Interview with Marilyn Chin

Marilyn Chin has been inventing a literature of Pacific Rim cultural assimilation, resistance, and hybridization throughout a distinguished career as one of the leading authors of her generation, but perhaps never more so than in her genre-bending first novel, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen (2009). Always a prolific experimenter, Chin here constructs a new kind of pastiche fiction, a feminist magical realism built from both ancient Chinese erotic ghost tales and contemporary Asian and American (manga, kung fu) character concepts, spun through narrative modes ranging from Buddhist tales and Zen texts to other Chinese folktales, animal fables, and revenge tales—all within an overarching picaresque. Through the multiplicity and open-endedness of this hybrid genre, Chin finds a formal and tonal equivalent to the assimilative tensions and disequilibria lived out by her characters, featuring especially her decadent, precocious, part-superhero twin Southern California protagonists, Moonie and Mei Ling in Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, and the novel’s anchor, their “cleaver-wielding” (53) family matriarch, Grandma Wong. In the Mark Twain mode of culturally explosive comic novels, Chin’s characters struggle with psychologically brutal forms of exile, racism, and sexism—all within the context of multiple patriarchies, absurd generation gaps, and the equally unsettling vagaries of new world decadence.

Born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon, Chin has created poetry collections that are Asian American classics, featured in numerous anthologies—including The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (1985), The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2003), Anthology of Modern American Poetry (1999), Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry (1994), and The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America (1993). She was also featured in Bill Moyers’s PBS series and companion anthology, The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets (1995). Throughout Chin’s career as a writer—starting with Dwarf Bamboo (1987) and especially with the publication of her second and third poetry collections, The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty (1994) and Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (2002)—Chin has steadily gained a reputation for artistic range and accomplishment: for hybrid forms that draw from both Chinese and Western poetic traditions, for a voice that moves from tenderness to searing irony, and for her elegant and eloquent subversion. Chin’s is not a poetry satisfied with standard forms of lament, homage, or irony (although each tone is foregrounded). Rather, she conjures an overarching tone of satiation and determination—less the groan under empire, more the yawp of a fierce resistance—for her mother, her grandmother, and her soul. Multiple exiles (political, cultural, familial, and linguistic) haunt Chin’s poems and her new novel; all in turn shimmer with original and potent voicings. In Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, Chin’s vision remains edgy-feminist, often sobering, yet formally and tonally dizzying and ebullient, again marked by a range that can at once ennoble her subjects with high lament or pierce them with searing irony or raucous parody.

Always a fan, but now captivated by her switch to tale spinning and this new penchant for comedy, in the summer of 2009, I spoke with Marilyn Chin about Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, including its manuscript history and the evolution of the novel’s characters and experimental form; its use of parody and other comic elements; and its literary, political, and feminist roots and contexts. We also spoke about that most basic context of all: what is a poet doing writing fiction, anyway?¹

Ken Weisner:

Marilyn, there’s much we want to ask you about your genre-bending debut novel, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen. Since the book was ten years in the making, first of all, congratulations on the persistence and daring that brought you, an accomplished poet, to undertake an experimental novel. You call Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen a novel. Did you always think of it that way? Tell us a little bit about how the book came into being.

Marilyn Chin:

I began with one tale, “Moon,” which was published in an anthology called Charlie Chan is Dead [1993]. Then, I started to build pieces and characters around...