Of Flesh & Spirit (review)

Of Flesh & Spirit, a collection of new poems by Shanghai-born poet and novelist Wang Ping, is filled with the mutilation of the flesh and spirit of women by husbands, mothers-in-law, language, and ideology. These poems are by turns angry, strident, mournful, and earthy. Wang Ping is a fearless poet, unafraid to give offense and uninterested in creating cool, clean surfaces of language; she prefers questioning, recovering, screaming.

One of the most prominent images in Of Flesh & Spirit is that of the bound and mutilated feet of aristocratic Chinese women. For her, bound feet are a metaphor for repressed sexuality. In the title work, a prose poem, she proclaims her ridicule: “For a thousand years, women’s bound feet were the most beautiful and erotic objects for Chinese. Tits and asses were nothing compared to a pair of three-inch ‘golden lotuses.’ They must have been crazy or had problems with their noses. My grandma’s feet, wrapped day and night in layers of bandages, smelled like rotten fish.”

Remembering what happened to the women in her family is Wang’s central theme. In “Female Marriage” she writes, “I think of what happened to my grandmothers, what’s happening to my mother and my sister, all those years of not knowing where or who they are. I’m not taking that road. But the only way to help is to think back through my grandmothers and my mother.” At the heart of the book is the ten-page poem “What Are You Still Angry About,” in which Wang creates a maternal genealogy with verse, prose, and lists. The poem loops back from her mother to her great-great-great-great-grandmother and then forward to herself and her sisters so that “the names of my female ancestors [won’t] just vanish like tadpole tails.” She describes how her maternal grandmother, Chen Duoni (duo means “extra”; ni, “girl”), indentured herself as a laborer to a textile factory so that her baby sister wouldn’t go the way of the previous five girls: death by drowning in a chamber pot. And she tells us that her great-great-grandmother, Wu Hehua, was sold into marriage at age five and had her bound feet reset by her mother-in-law: each toe was pulled straight, then bent back further towards the arches.

Wang is at her best when her poems approach memoir, when she uses her anger as a tool to recover the missing pieces of her family history. Often, this anger causes her to dwell on the harshness of women’s lives. In “Female Marriage,” she lists the proverbs and curses that the Chinese have for women—like “cheap stuff” and “losing money commodity”—and tells us that in Chinese the word for woman, nu, means “slave.” In “Resurrection,” she writes to her grandmother’s ghost: “Do not wave your bandages at me. My feet have grown as hard as white poplars in our native town. I’ll make a pair of wings with them, to carry your soul into spring, into the forest and grass, into a world without memory. Be a bird, a bee, or even a fly. Just to live again, with joy.” “In Touch with America” describes her relationship with her mother: “Each day I run to my mailbox to see if my mother has written to me./When a letter arrives, I leave it unopened for weeks on my desk.” The women Wang writes about, including herself, are brutalized, so she creates a community of survivors by giving them a voice.

Wang’s concern for those without names and voices extends beyond her own family and gender. “Song of Calling Souls,” for example, is about a group of Chinese illegal immigrants who died when their ship, The Golden Venture, sank off the coast of New Jersey. In the poem, the dead plead to be remembered:

Please, oh please   call our names     Chen Xinhan, Zhen Shimin even if you can’t say them right     Lin Guoshi, Chen Daie even...