Purple Plums in Hollywood

Marilyn Chin’s breakthrough poetry volume, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (2002), is a mean-spirited diasporic bricolage. An omnivorous polyglot, Chin hoovers up influences from John Donne to blues to Li Bai and spits them out as satire, scatology, jaded sideways biography, and acerbic reflections on Chinese-American and bicultural experience. Line by line you never know where you are or who’s going to get kicked in which crotch until they start giggling and/or desecrating whatever tradition happens to be sitting around.

Say: I don’t give a shit about nothing 
‘xcept my cat, your cock and poetry….

        Say: to Maui   to Maui   to Maui
creeps in his petty pompadour…

Say: I have seen the small men of my generation
        rabid, discrete, hysterical, lilliput, naked.

That’s a series of rapid-fire quotations from the title poem in which Chin declares her dedication to muses of various horniness, sends Shakespeare to Hawaii, and castrates Allen Ginsburg. That’s all as part of a parody of the long Chinese fu form “characterized,” she explains in a note, “by long poetic exposition.”

Poetry focused on immigrant identity often adopts confessional tropes and an earnest approach to the problem of staying true to one’s roots while creating a new life or a new vision—as in the lovely, father-obsessed, Rilkean work of Li-Young Lee, probably the best-known Chinese-American poet of the Baby Boomer generation. Chin, in contrast, is scathingly cynical about both past traditions and future possibilities.

“The True Story of Mr. and Mrs. Wong” starts as a fable, (“Mrs. Wong bore Mr. Wong four children, all girls./One after the other, they dropped out like purple plums.”) But then it quickly takes a left turn from the crass patriarchy of the old homeland to the crass patriarchy of the new, as Mr. Wong throws a tantrum because he has no sons. And…

So, in the next two years he quickly married three girls off to a missionary,
a shell-shocked ex-Marine and an anthropologist. They youngest ran away
to Hollywood and became a successful sound specialist.

Mr. Wong’s eager embrace of Western banality and success is matched and mirrored by the white US appropriation of a supposed Eastern spirituality. (From “Summer Sonatina.”)

Some American poet said to me, The Haiku is dead.
I thought, pink and swollen, something sad about his body.

The American believes he has authority over eastern forms because of superior intellect. Chin (who speaks Japanese as well as Chinese and English) responds not by refuting him logically, but mocking his pink, pale embodiment—the pink, pale embodiment which he thinks gives him the right to pass judgment on less pale people.

Like the New York School (not least John Yau Chinese-American peer John Yau), Chin glories in different registers of language—running away to Hollywood from those dangling poetic purple plums; turning a clichéd critical default about the haiku into a haiku itself (count the syllables in the italicized words in that couplet). Her social commentary, though, is more direct than you generally find in Ashbery or O’Hara, and her relationship to form and tradition is more personal. When she picks up a sonnet or a Chinese quatrain, it’s not just a fun container to fill, but a room to live in and a prison to claw her way out of.

One of the best examples is her brilliant poem “Get Rid of the X,” an adaptation of Li Bai’s “Drinking with the Moon” which turns the old man’s drunken waltz in moonlight into a pregnancy scare which is also a meditation on what a Chinese-American woman carries with her from the patriarchal past and what she might give birth to. Another is the opening poem, “Blues on Yellow,” which is a gracefully messy effort to assimilate into an American tradition of pain and refusal to assimilate. (Italics in the original.)

Something’s cookin’ in Chin’s kitchen, ten thousand yellow-bellied sapsuckers baked in a pie. 
Something’s cookin’ in Chin’s kitchen, ten thousand yellow-bellied sapsuckers baked in a pie. 
Something’s cookin in Chin’s kitchen, die die yellow bird, die die…

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

Teaching Asian (not bound) toes to fight and sing the blues is an image that nicely sums up Chin’s poetry of mis-matched and virtuosic combat. That combat is sometimes powered by rage—against prejudice, condescension, cupidity and stupidity. But (as the title suggests) Rhapsody in Plain Yellow also channels joy. Being in the middle or in diaspora can mean skepticism about where you’re from and where you’re going. But it’s also an opportunity for Chin to celebrate her command of so many different traditions, and demonstrate the sharpness of her pen, which allows her to cut all those forms into a pompadour which creeps the way no pompadour has ever creeped before.