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Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity

2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.49.4.0630

1528-4212

Josephine Park,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Steven G. Yao begins Foreign Accents by noting the “curiously bifurcated” place of Asian American poetry: it is “situated simultaneously as the most demotic and the most arcane form of literary expression by Asian Americans”(11). Delving into this conflicted site, Yao traces Chinese American poetry from the Chinese characters carved into the walls of the Angel Island detention center to John Yau's recondite and playful verse. Between the “most demotic” collaborative efforts of poorly educated migrants and the “most arcane” oblique parodies of an Asian American heir to language poetry, Yao uncovers a series of formal strategies for bringing Chinese writing into the looming orbit of English. The introduction presents a taxonomy of such strategies, which mark gradations of contact between the languages, and Foreign Accents is ultimately an exploration of the formal effects of this contact.Through his fluent comprehension of Chinese writing and poetics, Yao redresses a significant lacuna in the small but growing body of scholarship in Asian American poetry: the effect of heritage linguistic and literary traditions. Foreign Accents reads the play of Chinese in English, from the near complete absorption of the foreign language into the hegemonic one to the disruptive properties of Chinese—and even to its potential to reshape English. In reading this linguistic register as a metonym for the political and cultural struggles of Asians in the United States, Yao offers a critical mode for examining the process of racialization. As he explains in the introduction, the concept of racial formation in the United States elaborated by sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant has become the standard means of understanding racial difference in Asian American literary study—but little attention has been paid to the process itself. Foreign Accents contends that we may observe the precise unfolding of the process of racial formation by paying attention to poetry, which lays bare these forms. Thus, by tracing the linguistic interplay of Chinese and English, we may witness the formation of racial and ethnic difference; and Yao has chosen four signal poets to mark out a political spectrum from reifying to destabilizing the hegemony of English.Before he gets to his four contemporary case studies, however, Yao presents two divergent foundations for Chinese American poetry: Ezra Pound's famous translations of Tang Dynasty poems and the Angel Island poems. Yao dubs Pound's Cathay a “prehistory”(51) for Chinese American poetry, and his analysis of this well-trodden terrain neatly reframes this canonical text as “the establishment of a veritable grammar for the very idea of Chinese emotion in English”(55, emphasis in original). Yao reminds us that Cathay (published in the United States in 1917) emerged at a time when Chinese were popularly thought to be insensate, incapable of individual feeling. Pound's poignant Chinese voices spoke against the dark fantasy of the Asiatic horde, but Yao cogently notes that these literary acts of individuation also domesticated Chinese identity, putting in place a formal mode of assimilationist politics in which English effortlessly folds in Chinese. While Pound was mining classical Chinese verse, Chinese migrants were chiseling their feelings—composed into classical verse forms—into the walls of their detention center (which operated from 1910 to 1940). The famous high modernist and the anonymous migrant both presented individual feeling through classical literary form, but the poems on the walls invoke a performative and collaborative dimension that Yao likens to another contemporary art form, jazz. Yao's suggestion of the formal possibilities opened up by jazz momentarily launches a performative genealogy detached from the rest of the study—a gesture that reveals the generative possibilities of the Angel Island poems, which become newly strange in Yao's reading. Yao does not insist on perfectly matching or opposing Cathay to the Angel Island poems, and following these two chapters is an interchapter that briefly elaborates the midcentury fashioning of multiculturalism as a hinge between his foundational readings and his late-century case studies.The case studies are remarkable for their close attention to form and their expansive comprehension of the sweep of each poet's oeuvre. The four readings do not hew to chronology or theme; instead, Yao has ordered them in terms of a progression from assimilationist to indeterminant poetics. We begin with something of a surprise: Ha Jin, better known as a novelist, whose adult migration to the United States and thematic focus on China sets him apart from the contours of Asian American literature, which has typically presented the experience of the second generation within the United States. Yao's discussion of Pound pays off in his close reading of Jin's verse: Jin's poetry knowingly echoes Cathay, and Yao convincingly demonstrates that Jin's verse “affirms dominant liberal notions about Chinese culture and identity”(134). Yao traces Jin's anticommunist critique of China into the forms of his poetry, which abets the liberal cultural stance of the American mainstream. From Jin's accommodating verse, Yao moves to his second case, Li-young Lee, whose romantic verse Yao reads as a “triumphalist narrative of integration”(149). If Jin offers a quiet affirmation of dominant modes of incorporation, Lee presents a near apotheosis of assimilation: Yao critiques Lee for his predictable aspiration to transcend ethnic difference, through which Yao illustrates the severe political limitations of “lyric testimony”—Yao's useful term for the dominant mode of Asian American poetics derived from Poundian innovation.If the first two case studies present hardening limits, the last two open possibilities. Marilyn Chin and John Yau offer differing modes of “contesting the tacit assimilationist formal politics”(216) on display in the poetry of Ha Jin and Li-young Lee: Chin's poetry ventures to reshape English through “the distinctive structure of her heritage language”(228); Yau's erodes the boundary between English and Chinese altogether, revealing the volatility of ethnic identity. Yao notes that both poets have been neglected by the literary establishment, and it is his focus on Marilyn Chin that provides the most welcome corrective in Foreign Accents. John Yau is presently an elder statesman—albeit minor—of avant-garde poetics, but Chin falls into the gap between the elite scholarly attention given to Yau and the mainstream literary appreciation enjoyed by Li-young Lee. Yao's reading of Chin is an impassioned call to rediscover her work, which, as Yao convincingly argues, features a wealth of Chinese history and literature in an array of formal strategies. Over the course of his readings, Yao identifies three different modes for Asian American poetry: the “racial protest” exemplified in the Angel Island poems, “lyric testimony” as demonstrated by Ha Jin and Li-young Lee, and John Yau's conceptual play, which Yao terms “ethnic abstraction.” For Yao, Chin's achievement is to have “developed an approach to setting forth a counterpoetics of ethnic Chinese difference that manages to unite the most distinctive features from all three principal modes of Asian American poetic expression, supplementing the focus on personal affect of lyric testimony with both the oppositional political engagement of racial protest and the subversive conceptual interrogations of ethnic abstraction” (204). In Yao's appreciation of Marilyn Chin, we see the efficacy of his taxonomy, which registers the nuance and significance of poetic form.The sustained analyses that unfold in Foreign Accents present a critical framework for teasing out the precise operations of ethnic expression. Yao balances his close attention to poetic form with a clear elaboration of the political stakes of Asian American poetics, and his study ably demonstrates the critical possibilities of a comparative, multilingual approach to minority American writing.