Forms of Asian Americanness in Contemporary Poetry

There is a curious scene in Scott Derrickson’s 2008 remake of the sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still in which issues of race, foreignness, linguistic difference, and the extraterrestrial entangle. The newly arrived alien Klaatu (played by Keanu Reeves) visits a McDonald’s restaurant in human guise to meet alien sleeper agent Mr. Wu (played by James Hong). The conversation begins in Mandarin as the aliens discuss humans’ destructive and stubborn nature; they decide that their mission to save the planet by exterminating humanity should proceed. “Any attempt to intercede would be futile,” says Wu, who has been living on Earth for seventy years; “they won’t change.” The dialogue shifts into English as Wu announces—against Klaatu’s protestation—that he prefers to remain on Earth and die, as he has come to love humanity despite its shortcomings. The racial and linguistic coding of the scene is unmistakable: for Wu and Klaatu, who are phenotypically legible as Asian and Eurasian, Chinese is the uncompromising and bellicose language of alterity, while English, as a discursive medium for reflective, even poetic, sensitivity, humanizes them. “Human life is difficult. But as this life is coming to an end, I consider myself lucky to have lived it,” says Wu in his final lines of the scene.¹

Derrickson’s film underscores the fact that Asianness in America, whether manifested racially or linguistically, has been, and still is, associated with the threatening, radically distant, or duplicitous, a point that recurs throughout Dorothy J. Wang’s important book Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry. For Wang, Asian Americans are “constitutively and immutably ‘alien’ racialized subjects” (xix), a social reality which has had an enormous impact on Asian American poetic production not only in terms of subject matter but—and this is the major contribution of Wang’s book—on the level of form. Wang argues, “How . . . an Asian American poet situate[s] herself in an Anglo-American poetic tradition when she is marked as constitutively alien and unassimilable and excluded from the category of ‘native speaker’” (26) “surface[s] as much in the formal structures as in the thematic content” of her poems (27). Wang’s approach, which understands the effects of race in canny and complex ways, reinvigorates a field that suffers from a “treble marginalization” (49): within U.S. minority literatures, Asian American literature is not as institutionally robust or respected as African American literature, and within Asian American literature, fiction is the privileged genre (the first monograph on Asian American poetry, Xiaojing Zhou’s The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry, didn’t appear until 2006).² Moreover, Wang seeks to go beyond internecine skirmishes that pit against one another “‘bad’ ethnic poetry (autobiographical, identity-based) and ‘good’ poetry (formally experimental) that just happens to be written by a person of color” (31).

The scope and sophistication of Wang’s argument is borne out by the way she reads a stylistically ecumenical corpus against the grain as she demonstrates that interpreters of mainstream Asian American poetry needn’t limit themselves to thematic readings, and that critics of experimental work needn’t elide race when analyzing what may appear to be “purely” formal concerns. For example, Wang suggests that race meaningfully enters Li-Young Lee’s poetry not just in conspicuous, ethnically marked content or his “pursuit of certain Chinese ideas, or Chinese memories”—to quote Gerald Stern’s introduction to Lee’s debut book, Rose³—but in his employment of metaphor, whose structural logic “is not only similar to but isomorphically captures the structural logic governing social and psychic processes this particular Chinese American poet has been subject to and has grappled with” (57). In other words, one can track the way Lee works through the difficulties of immigration and assimilation by heeding his practice of metaphor, which significantly evolves from Rose to his second book...