Chatoyant

Rhapsody in Plain Yellow
Poems by Marilyn Chin
W.W.Norton & Company, New York, 2002
Review by Suki Wessling
Published in caesura

In a poetry seminar years ago, when multiculturalism was just starting to gain power, a certain moderately successful poet expounded his theory that truly great American poetry could not be written by someone whose mother tongue was not English. Furthermore, the poet, whose last name may have come over on the Mayflower, said that it takes generations of English speakers in a family to produce a person who can do justice to our great language. The students were silent. One student, who not only didn't consider herself a great poet but not a poet at all, spoke up. "But doesn't that rule out...pretty much everyone in this room but you?"

There we were, the mongrel products of America: Mixed-race, mixed identity, grandchildren of slaves and Slavs, some of us the first in our families to come to college. As an upholder of the grand tradition of American poetry—perhaps his theories were developed while repairing a stone wall in Vermont!—our seminar leader thought he knew America. He assured us that he wanted to nurture the best poetry we could offer.

But perhaps he was just afraid of Marilyn Chin.

Chin's latest book, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, is testimony to how firmly an immigrant can plant her feet in the fertile soil of the American language. As someone who looks for a more immediate enjoyment of poetry on first reading, I try to read a book through first without the aid of a dictionary or encyclopedia. I could have used both in my first reading of Chin's new book, but still, I enjoyed my rather mysterious foray through her tightly orchestrated poems. Although I missed many of her allusions, I enjoyed the world she evokes and the songlike language that is the book's structural theme.

Before the title page, the book starts with "Blues on Yellow," an angry piece in blues rhythm. Those comfortable with the stereotype of well-behaved Asian girls might flinch at her assertion, "If you cut my yellow fists, I'll teach my yellow feet to fight." But the poem is a fitting introduction to the life in her poems, in which "there's no life on earth without pain."

As the body of the book starts, Chin turns her critique inward and laments the loss of her "Chinese half"—upon writing to her mother she finds that she's forgotten the character for "love." This first part of the book focuses on Chin's family and brings their experiences into continuum of a Chinese past and an American present. There's no small amount of anger here, especially for the father figures in her poems, but there is also love and a searching for meaning in the chaos of assimilation. Chin's poems show the sameness of human experience that comes from seeing behind the names, skin color, and mother tongue of the actors. In the repetitive conclusion of "Millennium, Six Songs," Chin actually repeats "the same" twenty-three times—as if through hypnosis she wants to show us that her family is ours, her anger could, or should, be ours.

As the book continues, Chin works outward from her life with "The True Story of Mr. and Mrs. Wong," which reads as a rather sarcastic fable, in which Mr. Wong leaves Mrs. Wong for "fresh eggs, white and strong"—in other words, a white wife. Continuing onward, her friends and lovers populate the poems of her present life, and she presents us with some of her toughest material. They are traveling a world made small...

A jumbo jet careens between sun and moon—

a small man controls her destiny,

veers into the vast blue loneliness.

("Where We Live Now, Vol. 3, #4")

Her dates are miserable...

He pretended to be well-meaning.

His décor flaunted multicultural—

("Bad Date" from "Bad Date Polytich, Eight Poems")

And her friends lonely...

Ten thousand in this village, but you're unloved

Breasts should be kissed

Not lopped

A cold bed of chemo awaits

No sister to hold you, no lover

("Ohio/Ohio" from "Bad Date Polytich, Eight Poems")

She seems, at times, to scorn everyone around her, while simultaneously wanting to take them in her arms and mother them. It's an uncomfortable feeling for a reader, keeping you ready to bolt for the door if she goes too far. But just when you might give up on her, she makes you laugh...

Some American poet said to me, The Haiku is dead.

I thought, pink and swollen, something sad about his body.

("Summer Sonatina")

Or just go straight to the hilarious and irreverent "So, You Fucked John Donne."

In Marilyn Chin's world, you're invited to ride around with her at a furious pace from Hong Kong to Los Angeles to Rwanda. Whether or not you stay on the ride depends on the stiffness of your upper lip when someone spits on it and the iron quality of your stomach when she jerks you back into her arms. It's not an easy read.

On subsequent readings, I found the book a firm wielding of Chin's poetic chops. Her use of unusual English words is creative and most always reads without that awkward feeling I get with some poets that she'd been digging in a dictionary for something new. But it's her assimilation of her multi-faceted cultural baggage that impresses and challenges a reader of this book. In order to analyze Chin's poetry as deeply as I'd like, I'd have to do a lot of reading: Chinese history, American popular music, Buddhism. As it is, Google and a literate husband helped out quite a bit.

A facet of Chin's poetry of particular interest to me is her unabashed embrace of being a citizen of our West Coast, which looks toward the East—the Asian East—more often than to the East Coast for inspiration. "I'm thoroughly bi-cultural and bi-lingual, and I see myself as a Pacific Rim person," she told Bill Moyers in an interview. It's no wonder that many of us on America's Pacific Rim look outward—across the wide, mysterious Pacific—rather than inland at the mountains that thwarted our earliest settlers. Even those Westerners whose ancestors did come that way (or more recently by train or plane), seem more likely to look outward over the Pacific for their enrichment—literary, spiritual, and culinary.

And it gives the old nonconformist in me a little joy to see that a person of letters—for that is what Chin clearly is—can invoke the literature and traditions of a culture less often seen in English language poetry. In lines such as "General Yuan Shih Kai / your horse went mad" she challenges the old poetic assumption that American poetry's references must follow the Greek-Latin-French-English-over-the-Atlantic path. If America truly is a land of immigrants, then our poetry must draw on the knowledge of those immigrants. I admit I had to look up General Yuan, but before I did, I enjoyed watching him dance "a ribbon around the character for "chaos."" A non-reader of Chinese, I had no personal evocation of that character, just as I have no deep knowledge of Greek. Yet a fine poem can both stand on its own without the deeper meaning, and then inform us when we want to delve deeper.

Perhaps the hardest trap to avoid with a book like this is the easy-to-miss line between theme and schtick. Chin runs the risk of not just being a Chinese-American writer, but being only a Chinese-American writer. At various times while reading this book I cringed at her insistent use of the word yellow, her almost obsessive need to bring race into every poem. But I was saved from annoyance again and again by the rawness of her language as well as her mastery of it, and by the passion she clearly has for her subject.

Almost as if to acknowledge the traps that it deftly avoids, the collection ends with the title poem, "Rhapsody in Plain Yellow." To my ear, this is the best poem of the collection, and in a way, it takes in everything that has come before. Dedicated to "my love, Charles," it starts as a love poem with the collection's rhythmic theme, a repeated word—"say":

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.

A long poem, it moves through the disciplines that Chin knows so well: her personal wants and desires, history from both hemispheres, the relation of life to fable, quotations from poetry and philosophy. Soon after making the statement, "Suddenly, my terrible childhood made sense," Chin's poem starts to dissolve into fragmented language, words that reflect more emotion than meaning. Having started with a song, Marilyn Chin ends in silence:

Hills and canyons, robbed by sun, leave us nothing.

Suki Wessling is a writer and publisher of Chatoyant (www.chatoyant.com), a small literary press. She is the mother of two children and lives on California's Central Coast.

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