The New Anthology of American Poetry: Vol. III: Postmodernisms 1950-Present

MARILYN CHIN

486 MARILYN CHIN b. 1955 Calling herself a “chinese-american poet,” marilyn chin has said that her poetry “both laments and celebrates my ‘hyphenated’ identity.” “How I Got That Name,” for example, tells how her father changed her name from “Mei Ling” to “Marilyn,” for the iconic American movie star Marilyn Monroe. In her witty, sometimes sardonic poems, she presents identity as mobilized, dynamic, and a subject of wonderment and humor. She employs her ironic perspective on both personal and cultural stories, which tend to overlap and merge in her texts. Chin was born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. She received her B.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. She is now a professor at San Diego State University, where she codirects the M.F.A. program. She has published four books of her own poetry and has translated poems from Chinese and Japanese. Although humorous and unpretentious, Chin’s poetry is fundamentally serious . Considering the question “What is American about American poetry?,” she has written that her work “is seeped with the themes and travails of exile, loss and assimilation.” It includes “a delicate and apocalyptic melding of east and west,” as she mixes a variety of dialects and dictions, preserving both halves of her Chinese-American identity while at the same time asking what it means to have a global consciousness. Influenced by the work of feminist poet Adrienne Rich, Chin’s poems reflect the viewpoint of a woman struggling to maintain her independence and sanity in a society with which she is frequently at odds. As a “hyphenated American poet,” Chin seeks “to hammer the rich virtues and contradictions of my adopted country into a fusionist’s delight.” further reading Marilyn Chin. The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1994. — — — —. Rhapsody in Plain Yellow. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002. — — — —. “What is American about American Poetry?” Poetry Society of America website, www .poetrysociety.org/chin.html. Catherine Cucinella. “Marilyn Chin.” In Contemporary American Women Poets: An A-to-Z Guide, ed. Catherine Cucinella, 55–60. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. — — — —. Poetics of the Body: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Marilyn Chin, and Marilyn Hacker. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Bill Moyers. “Marilyn Chin.” In The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets, 67–80. New York: Doubleday, 1995. How I Got That Name Ø 487 1. Island in San Francisco Bay where about one million Asian-American immigrants were registered and/or detained on their journey to the United States between 1910 and 1940. Chin’s father could not literally have passed through this immigration center (now a California state park), because it was closed in 1940. 2. Chinese immigrants using false papers to claim that they were sons of American citizens. The practice resulted from the discriminatory Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was repealed in 1943, more than a decade before Chin’s father immigrated to the United States. 3. Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962), a celebrated Hollywood movie actress who died from an overdose of the sleeping pill Nembutal. How I Got That Name an essay on assimilation I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin. Oh, how I love the resoluteness of that first person singular followed by that stalwart indicative of “be,” without the uncertain i-n-g of “becoming.” Of course, the name had been changed somewhere between Angel Island1 and the sea, when my father the paperson2 in the late 1950s obsessed with a bombshell blonde3 transliterated “Mei Ling” to “Marilyn.” And nobody dared question his initial impulse—for we all know lust drove men to greatness, not goodness, not decency. And there I was, a wayward pink baby, named after some tragic white woman swollen with gin and Nembutal. My mother couldn’t pronounce the “r.” She dubbed me “Numba one female offshoot” for brevity: henceforth, she will live and die in sublime ignorance, flanked by loving children and the “kitchen deity.” While my father dithers, a tomcat in Hong Kong trash— a gambler, a petty thug, who bought a chain of chopsuey joints in Piss River, Oregon, with bootlegged Gucci cash. Nobody dared question his integrity given Ø Marilyn Chin 488 4. A reference to William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.” 5. Soap opera on American television (1984–93). 6. See John Berryman’s Dream Song 14: “I conclude now...