea to use one as an argument for sex.

The image of "head-bent, peeling shrimp" (from "Family Restaurant") is also from experience. I used to sit on the steps in the back of the restaurant and peel hundreds of shrimp. My uncle, the miser, only gave me a dime for four hours of peeling. One day, my fingers blew up like sausages; and my grandmother chewed my uncle out; and I was prevented from doing that chore again. I am told that restaurants now order frozen shrimp already peeled, so this experience not only speaks to my heritage but dates me to the sixties, before the advanced processing of food.

Every image in my poems seems to fill with autobiography. The challenge for a lyric poet is not just harnessing the imagination to make things up, but being able to take ordinary experience and memories and make them radiate with meaning. To make the common egg become a political conceit, as a common flea can be a metaphysical one.

Both in form and content, then, my poetry draws freely from multiple traditions. Consider the following poem, which I loosely fashioned after anonymous English ballads of high chivalry and bawdy tales. (I squeezed in a "monk" for respect.)

Song of the Giant Calabash

At the market I bought a calabash
    to make my father stew.
He spat and called it bitter,
    his sputum seeded the ground.

Out came a giant calabash
    shaped like Buddha's long head.
I baked it with honey and jujubes
    to feed my father again.

"Useless girl! I said I hate calabash!"
    He slapped his bowl to the floor.
The rains poured down from heaven,
    green mists and healing clouds blue.

Again another calabash
    Rounder than Buddha's mighty torso.
I mixed it with wild cat and agar
    and called it "A Monk's Mock Lamb."

"Dead girl! I said I hate calabash,"
    he burst into a thousand flames.
His head smashed open—well, like a calabash.
    He perished, headlong into his bowl.

Faint light into a silent altar.
    Blue, blue, the mist of spring.
The sun shone through her hardy trellis
    and danced on his empty bed.

This morning I cut my last calabash,
    carved a large bottle-gourd of dreams.
I shall float her down the river
    Into Buddha's eternal dawn.

The poem is cast in loose ballad form, and like most ballads is a narrative. The food trope again provides a Chinese flavor. Only a calabash is not really edible. The calabash or gourd in Chinese motif is supposed to be filled with magic. It is either filled with good luck or the elixir of eternal life. This one is also in Buddha's image and serves as protection for the girl. In fact, since a gourd is not edible, it serves as a conceit for the girl's obstinacy and endurance, which drive her to finally kill her father. In the final twist, one might say that yes, it is a magical gourd that can fulfill one's wishes. The protagonist is half situated in Portland, Oregon, and half in some rural village lost in time.

Again the poem comes from autobiographical truth. One day, after work, my father was sitting at the table in his underwear. It was record-breaking heat and we were all in our underwear. My grandmother ordered me to make him coffee. So, I did. The first cup I brought to him, he said, "Stupid girl, it's too hot, it almost burn my lip off." So, I brought the coffee back into the kitchen, thinking, of course, "asshole." Nonetheless, I carefully blew on it and cooled it down. I brought it back to him, he sipped it and said, "Idiot girl, it's too weak, go brew me another cup." So, I went back to the kitchen and stuffed the pot with coffee and let it brew, again. Then, I brought it to him and he spat it out: "Dead girl, it's too bitter! Get out, get out of my sight!" (The curse "dead girl" is a common phrase in working-class homes.) My father hated his life and cursed us day and night; and I was "filial pious" and traditional enough to not talk back. But my hatred for him was already deep. Thus, in my poem, the daughter makes a pun of "to make my father stew" and continues to put weird things in his pottage in order to disguise the inedible, magic gourd; ultimately she makes him so angry that he has a heart attack and dies.

Writing poetry is about giving the powerless power, turning the tables so that the eater will be eaten, the oppressor oppressed, and the moral will have just retribution against the immoral.

My friends tell me, "Stop beating your father." Well, I can't and I won't. It's an obsession, but it feeds my poetry. And my poetry feeds into the larger historical banquet. I am writing against the patriarchy not as some feminist abstraction but as lived experience. My father's sins, my father's immoral behavior, constitute a small flea on the larger beast that has oppressed women for centuries and has almost destroyed the world.

In "Song of the Giant Calabash," Buddha becomes whole at the very end and gives the protagonist some peace. "The sun shone through her hardy trellis / and danced on his empty bed." His death gives her salvation. This is an anti-Confucian idea of filial piety. The oppressor-father will stop his oppressive behavior only after he is dead. The more the oppressor spits on the ground, the more calabash. The "hardiness" of the gourd is, of course, metaphorical for the hardiness of this girl and, by extension, for my own willfulness.

The truth is that we all do survive childhood traumas and float down the river with a large bottle-gourd of dreams. These examples from my poems are, I believe, very different from one another. We can get to autobiographical truth in myriad ways. How memory and experience is formalized into song is both the autobiographical poet's challenge and her ecstasy.

In short, Chinese-American writers who draw from two cultural histories must extract from multiple sources. Not only do we serve as cultural translators, we synthesize the form and content of the two great traditions that came before us. The result is a cross-fertilization of culture, creating new models to accurately portray Chinese-American identity. No one cultural style can adequately express my experiences. I must sample and draw from East and West, modern and ancient. As a lyric poet I must infuse my art with my own personal history and passions. This autobiographical means to proclaim identity is a reversal of the current postmodern criticism which declares that stylistic innovation is dead. The signifiers are not empty but allude to referents that hold generational and personal meaning because the Chinese-American poet must reclaim lost voices, simultaneously debunking and reconstructing the past to reflect her own mirror image. Mt task is to constantly reinvent my particular history through the truth of my experiences.

This essay first appeared in After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography edited by Kate Sontag and David Graham (Graywolf Press, 2001).