ORIENTING TRACES:
(RE)VIEWING CHINESENESS IN MODERN AMERICAN POETRY
by
ANASTASIA WRIGHT TURNER
(Under the Direction of Jed Rasula)
ABSTRACT
While numerous studies have been published detailing Modernism’s interest in Asia as
well as Asian Americans’ minority subject position within American culture, few books realize
the inherent interconnectedness between the two topics. This project proposes to fill this lacuna
by reconsidering the legacy of American Modernist poets’ interest in and glorification of
Chinese language and culture against the parallel history of Chinese immigration to and
participation in the US nation state. I begin by probing the sociohistorical factors that allowed
for the art object of China to become elevated while the makers of such objects were refused
entry into the United States. I then discuss the varying shades and levels of appropriation,
mimicry, inspiration, and translation apparent in Modernists’ poetic usages of Chineseness.
Next, I trace the poetic lineage of a single Chinese character from the work of Ezra Pound
through contemporary American poetry. The second section of my dissertation explores how
contemporary Chinese American poets Marilyn Chin and John Yau negotiate such legacies of
cultural borrowing. While Chin writes back against this history by claiming America and
refusing to ignore or aestheticize China, Yau’s poems disrupt traditional poetic form in order to
question the process whereby identity was determined in the first place. My project contends
that paralleling these disparate works reflects the complex and conflicted influence of Chinese
language, literature, and culture on American poetry.
INDEX WORDS:
American Poetry; Chinese American Poetry; Chineseness; Modernism;
Influence; Multiculturalism; Postmodernism; Identity; Orientalism;
Cosmopolitanism; Ezra Pound; Marilyn Chin; John Yau
ORIENTING TRACES:
(RE)VIEWING CHINESENESS IN MODERN AMERICAN POETRY
by
ANASTASIA WRIGHT TURNER
B.A., Wofford College, 2000
B. S., Wofford College, 2000
A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial
Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
ATHENS, GEORGIA
2010
© 2010
Anastasia Wright Turner
All Rights Reserved
ORIENTING TRACES:
(RE)VIEWING CHINESENESS IN MODERN AMERICAN POETRY
by
ANASTASIA WRIGHT TURNER
Electronic Version Approved:
Maureen Grasso
Dean of the Graduate School
The University of Georgia
May 2010
Major Professor:
Jed Rasula
Committee:
Kam-ming Wong
Susan Rosenbaum
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to all of those who have supported my academic endeavors over the past
years. First, thanks to Benjamin Dunlap, who started me on this quest so long ago at Wofford
College. This project also benefitted substantially from the tutelage of Jed Rasula; thanks for
“removing the shroud” and pushing me ever forward. Susan Rosenbaum equipped me with the
critical skills necessary to undertake such a project. Barbara McCaskill has long served as a
mentor, personal cheerleader, and role model; her enthusiasm and support never cease to amaze
me. Kam-ming Wong provided guidance on all aspects of Chinese language and literature and
contributed greatly to my appreciation of it. The Fulbright office of Taiwan also aided me in
numerous ways. Without my year’s sojourn there, none of this would be possible. In addition,
I’d like to express my gratitude to the many colleagues and dear friends who have assisted in the
completion of this manuscript. Wang Fang-Yu, Liu Ying, Chen Chung-An and Rita Kung
submitted to numerous inquiries along the way. Neal Lin supplied encouragement, humor, and
perspective. Valerie Morrison’s futon and reassurance always helped me feel more comfortable,
while Keely Byars-Nichols and Shannon Whitlock Levitzke provided invaluable feedback on
numerous less-than-stellar drafts. Finally, this whole thing wouldn’t have come together without
the love and support of my extended network of friends and family and the constant
encouragement of my husband. This is for each of you.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................... iv
CHAPTER
1
INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................1
2
ANXIETY AND DESIRE:
AMERICAN VISIONS OF CHINESENESS AT THE TURN OF THE
CENTURY..............................................................................................................14
3
“AS A CHINESE VASE STILL”:
CHINESENESS IN AMERICAN MODERNIST POETRY ................................53
4
新日日新:
A CASE STUDY OF INFLUENCE .....................................................................87
5
“(AND NO HELP FROM THE PHONETICIST)”:
MARILYN CHIN’S DIALECTIC OF ASIAN AMERICANNESS ...................120
6
WHO’S AFRAID OF JOHN YAU?:
RESISTING RESISTANCE IN ASIAN AMERICAN EXPERIMENTAL
POETRY ..............................................................................................................148
7
AFTERWORD..........................................................................................................193
REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................204
v
CHAPTER ONE:
INTRODUCTION
As Ezra Pound entered the British Museum of Art’s exhibition of Chinese paintings, the
Angel Island immigration station opened its doors. Pound began his study and imitation of
Chinese poetry at precisely the same moment the Chinese inmates of Angel Island were
inscribing poetry on the walls of their barracks, detailing the racism that both jailed and
systematically stripped them of their hopes and dreams. At the very height of the Chinese
Exclusion Act, the newly formed little magazines competed to bring out imitations and new
translations of Chinese poems. These snapshots reveal America’s diverse representations of
Chineseness. While legally Chinese were positioned as separate and apart from the US majority,
their cultural advancements were lauded in the burgeoning Modernist literary movement. The
simultaneity of discriminatory practices against Chinese immigrants and interest in and
glorification of Chinese literature and culture begs the question of America’s discrepant
engagement with China.
Though the West had been “imagining” the East for centuries, the discovery of gold at
Sutter’s Mill in 1848 would drastically change the terms by which it was perceived. The
eighteenth century presented a heightened interest in chinoiseries while early nineteenth century
travelogues and adventure stories like Herman Melville’s Typee chronicled exotic worlds and
cultural traditions. However, 1849 marked a turning point in such imaginings as Chinese began
immigrating to the US in increasingly significant numbers. Encouraged by famine and poverty
as a result of economic debt incurred during the Opium Wars, 325 Cantonese speaking laborers
1
from the Guangdong province disembarked on California’s shore in 1849 in search of Gam Saan
or Gold Mountain. Leaving family behind and disregarding the imperial government’s decrees
against emigration, these “sojourners” heeded American employers’ calls for cheap labor.
American businessmen brokered the Chinese arrival through a credit-ticket system where
laborers would repay the agents with their employment wages after arrival in the United States.
From 1849 on, the population of Chinese in the United States continued to increase
exponentially due in large part to the Central Pacific Railroad Company’s avid recruiting of the
Chinese as well as many businesses’ use of Chinese workers as scabs. By the year 1870, 63,000
Chinese lived and worked in the United States. No longer a far away people, China had become
real for Americans and an integral part of the creation of American capital.
Yet, for most Americans the future of the United States did not include this new labor
force. Concepts like Manifest Destiny reflected Protestant desires to create a “new Canaan” on
the North American continent. In keeping with this idea, the population was imagined as pure;
naturalized citizenship was restricted to “whites,” effectively prohibiting Native Americans,
African Americans, and the later Chinese Americans from participation in the official making of
America. Thus while American businesses seemed to openly invite Chinese to partake in the
riches of the United States, they tacitly expected the Chinese to leave once their labor had been
exhausted. Encouraged by perceived Chinese passivity, the United States viewed the Chinese
more as tools of production than as potential citizens. Restrictive, racially targeted laws silently
disenfranchised these immigrants upon their arrival in America. With the completion of the
transcontinental railroad and a surplus of Chinese American labor, Americans were forced to
reconsider the place of the Celestial in the making of America. The shortage of jobs coupled
with fears about Chinese assimilation and racial intermarriage increasingly turned public opinion
2
against the integration of these immigrants into the body politic. Acquiescing to the demands of
popular opinion, congress passed the Exclusion Act of 1882 as an answer to the “Chinese
question.” This act represented the first national immigration law targeting a specific ethnicity.
As Lisa Lowe rightly notes in her study of the intersection of Asian American history and
politics, “the life conditions, choices, and expressions of Asian Americans have been
significantly determined by the US state through the apparatus of immigration laws and policies”
(7). In effect, the law legislated the Otherness of Chinese Americans by equating them with
characteristics anathema to American culture. The law also disrupted their familial lives by
separating husbands from wives and parents from children. Even with its repeal in the wake of
World War II, the Chinese would wait until the Immigration Act of 1965 to be allowed to
emigrate in the same proportions as immigrants from Europe.
The racialization of such legal restrictions coupled with the public’s continued
perceptions of Chinese as “inassimilable” and “alien” led to the ghettoization of Chinese
Americans into self-sufficient ethnic enclaves in the late 1800s. These Chinatowns quickly grew
into tourist locales where the typical Euro American could enjoy the intrigue and exoticism of
China without leaving the comfort of America. In addition, turn of the century freak shows often
framed their “exhibits” as overtly Asian so as to magnify the spectacle. This legacy of exoticism
persists today as Chinese Americans still remain prodigal in diverse forms. In film, television,
and the US literary imaginary, the Chinese are variously portrayed as deviant martial arts experts,
“dragon ladies,” or as frozen within the cultures and traditions of the Qing dynasty. Others are
ultra-sexualized; in the continuing trend of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, men are viewed as
overly feminine while women are still viewed as submissive. Perhaps the most telling and
pervasive stereotype, the “model minority,” insidiously works against Chinese (and Asian)
3
Americans on a daily basis. This erroneous appellation codifies Asian American achievement as
a function of the seemingly incompatible conditions of complete assimilation into the American
melting pot myth while retaining race-based characteristics which predispose them to success.
As fulfillers of the “American Dream,” Asians are denied much of the assistance and privileges
given to other ethnic groups. Yet, most markedly, the “model minority” stereotype reinforces
the conceit that Asian Americans are first and foremost a minority and not Americans. Once
again “alien” and “inassimilable,” Chinese Americans have become scabs in America’s minority
discourse. Flouted as the “good” or successful minority, they are often held up as an example of
what other minority groups should strive for. Under such pressure, both anger and violence
against Asian Americans has erupted in major cultural centers such as New York and Los
Angeles. Though these backlashes against Asian Americans were perpetrated mainly by other
minorities, the root cause still lies in the majority’s understanding and perpetuation of Asian
American stereotypes.
Against this history of exclusion and racialization also stands a parallel phenomenon of
artistic cooptation and fetishization. Modern American poetry most interestingly complicates
American images of Chineseness and poses the question of how a nation’s poetry can exalt a
certain sect of people while its laws and policies restrict them. The Modernist movement
followed on the heels of the first Chinese exclusion act and subsequent “Driving Out,” and
coincided with the building of Angel Island and the rise of bachelor societies in California.
Despite their contemporaneity, American Modernism, a literary movement largely fueled by
white, college educated, affluent men and women from the Northeast, seems completely separate
from the plights of Chinese Americans. Yet, Modernism’s complex interest in and use of
Chinese literary and linguistic forms begs a reconsideration of the inherent interconnectedness
4
between these two fields of study. Pound’s 1915 statement to his fellow poets that “Liu Ch’e,
Chu Yuan, Chia I, and the great vers libre writers before the Petrarchan age of Li Po, are a
treasury to which the next century may look for as great a stimulus as the renaissance had from
the Greeks,” stands in stark contrast to the US’s imagining of Chinese Americans as shuffling,
dirty workers who would take on the most menial tasks for limited pay (Literary Essays 218).
How is it possible that these writers propagated such a differing view from the one advanced by
the legal declarations of the United States? And, what impact did and does this have not only on
Chinese Americans, but also the American populace at large?
The bulk of the following book attempts to theorize the reasons for and effects of such
inconsonant imaginings of Chineseness by actuating historical texts alongside the flourishing
critical field of Modernism and Asia. This field, in effect inculcated by Zhaoming Qian’s book
Orientalism and Modernism, has blossomed in the past decade and a half; the work of critics
such as Robert Kern, Ming Xie, Eric Hayot, and Guiyou Huang each focus on elucidating the
extent to which Modernist writers were influenced by Asia. Invariably, the question of Pound
and China figures largely in each critic’s work. Pound, the most vocal of his generation on the
importance of China, makes a good study due both to his voluminous legacy of miscellanea and
his continuing presence and importance within the American poetic canon. Though much of the
work complicating the impact of Asia on Modernist poetry may be new, interest in Pound’s
entanglement with China evidenced itself in earlier criticism of his poetics. Achilles Fang’s
work on Pound and Fenollosa in the fifties gave way to Woon-Ping Chin Holaday’s study of the
relationship between Pound and Binyon in 1977. In addition, the current outpouring of scholarly
interest in China and Pound draws largely from the early biographical work of Ira Nadel and
Hugh Kenner as well as builds off the critical inquiry of Ronald Bush, Anne S. Chapple, and
5
John Nolde in the 1980s. This scholarship coupled with the corpus of work interrogating
Pound’s translational abilities promulgated by multilingual scholars like Wai-lim Yip, James Liu,
and Stephen G. Yao set the stage for Qian to recognize modernism as “a phenomenon of
internationalism / multiculturalism” (5). Qian’s groundbreaking analysis pinpoints the process
through which Asian arts and texts became constitutive in the works of Pound and Williams.
Arguing against earlier understandings of Modernism as an event contained within European and
American literature, Qian broadens the discussion to show how China functions as a generative
force in Modernist poetry.
Though Qian’s work admirably amplifies the presence of China within Euro American
writing, his focus on elucidating these sites of borrowing ignores the more complex postcolonial
nuances of such exchanges on both the American literary canon and Asian American literary
production. His thesis of “argu[ing] for a multiculturalist model that recognizes the place of the
Orient among all other influences in the Modernist movement” unfortunately stops short of
interrogating the cultural and critical implications at play (5). While I agree with Qian’s
depiction of Modernism as inflected by multiple cultural phenomena outside of Europe, I worry
that his assessment falls prey to a liberalized notion of multiculturalism predicated on ideas of
premature pluralism. In his recuperation of the importance of China to Williams and Pound,
Qian takes pains to distance his use of the word “Orientalism” from that of Edward Said.
Contrary to the Saidian paradigm of locating the self against the other’s shortcomings, Qian
argues that these two writers looked to the East for commonalities as “crystallizing examples of
the Modernists’ realizing Self” (2). Qian’s dismissal of Saidian Orientalism in favor of a new
kind by which Pound and Williams sought out affinities with the East not only sanitizes the term
but also the very real appropriations going on within Modernist poetry. While a much needed
6
first step in terms of recognizing the global impulse of Modernist American poetry, Qian’s work
points out the impact of China while suppressing the agency and history of Chinese Americans.
In this model, Chinese influence becomes a part of the canon of Euro American knowledge
without questioning the means by which it came to be there or connecting such cooptation with
the historical reality of Chinese America’s political position.
Currently the bulk of scholarship on Modernism and Asia still centers on elucidation and
legitimization of the effect of the East on Western poetry. The field has yet to fully engage the
historical moment of such a cultural exchange, one in which the object of Modernism’s affection
was simultaneously excluded from American society. As Steven G. Yao laments in his review
of Yunte Huang’s Transpacific Displacement,” “the extent of this generative interaction, as well
as the complexity of its dynamics, have gone largely under-theorized across the range of relevant
academic fields” (213). Few texts query the effect of the China-Modernism partnership on Asian
American textual production and the American literary canon; the field of Modernism and Asia
has largely been self contained, content to gesture toward the multicultural nature of Modernism
without probing the sociocultural and historical dynamics of such cross-cultural exchange. It is
time to move beyond disciplinary boundaries to cross-examine the implications and
ramifications of such textual borrowings.
Yunte Huang’s Transpacific Displacement begins to address the absence of critical
thought across various disciplines through his exciting and innovative approach to
representations of the Chinese language. In his work, Huang reformulates the Black Atlantic of
Paul Gilroy in terms of theorists like Lisa Lowe and David Leiwei Li. Huang then goes on to
define his premise of “intertextual travel” as including the practices of both ethnography and
translation. These separate fields work in concert to create representations of Asians and Asian
7
Americans that move backwards and forwards across the interlingual and intercultural routes of
the Asian diaspora. For Huang, these textual migrations not only indicate the plurality of Asian
American experiences and representations, but also the ramifications that appropriations of these
cultural and signifying markers may have on both the Other and the borrower. Viewing the
appropriations of Modernists like Pound and Lowell as “ethnography,” Huang posits these works
constitute “a historical process of textual migration of cultural meanings” which reveal the
transnationalism and interlinguality of the American canon (3). Huang continues this study
forward into the works of Lin Yutang, John Yau and Maxine Hong Kingston to demonstrate
these writers’ linguistic challenges to such signifying practices. Overall, Huang’s work examines
the anthropological and linguistic nuances of Pacific textual migrations and sets the standard for
critical literature connecting the separate arenas of Asian, American, and Asian American
literature. His text also argues for a transnational understanding of American literature and a
revaluation of the canon.
My purpose in the following book mirrors some of the broader concerns at work in both
Huang’s and Qian’s texts. First, I build off of Huang’s premise of formulations of Chineseness;
however, whereas Huang focuses on linguistic appropriation and a framework of intertextual
migrancy, I instead highlight the process through which the images and objects of China become
charged signifiers of Chineseness as a means of evaluating the sometimes hidden, always
ambivalent influence of China on much of modern American poetry. Here, I share Qian’s
overarching thesis that Chinese language and literature are fundamental components of
Modernist poetry. Yet, I complicate this thesis by resurrecting the historical moment of cultural
borrowings, one in which the art object of China became elevated while the makers of such
objects were refused entry to the United States, as well as interrogating the mode in which these
8
borrowings continue to echo in later American poetry. Within this history, I mobilize a
sociohistorical account of the factors surrounding American imaginings of China that also
remembers both the literary and sociopolitical history of Chinese America. In lieu of denying
the extant Chinese influences in post-1910 American poetry or investigating and isolating such
moments, I actualize critic Eric Hayot’s call to develop “a history of the West’s cultural and
literary representations of China that [is] not squeamish about Orientalism…living instead inside
the more complicated space that combines uncertainty and discomfort” (530). By situating
Modernist representations of China in their historical moment and tracing forward the
implications of such representations to the poetry of Gary Snyder, Marilyn Chin, Fred Wah, and
John Yau, I foreground the inconsonant treatment of Chinese and Chinese Americans by the
American government as well as indicate the permanence of these Chinese influences on the
American poetic canon. Much as Chinese Americans have proved they are not “sojourners,” so
too have the Chinese influences interwoven into Pound’s poetry become a recurrent and
trenchant force in contemporary American poetics. My hope is that foregrounding the lessconfronted and more ambiguous texts concerning China and Chinese Americans against the
currently circulated (mis)understandings of both will evince a more accurate collage of American
poetry that may enable further Chinese American political and literary parity.
To begin to address these questions, the first chapter offers a socio-historical picture of
America’s conception of China from the pivotal year of 1849, when the Gold Rush first brought
over scores of Chinese, to the beginning of the Modernist movement. Reading the disparate
cultural images of the Chinese across early newspapers, poetry, dime museums, interior design,
and travel narratives intimates the complicated and sometimes contradictory reactions to China
and Chinese Americans. Though early cultural works cast Chinese Americans as inassimilable
9
aliens, or, borrowing from Susan Stewart’s work, “freaks,” by the turn of the century a parallel
vision of China as a cultural mecca began to emerge. Blending together the work of scholars of
museum studies, historians, and Asian American activists, this chapter erects a critical
framework which theorizes that such a shift was possible due to the abstraction of Chineseness
from the corporeal Chinese body.
With this framework in place, Chapter Two focuses on the American Modernist
movement. Much like the cultural ephemera after the turn of the century, Modernist poets also
conceived of China in more laudatory terms. Contrary to the early casting of the Chinese as
“dirty” and “inscrutable,” Modernist poets often used China as a touchstone for their poetic
imaginings. Though much work has been done previously on the role of China in the works of
such major figures as Williams, Pound, Moore, and Stevens, few studies address these poets’ use
of China or offer a more complete picture of the manner in which an image of China manifested
itself in American poetry. Though Pound would go on in his later years to find within the
Chinese character a new poetic method, his and other poets’ early interactions with an idea of
China beg the questions of appropriation and ascendancy. This chapter addresses the question of
“why China?” as well as offers several literary exhibits of the different ways in which
Modernists appropriated, translated, and imagined China in their works. It also addresses the
questions of intertextual colonization as well as the lasting effect of these “translated” texts.
Focusing not only on poets traditionally linked with China such as Pound and Lowell, the
chapter additionally interrogates poets outside the “Modernism and Orientalism” canon. By
drawing on recent market theory that reassesses Modernism against its era of capitalist growth, it
argues for a more pragmatic understanding of the different avenues through which how
Chineseness was framed and disseminated for public consumption.
10
Chapter Three, “‘Translucencies’: Chinese Myths Rendered in English,” conjoins critical
inquiry on Pound’s literary use of China with research on his continuing importance to present
day poetics. Adding to the work done by Lazlo Géfin and others, I focus not on Pound’s
transformation of prosody but rather on the literary heritage of a single Chinese word, 新 (xin).
First revisiting the concomitant discovery of the ideogrammic nature of the Chinese character
with Pound’s ascent to Vorticism, I trace the term 新 from its earlier uses in the Confucian
Chung Yong (also translated by Pound), 4th century BCE poet Lu Ji’s Wen Fu, and the Shi Jing
or Book of Odes, adapted by Confucius in 600 BCE, through to its presence in the Cantos and
later revival in Gary Snyder’s “Axe Handles,” Fred Wah’s “Tracks,” and John Yau’s “Chinese
Villanelle.” Tracing these roots and routes of 新 fleshes out its various meanings and the
avenues through which these meanings change/are changed and enrich/are enriched in each
poem. The literary etymology of 新 both explains and illuminates the translation methods by
which Modernist poets, as well as the poets who came of age in the years following Modernism,
not only created new means of translating, but also allowed these translation practices to resonate
within their poetic innovations. Finally, acknowledging 新’s importance underscores the extent
to which Chinese literature and language remains an integral piece of American poetics.
Chapter Four complicates the arguments of the previous two chapters by focusing on the
techniques used by contemporary Chinese American poet Marilyn Chin to undermine the
Modernist use of Chinese images. To write poetry as a Chinese American requires engagement
not only with issues of racism, but also with the legacy of American Modernist poetry’s
interaction with Chinese literature and language and its projection of China as enlightened,
aesthetic Other. Claiming a dual literary and linguistic heritage, Marilyn Chin’s poetry confronts
these issues by probing the tripartite relationship between Modernism, the Chinese American
11
literary tradition, and the Chinese language. In so doing, Chin constructs an interlingual poetry
that concomitantly celebrates and calls into question her identity as twice-removed (female,
minority) Other. The chapter investigates how Chin distances her poetry from a singular reading
to create a dialectic that disavows Orientalist imaginings of China and the Chinese language
while creating a liminal space where Chinese and English, American culture and Chinese culture,
can be equally represented and owned. By situating Chin’s poetry amidst current debates of
liberal multiculturalism, ethnic publishing, and the continuing study of Modernism, China and
Orientalism, I proffer a more difficult and complicated (re)vision of Chinese Americanness.
Chapter Five continues the dialogue between Chinese American poetry and the Poundian
legacy by engaging the experimental poetics of John Yau. Unlike Chin, Yau’s poetry intersects
with the formal innovations inspired by Pound and other Modernists and is less likely to rely on
an autobiographical lyric I. As such, his disjunctive poetics has only recently been considered by
Asian American literary critics who are eager to refute the perception that ethnic American
poetry is unconcerned with formal innovation. Yet, in responding to such critiques, these
theorists often neglect to take into account the Asian American literary paradigms which have
unwittingly laid the groundwork for such essentialized readings. From its inception, Asian
American criticism has focused on narrating a coherent tradition of socially engaged writing that
actively challenges dominant Eurocentric ideals via the evocation of a markedly Asian American
content. Works which do not conform to such paradigms have often been overlooked or only
tangentially engaged. Investigating John Yau’s position within both Asian American studies and
poetry criticism at large elucidates the complicity of multiple groups in delineating authorized
versions of Asian Americanness that adhere to specific poetic markers and as well as gestures
towards the complicated nexus that narrates which versions of ethnic poetry enter into the
12
mainstream. I contend that understanding how these theoretical paradigms both constrain and
encourage certain modes of reading allows us to create new flexible frameworks that may fully
engage experimental works and again widen our conception of not only contemporary American
poetics but also of the nuanced connections between the traditions which inform it.
13
CHAPTER TWO
ANXIETY AND DESIRE:
AMERICAN VISIONS OF CHINESENESS AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
“Most important of all, these poets have bowed to the winds of the East”
-Harriet Monroe1
Harriet Monroe’s above assertion should by now seem passé. In the past two decades,
numerous studies detailing the relationships between Modernist poets and all things Asian have
appeared. Critics like Zhaoming Qian and Eric Hayot have intricately followed the historical
interactions of Modernist figures such as Pound and Williams with Asian literature and art, while
others such as Steven G. Yao have speculated on the extent to which these poets fully understood
the Asian texts they worked with. This reality has in effect become canonized by the Bedford
Anthology of American Literature’s assertion that “the art of [China] strongly influenced
Modernist poets and painters in Europe and the United States”; students are now taught from the
minute they learn about Imagism that Asia figures largely in the Modernist canon (Belasco and
Johnson 531). Yet, in teaching American literature from the Civil War forward, the historical
record offers an incongruous story. Reading texts such as Pound’s translations of Li Po (李白)
alongside historical accounts of the struggles of Chinese Americans begs the question of the
overwhelming inconsonance between Modernism’s designation of China as “a treasury to which
the next century may look for as great a stimulus as the renaissance had from the Greeks” (Pound,
Literary Essays 218) and the US government’s systematic removal and exclusion of Chinese
1
Monroe qtd in Patricia C. Willis’s "Petals on a Wet Black Bough: American Modernist Writers and the
Orient."
14
from US shores. How can we accommodate the factual and generative influence of Chinese
literature and art with the equally real history of Chinese disenfranchisement and racism?
Excavation of the historical perceptions of Chineseness from the influx of Chinese labor
to 1914 reveals the variety of political and social forces which acted in concert to alternately
objectify and fetishize China and Chineseness. Due to the United States’ rapid modernization,
Chinese subjects oscillated from economic necessity – labor essential to the taming of the Wild
West – to financial and cultural scourge, the ghettoized, unseen cogs in America’s economic
machine. Yet in the decades surrounding World War I, the previous image of the Chinese as
oppositional to American nationhood gave way to a third depiction of China – that as foil to
America’s fragmented and over-industrialized condition. Whereas nineteenth century Americans
largely viewed the Chinese as underdeveloped, by the early twentieth century the cultural objects
produced by such a society had proven to be authentic treasures. The following chapter
reconciles these representations of China at the turn of the century by explaining the sociohistorical forces that objectified, othered, and enfreaked Chinese Americans. By mobilizing
historical sources, travelogues and the ephemera of dime shows, museums, and interior design
magazines, I effect a broader comprehension of the different avenues through which Chineseness
was deployed and displayed from the moment of Chinese immigration to the beginning of the
Modernist movement. Reading across these sources evinces the multiplicity of ways the
anxieties of the US were historically displaced to China and its objects. Such displacement
culminated in an abstraction of Chinese cultural products from their human producers,
consequently freeing Chineseness from its association with negative “yellow peril” images of the
Chinese and allowing for a new fetishization of Chinese art, language, and poetry.
15
A History of Difference
Though a handful of Chinese had come to the US prior to 1849, the discovery of gold at
Sutter’s Mill and the ensuing gold rush caused Chinese to sail for America in earnest. Frustrated
by a declining economy due to recent droughts, California’s promise of Gam Saan or Gold
Mountain lured Cantonese speaking Chinese by the thousands from the Guangdong province to
the rough-and-tumble seaside town of San Francisco. Here, the Chinese mixed with an
assortment of men from different cultures, backgrounds, and professions. Australian, Irish,
English, Chinese, Mexican, and American prospectors all frequented the city to procure
necessities, eat a good meal, and enjoy the robust nightlife. In addition to these prospectors and
other intrepid youths looking to secure their futures, San Francisco also attracted business
proprietors and investors eager to exploit the opportunities afforded by the bustling frontier town;
in fact, by 1853 San Francisco enjoyed a number of newspapers and a large share of the nation’s
college graduates (I. Chang 36). Thus, in the early days of the Gold Rush, the Chinese merely
contributed another exotic element to the odd admixture of San Francisco. As the Chinese
population rapidly increased (by 1852 over 2,000 Chinese had entered through San Francisco’s
port) however, curiosity quickly gave way to unease over their alien customs. Accordingly,
California imposed a foreign miner’s tax aimed at crippling the Chinese mining business. By
1855, these sentiments had made their way East to Congress as legislators apprehensive of the
perceived threat the Chinese mounted against Christian American culture lobbied for additional
Chinese restrictions.
Despite these fears, the Civil War and its aftermath momentarily stayed any national legal
action against Chinese immigrants and instead extended another labor opportunity. Following
the trauma of internal war, Americans looked to the transcontinental railroad as a healing
16
measure that would figuratively and physically link together the lands America now claimed.
Though the Central Pacific Railroad Company initially hired only white men, the pool of white
labor available on the frontier was often scant; hard labor on the railroad was less enticing next
to the ever imminent chance to strike it rich in the mines. The company’s initial drive for 5,000
workers brought in only 800, many of whom were “unsteady men, unreliable” (qtd. in I. Chang
55). When these workers struck in 1865, the Central Pacific replaced them with Chinese
laborers who would perform the same work for a lower price. Pleased with the industry of the
Chinese, the company not only kept them on after the return of the white laborers, but eventually
extended its recruiting front to China; as Collis Huntington, one of the executives of Central
Pacific wrote, “It would be all the better for us and the state if there should half a million come
over in 1868” (qtd. in I. Chang 57). For many of these Chinese, the harsh working conditions
and low wages in comparison with their white counterparts were a small price to pay to escape
the poverty of Guangdong province. Thus, over the next 4 years, the Chinese became a driving
force behind the timely completion of the railroad in 1869.2
While the Chinese were highly sought after before 1870, economic crises as well as a
surplus of labor conspired to turn the Chinese American of the 1870s into a scapegoat for
American financial woes. In the early years of Chinese immigration, the gold rush, a thriving
economy, and the headlong drive to “establish” California had all conspired to present an open
labor market for Chinese eager to escape famine and violence in their homeland. As late as 1869,
Charles Robinson in the Overland Monthly proclaimed prohibiting Chinese labor would be “the
height of folly,” in that it threatened to stall the transformation of the California frontier (Takaki,
A Different Mirror 28). Yet by 1870, overspeculation and the monopolization of major
2
Equally telling of the invisible labor of the Chinese was the exclusion of Chinese American workers
from the celebration of the completion of the railroad at Promontory Point on May 10, 1869. At this fete,
the historical picture of the driving of the golden stake is framed only with Euro American workers.
17
companies such as the Union Pacific led to a drastic increase in unemployment. As Iris Chang
notes, “by the end of 1870 there were one Chinese and two whites for every job in San Francisco”
(117). The increased competition for jobs exacerbated race tensions, pitting white workers
against Chinese.
As Euro Americans grew more and more frustrated with what they felt was the unfair
advantage of the labor capital of the Chinese, attitudes towards Chinese labor began to shift.
Cast as “sojourners” by the American populace, it was widely believed the Chinese had come
merely to earn money and would leave soon enough. These racially motivated and historically
incorrect notions served to further distance and disenfranchise early Chinese Americans from
their Euro American counterparts. 3 Perceived as interested only in bettering themselves and
their home nation, they did not fall in line with the popular American notions of Manifest
Destiny and the errand into the wilderness; Chinese pursuits were seen as monetarily motivated
while American settlers answered the call of a higher power. The term “sojourners” also
cemented the dominant culture’s idea of the Chinese as “being brought to this country about the
same as foreign cattle and horses are” (Laramie Daily Sun, qtd. in Sorti, 71). Highly illustrative
of this view is a receipt from the Davies Company in1890 which lists “a Chinaman” alongside
other commodities such as “bonemeal [sic]” and “canvas” (Takaki, A Different Mirror 25). This
image of Chinese not as immigrants but as labor capital “brought” into the States by
pro(a)gressive American businessmen coupled with the “Chinaman’s” perceived
nonparticipation in the great American experiment laid the groundwork for the scores of
discriminatory laws and practices enacted against Chinese laborers as California’s booming
economy came to a screeching halt.
3
In fact, as Takaki notes, Western European “Americans” returned to their home countries in sizable
numbers between 1895 and 1918. (See Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 11.)
18
In this climate, articles and editorials that examined the potential negative impact of
Chinese immigration proliferated. Bret Harte’s “Plain Language from Truthful James,” perhaps
better known as “The Heathen Chinee” became one of the most popular texts of 1870. Though
the story itself pokes fun at both Chinese and Irish immigrants, the final exclamatory line, “We
are ruined by Chinese cheap labor!” resounded throughout the US and echoed popular sentiment
against Chinese Americans. The story became so popular that the Union Porcelain Works in
New York used a drawing of the climactic scene where Ah Sin is discovered cheating on a bar
pitcher in the 1870s (Denker 55). Reputable institutions like the American Medical Association
also contributed to the growing xenophobia by funding a medical study of the proliferation of
syphilis by Chinese prostitutes. Despite its inconclusiveness, the president of the AMA charged
“even boys eight and ten years old have been syphilized by these degraded wretches” and a
major medical journal published the incendiary “How the Chinese Women Are Infusing a Poison
in the Anglo-Saxon Blood” (qtd. in I. Chang 123). Acquiescing to the fears of the public,
California passed several racially motivated laws aimed at restricting Chinese Americans both at
work and at home. Legislation like the Sidewalk Ordinance disrupted Chinese laundries while
the Cubic Air Law cracked down on overcrowded Chinese American apartments while ignoring
equally crowded Euro American ones (I. Chang 119). The institutionalization of Anti-Chinese
sentiments via legislation served to ignite violence against Chinese immigrants and worked hand
in hand with the passage of other exclusionary laws. In 1871, a number of Chinese Americans in
Los Angeles were massacred. By 1876, the Chinese question had become a political problem as
Republicans in Wyoming concluded Chinese labor to be “fraught with serious and dangerous
consequences,” and several Wyoming governors held they “are not to be regarded as a desirable
element in our civilization” (Sorti, 98-99). The rise of the strongly anti-Chinese orator Dennis
19
Kearney and his catch-phrase “The Chinese Must Go” intensified these sentiments to the point of
violence. On March 13, 1877 five Chinese workers in Chico California were murdered by
Kearney’s Workingmen’s Party. Four months later a riot against the Chinese broke out in San
Francisco’s Chinatown. The urgings of anti-Chinese groups like the Workingmen’s Party as
well as anxiety over loss of capital prompted Congress to pass the Exclusion Act of 1882. As
Lisa Lowe expounds in Immigrant Acts, “immigration has been historically a locus of
racialization and a primary site for the policing of political, cultural, and economic membership
in the U.S. nation-state” (174). The Exclusion Act, the first immigration act based on race, not
only barred Chinese from immigrating to the United States, but also racialized Chinese
Americans within the national polity, marking them as perennial outsiders to American life. By
1884, the law was amended to prevent the reentry of Chinese who had claimed residency prior to
1882. The extended 40 year tenure of the act coupled with citizenship restrictions and other
ethnically prohibitive legislation cemented an impression of Chinese Americans not as citizens,
but as “the foreigner within” (Lowe 5).
Though the majority of news-worthy White/Chinese confrontations happened on the
frontier, the Chinese American population and anti-Chinese sentiments were not restricted to the
West Coast. As the widespread reception of Bret Harte’s work suggests, the proliferation and
modernization of media and publishing served to bring the average Euro-American in contact
with the Chinese. The Rocks Springs Massacre of 1885, which resulted in an estimated two
dozen Chinese deaths and 150,000 dollars in property damage, was reported promptly by the
New York Evening Post. The article went on to note how a Mrs. Osborn shot and killed two
Chinese and “is applauded for her public spirit” (qtd. in Sorti, 117). Additionally, in the years
following the close of the Civil War, numerous Chinese fled the California area to try their luck
20
in the East. While some became shop owners in the South, many flocked to metropolitan areas
throughout the East Coast. New York’s Chinatown was firmly established by the 1880s; by
1900, more than 7000 Chinese Americans lived in New York (Waxma). Though widely
believed to be a frontier problem, by the early 1900s the Chinese question reached across the
nation.
Hence, the first and only contact many Americans had with China or Chinese Americans
was mediated through print. The growth and diversification of the US publishing industry
further helped to bolster this phenomenon and bring China to the States. As new technology
made printing both faster and less expensive, a multiplicity of texts, including those authored by
a nascent American literary scene, began to find their way into the market. These American
authors, much like the general public of the US, sought to define American literature over and
against that of Europe. Especially in the years following the aftermath of the Civil War, authors
and critics assayed to identify specific styles and themes that reflected the rapidly changing and
growing make up of the States. Despite this cultural push, few publishers were willing to take a
chance on lesser-known American authors and instead relied heavily on reprinting older British
classics. American travel literature, however, managed to escape the financial binds that would
prevent its proliferation and enjoyed an unprecedented popularity among the Americans. As
Benjamin Moran states in his 1859 article “Contributions towards a History of American
Literature”:
This would seem to be the age of travel literature, judging from the many
narratives now published, and the general excellence of such works. No nation
has given more good books of this class to the world since 1820 than the United
21
States, considered with regard to styles and information (qtd. in Melton 17).
By allowing the American-at-home to tour the far reaches of the world with his fellow
countryman, American travel literature offered a compatriot understanding of the outside world
that British texts could not provide nor compete with.
Travel narratives of this period largely drew their popularity from the American public’s
love of adventure and search for an authentic American experience. Many early travelogues
recorded the opening of the American West and exploration of the Pacific Islands. These texts
allowed Americans in the Eastern states a front row view of the cultural expansion guaranteed by
America’s Manifest Destiny. As the infant country entered the world scene through
industrialization and imperialism, travelogues became another venue by which a sense of
American identity could be constructed and its fetishization of progress evinced. Through its
presentation of opposing cultures and its very narrative frame, travelogues delineated an
American uniqueness. Travel narratives to even familiar locales such as Europe became fraught
with imagery that positioned Europe as the past and America as the future; as Washington Irving
summed up, “my native country was full of youthful promise: Europe was rich in the
accumulated treasures of age” (qtd. in Melton 20). Americans who participated or wrote of the
“Grand Tour” of Europe most often did so as a means of affirming their prior history and setting
America apart as advancing ever forward. Regardless of the travelogue’s setting, the confident
American authorial voice reaffirmed readers’ nascent sense of American identity through the
contrast produced between the narrator and the culture under review.
For most travelers to China before 1900, China directly contradicted the Western
paradigm of progress; while Western science and industry moved forward at an ever-quickening
22
pace, China remained locked in archaic traditions. As the Reverend Karl Gützlaff observes in
his 1838 volume China Opened,
comparing the whole mass [of Chinese] with the inhabitants of Europe in the
present age, we look up with veneration to the spirit of improvement which has
constituted the latter the empires of the world. Once they were on a par, they
even fell beneath the Chinese; but now they have risen to a height almost to
dazzle the Asiatic eye (qtd. in Goodrich and Cameron 26).
As an early example of a missionary text, Gützlaff’s account appeared at a time when China
seemed off limits to the Western world. Therefore, despite its many textual shortcomings, his
two volume description became highly influential due to its rarity and realism.4 Like Gützlaff,
many travelers read China’s primitiveness as symptomatic of the nation’s over-civilized culture
and believed with General Wilson that Confucianism served “to arrest all intellectual
development and progress in China” (qtd. in N. Clifford 56). China’s stubborn hold on tradition
was not the only impediment to progress; it also suffered from laziness symptomatic of its
paganism. None of the cultural markers of progress in the West could be mapped onto China.
When measured against the West’s standards for improvement, the East had fallen conspicuously
short. Thus, for many a travel writer and his or her audience, only Christianization and
enlightened Western ideals could raise China out of its perennially archaic condition and propel
it forward into enlightened advancements.
The treaty of Nanjing in 1842 and subsequent additional treaties in the following year
served not only to open commerce between China and the Western world but also to increase the
amount of knowledge circulated about China. Intrepid travelers could now enter China and
4
Patrick Hanan discusses many of Gützlaff’s English and Chinese works as well as provides an excerpt
of an 1938 review of China Opened.
23
record its intricacies and exotic characteristics for an eager American audience at home. Within
these narratives, the travelers almost invariably made reference to the filth of the Chinese masses.
In the eyes of many American writers, the pervasive grime of the country and its residents served
as an outward indicator of the country’s backwardness (Denker 46-50). When held beside
Christian European standards of cleanliness as a measure of industry, this dirt symbolized
China’s want of progress. The Chinese in travelogues were often presented as a scrambling mass
which distracted and sometimes prevented travelers from fully appreciating the natural vistas of
China. Travel narratives generally focused on the scenery and strange customs of China, rarely
including descriptions or interactions with an individuated Chinese person. This continual
recourse to the undifferentiated Chinese masses worked to reiterate both the threat of the “yellow
peril” to a White Protestant America and the inability of Chinese to assimilate to the US ideals of
progress, individuality, and independence. The Chinese, like the Europeans, were stuck in the
past, while the United States moved constantly forward in science and industry. Bayard Taylor,
one of the most prolific travel writers of his time, serves as a barometer for US feeling on China
in the 1850s. Introducing China in his narrative as “the land of bizarre artifice and cunning, a
culture lacking,” the well-established poet and writer helped buttress the growing American
vision of China as inferior (Harvey 2). Toward the Chinese, Taylor felt an aversion that
“amounted, in effect, to a horror,” causing him to proclaim: “Their touch is pollution, and harsh
as the opinion may seem, justice to our own race demands that they should not be allowed to
settle on our soil” (qtd. in Ziff 152-153). These views, gathered first hand by one of their own,
were avidly sought and considered by the American populace; in the lecture season of Winter
1853-1854 alone, Taylor “gave 130 lectures, all of them to packed houses” (Ziff 154). Through
24
Taylor’s eyes, many Americans gained a first-hand look at the Chinese at the very instant that
Chinese immigrants began to enter America.
Desiring America
By the middle of the century, America itself had become a cultural myth; its image as a
new nation where anyone from any country could “make” something of himself was widespread.
To be American awarded one a sense of pride and ownership in the making of a new country
further engendering within immigrants a fierce desire to be and be perceived as American. Yet,
as many immigrants learned, the term American was primarily restricted to Western European
Protestants. To accommodate this reality, those born to less desirable parentage and those of
mixed race often did everything within their power to “pass.” Immigrants anglicized their names,
tamed their accents, and copied the manners and dress of old-stock Protestant Americans. Lightskinned children of mixed parentage denied their non-Caucasian heritages and fully embraced
their whiteness in order to ease their paths in the US. Many moved far away from their
birthplaces so as to start over as “American” and ensure participation in the great American
project. For Chinese Americans, often viewed as the lowest race in the Asian hierarchy,
“passing” was largely out of the question. Marked by physical difference, it was nearly
impossible for Chinese to merge into mainstream American society. Though mixed race
children of Chinese ancestry were few, thanks in part to strict miscegenation laws prohibiting
such relations, “Eurasians” often claimed an ancestry apart from China. The Eaton family, from
which sprang the earliest examples of Asian American writing, represents the avenues by which
Asian identity was negotiated in the New World. Born to a Chinese mother and an English
father, the Eaton family’s children alternately declared Chinese, Japanese, English and Mexican
heritage with the latter two siblings living “in nervous dread of being ‘discovered.’” (Far 227).
25
While Edith Maud Eaton represented herself as ethnically Chinese through her pseudonym Sui
Sin Far, her sister Winnifred Eaton claimed Japanese ancestry. Winnifred’s choice of the
Japanese pen name Otono Wantanna and her focus on mediating a Japanese perspective led to
her immense popularity over that of her sister. Her literary status also attests to the elevated
station occupied by the Japanese in comparison to the Chinese in the late 1800s.
In addition to their marked racial characteristics, these “strangers from a different shore”
were also immigrants to a different shore. From the moment they landed in California, Chinese
immigrants were treated as sojourning foreign labor, not as potential Americans. Chinese
Americans therefore offered a standard by which recent white immigrant groups could oppose
themselves; as such, they became a target for racism and exclusion. Irish Americans, whose
immigration also began in earnest in the1840s, represent one of the most outspoken groups on
the subject of Chinese labor. Discriminated against by the more established American Protestants
who viewed “the massive immigration of deeply impoverished Irish…as a Roman Catholic
challenge to an American republicanism deeply grounded in Protestantism,” Irish Americans had
continuously struggled to gain a foothold in American society (Lee 67). Like the Chinese, the
Irish initially faced xenophobia rooted in fears over their different culture and religion. Often
compared with blacks, the Irish were envisioned as both savage and dim-witted. Economics
played a major role as well; worried that Irish labor would take away the jobs of Protestant
Europeans, the opportunities for Irish workers were scant, poorly paying, and often dangerous.
As the Irish began to gain a foothold in American society, the influx of Chinese labor proved a
growing threat to their job security and precarious position in the States. While the Irish
immigrants began the transcontinental railroad in the East, they saw these same jobs go to
Chinese immigrants in the West. In 1870, Chinese workers were used as replacements for
26
striking members of the newly formed Irish labor society the Secret Order of the Knights of St.
Crispin at a shoe factory in North Adams, Massachusetts. The use of Chinese labor to break
Irish American strikes fueled the rising conflict between the two groups. Yet, while Irish
Americans blamed Chinese labor for economic downturn and decreases in labor demand, they
also used Chinese immigrants as a measure against which they could prove their Americanness;
by loudly speaking out against Chinese immigration and galvanizing a white supremacist
solidarity against Asians, Irish Americans aligned themselves with the more widely accepted
versions of Americanness and reignited the idea of the United States as a white republic.
This fierce desire to be perceived as American coincided with and fueled the rise in dime
museums and side shows in the middle of the nineteenth century, both of which made pointed
use of the extraordinary body. In her introductory essay “From Wonder to Error – A Genealogy
of Freak Discourse in Modernity,” Rosemarie Garland Thomson traces the historical
development of narratives concerning the anomalous body, proposing that “freak discourse is
both imbricated in and reflective of our collective cultural transformation into modernity” (3).
As Thomson explains, early conceptions of monsters and unusual phenomena as extraordinary
portents indicative of divine will persisted until the Enlightenment when science reformulated
the freak not as wonder but as error: “the prodigious monster transforms into the pathological
terata; what was once sought after as revelation becomes pursued as entertainment” (3).
Concomitant with these shifts, natural oddities become curiosities, inaugurating the age of
Wunderkammern or curiosity cabinets. As the precursors to modern museums, curiosity cabinets
were private collections held together by a scientific narrative that marshaled various man-made
and natural objects of the fantastic into an organized whole. In nineteenth century Victorian
America, modernization and capitalism served to reconfigure the fantastic; as Rachel Adams
27
reminds us in her study of the images of freak shows in the twentieth century, “While individuals
have been exhibited as freaks for hundreds of years, the orchestrated spectacle of the freak show
was born in the mid-nineteenth century of a conjunction between scientific investigation and
mass entertainment” (27). Many of these shows took place as standalone operations in rented
halls, others travelled across the country, and still others became permanent fixtures in the dime
museums that began sprouting up across the country in the 1800s. As an inexpensive mode of
entertainment that catered to a wide cross section of society, dime museums offered “a
democratic and ostensibly ‘educational’ form of entertainment in which neither language,
literacy, sex, nor the size of one’s wallet was an issue” (Dennet 5). Like the Wunderkammer of
the renaissance, successful entrepreneurs touted their museums as arenas not only for pleasure
but also for learning, thus adhering to Victorian beliefs that one’s leisure time should be spent in
the pursuit of edifying diversions.
Yet while dime museums and freak shows still retained aspects of wonder and the quasiscientific underpinnings of their antecedents, the incorporation of these shows as public
attractions also suggested new modes of display and narration. The growth of side shows in the
middle to late nineteenth century shadowed the rapid social changes and modernization of the
US. Addressing the American public’s apprehension of the effects of these changes on one’s
spiritual framework, freak shows reassured Euro American onlookers of their normality and
offered a unilateral view of difference. As Thomson explains in Extraordinary Bodies, these
exhibits “reaffirm[ed] the difference between ‘them’ and ‘us’ during a time when immigration,
emancipation of the slaves, and female suffrage confounded previously reliable physical indices
of status and privilege such as maleness and Western European features.” (Thomson 65).
Capitalizing on human deformities and cultural difference, dime museums were part curiosity
28
cabinet, part ethnographic study. Presenting everything from midgets to “fatboys,” dime
museums became “a place where deviance [was] enhanced, dressed, coiffed” (Dennett 134). The
display of the freaks as animate exhibits narrated by a hawker or program literature allowed
difference to remain static, nonthreatening and a subject for quasi-scientific study. By
showcasing difference in such a way, freak shows offered a chance to safely view Otherness
along with the opportunity to reaffirm one’s own normality; audience members confirmed their
commonality and solidarity with the mainstream American public merely by their participatory
presence as voyeur.
Through their revolving cast of characters, the rise of freak shows and dime museums
also echoed the century’s changing political and social challenges, many of which centered on
questions of ethnicity. As Rachel Adams argues, freak shows “performed important cultural
work by allowing ordinary people to confront and master the most extreme and terrifying forms
of otherness they could imagine” and acted as “a stage for playing out many of the century’s
most charged social and political controversies, such as debates about race and empire,
immigration, relations among the sexes, taste, and community standards for decency” (Adams 23). The prominence of “missing links” in the latter half of the nineteenth century belied a
growing preoccupation with evolution theory and a desire to “place” African Americans within
the US cultural strata. P.T. Barnum’s famous “What Is It” capitalized on this desire through its
stylized presentation of a short, mentally-retarded African American fashioned to represent the
connection between man and beast. Asking “Is it a lower order of MAN? Or is it a higher order
of MONKEY?” Barnum’s display invited onlookers to determine for themselves just what “it”
was – man or beast – while the exhibit’s race complicated that question and elicited speculations
on ethnicity (qtd. in Adams 37). Though Dennett avers that Barnum “avoided making a racial
29
statement,” the very alignment of the exhibit with the animal spoke volumes in favor of
prevailing opinions (both public and scientific) on the lesser nature of the African American
while underwriting the racist argument for their protection through slavery (Dennett 31). In the
“What Is It” exhibit and other racialized exhibits occurring in museums nationwide, the
predominant stereotypical assumptions about a specific ethnic group were enhanced and
extended.
By the close of the nineteenth century, the opening of Eastern markets coupled with an
expanding global presence and diversifying populace led to an increasing American interest in
the exotic. Multiple museums that centered on Asianness sprung up around the country as
sideshows increasingly showcased “freaks” of Asian ancestry alongside Orientalized non-Asian
acts which represented deviance by means of their size, disability, or indiscriminate gender.
While this growing assortment of Asian exhibits bespeaks the nation’s residual anxiety towards
the specter of Chinese labor and those Americans of Chinese descent already within its borders,
it also remembers an earlier American curiosity with China. The first recorded Chinese curiosity,
“The Chinese Lady,” toured multiple venues in New York and Philadelphia from 1834 to 1838. 5
As a cultural display, Moy offered onlookers an introduction to Chinese culture. Displayed with
various silks and tapestries, Moy engaged audiences through her use of chopsticks, her language
(she counted in Chinese), and her small bound feet. Largely ethnographic in purpose, Moy’s
display enticed voyeurs by allowing them to view the exotic at a safe distance. Like later
exhibits, communication was not allowed; rather, Moy existed separately from her audience, as a
specimen. Not disfigured or disproportionate in any way, Moy’s “freakishness” arose solely
from her ethnicity and her display alongside other curiosities. Thus “The Chinese Lady” served
5
Afong Moy is also “the first recorded Chinese woman in America” (I. Chang 26).
30
to bring one of the first accessible pictures of Chineseness to the West; for the price of admission,
the everyday American could get a first hand glimpse of the East.
The proliferation and popularity of Asian exhibits during the “peak years” of 1865 to
1900 testifies to the democratizing social function of dime museums and freak shows in the
increasingly turbulent later years of the nineteenth century (Dennett 41). These acts capitalized
on what Bogdan describes as the “exotic mode,” whereby a “racist presentation of them [Others]
and their culture” drew voyeurs eager to partake of difference (29). Perhaps the most well
known Chinese curiosity, the Siamese twins Chang and Eng were so successful as sideshow
freaks that they managed to retire to a North Carolina plantation with their respective wives.
While Chang and Eng’s most substantial draw was their conjoined bodies, their racial makeup
also played a role in their prominence and success. Often pictured in traditional Chinese garb
with queues hanging down their backs, the story of their rescue from a bleak Siam existence,
their portrayal as youths, and their purported joy and interest in American life all added to a
domesticated vision of the twins and reassured onlookers of their essential exoticness. Similarly,
other Orientalized exhibits took advantage of the public’s image of Asians by casting European
Americans as Asian through make up and dialogue. These exhibits drew customers by
highlighting the exotic persona advanced by the hawker or showman and “appeal[ing] to
people’s interest in the culturally strange, the primitive, the bestial, the exotic” (Bogdan 28).
Regardless of the exhibit’s ethnicity, the silence of the freak acquiesced to the overarching
narrative sold by the show at large and reaffirmed his or her own extra-humanness. In effect,
“the common strategy of attributing non-Western origins to people with developmental
disabilities” constitutes a growing American standard that equated whiteness with normality and
racial characteristics with deviance (Adams 30). For example, the “Wild Men of Borneo”
31
depended largely upon the overarching narrative produced and systematized by the scenery,
props, and back story of the exhibit. While the “Wild Men” were in reality two short, mentally
challenged brothers who grew up in Ohio, the show’s exotic narrative and trappings created two
savages from the Pacific domesticated and brought to America. The efficacy of this exotic mode
is evidenced in the near 53 year tenure of the “Wild Men” exhibit and a proliferation of similar
displays. The narrative delineated by the hawker alongside the backdrop and costuming thus
took on a far greater role than the human exhibit itself by insisting upon the foreignness and
exceptionalness of the freak, which served to further define the normality of the audience
through its showcasing of difference.
While Orientalized side show acts continued to serve as “edifying curiosities” that
reassured Americans of their place in American society, a new site for the performance of
Chineseness also arose in the Chinese Museum. By 1838, the display “Ten Thousand Chinese
Things” occupied a floor in the same building as Charles Wilson Peale’s famous natural history
collection. This assortment of Chinese cultural objects, gathered by Nathan Dunn during his
expedition to China, enhanced the few Chinese curiosities (including a life size carving of a
Chinese man in native garb) already housed in Peale’s dime museum (Denker 21). Ostensibly
the first public museum housing an extensive number of Chinese items, Dunn’s collection
remained open in its Philadelphia location for three years. Following much the same formula as
Dunn, John Peters Jr.’s “The Great Chinese Museum” opened in Boston in 1844. Peters, a
member of the small party sent to secure trade agreements between the US and China in June of
1844, returned to Boston with a significant store of Chinese artifacts. Peters’s museum
purported to be “a Picture of the Genius, Government, History, Literature, Agriculture, Arts,
Trade, Manners, Customs, and Social Life of the People of the Celestial Empire” (Tchen 113).
32
His various exhibition cabinets featured a variety of Chinese items ranging from crafts and
everyday household goods to expansive dioramas replete with life size Chinese figures.
Discreetly sectioned off and presented in neatly organized rows, Peters’s displays offered visitors
a scientific and catalogued look at Chinese culture as represented through its various objects.
His use of goods to signify Chinese culture indicates not only America’s growing interest in the
exotic, but also underscores the continuing perception of Chinese culture as archaic and inferior.
Much as early travelers commented on the backwardness of the Chinese people at large, Peters
similarly remarks in his catalogue, “They live in the past, we in the future, and consequently they
are not to be judged by our standards” (qtd. in Tchen 117). Such a conception of China’s
underdevelopment served to buttress the American fetishization of progress as realized through
scientific and industrial advancement. When measured against the stagnant culture of China,
America’s growing industry and imperialism revealed just how far the States had come.
P.T. Barnum would additionally cement this connection between the freak show and the
dime museum through his addition of the “Chinese Living Family” to Peters’s museum in 1850.
Moved about from Boston, to Philadelphia, and finally New York, Barnum rented The Great
Chinese Museum, renaming it Barnum’s Chinese Museum, during renovations on his own
building. In addition to the name change, only one other change took place: the inclusion of the
live exhibit of Miss Pwan-Ye-Koo and her assorted entourage. Barnum touted the debut of Pwan
as “the most extraordinary curiosity yet,” and “the first Chinese lady that has yet visited
Christendom” (qtd. in Tchen 118, 119). The authenticity of Pwan, bolstered largely by her
bound feet, substantiated both the exotic and authoritative nature of Peters’s collection. These
apprehensions translated well to Barnum’s audiences; according to the New York Express, Pwan
was “so pretty, so arch, so lively, and so graceful, while her minute feet are wondrous!” (qtd. in
33
Tchen 118). Unlike the side show exhibits, Pwan’s display did not operate primarily on bodily
abnormality nor did it document the progress of the States by producing a narrative of savagery.
Instead, the success of the exhibit rested largely on cultural difference. As Adams incisively
notes, “freaks are produced not by their inherent differences from us, but by the way their
particularities are figured as narratives of unique and intractable alterity” (56). Pwan’s
costuming, staging, and the alien cultural practice signified by her bound feet laid the foundation
for her popularity. Though Pwan and her attendants were only displayed for a total of eight
weeks, Tchen estimates that Barnum earned $10,000 in their display. The ethnographic interest
in China manifested by Pwan’s debut served as an impetus for the American tour of Barnum’s
Great Asiatic Museum from 1851 to 1855 and prefigured the proliferation of other “Chinese”
museums in Boston and elsewhere in the second half of the nineteenth century. While many of
these displays continued to define Americanness by showcasing difference, these museums also
bespoke a growing American curiosity toward Asian goods, thus laying the groundwork for the
later fetishization of Chinese cultural objects and the transformation of Chinese goods into a
form of symbolic capital.
Acting in concert with the enfreakment peddled by dime museums and carnival side
shows, the cessation of incoming Chinese due to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 removed
Chinese Americans from public view (and history books).6 As the mining and railroad industry
slowed, the majority of Chinese Americans began working in independently owned shops,
laundries, and restaurants largely concentrated in Chinatowns. To interact with Chinese
6
After the Exclusion Act, the majority of mainstream history books tend to gloss over any Chinese
American presence until well into the twentieth century. Ronald Takaki’s revisionist A Different Mirror
recaptures their presence against similar omissions of the specific histories of other ethnic groups.
Tellingly, perhaps, most mainstream literary anthologies also figure early Chinese American textuality in
terms of exclusion, generally reproducing texts like Sui Sin Far’s “In the Land of the Free,” which offers
a fictional account of the results of the Exclusion Act legislation. Following such inclusions, Chinese
American literature is usually not revisited until the outpouring of ethnic texts in the 1980s.
34
Americans now required one to seek out these stores in one of the increasing numbers of
Chinatowns located throughout the US. The formation of Chinatowns as a result of Chinese
American urbanization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries afforded another vista
for viewing the Celestial. Here, everyday Americans could visit an authentic China and
experience the spectacle it presented. Numerous advertisements touted tourists could “‘wander
in the midst of the Orient while still in the Occident’ and see throngs of people with ‘strange
faces’ in the streets” all while experiencing the ‘sounds, the sights, and the smells of Canton’”
(Takaki, A Different Mirror 247). Thus, tourism served a double function for Euro Americans
and Chinese Americans. For both, as Takaki notes, “tourism became a new ‘necessity’” (231).
While Chinatowns offered first and foremost a sense of community and protection away from
Euro American prejudice, they also offered employment much in the vein of dime museums and
side shows. Here, as there, visitors could engage the exotic and gain first hand ethnographic
views of Chineseness. Unlike the sideshows, however, Chinatowns also allowed for dialogue
through interaction with an actual Chinese American and the potential for significant
intercultural communication. At the same time, the very foreignness of the Chinatowns
“reinforce[ed] both the image and condition of the Chinese as ‘strangers’ in America” (Takaki
231). Tourists were advised not to stay within Chinatown after dark when danger and
lawlessness was apt to become more prevalent. Chinatowns became tourist attractions that
offered an exotic view and a chance at travel within America’s boundaries. In contrast to the
Euro Americans who visited them, Chinese Americans did not return to homes beyond the walls
of Chinatown at the close of the day. While Chinatown tours offered a discrete place for the
exchange of culture, the very ghettoization of these areas also reinscribed the Otherness and
objectification of the Chinese.
35
The renewal and strengthening of various exclusionary laws reduced the population of
Chinese in America and concentrated them into self sustaining units within Chinatowns,
effectively limiting their contact with mainstream Euro Americans. In addition, the racial
underpinnings of the Exclusion Act legislated and affirmed the un-Americanness of Chinese
immigrants. No longer needed as labor capital, the unwanted Celestials alternately represented
an exotic form of life that reified the American standard through its obverse paradigm. The
ghettoizing result of Chinatowns further cut off many Chinese from mainstream American
culture, confirming their position as exotified Other.7 As silent, anonymous exhibits in
Chinatowns and freak shows, the Chinese body became objectified and historicized outside of
the continuing American progressive model and as such assumed colonization by it. Relegated
to the back alleys of Chinatown, the silent stages of the side shows, and the display cases of dime
museums, Chinese Americans of the late nineteenth century became accessible primarily as
exhibited objects for curiosity and comparison. Functioning similarly to the disabled studied by
Rosemarie Garland Thompson, Chinese Americans became “icons upon which people discharge
their anxieties, convictions and fantasies” (56). China, and by extension Chinese Americans,
represented the ignorance and primitiveness of the past, which America had long since
conquered and corrected. No longer a labor threat or a menace to the nation’s cultural security,
Euro Americans measured themselves against Chinese Americans and began to use their
Otherness as imaginative fuel.
(Re)Visioning China
Though “the Euroamerican image of the Chinese and Chinese Americans from 1850 to
the turn of the century was almost completely negative,” the latter half of the century also
7
Ronald Takaki’s Strangers from a Different Shore details many of these attitude shifts as well as the
migrations of Chinese Americans.
36
realized a concomitant increase in interest in Chinese objects (Williams 95). Such an interest
proceeded paradoxically from stereotypes of China’s historicity; while the pastness of China
conflicted with paradigms of American progress, its perceived continuation of traditional ways
of life fixed many of its objects as not only curiosities but examples of cultural attainment. Freed
from negative associations with the potential power of a culturally alien populace, the exhibits of
Chineseness during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century detached Chinese Americans
from their cultural products. Objectified as exhibit, Euro Americans were able to dissect
Chineseness at will and rearrange and reorder it to fit into a dominant Western world view. Thus,
as the Europe gradually turned toward war in the early 1900s, China’s backwardness became
situated as a positive attribute in a world increasingly fragmented by industrialization. Whereas
early travelogues were apt to critique China’s seeming disinterest in Western paradigms of
progress and innovation, it was precisely this underdevelopment that began to gain praise in the
twentieth century. Now that the Chinese were no longer a threat to domestic life, the idea of
Chineseness formulated in the late 1800s could modulate into a symbol of culture,
cosmopolitanism, and wealth.
The new American museums of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century serve as a
primary reference point for delineating the growing interest in things Chinese. The cultural
antecedents of these museums, earlier Chinese museums like Peale’s and Peters’s, also reflect
this shift toward the perception of Chinese culture as aesthetically advanced. Though Peters’s
and Peale’s for the most part worked as arenas by which to showcase the exotic essence of the
Chinese, Peters’s, in particular, anticipated the later fetishizing of Chinese objects as refined,
cultural art. As Zboray and Zboray successfully argue, the underlying political message of the
museum argued for increased trade and treaties between the US and China. Not fully bent on
37
exotification, the museum was largely couched on the premise that the Chinese represented a
suitable venue for increased trade. Thus, the museum’s cases introduced the visitor to a life-size
diorama of the signing of the Wanghia treaty followed subsequently by a life-size rendering of
the empress and other cases which testified to the cultural attainments of the Chinese people.
Accompanied by a catalog which explained many of the cultural differences between the
Chinese and Americans, this assemblage tacitly alluded to the suitability of trade with China on
the basis of the Orient’s refinement and civility. As such, the museum countered many of the
previously held connotations of Chinese as dirty and backwards by indicating how its cultural
objects could be of aesthetic interest to Americans.
Despite the aims of the museum, the American public of the nineteenth century was still
strongly influenced by the image of the Chinese they had envisioned via authors such as Gützlaff
and Taylor or through the news accounts of the frontier. However, Britain’s dominance in the
Opium Wars concluded that, despite its difference, China offered no threat to the American way
of life. In addition, the eventual permanence of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1902 and the
continued ghettoization of Chinese Americans acted in concert to allay prior economic and
xenophobic apprehensions of Chinese on American shores. With no new Chinese immigrating,
and Chinese Americans already taxonomized in Chinatowns and side shows, the Chinese labor
menace virtually disappeared from popular view. Such invisibility reinforced the reality and the
legitimacy of Oriental displays, which in turn created a market interested in the authentic cultural
objects of the Chinese and the history and aesthetics to which they alluded. Participating in the
process of what Rosemarie Garland Thomson refers to as “enfreakment,” the arrangement of
Chineseness and Chinese Americans in museums, side shows, and travelogues, conflated the
Chinese self with its cultural antecedents. As Thomson explains,
38
Enfreakment emerges from cultural rituals that stylize, silence, differentiate, and distance
the persons whose bodies the freak-hunters or showmen colonize and commercialize.
Paradoxically, however, at the same time that enfreakment elaborately foregrounds
specific bodily eccentricities, it also collapses all those differences into a ‘freakery,’ a
single amorphous category of corporeal otherness. (“Introduction” 10)
Such voyeurism abstracts the human from the corporeal, leaving only an objective shell as each
cast member of the side show is reduced by the audience to a non-participatory inhabitant who
exists only on the stage and in the imagination of the onlooker. The body displayed abdicates
agency and becomes immobilized as object. Accordingly, the totality of the exhibit itself
becomes representative rather than its specific parts. In the case of Chinese exhibits, the myriad
orientalized side show exhibits working in what Bogdan terms the exotic mode serve as example.
In these displays, no ethnic Chinese was required; instead, Asian costume or trappings served to
delineate Chineseness. Here, the presentation and display became more important for audience
members than the human exhibited as the shell became by proxy the image and signifier of
Chineseness. The body and cultural object were further conflated by the selling of souvenirs at
these venues. According to Susan Stewart, the hawking of souvenirs “allow the tourist to
appropriate, consume, and thereby ‘tame’ the cultural other” (146). Without the ready
comparison between Chinese Americans and the orientalized memento, objects or tokens serve
to explain and replace Chineseness. The object substitutes for the missing Chinese American,
thus becoming the signifier of a culture; it is more “real” in its tangibility than the removed
human representation of the culture. This concrete reality of the object allowed visitors
uninitiated to China to exclaim Dunn’s museum to be “China in miniature,” “a perfect fac-simile
[sic],” and “a perfect picture of Chinese life” (Denker 21). Even without having known or seen
39
China or a Chinese, audience members could verify the reality of the displays due to their
preconceived notions and the wholesale marketing of the orientalized product for Chineseness.
The mounting prevalence of Chinese objects in American museums and the domestic
sphere also reveals the growing impression of China as culturally and artistically superior. Over
time, the private collections of Chinese artifacts exhibited by entrepreneurs like Barnum and
Peale would give way to the public collections displayed throughout the US in various art
galleries. As Denker notes in the exhibition catalogue After the Chinese Taste, “by the end of the
1930s, many distinguished public collections of Asian art were available to students throughout
the United States” (Denker 42). The proliferation of these venues began around 1890 through
the work of Ernest Fenollosa. Fenollosa, perhaps most famous for the inspiration he provided
Ezra Pound, returned from his study in Japan to become the curator of the new Oriental
Department at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (Denker 42). By 1895, Fenollosa had begun
lecturing on the finer aspects of the arts of China and Japan. In 1893, the Springfield Museum
opened an exposition of Asian art, while 1907 saw the display of Chinese porcelains in the
Metropolitan Museum. In 1919, the railroad engineer Charles Freer bequeathed to the
Smithsonian both his extensive collection of Asian art and a substantial sum of money earmarked
for constructing a gallery to house it. The Freer Gallery’s opening in 1923 also had the
distinction of being the first Smithsonian museum dedicated to the fine arts. That Asian art
would constitute the contents of the first Smithsonian fine arts museum speaks volumes of its
perceived aesthetic value.8
These proliferations of Chinese exhibits in public museums also paralleled another
growing trend in the antebellum era: that of international interior decoration. As the United
8
The Freer collection continues to boast one of the most extensive public collections of Asian art in the
US.
40
States entered the global stage in the late nineteenth century and tested the waters of imperialism
in the early twentieth century, changes in interior design mirrored a growing interest in the
international and turned away from the pre-war colonial revival styles. Fueled by the new sense
that interiors were “expressions of the women who inhabited them,” housewives desired décor
that readily evinced their individuality and articulated their membership in a growing sense of
Americanism (Hoganson 58). In contrast to the seventeenth century chinoiseries, the postbellum vogue of amassing Chinese objects was more widespread and affected a larger section of
society. According to Denker’s survey of the Asian aesthetic in American decorative arts, “prior
to 1860, most of the Chinese objects available to Americans were trade goods made to Western
taste” (Denker 41). By the late 1800s, increased trade agreements between China and the US
resulted in the wide availability of Chinese art. Aided by the diversifying markets of the US,
women could more easily and cheaply acquire objects from the global scale to present a worldly
ethos to their visitors. Thus, what Hoganson calls cosmopolitan domesticity, or the incorporation
of foreign objects in household decoration, became a style accessible by multiple echelons of
society.
The appropriation of international design elements by late nineteenth century families
were part and parcel of the “orientalist craze that swept the nation from 1870s to the turn of the
century” (Hoganson 62). Though certainly not all of the objects amassed hailed from China, a
large sector and the more easily discernible did. While notions of the Chinese as a challenge to
the fabric of the Euro American families and a symbol of all that America was not still persisted,
the continuing taxonomy of Chinese as Other coupled with the 1882 Exclusion Act and the
concomitant rise of Chinatowns served to both lessen the threat of the Chinese. Such welcoming
of Chinese products into the domestic sphere also manifests the separation between maker and
41
product accomplished by the forces of objectification and exclusion. Chinese goods that entered
the marketplace did not retain the taint of Chinese in America and the associated fear of “yellow
peril,” but rather signified to Euro Americans the long and exotic history of a foreign land.
Sanitized of their association with Chinese Americans, these culturally alien objects entered the
feminine sphere allowing for the domestication of the foreign art object and the transference of
the cultural capital symbolized by the object onto the US. As Hoganson perceptively notes,
“globalization did not threaten cultural loss so much as promise cultural gain, in a very literal,
materialistic, sense” (78). Much in the same way the tourist of the early nineteenth century
visited Europe to define a sense of history the US lacked, cosmopolitan domesticity appealed to
housewives as an avenue by which they could signal their worldliness and celebrate the success
of the United States in foreign fields. Chinese curiosities affirmed their possessors as worldly
women of wealth and distinction. While these women may not have traveled abroad, the objects
served, nonetheless, “as traces of authentic experience” (Stewart 135). In much the same vein as
the exotic souvenir Stewart theorizes, these objects’ “otherness speaks to the possessor’s
capacity for otherness,” marking the owners as cosmopolitan in an increasingly globalized world
(145).
Though authentic Chinese art was certainly more valued than American reproductions,
Chinese design elements nonetheless exerted a strong influence on multiple spheres of American
art from the late nineteenth century throughout the twentieth. Not restricted merely to painting,
this phenomenon is remarkable in the multiple spheres of art it affected including pottery, china,
furniture design, among others. Hobbs, Brocunier & Company’s “peachblow” vases represent
one of the earlier instances of American appropriation of Chinese design. Capitalizing on the
public interest surrounding the 1886 sale of a rare “peachbloom” glazed vase for $18,000, the
42
firm created and marketed similar vases to “considerable success” (Denker 42). The early
twentieth century also saw a revival of Chinese Chippendale furniture. As Denker notes, the
prevalence of these designs in antique and second hand stores connotes their popularity (47). In
addition, respected companies such as Lenox released China patterns that mimicked traditional
Chinese designs; for instance, the Ming pattern, featuring a cherry blossom in its center, was
marketed from 1917 to 1965 (Denker 68). However, this new image changed little for Chinese
Americans of the 1900s, as they still reported various forms of both random and institutionalized
discrimination.9 In fact, though China left a distinct imprint on interior design, designers often
preferred to ascribe Chinese designs with the moniker “AngloJapanese” as “the menial position
of Chinese workers in Western society at that time led writers in this field to ignore the influence
of the Chinese” (Denker 43). Such misnomers further underscore the separation taking place
between Chinese Americans and the aestheticizing of their cultural and artistic products.
Travel writers of the early twentieth century also began to offer a new vision of China
proper. The closure of Britain’s Opium Wars and Japan’s seizure of Taiwan along with the US’s
Open Door Policy left China more open to travel and tourism. Coupled with the prevailing idea
of tourism’s commodification of Europe and the death of “real travel,” a renewed interest in
seeing the unspoiled wonders of China emerged. In addition, the completion of the
transcontinental railroad and the settling of the “Wild West” engendered within many Americans
the desire to explore a new borderland to rejuvenate America’s pioneering spirit. Travel
remained “something like an obligation for the person conscientious about developing the mind
and accumulating knowledge” (Fussell 129). According to Justin Edwards, “by 1850…as many
as thirty thousand Americans traveled to Europe each year” (7). Travel to the European cultural
9
Both Ronald Takaki and Iris Chang list a number of discriminatory acts against Chinese Americans in
the early 1900’s, the least of which is the continued enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the
resultant “bachelor societies.”
43
meccas of yesteryear were now fraught by 1905 with “what [Henry] James refers to as ‘one’s
detestable fellow pilgrim’” (Caesar 53). In contrast, travel to Asia, and more specifically China,
escaped the abundance of tourists and the reality of America by offering an exotic experience
and a “new frontier” unmitigated by other Europeans. As early as 1881, Thomas W. Knox noted,
“the brainless idiots that add a pang to existence on the transatlantic voyage are rarely seen so far
away from the home as the coast of China” (qtd. in Fussell 466). In China, it was imagined, one
could retreat from the industrialized West by indulging in the civility and leisure of the East. In
the wake of the European world’s fracturing at the break of World War I, China’s previous status
as an over-civilized nation mired in tradition turned into a positive draw. Unlike India, the
Philippines and other Asiatic countries, China was virtually untouched by Europe’s imperialistic
hand. Save Hong Kong, China resisted colonization, just as it had previously resisted Western
relations. Thus, following the opening of China to trade in the late 1800’s China became for the
Westerner, in Kowalewski’s words, “terra incognita.” As Scidmore incisively notes, “neither
Murray nor Baedeker has penetrated the empire…and Cook has only touched the edge of it at
Canton” (qtd. in N. Clifford 19). China seemed to offer the last frontier for true “travel,” where
the traveler could experience the exotic, in its full historical splendor.
Many travel writers embraced the changing face of travel in the early 1900s by
delineating to their readers the perceived improvements between China now and China of ten
years before. Whereas earlier travelogues focused on the differences between China and the US,
later works found it useful not to dwell extensively on these differences but on the changes
occurring in China that allowed for a more comfortable journey. At first blush, these narratives
seem to offer China on its own terms – different but nonetheless an area to be visited and
appreciated. However, the recurring designation of the European ideal of Christian progress as
44
the future toward which China was approaching underlines the deep-seeded Eurocentrism in
many of the travelogues. For instance, Edwin Dingle, travelling to China in 1909, first notes:
“China is changing… although the movement may be hampered by a thousand general
difficulties, presented by ancient civilization of a people whose customs and manners and ideas
have stood the test of time” (8). Similarly, Isabella Bird Bishop devotes the final chapter of her
work to debunking prevalent themes of a decaying China; though this theme had been recurrent
in pre-1900 travelogues, a changing global scene coupled with a growing question over the end
result of industrialization led to a growing perception of China as a symbol of continuity.
Instead of using the citizens of China to demonstrate the disrepair and backwardness of the
country, Bishop points to governmental problems as the font from which China’s major issues
flowed: “the people are straight, but officialism is corrupt” (325).
However, as much as Dingle and Bishop represent a changing understanding of China,
they nonetheless retain many of the opinions of earlier travelers. On the page following Dingle’s
assessment of China’s change, he notes “there are huge areas absolutely untouched by the
forward movement and where the people are living the same life of disease, distress, and dirt, of
official, moral, and social degradation, as they lived when the Westerner remained still in the
primeval forest stage” (9). Unable to shake off previous conceptions of China and an
overarching belief in the superiority of Western customs, the subtext of Dingle’s observation
substantiates the hierarchical location of the Chinese under that of the West. Like Dingle,
Bishop also placed China within a Western framework. For Bishop, the major fault retained by
the country was its religion: “the strongest power in China to-day is Confucius; but the admirable
theory has proved weak in the presence of the neglected factor of the downward tendency of
45
human nature in a pagan nation” (326). Without the enlightenment of Western Christian ideals,
Bishop feared the country could never equal that of the Western world.
Although the 1900s represented a burgeoning change in the attitude of travel narratives
towards China, these attitudes were by no means universal. Eliza Scidmore, writing at the cusp
of the new century, still hearkens to many of the previous images of China. Constantly
remarking of the filth and degradation she saw in the inns, homes, and streets of China, she
affirms China “has been dying of old age and senile decay…slowly ossifying for this hundred
years. During this wonderful century of Western progress it has swung slowly to a standstill, to
a state of arrested existence, then retrograded, and the world watches now for the last symptoms
and extinctions” (qtd. in N. Clifford 28). For Scidmore, as for many other travel writers, this
arrested existence had less to do with backwardness or a want of civilization and more to do with
a perceived over-civilization and outdated modes of interaction. Thus, as Nicholas Clifford
rightly observes, China by the turn of the century “no longer reflected the kind of unchanging
and essentialized Orient that we today perhaps take too easily as the subject of colonial discourse”
(33). Yet, while the opinions and images published by travel writers after 1900 do offer
divergent views of China, more often than not Western imperialism would inform even the most
positive views. In these accounts, changing China, and a China changing for the better, did so in
order to accede to the demands of an increasingly Westernized world.
As the world reeled from international war, another distinctive shift occurred in the theme
of Chinese travelogues. Though some of the travelogues written in the years surrounding World
War I and World War II still retained traces of the exoticism found in earlier works, a great many
began to offer up China as a distinct refutation of the ills of the modern world. McGovern’s
1929 account of his entry into the “Forbidden city” by way of India presents China in the exotic
46
mode: “we had not only crossed the Rubicon, we had also burned our bridges behind us” (117).
Once in China, everything was expected to be foreign, different, and cut off from the Western
world. Similarly, like many earlier travelogues, educator and philosopher John Dewey’s 1929
account highlights the primitive aspects of China. However, for Dewey, this association with the
past and dedication to conservative values “is that of old China at its best, a kind of Confucian
paternalism” (248). Dewey would go on to become a major proponent and caretaker of this view
of an ancient China in an attempt to protect it against encroaching modernization and
degradation through industrialization. Stating China’s resistance to modernization as “in truth
the manifestation of a mighty social instinct,” Dewey’s China recalls a refined Europe of time
gone by and positions China as America’s enlightened counterpart (251). Writing from China
shortly after World War I, Bertrand Russell continues this portrait by pitting the condition of
China against that of the West:
China may be regarded as an artist nation, with the virtues and vices to be expected of the
artist: virtues chiefly useful to others, and vices chiefly harmful to oneself. Can Chinese
virtues be preserved? Or must China, in order to survive, acquire, instead, the vices
which make for success and cause misery to others only? And if China does copy the
model set by all foreign nations with which she has dealings, what will become of all of
us? (10)
Russell’s characterization of China as an “artist nation” reifies the increasing perception of the
aesthetic value of the country. Yet, Russell’s quotation also signals an increasing anxiety over
the state of the Western world and a growing desire to return to a pre-industrialized state. Thus,
as Nicholas Clifford avers, via Dennis Porter and Peter Bishop, “ideas of racial difference might
coexist quite easily with a Western belief that the East, in its inheritance of an unchanging
47
wisdom, knew how to draw on sources of knowledge that the West had never attained, or in its
headlong rush toward material progress and bourgeois satisfaction had lost” (25). China, then
symbolized what had been forgotten or destroyed in the race for “progress.”10
Even as attitudes towards China began to change, these new perceptions were directed
more to the cultural objects of the Chinese and less towards the Chinese themselves. In
surveying the balance of American travelogues to China in both the eighteenth and early
nineteenth century, only a handful allude to a specific Chinese individual. Scidmore’s impression
of the Chinese as “cast in the same unvarying physical and mental mold, the same yellow skin,
hard features, and harsh, mechanical voice” indicates the indifference she evinced towards the
Chinese (qtd. in N. Clifford 57). Scidmore’s envisioning of the Chinese as an indiscriminant
mass objectifies the group as a whole in much the same vein as the earlier tradition of dime
museums. Dingle similarly describes the populace of the “great metropolis of Shanghai” as
“swarming masses of coolie humanity carrying or hauling merchandise amid incessant jabbering,
yelling, and vociferating” (Dingle 10). Despite his interest in the changing face of “Wonderful
Shanghai,” Dingle, like many of the travel writers of this period seems to care little for the
people who inhabit it; asserting both “it is for such [natural beauty] that China holds out an
inviting hand, but she holds out little else to the Westerner” and “thank god there are those
uninvaded corners,” Dingle makes clear that China could be improved just by simply removing
the Chinese component (10, 29, 41). Echoing the earlier sentiments of pre-1900 travelers, the
majority of these travelogues viewed China as a feat of natural and artistic excellence marred by
its indistinguishable masses of residents.
10
Interestingly, travelers like Russell who opposed the development or modernization of Asia were
censured in 1925 by Lu Xun for their Orientalist views of China. Writing at the beginning of the Chinese
revolution, Lu Xun viewed the Western vision of China as adored other as connected to the West’s desire
to keep China from participating in the modern global economy.
48
For travelers to China in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, interaction with
Chinese was not a prerequisite for having traveled; on the contrary, souvenirs that could
authenticate one’s visit to an exotic location, and by extension testify to one’s cosmopolitanism
and wealth, were avidly sought. Mirrored by the lack of individuated Chinese in the majority of
American travel accounts in China, this idea is most clearly featured by Carl Crow’s A
Traveller’s Handbook for China. The guidebook, set up in a number of smaller chapters, begins
with everyday concerns including money, the use of Pidgin English, the art of haggling, and so
forth. However, the book quickly turns to “Arts and industries,” which covers in detail the
bronzes, laquerware, paintings, and embroideries one could purchase. In the updated
introduction to the 1922 edition, Crow entices readers promising: “the artist finds new and rich
treasures…for the curio collector there are great stocks of rare brocades, bronzes, pictures and
porcelains” (2). Much like the museums and interior decorating schemes of the previous century,
this turn away from the humanity producing these objects and toward the objects themselves
emphasizes the extent to which the Chinese cultural object served as a token of Chineseness.
The potential of these commodities exists not in “the conditions authored by the primitive culture
itself but from the analogy between the primitive/exotic and the origin of the possessor” (Stewart
146). Under the exchange economy of the US, these objects became disengaged from their
corporeal antecedents and instead represented a kind of cultural capital wieldable by Euro
Americans. As cultural capital, these art works worked both by “reproduc[ing] the established
social order and conceal[ing] relations of domination” (Ong 89). Crow inadvertently
substantiates this understanding in the 1913 version by stating “many travelers carry home one of
their carved camphor wood or teakwood boxes as the richest trophy of a trip to the Orient” (76).
Thus, not only did “the traveler’s search for a real China…risk reducing China to an exotic
49
object that reflected Western fantasies, turning it almost into a kind of theme park” (N. Clifford
92), many a travelogue did reduce China to its tangible objects. “Engendered by an experience
of lack within the subject for which the desired object provides imaginary compensation”
(Figuiera 9), the recently forced open doors of China offered a new repository for the American
imagination that culminated in a projection of the traits of cultural superiority, aesthetic
achievement, and timelessness onto the disembodied and objectified arts of China.
By the beginning of the Modernist poetry movement in 1914, Chinese artifacts could be
seen on display in museums and private collections throughout the US. Owning one of these
pieces “offer[ed] an authenticity of experience tied up with notions of the primitive as child and
the primitive as an earlier and purer stage of contemporary civilization” (Stewart 146). Similar
to the African objects d’art gathered at the turn of the century, Chinese objects denoted the
possessor’s capacity for Otherness and bespoke his or her individuality. And, just as Picasso
would draw on Africa to initiate his revolutions in the Modernist art world, many a Modernist
writer would find in the literature and art of China the germ of “modern” writing. As Simon
Gikandi explains in his work on Picasso’s entanglement with African art forms, Africa “could
not be relegated to antiquity nor could it be considered modern; rather it occupied a middle space
temporally located both in the childhood of mankind and yet very much part of the living world”
(459). In much the same way, China provided Modernist poets an alternative to both
contemporaneous and traditional poetics; its exoticness allowed Modernists to challenge
dominant Western poetic modes while its antiquity signaled a revaluation of traditional aesthetic
values. The “unmodern” of China accommodated resistance to both classicism and modernity.
50
Toward Modernism
The foregoing mobilization of political, cultural, and historical forces at work in the US
from the gold rush to the rise of Modernism sets in bold relief the avenues through which
Chinese in the US were systematically enfreaked and objectified while their cultural objects
moved into the nimbus of artistic treasure. While the specter of Chinese labor and an ardent
desire to be perceived as American led to a view of Chinese as freaks in the formative years of
the nineteenth century, the turn of the century’s marked valuing of Chinese objects in the
domestic sphere and public museums points to the disassociation of Chinese Americans and their
cultural products. Reading travelogues across these two time periods further documents
America’s discrepant engagement with the Chinese and affirms that despite the later intrigue and
intellectual response to China, the very fact of its otherness kept most Americans from
approaching China or the Chinese in more than an objective sense. The pervasive climate of
anxiety and desire coupled with the ghettoization of Chinese and subsequent rise in stock of
Asian artifacts ultimately led to the bifurcation of Chineseness into two distinct notions both
predicated on exotification and objectification. While this binary view of China cannot
completely capture all of the ways in which Chineseness was imagined, the two poles of freak
and fetish nonetheless provide a frame for understanding the way the “yellow peril” of the mid
eighteenth century was able to provide aesthetic imperatives for cultural achievements in the
early twentieth century. When cast as freak, the earlier Chinese sojourners offered a racially
nervous dominant society a way measure themselves and be found sufficient. As fetish, the
disembodied Chinese object could be reinvented to symbolize the cultural and aesthetic
achievements that American society had lost in its upward climb toward progress. Adhering to
the rules of capital and desire, the freak and the fetish resulted from the objectification and
51
dismemberment of Chineseness; two halves of the same coin, the Chinese American of the early
1900s was relegated to the side show while the uncoupled art objects from his ethnic past were
appropriated as capital. Thus, removed from the human, the Chinese fetish11 was free to
influence various forms of art, finally galvanizing the poetry of many Modernist writers through
its generative offerings.
11
My use of the term fetish indicates not a sexualized representation but instead an object imbued with
denotative meanings and ideas.
52
CHAPTER THREE
“AS A CHINESE VASE STILL”:
CHINESENESS IN AMERICAN MODERNIST POETRY
As the previous chapter details, the reaction of early twentieth century Americans to
American imperialism, globalization, and the impending world war culminated in a shift in the
manner in which Chineseness was perceived and represented. Whereas Chineseness had
heretofore generally been viewed negatively and China conceived of as regrettably
underdeveloped and stagnant, anxiety over the US’s increasingly fragmented condition as a
result of industrial progress led to a reconsideration of China’s historicity. In addition, the
Exclusion Acts and cessation of incoming Chinese allayed fears of the “yellow peril,” freeing
China and Chinese goods from the specter of Chinese American labor. Against the overindustrialized United States, China maintained an enviable connection to tradition, and its goods
and cultural objects became sought after specimens of aesthetic excellence that offered
authenticity in the face of a growing market of mass produced items and signaled the
cosmopolitanness of their possessors. As Chinese objects became more popular in the
marketplace, they also became more prevalent in the nascent Modernist poetic movement.
Interest in Chinese poetry stretched beyond the initial Imagist movement as an increasing
number of writers including Pound, Williams, Stevens, and Moore all manifested significant
relationships with China and its literary history. Accordingly, Zhaoming Qian, Marianne Stamy,
and Ming Xie have each produced well researched and documented critical studies on both the
extent to which China influenced these Modernist poets as well as these poets’ understandings of
53
both Chinese language and poetic forms.12 However, despite the large number of critical essays
dedicated to China and Modernism, few move past the study or comparison of one or two
representative poets who established direct textual links to China via either their study or
translation of Chinese poetry. In addition, most of these studies read the poet’s style of
engagement as a manifestation of his or her individual affinity to specific aspects of Chinese
language, literature, or culture, overlooking a growing interest in China among Modernist poets
at large. While such critical inquiry importantly demonstrates how China and Chinese poetry
infused and inspired the work of many an individual Modernist poet, the extent to which Chinese
objects pervaded the culture of Modernist poetry has yet to be probed. 13
Far from being a textual interest for a handful of Modernist poets, China and objects of
Chineseness figure largely in the Modernist movement, stretching beyond individual interest into
something of a vogue. Harriet Monroe’s introduction to The New Poetry (1917) offers a
narrative of the growing interest in Chineseness in Modern American poetry as well as gives
another vantage point by which to assess its mode of use. In the essay, Monroe distinguishes the
key characteristics of the poetry currently being published in Poetry magazine from poetry of the
previous decades. In lieu of following contemporary European traditions and tropes which
“represent a treasure trove for the second rate,” Modernist poets “seek a vehicle suited to their
own epoch and creative mood, and resolutely reject all others” (v). The search for new forms
reflected not only innovation on the part of these poets but also evinced Modernism’s “less
provincial, more cosmopolitan” temperament (xii). In his essay “Provincialism the Enemy,”
Pound defines provincialism as “(a) An ignorance of the manners, customs and nature of people
12
See Zhaoming Qian’s Orientalism and Modernism for information on Pound and Williams, his The
Modernist Response to Chinese Art for Pound, Stevens and Moore, Cynthia Stamy’s Marianne Moore
and China, and Ming Xie’s Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry.
13
See the Introduction for a discussion of these texts and a brief literature review.
54
living outside one’s own village, parish, or nation. (b) A desire to coerce others into uniformity”
(Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose 245). Against such shortsightedness, Pound prescribes what he
refers to as a Jamesian internationalism. Thus, for both writers, the revolutions in Modernist
poetry stemmed from a repudiation of provincial or traditional English language forms and a
resistance to commodified verse structures. To achieve these effects, Modernist poets drew
largely from the culture and literature of foreign nations so as to foreground their poetry’s
difference from that of previous epochs. As Monroe details, Modernist poets first experimented
with French, Italian, Greek and Provencal lyrics, before at last, “but perhaps most important of
all,” turning to Asian forms such as such as the Japanese hokku (haiku) and the “delicate and
beautiful art” of China (xi, xii). Noting the “special exquisite perfume” of Chinese poetry, she
explains its substantial difference from other poetic traditions in terms of its historicity: “it flows
from deep original streams of poetic art” (xi). In situating Chineseness as the far pole of textual
interest, Monroe figures China as more exemplary of a worldly ethos than some of the other, less
exotic, countries she lists. Similarly, her historicizing of it parallels the cosmopolitan
domesticity of turn of the century housewives; China, with its connotations of aesthetic
excellence, temporal remove, and exoticism registered for these writers as an excess of
cosmopolitanism.
Though China was by no means the only culture mined by American and British
Modernists in their revolution against conformity, it nonetheless permeates a large deal of
writing during the Modernist movement. As Monroe intimates, China’s Otherness offered a
touchstone for Modernists eager to showcase their cosmopolitanism. Fearing a “compromise
with the public taste,” Modernists avidly sought to distance their work from that of the
mainstream. In addition, the movement’s pervasive beliefs in the primacy of art and the
55
deteriorating effects of capitalism and consumption on culture manifested themselves in many a
poet’s use of Chinese images and forms. China, with its connotations of timelessness and artistic
elegance symbolized a way of life significantly removed from the West’s capitalistic endeavors
and allowed poets a means by which to foreground their dissatisfaction with what they saw as the
ailing culture of a Western society torn from its roots. Appalled by the three-headed hydra of
mass production, technical advances, and world war, these poets mourned the loss of original
Western arts. As Andreas Huyssen explores in his work on Modernism’s relationship to popular
culture, Modernists retained an intense “anxiety of contamination” from any association of their
art with the economic inner workings of publishing and marketing (vii). In what has become a
rather popular understanding of Modernism, writers and artists concerned with maintaining the
purity of their artwork against commodification strove to conceal any acknowledgement of the
exchange value their works ultimately held; to apprehend a work’s market value, and to profit
from it in any way, signaled ideological shortcomings and sacrificed the genuine creativity of the
work. Thoroughly disillusioned with the mass marketing of American taste, China’s handmade
objects, timeless aura, and traditions offered something that could transcend market capitalism.
Drawing upon China’s objects, then, offered marked immunity from the encroaching ideologies
of mass culture and refused the taint of mass marketing. Pulling from the Other to critique the
status quo, Modernists used distinctly Chinese images and objects to mark their work as
cosmopolitan and simultaneously convey their disillusionment.
Though Chinese objects offered a viable avenue for Modernist rebellion, Chinese goods
had already become prevalent commodities in the domestic sphere as indicators of wealth, status,
and worldliness. Thus, while China was figured as a reaction against mass marketing, in practice
it, too, became a marker of a certain type of Modernist product. As recent works by Timothy
56
Materer, Michael Murphy, and Lawrence Rainey propose, Modernists, far from eschewing
commodification, participated in its reconfiguration. In Institutions of Modernisms, Rainey
explains that Modernist artists relied on a system of patronage and publishing which constructed
a new schema of commodification outside the realm of mass production. Modernist writers
“entertained no illusions about utopian alternatives; to live completely outside of market
relations was no more possible than breathing without air” (Rainey 170). To this end, the vogue
of including Chinese objects in Modernist poetry can also be read as a reaction to market
demands. As Celena Kusch writes, “far from breaking boundaries, Modernist ideals of
intellectual cosmopolitanism connect to and even mirror the modern economies of colonial
entrepreneurs” (41). In much the same way the colonies of Western powers brought capital to
the mother state through their production of goods, so also was the colonial body or object
appropriated and disseminated in texts to signify worldliness. For Kusch, such a
cosmopolitanism “operat[es] from the center of empire, [where] cosmopolitans could appreciate,
even don the costumes of, global others, but global others in their own cultural dress remained
native while those in the dress of the metropole were merely assimilated” (Kusch 45). Thus, in
Kusch’s view, the exhibition of Otherness by Euro Americans authorized these writers as
cosmopolitan and improved the marketability of their literary products while at the same time
maintained a separation between the writer and the Other and circumscribed real cultural
exchange.
Yet, while Kusch’s analysis offers an intriguing critique of Modernism’s interest in China,
it can also serves to counteract any study of the way the salient aspects of Chinese language and
culture affected American Modernism. As Dennis Porter points out in his critique of
Orientalism, such readings evacuate the interplay of East and West, thereby reinscribing
57
Eurocentrism by refusing Chinese agency from the outset (150). To follow this line of thinking
in effect substantiates Eliot’s claim that “Pound is the inventor of China for our time”; without
looking at the very real connections between China on Modernism, a complete picture of the
interplay between the economic and social desires that necessitated a estimation of the other and
the consequent effects of this estimation on the Modernist poetic project is obfuscated. Instead,
drawing on a wide array of Modernist exhibits of Chineseness mobilizes a composite image of
China as created by Modernist poets. Though the most easily recognizable manifestations of
China in Modernism occurred via translation, early writers also constructed literary chinoiseries,
poems meant to seem Chinese though they were not translated from nor even based on Chinese
works. In addition, Chinese images figured largely in the writings of poets with no professed
interest in China or its literature or language and in poems with no other connections or
references to China or Chinese culture. Reading across these different presentations articulates a
more flexible understanding of both Modernism’s interaction with and fetishization of China as
well as how this interaction inspired and transformed twentieth century American poetry. The
purpose of such a display is two-fold; first, it allows for an appreciation of the width and breadth
of China’s presence within the Modernist canon. Second, it permits a comparison between those
poets overtly influenced by China such as Pound and Lowell, with other seminal Modernist
figures who often remain outside the purview of the study of Modernism and China. Displaying
these images of China side by side presents a new conceptualization of the complicated
Modernism/China relationship that supersedes the current lenses of post-colonialism to recognize
the different modes in which such images were produced and presented.
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Chinoiseries
The first Modernist to test China’s currency in the literary marketplace is paradoxically a
man generally relegated to the footnotes of any work on Modernism – Allen Upward. 14
Upward’s interaction with China and Confucianism began around the turn of the century through
his collaboration with the sinologist Lancelot Cranmer-Byng on a small printing company called
the Orient Press (Qian, Orientalism 19). Upward himself gained notoriety as a writer and
subsequent approval from Pound with his 1907 book The New World. 15 However, it was his
“Scented Leaves from a Chinese Jar” which offered the first model for the excavation of Chinese
poetry as a new mode for English poetics. Written sometime after his collaboration with
Cranmer-Byng, Upward’s verses first saw light in the September 1913 edition of Poetry and
were subsequently reprinted in Des Imagistes and Monroe’s The New Poetry. In the poems,
Upward’s specific attention to individual, exotified objects coupled with his prose form
exemplifies the new poetry exhorters like Monroe and Pound hoped to bring out.16 Upward’s
use of images and traditions geographically and culturally removed from Europe add to the
poems’ objectivity. People, when present, are stripped of their subjectivity and treated as objects.
Even when given voice, characters are moved to secondary and objective relevance by their
positioning in the poem. For instance, the poet in “The Intoxicated Poet” seems at first blush to
have agency as he describes his beloved: “more fragrant than the heliotrope, which blooms all
the year round, better than vermilion letters on tablets of sendal, are thy kisses, thou shy one!"
Here, though the poet articulates his thoughts, he himself is overshadowed by the exotic and
elusive “shy one” who we know only through her metonymic descriptors of “heliotrope,”
14
Though his poems are often left out of anthologies of Modernism, Upward remains a constant figure in
any study of Pound and Orientalism. See Donald Davies, “The Mysterious Allen Upward.”
15
According to both Qian and Kern, The New World was reviewed positively by Pound in 1914.
16
K.L. Goodwin notes that Upward was among the first poets Pound referred to as “Imagist.”
59
“sendal,” and “vermillion.” “The Marigold” carries this idea farther, highlighting the
insignificance of the poet while gesturing toward removed “mandarins”:
Even as the seed of the marigold, carried on the wind, lodges on
the roofs of palaces and lights the air with flame-colored
blossoms, so may the child-like words of the insignificant poet
confer honor on lofty and disdainful mandarins. (353)
By subjugating the words of the poet to both the nameless mandarins and, most significantly, the
marigold seed, Upward centers the poem on the image of the seed as an encapsulation of the
truth lurking in the elusive “child-like words.” Both the poet and the government officials
disappear in the imagistic description of the wind-tossed seed.
Formally, Upward’s poetry integrates the Imagist constructs Flint put out in March 1913.
Employing “absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation,” Upward’s “leaves”
look to the casual reader less like poetry and more like prose. Additionally, his strict
engagement with only the flora and fauna of China fulfills the imagist mantra of “direct
treatment of the thing” (Literary Essays 3). However, the most striking element of Upward’s
poetry to readers like Pound was most surely its exotic flavor. Through continual recourse to
such exotic signifiers like “Ming,” “mandarins,” and “junks,” Upward’s poems displayed a
Chinese aestheticism heretofore rarely seen in American poetry. 17 Pound’s enthusiastic response
to Upward’s verses confirms the new ground he had broken with “Scented Leaves.” As Pound
wrote to Dorothy on September 17, 1913, “the Chinese things in ‘Poetry’ [sic] are worth the
price of admission” (Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear 256). A week later, of his work on
Des Imagistes, Pound would add, “Upward of the Chinese poemae is quite an addition” (259).
Of note in this response is the way in which Pound casts Upward’s poems. His characterization
17
The word junk was coined in 1555 to describe “native sailing vessel in the Chinese sea” (OED).
60
of them as “Chinese things” underscores the extent to which Upward’s verses acted as a display
case presenting his readers with a singular Chinese objectivity. It also presages Pound’s growing
fascination with “things,” and Chinese or Asian things in particular. Additionally, the
christening of his verses as “Chinese poemae” echoes T.S. Eliot’s famous statement crediting
Pound’s Cathay as inventing Chinese poetry. For Pound, Upward at this point had converted the
very real colors and subjects of Chinese paintings into equally objective poetic verse.
Though Upward would later tell Pound his verses had been constructed based on “a
certain amount of Chinese reminiscence,” Pound’s excitement over “Scented Leaves” did not
flag (Letters 59). By 1913, Pound himself had already explored a number of international poetic
traditions in his attempt to discover what “could not be lost by translation,” and he saw in
Upward’s presentation of Chinese writing another tradition which might serve him in his poetic
quest to generate a poetic reawakening (qtd. in Xie 229). As he writes in 1914, “The first step
of a renaissance, or awakening, is the importation of models for painting, sculpture or writing.”
(Literary Essays 214). Hence, Pound spent his early years combing the globe for such models;
he studied a number of different languages including Latin, German, Italian, French and
Provençal during his university career, earning a Master of Arts degree in Romance languages in
1906.18 By the time he issued Cathay, Pound had already published translations in Provençal,
Italian, and Old English.19 For Pound, translation itself is a poetic act, the “highest honor of the
arts” whereby the translator “tried to preserve the fervor of the original” (Spirit of Romance 87,
Literary Essays 200). Pound’s attempts to “bring over” the original meaning into the target
language also infused his early personae, as Pound notes in Gaudier Brzeska: “I began this
search for the real in a book called Personae, casting off, as it were, complete masks of the self
18
See Noel Stock’s The Life of Ezra Pound for further information on Pound’s course of study in foreign
languages (12-27).
19
See Xie’s Chapter Eight, “Pound as Translator: An Overview,” for a list of Pound’s early translations.
61
in each poem. I continued in a long series of translations which were but more elaborate masks”
(85). Pound’s conflation of his translations and the poems in Personae reveals his indifference
to traditional demarcations between translation, adaptation, and original composition. Thus,
Upward’s “reminiscences” directed Pound eastward as he continued to experiment with different
poetic forms that could serve to capture the spirit of the age and return poetry to its rightful post
as a record of the people.
Upward’s importance to both the Imagist movement and Pound cannot be overestimated.
Chronologically, the publication of Upward’s poems occurred in tandem and likely influenced
Pound’s collecting and editing of works for Des Imagistes. As Qian, pace Flint, substantiates,
Pound was at work on Des Imagistes between October and November of 1913.20 In addition, it
was also in late 1913 that his enthusiasm for Upward’s poetry along with his apprenticeship to
Lawrence Binyon culminated in his own study of Chinese literature via Giles’s History.21 As
Pound writes in a letter to Dorothy dated October 2, 1913, “I seem to be getting Orient from all
quarters…I’m stocked up on K’ung Fu Tze and Meng Tze, etc.” (Ezra Pound and Dorothy
Shakespear 264). Another letter to Dorothy a week later confirms “K’ung Fu Tze and Meng
Tze” to be mediated through Giles’s text.22 Within the pages of Giles’s work, Pound met fellow
Imagistes Chu Yuan (屈原), Li Bo (李白), and Liu Ch’e (劉徹 or the Emperor Wu of Han). His
enthusiasm for these three poets overran in his letter to Dorothy on the 13th: “THE period was 4th
cent. B.B. [sic] – Chu Yuan, Imagiste – did I tell you that before?” (ibid. 267). “Further
20
Earlier biographers had erroneously assumed Pound shipped the draft of Des Imagistes to the US in the
summer of 1913. However, as Qian uncovers, this assumption was predicated on a date imprecisely
remembered by Alfred Kreymborg. For a detailed analysis of the facts leading to this conjecture, see
Qian, Orientalism and Modernism, 48-51.
21
Though many credit Upward with introducing Pound to Giles’s work, it remains unclear exactly how
Pound came to it.
22
In his letter to Dorothy dated October 11, 1913, Pound offers her several texts, including Giles: “In lieu
of the print-room you can have Giles’s ‘History of Chinese Literature,’ a book of Japanese ditto, & the
new Tagore, & Upward’s ‘Divine Mystery’” (Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear 270).
62
Instructions” and “Xenia,” published in the November 1913 edition of Poetry, additionally mark
his growing appreciation of the Chinese forms and colors he saw in Upward and Giles. “Further
Instructions” begins as an evaluation of Pound’s “songs,” or poems: “You are very idle, my
songs / I fear you will come to a bad end” (Personae 95). However, the “newest song of the lot,”
offers a different future: “You are not old enough to have done much mischief / I will get you a
green coat out of China / With dragons worked upon it.” Reading in retrospect, this “green coat”
is perhaps the new Chinese idea of image and prosody he learned via Upward, Giles and
Fenollosa; certainly, from this point on many of Pound’s poems would wear the “coat” of China
in terms of images and objects. Another line from “Xenia,” later reworked into the first line of
“A Song of the Degrees” in Lustra, further substantiates Pound’s preoccupation with China by
declaring, “O rest me with Chinese colours” (95). Pound’s first solid introduction to China
occurred through his frequent visits to the British Museum and his acquaintance with Binyon.
As Qian notes, the Chinese pieces displayed in the museum evidenced “intensity, precision,
objectivity, visual clarity, and complete harmony with nature – all key elements of Modernism
itself” (Orientalism 3). Thus, Pound’s specific reference to “colours” in “A Song of the Degrees”
mirrors his growing appreciation of Chinese art as well as foregrounds the visual basis of his
early perceptions of Chineseness. Pound’s interest in Chinese art would lead to his perusal of
Giles and finally to his work with the manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa and Cathay. From this
moment forward, much of Pound’s poetry would indeed be colored with Chinese images.
Des Imagistes itself also speaks to Pound’s increasing turn toward the poetic images and
models of China. Though many of the poems Pound selected for inclusion are predicated on
Greek models, four of Pound’s six entries are conspicuously Chinese in nature; “After Ch’u
Yuan,” “Liu Ch’e,” “Fan-Piece for her Imperial Lord,” and “Ts’ai Chih” all re-create Giles’s
63
translations via Upward’s technique of reminiscence. Though Pound would go on to boast a
working (though somewhat flawed) knowledge of Chinese language and literature, it is
important to note his reimagining of the four poems in Des Imagistes occurred prior to such an
understanding. First mention of Pound’s “Chinese poems” occurs in Dorothy Shakespear’s
request for them on November 20, 1913. Responding in the affirmative, Pound warns her that
they are “only very small 3 ½ poems” (Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear 276). Though
Pound had met Mrs. Fenollosa in late September, he would not receive the entirety of
Fenollosa’s work until mid-December (Letters 65).23 Therefore, the four “Chinese poems” in
Des Imagistes are written in a mode very similar to that of Upward’s reminiscence. As
representations of what Pound thought Chinese poetry looked and sounded like, they are
predicated more on his reception of the Chinese translations he had read and the Chinese
paintings he had studied. Yet, the overarching success of Pound’s early chinoiseries differentiate
his poems from Upward’s. This success coupled with Cathay’s later prominence among
translations has enticed some critics to read Pound’s pre-Fenollosan chinoiseries as markedly
Chinese or as translation instead of just Pound’s imaginings of China. The recent New
Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry includes Pound’s four early chinoiseries
among its Chinese translations. Even Qian, though noting Pound’s ignorance of Chinese at the
time, is tempted to imbue Pound with a curious sixth sense about Chinese language and literature
that allows him to get closer to the original than Giles. Xie perceptively explains the desire to
place such poems as translations: “when the results of such translation or adaptation are
successful English poems in their own right, it is often tempting to assume that they are in fact
23
Pound appears to have received the Fenollosan materials between December 5, 1913, when he writes
to his father “I am to have all Prof. Fenollosa’s valuable mss. To edit & finish” (qtd in Qian, Orientalism
56), and December 19, 1913. On the latter date, his correspondence with William Carlos Williams affirms
“I’ve all old Fenollosa’s treasures in mass” (Letters 57).
64
closely and directly derived from their Chinese models” (3). However, this is a critical
movement that must be scrutinized. Certainly, in the case of Pound, these poems do include
within them a grain of truth about China, as they are reworked from Giles’s translations. Yet,
unlike his later collaboration with the Fenollosa materials, in these renderings, he maintains no
connection to the poems in the original. As such, Pound’s work may (and I would argue does)
amplify the creative liberties Giles took in his primary translation while failing to recoup any
missing elements. In basing his “translations” on Giles’s with no recourse to the original,
Pound’s poems become “recreations” or projections of what he thought the original Chinese
might look like. The tendency to read Pound’s early chinoiseries without question as Chinese
reflects the extent to which readers and critics alike have allowed Pound to create and modulate a
certain image of China. However, reading this idea against its historic moment offers a vision of
how China was perceived during the early years of the Modernist movement.
Like Upward’s before them, Pound’s “small 3 ½ poems” are impressions of Chinese
poetry gathered both from his own speculations about China as well as Giles’s source material.
As such, they reproduce the concomitant image of China present in both Europe and the US and
are not exceedingly faithful representations. One clear example of this lies in Pound’s
(mis)understanding of Chinese prosody. Because only about a dozen English translations of
Chinese texts were readily available prior to 1909, Giles (and Fenollosa in terms of Pound)
described and delimited Asian poetry for Modernist poets who in turn framed it for American
consumption. This is most clearly seen in the (mis)conception of Chinese poetry’s vers libre
form. As many a critic has noted, Pound likely read with pleasure Giles’s assertion “in the
fourth century B.C., Ch’ü Yüan and his school indulged in wild irregular meters which consorted
well with their wild irregular thoughts. Their poetry was prose run mad” (qtd. in Xie, 170). For
65
a poet known for his defiance of Victorian norms, Pound surely felt a kinship with the “wild
irregular thoughts” of these Chinese poets. In addition, the subversive nature of these poet’s
eschewal of basic Chinese forms meshed well with Pound’s own project of revisioning Euro
American poetry and culture though an excavation of overlooked models. However, as Xie
notes, Giles overstated the extent to which Ch’ü Yüan and his poetic group worked in vers libre;
though Ch’ü Yüan’s poetry along with other poetries of the time did differ metrically and
thematically from previous Chinese poetry, it still retained its own form and metric strictures
(170). Nonetheless, the growing understanding of China as culturally and artistically advanced
coupled with Modernism’s own interest in cosmopolitanism led the idea of Chinese prosody to
become a touchstone for Pound and others. Essentially, adhering to this foreign structure
reaffirmed their break with provincial European forms and signaled their worldliness. In
addition, the idea of Chinese form also reaffirmed Pound’s and the Imagists’ assertion that
prosody should be second to the image or the idea presented, for, as Pound stated, rhyme “tends
to draw away the artist’s attention from forty to ninety percent of his syllables….It tends to draw
him into prolixity and pull him away from the thing” (Selected Prose 42). The affiliation such
Modernists felt toward the presented idea of Chinese poetry by Giles and other prominent
sinologists led to the canonization of such (mis)understandings of Chinese poetry by American
poets.24
To this end, examining several of Pound’s chinoiseries next to Giles’s originals gives
some insight into Pound’s conception of China prior to his extended conversation with Chinese
poetry through the notes of Ernest Fenollosa. While much has previously been done to estimate
the extent to which he “got at” the original, here my focus is less on Pound’s ability to recoup the
24
Ming Xie offers an insightful look at Giles’s misperceptions concerning Chinese writing and the ways
in which these perceptions were extended through poets such as Pound.
66
meanings intended by the Chinese poets and more on the ways his use of Giles reified his own
poetic project and vision of China. The most imagistic of the four poems, Pound’s “Fan Piece
for her Imperial Lord” has been traced to Giles’s original translation of a poem attributed to Ban
Jieyu (班婕妤), an imperial consort during the Han dynasty: 25
O fair white silk, fresh from the weaver’s loom,
Clear as the frost, bright as the winter snow –
See! Friendship fashions out of thee a fan,
Round as the round moon shines in heaven above,
At home, abroad, a close companion though,
Stirring at every move the grateful gale.
And yet I fear, ah me! That autumn chills,
Cooling the eddying summer’s torrid rage,
Will see thee laid neglected on the shelf,
All thought of bygone days, like them bygone. (101)
In Giles’s version, Lady Ban offers an apostrophic meditation on her advancing age and fear of
abandonment. Her use of the fan is symbolic; not only does the fan’s color and brightness
represent her youth and beauty, the fan’s exquisiteness and rarity suggests her social status as a
consort. In reading the poem, Pound seems to have been captivated first and foremost by the
image of the fan:
O fan of white silk,
clear as frost on the grass-blade,
You also are laid aside. (Personae 111)
25
The literal translation of Jíeyú or 婕妤 is concubine.
67
The image of the fan stands as the main thrust of the poem. On first reading, only the title and
the “also” in the last line point to anything beyond the almost photographic rendering of a
delicate fan. The passive voice Pound implies here also acts to focus attention on the thing in the
poem, overshadowing any accompanying movement. Additionally, such passive voice points to
the lack of agency evinced by both the lady and the inanimate fan.
Pound’s (re)presentation of Giles’s translation concretely underlines Pound’s fascination
at this juncture of his career with Chinese colors and objects above an understanding of its
language and prosody. By foregrounding the fan in the poem, Pound uses a Chinese cultural
signifier to emblematize his doctrine of the image. Modernist poetry like Pound’s sought, in the
words of Monroe, to present the “concrete and immediate realization of life,” by highlighting the
“individual, unstereotyped” essence of the object under review (vi). By drawing on an exotic
Chinese image, Pound’s poetry continues past the immediately observable and into the realm of
the objective; the fan’s lack of lexical collocations in English guaranteed Pound’s poem be read
as Imagistic over and against the metaphoric tendencies of French symbolism – where the object
always signified another idea – and into a new poetry that privileged the object only as object.
As Douglas Mao explains in his work on objects, the new poetry differed from that of previous
movements most significantly in “the implied reversal of poetic value that made the ‘objective’
thing, with or without symbolic import, not only worth including in poetry but poetry’s very
marrow” (14). The object, and most especially the exotic object retains “the profounder
innocence of an immunity to thinking and knowing” and thus stood outside the reach of ideology
and politics (Mao 9) .26 The fan, a notable cultural referent in the artwork and designs of China
that had begun to permeate museums and drawing rooms alike, affords Pound’s poem
cosmopolitanism as well as freshness. Like Upward, his use of a Chinese cultural emblem reads
26
Mao carries these ideas to fruition in his introduction to Solid Objects.
68
as “new” amidst other hackneyed European images. In this sense, then, the success of “Fan
Piece” lies in its cooptation of a single Asian image.27
Though “Fan Piece” represents a successful Imagist exercise and would later serve as an
emblem of the Imagist movement, the other poems Pound adapted in Des Imagistes are less
strikingly imagistic and brief. Nonetheless, the longer “Liu Ch’e” additionally exemplifies
Pound’s early use of Chineseness to supplement his poetic program. Placed in tandem, here are
the two renderings. First, Giles:
The sound of rustling silk is stilled,
With dust the marble courtyard filled;
No footfalls echo on the floor,
Fallen leaves in heaps block up the door….
For she, my pride my lovely one, is lost,
And I am left, in hopeless anguish tossed. (100)
And Pound’s:
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:
27
Qian suggests that Pound’s early introduction to Lady Ban via a painting by Gu Kaizhi hanging in the
Oriental Gallery of the British museum greatly influenced the composition of “Fan Piece For Her
Imperial Lord.” Though this line of thinking may be valid, no textual evidence exists to supports it.
However, regardless of whether or not Pound connected Giles’s “Song of Regret” with Gu’s evocation of
Lady Ban, Chinese paintings most surely influenced the final imagistic rendering of “Fan Piece.”
69
A wet leaf that clings to the threshold. (Personae 110-11)
Here again, Pound crafts a poem that focuses on specific images in order to evoke a feeling of
loss. However, whereas Giles’s piece uses heavy rhyme and cadence to bespeak how the
physical setting echoes the loss of the foreign sounding “my lovely one,” Pound’s focus on the
scenery obscures the human “she” in the poem and creates a more complex picture. His final
line, set off by space and a colon, creates a lasting impression in its reference to and connection
with the disarray beforehand. Pound displaces the woman in the poem through his evocation of
the delicate and beautiful image of “a wet leaf that clings to the threshold”; the lady is invisible,
but the mental picture of the wayward leaf remains as a signifier of loss. As Kern notes, the
poem “is calculated to take us out of our own time limits and space limits and into the presence
of a rendering of things that has transcended ordinary speech” ( 187). Pound’s use of natural
images coupled with the poem’s foreign title itself allow for a poetics that moves beyond the test
of production. The articles in phrases like “the rustling of the silk” outdistance the immediate
and knowable, while the odd moniker “the rejoicer of the heart” confirms the translation or
cultural removal augured by the poem’s title. Such foreignization imbues the poem with
“Chinese colours,” which insist not only on its objectivity but also its historicity. China, still
viewed as timeless and separate from the Western world, works to make Pound’s poem “new”
and at the same time transcendent.
After Cathay
Pound’s imagistic success with Des Imagistes marks an interesting and seldom
researched area in China-Modernism studies. The Chinese pieces presented in it alongside
Pound’s later fame from Cathay would indoctrinate Modernism to the fashion through which
China could be mined for generative images and objects. Prior to Pound’s and Upward’s poems,
70
Chinese objects rarely found their way into poetry; instead, Victorian poets and the early
Modernists relied more on images closer at hand. Indeed, Des Imagistes itself pulls much more
staunchly from images of ancient Greece; only Pound and Upward’s voices turn outside of the
European literary tradition. Yet, the publication and commercial and artistic success of Cathay
in 1915 signify another important moment in the representation of China in American poetry.
Unlike the chinoiseries of Des Imagistes, Pound abandoned imitation for more engaged work
with the original Chinese poems through the notebooks of the late Ernest Fenollosa, a sinologist
who had spent a number of years studying Chinese poetry in Japan. The cribs Pound found in
Fenollosa’s notebook provided the raw material and basic translations from which he constructed
Cathay.
Regardless of the longstanding debate over Cathay’s status as either poetry or translation,
its publication nonetheless served as a major event for both translation practices and Modernist
poetry.28 Foremost, Pound’s deviant “translucencies” ushered in a modern era of translation.
While prior to Cathay only a dozen or so translations of Chinese poetry were available, “by 1930,
published work on Chinese art and history as well as commendable, if not definitive, translations
of Chinese poetry were readily available in English” (Stamy 29). Many of these new translations
followed Pound’s lead in the rejection of Victorian forms and rhyme in favor of free verse
renderings. Like Pound’s, many of these translations attempted to recreate the original Chinese
by refashioning English to suit the grammatical and syntactical demands of the Chinese language
28
The response to Cathay has been marked with dissension; while many hail the collection as “literary
miracle” others see it as “literary fraud” (Hayot 518). Much of this disagreement lies in the way in which
the poems are perceived. For critics like Kenner who read Cathay as beautiful poems first and foremost,
Cathay succeeds on the basis of its poetic innovation. For other critics who read Cathay as translation, it
fails in its in ability to conform to accepted translation standards. Yet while early studies of Pound’s
translation methods worked to correct Pound’s “literary narcissism” (Unger 59), recent studies like those
of Qian and Yao have found Pound’s translations to be in line with contemporary Chinese translations.
Other critics like Xiaomei Chen have explored Pound’s “‘misunderstanding’ as a legitimate and necessary
factor, as a dynamic force, in the making of literary history” (Chen 82).
71
rather than constructing literal translations which obscured the act of translation by presenting
seamless poems in the English idiom. Translation, and especially Chinese translation, also
became a commendable practice for poets. Alongside the “definitive” editions by sinologists
emerged a number of poems based, like Pound’s, on earlier English translations. For instance,
Djuna Barnes published “To the Dead Favorite of Liu Ch’e,” her own reworking from the
translations of Giles, in the Dial in 1920 (73).29 As Amy Lowell insightfully remarked in 1919,
“Chinese poetry is much in people’s minds at present” (Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell 76).
Following such demand, the so-called little magazines competed for the right to publish poetry
steeped in Asian images or the newest Chinese translation (Qian 4). In the wake of this Chinese
vogue, many poets began to publicly acknowledge their debt to China. Certainly, the early
Imagists Hulme and Flint had already “left” Japan for China. However, other writers like
Stevens and Fletcher would also later claim Chinese influence.30 As Fletcher declares of his
early Visions of Evening, “What had happened was that I had somehow, as a poet, guessed at the
way the Orientals had constructed their poems….the self same quality is omnipresent in Ezra
Pound’s Cathay” (qtd. in Xie 7). Fletcher’s quote denotes the growing perception that sustained
contact with Chinese culture or language was unnecessary to the understanding and reproduction
of China; the success of creating a “Chinese” poem centered more on appreciating the art and
translations available. His quote also underscores that the success of Cathay, as poetry or as
translation or both, was something everyone wanted a piece of.
Foremost among those hungry for the fame associated with Cathay was Amy Lowell.
Known for her shrewd business acumen, Lowell had already availed herself of Pound’s Imagist
29
Herring and Stutman also note that Faulkner quoted two of Barnes’s lines from “To the Dead Favourite”
in Intruder in the Dust. This again points to the way in which ideas of China codified in the Modernist
period continue to reverberate in later writings.
30
See Qian’s chapters on Stevens and China in The Modernist Response to Chinese Art.
72
movement in the years prior to Cathay and had in effect become the impresario for Imagism on
American soil. Her early “schism” with Pound is legendary; too similar in temperament and too
dissimilar in writing style, the two had clashed over the future direction of Imagism. Lowell,
wanting to substantiate her vocation as poet, argued for equal representation and democratic
selection processes in future Imagist volumes. Concerned that others would see her as a
benefactress and not a poet in her own right, Lowell also demanded she be paid, however little,
for her work. However, whereas Lowell saw poetry as a vocation, Pound saw it more as a
calling. He was significantly less concerned with the economics, publication and publicity end
of the poetry business.31 Alternately, Lowell believed “Publicity first, Poetry will follow”; only
through fame as a writer could she successfully shed the Lowell name and make a new one for
herself (Lowell qtd. in Bradshaw 141). It may well be this desire and not a firm commonality
with the Imagist movement that led her to travel to London to find out the secrets of Imagism
first hand. Lowell realized association with the Imagist movement would lead to more publicity
and enhanced visibility within the poetry scene. Once established within the movement through
her inclusion in Des Imagistes, Lowell capitalized on Imagism’s currency through her
subsequent organization of several collections of Imagist poetry. A shrewd businesswoman by
birth and an actress by chance, Lowell parlayed these two traits into an unstoppable combination.
Characterized as “perform[ing] the service of a barker at a circus, as from the lecture platform, in
the press, and almost the street corner, she cried aloud, ‘Poetry, Poetry, this way to Poetry’” (qtd.
in Bradshaw 143), Lowell’s poetry readings recalled the spectacle of the late nineteenth century
31
Timothy Materer makes an interesting argument regarding Pound’s marketing skills in “Make It Sell!
Ezra Pound Advertises Modernism.” In his article, he demonstrates how Pound’s staging of Imagism
successfully generated publicity and interest.
73
side shows, while her audacious behavior, insolence, disrespect for conventional (read:
provincial) verse and outrageous performances all aided in the dissemination of her poetry.32
Cathay, however, offered to Lowell a new challenge. With all of the excitement over
Pound’s “Chinese translations,” Imagism seemed to take a backseat in the journals and
magazines of the day. Eager to capitalize on the public’s capricious tastes, Lowell decided to
“knock a hole in” Pound’s verses through the publication of her own version (Florence Ayscough
and Amy Lowell 43). To help her in this task, Lowell tapped Florence Ayscough, a long time
resident of China and her own “native informant.” Lowell was introduced to Ayscough in 1917
and entertained her at Sevenels in the Summer of 1919. During that summer, Lowell and
Ayscough began preparations for their joint effort of Chinese translations, Fir Flower Tablets,
published in 1921. Correctly assessing the public’s desire for Chinese verse at the time, Lowell
made use of this relationship much in the same way Pound capitalized on his relationship with
Fenollosa. Both brought out poetic translations mediated through a number of other players. For
Pound, the Chinese originals were twice removed from him through Fenollosa’s reliance on his
Japanese tutor’s comprehension and translation. In addition, Fenollosa’s misunderstanding of
many of the facets of the Chinese language were accepted by Pound as fact and represented in
his work. Similarly, Lowell’s translations were predicated on Ayscough’s elementary grasp of
Chinese vis-à-vis her Chinese tutor Nung Chu with whom she communicated in pidgin.33 While
Ayscough provided extensive cribs and annotated translations for the poems, Lowell, like Pound,
held the final say in terms of the poetry; both changed and cut what they felt necessary in order
to present a “modern” rendering. Accordingly, the translation ventures of both poets reflect the
32
For further information on Lowell’s advertising movements throughout her life, please see Melissa
Bradshaw’s essay “Outselling the Modernisms of Men: Amy Lowell and the Art of SelfCommodification.”
33
Pidgin Chinese was largely English stripped of its tenses and plurals. Often words hard to pronounce in
Chinese would become altered slightly to fit English tongues.
74
power structures at work in recreating China for the US as well as gesture toward the importance
of conveying authenticity.
To guarantee the success of Fir Flower Tablets over and above that of Cathay, Lowell
flaunted foreignness and exoticism in her translations. Reading Lowell’s “Cha’ang Kan” against
Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” exemplifies the differences in the ways these
two poets approached Chinese poetry. Though Pound’s Cathay represents his growing
investment in Chinese ideals and Chinese poetry, Fir Flower Tablets reveals the underlying
commodification of Chinese culture inherent in many “Chinese works” of this time. Pound’s
famous translation begins
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 the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion. (P 134)
In contrast, Lowell’s poem opens
When the hair of your Unworthy One first began to cover her forehead,
She picked flowers and played in front of the door.
Then you, my Lover, came riding a bamboo horse
We ran round and round the bed, and tossed about the sweet meats of green plums.
We both lived in the village of Ch’ang Kan.
We were both very young and knew neither jealousy nor suspicion. (28)
75
Barry Ahearn’s work on Cathay argues that Pound intentionally exotified his renderings as part
of his plan to diminish his role as translator thereby circumventing any questions as to his ability
(38). However, in looking at Pound’s poem in tandem with Lowell’s, a more significant
exotification seems to be taking place in her presentation. Immediately noticeable in Lowell’s
translation is the designation of the first person narrator as “your Unworthy One.” Lowell here
attempts to distance and subjugate the narrator through third person references. In addition, her
constant use of the word “we” sets the actors of the poem apart from the reader. The effect is
two-fold; the distance created through the awkward use of a formal third person appellation also
creates an exotic tone that consciously works to orientalize the poem as a translation. Though
both poets make reference to the exotic locale (Ch’ang Kan and Chokan), Pound deemphasizes it
through his indication of culture: “We went on living the village of Chokan.” Lowell’s direct
syntax points up the alien location: “We both lived in the village of Ch’ang Kan.” Her decision
to use the elongated and punctuated English transliteration for the place name emblematizes
Lowell’s program of pandering to the demands of the market for an orientalized poem.
The conclusion of both poems further points out the marked foreignness of Lowell’s
translation. Here is Pound’s:
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-sa (P 134)
76
In contrast, here is Lowell’s:
It is the Eighth Month, the butterflies are yellow,
Two are flying among the plants in the West garden;
Seeing them, my heart is bitter with grief, they wound the heart of the Unworthy One
The bloom of my face has faded, sitting with my sorrow…
Prepare me first with a letter, bringing me the news of when you will reach home.
I will not go far on the road to meet you,
I will go straight until I reach the Long Wind Sands. (29)
Against Pound’s imagistic “paired butterflies,” Lowell spells out the feelings of the main
character thereby creating an opportunity to refer to her again as “the Unworthy One.” In
addition, whereas Pound’s speaker simply states, “They hurt me, I grow older,” Lowell
specifically compares her speaker’s face to a fleeting “bloom,” suggesting the exotic flora of
China. Throughout Fir Flower Tablets, Lowell’s continued use of archaic diction and
convoluted sentences reinforces the exotic nature of the poems and underlines that these are, in
fact, translations. Her conscious decision to leave the majority of the place names in Chinese
instead of translating them into English adds to this effect. As she tells Ayscough, “It does not
go well in English, and, by keeping the Chinese name in the title of a place or province or things
of that sort, we keep the Chinese flavor” (Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell 103). Ultimately,
Lowell is most interested in capitalizing on the current vogue of Orientalism.
Understanding the nuances behind Lowell and Ayscough’s collaboration on the
translations of Fir Flower Tablets additionally exposes the relationship of China to the final
poems. Writing Ayscough in January of 1920, Lowell remarks to Ayscough, “You
misunderstand, I think, my function in our collaboration.” She then goes on to remind her of the
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structural arrangement of their poetic venture: “I consider that it is for you to give me the
translations, and for me to put them in English from your material, but emphatically not for me
to do anything whatever with the original Chinese” (Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell 104).
Here, Lowell makes clear the labor divisions and hierarchy of their partnership as well as her
opinions on the original Chinese. Ayscough’s use lay in her willingness to perform the drudgery
of translation. Lowell was to take this knowledge and “make” something of it. Ayscough,
overwhelmed at times due to her limited proficiency in Chinese, would often offer Lowell more
information than the latter deemed necessary or encourage her to read a text like Giles’s to help
her better get at the source material. However, Lowell’s emphatic rejoinder highlights her
discernment of the original as ineffectual: “It is quite impossible for any Chinese words, or any
knowledge of them, to help me in the least” (Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell 104). For
Lowell, the success of the translations would come more from her own poetic insight than from
Ayscough’s painstaking work to offer correct translations. In effect, Lowell saw the Chinese
source materials as secondary to the final translations; these were English, not Chinese poems.
Perhaps even more important for Lowell than Ayscough’s translations was the latter’s
status as a resident of China. Though Ayscough had only begun to study Chinese a few years
prior to her work on Fir Flower Tablets and spoke an English-based form of pidgin to her
Chinese servants, her birth and subsequent tenure in China lent the collaboration an authenticity
that other concurrent translations did not have. Exploiting this, Lowell publicized Ayscough’s
qualifications at every available juncture. Writing to Ayscough in 1918, she describes her pitch
to Harriet Monroe:
I also gave her a great song and dance as to your qualifications as a translator. I told her
that you were born in China, and that it was, therefore, in some sense your native tongue
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(Heaven forgive me!), although you had only taken up the serious study of it within the
last few years. I lengthened out your years in China until it would appear that you must
be a hundred years old to have got so many in, and altogether I explained that in getting
you, she was getting the ne plus ultra of Chinese knowledge and understanding.
(Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell 38)
Lowell’s “native informant” served first and foremost as a marketing tool; by advertising
Ayscough’s longtime residence in China, Lowell could one-up Pound by claiming a closer, less
mediated translation. Whether genuine or not, Lowell’s publicizing of Fir Flower Tablets
catapulted Ayscough to fame as a Sinologist and chronicler of China. In the years following,
Ayscough would become known for a number of well-received books as well as numerous
lectures she delivered worldwide (Y. Huang 51).
Within the same letter, Lowell also makes mention of Nung Chu, Ayscough’s tutor and
an immense asset in the production of Fir Flower Tablets. For Lowell, Ayscough and Nung
were her ace in the hole; unlike Pound, she had a living breathing Chinese to speak for his own
literature, language, and culture. Yet, the way Lowell refers to Nung reifies his subject position
within the venture. Lowell seems put off by his audacity to second guess her own poetic
impulses. Noting “your teacher undoubtedly knows a great deal of Chinese, but he does not
know anything about poetry,” Lowell reaffirms that the final poems published in Fir Flower
Tablets succeed more on the basis of their ability to seem like Chinese poetry that on their
fidelity to the original texts (103). She goes on to say Mr. Nung “has entirely misunderstood Li
T’ai Po’s meaning” (105). These statements clarify the hierarchical arrangement of Ayscough,
Lowell, and Nung; whereas Lowell and Ayscough are collaborators possessing cosmopolitan
knowledge that sets them apart from the everyday poet, Nung himself is ranked as a silent and
79
invisible part of that venture. Much like the early Chinese workers in the US, Nung is pushed to
the sidelines and erased from the literary history of Modernism. Only when it is profitable to
bring him out, does he become a salient part of the endeavor. Lowell’s letter to Florence in 1922
makes this abundantly clear. Worried over Witter Bynner’s “blowing like anything” about the
high standing of his own Chinese native informant, Lowell asks Florence to “give me some sort
of an account of Mr. Nung – and make it sound as grand as possible” so as to bolster she and
Ayscough’s claims as to the authenticity of the translations.
Lowell’s interaction with Nung foregrounds the question of the Other’s place in
American poetry. As Gikandi asks in his work on Picasso and Africa, “How else can we explain
the paradox that runs throughout the history of modernism, the fact that almost without exception
the Other is considered to be part of the narrative of modern art yet not central enough to be
considered constitutive” (457)? Indeed, as Lowell’s relationship with China shows, though
China comprises a major part of her creative output, she also necessarily reduced the Other to a
non-participatory member of her final product. Lowell primarily made use of Nung for his
authenticity; however, as quickly as she flaunted him she also foregrounded herself as author and
her product as American. By using Nung only for publicity, Lowell was able to retain complete
control of the final product while using his Chineseness for her own profit.34
Chinese Objects
The proliferation of Chinese translations and chinoiseries were also echoed by a third,
less conspicuous trend. As Modernism moved forward and poets like Williams, Stevens, Lowell,
and Moore, began experimenting with Chinese verses, prosody, and language, other poets began
34
Though Lowell’s relationship with China in Fir Flower Tablets presents a certain Orientalist attitude,
her poem “Guns as Keys” shows a more sympathetic and understanding side. See Yoshihara’s work
“Putting on the Voice of the Orient: Gender and Sexuality in Amy Lowell’s ‘Asian’ Poetry” for an
extended discussion.
80
recuperating Chinese images in substantially non-Chinese poems. While the writers alternately
included such images to mark their cosmopolitanism, signify wealth, or connote their
participation in (or rejection of) global issues and norms, such continuing recourse to material
images confirmed for the public China’s removal from modern day developments, its historicity,
and above all its objectivity.
T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound’s protégé and longtime friend, represents one poet who remained
largely uninfluenced by the vogue of China in Modernism. Eliot’s relationship with Pound
began in 1914, when, as Eliot says, “my meeting with Ezra Pound changed my life” (Letters of
TSE xvii). In grooming his friend for the rigors of a life in poetry, Pound introduced Eliot to his
first “artistic milieu” (Gordon 99). Among this group were Wyndham Lewis, Hilda Doolittle,
and from time to time, Chinese translator Arthur Waley. Yet, while many of these poets dabbled
with disparate literary forms, Eliot worked more within established English literary traditions
rather than pulling from outside sources. When he did look to the East, it was to India and not
China. Nonetheless, his lasting friendship with Pound as well as his enthusiasm for Pound’s
work surely introduced him to Pound’s idea of China and Chinese poetry. Perhaps because of
this relationship, “Burnt Norton,” the first movement of Eliot’s later work Four Quartets,
curiously contains a Chinese vase and points to the manner through which certain poets
unwittingly affirmed China’s place in the Modernist canon. The poem itself is largely a
meditation on time and its inescapability; our existence in time and the distractions of reality
prevent us from transcendence and an appreciation of the eternal. Throughout the work, Eliot
grapples with the moment of transcendence, describing it in the second movement as the still
point where “There would be no dance and there is only the dance” (2. 21). The still point thus
represents a release from the flux of life. In this moment, Eliot moves past the trappings of time
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and false illusions to envision the all-encompassing eternal. However, this understanding is
fleeting and almost impossible to sustain due to the “enchainment of past and future / Woven in
the weakness of the changing body” (2. 33-4). Our existence and subjugation to time conspire to
keep us locked in the temporal.
However, the final movement of “Burnt Norton” offers one means of transcendence: art.
In this important section, Eliot recalls the idea of the “still point” and advances art’s ability to
move one past the temporal:
Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness. (5. 4-7)
Through the pattern of art, and its ability to move us from one plane of understanding to another,
we may transcend time. The Chinese jar, much like Keats’s Grecian urn, represents the
capability of art to function in multiple eras and to allow us, the viewer of that art, to transit
between those eras. By using a Chinese jar, Eliot also calls upon the perceptions of China as
historicized and lasting. There is no sense that the “Chinese jar” is modern; alternately, its
foreignness and objectivity allow Eliot to most fully express his vision of transcendence. In
other words, the exoticness of the Chinese jar coupled with the prevailing ideas in Modernist
circles of China as artistically and culturally superior further buttress the ability of the jar to
transcend not only time but also culture; moving from the East to the West its beauty collapses
time and space. Hence, while Eliot capitalizes on the current impression of China so as to fully
realize art’s transcendent properties, he also reifies the idea of China as the apotheosis of wisdom.
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Like Eliot, Gertrude Stein also includes Chinese objects in Tender Buttons. However, the
complex construction of her poems and general lack of critical agreement on her writing
processes tend to complicate the reasons behind her inclusion of Chinese objects. Some read
Tender Buttons as Cubist, where her choice of words reflect her shifting of perspective to reveal
the thingness of the object she is working with. Others see Tender Buttons as an experimental
work where Stein calls into question the orders imposed by man on words. In this respect, Stein
refuses to use collocations and plays with grammatical and syntactical forms to reclaim English
from its predictability. The recent work of Catherine Paul offers yet another way to view Stein’s
verses. Paul argues that Tender Buttons is a meditation on collecting which “both represent[s]
what it means to collect things and redefine[s] the ways in which her own collection could be
defined” (196). Paul’s approach mimics the way uninitiated readers come to Stein’s verses.
Without the exegesis of critical research, Stein’s eschewal of expected patterns forces each
reader to make sense of the sections on his or her own terms, in a sense re-ordering them. In this
respect, the reader works through these sections much as he or she would work through the
exhibits in a museum. Such a process democratizes the objects in the poem, thereby allowing the
reader to negotiate the item’s meaning and station in the room.
Stein’s arranging of Chinese objects then would seem to be a moot point; if each reader
makes sense of the object as he or she encounters it, no lasting interpretation can be made.
Indeed, her first recourse to a Chinese object in the section entitled “Rooms” proves immediately
disconcerting: “A little lingering lion and a Chinese chair, all the handsome cheese which is
stone, all of it and a choice, a choice of a blotter. If it is difficult to do it one way there is no
place of similar trouble. None. The whole arrangement is established” (44). In my reading, the
section “Rooms” itself is a long meditation on the state of the rooms in which she lives. As such,
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the Chinese chair and the lion are decorations within the room. Stein’s repetition of choice
indicates choice in presentation of these pieces of decoration so that the “whole arrangement is
established.” She closes out the paragraph noting that “there is a suggestion…that there can be a
different whiteness to the wall” again noting the impermanence of the items in their current state
and their susceptibility to rearrangement (44). Stein gives us the power to rearrange words just
as we would rearrange furniture. Yet, my ordering of Stein may prove altogether different from
another reader’s. In this sense, Stein’s use of a Chinese chair is no more exotic than the
“lingering lion” she puts next to it.
However, Stein’s second recourse to China on the next page complicates the image of the
“Chinese chair”: “Alike and a snail, this means Chinamen, it does there is no doubt that to be
right is more than perfect there is no doubt and glass is confusing it confuses the substance which
was of a color” (45). While Stein’s work is known for its arcane and inscrutable use of words,
the insertion of “Chinamen” begs the question of objectification. If this is indeed “a whole
collection made,” what role do “Chinamen” play in that collection? Stein answers this question
in the lines following her assertion of the nature of a collection: “A damp cloth, an oyster, a
single mirror, a manikin, a student, a silent star, a single spark, a little movement and the bed is
made. This shows the disorder, it does” (46). The litany of unrelated objects including the
“corporeal” student demonstrates that Stein’s use of disconcerting words and syntax is meant to
force readers to do work in meaning making. The collection can only be “made” by our
patterning.
While Stein’s use of Chinese objects escapes easy reading, one thing remains clear: even
in the experimental poetry of Stein, China had a place. As an avid collector of art, her salon
most likely included a Chinese chair or artwork alongside its Picassos and Matisses. This
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Chinese artifact acted upon Stein and became integrated into her poetry. Stein thus offers the
Chinese chair to her readers, again asking us to value it against the other parts of the room.
While Eliot’s Chinese vase has a clearer centrality and connotation in “Burnt Norton,” Stein’s
Chinese chair nonetheless remains an important element of her work. The inclusion of Chinese
images in the major Modernist works of Eliot and Stein underscores the continued intrigue and
effect of China on American Modernist poets. In addition, the sustained use of these images
illustrates Modernism’s estimation of China as primarily aesthetic, historicized, and timeless.
(Re)Orientations
The foregoing literary exhibits of various authors’ visions and use of China sets in relief
the multiplicity of ways Modernists presented China as well as validates the need for a broader,
more flexible way of viewing such imaginings. Whereas Lowell’s negotiation of her relationship
with Nung along with Imagism’s insistence on itself as a largely American movement seem to
exemplify Simon Gikandi’s characterization of Modernism that “almost without exception the
Other is considered to be part of the narrative of modern art yet not central enough to be
considered constitutive,” Pound’s later sustained engagement with China conforms more to
Qian’s multiculturalist vision of Modernism’s entanglement with China (457). Both, in their
own ways, are right. Imagism, in order to enter the halls of “art,” had to foreground its status as
an English literary work and minimize, except in reference, its reliance on Chinese images.
Similarly, Lowell used Nung for publicity, yet his contributions and role in the creation of the
final translations of Fir Flower Tablets are largely undervalued. Eager to foreground and
substantiate herself as a poet, Lowell relies on China more as signifier than informant, in effect
fulfilling the Saidian theory of Orientalism. Nonetheless, despite Lowell’s commodification of
China for material gains, she did translate from Chinese originals. Though less successful as a
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poem in the eyes of today’s critics, Lowell’s work offers more explanation of Chinese ideas and
myths than Pound’s early translations. Though this is due in large part to the labor of Ayscough,
it nonetheless points to a grain of truth in Lowell’s translations.
What becomes clear then is that no single theory of China’s interaction with Modernism
holds true across the wide variety of approaches Modernist poets took to China. Instead, what
this study calls for is an examination of Chinese objects and images in Modernism that isn’t
conscripted by Orientalism or liberal multiculturalism. By pushing beyond discussion of real
influence versus Orientalist imaginings, we may begin to grasp the changing image of China
within American poetry of the twentieth century. Much like the fetishizing of cosmopolitan
domesticity, the first uses of China, and it subsequent use as object in later poetry, certainly point
to the objectification of Asia. However, to read these exhibits as solely objectifying misses the
very real cultural exchange going on between China and the US. We must remember that each
of these poets’ images of China are predicated on both the real and the imaginary. Though China
was indeed commodified by many writers of the Modernist movement, it also played a very real
and constitutive role in the making of Modernist poetics. While significant evidence of this role
exists in the writings of critics like Stamy, Qian and Hayot, my work here has concentrated more
on the various other schemes of Modernist engagement with China. This is not to undercut the
reality of Chinese influence, but rather to broaden the discussion of China’s relationship in
Modernism by complicating Qian’s assertion “Modernism is a phenomenon of internationalism/
multiculturalism” with Kusch’s idea that “performance of otherness is one of the most common
strategies of literary modernism” (5, 40-41). Only by doing so can the very complicated
relationship between China and Modernism be truthfully presented and the lasting presence of
China (both real and imagined) in American poetry be elicited.
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CHAPTER FOUR
新日日新:
A CASE STUDY OF INFLUENCE
The previous chapter’s focus on the widespread use of Chinese images in American
Modernist poetry highlights the centrality of Ezra Pound to the practice of (re)presenting China.
The success of Pound’s Cathay mirrors the growing Modernist interest in the Chinese object as
poetic material. While Cathay undoubtedly marks an important moment in the history of the
West’s textual interfacing with the East, it represents only the beginning of Pound’s extended
study of Chinese language and literature. 35 Pound maintained an interest in China throughout
his career, and his conceptualization of Chinese literature and language informed and inflected
both his poetics and the composition of the Cantos. Accordingly, “Pound and China” has
become its own field of study, and numerous scholars have sought to estimate and clarify the
role of China in Pound’s oeuvre.36 Against this line of critical inquiry also appears a rich
tradition of literature that traces Pound’s persistent importance to American poetics. Works like
Christopher Beach’s The ABC of Influence and Charles Altieri’s The Art of Twentieth-Century
American Poetry suggest direct linkages between Pound and his poetic heirs, while others like
Michael André Bernstein’s The Tale of the Tribe and Laszlo K. Géfin’s Ideogram: History of a
Poetic Method trace Pound’s innovations in terms of specific Poundian legacies. His almost
35
The continuing debate over Cathay’s position as a Chinese or English product additionally adds to its
importance. See Hayot’s “Critical Dreams: Orientalism, Modernism, and the Meaning of Pound’s China”
for a meditation on the textual scholarship Cathay has produced.
36
See the Introduction for a brief discussion on the genesis of scholarly work on Modernism and
Orientalism.
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palpable influence has created not only a rich avenue of critical inquiry by individual scholars
but also an entire scholarly journal – Sagetrieb.
Yet, the amassing critical corpus on Poundian influence continues to go largely
untouched by the parallel tradition of literature that treats Pound’s interaction with China. While
Steven G. Yao’s Translation and the Languages of Modernism and Lazlo Géfin’s Ideogram both
implicitly argue that China, or perhaps more accurately Pound’s idea of China, exerted an
important poetic effect on later American poets, neither formally announces such a corollary.37
The inability to combine these two fields of study is predicated on Pound’s changing
understanding of the Chinese language as well as the difficulty in defining the parameters
necessary to read for such influence. For the majority of these critics, influence is traced via a
specific mode or stylistic trait; for instance, Perloff, who provides perhaps the most sweeping
analysis of the Poundian poetic lineage in “The Contemporary of our Grandchildren: Ezra Pound
and the Question of Influence,” narrows down his influence to four specific traits: verbal
precision, verse libre, translation as creation, and “the example of the Cantos as ‘a poem
including history’” (Perloff 122). However, while Pound’s specific modes of paratactic
juxtaposition and translation were informed by his interest in the Chinese language, constructing
37
Steven Yao’s Translation and the Languages of Modernism begins to treat this lacuna via his focus on
translation as a harmonizing force in Modern American poetry. Throughout his text, he probes the ways
Pound and others use translation to further their own poetic innovations. The final chapter of his book
connects the Modernist legacy of translation with its later heirs Robert Lowell and Louis Zukofsky.
While Yao’s book duly notes the importance of Chinese translation in Pound’s poetics, the impressive
scale of his work fails to substantially elucidate the effect of Pound’s China on these two later writers.
Géfin’s Ideogram comes closest to treating the nexus between Pound’s influence and interest in China
through his focus on the ideogram as a mediating center. Géfin first painstakingly explains the
particularities of the Poundian poetics of juxtaposition by reading Pound’s understanding of Fenollosa’s
“Chinese Written Character As a Medium for Poetry” against the text itself before briefly analyzing how
such juxtaposition works in the Cantos. After concretely defining the ideogrammic method, the balance
of Géfin’s text traces the influence of the method on later poets including Williams and the objectivists.
Yet, whereas Géfin’s work provides an excellent analysis of Pound’s method and its extension via the
objectivists, it centers more on the practice and implementation of the juxtapositional techniques which he,
following Pound, designates the ideogrammic method, and pays less attention to what other vestiges of
China may continue to inhabit the poetry of those in the Poundian lineage.
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a case for the continuance of Chinese influence via a specific literary technique that was adopted
and reconstructed by Pound ultimately remains problematic.
To concretely evidence the extant Chinese influence handed down by Pound requires the
use of a different paradigm of influence, one that draws on Wai Chee Dimock’s theories of deep
time and resonance as well as the notion of intertextuality. In “Deep Time: American Literature
and World History,” Dimock advocates a shift in the frame of reference by which intercultural
texts and translations are compared and evaluated as “neither a single nation nor a single race can
yield an adequate frame for literary history” (757). Dimock’s assertion denotes her belief that
American literary theory’s tacit reliance on linear historicism and national boundaries reinforces
the Eurocentrism and limitations implicit in the reading and teaching of American texts. Texts
cannot be relegated to specific time frames or bordered nation-states as they are “diachronic
objects” which extend across the arbitrary boundaries imposed by man. In these journeys, texts
pick up different resonances; these reverberations in turn make a text ‘literary” by continually
changing our perceptions and interpretations, thus “annoying and inspiring more and more
readers” (“Theory” 1068). In lieu of periodization, Dimock calls for the employment of deep
time, where texts are read nonlinearly across a larger time and space continuum defined by a
significant event, belief, or idea. Dimock’s paradigm of deep time evinces the ways certain texts
pick up, share, and become transformed by other texts, and such intertextuality intimates a
concrete example of influence.
Dimock’s suppositions offer a theoretical framework that bridges the gap between the
Poundian legacy and Pound’s Chinese influences. Following Dimock’s idea of deep time, this
chapter trades in the traditional boundaries of American studies in favor of a “different input map”
which takes as its starting point Pound’s maxim “make it new” and its emblematic signifier the
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Chinese word 新38 or xin (“Deep Time” 761). I follow the transpacific literary migrations of 新
as it appears across the Cantos, the Confucian Shi-ching (诗经), Lu Ji’s Wen Fu (文赋), a 600
BCE Chinese folk song, Gary Snyder’s “Axe Handles,” Fred Wah’s “Dead In My Tracks,” and
John Yau’s “Chinese Villanelle.” So doing exposes a web of interconnected poetries and
linguistic resonances and attests to the extent to which Pound’s idea of paideuma – as imagined
through 新 – continues to inflect American poetics. Reading 新 across two continents and two
millennia acknowledges its centrality in American literature as well as illuminates how each of
these poems intertextually acts on the others, elucidating new readings and forcing a temporally
diachronic comparison that illustrates the intercultural transmissions in these poetic innovations.
Although 新 first appears in Canto LIII (published in 1940), tracing Pound’s interaction
with the Chinese language to this point is necessary to constructing not only his evolving theory
of the ideogrammic method but also his increasing appreciation of the Chinese language and the
changing content and theory of the Cantos themselves. Such a brief account of the history of
Pound’s interest in China alongside the production of the Cantos also reveals the way 新 came to
function in Pound’s poetics. In keeping with Dimock’s interest in developing a diachronic
history, examining a text through the lenses of resonance and deep time does not entail
abandoning traditional historical readings; Dimock’s paradigm breaks open such linear readings
to “engage history beyond the simultaneous, aligning it instead with the dynamics of endurance
and transformation that accompany the passage of time” (“Theory” 1061). 新 in Canto LIII
represents the center of such a diachronic history that encompasses not only Pound’s use of the
term but also its continuing resonance in a multitude of other poetries. Therefore, an
38
Throughout this essay, I will refer to the Chinese word xin (新) in its Chinese form so as to retain the
cultural and graphical nature of the character.
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understanding of how 新 and the Chinese language came to be embedded in Canto LIII and
representative of the ideogrammic method is germane to the following study.
While Pound had demonstrated curiosity for Chinese literature as early as 1908 during
his involvement in Hulme’s Poets Club and had been reading Herbert Giles’s History of Chinese
Literature (published in 1901) on the recommendation of Upward, his sustained interaction with
the Chinese language began with his reception of the late Ernest Fenollosa’s notebooks in 1913.
A renowned investigator of Chinese art, Fenollosa had been working on translations of numerous
Chinese poems in Japan with Professors Kainen Mori and Nagao Ariga (the latter acted as
translator) at the time of his death. Fenollosa’s widow, familiar with Pound’s work, felt that he
would be the best person to inherit Fenollosa’s notes.39 After several meetings with Pound,
Fenollosa’s widow transferred the bulk of his work in Japan (eight notebooks plus voluminous
notes on Noh plays and other assorted notes) to him in December. As he notes in “Dateline,” his
receipt of Fenollosa’s manuscripts happened “when I was ready for it”; by 1914 Pound was
simultaneously involved in construction of Vorticist principles as well as preparing Cathay from
the drafts of Fenollosa (Literary Essays 74). Disgusted with the cooptation of Imagism by Amy
Lowell and other poets and their subsequent inferior verse, Pound turned to Vorticism as a way
to redefine his idea of the image against these second rate poems that recorded visual, overly
descriptive, and static images.
Pound’s ascent into Vorticism coupled with the Fenollosa manuscripts succeeded in
fortifying the doctrine of the image he had begun formulating in his Imagist years. Against
Imagism, which he began to see as “a movement of criticism rather than of creation,” Vorticism
offered creativity in a wide range of art forms (Gaudier-Brzeska 82). Most immediately, Pound
39
Qian offers several different accounts of Mrs. Fenollosa’s meeting with Pound in Chapter Two of
Orientalism and Modernism.
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found an affinity within the sculptural, modern art forms of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and
Wyndham Lewis. The intensity he saw in their works reflected the passion he had captured in
his finest images. Key to this intensity was the Vorticist penchant of using the past to comment
on the present.40 Surpassing primitivism, Vorticist artists were “concerned with the relative
intensity, or relative significance of different sorts of expression” (Gaudier-Brzeska 90). Unlike
the Futurists, the Vorticists drew from the past to critique the present via the associations forced
by paralleling the two. For Pound, whose early poems had come from imitating or translating
past literary figures, such a dynamic realization of the influence of the past on the present
pointed the way to a more engaged use of early texts. These commonalities led Pound to partner
with Lewis to launch Vorticism as a pan-artistic movement. Though the first assertion of this
new poetics alongside its moniker “Vorticism” occurred with the publication of Blast on July 2,
1914, Pound would impart a clearer definition of its precepts in “Affirmations II: Vorticism,”
published just two months before Cathay:
Vorticism is the use of, or the belief in the use of, THE PRIMARY PIGMENT, straight
through all the arts. If you are a cubist or an expressionist, or an imagist, you may
believe in one thing for painting and a very different thing for poetry. You may talk
about volumes or about colour that ‘moves in,’ or about a certain form of verse, without
having a correlated aesthetic which carries through all of the arts. (277)
Vorticism offered Pound an aesthetic that could stretch across and bind different art forms while
at the same time setting in bold relief the differences between them. By elucidating each art
form’s “primary pigment,” the vital, indispensable feature used to convey an idea in one art form,
insinuated the limitations of another. For example, the viewy, showy, later Imagist poems failed
40
See Dasenbrock’s chapter “The Aesthetic of Vorticism” for a more extended treatment of Vorticist
artists’ use of these relationships.
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precisely because they borrowed the primary pigment of the visual arts; in contrast, poets needed
to rely on their own primary pigment, the dynamic image, to achieve the “still point” or center of
energy in their own poems. By eschewing a poetry which competed with the visual arts for
something the latter could accomplish more completely and correctly, Pound acclaimed a new
standard concentrated on a firmly defined conceptualization of the image as “a radiant node or
cluster…a VORTEX, from which, and through which and into which, ideas are constantly
rushing” (Gaudier-Brzeska 92), effectively setting the image in motion and carrying it beyond
the merely pictorial.
For Pound, the first fruit of Vorticism would come through his engagement with Chinese
literature via Cathay. While Cathay is often read primarily as Imagist, Pound constructed it as
he was already transitioning to Vorticism. Unlike his 1913 “In a Station of the Metro,” the
poems in Cathay surpass his earlier definition of the image as that which presents “an intellectual
and emotional complex in an instant of time” by emphasizing the connection between the earlier
Chinese poems and his contemporary translations (Literary Essays 4). Gaudier-Brzeska’s
comment from a trench in war-time France that the poems of Cathay “depict our situation in a
wonderful way” concretized for Pound the new ground he had broken (Gaudier-Brzeska 54). In
Chinese poetry, Pound had stumbled on to the raw materials of the vortex; using modern
language to (re)present ancient voices, Pound produced both “a sense of awakening and of our
belief in the present” by mobilizing the past to clarify the present (Gaudier-Brzeska 110). As
Ming Xie explains, “translation enables the poet to have access to trans-cultural and transhistorical universals while at the same time making it possible for the poet to effect original
transformations in a given local language” (245). Through his mobilization of early Chinese
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poetry, Pound had managed to both create and translate, giving his readers “new eyes” with
which to view the present (Gaudier-Brzeska 85).
While Cathay initiated Pound into the Vorticist movement, Fenollosa’s “The Chinese
Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” offered Pound a form for his poetic goals. Though
Pound received Fenollosa’s manuscript along with the rest of his notebooks in1913, there is no
indication that he perused the draft before 1916. Rather, Pound began with Fenollosa’s Noh
plays before moving on to the Chinese poetry notebooks in November 1914 (Qian, Orientalism
26). Pound’s first mention of the essay occurs in a 1916 letter to Iris Barry. In the letter, Pound
seems most taken with Fenollosa’s appraisal of the Chinese language as devoid of grammar and
more “active” than the English Language; he characterizes Fenollosa’s work as a “big essay on
verbs” where he “inveighs against ‘IS,’ wants transitive verbs” (Selected Letters 82). In the
essay, Fenollosa asserts that the language itself lacks a “to be” verb and insists that the meaning
of a Chinese sentence depends singly upon the relationships between its words.41 This
elimination of unnecessary syntax is what Pound had been aiming for in his earlier Imagistic
years through his study of Japanese Haiku. Furthermore, Fenollosa holds that the Chinese
language’s lack of articles and reliance on active verbs over nouns underscores “how poetical is
the Chinese form and how close to nature” (“The Chinese Written Character” 314). Using the
much cited example of “人見馬” or “man sees horse,” Fenollosa argues that the Chinese
language’s syntactical forms mimic the processes of nature; action moves from the doer, to the
doing and finally to the object forming a continuous moving picture (“The Chinese Written
41
In “The Chinese Written Character,” Fenollosa offers the example of the verb 有 (you3) as the closest
in meaning to the English “to be.” 有 (you3) is generally regarded to mean have, while 是 (shi4)
approximates “to be.” Nonetheless, again Fenollosa is partly right in his understanding of Chinese;
Chinese grammar does eschew the 是 (shi4) in many cases where it is required in English, most notably
sentences which describe one’s own characteristics. For instance, the English sentence “I am very tall”
would translate to the Chinese “我很高,” or in word to word translation: “I very tall.”
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Character” 308-309). Unconstrained by what Géfin terms “connectives” such as prepositions
and articles, Chinese is linguistically less specific than English; many verbs can be nouns and
vice versa. As Yip explains in Chinese Poetry: Major Modes and Genres, Chinese retains a
syntactic freedom [which] promotes a kind of prepredicative condition wherein words,
like objects in the real-life world, are free from predetermined closures of relationship
and meaning and offer themselves to us in an open space. Within this open space we can
move freely and approach words from various vantage points to achieve different shades
of the same aesthetic moment (30).
Such directness in writing immediately appealed to Pound as it echoed his earlier convictions in
“A Retrospect” that “the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction”
(Literary Essays 5). For Pound, Chinese syntax succeeded in “throwing light upon our forgotten
mental processes” by using juxtaposition to confirm the more natural relationships between
words (“The Chinese Written Character” 319).
While Pound’s early references to Chinese poetry highlight his interest in its concision
and immediacy, he would additionally come to find within “Fenollosa’s treasures” the ideogram
and “the poetical raw material which the Chinese language affords” (Selected Letters 27; “The
Chinese Written Character” 319). As Fenollosa explains, the ideogrammic structure of Chinese
written words provides a condition whereby “things work out their own fate” (309). Fenollosa
elucidates these pictographic properties through the character 東, or East, glossing it as “the sun
sign [日], tangled in the branches of the tree sign [木]” through the sentence “日上東” (329).
His conception of Chinese as primarily logographic led him to proclaim:
the Chinese written language has not only absorbed the poetic substance of nature and
built with it a second work of metaphor, but has, through its very pictorial visibility, been
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able to retain its original creative poetry with far more vigor and vividness than any
phonetic tongue (“The Chinese Written Character” 321).
While these lines no doubt resonated with Pound as he strove to define and refine Vorticism as a
pan-artistic method, they would become more compelling when Pound returned to his study of
Chinese in the 1930s. Regardless, in his first reading of Fenollosa, Pound saw in this gloss of 東
the example of a language that could “speak at once with the vividness of painting” (“The
Chinese Written Character” 309). Armed with Morrison’s Chinese dictionary, he amplified this
notion changing “日上東” to “日昇東.” 42,43 By adding sheng “昇,” which also means rise but
contains the sun radical “日,” Pound magnified the ideographic qualities of the sentence. Thus,
while Pound’s more overt propagandizing of the ideogrammic method would occur in later
publications, it is clear that his interest in the pictographic composition of Chinese characters
stems from his first interaction with Fenollosa’s manuscript.
Pound’s Imagism, Vorticism, and his revision of the “The Chinese Written Character”
laid the foundation for his half-century dedication to “an endless poem, of no known category,
Phanopoeia (light or image-making) or something or other, all about everything” (Pound/Joyce
102). From its earliest stages, the Cantos mimicked Pound’s interest in translation and
reemphasized its inextricability from poetry. By the Cantos, Pound makes use of voluminous
(sometimes untranslated) sources in his personae creations, so that his “translation esthetic is
transformed into a completely new process in which the juxtaposition of language upon language
in its original form only implies a translation in the context of its constituent elements”
(Maerhofer 105). Opening with Odysseus’s descent into hell, the epic grasps toward moments of
42
The Morrison dictionary Pound often consulted conceived of Chinese characters ideogrammically.
Morrison’s entry for 新 echoes Pound’s understanding of it.
43
Yunte Huang is the first critic to realize Pound’s substitution from Fenollosa’s original. See pages 7073 of Transpacific Displacement for his discussion of this change.
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light defined by erudite, juxtaposed excerpts from the cultures, histories, and literatures of more
than fifteen languages. Pound would give voice to this method some ten years after beginning
his “poem of some length.” In the ABC of Reading, Pound describes his approach as akin to that
of modern science, and he cites Fenollosa’s monograph as “the first definite assertion of the
applicability of scientific method to literary criticism” (18). For Pound, Fenollosa’s study of the
Chinese character offered a distinctly scientific model and also served as his answer to the
overwhelming Modernist problem of what Altieri calls the “new realism” (The Art of TwentiethCentury American Poetry 4). Given by the Romantics a poetry rich in false sincerities and an
ever present narrator, Pound and many of the other Modernists strove to follow emerging science
in isolating the expression or feeling of an event and not the actual event itself. Modernist poetry
often reacted to oppressive Victorian ideals of universality by foregrounding the particular,
immediate, and concrete over the abstract. These poetic experiments effaced the poet himself,
removing him from his mediating position in much earlier poetry, in an attempt to fashion a new
form capable of expressing the contemporary psyche. 44
In direct opposition to Victorian abstraction, the Chinese character’s uninflected
representations of the concrete offered discrete scientific particulars from which an overarching
connection could be determined. Drawing from Fenollosa and the Chinese character, the
ideogrammic method served to fulfill Pound’s dicta that “The proper METHOD for studying
poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful first-hand
examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON” (ABC 17). Such “COMPARISON”
also accented his own poetic processes and the structure the Cantos would take. Pound explains
his concept more clearly in Guide to Kulchur: “The ideogrammic method consists of presenting
44
See Altieri’s “Introduction” to The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry for a more detailed
discussion of the new realism.
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one facet and then another until at some point one gets off the dead and desensitized surface of
the reader’s mind, onto a part that will register” (51). The juxtapositional technique succeeded
by presenting enough particulars in concert that a reader would be able to deduce the ideas
holding them together.
By the 1930s, Pound’s construction of the Cantos was acting in concert with his return to
Chinese studies. While Pound first published a translation of the Confucian Ta Hio from
Pauthier’s French version in 1928, he subsequently began his own translation publishing a
pamphlet entitled Confucius: Digest of the Analects in 1937; the pamphlet would become the
first chapter of Guide to Kulchur, published in 1938. Pound continued to work on translations of
other Confucian texts throughout the next decade.45 Correspondingly, Pound’s ideogrammic
method became colored by his Confucian readings of the Chinese language as a model for the
connection of nature and politics. Pound’s belief in the logocentric basis of many Chinese
characters as direct, uncompromised representations of natural phenomena freed the Chinese
written language from the vagaries of misuse; because they were formed as a mirror of the
natural world they were exempt from ideology. Confucius’s philosophy advocated adherence to
the correct social order where a man’s actions mirrored his words and his title defined his life. In
the Confucian scheme, the poet acted as a sage; in a sense, the poet was the purveyor of wisdom,
the voice of the people. Confucianism’s centering tenet of a just moral order allowed Pound to
align poetry with both nature and politics; a man’s politics were nothing more than an extension
of his moral duty within the correct Confucian order.
It was in this frame of mind that Pound published what would come to be known as the
Chinese History Cantos in January, 1940. As Hugh Kenner contends, the inclusion of China,
“though not wholly unprepared for, is a surprise”; while Canto XIII centers on Confucius and
45
Pound published The Great Digest and The Unwobbling Pivot in 1947.
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Canto 49, the Seven Lakes Canto, offers an ekphrastic meditation on a Japanese screen book,
Asia to this point has played a relatively minor role in Pound’s epic (432).46 Pound concludes
the Fifth Decad of Cantos’ images of Geryon and indictments of usura, with 正名 (zhèng míng),
the Confucian ideal of right naming and Confucius’ starting point for setting up good
government (Confucius 249). Canto LII thus begins with the “Rays” ideogram copied from
Fenollosa’s notebooks, returning to Pound’s motif of light and his use of early Chinese history as
an exemplar of proper government. The addition of Cantos LII – LXI deepens the intertexuality
and ideogrammic form of the epic and emphasizes its fugal character; Fenollosa’s text is invoked,
while the history of China becomes juxtaposed with Pound’s previous interest in European texts
and history. The Chinese Cantos also recall and highlight Pound’s invocation of Confucius
(Kung) in Canto XIII, thus recentering and realigning the work as a whole.
From the Chinese Cantos onward, Chinese characters figure prominently in the poem. It
is also within these Cantos that 新 makes its first appearance. Though Pound had obviously
stumbled onto the maxim “make it new” before the publication of a collection of essays by the
same name in 1934, the origin of the phrase is not revealed until Canto LIII:
Tching prayed on the mountain and
on his bath tub
新日日新
wrote MAKE IT NEW
day by Day make it new
cut underbrush,
pile the logs
keep it growing. (265)
46
See Qian’s “Painting Into Poetry: Pound’s Seven Lakes Canto” in Ezra Pound and China for an
extended discussion of Pound’s use of the screen book.
99
Generally translated as “renew thyself completely each day; do it again and again and forever
again,” the inscription on Tang’s bathtub is traditionally seen as a reference to the perseverance
which allowed Tang to overthrow the reigning emperor and begin the Shang dynasty. Pound
abbreviates the original Chinese phrase “ 日新, 日日新,
and 新 and removes the connective “
日新” to its major components 日
” (you) so as to rectify the “dominance of the verb” (“The
Chinese Written Character” 29). In reworking the phrase, Pound also mimics Chinese chengyu
(
), idiomatic literary expressions constructed from four Chinese characters that often allude
to a historical or literary proverb or adage. The collage of words within Canto LII extends the
ideogrammic method of the Cantos by juxtaposing English and Chinese; whether or not a reader
comprehends both languages is immaterial – he can get at one by way of the other. As Pound
famously remarks in a letter to Sarah Perkins Cope, “Skip anything you don’t understand and go
on till you pick it up again. All tosh about foreign languages making it difficult. The quotes are
all explained at once by repeat or they are definitely of the things indicated” (Selected Letters
250). For the largely Mandarin-illiterate audience, the Chinese text serves as both aesthetic
juxtaposition and a graphic (re)presentation of the poetry to the left.
Pound’s belief in the ideogrammic constitution of the Chinese language additionally
imbues the single word 新 with other valences of meaning. Thirteen pages after its initial
appearance, Pound shortens the phrase to 新, appending the phonetic approximation “sin / jih /
jih / sin” to it. 新 thus becomes emblematic of the entire phrase. 47 Following Fenollosa’s belief
47
While I focus on 新 as a model of Pound’s project of paideuma, it is perhaps interesting to note that 日
(rì) also remained important in Pound’s ideogrammic project. As the radical for sun, Pound often reads
words containing it as indicative of his theory of light. For example, he glosses (míng), which literally
combines the radicals for sun and moon, as “the total light process, the radiation…hence, the intelligence”
(Confucius 20). He also instructs readers to “refer to Scotus Erigena, Grosseteste and the notes on light in
my Cavalcanti,” further connecting his ideogrammic readings with Neoplatonic light philosophy. (See
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that each Chinese character “bears its metaphor on its face” and echoing the entry for 新 in
Morrison’s dictionary, Pound envisions 新 as comprising three distinct pieces which combine
ideogrammically to infuse the word with metaphorical significance:
lì or wèi - woodpile
新
mù - tree
jīn - axe
木
Pound hints at this connection in the lines “cut underbrush / pile the logs / keep it growing” in
Canto LIII. He further expounds on the gist of 新 in his updated translation of the Ta Hio (
/Da Xue) in 1947; here, the 新 ideogram breaks down into three constituent parts: “axe, tree and
woodpile” and outpaces its simple definition of “new” to mean “renew the people” (Confucius
39).
Renewal for Pound, as translated through Confucius, depends upon ascertaining the root
of history, so that “to know what precedes and what follows, is nearly as good as having a head
and feet” for “if the root be in confusion, nothing will be well governed” (Confucius 29, 33). By
reading 新 ideogrammically, Pound is able to align the “root” of Confucian wisdom with the
“tree” radical, intimating that to make it new requires an excavation of what has gone before. Its
first appearance in Canto LII alongside the portrayal of the successful reign of Yao
and Yu
, Chun
emphasizes the continuation of right rule as well as recalls the Confucian “root” of
such an enterprise: “Virtue is the daughter of heaven, YU followed CHUN / and CHUN, YAO
having one root of conduct” (Cantos 278). Imbued with this significance, 新 as metaphor
recreates not only the ideogrammic method but also recalls one of Pound’s major themes of the
also Mary Cheadle’s excellent essay on the intersection of Pound’s Confucianism and Neoplatonism in
“The Vision of Light in Ezra Pound’s The Unwobbling Pivot.”
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,
Cantos: the repeat in history. As he explains in “The Tradition,” “a return to origins invigorates
because it is a return to nature and reason” (Literary Essays 92). Like Fenollosa, Pound believed
that the radicals of Chinese, the smaller components that make up each character, each
referenced pre-historic renderings of concrete natural things. As such, placing these “pictograms”
in concert with each other provides for a moving picture “almost invariably tied to myth, and
through myth to the fundamental process of nature” (Géfin 40). By collapsing much of the
distance between man and word and thereby precluding political or religious misreadings, the
Chinese character served as the perfect medium and symbol to ground Pound’s poetic project of
voicing “the tale of the tribe.”
While 新 is clearly associated with Chinese literature and Confucianism in its earlier
manifestation in the Chinese Cantos, its reappearance in later Cantos extends its sphere of
associations as its meaning widens to reflect Pound’s shifting estimation of his ability to create a
paradiso in light of World War II, his imprisonment at the DTC, and his stay at St. Elizabeth’s.
Notably, the Pisan Cantos are recorded in the same notebook as Pound’s translations of the Da
Xue and The Unwobbling Pivot, and the three texts create a palimpsest, each informing the other.
Pound pursued his Confucian studies at St. Elizabeth’s, translating the Shih-ching or Confucian
Odes as he continued work on the Cantos. Pound’s interest in 新 resonates throughout the later
Cantos becoming a radiant node, a fugue-like, vibrating image aligned with Pound’s conception
of light and representative of his notion of paideuma as “the grisly roots of ideas that are in
action” (Guide to Kulchur 58). 新’s appearance in Canto LXXXV serves as an example. The
Canto itself opens with an ellipsis, indicating its allusiveness to the previous Canto and inviting
juxtaposition. The section then proceeds in an indictment of the “infantilism” of usurious
practices before lamenting the passing of American leaders dedicated to the prevention of
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“paideuma fading” (589). In contrast to demands to “Remove the mythologies before they
establish clean values,” Pound proclaims “hic est medium” and subsequently offers examples of
leaders and works that affirm the continuation of cultural growth:
Ocellus:
jih 日
hsin 新
the faint green in spring time.
The play shaped from ϕλογιξόµευου
gospoda ∆ηάειρα λαµπρά συµβαίυει (591)
Here, 新 is recreated and mirrored in both Ocellus and Sophocles’ play Trachiniae. Pound, who
was translating the Shih-ching poems around the same time he was translating Trachiniae (the
former published in 1954, the latter in 1953) sees in the two a compatibility, a shared vision of
the light the Cantos moves toward. For Pound, Heracles symbolizes the “solar vitality,” the
ephiphanic light that can illuminate man’s darkness. As Xie explains, in Pound’s translation
Heracles, not Daineira, is the main character and “the embodiment of the play’s essential
meaning.” (239). Ocellus, affiliated with the light philosophers, also references Pound’s quest
for light and his continuing interest in Neoplatonism. The juxtaposition of the different
languages forces the reader to construe a relationship between the two; 新 becomes interpretable
through its location alongside Ocellus and the Greek, while 新 in turn also defines and amplifies
the meaning of the Greek and the allusion to Ocellus.
Pound’s use of these different cultural traditions underscores his image of a universal
paideuma as “the tangle or complex of the inrooted ideas of any period” (Guide to Kulchur 57).
By Canto XCVIII, 新 becomes additionally linked to the Egyptian composite deity Ra-Set, who
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first appears in the context of Ocellus and the “acorn of light” in Canto XCI, as well as the
Soninke legend “Grassire’s Lute” through Pound’s use of “Agada, Ganna, Fasa”:
The boat of Ra-Set moves with the sun
"but our job to build light" said Ocellus:
Agada, Ganna, Fasa,
新
hsin
Make it new (704).
Pound’s combination of the male sun god Ra with the female moon deity Set connotes a
balanced whole while “Grassire’s Legend,” the myth of the founding and re-founding of the
nation of Ghana, resonates with Pound’s Confucian emphasis on right rule. Invoking both
traditions alongside 新 further internationalizes Pound’s ideogram.
The presentation of 新 at the end of Canto XCIV most clearly associates the ideogram
with light:
“To build light
日
新
jih
hsin
said Ocellus. (662)
For Pound, to achieve a new paideuma that will restore the world requires the excavation and
recognition of older models and traditions. 新 stands as an emblem of this procedure, lighting
the darkness through the recovery of truth. While the Chinese and Confucian roots of 新 are
certainly indispensable to his final estimation of the character,新 nonetheless by the end of the
Cantos incorporates truths gained from a number of different sources including Neoplatonism.
Much like 新, images of Neoplatonic thought repeat throughout the epic confirming Pound’s
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interest in the intellectual tradition begun by Erigena, extended by Grosseteste, and supported by
the writings of Guido Cavalcanti.48 His enduring interest in both Confucianism and light
philosophy results in a conflation of the aspects of the two; much as Pound read meaning into the
ideograms of Chinese, he saw in Neoplatonism and Confucianism certain resonances that
illuminated and changed both.49
Throughout the Cantos, Pound attempts to relay his prescription for producing a new
paideuma. 新, as illustrative of that quest, recalls Pound’s belief in honoring the traditions of the
past as well as making use of them in recreating the present. The process embodied by 新
bespeaks not only the Confucian ideals of right government and renewal, but also the theories
derived from his study of a number of other literary traditions. 新 becomes a vortex
encompassing Neoplatonism alongside Greek mythology and Egyptian wisdom and
metaphorically represents both Pound’s ideogrammic practices and his poetic goals. While the
Pound of Drafts and Fragments seems skeptical of the ability to effect a new paideuma (“And I
am not a demigod, / I cannot make it cohere”), he nonetheless still proffers to future writers an
image of light that reverberates in his interpretation of 新: “I have brought the great ball of
crystal / who can lift it? / Can you enter the great acorn of light?” (816, 815). Subsequent writers
48
See Walter B. Michaels’s “Pound and Erigena” in Paideuma 1:1 for a chronology of his interest in
Erigena and the light philosophers.
49
Mary Cheadle’s article “The Vision of Light in Ezra Pound’s The Unwobbling Pivot” also provides an
interesting account of the growth of Pound’s interest in Neoplatonism alongside his translations of
Confucius. Cheadle suggests “Neoplatonism salvaged Pound’s Confucianism from the political and
historical morass into which the fate of fascism threatened to take it by enabling his Confucianism to
transcend the very ends and limits that his earlier Confucianism had valued” (Cheadle 124). While I am
not sure her essay fully supports such a conjecture, it nonetheless provides valuable information
concerning Pound’s parallel interests in the two ideas and the ways in which he allowed one to influence
the other. In particular, her translation of the typescript draft of Pound’s Italian edition of The
Unwobbling Pivot confirms his perceived connection between the two: “Confucian metaphysics arises
from light; students should compare it with scholasticism; with Grosseteste, or with the poetry of Guido
Cavalcanti (in Donna mi prega)” (qtd in Cheadle 122).
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have accordingly taken on the challenge offered by Pound, remaking not only his ideogrammic
method and moving forward his idea of paideuma, but also capitalizing on the idea of 新. Yet,
just as 新 is (re)visioned and infused with different valences throughout the Cantos, its
subsequent appearance in the works of poets like Gary Snyder, Fred Wah, and John Yau deepens
its meaning by adding more resonances to it and entrenches Chinese literature, among other
traditions, in the making of American poetry.
The poetry of Gary Snyder has long been situated in the Poundian tradition; both
Christopher Beach and Laszlo Géfin expound on Snyder’s relation to Pound in their work on
Poundian influence while Robert Kern connects Snyder to Pound in terms of an interest in Asia.
Indeed, Snyder himself testifies to the influence Pound provides: “I grew up with the poetry of
twentieth-century coolness, its hard edges and resilient elitism. Ezra Pound introduced me to
Chinese poetry, and I began to study classical Chinese. When it came to writing out of my own
experience, most of modernism didn’t fit, except for the steer toward Chinese and Japanese”
(“Afterword” 65). Following Pound’s example, Snyder became an avid student of both Chinese
and Japanese and has produced a number of translations, most notably those of the T’ang
dynasty poet known as Han Shan. Snyder’s own major mode of poetic production, which he
calls riprap, also pulls from his study of Pound, the five years he spent “doing finger exercises”
that mimicked the Modernists, and his interest in Asian languages (The Gary Snyder Reader
323). Snyder asserts Pound’s Cantos “touched me deeply and … I am still indebted” (324).
Similar to the ideogrammic style of the Cantos, Snyder’s technique of riprap uses a poetics of
collage which juxtaposes words together so as to construct a meaning out of their positioning.
Yet Snyder’s abbreviated parataxis is also informed by his study of Chinese and Japanese poetry
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and his approximation of the grammatical patterns in these works; eschewing connectives,
Snyder forces the reader to create his or her own associations and understandings.
The force of these influences on Snyder’s operation of riprap is perhaps best
exemplified by his first collection Riprap (Gary Snyder Reader 404). Snyder’s own comments
on the construction of the poems in Riprap affirms the composite influence of environmentalism
and the Chinese language on his own poetics. Written “under the influence of the geology of the
Sierra Nevada,” Snyder constructed “poems of tough, simple, short words, with the complexity
far beneath the surface texture. In part the line was influenced by the five and seven-character
line Chinese poems I’d been reading, which work like sharp blows on the mind” (qtd. in Géfin
128). The title poem of the collection succinctly explains Snyder’s poetics:
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Of note is Snyder’s placement of “words” before “the body of the mind” – the act of the poem
precedes the act of the mind. The words, in Snyder’s estimation, are concrete items “placed
solid” by hands, construct an unbroken path forward on which the reader’s mind may travel.
Much as Pound views the ideograms of Chinese as tangible recreations of ideas, Snyder
envisions words not as abstract entities but rather a solid force in the construction of reality. As
Géfin succinctly summarizes, “‘riprapping’ is the re-creation of an ongoing ceaselessly unfolding
movement of things and events…an act of conscious and intuitive participation in the universal
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scheme of eternal change” (128). “Riprap” thus not only embodies and explains Snyder’s
poetics but also expresses his cosmology and belief in the world as a place of multiple
components – man, animal, nature – connected in a constant flux. Accordingly, Snyder extends
his created trail with a “riprap of things” including the “Cobble of milky way / straying planets /
These poems, people, / lost ponies.” Within this space, he also imagines “The worlds like an
endless / four-dimensional / Game of Go.” His inclusion of the Japanese game of Go references
his extended study and appreciation of Asian cultures and languages as well as his respect for
tradition; the game dates to 4th century BCE China. For Snyder, though, Asian tradition can be
incorporated into American tradition. While the poems themselves speak from the Sierra
Nevada Mountains, they nonetheless reference images from his 8 year sojourn in Japan and offer
Snyder’s own ideogram of cultural experience. By the end of the poem, “each rock a word”
becomes “a creek-washed stone” moved and shaped by reality but ultimately remaining, as in the
last line, “Granite: ingrained.” The relationship created by the words’ proximity to one another
ultimately allows the reader to construct her own trail through the poetry, which offers a foothold
in and an understanding of the impermanence and interconnected materiality of the world.
Snyder’s interest in Pound and Chinese language and literature alongside his reimagining
of the ideogrammic method clearly situate him as an heir to the Chinese inflections of Pound’s
poetics. As Robert Kern rightly remarks, “Snyder’s work…is arguably the premier example in
post-Poundian American poetry of an Orientalized verse in the Modernist tradition and of
English-as-Chinese” (223). Yet, while Pound provides Snyder with the impetus to study Asian
languages, Snyder’s avid interest in and mastery of Japanese and Chinese make it difficult to
separate Poundian mediated Chineseness from Chinese influence gathered through Snyder’s own
translations; in other words, if Riprap stems from Snyder’s imitation of Chinese syntax, does this
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influence take precedence over Pound’s ideogrammic process in Snyder’s composition of the
poems? Snyder himself avers that Chinese poetry provided a greater impetus for his poetics than
his study of Pound. In response to Eliot Weinberger’s inquiry “were you getting the ideogramic
[sic] method from Pound or from the Chinese poetry directly?” Snyder answers, “From the
Chinese poetry directly. I could never make sense of that essay by Pound….What I found in
Pound were three or four dozen lines in the Cantos that are stunning – unlike anything else in
English poetry” (The Gary Snyder Reader 324). While Snyder himself privileges the influence
of the Chinese on his poetics, both clearly color his work. Untangling the two to delineate a
direct transmission of Poundian Chineseness to Snyderian form would be impossible. Thus,
while Kern and others concentrate on Snyder’s forms, what is more useful and concrete for this
study is the way Snyder picks up and unpacks Pound’s idea of 新 in his poem “Axe Handles.”
Snyder’s inclusion of 新 comments specifically on the lasting legacy of Pound’s comprehension
of the single Chinese word. Tracing the ways he adds to the resonance 新 points to the extent to
which the idea has become entrenched within the American poetic idiom.
Like “Riprap,” Snyder’s “Axe Handles” focuses on the parallels between poetry and
meaning making while concomitantly underscoring his belief in the primary role tradition plays
in the continuation of human life. Similar to Pound, Snyder believes in the power of ancient
traditions: “As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the late
Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil; the magic of animals, the power-vision of solitude, the
terrifying initiation and re-birth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe”
(qtd. in Géfin 126). “Axe Handles” exemplifies these beliefs, offering Snyder’s own tale of the
tribe. The poem itself mediates on the power of such a tale through its metaphoric comparison of
the creation of poetry with Snyder’s literal creation of an axe handle and concomitant
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transmission of this centuries old practice to his son Kai. The poem opens “one afternoon the
last week in April / Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet.” From the outset, Snyder mediates his
own handing down of specific practices to his son. As the poem continues, Kai remembers the
“hatchet-head / without a handle in the shop” which he then wants for his own. Repurposing a
“broken-off axe handle,” the two proceed to literally reconstruct the hatchet:
Then I begin to shape the old handle
With the hatchet, and the phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
“When making an axe handle
The pattern is not far off.”
The “phrase” Snyder alludes to resonates keenly with Pound’s reading of 新 as wood, woodpile,
and axe as presented in The Cantos and The Great Digest. Indeed, Snyder is “making it new” in
a Poundian sense, creating a new handle through the pattern of the old and passing this
knowledge onto the future. Yet, like Pound, Snyder’s reconstruction also necessarily changes
the original; Kai and Snyder create a hatchet handle from an axe handle, reimagining the form
handed down to them.
Though Snyder’s invocation of the axe recalls Pound’s presentation of 新 in the Cantos,
it actually refers to Pound’s own translation of the Chinese Shih-ching or Book of Odes published
in 1959.50 The 350 Odes are traditionally believed to have been compiled by Confucius (or one
of his followers) around 600 BCE. They thus represent some of the earliest recorded examples
50
Pound’s translation of the Odes joined only a handful of other translation attempts. Legge’s seminal
translation appeared in 1871 followed by the small press distribution of Lawrence Cranmer-Byng in 1908
and Waley’s more definitive edition in 1937.
110
of Chinese poetry and constitute one of the Confucian Five Classics – the traditional canon of
required reading for any higher study in China. Essentially folk idioms, these poems illustrate
themes of the common man, or in Pound’s words, the “tale of the tribe.” Pound’s translation of
Ode 158, or the fa ke51 begins: “How cut haft for an axe?/Who hacks / Holds a haft” (Shih-ching
78). Pound’s adaptation of the folk wisdom of the fa ke uses strong, short lines of single
syllables, emphasizing the action of each line. The practice of constructing a new axe handle
with the pattern of the old further engages his conception of 新 as the ideographic emblem of
creating a new paideuma from a revaluation of older traditions. His final line, “Let who weds
never pass too far from his own class,” veers from the original to gloss the metaphor of the axe
with another example of the Confucian right order of things. With these resonances,新 not only
encompasses the Shih-ching and the folk idioms it evokes but also offers a new and concrete
example of the practice; to “pile the logs / keep it growing” as in the Cantos requires the
51
Below is the text of the 伐 柯(fá kē). I include the Chinese with its pinyin transliteration. Next, I
include my own close word-to-word translation and finally David Hinton’s recent translation:
伐柯
fá kē
伐柯如何
fá kē rú hé
匪斧不克
fěi fǔ bú kè
取妻如何
qǔ qī rú hé
匪媒不得
fěi méi bù dé
cut axe how?
How do you cut an axe handle?
useless to cut
Without an axe it can’t be done.
marry how?
And how do you marry a wife?
no match maker, cannot
Without a matchmaker you can’t.
伐柯伐柯
fá kē fá kē
其則不遠
qí zé bù yuǎn
我覯之子
wǒ gòu zhī zǐ
籩豆有踐
biān dòu yǒu jiàn
cut axe cut axe
Cut an axe handle, axe handle
that standard not far
the pattern’s close at hand.
I meet it unexpectedly
Waiting to meet her, I lay out
bean basket is enough
offerings in baskets and bowls (32).
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excavation and (re)visioning of the wisdom housed in ancient texts as a means by which to
“renew the people.”
Yet, while Snyder deepens the Poundian image of 新, he also gestures toward other
resonances that extend its web of meaning. At the very moment of Kai’s recognition of the
transformative power of the axe, Snyder’s 新 widens to encompass not only Pound’s notion of it
but also his teacher’s instruction of Lu Ji’s Wen Fu:
And he sees. And I hear it again
It's in Lu Ji's Wen Fu, fourth century
A.D. "Essay on Literature"-in the
Preface: "In making the handle of an axe
By cutting wood with an axe
The model is indeed near at hand.
My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen
Translated that and taught it years ago
Handed down not only by Pound, 新 has also come to Snyder through Chen, and through Chen
from the fourth-century BCE poet Lu Ji. Lu Ji’s Wen Fu (文
) or Rhymeprose on Literature is
essentially a meditation on the many facets of the art of writing meant, in Lu Ji’s words, “to tell
of the consummate art of past writers and to present the why and how of good and bad writing as
well” (424). In sentiments Pound would not have disagreed with, Lu Ji argues that the practice
of writing is concomitant with the reading and studying of good writing. Lu Ji thus appropriates
his own version of the fa ke in terms of poetic production: “Surely, hewing an axe handle with a
handle in hand, the pattern should not be far to seek” (424). Lu Ji thus rounds out the metaphor
by connecting the poetic act concretely to the maxim of the fa ke. Like Pound and Snyder, Lu Ji
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believes one must study the masters before he or she engages in his or her own masterpiece.
However, Lu Ji tempers his advice with caution: “The difficulty, then, lies not so much in the
knowing than the doing”; the creation of poetry, whether guided by the hands of the masters or
not, is inevitably harder and more complicated than mere imitation would suggest (424). As
many a student of Pound and Pound himself came to recognize, imitation without (re)creation
renews nothing. Thus 新 comes to represent the difficulty facing each successive generation of
poets in their quest to “make it new.”
It is this paradoxical difficulty that Snyder’s “Axe Handles” picks up and plays on.
Snyder sees the tradition in broader terms outside of poetry; his instruction of Kai on the building
of an axe handle is grounded in the commonplace, the necessary, the natural. Snyder’s 新
resonates with the continuity of life or “how we go on” and hearkens to the everyday maxims of
the Odes. Lu Ji’s use of 新 complicates these ideas; as Lu Ji proceeds with his rhymeprose, he
revisits the 新 inscribed on T’ang’s bathtub and through it to the 12th century Book of Changes (I
Ching)52: “It inscribes bronze and marble, to make virtue known, it breathes through flutes and
strings and is new always” (Lu Ji 432). More than just “renewal,” Lu Ji’s 新 also means virtue:
“the daily renovation which it produces is what is meant by ‘the abundance of virtue’” (Legge).
This new description adds a fresh valence to the foregoing meanings of 新. For Lu Ji, 新 is
composed of an axe and a tree, but not a woodpile; alternately, he sees the third component,
,
for its extended Chinese meaning of “virtue.”53 This notion of virtue is reflected in Pound’s and
Snyder’s understandings of 新. For both, poetry is more than writing – it involves social
52
Fang’s footnote quotes Legge who attributes Lu Ji’s invocation of the T’ang bathtub to The Book of
Changes (I Ching). Although traditionally associated with the mythic emperor Fu Hsi (approximately
2000 BCE), Legge dates the I Ching to the 12th century BCE (3).
53
According to my Chinese dictionary sources,
(lì or weì) does in fact mean “stand, erect, establish,”
and can be understood as virtue in a Confucian sense.
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engagement and a grounding in the strengths and beliefs of the past. For Pound, this contact
occurs via his invocation of various personae, his didactic texts on literature and politics, and the
Chinese language through his belief in each character’s intrinsic ideogrammic properties that
mimic the processes of the earth. Snyder demonstrates these values through his Buddhist
meditations – a practice rooted in Chinese history – and his commitment to living as closely to
the earth as possible. For Snyder and Pound, then, poetry is a way of “inscribing” virtue and
extending paideuma by pointing towards the values and beliefs modern society has overlooked.
Snyder’s use of 新 indicates concretely how Pound’s images of Chineseness persistently
serve as an influence in modern American poetry. Pound’s now commonplace maxim of “make
it new” coupled with the image of the axe handle mediated through Snyder have indeed become
repeated motifs in modern poetry. Fred Wah makes this point clear in “Dead in My Tracks:
Wildcat Creek Utaniki.” The poem, written in the form of utaniki or journal entries, hearkens to
Gary Snyder’s prose poems in Earth House Hold and many of his longer poems in the more
recent Mountains and Rivers Without End. Here, as in much of Wah’s other poetry, the focus is
on process; as he states in Faking It, “the purpose of art is to relate the sensation of things as they
are perceived and not as they are known” (49). The poem opens with the date “July 29/89” and
narrates the trek to the campsite on the “continental divide ridgeline of the B.C./Alberta
boundary.” Yet, the seemingly straightforward manner of the journal entry is shifted by the
inclusion of italicized print:
My Borders are Altitude
and silent
a pawprint's cosine
climate from the lake to the treeline
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all crumbly under foot at the edges
cruddy summer snow melt
soft wet twig and bough-sprung alpine fir
but more than this
height
is my pepper
Wah’s concrete description of the trek to the campsite is also amplified by this section’s elliptical
description of the area itself. The images of the “pawprint” and the “crumbly” snow against the
sensations of “height” and “altitude” attempt to approximate Wah’s sensory experience at
Wildcat Creek. Much like the poetry of Snyder and Pound, Wah’s poetics proceeds by
juxtaposition; the collage he presents in the italicized section offers resonance against the
opening lines.
Wah cements this association in the third utaniki. The entry records Wah’s hike up a
nearby valley. As he ascends, he notes “those rocks this morning on the way up appeared full of
signs and messages. So I walked around in a meander and kind of grilled each striated spot for
information, news of the conglomerate earth.” As his mind “meanders” over the earth, he lights
upon the idea of 新: “The wooden handle of an ice axe stuck in the snow: ‘When making an ax
handle,’ the pattern is occasionally too far off. Somewhere else. Out of sight, ‘man.’ Out of
mind.” Wah’s 新 resonates with Lu Ji’s Rhymeprose and the idea of the cavernous divide
between thought and speech; though his poem tries to approximate his perception of his
experience through its juxtaposition of utaniki and italicized parataxis, the exact recording is
“occasionally too far off.” However, unlike Pound and Snyder who gesture towards the source
of their uses of 新, Wah expects the reader to know the maxim already and to recognize that he is
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reworking it and inverting its intended meaning. Such an expectation attests to the fixed location
of 新 within not only American poetry, but, given Wah’s Canadian citizenship, North American
poetry as a whole.
Wah’s consideration of the adage is additionally complicated by its resonance with his
own poetic practice of the “synchronous axe.” As an Asian Canadian poet (Wah’s father is
Canadian born Chinese/Scotch-Irish, his mother, Swedish-Canadian), much of Wah’s poetics
centers on “the hyphen, that marked (or unmarked) space that both binds and divides” (Faking It
72). As he explains in his long prose poem to his father Breathin’ My Name With a Sigh, “I’d
better find that double edge between you / and your father so that the synchronous axe / keeps
splitting whatever this is the weight of / I’m left holding” (n. pag.). In limbo between the
Chinese heritage of his father and his own Caucasian appearance, Wah’s poetry explores the
positionality of his mixed identity through the act of cleaving, which both separates him from his
ethnicity and binds him to it. In this case, the axe handle that is “too far off” may reference his
own father’s Chinese heritage, which he feels disconnected from as his appearance at times
moves his ethnicity “out of sight.” Regardless, as Breathin’ explains, the “weight of / I’m left
holding” always remains. Like the axe of 新, the synchronous axe of Wah’s poetry creates a
dialectic that recalls Wah’s identity even as it constructs new images of that identity.
The ambivalence in Wah’s treatment of the maxim begs the question of its effect on
Asian American writing. The double sided nature of such a tradition to Chinese American
writers is made apparent in John Yau’s poem “Chinese Villanelle.” Written in the villanelle
style, the poem from the outset calls into question just what is “Chinese” about it; the ostensibly
European form and nonracially marked content offer little explication of the Chinese adjective in
the title. The poem begins, “I have been with you, and I have thought of you / Once the air was
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dry and drenched with light / I was like a lute filling the room with description” (RS 24). The
poet here is active, producing something through his writing. However, as the poem continues
and the “you” and “I” form a “We,” the autonomy of the lute changes. In the third stanza, the
lute becomes filled with descriptors instead of actively offering something: “Like a river worthy
of its grown / And like a mountain worthy of its insolence… / Why am I like a lute left with only
description.” The final stanzas of the poem complete the lute’s conversion from a solid, centered
production of seeming substance to one unable to fully communicate its own self:
How does one cut an axe handle with an axe
What shall I do to tell you all my thoughts
When I have been with you, and thought of you
A pelican sits on a dam, while a duck
Folds its wings again; the song does not melt
I remember you looking at me without description
Here, Yau includes the idea of the axe, recalling Pound’s own dabbling with ideograms. Despite
the innovation and inspiration Pound’s poetics offers, the legacy of his literary Orientalism
nonetheless serves as a stumbling block that Yau must attend to. The lines “How does one cut
an axe handle with an axe / What shall I do to tell you all my thoughts” echo the writer’s struggle
to create something new, something that hasn’t already been said. In terms of Yau, a Chinese
American writer, such a problem also stems from saying something that hasn’t already been
proscribed, from constructing a poem that circumvents the mold of Chineseness handed down by
Pound. That the “song does not melt,” testifies to Pound’s legacy, its force, and its permanence.
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The unnamed “you” envisions the author “without description,” as he has already been narrated
by Pound’s images of China. Yet it is the final lines that fully capture the poet’s predicament:
Perhaps a king’s business is never finished,
Though “perhaps” implies a different beginning
I have been with you, and I have thought of you
Now I am a lute filled with this wandering description (RS 24)
Rather than creating his own subjectivity, the “I” is imbued with the “wandering description”
built from Pound’s collage of Chineseness.
Perhaps more decidedly than Snyder and Wah, Yau’s incorporation of 新 gestures toward
the enduring relevance of Pound’s imaginings of Chinese poetry to Modern American poetry at
the same time as it complicates such a legacy. In titling the poem “Chinese Villanelle” and
invoking 新, Yau invites comparison to Pound’s presented ideas of Chineseness. Yet in direct
contrast to the translational poetics of Pound and Snyder which imagine Chinese poetry as
paratactic and free of description, Yau’s poem openly thematizes such description, arguing that
the poetics of Pound, despite their revolutionary forms and continued importance to the
development of American poetics, nonetheless describe and delimit what is considered Chinese
in American poetry. The tendency to associate Snyder’s riprap more closely with Pound’s
ideogrammic method than with Snyder’s translation of Chinese poetry additionally registers such
an assessment. In effect, Yau’s poem intimates that Eliot’s famous declaration “Pound is the
inventor of Chinese poetry for our time” still rings true in the twenty-first century.
In “A Theory of Resonance,” Dimock avers “the passage of time, deadening some words
and quickening others, can give the past text a semantic life that is an effect of the present”
(1061). The abstract concept Pound represents in the word 新 exemplifies her assertion. The
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diachronic web of meaning surrounding 新 encompasses verse as disparate as a 400 BCE
Chinese folk sayings and the contemporary poetry of John Yau, highlighting the interconnected
and international qualities of 新 and the ways it inflects the poetry of the present. That Pound’s
idea of 新 has become a recurrent theme in American poetry offers a concrete example of the
continuing influence of Chinese language and literature on American poetry. Yet, despite the
generative nature of China on modern American poetry at large, the prevalence of these
imitations and approximations has nonetheless canonized certain expectations of the mode in
which Chineseness operates and is presented. In this respect, Pound retains his position as
curator of exhibits of Chineseness in modern American poetry. As the next two chapters explore,
negotiating the Modernist legacy of Orientalism has become a key aspect of much Chinese
American poetry as writers like Yau and Marilyn Chin continually revise what constitutes
Chineseness in the American poem.
However, while Pound’s and Snyder’s borrowings of 新 does qualify as an orientalizing
of sorts, the course each took in his pursuit of the essence of 新 points to a third space of
orientalizing, between fetish and freak. In this space, these poets seek common ground where
their own culture can resonate with what they have found of interest in Chinese culture. Much
like Lu Ji in his invocation of both the I Ching and T’ang’s bathtub, Pound and Snyder act as
mediators who pass on images and motifs gleaned from Chinese language through the
palimpsestic construction of their fugal poetics. By interrogating 新 across its many contexts,
the multiple resonances within it come alive, changing and restructuring the manner in which we
read each poem. Though entangled and nonlinear, this web of influence is clear on one point: to
fully appreciate both Modernism and American poetry after Pound, we must look past our
borders and own language to understand, in the words of Snyder, “how we go on.”
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CHAPTER FIVE
“(AND NO HELP FROM THE PHONETICIST)”:
MARILYN CHIN’S DIALECTIC OF ASIAN AMERICANNESS
In the corpus of literature treating the presence of China in modern American poetry and
the American imagination at large, one important authorial group has been noticeably absent –
Chinese Americans. Much like Euro American poetry, Chinese American poetry boasts a
generative yet complicated relationship with the Chinese language. Yet, due to the double bind
of ethnicity and Orientalism, Chinese American poets remain silenced in the discussion of postWWI poetry and China. As critics like David Palumbo Liu, Timothy Yu, and Juliana Chang
have investigated, Asian American textual production at large continues to be hindered by a
widespread notion of the inherent ethnicity of its “hyphenated” authors. In our current postmulticulturalist world, texts authored by an ethnically marked name are often times first read for
Otherness; only secondarily are these works read on the grounds of being “good literature.”
Such a response reflects the common conflation of Asian Americans with Asians and the
continuing perception of Asian Americans as foreign and Other. In terms of literature, this
conflation haunts Asian American textual production by positing a residual “Asianness” that
marks the Asian American experience as irreconcilably different from the Euro American
experience. As Juliana Chang explains, Asian American texts are often perceived as providing
“direct access to cultural difference and Otherness” which allows readers to view cultural
difference without actually engaging it or its history (Chang, “Reading” 87). Yet, this Otherness
also paradoxically works to elide cultural difference and undergird narratives of mainstream
multiculturalism. Timothy Yu furthers these assessments, expounding that when texts “speak
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out” by moving into publication they fall prey to the “marketplace of wider culture” where “the
ethnic differences displayed by minority writers become marketable commodities, name-brand
variations on a uniform product” (436). These commodities are serviceable products of what
David Palumbo Liu terms “liberal multiculturalism,” where the ethnographically marked texts
are presented for their foreignness so as to point to the diversity present in the U.S. while eliding
the historical, cultural, and economic challenges that continue to mark and complicate the reality
of Asian Americans (6). 54 When read ethnographically, these texts buttress the ailing image of
the melting pot by offering a circular argument whereby the domestication of the foreign through
assimilation to Euro American cultural norms envisages the illusive diversity of the US.
This commodification of Asian American texts is most clearly evidenced in the
publishing and popular acceptance of “ethnic memoirs.” Texts that center on the immigrant
trope, particular moments of Asian American history (such as Japanese American internment), or
linguistic concerns continue to dominate high school and college reading lists.55 These memoirs
are often taught unilaterally as wholly representative and explanatory of a singular time period,
cultural struggle, or entire ethnic group. The publication history and popularity of Maxine Hong
Kingston’s Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts demonstrate a sound
example of the cooptation and commodification of Chinese American memoirs. As Kingston
herself notes, the book’s presentation is “mildly deceiving”; marketed by her publisher under the
category of “non-fiction” and saddled with an Orientalized title chosen by the book’s editor,
54
This term as coined by Palumbo-Liu indicates a whitewashed multiculturalism that forgets the
historical and current conflicts of ethnic groups. I would view this idea as analogous to Stanley Fish’s
indictment of “boutique multiculturalism.”
55
Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, and Chang Rae Lee’s Native
Speaker appeared as suggested texts to respond to on the 2007 AP exam. Kingston’s text is often read
solely for its “Asianness” in terms of her use of Chinese myths, while Obasan details Japanese Canadian
internment and Native Speaker focuses on a Korean American’s feelings of isolation in terms of language
and culture.
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Kingston’s project of (re)asserting Chinese Americans into American culture is often read
through an exotified lens (Kingston qtd. in Chae 46).56 Though her works tackle an extensive
number of issues at play in the Chinese American community as well as disrupt the “either/or”
divide, Woman Warrior is frequently co-opted in the classroom as a simple “memoir” about the
two fold struggle of growing up as a minority and as a woman. Read obliquely and as history,
students often do not interact with the current concerns of the larger Chinese American
community and instead meditate on issues of acculturation and immigration only in terms of
difference, disregarding the more ambiguous notion of identity so finely wound into Kingston’s
text.
Recently, critics such as Youngsuk Chae have attempted to respond to the dilemmas
posed by ethnic publishing and liberal multiculturalism. Chae’s volume Politicizing Asian
American Literature: Towards a Critical Multiculturalism summarizes the debates on the
cooptation of Asian American texts by centering on the question of Asian American complicity
in the propagation of a multiculturalism predicated on capitalism and Eurocentric ideals. As
Chae perceptively notes, “If Asian American literature functions as a mere ‘ethnic’ literature by
reproducing a typical image engraved on Asians, those narratives eventually function as an
‘exotic commodity’ and their cultural, racial, or ethnic differences become ‘essentialized’” (17).
From this vantage point, Chae attempts to read various Asian American texts within a historical,
political, and socioeconomic framework that yields a binary where works are either “politically
acquiescent” (in line with Eurocentric notions) or “politically conscious” (aware of limiting
socioeconomic forces within the American value structure.) However, Chae’s work does not
tackle the shift in perception that occurs when a text, like Kingston’s, moves into the public
56
See Kingston’s censure of such readings in her article “Cultural Mis-Readings by American Reviewers”
in Guy Armirthanayagam’s Asian and Western Writers in Dialogue: New Cultural Identities.
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realm. If the marketing and reception of Kingston’s text falls prey to preexisting notions of
Orientalism despite her best efforts at subverting it, should Kingston be relegated to the
“politically acquiescent” realm? If, as Juliana Chang notes, the preponderance of exoticism in
the reading of these texts “elide[s] the possibility of an ‘Asian American’ cultural production
distinct from ‘Asian’ culture by positioning ‘Asian’ or ‘Chinese’ as a monolithic cultural essence
detached from historical change, unmarked by processes of migration and displacement,” what
recourse is left to the politically conscious writer? (“Reading” 89). Despite the best intentions of
Asian American writers, the larger public’s misreading of ethnic memoirs often unwittingly
reinforces the idea of the Asian American as exotic Other. As such, these texts become
commodities that underpin essentialist narratives of Asian Americanness despite the authors’
original intentions.
The cooptation of Asian American literary texts by publishers and the mainstream
reading community at large not only reifies a homogenous view of Asian Americans, but also
serves to conceal the connections, conflicts, and tensions between modern American poetry and
Asian American poetry from critics and readers alike. While works like Chae’s continue to
critique multiculturalism and theorize new understandings of the heterogeneity of Asian
Americanness, few critics consider works of poetry in their analyses. 57 This almost constant
refusal to interrogate Asian American poetry alongside the more well-known field of Asian
American literature may be seen as a response to the larger misreading of these texts by
mainstream critics; the misperceptions of the reading public at large offer ethnic critics a solid
platform on which to critique current multicultural polity. Yet the poetic innovations of many
Asian American poets often succinctly capture the multiplicity of identity that these same critics
57
Here Yunte Huang’s Transpacific Displacement is truly an exception. His work deftly negotiates the
many different modes of Asian American writing as well as the disparate portrayals of the Chinese
language and China at large.
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argue for. Poetry’s easy dismissal of the linear, plot-based structures of prose allows Asian
American poets to experiment with language through techniques that more easily resist
cooptation and one-sided readings, thus allowing for heterogeneity. However, it is paradoxically
the lack of linearity in the forms of much Asian American poetry that both removes it from
critiques of liberal multiculturalism and dooms it to relative obscurity.58
While Chinese American poetry offers an under-researched vehicle for declarations of
Chinese Americanness, it nonetheless boasts its own limitations in terms of reception. Haunted
by what Josephine Nock-Hee Park refers to as the “loose horse” of America’s fetishization of the
East as aesthetic Other, Chinese American poets “write within the constraints of an American
poetry indelibly marked by Orientalism” (Park 123). Accordingly, any bilingualism within
ethnic poetry is always already marked by Pound’s interest in ideograms and American
modernism’s projection of China as transcendent; accordingly, the Chinese-influenced
innovations Pound engineered continue to inspire American poetics today and further perpetuate
the perception of China as historically frozen, exotic, cultured, literary and learned land and an
Other for America’s short history. By including China or Chinese words into their work, Euro
American poets convert the borrowed culture of China into capital of their own, effectively
reflecting a static view of a historicized and material China. This capital, however, does not
translate for Chinese Americans. Unlike Pound, Chinese American poets have not enjoyed much
fame for their use of the Chinese language. Viewed as immigrant regardless of their tenure in the
country, any recourse to Chinese literature or language in Chinese American works is seen
purely in terms of ethnicity. As Lim notes in her call for ethnopoetics, Asian American poets are
consistently read as either incomprehensible or Other; while the dominant approaches to
58
While most critical compilations include at best an article or two engaging Asian American poetry,
Zhou’s 2006 volume The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry represents the first
book length work to treat Asian American poetry.
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“reading” poetry privilege a Eurocentric assessment, reading a poet as a Chinese American
paradoxically limits that reading to expected ethnic tropes and devices. In short, Chinese
Americans cannot turn their bilingualism into literary capital in the same fashion as Euro
American poets in the Poundian tradition.
The poetry of Marilyn Chin confronts these paradoxes of reception by working within
rather than against the dual constraints of ethnicity and Orientalism. In her poetry, Chin forces
both the question of American poetry’s reverence for China and the effect of this poetic tradition
on Chinese Americans. To do so, she creates an interlingual poetics that concomitantly
celebrates and calls into question her position as twice-removed (female, Chinese American)
Other. In addition, her poetry’s refusal to be firmly categorized within any one tradition or
school emblematizes her overall project of defining identity as a slippery, non-static complex.
Chin distances her poetry from a singular reading though her employment of lyricism, history,
sharp wit, self-deprecating humor, bawdy sexuality, and pointedly American idioms. Her largely
self-referential poetics both claim America and refuse to ignore or trivialize Chinese culture;
Chin confronts both Orientalism and identity politics through her use of multiple voices,
repetition, and non-linear narratives.59 The result is a poetics of self that refuses reduction and
elucidates the kaleidoscopic reality of the twenty-first century’s diasporic, interlingual Chinese
American.
Chin’s departure point in her de-aestheticization of China centers on the reverence with
which poets such as Pound treat the Chinese language. As the previous chapters indicate, by
World War I, a large portion of the West had come to see Chinese literature and China itself as
59
As Chin notes in her interview with Bill Moyers, her poetry speaks from her own personal experience:
“when I talk about myself the ‘I’ is always personal and also always representative of other Chinese
Americans like myself.” Thus, in my treatment of Chin’s poetry, I will often reference Chin herself as the
speaker.
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representative of artistic elegance, transcendence, and wisdom. In the US’s drawing rooms and
publishing houses, Chinese objects offered a foil to the fragmented and over-industrialized status
of the West. After Pound’s early success with Cathay, Modernist writers increasingly
capitalized on these connotations by either including Chinese objects in their poetry or offering
their own translations of Chinese poetry. Pound’s exaltation of the Chinese language as poetic
medium and his continued use of Chinese characters to emblematize his doctrines still resonate
with writers today. In addition, his ideogrammic method, drawn in part from his study of the
Chinese written character, continues to inspire poetic innovations. Even more specifically, as the
previous chapter explains, pieces of Pound’s subject matter have become integrated into the
American poetic vernacular. Thus, in many a poem, novel, or movie, Chinese culture remains
situated in the American imaginary and is, more often than not, externalized as ancient,
mysterious, and erudite.
Chin undermines this veneration through her juxtaposition of the Chinese language with
vulgar American sayings and slang as well as her employment of numerous puns. By using
Chinese language and literature matter-of-factly, she strips the language of its exotic veneer and
lays it bare as just another way of speaking. The first two stanzas of “Turtle Soup” from Chin’s
second collection The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty characterize this approach (24). The
poem opens with her mother preparing turtle soup, a traditional Cantonese dish. The speaker
then exclaims, “Ma, you’ve poached the symbol of long life!” (line 5). In this brief line, Chinese
symbolism and tradition collide with culinary practices to reveal the ordinariness and fallibility
of Chinese culture. No longer exotified as transcendent wisdom, Chin uses tongue-in-cheek
humor to familiarize without colonizing China; because the irony of the situation is relatable,
Chin prevents her use of Chinese cultural traditions from becoming Orientalized. Such a move
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allows Chin’s poetry to be read as both poetry in and of itself and as important cultural and
ethnic work.
Chin extends her project of familiarizing China in the seemingly romantic “And All I
Have Is Tu Fu” (Phoenix 79). On title alone, the poem gives the impression of a longing for a
mythical Chinese past and seems ripe for an ethnicized reading which posits Chin as orientalized
Other. Tu Fu, one of the most revered Chinese poets of the T’ang dynasty and one of Pound’s
Chinese muses appears at first glance an apt match for the collection’s title, which alludes to the
translation of the title of a Tang dynasty poem.60 However, “And All” is far from a simple
meditation on the transcendent qualities of Chinese poetry. As John Gery avers in his brief
reading of “And All I Have Is Tu Fu,” Chin invokes both Western and Eastern philosophy as
well as formal and colloquial language to “reconfigure both [heritages] to become part of the
poet’s own language” (Gery 35). Chin’s literary references and allusions juxtapose her vulgarity
and in turn create a new dialectic emblematic of Chin’s (female) Chinese American subject
position.
As the poem opens, two traditions are literally colliding:
Pied horse, pied horse, I am having a dream
Twenty-five Mongolians on horseback, twenty-five;
Their hooves gouging deep trenches into the loess
Now they enter a hole in the Wall, now they retreat.
Freud snickers; Jung shakes his head. (lines 1-5)
An ethnopoetic reading would immediately make note of the allusion to Chinese literature’s
trope of the piebald horse, which traditionally represents a wandering husband, never to return.
60
As Zhou notes in “Marilyn Chin: She Walks Into Exile Vowing No Return,” the title The Phoenix Gone,
The Terrace Empty is a translation of the title of a famous Li Po (李白) poem.
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The Mongolians and the Wall signal China’s most recognizable symbol, the Great Wall of China.
Yet, as quickly as Chin piles up these images in a seeming Modernist gesture of aestheticized
Orientalism, she just as quickly grounds the entire stanza in the sexual theories of Freud and
Jung. The dream is perhaps a nightmare of “Mongolians” raping her through a “hole in the Wall”
of her Americanness, reminding Chin of her inescapably two-fold heritage.
The next stanza continues her dream and introduces a soldier “who “calls himself Tu Fu”
(6). Just as in any dream, all one’s preconceived notions are done away with; Tu Fu is not Tu Fu,
but a soldier who portends the speaker’s disembowelment by means of reading a cartouche
which “issues” from his mouth (7-10). The final stanza appears to be an interpretation of the
dream as a whole as it begins “Pray, promise me, this not what the dream portends” (11). The
speaker’s construal of the dream strikes a chord both with her allusions to Freud and with the
general public’s perception of Chinese culture as one of fantastic dreams and prophecies where
folk wisdom still prevails. However, the ending two lines move back to sex as she states rather
bluntly, “my roommate’s in the bathroom fucking my boyfriend, / and all I have is Tu Fu” (1213). The loss of the boyfriend either in her dream or in real life (her punctuation obscures
whether or not the act is mere presentiment or actuality) returns to the image of the pied horse in
the first stanza and of the woman forever abandoned. By tying together Chinese literary
allusions with a boyfriend “fucking” another woman, Chin modernizes the Chinese trope with an
American tone.
While Gery reads “All I have is Tu Fu” as emblematic of Chin’s “self-consciousness of
the Eastern and Western patriarchal webs from which she hopes to extricate herself” and “the
speaker’s fear of erasure,” I find it more in line with Chin’s greater project of creating a poetic
language capable of projecting her complex selfhood (34). Though her poetry does protest
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patriarchy, in this poem she focuses more on mobilizing the different forces that inform her
reality by pulling equally from Chinese literature, Western philosophy, and everyday life.
Within the poem, her fear of “erasure” stems from the realities of assimilation and her nonparticipation in the events of the poem. In “All I Have Is Tu Fu,” Chin capitalizes on the larger
public’s different cultural context to poke fun at America’s obsession with white-bearded
Confucian wisdom. As Shirley Lim elaborates, “the differences in cultural contexts create
significant differences between readers’ expectations and authors’ intentions” (56). Chin
manages to control these expectations by understanding and then subverting preconceived
notions of Tu Fu and Chineseness. The sexuality of the poem additionally symbolizes the
cultural miscegeny of Chin’s identity. Chin deliberately mixes cultural metaphors in her work to
rebuff “the trained readers’ ethno-sensitive interpretations” and thereby forge a new,
unpredictable and changing dialectic capable of representing the nuanced identity of a twentyfirst century Chinese American woman (Lim 56).
Another example of Chin’s refusal to be read linearly is the assimilationist poem gone
awry “That Half is Almost Gone” from Chin’s latest collection Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (17).
At first blush, the poem seems to follow the predictable and stereotypical multicultural trope of
lamenting acculturation: “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” (lines l-4). The imagery at work, the
luscious “peach” which connotes both the exotic reminiscence of “peach blossom pavilions” and
the eroticism of Prufrock’s unconsummated desires, the domineering “knife of time” under
America’s “cruel sun,” all seem to underline and define this poem as another jeremiad lamenting
assimilation. Yet, Chin subverts such a simple reading by positing the remark as reflective of the
speaker’s inability to write “the character / for love” in a letter to her mother (8-9). Until this
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point, the speaker has very much been writing a letter, composed most likely in Chinese (and if
we take Chin to be the speaker of the poem, definitely in Chinese as she has stated her mother
communicates largely in Chinese). The speaker’s ability to compose in Chinese, to create
sentences which then perhaps are not translatable into words on a page, hardly seems to support
the poem’s opening remarks. After all, the complicated structure of Chinese words allows for
even native speakers who have never left a Chinese speaking nation to sometimes forget a
word.61 Chin’s assessment of “that half is almost gone” seems instead to spotlight society’s
dominant perspective of exactly what is Chinese about Chinese Americans – the ability to write
and speak in a language one may not have even grown up listening to – a perspective dating back
to the early twentieth century’s obsession with the Chinese character.
As the poem continues, Chin demonstrates that she remembers more than originally
conveyed. She recalls the “radical” or base component of the word for love, 心 (xin), as well as
its phoneme ài and the general shape of the word where “a slash dissects in midair” (16). The
composition and etymology of ài emphasize Chin’s deeper knowledge of the word’s meaning;
the “slash” that dissects, the second radical 夂 (yǒu), is traditionally read as cutting through the
heart indicating that the word ài represents a love worth dying for. Though Chin may not
initially remember how to write the word, she nonetheless thoroughly understands its meaning
and usage as well as its linguistic grounding. Chin’s delineation of the way a certain Chinese
character looks and sounds seems oddly suspect to those who fear the commodification of
Chinese American poetry solely on the context of its Chineseness. However, Chin’s impartation
of the wisdom of her “ancestors” and constant recourse to Chinese writing are mitigated by her
61
By way of contextualizing, at a McDonald’s in Taiwan, a woman who was writing down customer
orders so as to speed up processing was stymied when she realized she couldn’t remember how to write a
certain word. (The actual word escapes me now.) In explanation she offered, “I don’t use that word often,
so I can’t write it.”
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tongue-in-cheek repetition of “ai, ai, ai, ai, / more of a cry than a sigh / (and no help from the
phoneticist)” (17-19). The melancholy “ai, ai, ai, ai” sounds vaguely sexual signaling a return to
the erotic while the assonance undercuts what could be read as packaged Confucian wisdom of
what “the ancestors won’t fail to remind you (12). The use of four “ai’s” is perhaps a further
reference to Chinese language and the four tonal counterparts of Mandarin so that “ai” can be
read alternately as sorrow or even “oh dear”.62 The appended parenthetical statement extends
Chin’s biting humor while also referencing the non-Chinese linguistics practitioners for and by
whom pinyin was created; the phoneticists who merely understand the tones of Chinese offer
Chin no help in her plight as her desire to retain her Chineseness goes beyond the linguistic.
By the end of the first page of “That Half is Almost Gone,” Chin has stymied a
conventional reading of her poem by refusing to align her identity firmly with either side.
Additionally, she has questioned the impulse to read her work as either assimilatory or exotic by
pitting the two ends against each other in the crucible of language. Chin’s usage of both Chinese
and English throughout her poetry indicates an interlinguality that in Chang’s estimation “would
change the shapes and sounds of dominant languages like English by pushing the language to its
limit and breaking it open or apart” (“Reading” 93). The use of these multiple languages
reference Chin’s birth in British colonized Hong Kong to ethnic Chinese parents and her
subsequent upbringing in the American Midwest, thus underscoring the complex tangle of the
two languages in her identity. Through her interlinguality, Chin subverts any attempted
reduction of her inherent multiplicity and hybridization. Unlike Modernist usages of Chinese as
largely aesthetic, Chin’s invocation of it reveals her deep, natal ties to the language as well as the
tenuous power relationships between the two languages of her birth. Chin forges an interstitial
62
The popularly used (哎喲) pronounced ai-yo, indicates interjection and can be used much in the way of
“hey” or as a sigh.
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dialectic from the coupling of her dueling mother tongues to de-exotify American notions of
Chineseness while referencing the complicated and inextricable ways in which these languages,
and their attendant cultures, are equally constituted in Chinese American reality.
Chin also makes use of interlinguality and her Chinese American dialectic in the title
poem of Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (96). The poem begins with the line “Say: 言,” which
highlights the author’s bilingualism: say and 言(yán) represent approximate meanings (line 1).
The remainder of the poem is a collection of phrases headed by the imperative: “Say:” and
punctuated towards the end by two intrusions of the author’s own voice. The longest poem in
the collection and arguably the most experimental of Chin’s oeuvre, “Rhapsody in Plain Yellow”
creates a sense of the speaker’s life and inner thoughts through piling phrase upon phrase of
snatches of conversation. Her inclusion of “言” reminds the reader of the speaker’s biculturality
and bilingualism while the body of the poem, characterized by Chin as “mock[ing] the fu form”
also borrows from the Blues tradition and African American poetic expression (Rhapsody 108).63
Chin artfully mixes the pedestrian such as “Say: I don’t give a shit about nothing / ‘xcept my cat,
your cock and poetry,” and elevated diction such as “sonatina,” “dictatorial,” and “celebrant”
with an allusion to a Chinese fairytale where “a prince came on a horse, I believe it was a piebald”
and the Buddhist incantation “amadoufu” (阿弥陀佛) (lines 71-2, 22). Chin’s piecing together of
two distinct, highly idiomatic languages establishes the broad linguistic space she inhabits as
well as affirms the multiple cultural influences in American poetry. By forcing snatches of
conversation in two languages to work in concert, Chin complicates Chinese with English and
vice versa, underscoring her post as master and creator of a third, new language equally
comprised of both.
63
Chin explains the impact of blues on Rhapsody in Plain Yellow in her Writer’s Chronicle interview
with Calvin Bedient.
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Chin continues to explore, familiarize, and complicate her identity in “To Pursue the
Limitless” (Rhapsody 85). Incorporating a Chinese saying or cheng yu (成語)in the very middle
of the poem, Chin uses puns and antonyms to subvert the Orientalist tendency to view Chinese
aphorisms as transcendent truths. Though the poem’s title seems grandiose, its first quatrain
begins by de-elevating this perception through coupling it with “a hair brained paramour” (line
2). Here, the “limitless” is made banal through a trivialized lover. Chin continues to
conventionalize her poem through contrasts such as “To chase a dull husband / with a sharp knife”
and “to speak to Rose / about her thorny sisters” (3-6). This array of antonyms and collocations
evinces the juxtaposition of Chin’s two cultures within her “limitless” imagination. The poem
turns to second person in the next few stanzas:
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 mid air (9-20)
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In these first two stanzas, Chin makes use of Chinese diction and imagery common within
Chinese literature. Yet, again, she censures the imagery, in effect censuring the reader who
might slip into a purely ethnicized reading of Chin as Chinese and not Chinese American, with
the lines “to dither / in monosyllables.”64 Unlike Pound’s vision of Chinese as precise and
transcendent, Chin understands the Chinese language to be just as full of confusion and
frustration as English. In addition, her use of second person calls into question just who the “you”
is. Grammatically, the “you” references someone else, most likely the reader to whom Chin is
speaking and not Chin herself. However, the intimacy of Chin’s knowledge of the “you” as well
as the latter’s relationship to the Chinese language seems to denote Chin herself as the “you.”
This ambiguity complicates any reading of Chin as the romantic “Dawning” and invites the
reader to consider his or her relationship to the Chinese language itself; perhaps it is “you” the
reader who “are touched / by mercury,” and not Chin. Or, perhaps the “you” emphasizes the
community from which Chin speaks; as Chinese Americans go unheard as an “I” within much of
American poetry and politics, Chin’s best representation of her political condition is the second
person, the more formal and distanced “you.” The ending image of “binomes copulating in mid
air” completes the knotty picture Chin creates by referencing the middle ground occupied by
Chin and the miscegenetic nature of the two cultures of her identity.
Like much of Chin’s poetry, “To Pursue the Limitless” does not contain one emotion or
one tone. It instead mediates the complexity of Chin’s status as a Chinese American female
writer through its mixing of high and low diction and Chinese and American imagery as well as
the Chinese and English languages. The eighth stanza adds to this amalgam by incorporating
Chinese characters and amplifying Chin’s earlier banal contrasts into a more complicated,
64
Chin’s employment of “monosyllables” references each Chinese character’s single syllable
pronunciation. Chinese works off of separate syllabic words which may be used together to effect a third
meaning.
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dichotomous vision: “ 美言不信 信言不美 / Beautiful words are not truthful / The truth is not
beautiful” (25-7). Though the juxtaposition of a Chinese aphorism with its English translation
seems Poundian in a sense (and in fact incorporates one of Pound’s ideogrammic representatives,
which he reads as “a man standing by his word”), its placement within the paradoxical
world of “To Pursue” bars its reception as such. Unlike Pound’s one-to-one translations in the
Cantos, Chin disturbs the notion of easy transmission of Chinese into English with the next line:
“You have translated “bitter” as “melon” / “fruit” as “willful absence” (28-29). Here, Chin
reifies Juliana Chang’s supposition that poetic interlinguality allows Chinese American authors
to foreground “the multiplicities, contradictions and hierarchical relations within and between
languages” (Chang, “Reading” 92). In these lines, Chin reiterates both the difficulty by which
one language or culture is translated into another as well as questions the aestheticization of the
Chinese language by American poets. The ludicrous translation of “fruit” hearkens to the
idealization of Chinese language and culture; Chin takes to task the image of Chinese poetry
promulgated by Modernist translations by underlining how simple mistakes allowed felicitous
imaginings to be forced onto the Chinese language. Read alongside these lines, the first half of
the aphorism, “Beautiful words are not truthful,” expands in meaning to encompass the continual
imagining of China as emissary of transcendent wisdom while the second half, “the truth is not
beautiful,” calls into question the ability to fully translate between English and Chinese.
Chin further affirms the complicated makeup of the Chinese language in the fifteenth
stanza as she notes the difficulty of managing its tones:
You said My name is Zhuang Mei
Sturdy Beauty
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But he thought you said Shuang Mei
Frosty Plum (41-4)
Chinese has its limits too; contrary to Pound’s notion of the language as the most precise, its
homophony often leads to confusion. Chin’s use of English to negotiate the elusiveness of such
Chinese homophony accentuates the tangle of both languages in her identity. Chin accentuates
this fact through “To (二) err is human / To (五) woo is woman” (35-6). A play on the
homophonous pronunciation of the Chinese words for 2 (二 or èr) and 5 (五 or wŭ), Chin shows
the inescapable interrelatedness and confusion between her two languages and two cultures and
how the two work against each other to mediate her selfhood. By continually juxtaposing
English with Chinese and the fantastic with the banal, Chin unmasks and challenges the
continued orientalized images of China, while introducing the duality and inseparability of the
two cultures within Chinese Americanness. It becomes clear that perhaps the “limitless” that
Chin wants to pursue is indeed the paradox of her Chinese American identity.
Though “the unleashed fantasy of the ideogram can’t be retrieved,” Chin negotiates its
presence by her meditation of wryly ordinary representations of the Chinese language (Park 134).
Her continual recourse to it in poems such as “To Pursue the Limitless” also affirms her
connectedness to not only her first tongue, but her ethnic Chinese roots. In her work on
ethnopoetics, Lim argues, “The linguistic survival of first language expressions, whether actual
or translated into English, points to the poets’ awareness that there exists in the original language
itself certain values, concepts, and cultural traits which are not discoverable in English” (Lim 54).
Similarly, Chin’s poetics value Chinese as a mediating factor in her own identity. Without both
languages, Chin cannot fully capture her own hybrid reality. Yet, at the same time, Chin works
to distance her use of Chinese from cooptation and orientalization through her use of satire and
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doublespeak. Chin’s dialectic continuously undercuts itself to frustrate and destabilize
specifically ethnic or assimilationist readings; in so doing, Chin clears a liminal poetic space
where Chinese and English, American culture and Chinese culture, can be equally represented
and owned. By including Chinese, Chin “writes back” against the dominance of English while at
the same time owning it and creating within it her own Chinese American dialectic.
In addition to Chin’s interlinguality, her poetry works on a second, more subtle level to
subliminally accustom the reader to her Chinese American dialectic. Throughout her three
collections of poetry, various symbols, words and images recur, acquainting the reader with the
interstitial space Chin inhabits. Unforgettable lines such as “the gaffer-hatted fishmonger / sings
to his cormorant” in “That Half is Almost Gone” from Rhapsody in Plain Yellow are transformed
into “the gaffer-hatted fishmonger / and his songs of the cormorant” eighteen pages later in
“Cauldron” (18, lines 32-3 and 36, lines 70-1). This image recollects the “cormorant” referred to
twice in “Clear White Stream” from her earlier collection The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace
Empty’s (45). Chin also makes use of other, less overt repetitions to draw the reader into her
world. Older words such as “cauldron,” are used throughout her works; while “Cauldron”
appears as a title of a poem in Rhapsody, it is used in four different poems in Phoenix
(“Barbarian Suite,” “Turtle Soup,” “Gruel,” and “First Lessons, Redux”). By reprising similar
images across poems, readers experience déjà vu and the dialectic Chin presents seems
increasingly natural and conventional. Such familiarization invites the reader to experience
Chin’s hybrid, shifting position as a Chinese American.
Chin continues to indoctrinate the reader into her world by recycling specific characters
and literary allusions. “Rose Wong” appears twice in Rhapsody (“That Half Is Almost Gone”
(19) and “To Pursue the Limitless” (85)), while Chin’s mother is a constant character in Phoenix.
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“Mrs. Lookeast,” Chin’s somewhat caustic nickname for herself, appears in three different
poems in Rhapsody (“Where We Live Now” (57), “Tonight While the Stars Are Shimmering”
(72), and “Rhapsody in Plain Yellow” (96)), and reminds the reader of the double bind of Chin’s
hybrid identity as a Westerner with Eastern roots. Repetition of “pearl” as both the semiprecious stone itself and as the name of a character occurs across Rhapsody in Plain Yellow.
“Tiny Pearl / too precious to be included in their story” in “The Colonial Language is English”
grows into “Yellow Pearl, I bemoan your preciousness” in “Summer Sonatina” (20, lines 20-1
and 88, line 15). In between, “pearl” is alternately associated with female children and
concubines in “Chinese Quatrains” (24) and “Rhapsody in Plain Yellow” (97) respectively. Yet,
while Pearl becomes a familiar inhabitant of Chin’s poetic work, her changing representations
and status underscores the shifting character of both Chinese American identity and its
impression on the public. Finally, the image of the “pied horse,” which occurs in both “All I
Have is Tu Fu” from Phoenix and “Rhapsody in Plain Yellow” from Rhapsody, weaves into
Chin’s poetry the Chinese legend of the wandering husband. Regardless of whether or not
Chin’s readers make the connection between the pied horse and the piebald horse of Chinese
mythology, the image oscillates between the two books of poetry creating new allusions and
meanings within American poetry that echo the resonances produced by Pound, Snyder, Wah
and Yau.
The familiarizing effects of these repetitions also clear the way for Chin to advance a new
vision of Chinese American identity and to enter into the ongoing arguments over what exactly
being Asian American means. During the ethnic studies movements of the1960s, the term
“Asian American” arose out of a need for solidarity and one strong, singular voice; the many
ethnicities that make up the Asian diaspora melded together under the flag of “Asian America”
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in order to forge a critical mass and evoke change. In the decades following however, many
Asian Americans became suspicious of this unifying term as it elided the historical and cultural
realities of each separate ethnicity. New Asian immigrant groups found little in common with
other groups who had been here for generations; the political struggles of third and fourth
generation Asian Americans were alien to newly immigrated groups like Korean Americans who
managed their own set of struggles in adapting to American life. King-Kok Cheung summarizes
these changes in “Re-Viewing Asian American Literary Studies”: “whereas identity politics –
with its stress on cultural nationalism and American nativity – governed earlier theoretical and
critical formulations, the stress is now on heterogeneity and diaspora” (1).
This shift in perception is symbolically linked to the very term “Asian American.”
Known early on as the “hyphenated minority,” Asian American theorists first collectively
rejected the hyphenation of “Asian” and “American” affirming “we’re not a wobbly balancing
act but something together, a solid wholeness” (“A Perspective” Ling 77). Yet, the changing
landscape of Asian American political subjectivity has led to divergent views in Asian American
cultural criticism as evidenced most clearly by Lisa Lowe and David Leiwei Li, two leading
Asian American theorists. While Lowe argues for a diasporic tradition, where the term “Asian
American” is polarized toward “Asian,” Li calls for restoration of Asian American political
power through emphasis of the “American” over the “Asian.” The theoretical stances of Lowe
and Li are analogous to the impassioned debates about Chinese American authenticity and
representation between Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston. As a fifth generation Chinese
American, Frank Chin’s literary project emphasizes (re)writing Chinese Americans into
American history, both literary and otherwise. In his work, Chin (re)claims America through
asserting his nativity even at the expense of his Chinese heritage. In direct opposition to Frank
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Chin are those newer writers like Kingston with less distance between China and America. In
Frank Chin’s mind, these first and second generation Chinese Americans invoke “too much” in
their writing allowing what he sees as a packaged ethnicity to color the final product.65 As a
more recent immigrant, Kingston and writers like her inhabit a limbo Frank Chin may not fully
understand in terms of language and acculturation; in turn, they also do not completely
comprehend his rage with regard to his “stepson” status. The disparity between these two sides
reemphasizes the heterogeneity of the term Asian American and the slipperiness of identity
altogether; if Chinese Americans, one subset of the Asian American collective, are so dissimilar
how can those of completely different ethnic backgrounds fit inside one overarching term?
Marilyn Chin’s poetry seeks to arbitrate an answer to these issues of representation by
elucidating the unfixed nature of identity. Through her recourse to different modes of speaking
and her interlinguality, Chin redefines the term American by continually interrogating and
challenging her relationship to the US nation state and her Chinese inheritance. Her best poems
question both the impulse to assimilate and resistance to it by seeking a third ground representing
and celebrating all the forces within her identity: American, Chinese, and Chinese American. As
Chin elaborates in an interview with Bill Moyer:
I see myself and my identity as nonstatic. I see myself as a frontier, and I see my limits as
limitless. Somebody once accused me of being a leftist radical feminist, West Coast,
Pacific Rim, socialist, neo-Classical Chinese American poet. And I say, "Oh yes, I am all
of those things." Why not? I don't believe in static identities. I believe that identities are
forever changing. (n. pag.)
65
Much of Chin’s issue with these writers returns to the commodification of ethnicity and its cooptation
in the publishing realm. Specifically, Chin views Kingston’s work as acceding to and amplifying the
Chinese stereotypes fit onto Chinese Americans.
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Following the work of recent theorists like Cheung and Lim, Chin is more concerned with “the
quandaries and possibilities of postmodernism and multiculturalism”; her poetry thus attempts to
destroy preconceived notions of identity in favor of an approach that understands heterogeneity,
exile, and the possibility of a double consciousness (Cheung 1).
The widely anthologized “How I Got That Name” plays with the notion of identification
by presenting a doubleness that Chin’s works are known for. In it, Chin asserts an identity
predicated on the dual historical and literary traditions of both the US and China (Phoenix 16).
The first line “I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin” asserts with Whitmanesque finality Chin’s identity
as well as allows the poem to become more personal; in a sense, it is Chin’s manifesto. The
“resoluteness/ of that first person singular” also seemingly mitigates the subtitle of the poem, “an
essay on assimilation.” At this point, Chin revels in the “stalwart indicative / of ‘be,’ without the
uncertain i-n-g / of ‘becoming,’” announcing herself as an autonomous “I” (4-6). Yet, by line 6,
Chin qualifies her first assertions with “Of course.” With this interference, Chin disrupts a linear
reading of the poem as well as her identity; to understand the poem is to wrestle with the
different conceptions of Chinese Americans as well as their history of exile and discrimination
and the role immigration plays in constructing her own identity. As the poem continues, we
learn the origin of Chin’s first name, “changed / somewhere between Angel Island and the sea”
by her father “the paperson / in the late 1950’s” (7-10). Though Chin would have immigrated to
the States after the close of Angel Island and the passage of the Magnuson Act, her
announcement of these facts owns one of the most resonant and recognizable periods in Chinese
American history. Chin’s claiming of this history underlines both her separation from earlier
Chinese American immigrants and her connections to them.
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Balancing national history with personal history Chin continues to narrate her dual
cultural inheritances by eroding the strong voice of the first six lines with the uncertainty and
intermixing that characterize her hybridity. While Gery rightly reads this section of the poem as
demonstrating Chin’s self-erasure through her own delineation of the “grotesque
inappropriateness of her own name,” Chin’s consistent balance between East and West keeps her
“renaming” from signaling complete assimilation and instead allows for a fuller understanding of
the forces which comprise her identity. Her name, “transliterated ‘Mei Ling’ to ‘Marilyn’” by
her father, remains equalized in her own assertion at the beginning (12). While she underlines
patriarchy through her mother’s inability to pronounce her Anglicized name, she also intimates
the cultural and familial ties which bind her to China as her mother “dubbed me ‘Numba one
female offshoot,’” an English translation of the term reserved for oldest sister, jiě ( ) (21). The
assimilatory influence of her father as symbolized in her renaming is moderated by her mother’s
continued insistence on Chinese naming practices, even if translated (somewhat comically) into
English. The section concludes with Chin’s sardonic explanation of her father’s questionable
integrity marked by a patriarchal system which “Nobody dared question,” further elucidating the
constraints she works against as a “nice, devout daughter” to a “tomcat in Hong Kong trash” who
“bootlegged Gucci Cash” through his “chopsuey joints / in Piss River Oregon” (26-32). Yet,
while the section closes with her acquiescence to patriarchy, her continued satirical voice
alongside the mixing of references to Hong Kong and the US undercuts her own supposed
assimilation.
The second strophe of the poem takes up these images of filial piety to expand on the
binds that constrain Chin’s identity. Much as the patriarchy in the form of her Chinese father
renames her “Marilyn,” American society has also cast her as the model minority. Connecting to
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the previous section’s “devout daughters” and industrious sons,” the second strophe opens with
the exclamation, “Oh, how trustworthy our daughters, / how thrifty our sons!” (1.32-33, 2.1-2).
Within the context of Chin’s satirical tone, the exclamation resonates both as pride and
lamentation as the positive attributes of Chinese Americans are inverted to embody the cunning
stereotype of the model minority. Chin doubles back on this image as she empties out the model
minority stereotype as false:
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! (3-9).
Chin’s italicization of “use” implicates Euro American society in its envisioning of the Asian
American as an honored minority, one which other minorities should strive to be like.
Stereotyped as “rote learners” who excel in math and sciences, Asian Americans evidence the
true American dream by clawing their way up the academic and economic ladders. As the model
minority, they are effectively pitted against other minorities and moved into the category of
“neither black nor white” (4.9). Yet Chin’s use of “fool” and “tease” belies her disavowal of the
model minority stereotype (Chin’s own status as a Chinese American writer in and of itself is an
affront to the stereotype), while her refusal to “give you any” intimates the performative effect of
Chinese Americanness. The next line, “Oh, bamboo shoots, bamboo shoots!” underscores the
ethnicized condition of Chinese Americans and echoes the opening lines of the strophe; whether
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it is a lament or a call to arms, it turns on the orientalization of Chinese Americans via both the
model minority stereotype and their innate Chineseness.
As section two continues, Chin moves from clichéd images of Chinese Americans to
present a more complicated picture that questions Chinese Americanness and Americanness at
large. “Bamboo shoots!” modulates to read as a clarion call for Chinese Americans:
Oh, bamboo shoots, bamboo shoots!
The further west we go, we’ll hit east;
The deeper down we dig, we’ll find China
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.” (2.10-19)
The ideas of “hit east” and “find China” build off of “bamboo shoots” to reify the vision of
Chinese Americans as the mystical recipients of the historicized culture of China, thus reflecting
the common misconception that ethnicity lies in blood relation and not lived experience. Chin
evidences the predicament of the first generation Chinese American, stuck between two cultures
with one’s nationality constantly in question from both sides (the expectation that Chinese
Americans speak Chinese rather than surprise that one does, in fact, speak Chinese). Such a
vision denies Chinese Americanness by insisting on Chineseness. Chin negotiates this vision by
incorporating Williams’s pastoral image of the “red wheelbarrow” and “Santa Barbara” to
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parallel Chinese American participation in American cultural norms. Yet, such participation is
further called into question as “history has turned its stomach”; Williams’s pastoral idea of the
“Red Wheelbarrow” is lost in today’s soap opera world. In Chin’s developed picture of America,
“we” wait for our favorite heroine to be called “bitch.” Chin’s use of “we” stacked among such
American allusions not only articulates the manner in which Chinese Americans have become
integrated, for better or for worse, into American culture, but also entangles the reader in its
familiar American world. The section’s final two lines, then, are aimed not solely at Chinese
Americans, but Americans at large as she asks, “Oh God, where have we gone wrong? / We have
no internal resources!” (2.20-1). The section’s consistent use of stereotypical images both
American and Chinese American works to empty out assimilation by questioning its motivation
as well as its process. If assimilation is judged by the model minority stereotype, it is
unsuccessful as the stereotype is a sham. However, the “we” watching “Santa Barbara” offers a
different (although sarcastic) marker of Chinese American participation in the American dream
that moves beyond the merely ethnic.
Against the meditation on assimilation in the second section, the third strophe introduces
the “Great Patriarch Chin” who offers a view of the author as “not quite boiled, not quite cooked”
(3.2, 10). Stationed midway yet again, the section offsets the previous one’s focus on the US by
including Chin’s paternal grandfather. Her grandfather’s vision of her and her “metaphorical”
death at the end of the strophe question Chin’s supposed assimilation in the foregoing section.
And yet, as it is Chin’s grandfather’s understanding of her, the assimilation does not seem quite
complete; the line “plump pomfret simmering in my own juices” indicates Chin’s inability to
fulfill the wishes and demands of her grandfather or fully assimilate into the American world
(3.11). She remains apart, symptomatic of a new version of Chinese Americanness.
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The final strophe picks up at her “metaphorical” death by offering an obituary which lists
the names she is associated with by marriage or family. This attempt to contextualize Chin
reveals nothing about her person as she is “survived by everybody and forgotten by all” (4.8).
Only Chin herself, in the end, remains to fully articulate her own identity as well as her own
death and rebirth:
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 or 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! (4.13-23)
The concluding lines of “How I Got That Name” establish Chin not as either/or, but as both/and;
balancing between the Moby Dick of the West and the Godzilla of the East, she exists, though
somewhat scathed, in her own poetry as something beyond West and East, beyond naming. This
“solid” selfdom refuses the totalizing definitions of the US and China, and instead recognizes the
effacing effects and generous gifts of both sides. Though the final line rings with loss, the poem
as a whole coheres in her acceptance of “all that was lavished upon her”: the different fluctuating
forces of her identity. As Chin summarizes in her interview with Moyer, “assimilation is
inescapable….everything must merge, and I’m willing to have it merge with in me, in my poetry.”
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Chin pragmatically owns both the pain and losses inherent in acculturation and the gains
afforded by it to envision the uneasy equilibrium of her own hybridity.
In her essay “Reviewing Asian American Literature, King-Kok Cheung asserts that Asian
American criticism must “both ‘claim America’ – assert and manifest the historical and cultural
presence of Asians in North America – and use our transnational consciousness to critique the
polity, whether of an Asian country, Canada, the United States, or Asian America” (9).
Throughout her oeuvre, Chin responds to Cheung’s demands by devising a new dialectic which
disallows exoticism and dismissal as “the foreigner within,” while crafting a space for the
incorporation of Asian culture and remembering “the rough grain of politics and history”
(Palumbo-Liu 2). Working against Modernist appreciations of China as a cultured and historical
foil to the United States, Chin speaks from her postmodern position as cultural Other to remake
and (re)present Chinese American culture as dynamic and shifting. Through her continuous
aligning of East against West, high culture against low, and the pedestrian against the esoteric,
Chin mobilizes a vortex of images that reveal the porosity and malleability of identity. Her
biting satire capitalizes on these effects by preventing the reader from lapsing into complacent
perusal; to read Marilyn Chin is to confront one’s own preconceived notions about Chineseness
as well as Americanness. The resulting network of intertwined images gestures towards the
complex and paradoxical political identity of Chinese Americans and creates a new (Chinese)
American dialectic which invites the reader to (re)assess and (re)learn history, identity, and
(Chinese) Americanness.
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CHAPTER SIX
WHO’S AFRAID OF JOHN YAU?:
RESISTING RESISTANCE IN ASIAN AMERICAN EXPERIMENTAL POETRY
As the foregoing chapter explores, Chinese American poetry voices a complex
relationship to Modernist poetry and American poetry at large. Given the experiments of Pound
and others with Chinese language, literature, and culture, to write poetry as a Chinese American
requires a negotiation with this tradition of literary Orientalism. Yet, Modernist poetry offers
another legacy to both Chinese American poets and American poets at large – innovation. The
poetics of Pound disrupted previous standards of poetry ushering in a renewed interest in formal
innovation. These innovations have served as a touchstone for later experimentation in
American poetry. According to Laszlo Géfin, “All postmodernist renewals and upheavals in
America…have invariably stressed the seminal importance of Pound” (xiv). Thus, while the
poetry of Marilyn Chin represents the most commonly framed way Chinese American poets
respond to the Orientalist legacies of Modernism, the disjunctive poetics of John Yau offers
another form of engagement; whereas Chin’s translingual poetics undermine static definitions of
identity, Yau’s poems are more likely to play with poetic form in order to question the very
terms of the argument and the process whereby identity was determined in the first place. Yet,
despite Yau’s early success with Corpse and Mirror and his interest in exploring the processes of
ethnic signification, his poetry has only recently earned a place in Asian American criticism and
discourse. In addition, while he was featured in both Hongo’s The Open Boat and Walter K.
Lew’s Premonitions, two Asian American anthologies published in the 1990s, Yau has not
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appeared in any major anthologies outside of Asian American discourse.66 Yau’s use of a wide
variety of poetic forms and his focus on the limits and possibilities of language locate him, as he
titles his essay in Amerasia, “between the forest and its trees.”
Despite his absence from mainstream anthologies, Yau’s poetics have recently served as
a touchstone for a number of critics seeking to interrogate the often supposed incompatibility
between ethnicity and formal innovation in poetry. As Christina Mar sums up in her essay “The
Language of Ethnicity,” “ethnic poetry is often constituted in a disabling opposition to poetry
that is engaged in the politics of aesthetic innovation by resisting representation and refusing the
tyranny of the signified” (71). For Mar, “It is this refusal to address the full complexity of ethnic
writing by some publishers and mainstream critics that facilitates the marginalization of poetry
and eclipses the heterogeneity of ethnic texts” (72).While many critics like Mar tend to lay the
blame for this separation at the feet of mainstream publishers and other critics, the recent focus
in Asian American studies on valorizing and recovering the aesthetic points to the unwitting
complicity of early Asian American theoretical paradigms in the production of such readings.
Much like the criticism of other ethnic groups, the early focus on sociohistoric concerns and on
articulating a coherent Asian American identity over and against Eurocentric constructions has
ultimately positioned Asian American literature as unconcerned with or disconnected from the
aesthetic inquiry more readily found in the interpretations of Euro American experimental works.
Meditating on some of these issues, Nathaniel Mackey reminds us in Discrepant Engagement
that “our interest in cultural diversity – diversity within a culture as well as the diversity of
cultures – should lead us to be wary of hypostasis, the risk we take with nouns, a dead end that
will impede change unless ‘other,’ ‘self,’ and such are given the possibility of ‘infinite’
66
Yau has appeared in the 1988, 2000 and 2002 The Best American Poetry collections as well as Primary
Trouble, published by Talisman.
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qualification” (276). When used as a monolithic designation, words like “ethnic” separate and
encompass these works so that they are read only within self-contained paradigms. As Mackey
points out, such “failures or refusals to acknowledge complexity among writers from socially
marginalized groups, no matter how ‘well-intentioned’ condescend to the work and to the writers”
and result in the tendency to only read ethnic writers “racially, primarily at the content level, the
noun level, as responding to racism, representing the ‘black experience’” (18, 284). Such a one
to one correspondence between identity and poetry denies ethnic writing the agency to produce
formal innovation while also situating it as politically active only in its reification of cultural
themes.
Yau’s poetry, with its interest in signification practices and distrust of an
autobiographical, lyric I, takes as its base Mackey’s interest in the verb and carries on many of
the innovative practices of a number of schools that base their inspiration on the poetics of
Modernists like Pound. Alternately taxonomized as a member of the New York School, a
surrealist, an Ashberyite, and an Asian American, Yau’s oeuvre defies categorization, rendering
each label inaccurate and incomplete and evincing his own interest in destabilizing such
classifications. Nonetheless, Asian American critics often seize on Yau’s status as an Asian
American poet and his experimental tendencies to combat charges of the banality and lack of
innovation in Asian American poetry. While these critics offer a much needed reconsideration
of the importance of situating Yau within Asian American studies, such studies continue to
operate largely on the critical paradigms of resistance and community forged in the early years of
ethnic studies forcing a reading of Yau predicated largely on the way his poetry conforms to the
theoretical and political interests of Asian American discourse at large, thus inadvertently
refiguring interest in Yau’s subjectivity over his aesthetic experiments. Reading his engagement
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by Asian American critics establishes the parameters through which Asian American poetry has
been conceived and the limits of its criticism. In this chapter, I investigate John Yau’s position
within both Asian American studies and poetry criticism at large to gesture towards the
complicated nexus that narrates which versions of Chinese Americanness enter the mainstream.
Reading for the absence and presence of Yau in Asian American criticism as well as the
assessment of his work in the “mainstream” elucidates how these theoretical paradigms both
constrain and encourage certain modes of reading. Realizing the possibilities Yau’s poetry offers
for reconfiguring such poetic discourse argues for new, more flexible frameworks that fully
engage these experimental nuanced versions of Chinese Americanness and connects Chinese
American poetry to the Modernist traditions of innovation celebrated in American poetry at large.
While an ethnic Asian background serves as the sole basis for designating someone as an
Asian American poet today, Asian American studies initially emerged as a movement predicated
on sociocultural and political concerns. In its early years, Asian American discourse was largely
autonomous, and the writers labeled as Asian American adhered to the shared political aims of
the movement. Thus, the publications of nascent Asian American discourse privileged activist
and populist lyrics which offered a reflection of the social and material reality of Asian
Americans, in the hopes that such literature, once recognized, could effect political changes
through the transformation of public consciousness. Aion, the first Asian American literary
magazine, furthered these aims through its focus on supplying “a forum for Asian American selfdefinition and expression on issues relevant to problems and needs of our communities” (qtd. in
Yu, Race 77).
Edited by Janice Mirikitani, then a young activist poet involved in the Third
World strike, Aion exemplifies the political project of the poets who identified as Asian
American in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the editorial that opens the first issue, Mirikitani
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draws attention to the method by which Asian Americans “have been conditioned by stereotypes
imposed upon us by the white middle class and have internalized the consequent insecurity and
confusion.” Against such a process and its abiding “cultural destruction,” Mirikitani argues,
“We must join the international movement to end the exploitation of all Third World peoples and
work to create our own revolutionary culture in this country” (qtd. in Yu, Race 78). As
Mirikitani’s invective suggests, much of the poetry in Aion drew from a cultural nationalist
sensibility that offered a third choice between the binary of being cast as either solely Asian and
thus inassimilable or exclusively American, assimilated, and invisible. Such a focus was
extended in the 1970s through the critical discussions surrounding the publication of the
Aiiieeeee! anthology. Seeking “the history and source of the yellow literary tradition and
sensibility” the editors of Aiiieeeee! exemplify the importance of history in the articulation of
Asian American experience. The Aiiieeeee! editors couch their explanation of selections and
omissions in terms of stereotypes and capitulation to Eurocentrism. Works which conform to
mainstream notions of “icky gooey Chineseness” were read as co-opted by dominant forces, or
in Frank Chin’s more derisive prose, “fakes.” Against these fakes, the authors valorized Asian
American works that challenged stereotypes of Asian Americans as either Asian or Other.
Given the early focus on community, history, and a recognizable ethnic voice among
Asian American critics, it is perhaps not surprising that Yau’s work went largely unremarked in
Asian American discourse. Yau, who published his first book of poetry in 1976, offers little to
this textual fabric of Asian Americanness. Speaking in an interview with Dorothy Wang in 1993,
Yau describes his absence from Asian American discourse of the late 1970s as a result of his
work’s dismissal by critics like Frank Chin as “not Asian enough”; “there was literally nobody
sympathetic to me. Nobody. They couldn’t see what I was getting at because they didn’t
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perceive me as being an Asian American poet” (qtd. in Wang 136). Unlike the work of the more
readily recognized Asian American poets like Mirikitani, Yau’s poetry does not immediately
attend to social realities or identity politics and offers little purchase by which to promote an
ethnic consciousness. In the nascent years of Asian American discourse, works chosen for the
pages of Aion and Aiiieeeee were more often thematically geared to counter negative stereotypes
and produce acceptable versions of Asian Americanness.67 Aesthetically, these works were
marked by realism and accessibility; in order to be efficacious in the political project of defining
race and community, texts had to be read and understood. Janice Mirikitani’s “We, the
Dangerous” offers an example:
We, the dangerous,
Dwelling in the ocean.
Akin to the jungle.
Close to the earth.
Hiroshima
Vietnam
Tule Lake
And yet were not devoured
And yet we were not humbled
And yet we are not broken. (qtd. in Kim, Reading 223)
67
While Yau was not viewed as an Asian American poet in these years, it is interesting to note that Mei
Mei Berssenbrugge, also an experimental poet, did receive quite a bit of exposure and appeared in the
Breaking Silence, the first Asian American poetry anthology. Berssenbrugge, however, was also active in
the Asian American studies movement.
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Speaking in a collective voice, Mirikitani connects American aggression against Japan and
Vietnam to the domestic racism of Japanese American internment camps, offering up a tribal
sensibility that attempts to speak for the composite Asian American. Her use of the politically
charged nouns “Hiroshima” and “Tule Lake” refuses to aphorize the atrocity of nuclear war and
the degradation of forced relocation. Like many of the poems prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s,
“We, the Dangerous” runs counter to more formal, lyric poetry by engaging and mimicking
orality; instead of the elite literary devices of the academy, Mirikitani uses plain speech to
“deliver poetry to the People, who, apprehending its ‘essentials,’ would renew it in the spirit of
emerging political freedom” (Uba, “Versions” 33). Such political goals are additionally
demonstrated in the first collection of Asian American poetry, Breaking Silence. Edited by
Joseph Bruchac, the volume borrows its title from Mirikitani’s poem of the same name and aims
to present how Asian Americans are “breaking both silence and stereotypes with the affirmation
of new songs” (xv).
Unlike Mirikitani’s mobilization of a pan-ethnic consciousness, Yau’s early poetry rarely
takes part in the autobiographical style prevalent among other Asian American poets, and seldom
includes any overt ethnic textual markers of his Chinese Americanness. When these markers are
present, as in several of the poems in his first book Crossing Canal Street, his poetry does not
engage Asianness in the manner expected of an Asian American poet. For example, “Cameo of
a Chinese Woman on Mulberry Street,” subsequently reprinted as the first poem of Radiant
Silhouette, does not draw any connection between the ethnicity of the speaker and that of his
subject:
Her face this moon a house
always nearing the end of its road
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from within each room
rising rising
slowly up through their sleep
for a breath
the pale fur and dark wings
the silver beak and silver talons (Radiant Silhouette 15)
Against Mirikitani’s desire to claim Asia in “We the Dangerous,” “Cameo” maintains a scholarly
distance between poet and subject. The objectivity inherent in Yau’s description reads
scientifically, operating in a much different vein than the self-reflective poetry of Asian
American studies proper. In lieu of claiming a coherent identity, the poem mediates an outside
perspective, an estimation of the woman filtered through comparisons. In fact, the first line’s
parataxis almost effaces the woman altogether; her face becomes a moon figured as a house
which moves and shifts representation until its final metonymic comparison to a bird of prey.
Working primarily as description, “Cameo” thus offers no political comment on the situation of
Asian Americans nor does it serve to narrate Asian American reality.
Yet, while “Cameo” and several of the other poems in Crossing Canal Street do not fit
the modes commonly adapted by writers like Mirikitani, they nonetheless express Yau’s active
engagement of ethnic subjectivity and the processes of his own signification. As Priscilla Wald
has noted, the title itself gives an indication of the poet’s subject position; Canal Street serves as
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the border between Chinatown and Yau’s downtown New York existence (135-6). For Yau,
writing as a young poet in New York outside of the Asian American movement located on the
West Coast, the “crossing” of Canal Street registers his interest in Chineseness while at the same
time the gerund form of the verb underscores his discomfort with casting himself (or being cast)
as Chinese American. Disconnected from the Asian American scene and its proponents, Yau
came to Chineseness in American poetry in much the same fashion as many a student of
American literature – through the work of Ezra Pound and the Imagists. Speaking of the
composition of Crossing Canal Street, Yau remarks Pound’s Cathay poems, “were very, very
meaningful to me then....For me, they were about being Chinese, about some kind of identity”
(44). Indeed, “Cameo” and numerous other poems in Crossing bear the impress of Imagist
technique through their short lines, parataxis, and concentration on Chinese images. As Dorothy
Wang notes, unlike Marilyn Chin’s works “Yau’s do not read as direct imitations of Tu Fu or Li
Bai but as imitations of imitations (filtered through Ernest Fenollosa) of classical Chinese poetry”
(141). For Wang, the poems lack the parodic edge of Yau’s later work and suggest that his
understanding of his own poetic subjectivity as a Chinese American writer has been
circumscribed by his overt mimicry of Pound’s translucencies. However, in “Cameo,” as in
“Suggested by a Waitress at YEE’s” (which I will discuss later), Yau mobilizes a subtle critique
of the Modernist portrayals of Chinese poetry. Specifically, the effacement of the woman in
“Cameo” parallels the way Chineseness is always already spoken for in the poems of Pound and
other Imagists; her selfhood is processed through images of the house, the moon, and finally, and
most disconcertingly, a bird of prey, moving Yau’s representation of her further away from her
actual being. Thus, while “Cameo” lacks the satiric edge of later more overt works like those of
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the Genghis Chan series, it nonetheless can be read as emblematic of Yau’s experimentation with
form as a means of negotiating identity and his own poetic modality.
Despite the questions “Cameo” poses to ethnic signification, such an overt poetic debt to
white tradition in the 1970s was more likely to read, in Frank Chin’s terms, as “fake.” In
addition, the poems in Crossing Canal Street do not embody the material realities of Chinese
Americans nor do they agitate significantly for social change, making it hard to align Yau’s
project with that of Asian American discourse at large. Moving from the highly Imagistic style
characteristic of Crossing Canal Street, Yau’s publication of Sometimes in 1979 evinces his
increasing inclination toward more experimental forms. Many of the poems written in this
period foreground Yau’s interest in the operations through which narratives both construct and
restructure meaning. In the volume, Yau reprints “The Reading of an Ever Changing Tale”
(which, as its title perhaps indicates, will be reprinted again in Corpse and Mirror and Radiant
Silhouette) a poem that deals explicitly with the how language and ideas are received: “But /
what of the phenomena whose /colors can only be imagined?” Radiant Silhouette 20). Here also,
Yau presents “Ten Songs,” a poem that subjects words and syntax to numerous substitutions and
permutations. The form will become a Yau signature in poems like “Variations on a Sentence by
Laura Riding Jackson” in Forbidden Entries: “There is something to be told about us for the
telling of which we all wait. Something to be told. There is something about the telling of which
we all wait to be told. Something telling. About something which we all wait for the telling to
be told” (13).
Yet, while Yau moves into more experimental constructions that subvert the primacy of
institutionalized European or American forms, the poems in Sometimes offer even fewer overt
signifiers of identity or ethnicity, again rendering them outside the paradigms of nascent Asian
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American discourse. One notable exception, “Shimmering Pediment,” emerges from what
begins as an autobiographical I/eye and alludes to “an ancient Chinese poet” (Radiant Silhouette
21). But, in a manner which Yau will adopt again and again, the “I” here resists accessible
understanding, instead working and reworking itself against its own location. In so doing, it
reifies Yau’s distrust of the stability and authority of language and identity: “Might not this I be a
false mirror?” (“Between” 38). Similarly, the allusion to Chineseness serves as misleading
ornamentation, or what Wang terms “a stray line” (142). In the poem, the assertion “I wandered
in as a child/ a fenced-in field” is revised four lines later as “Actually, I never played on this
knoll / Though I think somehow I must have.” The immediacy of “this” knoll is once more
called into question by the next lines, in which the poet makes his “return to that silent and
empty / Amphitheater.” The seeming inversion of “this” and “that,” the nearness intimated by
“this” in his reverie against his actual presence at “that” field, makes the speaker’s physical
location and trustworthiness both suspect. The last lines, “my plane spiraling / In a diminishing
circle, as I flew / Parallel to where I am now standing” continue this disorientation. The poem
itself becomes more about the position of the “I” and less about the “I” itself. In fact, we learn
nothing concrete about the “I,” as the continual revision of memory disrupts any transmission of
ego. In contrast to the narratives of poets like Mirikitani, Yau’s poem defies the accessibility
necessary to interact in dominant Asian American discourse while his lack of overt ethnic
signifiers also offers little to a movement predicated on self declaration and identity politics. In
addition, against the cultural nationalist impetus to claim a coherent and distinct singularity,
Yau’s poems reiterate his skepticism of such a gesture; as he asks in “Between the Forest and Its
Trees,” “Might it not be possible that the self is made of up of many selves, incomplete and
fragmented?” (41). In terms of the prevailing critical Asian American ideologies at work in the
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late 1970s, such a distrust of the stable lyric I ultimately worked to undermine projects
predicated on pan ethnicity and accordingly circumscribed the possibility of “speaking out.”
The challenge to community posed by Yau’s poetics that seemingly forestalled his
recognition as Asian American in the 1960s and 1970s paradoxically underwrote his insertion
into Asian American discourse in the 1980s and 1990s as its contours shifted to accommodate
the mainstreaming of Asian American studies as well as the more widespread acclaim of a new
cohort of Asian American authors. Yet, while some of the Aiiieeeee group’s masculinist rhetoric
and more proscriptive criticism was dismissed by emerging Asian American theorists, the focus
on the unique sociohistorical record of Asian American experience – and poetry which bespeaks
this record – continued to resonate in the 1980s. The publication of Elaine Kim’s Reading the
Literatures of Asian America: An Introduction to the Writings and their Social Context by
Temple University Press serves as an important marker of the growth of the field. As the first
book length theoretical treatment of Asian American writing, it codified for the public a nascent
Asian American literary theory and history. In her work, Kim expands on the theories of Aion
and Aiiieeeee by foregrounding Asian American women’s writings and including Filipino
American literature as she explores “the topography and rich textures of the Asian American
experience as it is expressed in Asian American literature” (xi). Noting that “one of the
fundamental barriers to understanding and appreciating Asian American literary self-expression
has been the existence of race stereotypes about Asians in American popular culture,” Kim’s first
chapter surveys American configurations of Asianness and situates Asian American writers with
the task of challenging such stereotypes by “defining their own humanity as part of the
composite image of the American people” (xv, 22). She justifies her focus on the contexts of the
writings rather than their formal qualities by explaining that the larger reading public’s ignorance
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of Asian America’s sociohistorical situation likely contributes to a misapprehension of the
literature itself. In her paradigm, Asian American writing is expressive of Asian American
experience so that “by studying Asian American literature, readers can learn about the Asian
American experience from the point of view of those who have lived it” (xviii). Though Kim
does highlight the multiplicity of approaches taken by Asian American writers by engaging both
earlier activist and cultural nationalist writings alongside the growing number of works which
focus on individual experience, she nonetheless reads these as ultimately connected: “the theme
that underscores the contemporary body of Asian American literature is the need for community”
(278). Like her forbears, Kim’s work constructs a theoretical paradigm which reads Asian
American writing as acts of resistance sociologically marked by the effects of immigration and
racism.
The emphasis Asian American literary theory placed on cultural nationalism, identity
politics, and historical specificity mirrors the larger trends of early multiethnic studies practices.
Born the same year as the Aiiieeeee anthology, MELUS, the Society for the Study of the MultiEthnic literature of the United States, represents the first professional group dedicated to
multicultural literary criticism. Constructed from a panel at the December 1973 Modern
Language Association committee, MELUS quickly established a quarterly journal and yearly
conference. As Katherine Newman remembers, “MELUS was conceived in anger and brought
forth into academe in words of defiance” (99). Chief among its early priorities was the
excavation of neglected literary texts authored by a diversity of writers with the long range
purpose of “writing the full history of American Literature” (107) that would contextualize the
incorporation of minority texts in the classroom. The growth of MELUS into the early 1980s
also paralleled an increase of interest in multiethnic studies by its parent organization the MLA,
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which recommended in 1982 that departments continually review their course offerings and
methodologies "in the light of women's studies, minority literatures, theories of composition, and
emerging ideas in linguistics, philosophy, and other branches of critical reflection" (953). The
MLA subsequently dedicated space in the Spring 1985 ADE bulletin to Amy Ling’s “Asian
American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Selected Bibliography.” Following the work of
Elaine Kim, Ling argues “any study of Asian American literature must take social contexts into
account”; accordingly, Ling situates her overview by offering brief histories of the different
immigrant constituents under the umbrella term “Asian American” (29). Ling asserts that “the
study of Asian American literature is often a study of white America” insofar as the relationship
between Asian American writing and the publishing realm betokens the changing relationship
between Asian American and Euro American communities at large (31). Ling’s essay confirms
that Asian American and multiethnic studies took their places in the broader landscape of literary
criticism primarily through a focus on the material history and social contexts of Asian America.
By the time of the first publication of the Heath anthology in 1989, the study and appreciation of
Asian American literature centered largely on the history, sociology, and ethnicity of specific
authors as well as a fetishization of resistance as a political gesture.
The mainstreaming of Asian American studies also paralleled the growth of Asian
American poetry itself. Whereas the politically and socially minded works of earlier poets like
Mirikitani and Merle Woo had struggled to find print, the lyric subjectivity in the work of poets
like Cathy Song, Garret Hongo, and David Mura were readily accepted and rewarded; Song’s
Picture Bride was published as part of the Yale Younger Poets series in 1982, Hongo was
awarded the Lamott Poetry prize in 1987, and Mura was selected for the National Poetry Series
in 1989. Written in a form alternately called “official verse culture” and the “MFA mainstream,”
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these poems echo the prevailing workshop style of the 1980s and adhere to the Romantic
ideology that poetry belongs to a realm outside the political. Against the difficult and
experimental poetries of Modernist writers like Pound, this poetry utilizes a neorealist style
which offers up the private, I-based lyric for public appraisal. The poems themselves aim for
sincerity and clarity, and the poets view language as a transparent medium allowing for
unhindered communication. Unlike the activist poets, however, much of the Asian American
poetry of the 1980s is not overtly oppositional; the poetics of authors like Song and Mura
resemble the aesthetic privileged in the mainstream while offering variety in terms of themes and
ethnic images. The success of these Asian American poets outside of ethnic studies also served
to redefine the parameters of Asian American poetry; their popularity in the mainstream coupled
with their decidedly ethnic publishing presentation (Song’s collection, originally entitled From
the White Place was retitled Picture Bride) signaled a shift whereby Asian American writers
became identified not by Asian American discourse on the basis of perceived solidarity with
Asian American political aims but rather by the wider reading establishment primarily on the
basis of identity. Song, Hongo, and Mura, as the first widely published and publically
acknowledged Asian American poets, served as an introduction to Asian American poetry for
many readers, thus hastening its perception as principally engaged in a poetics of lyric
subjectivity.68
68
Song, Hongo, and Mura, along with Mirikitani and the Angel Island poets, were the three modern Asian
American poets chosen to represent the movement in the first edition of the Heath anthology. Twenty
years later, their poetry along with the work of Li-Young Lee still remains emblematic of Asian American
poetry in major anthologies. The Norton includes Lee and Song, while the Heath still exhibits Mirikitani
and Hongo. The most recent edition of the Heath, however, also includes early protest-based poems by
Hagedorn as well as the more experimental works of Kimiko Hahn. Yet, Hahn’s works, unlike many of
Yau’s, are overtly tinged by ethnicity, allowing her to be read in line with the works of Hongo as
representative of Asian American reality.
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Asian American discourse quickly responded to the mainstream success writers like Song
and Mura by critically engaging them, further securing their image as representative of Asian
American poetry. Despite the more personal focus and less overt political stance of this poetry,
its accessibility and use of the first person fit into previous paradigms of poetry as social
expression. Continuing the content-based sociohistorical approaches begun in the 1970s,
criticism in the late 1980s and early 1990s focused on the how these poets, while mimicking
dominant poetic modes, offered a poetry distinctly different from mainstream American poetry.
This difference was articulated largely through a continued focus on thematic concerns and the
incorporation of Asian language in English poetry. For instance, Shirley Lim’s 1987 essay
“Reading Asian American Poetry: A Case for Ethnopoetics.” argues that reading Asian
American writing requires readers trained in the stylistic, linguistic, and contextual particularities
of Asian American writing so as to understand this poetry’s largely non-European cast. Lim’s
first component, the stylistic, refers to the Asian and Asian American images mobilized to
“create a style of nostalgia which looks eastward, forsaking entirely the American contemporary
scene” (54), while her second point insists that sensitivity to Asian languages enriches these
writers’ projects. Her last injunction focuses on the necessity of reading Asian American authors
against their specific sociohistorical context. Lim’s thesis points up the growing tension in Asian
American poetry between the first and the second halves of the term. Lim asserts, “This
stubborn residual identity which refuses oblivion characterizes much of not all of AsianAmerican [sic] writing today. Even an avant-garde third-generation Chinese-American writer
such as David Henry Hwang works and re-works elements of his original culture” (52). Her
continual recourse to terms like “original culture” and “first languages” presupposes a flatness of
Asian American identity whereby a writer does, in fact, have a “first language” or “culture.”
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Such slippage between Asian and Asian American is also indicative of the need to articulate
difference in the face of an easily commodified Asian American poetic production. Thus, Lim’s
essay mimics the paradigms put forth by Kim and attempts, as Kim does, to codify a coherent
cohort of Asian American writing by stressing its difference from the mainstream.
Even as Lim’s essay maps the rather narrow theories developing to deal with an Asian
American poetry that formally echoes American mainstream poetry, she also inadvertently
complicates that thesis by including John Yau in her assessment. Like the handful of other
critics who named Yau as an Asian American poet in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lim
mobilizes Yau as an example of difference but does not formally engage or investigate his
poetics. To support her third point of contextualization, Lim reads two oppositional reviews of
Yau’s award winning work Corpse and Mirror. Here, Lim argues, the key disparity between a
favorable diagnosis of Yau’s poems rests on the critic’s ability to identify him as Chinese
American. Unlike Richard Elman’s evaluation of Yau as an “unanchored poet,” Clayton
Eshleman’s review turns on the fact of Yau’s Chineseness, including the word “Chinese” eight
times in his assessment (55). Though Lim importantly is among the first Asian American critics
to situate Yau as an Asian American poet, her use of Yau pivots not on an analysis of his work,
but on reviewers’ responses to it. 69 The paradigms constructed by Lim and others to evaluate
Asian American work are unfortunately poorly suited to an investigation of Yau’s early surrealist
style. Lim ultimately summarizes Yau’s work as “juxtaposing ancient Chinese images and
69
The success of Corpse and Mirror in the mainstream seems to have afforded it a tenuous position in
Asian American discourse. Amy Ling appears to be the first to include Yau in Asian American
conversations by including Corpse and Mirror in her bibliography for the ADE. In the 80s, Lim alludes
to Yau in two separate essays, but does not engage in any reading of his poetry. Notably for this
argument, Lim’s first reference to Yau is in her favorable review of Bruchac’s Breaking Silence where
she observes his absence. Finally, Elaine Kim also alludes to Yau as a writer “all the more Asian
American” as he “contribute[s] to the broadening of what that term means” in her 1987 essay “Asian
American Literature” in the Columbia Literary History of the United States (821).
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contemporary American cultural graffiti,” a project that falls flat for Elman due to his inability to
recognize these allusions (56). Lim’s analysis of the two reviews hinges largely on Yau’s
identity and not his poetics per se; Eshleman’s foregrounding of Yau’s Chineseness is viewed as
culturally affirming, not orientalizing, while Elman’s bewilderment with Yau’s poetry must
surely come from his lack of an “ethnosensitive” reading, despite the fact that the poem Elman
alludes to, “An Ever Changing Tale,” contains no markers of identity. Lim leaves no room for
Elman’s dismissal to modulate on the basis of his dislike or misunderstanding of Yau’s
experimental poetics. At the same time, Lim herself refuses to formally engage Yau’s poetics;
her reading of Yau as Chinese American within the dominant paradigms of Asian American
discourse cannot account for some of the finer liberties he takes with language to undermine his
own positionality and call into question the permeability of language. Any investigation of the
way the formal composition of Yau’s work stylistically affronts Euro American poetry would
ultimately detract from Lim’s shadow narrative of a unified community of writers working
together to extend the cultural boundaries of Asian American poetry.
Yau’s ascension into the “mainstream” of Asian American poetry was also prefigured by
a certain amount of currency in mainstream experimental discourse. His poetry appeared in the
fourth issue of Clayton Eshleman’s experimentally-oriented magazine Sulfur with poets like
Robert Blackburn, Jed Rasula, and Ron Silliman. The selection of Corpse and Mirror by John
Ashberry for the National Poetry Series in 1983 brought Yau additional acclaim among
experimental circles; in 1985 he read alongside such renowned experimentalists as Rachel Blau
DuPleiss, Michael Palmer, and Clark Coolidge. In 1990, Talisman dedicated an entire issue to
his work. The multiplicity of reactions to Yau however emphasizes the difficulty in gauging
and responding to an avant garde Asian American writer, especially one with so many different
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writing styles. In the Talisman issue alone, David Chaloner offers a somewhat orientalizing
assessment of Yau’s work as drawn from “an inheritance from the more ancient culture of China”
while Joseph Donahue’s essay does not engage Yau’s ethnicity at all (114). These reviews
interestingly contrast with Ed Foster’s short essay on Yau, published in The Multicultural Review
in 1990 where, despite the absence of any sustained criticism on Yau either within or without
Asian American discourse, Foster declares “Yau has been seen as a major Chinese-American
poet, perhaps the most important of our time” (36). Such pronouncements are further
complicated by Marjorie Perloff’s 1997 review of Forbidden Entries, which asserts of Yau’s
early works, “there was no indication, at this stage of Yau’s career, that the poet is in fact
Chinese-American” (n. pag.). These diverse understandings point to the efficacy of Yau’s
questioning of identity. Clearly, ethnicity is and has been a factor in Yau’s works, yet the extent
to which it is engaged (or overlooked) in these essays illustrates the difficulty in assessing
whether and how identity functions in Yau’s poetics. When ethnicity is mobilized as in
Chaloner’s review, it is often filtered through a distinctly Chinese – not Chinese American – lens.
Kris Hemensley, for instance, moves from characterizing Yau’s work as one that “affords
Imagist collision” to one “as funny as Wang Wei’s, Tu Fu’s, Li Po’s” (117, 118). In the majority
of these reviews, and here Foster’s is truly an exception, Yau’s writing has no bearing on or
exchange with Asian American poetry. Instead, if ethnicity comes into play at all, such readings
generally locate the exceptional qualities of Yau’s writing in China, not in any politicized ethnic
American discourse.
The difficulty in seeing Yau as Asian American reads counter to the widespread
acceptance of poets like Song, Hongo, and Mura as Asian American. Unlike his lyric
counterparts, Yau’s more experimental poetics obstruct wholesale understanding of his work as
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Asian American regardless of his ethnically marked name and the author photos present on the
book jackets of works like Corpse and Mirror; in short, Yau’s poetics do not offer up ethnic
subjectivity in the form that has come to be expected. As Charles Bernstein explains in A
Poetics, “signature styles of cultural differences can be admitted into the official culture of
diversity if they are essentialized, that is, if these styles can be made to symbolically represent
the group being tokenized or assimilated” (7). Artists who write against these expected forms,
like Yau, will “find themselves falling through the very wide gaps and tears in the fabric of
American tolerance…the price for being less interested in representing than enacting” (7). Like
Palumbo-Liu, Bernstein reads the willingness of “official culture” to include diversity as part of
a larger scheme of commodification where the ethnic poets who gain fame and publishing
opportunities are those whose works fit into national metanarratives of American progress and
democracy and reinforce notions of liberal pluralism without critiquing the parameters of such a
concept too closely. Yau himself realizes the stakes of such narrative form. Echoing Bernstein,
Yau contends “The rules are clear: if you want to write in the language of others, and thus the
official language, they will accept you” (“Between” 40). He further dramatizes such a process in
“Avila I,” “You learn to accommodate yourself to others, to fit into the space left by their
shadow. This is one way of disappearing into the smile meant for the body you have left on the
carpet, where every rose is a perfect instrument of writing” (qtd. in Foster 38). Yau’s poetry
proceeds from the questioning of such processes rather than mere acceptance of them, balancing
between complete eschewal of authorial intent and total acceptance of language as a transparent
medium conducive to producing a singular self.70
70
Yau explains his position vis-à-vis poetic voice in “Between the Forest and Its Trees”: “I don’t 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 does not speak for me or to me….At the same time, I do
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Yet, in attending to a poetics akin to that of the language poets with their “dismissal of
‘voice’ as the founding principle of lyric poetry,” the Asian American subjectivity encoded in
Yau’s writing has often been overlooked, and Yau’s poetics understood as interested in aesthetic
innovation over engagement in the politics of ethnicity (Perloff, “Language Poetry” 405). This
supposed mutual exclusivity of a poetics interested in aesthetic form and those interested in
politics was reified in the rather acerbic exchange ignited by Yau’s unfavorable review of Eliot
Weinberger’s American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders. In his review, Yau
contends that in positing a tradition issuing from Pound and continuing through Williams and
HD, Weinberger’s editorial method has restricted innovation to the domain of white poets and
validated an aesthetic "which promotes assimilationism and imperialism" (45). While Yau’s
assessment of Weinberger’s lack of ethnic diversity may, as Perloff believes, “pla[y] the
minority card rather too piously,” the response he elicits from Weinberger underscores the
seeming incompatibility between aesthetic, experimental poetry and that poetry engaged in
identity politics (“Whose New”110 ). Weinberger first accuses Yau of “creat[ing] a remarkable
new persona for himself: that of the angry outsider ‘person’ of color” before enumerating a
comparative list of Yau’s ethnic shortcomings against his own multicultural qualifications:
“[Yau] has probably never written a topical social-protest poem in his adult life….I spent years
studying Chinese – which John barely speaks and cannot read….John has never, before this,
written on any minority writers” (43). Though Weinberger’s comparisons are more an ad
hominem attack, his list nonetheless evinces the predominant mode for reading Yau’s work.
Yau’s perceived lack of community affiliation, his inability to speak his parent’s language, and
his disinterest, until now, in ethnic resistance characterize him as an ethnic opportunist and not a
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” (“Between” 40).
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valid voice in issues of identity politics. That these are the characteristics required for an “ethnic”
Chinese American reiterates Asian American writing’s firm connection to a narrow cultural
definition that privileges ethnic themes.
By the late 1990s, the challenge of Yau’s poetics to both ethnic and experimental
paradigms had become an important site of inquiry for critics of both camps. Yet, as the reviews
of Forbidden Entries show, such an interest nonetheless manifested itself in very different
assessments of Yau’s place in American poetics. Marjorie Perloff’s review, published in the
Boston Review in 1997, begins by alerting the reader to Yau’s increased attention to ethnicity;
Perloff asserts while Yau “has always cultivated the image of Angry Young Man,” his more
recent poems have “increasingly defined his oppositionality as the resistance to what he
calls….’the aesthetics of the assimilated’” (n. pag.). Yet, for Perloff, “the more overt
representations of racial oppression in Forbidden Entries are, to my mind, the volume’s least
successful poems.” Contrary to her misgivings about poems such as “Genghis Chan: Private Eye
XXIV,” with its emptying out of stock stereotypical Chinese signifiers, Perloff is more favorably
impressed by his work in poems like “Blue Lizard Lounge” and the Angel Atrapado sequence
which make use of “a splitting of selves” instead of overt references to identity. In “Angel
Atrapado XXII,” such a splitting occurs through confusion of the subject/object. The poem
begins, “The one who says,” forestalling recognition of the speaking voice. The phrase recurs
again and again modulating as “the voice who says,” “the one who answers,” and “the voice who
stammers” (124-125). Identity is decidedly conflicted in the second stanza: “Someone is
speaking into a tape recorder / someone with a name that sounds like yours / someone who
claims she (or perhaps he)… / saw through your eyes, and did the things they did / to someone
else” (124). The interpenetration of the you and I elicits an almost erotic intimacy which
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suggests the ability of discrete identities to mutually construct each other. According to Perloff,
unlike the controlled chaos of “Angel Atrapado XXII,” Yau’s more ethnically inflected poems
“don’t quite grapple with the poet’s own conflicted identity, his own relation to an AsianAmerican community that interacts, in complex ways, with the sophisticated, urban New York
poetry/art world in which Yau came of age.” Ultimately, for Perloff, Yau’s work is at its best
when it refuses what she has elsewhere critiqued as the “metanarrative of ethnic amelioration” by
resisting strong Asian American overtones (“Postmodernism” n. pag.).
In contrast to Perloff, Juliana Chang’s review in MELUS largely turns on Yau’s work as
“an intriguing site of investigation into questions of racial authenticity” (226). She begins by
alluding to Perloff’s review and Weinberger’s comments about Yau’s ethnicity to question
whether or not such exchanges imply a sense of betrayal on the part of these authors that the
“presumably passive, assimilative, and grateful Asian American” has participated in “an act of
dis-identification with white power” (226). Alternately, for Chang “to use criteria of cultural,
ethnic, or racial authenticity in evaluating the writing of John Yau, however, is to miss the point
of his writing”; Yau’s poetry alternately approaches notions of identity by probing the means by
which Asian Americans are “always already reproduced in the media and mass culture and the
Asian American subject as to some extent part of this reproduction” (227). Here, Chang
mobilizes the “ethnic” poems discounted by Perloff. As one of the first Asian American scholars
to critically review Yau’s work, Chang’s take gives us a sense both of Yau’s growing importance
as an Asian American poet in the 1990s as well as how his poetry was perceived as fitting into
Asian American discourse. Against Perloff’s preference for Yau’s less ethnically inflected
poems, Chang valorizes his parodic interference with constructions of Asian American
subjectivity. Yau plays with orientalist constructions of Chinese language as in “Genghis Chan
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Private Eye XXV”: “Dump fun /dim sum… Strong song / Oolong” (103). Such play affords Yau
the opportunity to intimate the alterity of Chineseness as well as the how this perceived alterity
has been understood in the broader cultural sphere. As Peter Lorre who portrayed the Japanese
villain Mr. Moto in a number of films asks in “Peter Lorre Wonders Which Artist Should Paint
His Portrait,” “Can you see me without remembering my trimmed voice boiling in the cauldrons
of rural drive-ins?” (86-7). Chineseness has come to be a produced artifice. In situating her
review in this manner, Chang manages to call mainstream readings of Yau’s ethnicity into
question while at the same time focusing her analysis on how Yau’s work resists Asian
American stereotypes squarely in terms of his ethnicity. Yau’s poetry thus becomes centered in
Asian American discourse in terms of its ability to articulate resistance by deconstructing
subjectivity.
Reading Chang and Perloff’s reviews in tandem reifies the dilemma of forcing John
Yau’s work into the schema of either experimentalists or Asian Americanists. While Perloff
prefers Yau’s poetry when it displaces any strong sense of Yau’s ethnicity, Chang sees his
identity as central to his writing project. While both agree that “Yau is no more a ‘language poet’
than he is a typical multiculturalist,” each nonetheless emphasizes the side of Yau that most
underwrites her own poetic interests (Perloff, “Review” n. pag.). As Ikyo Day writing of Fred
Wah’s poetry explains, the opposition and resistance cultivated in ethnic studies which
legitimates accessibility as a key component in propagating social good leaves little room for
disjunctive, language centered poetics. Likewise, the autonomous restricted field of cultural
production, like that from which the Language poets operate, modulates on an aesthetic basis
which attempts at least on the surface to eschew the commodification multiculturalism must
submit to so as to ensure the publication and reading of resistant texts. Day summarizes:
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the appeal to autonomous production as a more politically resistant alternative to ‘realism’
or the popular makes the reading of ‘resistance’ available only to those with an unequally
distributed cultural capital. It is this delimiting of resistance to the field of restricted
production that nevertheless enables a traditionally white male avant-garde to assert its
detachment from not only market relations but gender, race, and class relations as well.
(46)
Whereas multicultural paradigms traditionally legitimate mimetic representation as the primary
method of effecting social change, thus equating form with social function, the same constraints
are a nonissue for experimentalist poets whose writing, freed from essentialist readings of
representation, becomes situated as more resistant due to its detachment from market demands.
Perloff’s response stops short of interrogating Yau’s constructions of ethnic identity and lyric
subject position, while Chang’s focus on his representations of identity attempts to read his work
primarily for resistance. Unfortunately, situating Yau’s texts squarely in either camp overlooks
the totality of his project. Multicultural analyses based largely on Marxism are likely to
undervalue the aesthetic while experimental analyses of poststructuralism tend to focus on
textuality in terms of an overarching Western ideology which conflates issues of identity and
class.
Since 2000, a number of Asian American critics have sought to engage and overcome the
incommensurability of multicultural and experimentalist approaches. Timothy Yu’s “Form and
Identity in Language Poetry” provides the first essay length investigation of Yau’s poetics and
initiates a reconsideration of the importance of experimental poetics like Yau’s to Asian
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American discourse.71 Placing Yau in the tradition of language poets like Silliman and Bernstein,
Yu elucidates that the concerns of language poetry and minority writing may be in some ways
complementary. He begins by foregrounding the seeming incompatibility of the two historically
synchronous literary movements through the now infamous object/subject argument advanced by
Silliman in 1988:
Progressive poets who identify as members of groups that have been the subject of
history – many white male heterosexuals, for example – are apt to challenge all that is
supposedly ‘natural’ about the formation of their own subjectivity. That their writing
today is apt to call into question, if not actually explode, such conventions as narrative,
persona and even reference can hardly be surprising. At the other end of this spectrum
are poets…who have been the subject of history….These writers and readers – women,
people of color, sexual minorities, the entire spectrum of the ‘marginal’ – have a manifest
need to have their stories told. That their writing should often appear much more
conventional, with the notable difference as to who is the subject of these conventions,
illuminates the relationship between form and audience. (63)
From this starting point, Yu sets these two narratives in fruitful opposition to illustrate how
“Asian American poetry exposes some of the strains and limits in the political project of
Language poetry, particularly around the issues of race and identity,” while Language poetry’s
implicit refusal of mainstream American forms, “map[s] the limits of the Asian American poetic
project, insofar as it relies upon a commodifiable ‘ethnic’ individuality” (424). In this respect,
Yau’s use of signifiers and clichés works to remind readers of the centrality of his Chinese
Americanness while still unsettling our understanding of those terms. As Yu succinctly puts it,
71
While Yu is the first Asian American scholar to consider Yau centrally in a critical essay, Americanist
Priscilla Wald offers an insightful piece entitled “Chaos Goes Uncourted” in the collection Cohesion and
Dissent in America (1994).
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“while we do still wish to ask ‘Who speaks?’ Yau shows us that we should never be comfortable
with our answer” (443). Ultimately, Yu reads Yau’s poetry as the productive synthesis of these
two traditions and accordingly focuses on poems like those in the Genghis Chan sequence or
“Toy Trucks and Fried Rice” where racial identity and history are kept in constant negotiation.
Yu argues that Yau’s “hanging on to history is crucial if the project of ethnic writing is to remain
coherent” (448). Rather than allow the totality of Yau’s poetic project to fully resonate against
that of mainstream Asian American discourse, Yu investigates only Yau’s poems that offer an
overt ethnic voice or theme. Thus, while Yu does depart from earlier theoretical models like
Lim’s which read Asian American poetry primarily in terms of Asian origin, the division he
posits between experimentalist form and Asian American themes remains; in reading only those
poems which explicitly demonstrate an Asian American subjectivity, Yu refigures the divide
between ethnic themes and experimentalist tendencies rather than fully investigating how Yau’s
poetry resists engaging in the discourse of “official diversity.”
The important cultural work of Yu’s essay has been followed up by a number of Asian
American critics who continue to utilize Yau’s poetics as an affront to the supposed opposition
between experimentation and politically enabled ethnic productions.72 For instance, in his
expansive investigation of American manifestations of Chinese language, Yunte Huang briefly
examines Yau’s counter mockery of racist parodies of the Chinese language through
“pidginizing racist literature’s pidginization of Chinese” (137). More extensively, Zhou
Xiaojing’s 2004 “Postmodernism and Subversive Parody” gives an extended reading of the
Genghis Chan series to uncover the “postmodern aesthetics of multiplicity, fragmentation and
indeterminacy” Yau uses to fashion an “irreducible, uncontainable Otherness that disturbs
72
Yu also extends his argument in his 2009 book Race and the Avant Garde: Experimental and Asian
American Poetry Since 1965.
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dominant notions about the racial, cultural Other” (77). She begins by locating Yau’s title
character as the fusion of the stereotypes of the model minority (Charlie Chan) and the yellow
peril (Genghis Khan) and continues to investigate the techniques Yau uses to displace reader
expectations of the raced subject; in specific, she traces how Yau makes and remakes the “I” of
the series alternately as Chan himself and the ventriloquism of Earl Biggers as Chan. While
Zhou’s reading unpacks much of the word play and intricacies of the series, it nonetheless
focuses, like Yu’s and Huang’s, primarily on the techniques Yau uses to adapt an “antiassimilation poetics” that offers “possibilities of a politically enabling Postmodernism for
minority American literatures” (98).73
For each of these critics, the Genghis Chan series is important because of its indictment
of stereotypical portrayals of Asian Americans. The sequence, which operates in a film noiresque world where a gumshoe detective named Genghis Chan investigates crime, cobbles
together a variety of different poetic styles. From the elongated and fairly syntactically sound
style of the first entries collected in Radiant Silhouette, to the shorter, more staccato entries
found in Edificio Sayonora, the sequence is held together not by a coherent style but rather by
the continual processing of Genghis Chan’s identity. This project is extended in the section
entitled “Hollywood Asians” in Forbidden Entries which combines new Genghis Chan poems
with several poems starring Peter Lorre, the white actor who played Mr. Moto in eight films
between 1937 and 1939. The first poem of the section “Peter Lorre Improvises Mr. Moto’s
Monologue” opens, “I float outside your windows on rainy nights, a blanket of gray mist you
can’t peel from the glass. My mechanized eyes are spherical rooms” (77). Yau’s bodiless
portrayal of Moto with his “mechanized eyes” reveals the constructed nature of Asian identity as
73
I will deal only tangentially with the Genghis Chan series as Zhou does a thorough job with it in
“Postmodernism and Subversive Parody.” Please see her reading for further information on the way the
series resists appropriation.
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presented on the Hollywood screen. Further enhanced with “upgraded teeth” and “matching
black eyebrows and hair,” Lorre declares of his character, “I’m better than a laboratory frog
because I don’t need batteries to send my electricity.” The presentation of Moto depends on
exaggerated, stereotyped features including the shifty, “mechanized,” and cold eyes of Asian
villains and their “upgraded” (read: buck) teeth. Resembling something of a Frankenstein, Moto
is made up of discrete parts that only taken together signify his entity. Lorre’s performance of
Moto remembers early exotified productions of Asianness in dime museums and affirms that
these physical markers of Asianness have come to stand in for and betoken popular
understandings of Asians. This image is one “you can’t peel from the glass,” ingrained as it has
become on the silver screen. The last lines reemphasize the constructed otherness of Moto: “I’m
an engine of rebuilt fur. I’m what slips through your purified crave” (79). Moto’s piecemeal
portrayal brings attention to the constuctedness of Asian American identity as Other.
However, it is the elliptical word play of poems like “Genghis Chan XXIV” which most
often becomes a centerpiece in the readings of Asian American critics. The poem extends the
racial constructions of “Peter Lorre Improvises Mr. Moto’s Monologue” by calling notice to the
participation of language in such a construction:
Grab some
Grub sum
sub gum
machine stun
Treat pork
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pig feet
On floor
all fours
Train cow
chow lane
Dice played
trade spice
Makes fist
first steps (FE 102)
The poem’s abbreviation of syntactic connections focuses attention on Chinese stereotypes
moving from food images and the “trained cow” of Chinese labor to the gambling vices like
those of Brett Harte’s Ah Sin, while also alluding to the spice route and the first contact between
East and West. Yet, his unexpected use of rhyme and homophony denotes the shifting essence
of such stereotypes and perceptions. For instance, the lines “sub gum / machine stun” subvert
the anticipation of the collocate pair “machine gun,” while his use of internal rhyme as in “train
cow / chow lane” disrupts typical rhythmic constructions. Yau’s highlighting of the artifice of
the poem mirrors and emphasizes the artifice of identity constructions, while the constantly
shifting rhymes and patterns call expectations of identity into question. For critics like Yu, such
poems are a “case study” of how the techniques of language writing might be used to further the
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aims of Asian American poetry (454). The lack of syntax locates Yau within the realm of
language and other experimental poets, while the form intimates the construction of Chinese
American stereotypes; the nonsensical and choppy sing-song of the lines approximates the
pidgins of characters like Ah Sin. As Perloff rightly summarizes in her review of Forbidden
Entries, “Yau is calling attention to the lingering Orientalism of U.S. culture, the labeling that
continues to haunt Asian Americans.” As such, Yau’s interest in this litany of stereotypes easily
fits into the dominant paradigms of resistance in Asian American criticism while also violating
the standards of accessibility found in much Asian American poetry. For Zhou and Yu, his
attention to the history of racism via a poetics that privileges form over content situates him as a
triumphal example of Asian American themes rendered in experimental form, contradicting
assumptions of the incompatibility of formal experimentation with political and social contexts.
Yet, in concentrating largely on poems like “Peter Lorre Improvises Mr. Moto’s
Monologue” and “Genghis Chan XXIV,” these critical works are still circumscribed by the
double bind of identity and form in terms of Chinese American poetry. While these critics
construct useful paradigms for reading Yau as an alignment of the experimental with the ethnic,
such readings generally overlook poems where ethnicity or ethnic signifiers are not overt.
Despite the lip service given to the rapidly changing Asian American theoretical constructs in the
late 1990s, these critic’s reliance on Yau’s Asianness continues to reify the same themes of the
cultural nationalists in the early 1970s, namely, the sociopolitical project of resistance to
dominant culture.74 In reading these critics’ readings of Yau, it becomes obvious that the turn to
the diasporic resulted not in a reconfiguration of Asian American theory so much as the
valorization of new forms of content; in this sense, Lowe’s call for “heterogeneity, hybridity,
74
It should be noted, however, that resistance to dominant culture constitutes a central concern of any
avant-garde project.
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multiplicity” worked primarily on the thematic level, engaging writers like Li Young Lee whose
works might have previously seemed too Asian to be included in Asian American discourse,
effectively continuing the project of maintaining a discourse oppositional to the canonical status
quo. This is not to say that race and ethnic identity are not important in the reading of John
Yau’s works, but rather to propose that the constant reiteration of his Otherness detracts from his
project of questioning the terms of that Otherness altogether. Yau’s work is most interested not
in unearthing a cogent Asian American cultural identity, but in looking at the processing of this
identity via language. Yau’s project is in this respect analogous to Mackey’s call in “Other:
From Verb to Noun”; instead of probing his Otherness, Yau probes the terms whereby one is
constituted as an Other. For Yau, “[o]ne’s color is neither something you can put on and take off,
like a coat, nor an ideology you announce one moment and ignore at another”; it is always
present (qtd. in Wang 153). However, the terms of that identity are constantly shifting,
constantly changing, and it is this effect Yau wishes to showcase with his poetry. Whether
through his more surrealistic poems which engage a constantly metamorphosing I or via his later
engagement with ethnic signifiers, Yau is primarily concerned with language and the way it
creates and contains identity.
Such a concern can be seen early on in “Suggested by a Waitress in YEE’s,” a poem from
his first collection Crossing Canal Street:
Holding the pencil like one lonely chopstick
& grasping the pad like an empty plate
waiting to be filled:
words such as shrimp almonds pork rice
thoughts of brocade pearl silk rain verbs (n. pag.)
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Here the title of the poem supplies the subject: the waitress herself, who is suggestive of a litany
of Chinese signifiers. The non-presence of the waitress in the poem points up her erasure at the
hands of the speaker. The disruption of syntax due to the lack of a referent in the opening two
lines allows the third line to resonate not only with the plate but the woman herself. She
becomes a vessel waiting for the narrator’s estimation of her; she is “waiting to be filled” with
his Orientalized imaginings. Her submission in this procedure mirrors the speaker’s stereotyped
construction of her as passive and servile while also gesturing to the strength of language to
capture and (re)present. The last word of the stanza, “verbs,” underscores the poet’s creation of
her and the process of othering his looking has enabled. The final two lines of the poem,
“nothing decorous but our own clinging minds / & the piling of her smooth black hair” complete
the transformation; “clinging minds” pinpoints the centrality of the I/eye in creating and
inculcating the vision of the woman, who is, after all, “nothing decorous” except in the mind’s
creation. The deferment of any attention to the speaker until the plural “our” of the last line
dislocates the poem from firm alignment with Yau as the raced speaker, while the orientalizing
of the waitress inverts any orientalizing tendency on the part of the reader toward the author yet
at the same time engages the reader in the action of orientalizing the waitress. Yau’s choice of
“our clinging minds” emphasizes the unwitting participation of the reader in the “making” of the
waitress as well as alludes to the inevitability of such constructions. His interest in these
constructions as suggestions, here figured as the system through which language and culture
have inculcated certain ideas of identity, closely follows Mackey’s interest in the verb form of
“other.” However, though Yau’s works may draw fodder from his life as a Chinese American,
Yau will not perform the part of the signified; his refusal to step firmly into the authorial role or
to comment or condemn the theme of signification in the poem critiques Asian American
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discourse’s participation in orientalization via labels. Here, perhaps more successfully than in the
Genghis Chan series, Yau foregrounds the mind’s act over any orientalizing tendency. Whether
in poems that explicitly call attention to ethnicity or poems which contain no ethnic markers,
Yau’s work is primarily concerned with the nouns, the signifiers, which constrain and delimit our
identities.
While Yau often draws on images of reified Chineseness in his works, he is also open to
a host of other influences. Reading Yau as part of the continuing tradition of resistance in Asian
American works overlooks other poems which exhibit the ways language constructs and
reconstructs perceived identities. Resistance in Yau’s poems is established in confrontations
with the overarching signification of language. That Yau is Chinese American is supplemental
to this ongoing negotiation. Though the critics outlined above provide insightful and challenging
readings of Yau’s importance to Chinese American literature at large, assessing Yau’s poems
which do not overtly articulate a Chinese American identity offers a larger affront to
essentialized notions of Chinese American poetry. For instance, “The Reading of an EverChanging Tale” investigates signification and its importance in constructing reality. Reprinted in
several of his collections, “The Reading of an Ever Changing Tale” is, as Priscilla Wald points
out, emblematic of much of Yau’s poetic practices. The poem begins, “Certain colors got lodged
/ under the fingernails before their names / came to grace our speech” (Radiant Silhouette 20).
Here, Yau explores the movement of an already existent object into reality via the act of naming
which legitimates and concretizes the abstract. Such a progression is interrupted with the next
line’s “But,” which leads to the question “what of the phenomena whose / colors can only be
imagined?” What happens to concepts outside of our speech? Are those things which are
outside our vocabulary illegitimate? Yau continues the line of questioning with more mundane
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questions, “What did you do with the pills? / And why were you without any gasoline?”
subjugating his existentialist questions to the banality of other questions, which also remain
unanswered. The continual processing of questions shifts the tale, circumscribing any answer as
“these questions / are a restraint on your memory.” The question interrupts the seamless
remembering of the tale, presumably the naming of the colors, and changes it, so that “’blue’ is a
box opened up /like a sky.” Here, Yau switches the progression of the signification of “blue” by
beginning with its name rather than its abstract condition; the blue is sky rather than the sky is
blue. And, while blue abides in language, the color green, lingers outside speech. Under the sky,
“no grass grows / but traces remain,” the color caught under the “fingernails” by the changing of
the tale. Yau’s shifting of color and signifier recalls the arbitrariness of our naming processes as
well as the at times rather nonsensical paths they take.
Yau’s “Ten Songs” also works to evoke the shortcomings of language in capturing or
expressing reality as well as offers a glimpse of the poet’s own process of writing. As Yau tells
Foster in the Talisman interview, “For the poet, one way to resist assimilation is to follow
suggestions the words themselves offer rather than the poetic conventions and traditions one has
been taught to impose on them” (38). “Ten Songs” evidences this conviction through its
interrogation of the permutations of a fixed set of words. The poem begins, “Trying to find a way
to say something that would make it / make its sense” (Radiant Silhouette 18). The continual
present of trying articulates both the progressive idea of “try” along with its uncertainty and the
possibility of transformation. The act of trying is further attached to the verb “make,”
underlining the force of the writer in constructing meaning. Yet, the meaning is not wholly
determined by the author; conversely, he attempts to allow it to “make its sense,” speak on its
own terms. The continual deferment of change by a subject “trying” to force “something” to
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“make its [own] sense” alludes to the dependence of the writer on the meaning of the words
themselves. The complexity of the first sentence is paralleled and questioned by substitutions in
the second: “Trying to find a way to weigh something that would make / its own lens.” “Weigh,”
the homophone of “way” stands in for “say,” insinuating both the slipperiness of language and its
very gravity. “Lens” similarly substitutes for “sense” and points up the existence of parameters
that confine and define the reception of language. The final four lines of the first stanza continue
the permutations and reflections and depict through their syntactical forms the act of the brain
trying to make something “make sense”:
Finding it trying to say something they would make
a lens of
Finding the saying of something
weighing the sense of it trying
The rearrangement of “Finding” to the beginning of the sentence reconfigures the process of
communication again, while the introduction of “they” discloses the exterior constraints and
concomitant possibilities of cooptation that public discourse places on communication. The last
two sentences similarly remake the phrase, ultimately breaking off only halfway through.
“Finding the saying of something” illuminates the act of speech, its orality, while “weighing the
sense of it trying” gauges the actual meaning of the oral act. Separating “saying” from
“weighing” foregrounds the separation of the signified from the signifier underscoring the
disconnection of a word’s meaning from its sound.
The remainder of the poem continues the attempt to communicate a “something,” which
is ultimately made into “something else”:
Making the trying something that would find its sense
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Sensing the making trying to find something it says
Saying the finding is there to find is making it make sense
Making it make sense is finding something to say
Something to say is finding a lens to sense the making
Something making the making something something else
The continual processing of the verbs “say,” “try,” and “make” connotes the impossibility of
unmediated one to one communication. The title signifies the arbitrariness of grammar and
syntax. While each line maintains the same words, their positioning and repositioning revalues
them and constructs new meaning. Additionally, Yau’s attention to gerunds allows him to
refigure words alternately as nouns and verbs and gives a sense of immediacy, a perpetual
presentness. Ultimately, the syntactical mess of “Ten Songs” seemingly rights itself in the final
lines where “something” becomes a clear subject. Yet, the final line also defers explanation:
“something making the making something something else.” Meaning drops out and the forced
making creates for the “something” a new “something else.” Meaning is thus changed in the
shift from writing to reception as the receiver’s attempt to create coherence instead creates the
undefined something else.
Alternately, Yau’s “You Must Remember” traces the development of a “you,” not an “I,”
as it is formed and shaped by language. His choice of the imperative form emphasizes the
demands the formless “you” is subject to as well as obscures the identity of the “you” or the
speaker. In the poem, the title vies as the first sentence, again asserting the power of the speaker
who continues throughout the poem to offer instructions of things which the “you” must
remember. The first stanza reminds the “you” “not to mumble / not to mangle” the words held
“in your hands / in your head” (Radiant Silhouette 171). The metonymic combination of “your
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hands” and “your head” with their insistence on possession contrast sharply with the autonomy
of the “words” they hold. The similar syntactic structure also conflates the two, signaling the
evocation of the connection between mind and body, the Cartesian self. The next stanza
continues the subjugation of the mind and the body to discourse:
You must remember
to deliver your head
to the auditorium
where it will be mounted
along with the others
your hands and head
going together
to the auditorium
where someone
maybe more than one
is waiting for you
to deliver your voice
mangled as
it was
formed
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The predetermined voice, echoes the formation of the “you” mounted alongside heads and hands
of the Others. Again, the division between the possessive hands and head and the objective
words register the preexistence of the words, which always already exist to order the reality and
understanding of the “you.” The repeating of hands and head, metonymic representations of the
body, continuously situate the “you” as unimportant, immaterial to its purpose of entering the
auditorium and performing its part. The repetition of “deliver” also infers a required action not
of creating but of transmitting, underscoring the conscripted and (re)produced essence of the
“you.” Just as one delivers on a promise, the “you" must deliver his aforesaid identity into the
awaiting prestructured realm of language.
The second half of the poem opens similarly, yet in it Yau begins to work more with
associations and substitutions, further abstracting the “you” by aligning the head and words with
plate and page: “you must remember / to return bread / to plate / lift head / from page.” The idea
of consumption of identity underscores our willing acceptance of the function of discourse; the
“you” takes its “head,” its outward identity, from the page containing the words constructed to
describe it. In effect, we each “must swallow / what’s on / plate or page,” must passively
consume the ordering words given to us. Head and plate become connected, one the item to be
delivered, the other the mode of delivery. Yau completes the association in the next to last set of
directions:
You must remember
to deliver the words
mounted on the page
your head
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sitting on
the plate
The “words / mounted on the page” echo the head previously mounted in the auditorium, while
the substitution of the head for the bread on the plate draws allusions to the presentation of John
the Baptist’s head, his distinct outward image, to King Herod. The repetition of “deliver” again
recalls the servility and submissiveness of the “you,” which “must” in effect decapitate itself to
fulfill its role as display. This continued predetermination of the “you” seems to presuppose
Yau’s alliance with postmodern conceptions of the death of the author and the irretrievably
commodified status of language. Yet, for Yau, “This model proposes the existence of an
auditorium where everything that has ever been said has been heard and understood” (40).
While such an auditorium has seemingly been created in “You Must Remember,” this stanza
situates the words as displays pre-established and “mounted” as the head will be on the page.
The words themselves are not hegemonic; another power arranges them as it sees fit, producing
the reality it desires. Such an ordering is analogous to anthologies, which generally frame their
selections with introductions and author biographies often replete with a photograph of the poet
himself. In order to be accepted into dominant discourse as an ethnic poet, Yau’s work must “fit”
the parameters decided for it by the paradigms of multicultural studies and the editorial aims of
the anthology itself; quite literally, his “head” must match the “words” mounted as representative
of a specific ethnic experience or reality.
Yau’s poem then serves as much as a caution against such a liberal multiculturalism as it
does an indication of the restrictiveness of language. Rather than succumb completely to the
lack of agency occasioned by such rhetorical positioning, Yau offers one more set of instructions
that recast the previous:
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You must remember
these things
as things
that once kept you
from speaking from
a book or box
Yau’s separation of “things / as things” emphasizes the concrete fixedness of words; they are
things used and moved around, yet things we can also use and move around ourselves. The
speaking voice here admonishes the “you” to remember words are accessible to all and can be
rearranged and (re)presented to allow for speaking, for a self-articulated identity beyond that
which is written in a book or the showcased, mounted, “boxed” version of selfhood. Far from
eschewing the value of speaking out, Yau explores the double bind between speaking out and the
commodified existence of the writing subject. Thus, while Yau’s “You Must Remember” does
not contain any ethnic signifiers or allusions to Asian American writing or culture, its formal
analysis of subjectivity and subject making can be easily read as mimicking the predicament of
multiculturalism and the bound space Asian American literary discourse finds itself in as the
price of its institutionalization. As Palumbo-Liu describes in his introduction to The Ethnic
Canon, the ethnic texts moved into the canon of American literature are those chosen as
representatives of “authentic” ethnic experience; “yet the critical and pedagogical discourses that
convey these texts into the classroom…may very well mimic and reproduce the ideological
underpinnings of the dominant canon, adding “material” to it after a necessary hermeneutic
operation elides contradiction and smoothes over the rough grain of history and politics” (2). In
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this way, the self-assertive political works which seemed culturally enabling on the inside of the
movement run the risk of being co-opted when moved into the broader reading public. Yau’s
surreal substitutions, which disembody the head and hands, illustrate the disarticulation of the
author from his work and the way in which multicultural texts, once situated in anthologies, may
in turn “speak” in the service of “official discourse,” offering a voice “mangled as it was formed.”
Yet, in their continual play and rearrangement, these words nonetheless also resist such a reading.
Yau, the ethnically marked author, refuses to ethnically mark the you; thus, if we read the poem
as attending to a specific ethnic contingent, we the reader perform the “mangling” or the
signifying process Yau describes. We “box” the author and his speech. The poem is thus the
double bind incarnate.
Throughout Yau’s work, identity is processed, questioned, and its limits laid bare. While
Yau recognizes and owns his identity as a Chinese American writer, he focuses not on the limits
of such an identity but rather how language preconceives his alterity and the means by which he
can recreate discourse to suggest new identity constructions. While he mobilizes signifiers of
Chineseness to attend to the dialogue that has previously situated him as a specific kind of writer
or poet, much of his work is more broadly focused on the othering processes of language and
developing measures that complicate and subvert these procedures. His acceptance into Asian
American literary discourse, while tying Yau tightly to a Chinese American identity, nonetheless
also pigeon holes him as Asian American, inviting ethnicized readings which focus at the content
level on the themes common to Asian American poetry. Yau’s most recent book, Paradiso
Diaspora, seemingly confronts his authorial stance, attesting that he is a poet who happens to be
Chinese American, not a Chinese American who happens to be a poet. As he states in the
Talisman essay, “You know, who you are is simply an accident of birth….. And I don’t want to
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deal with the accident of my birth as a right or entitlement. But I don’t want to ignore it either,
and so it becomes to me an interesting dilemma: how do I deal with it? How do I write about
it?”(49). Yau’s ethnicity doesn’t define his poetry but instead serves as material to be
incorporated and explored, probed and examined.
The “Introduction” to Paradiso Diaspora attempts to locate this issue and dispense with
it. The poem opens, “It had to be from someone whose grandparents were born in Shanghai,”
which seemingly fulfills the purpose of the autobiographical head note often supplied by
publishers publishing ethnic works (1). Situating himself ethnically here, Yau recenters the
poem a few lines later via his characteristic use of anaphora to shift reception: “It had to be from
a distant or dissolute descendant (yes, moi) / who can sing praises unworthy of even a flicker of
your attention.” The connection between the Shanghai relatives and Yau is emptied out in his
evocation of distance, while the inclusion of “moi” introduces other linguistic and cultural
influences that also color Yau’s identity. His self-deprecating tone does indeed, as he announces
in the second stanza, “sound like it might turn into a love poem or a prayer,” or at the very least
the ethnically inflected lament of assimilation with its contingent issue of losing the ethnic
quality that would encourage the “flicker of your attention.” Yet, as “a man of the people /
which I am not nor will ever be,” Yau won’t succumb to the solipsistic musings of a solitary
author. The last three stanzas offer different definitions of the author premised in the same vein.
The first centers on the absence of a number of personal characteristics, the arguably most
important being “truthfulness.” The break from truth indicates Yau’s anti-autobiographic
standpoint and essentially declares all contained within to be fiction, again moving himself out of
ethnic classification. The next lines complicate and constrain who this writer could be, as “it
had to be from someone who could take my place / after I left the room / never to return.” By
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removing himself as the author, Yau invites realization of his constructedness as an entity, asking
the poetry be read on its own and outside the projection of identity he explores in “You Must
Remember.” Finally, the poem concludes, “it had to be from someone who didn’t exist / before
this poem / began writing itself down.” Yau’s final line seemingly enters the debate over his
post as an ethnic or non-ethnic writer by displacing authorship completely. Yau acknowledges
that the very act of writing the poem, a creative act which will undoubtedly be read for
communication and understanding, necessarily constructs and delimits the way he is perceived as
an author. Throughout “Introduction,” Yau strips away layers of his perceived identity piece by
piece to offer an unmediated collection of poems. By emptying out the signifiers associated with
his name, Yau offers his work to be read as poetry that investigates language first and foremost,
and as a poetry that investigates positionality and implicitly the positionality of a racially marked
author only secondarily.
Attending to the non-overtly ethnic poems of Yau is not a call to read his poems
apolitically, but rather an indication of how reading across Yau’s poetic oeuvre can question
essentialist assessments of not only his work, but Asian American poetry in general. As “Ten
Songs” and “Introduction” perhaps best evince, Yau’s poetics continually engage in a critique of
the manner in which identity, and his identity in particular, is always already established in
American and Asian American discourse. Against this reproduction, his poems work
dialectically to question and destabilize such significations. In terms of anthologies, including
Yau’s work alongside more traditional representations of Asian American poetry as well as
experimental poetry reveals the tensions it creates within both. His use of form and breaking of
syntax record not Yau’s exclusion but the processes by which such exclusion is manifested. For
Yau, understanding these processes is more important than rehashing the social history
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underlying them. Multicultural readings which foreground Yau’s material position overlook the
efficacy of his poetics in pointing out the complicity of language in such constructions. Rather
than focusing on his history, he looks at how that history has been narrated and can be used to
serve Orientalist purposes. Above all, his poetry is concerned with the process of looking, both
ours and his, and the field on the page where the impetus to assert identity confronts accepted
instantiations of identity. From his early poems which produce visions of Chineseness to later
poems which call into question the reader’s formulation of his subjectivity, Yau encourages us to
reconsider the paradigms by which we produce our own critical readings. He proffers that
limiting his poetry to a multicultural or Marxist reading may overlook the universal predicament
of signification, while submitting it to poststructuralist readings that deny author positionality
ignores the complex nexus of social structures that mediate identity. Just as his poems constantly
question identity, Yau’s poetry requires critics to reconfigure the demarcations of Asian
American literature and create flexible critical frameworks that may in turn constantly shift,
develop, and evaluate the continual movements of identity and the means by which it is imagined.
As he writes in “Between the Forest and the Trees,” “where the I begins is in a sentence”; it is
ultimately our readings that define it (38).
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CHAPTER SEVEN
AFTERWORD
As the foregoing chapters have illustrated, images of Chineseness continue to be a
prescient element of American poetry. From the Modernist’s use of Chinese objects to effect a
cosmopolitan aesthetic to Pound’s extended study of the Chinese language, images of
Chineseness pervade Modernist innovation. Such an interest in China continues throughout the
works of twentieth and twenty-first century poets. A recent poem by Billy Collins, the former
poet laureate of the United States, further testifies to American poetry’s enduring conversation
with China. In “Liu Yung” Collins satirizes the poetic penchant of using Chinese poetry as an
aesthetic touchstone:
This poet of the Sung dynasty is so miserable.
The wind sighs around the trees,
a single swan passes overhead,
and he is alone on the water in his skiff.
If only he appreciated life
in eleventh-century China as much as I do —
no loud cartoons on television,
no music from the ice cream truck,
just the calls of elated birds
and the steady flow of the water clock. (99)
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Collins’s longing for a quieter, simpler lifestyle seemingly echoes poets like Pound and Snyder
who evoke China as a measure against which to judge the over-industrialization of the West.
However, his tongue-in-cheek proclamation, “If only he appreciated life / in eleventh-century
China as much as I do” both participates in a dialectic with China while simultaneously
questioning his interaction with Chinese literature both in “Liu Yung” and a number of other
poems in Ballistics. The line also serves as a reminder of our ability to look backwards and
alludes to the rather small frame of reference by which many of these poets imagined China.
The images of China most often referenced in American poetry hail from the past; few poets
(and here Snyder serves as an exception) engage China on a contemporary scale. Such a
historicized and frozen version of China continues to haunt the poetry of Chinese Americans as
well as colors its public reception. Nonetheless, as the previous chapters attest to, the legacy of
including images of Chineseness is a complex tradition with varying shades and levels of
appropriation, mimicry, inspiration, and translation. While Pound’s interests in Chinese history
and culture continue to delineate a certain image of China and accordingly circumscribe Chinese
American poetic production, they also nonetheless demonstrate the very real connections
American poetry evinces to both the language and literature of China.
My purpose throughout this project has been to actualize the conflicting currents set in
motion by the Chinese influence on American poetry. At its base, the foregoing work aims to
reimagine current approaches to modern American poetry so as to more adequately
conceptualize the multiplicity of ways China inflects American poetic production. My intention
in this brief conclusion, then, is to elucidate how my previous arguments may be extended in the
classroom and in future studies to understand and combat stereotypical images of Chineseness.
Especially in our current “wired-in” and globalized society, students and scholars alike are
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finding more and more cross-connections between seemingly unrelated national and cultural
literary products. The profusion of multicultural classes in the wake of the cultural renaissances
of the 1970s and 1980s and the subsequent proliferation of ethnic poems and texts continues to
change the face of American poetry by challenging and widening its very nature. The
culmination of these phenomena indicates that it is not only time for us to reevaluate on a more
transnational scale the means by which authors are selected for canonization but also that is time
for us to reassess our approaches to and understandings of the authors already enshrined there.
This is not to advocate that new critical work can only be done outside the borders of traditional
American criticism. Nor is it to serve an anti-multicultural multiculturalism that assumes if
American works are already inherently multicultural there is no need to reassess the American
canon. Rather, the future of American studies depends upon a both/and approach. Such study
would foreground the resonances suggested by the extensive interactions (both face-to-face and
via texts and translations) of American poets with China while emphasizing the international
impulses of many currently canonized poets. Whereas postcolonial and multicultural studies
have traditionally relied on pinpointing cultural difference in an attempt to right discrimination,
these fields must grow to encompass sites of borrowing and collaboration, not just resistance and
imperialism. A genuine study of the generative possibilities of cross-cultural contact would do
more than repair the broken metaphor of the melting pot; rather than assume the process of
cultural transference always from the majority to the minority, it would actively explore the back
and forth of contact without privileging one group over another thereby engendering a critical
framework that resists Eurocentrism while not over-weighing the importance of other ethnic
traditions.
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The type of comparative study I am encouraging here would likewise take into account
the history of Chinese Americans and confront the way American images of China bolster the
perception of Chinese Americans as foreign and Other. Despite the seeming success of the
multicultural movement, Chinese Americans are often seen in terms of their Chineseness and not
their Americanness. And, while Modernist constructions of Chineseness most often modulated
on the basis of aesthetic ideas about China, these constructions nonetheless operate hand and
hand with stereotypical assumptions predicated on the physical appearances of Chinese
Americans. Though present and participatory in American nation and capital building, they have
long been regarded as foreigners. This identity is reflected in the “nicknames” historically
ascribed to this group; both the “coolies” of the nineteenth century and the “model minority” of
the twentieth connote Asian American difference; while the coolies were externalized as
sojourners, the “model minority” epithet of the twentieth century moves Asian Americans
outside of both dominant American and minority American paradigms alternately settling them
in a limbo between the two groups.75 The daily result of these views has been variously
illustrated by Asian American theorists and writers, each of whom describes his or her own story
of the inevitable “Where do you come from” question. The gist of these stories can be
summarized by my own witnessing of a similar event. Lara, a Stanford educated, American born
Asian American with a prestigious record of American service in both the Peace Corps and
Fulbright programs, is chatting with me about her experience in Mongolia when a bartender asks
her “Hey, where are you from?” Lara replies “California.” Slightly flustered, the bartender asks
again changing his intonation, “no, where are you from?” Lara, understanding his meaning,
sighs and responds, “My parents are from China.” “Ahhh.” As the bartender turns back to his
75
The model minority stereotype also serves to buttress the myth of American equality by suggesting that
minority success is predicated on personal choice and not affected in any way by racism.
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work, Lara and I discuss the issues underlying his question. Lara has no foreign accent, and is
dressed in typical American fashion; however, regardless of her “American” traits, her ethnicity
marks her as foreign, apart from the Euro American mainstream. Ronald Takaki relates a similar
story in the Introduction to Strangers from a Different Shore (3). Thus, regardless of the strides
made in recent years for cultural parity, Asian Americans often still invite unwanted curiosity
and scrutiny about their heritage due to their visible racial difference from Euro Americans.
While current mainstream multicultural76 propaganda such as the image of the melting
pot suggests a dwindling of these views, the growth of China as a national power has resulted in
heightened tensions, and the image of Chinese Americans as “outsiders” has been demonstrated
yet again through a discomfort with their perceived power in American politics. This fact was
unfortunately reified by the National Review’s March 1997 cover which presents President
Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Vice President Al Gore all in caricatured yellow-face to allude to
alleged campaign funding scandals. Though the cartoon itself is scandalous enough – in it both
Clintons possess buck-teeth and slanted, squinting eyes – it is perhaps the response of the
Democratic National Committee to these allegations that fully explores the extent to which Asian
Americans – and Chinese American in particular – continue to be viewed as outside,
inassimilable aliens. In order to satiate the larger demands of the public, the DNC began
contacting contributors with Asian American names and “demand[ed] they verify their status as
citizens or permanent residents” (Lee 4). As Lee explains, Asian Americans who refused to turn
over personal financial information were “threatened” and additionally investigated by the FBI.
Documentation of legal American citizenship did not prove enough for Chinese Americans;
instead, the perceived allegiance of Chinese Americans to their “home” country led investigators
76
By mainstream multiculturalism, I mean the non-critical multiculturalism Stanley Fish critiques in his
essay “Boutique Multiculturalism.”
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and the public at large to believe substantial contributions were gathered from Communist China.
This inability to separate Chinese Americans from Chinese was undergirded by a survey
distributed by the Anti-Defamation League. In the survey, out of “1,216 randomly selected adult
Americans, close to half thought that Chinese Americans “passing secrets to the Chinese
government is a problem” (I. Chang 396).
Though some of the foregoing incidents may seem innocent enough, the continuing
perception of Asian Americans as foreign does not always end in a polite explanation of one’s
family heritage. The labeling of Chinese Americans as “outsiders” forever connected and
allegiant to China regardless of their cultural removal belies an American xenophobia that when
unchecked can manifest itself in potentially harmful ways; the internment of Japanese Americans
after the attack on Pearl Harbor stands as a historic reminder. Racial hate crimes against Asian
Americans continue today, and, interestingly, many of these confrontations arise from Asian
American stereotypes. In 1982, Chinese American Vincent Chin was killed in Detroit in 1982
for being a “jap” who endangered American jobs. Graduate student Lili Wang was murdered in
2002 for refusing the advances of a European American attracted to Asian American women for
their docility and submissiveness. The spy plane incident of April 2001, when a Chinese fighter
pilot collided with an American surveillance plane, further served to fuel Anti-Chinese American
sentiment. Springfield deejays placed crank calls to Chinese Americans and advocated Chinese
restaurants be boycotted while a national talk show host went so far as to propose Chinese
American internment (I. Chang 396). As Iris Chang perceptively notes, such actions signaled to
Chinese Americans that their acceptance “was linked to the ever-shifting relations between the
United States and China rather than to their own particular behavior” (397).
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Despite the expansive corpus of critical literature aimed at correcting such
misperceptions as well as the canon wars and the multicultural movements of the 1980s and
1990s, we have yet to dispel the trenchant and varied stereotypes of “the foreigner within” (Lowe
6). This is due in part to the lack of a sustained critical pedagogy that addresses the issues at
hand in teaching Chinese American literature. As Laurie Grobman points out, we have
“adequately addressed changing the texts we bring to class but inadequately addressed what we
do with those texts in the classroom” (221). Yet, as my discussion of John Yau intimates,
perhaps an “adequate” revision still falls short of moving beyond existing literary paradigms.
Too often, the failure to successfully incorporate a variety of Chinese American texts into
already existing curricula unwittingly reinforces stereotypes. This lack of diverse Chinese
American voices denies the long historical, cultural, and political tenure of these citizens and
gives credence to stereotypical ideas envisioning Chinese Americans as a lately arrived (and
staunchly foreign) immigrant group.
Reevaluating American poetry in more international terms may help address some of
these misperceptions by necessarily interrogating the different images of Chineseness presented
throughout these texts. If both Pound’s idea of China and the images of China produced by
writers like Yau and Harte represent different versions of “Chineseness,” a more accurate picture
which includes the history of immigration of Chinese to America and the establishment of a
diasporic culture alongside Imagism’s mimicry of the initial departure point of this diaspora
needs to be promulgated. Foregrounding the less-confronted and more ambiguous texts
concerning China and Chinese Americans against the currently circulated (mis)understandings of
both manifests a more authentic collage which may enable racial and political parity on the part
of Chinese Americans. In addition, understanding these writers as both extensions of the
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American poetic tradition as well as extensions of other cultural poetic lineages constructs a
vision of modern American poetry that is at once both more cohesive and more diverse. Though
much work has already been done with respect to China and Modernism by authors like Kern
and Qian, many anthologies and critical studies still situate Pound and American Modernism as
largely European American events, effectively glossing over the very real international
exchanges occurring in the early 1900s.77 While some textbooks have begun to address this
lacuna by including a paragraph or two about Modernism’s interaction with China, none situate
this ascendancy sociohistorically so as to question the inconsonance of these poetic borrowings
against a growing Chinese American populace. Tracing how Modernism both participates in the
perpetuation of aesthetic stereotypes through its deployment of images of Chineseness and at the
same time paved the way for Chinese American writers is necessary.
Mobilizing poetic voices that round out the full length and breadth of Chinese American
poetry and paralleling these works against those of writers like Pound invites a fuller image of
the presentation and use of Chineseness in American poetry. For instance, incorporating
comparative teaching tactics that set the poetry of the inmates of Angel Island side by side with
Ezra Pound’s Cathay extends the goals of critical multiculturalism by expanding current
definitions of literature and challenging the parameters by which previous literary standards were
erected. 78 Just as Pound imagined China through his work with Fenollosa and Binyon, these
77
Yunte Huang notes, “most studies of Imagism either ignore its intrinsic cross-culturalism by presenting
a myopic nativist account of this exhilarating episode of America’s transpacific experience or disregard
the significant ethnographic aspect of Imagism, which has much larger cultural implications than the
model of comparative poetics can recognize. They either conceive of Imagism as a modern revolt against
the poetry of the immediate past that took place inside the Anglo-American literary tradition or regard it
merely as an interlingual, aesthetic project devoid of ethnographic contents” (15).
78
As David Palumbo-Liu summarizes, the purpose of critical multiculturalism is “to recover the marks of
historical and ideological contradiction and to map out possible spaces of resistance” (2). Fundamental to
this process is the eschewal of what Anna-Louise Keating calls the “commonsense” idea that “ethnic
identities are permanent, unchanging categories of meaning based on biology, family, history, and
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Chinese immigrants only imagined the U.S. from their internment on Angel Island. Kept from
coming ashore by racist laws, they recorded their imaginings of the U.S. on the walls of the
barracks that confined them. Setting these voices side by side gives agency to these immigrants
as well as posits a deeper lineage of Chinese American poetic writing. In addition, reading these
Chinese language poems as American poetry questions seemingly static terms such as literature,
identity, and nation. Such historical contextualization moves beyond the binary of Said’s
Orientalism and Qian’s liberal pluralism. Rather than casting all borrowings as imperialistic or
uncritically multicultural, the recuperation of the poetic voices of these Chinese Americans
allows for their agency as well as demonstrates the contested texture of such borrowings. The
formal style and juxtapositions in many of the Angel Island poems recalls similar forms in the
works of Snyder and Pound. In addition, presenting the original Chinese poems next to wordfor-word translations invites students to assess both the liberties Pound took with the Chinese
language as well as the beauty and innovation he was able to achieve through his translational
poetics.
Following the intersection of these poetic traditions forward to the work of Marilyn Chin
and John Yau emphasizes the ways in which China – and Modernism’s conception of it –
continues to modulate in American poetics. Chin’s poems confront the images of Chineseness
handed down by Modernism as well as contradict stereotypical renderings. Acting in concert
with much of the prevalent work in Asian American studies, Chin provides a clear understanding
of the difficulties faced by Chinese American poets. In addition, her work confronts and dispels
many of the more stereotypical ideas of Chineseness. Unlike Chin, Yau, a poet admittedly
affected by Pound’s Cathay as well as one with natal ties to China, examines and complicates the
tradition” (96). Instead, critical multiculturalism reveals the interplay and construction of complex hybrid
identities by locating analysis on both the collaboration and conflict inherent in their creation.
201
generative results of Modernism’s dialogue with China. Yau’s poetry, though indebted to Pound,
uses subtle formal nuances to question static representations of identity and the possibility of
unmediated speech. Through his elliptical syntax and distrust of the lyric I, Yau echoes and
extends the experiments of many of the most innovative American poets writing today.
Including both Yau and Chin underscores the hybridity of Chinese American poetic production
while extending and challenging current conceptions of both Chineseness and American poetry.
Such study of the poetic representations of Chineseness from these different angles also
requires expanding our scholarly business to include the literary histories of various other
cultural traditions. As critics like Guiyou Huang, Ming Xie, and Wai-lim Yip have explored,
Pound’s poetics are informed by his study of Chinese language, literature, and culture.
Furthermore, as I discuss in Chapter Three in terms of the Chinese character 新, certain Chinese
ideas and poetics have been passed down to those poets in the Poundian line. Acknowledging
and examining texts such as the Da Xue (大學) as well as the work of poets like Tu Fu (杜
甫)and Li Po (李白) alongside study of American poetry broadens our understanding and
appreciation of a number of poems which allude to these texts. Whereas study of Greek and
Roman literature claims a space in most high school curricula, devoting time to the study of
Chinese texts would suggest additional resonances and invite new readings. Perhaps more
importantly, though, engaging these Asian texts fulfils the tenets of critical multiculturalism by
shifting the parameters generally used to evaluate American poetry. Instead of relying solely on
reading practices informed by European tropes, symbols, and inferences, students would be
asked to include Chinese literary traditions as part of the constitutive framework of current
American poetry.
202
Like Yunte Huang, I believe “literature does its cultural work not only by passively
reflecting social reality but also by actively producing and changing reality” (186 emphasis
mine). As a scholar and teacher, my greatest efficacy lies in shifting and extending canonical
readings of American poetry through broadening the frame by which it is approached. This
project has aimed to do just that; by creating a dialogue between a number of different American
poets, each transformed in some way by Chinese literature, and reading these poets as indicative
of their specific historical moments, my work encourages seeing such a “new reality” of the
embedded nature of Chinese language, literature, and culture in much American poetry as well as
the conflicts and contradictions inherent in these images of Chineseness. Ultimately, I hope my
work has succeeded in complementing the existing canon of literature on China and Modernism
by extending it to assess the ramifications of Modernism’s interest in China on later American
poets and Chinese American poets in particular. While my study has necessarily focused on
Chineseness and modern American poetry, additional studies of both Chinese and other
international influences on the full spectrum of American literature are still needed. I anticipate
future studies will continue my interrogation of the increasing globalization of many countries’
modern textual products and the possibilities of recognizing and confronting, without favoring,
these globalized roots against traditional national-based scholarship. Investigating the interstices
of these lines of inquiry offers a rich future to critical studies.
203
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