The Bay Area's Hub for Asian Pacific American Community Arts Since 1972

Many of your poems circulate around your relationship with your body; this relationship takes on a heightened meaning when considering your background in slam poetry, in which the body is an embodiment of the poem. Can you talk about the body in performance and in your writing? Do you have a different relationship to your body when writing and when performing?

 

As a younger person, I always felt uncomfortable in my body; it was too skinny, too bony, not curvy enough to be beautiful. My nose and jaw and eyes were too Chinese to be attractive in a white supremacist society. I think this discomfort was heightened by the fact that I was very shy and very awkward. I wasn’t comfortable using my voice or taking up physical space. Writing and performing allowed me to reclaim my body from the various untruths I had internalized about it.

 

Through writing, I was able to name not only my insecurities about my body, but their sources. I found a way to rebuke every racist cat call or comment from a classmate or advertisement that had made me feel small. Through performing, I learned how to use my voice and body to act as a conduit for the story. I was lucky to have slam coaches who taught me to how to root myself on a stage, to project my voice and enunciate, to make gestures that enhance the meaning of the performance--and this newfound confidence on stage carried over into other areas of my life. Learning to write and perform simultaneously taught me to how become more grounded in my body.

 

The theme of APAture this year is "Here." Can you talk about the places you write about, and what it means for you to say that you're "here," in the Bay Area, and in Oakland in particular?

 

I was born in Berkeley and grew up in Oakland and haven’t lived outside of those places my whole life. Growing up, I had a deep desire to tell stories about Oakland. Most representations in the media only focused on crime and violence and perpetuating negative stereotypes of Black and Brown folks. I wanted to challenge that narrative, to write stories that celebrated the resilient and resourceful folks, the culture-makers and change agents around me who taught me how to love and to be in community.

 

I think, now, that’s become much more complicated. The massive gentrification in the Bay over the past decade has made the beautiful things about Oakland commodities, attractions for new, wealthier, whiter folks to move here and displace the working class Black and Brown people who’ve made the city what it is today. My own position, too, is complicated. As someone who grew up upper middle class, who has a university job, I have the privilege of being able to stay despite the tide of rising rent; I can easily buy into and support the economy that’s displacing working class people of color. I think being “here,” now, as an artist, not only means the necessity of writing to highlight the deepening racial and economic inequity around me, but supporting efforts led by and centering the folks most impacted by gentrification. That might look like supporting grassroots efforts to fight displacement, or helping facilitate spaces where folks can critique and heal and thrive. I see my work as an educator as one way of doing that--supporting other writers to develop their voices--and my work with a really great group of folks organizing The Root Slam, a new biweekly poetry venue that seeks to center those voices, as part of that mission.

 

In "Translation," you write "I had a dream the other night / that in a house with white walls / and wood floors that wasn't ours / in perfect english / you told me to go upstairs." This is the sort of translation that occurs often in your work: finding ways to read silence, lack, ghosts, dreams. Can you say more about these kinds of reading, and how you see translation in your work?

 

The idea of translation is ironic because I grew up monolingual, only speaking English. My parents were 2nd generation Chinese Americans, born and raised in California. While they grew up speaking Szeyup, our dialect of Chinese, due to time and the pressures of assimilation, they were not able to pass it on to me. As such, there were a lot of times when I, as a child, would be with my dad’s parents, who more or less only spoke Szeyup--and I would be incredibly bewildered or uncomfortable because I could not understand what they thought I should comprehend. When I was older, I had a lot of regret and guilt for not being able to communicate with them before they passed. I would go to Chinatown with my parents and feel a lot of embarrassment and shame if someone would ask me a question or speak to me in Chinese and I wouldn’t be able to understand. Much of my early writing worked to reconcile and understand these feelings--and then, eventually, to honor the things I do understand. These are sometimes words or phrases or snippets of Chinese; they are sometimes also making meaning of gesture and nonverbal communication, from dreams of my grandparents (which the excerpt you quoted refers to), to eating with family, to what’s been lost itself. I seek to translate and preserve what I do know, to record what remains.

 

You have this line "China / is a feeling I don't have the words for" in your last poem, "Letter to My Unborn Children." When I read this poem, I am intrigued by how China becomes a feeling, because identity is then allowed to becoming a feeling as well: the feeling of drinking soup, the feeling of coming home, the feeling of being named. What do you think about this, and do you think this theme is showing up in other places in your work?

 

I think that cultural identity cannot be distilled to a feeling alone, as perhaps Rachel Dolezal would have it; I think it’s a combination of historical memory, of how you are read and move in the world, as well as the feeling and sense of belonging that can be created by ritual. In that poem, I was struggling with comments from folks who deemed me not Chinese enough. As such, it was important for me to affirm that what I did know or feel was enough. I may not speak my ancestors’ language, I don’t know certain cultural cues or traditions as well as many Chinese Americans, but I do know the feeling of drinking tang yuan with family the way my grandfather made it, or the warmth when someone calls me by my Chinese name. For me, that’s what I mean by “feeling”: for those of us who have felt alienated by a community we identify with, or don’t fit into a hegemonic idea of who belongs in that group, there are ways we still know and can claim belonging. A lot of my more recent work seeks to record and honor those particular rituals and intangibles, from the love that’s passed down through family recipes, to the voices of ancestors, to creating new mythology from snippets of family stories.

 

In "Blenders," there's a refrain of "this time / I promise I will love myself," and then the poem becomes a loving declaration of "Jade Cho of the Town / the Land of Oaks," and "Jade Cho of Toisan / the Chinese backward countryside," before turning again to "It's easier to love myself in metaphor than fact." Can you speak more about the idea of loving through writing? And do you think that learning to love yourself in metaphor is ever a step toward learning to love in fact?

I went through a long process of seeking to love myself through writing. As a youth poet, my first work began by naming the biggest sources of shame, of silence, of hurt I had felt growing up--and for me, that centered around my body and my relationship with language. Through many drafts and revisions and pointed feedback from mentors, I eventually moved from describing the shame to speaking back to the people and places that had made me feel that way, to then affirming myself and those parts of me that I had struggled to love. And I suppose in that way the poems became like incantations. The more I read and performed them, the more people heard and received and resonated with them, the more I began to heal and become closer to actually loving myself. And so I do think that creating metaphor, or the act of writing what we know and hope and want to be felt, can have reverberations beyond the page. Even if I don’t always feel like “goddess of the black river hair,” that’s an affirmation that I can come back to in times where I need to remind myself of my power. I think all of us can write what we want to see about ourselves and the world around us, and in the process, begin to actualize it in real life.