An Arrestingly Stunning Poem by Jim Wong-Chu

I've been sitting in the archives basement of Mills library today reading Jim Wong-Chu's book of poetry, Chinatown Ghosts, and came across this wicked awesome poem.


tickles


pretty anna
a sweet fourteen
flutters in and out
of the party
detonating armpits

spiriting her cache out the back
a flock of friends in tow
she riots the stolen laughter
into the waiting air

meanwhile
inside the house
uncle bing
the family clown
begs laughter by balancing
ice cubes from his rum and coke
on his red nose

as she enters
their eyes exchange chuckles
not missing a beat
she cruises on
her terrorist fingers seeking

Found in Translation

In this new poem I wrote while I was in Montreal about a month ago, I started to really experiment with structure. But since blogger.com won't format the poem the way I want it to, you'll have to click on this link to read it.

Flesh Tone

I find myself
peeling back
from this windowpane

having been
of great use

sheltering the shame

of skin

darkening
thickening
into a
leather strap

a foreign layer

desiccating
into
unsightly
uncanny cracks

I shudder at being torn
away from you

wilting away
on this frosted surface

having failed
to blend away the pain

My First Pesach: Diasporic Offerings of Sorrow and Hope

A personal non-fiction piece I wrote for the University of Venus blog (for the guest blog post, click this link)... 

I would like to dedicate this piece to Max Haiven and Alyson McCready.

Surrounded by friends, friends and family of friends, I attended my first Passover this spring. On that first night of Passover, we sat in a circle and took turns reading sections of the Haggadah, the guide to the Seder ceremony that one of our hosts had rewritten years ago for a graduate course on diaspora. At any point during the ceremony, we were encouraged to interrupt the service with any questions, comments, debates, and especially jokes. We were also invited beforehand to share our own creative work or works of inspiration that related thematically to any of the sections of this unconventional Haggadah, unconventional for its radically politicized, anti-racist, anti-Zionist, and anti-every-other-oppression-ist bent.

For the section on remembering our losses, called the Zecher, I welled up with tears when I shared this poem that I had written last year about my late stepfather who had died in 1998:


Enlightenment
Everything I know
about Buddhism
I know
because of you.

I was only a child
then–I believed in you
I believed, I believed
in every word
you said.

One night I sat, cross-legged
and prayed, in front of
the altar because
you
told me to.

That night
instead of going to bed
that night because
you
told me to

I chanted
I chanted
a thousand
and one prayers:

Quan The Am Bo Tat…
Quan The Am Bo Tat…
Quan The Am Bo Tat…

I was too young
to understand
the journey.

I have lost my way since
the night you left me
the night
Quan Am passed me by.


What struck me about everything leading up to that moment was the generosity and creative impulse of my hosts to recreate and re-envision this Passover for themselves and their friends, most of whom were politicized non-Jewish folks affiliated with the English and Cultural Studies department, most of whom, like my hosts, had moved far away from home to go to grad school. Being around these folks on that first night of Passover and hearing about the pains and losses associated with migration and historical oppressions triggered an acute awareness of my own diasporic losses. In that one moment as I welled up with tears, I realized that I had been mourning.

For the longest time, I had been mourning the loss of my stepfather and all the good and bad memories of him. I realized in that melancholic moment that his death had closed a definite part of my life: a life of speaking primarily in Vietnamese, a life of daily prayers and the burning smell of joss sticks, a life of family meals and reliable intimacies, a life of ritual and satisfied bellies.

As a child, my stepfather had always spoken to me as though I were an adult. We would stay up late and talk for hours about things I could vaguely understand. In an ironic turn of events, I find myself today—as a Gen Y Chinese Canadian female literary scholar approaching thirty—only capable of speaking to my family with a child’s vocabulary. This language barrier entails more than just late-onset assimilation. It entails a loss of family connections and intimacies. It leaves me feeling lonely and isolated.

Overfilling with melancholic grief, I still managed to leave the Passover with an incredible feeling of hope. I left amazed at how my hosts have made this hybrid Jewish ceremony so meaningful for themselves and their friends for the past five years, and that it evolves and changes every spring. But after completing their dissertations this year, they will be moving back home to Halifax. Another hybrid ceremony will have to be created to help fill the palpable absence they will leave behind.

a family of trillin’ hip hoppin’ reverbratin’ androids are rattlin’ in Miss G Wong’s throat

i met a chinee artist today.

a chinee? really? a chinee? artist?

yes. a real chinee artist. and oh, my, what artistry, what musicality, what poeticity...

a chinee artist/poet/musician? no way!

yes way. you better believe it.

say, where she from? dis chinee wondah?

china. she was made in china.

ah, i see. just anuddah one of dem mass production chinee. nutting too special. one dollah store special. same ting every year but different colour maybe.

no. she wasn't made in a factory. she was made in china.

she a white devil ghost lady?

no? i mean, yes? i mean, maybe? it's hard to tell? she looks chinee to me. she says her parents are from china. but she felt she had to explain it. she felt she had to tell us. i don't know why. but i knew right away.

ah, chinee stirfry.

but aren't we all a little like that nowadays--a little stirfry? a little asian fusion? a little dim sum sushi bar all-in-one? if i were a bowl of pho, i'd be full of chicken feet, potatoes and meat, flat rice noodles, yellow egg noodles, char siu bun, and steamed fish in a pool of soy and ginger.

yech, humbalung. too muchee. no tastee.

but that's how i like my diaspora.

What would you like for Christmas?

I'd like a roly poly Chinaman for Christmas. It wouldn't be too hard to find at this time of the year. You could probably find one in one of those strange shops tucked away somewhere in the red sign district of the city, you know, the streets with the lucky fertility red awnings elegantly gouged with what you would call a foreign language, now, I'm sure you must know what I'm talking about, those street shops that sell just about anything--no restrictions required--they sell anything from cheap, affordable, hardly durable sweat labouring goods to fresh, rotten produce and bile churning salt fish, raw squid, slippery slimy eel, eew. Walk down another row and you'll be forced to gaze at crunchy swine carcasses and glistening, glowing Peking ducks hanging on hooks in steamy display windows inbetween exotic restaurants, Karaoke bars, bubble tea shops, and the only store front window signs you'll be able to read in English: Electronics, CDs, DVDs, VCDs, LCDs. In the midst of all this sensory overload, in this celestial pool of swarming sights and sounds and stinks and smacking masticating lips, haphazardly you will walk upon a hushed silence, the kind only a library preserves, a reprieve from the din, and the clang, and the clong of foreign rise and falls cut short by your sudden awareness of your awful massive presence, rudely out of place, under surveillance for threatening (read the sign: if you break, you pay), for towering, overshadowing the fragile porcelain delicate serene faces lined up in the room, a terra cotta army of peace: laughing Buddha faces, squinty eyes, chubby rosy cheeks, ruby red lips, and rambunctiously giddy children clambering jolly bellies, gripping fat man tits out of pure elation. Now who wouldn't want one of those for Christmas?

Sketching Mona

I was talking to Shar about Mona yesterday on the Go train after having spent a whole day with Marxist-Foucaultian-Anti-Racist-Anti-Colonialist Feminists. I was excited about writing Mona again--the protaganist for my novella project. I haven't had time to be excited about my creative writing in a long time. I have been thinking lately to abandon the whole classic Hollywood cinephile thing, where she works in a video store and is a classic Hollywood fan-girl. The whole point with that angle was that she would uncover the Charlie Chan series and become a politicized anti-racist chick of th 70s as a result of it. But again, that angle never really excited me. If anything, it felt a bit didactic.

Before the Himani Bannerji celebration conference yesterday, I have been thinking a lot lately about community. I have been thinking about how I've never really belonged to a community, especially a politicized community. Everytime I hear about people like Larissa Lai belonging to an activist movement in the 70s, I feel envious. I feel lonely. I feel absolute loneliness when writers like Larissa have a community of writers that read her work and help nurture her work. I link this loneliness to the romanticized loneliness I feel when I remember the coalition building between Asian American activists and academics with the Black Panther movement. Lately, in my academic work, I write about coalitional possibilities and solidarity building in literature. I'm beginning to realize that I focus on this stuff not just b/c it is important in this neoliberal day and age but b/c I feel lonely, I lack a politicized community. Unlike those scholars of colour who have been influenced by each other through the scholarly works and countless conversations they've shared with one another over the years, I don't belong to a group of scholars of colour who read each other's works and nurture each other's thinking. Academically and creatively, I feel lonely. I don't really belong.

I think I can funnel this loneliness to Mona. She can be, as Himani Bannerji declared proudly yesterday, "a foster child of the Black community!" But with a twist. I want to get at the loneliness, the loneliness that I feel ever so palpably in Larissa Lai's work. I want Mona to feel set adrift after her grandmother's death. I want her to be an aspiring Marxist-Anti-Racist-Anti-Colonialist Feminist. I want her to look to the African American and Asian American movement with lonely longings to belong. Maybe she shouldn't be a Vancouver-rite after all. Maybe she should be an Edmontonian. I think that's what it boils down to--Edmonton has nurtured my lack of cosmopolitanism that Asha and Phanuel exude, my lack of belonging, my lack of politics growing up and belonging to an ethnic community, to be sure, but a community depoliticized nonetheless. She can travel to Vancouver to visit the archives and be surprised at the amount of Asians and notice the palpable loneliness in her soul. Plus, if her grandmother and great aunts were adopted by white Methodist Missionary folks, her loneliness would be more stark than mine. With her ethnic grandmother gone, with only her assimilated devout Methodist almost white extended family (b/c they married white) left behind, Mona will be like the last Chinawoman standing, which parallels her search for her great-grandmother, the first Chinawoman, the infamous sex worker, the shameful secret no one in her family wants to acknowledge.

This project excites me b/c it will come out of my feelings of futility and frustration with the managerial state encompassing every aspect of our lives and the control of public discourse by right-wing ideologies, the incursion of the right and the fashionable anti-leftist and dehistoricized tendencies amongst my colleagues, or for that matter, in the university of the 21st century.