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Victoria Chang Mega-Post
Nov. 12th, 2008 04:58 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
stephenhongsohn.livejournal.comVictoria Chang Mega-Post
I primarily know of Victoria Chang through the introduction to one of the most recent Asian American poetry anthologies, a polemically structured work that delineated generational lines between earlier activist-centered poets and the generation currently producing many of the newest poetry collections, many of which I have been reviewing on this blog. In this Victoria Chang mega-post, I review Circle (2005, Southern Illinois University Press) and Salvinia Molesta (2008, University of Georgia Press). One of the interesting tidbits about Chang’s background is that she holds an MBA degree and one can see how this educational and professional trajectory influences her work.
The title of Chang’s first work clearly articulates one of the lyric goals of the entire collection, which “revolves” around various poems that together formulate a figurative geometry. The first section, “On Quitting,” certainly mobilizes this geometry in considering the intricacies in various relationships, often romantic in nature. One poem that demonstrates this circularity is “KitchenAid Epicurean Sand Mixer,” which is partly reprinted here:
KitchenAids still line the shelves at Williams-Sonoma
In military formations on her thirty-third birthday.
Their smooth bodies feel like butterfat,
Curves covered with enamel, boasting form and function.
Her eyes meet the hunter green one in the middle,
Everything she’s wanted in life in this box,
Never imagined she would not be married by now,
And still living with a roommate in a flat,
Intimate with a new man every weigh months,
Dancing in circles, spinning round and round (17).
The inventiveness of this poem lies partly in seeing that the first letter of each line corresponds to another lyric that moves vertically down the page, written out as “A Good Housewife Has a KitchenAid,” with the KitchenAid portion shown here. Of course, there is a sense of domestic expectations for the lyric speaker here, who finds her life “dancing in circles, spinning round and round,” but many of the lyric characters who appear throughout “On Quitting” are suffering some sort of challenge in their lives. The images here are ones of contradiction, where even as the KitchenAids are “smooth… like butterfat,” they nevertheless appear in “military formations” and “boasting form and function.” There is the sense of a genuine disconnect between her life and the one she idealized and it is this emptiness that pervades the poem.
In “Five Year Plan,” Chang highlights the more transnational nature of her poetics, where some poems reference immigration, Asian American identity, and Chinese history, and the ways in which these various rubrics might be seen to function in tandem or in collision with each other. In the opening lines, the lyric speaker considers what it means to be a Chinese American woman:
A good Chinese American housewife has a five-year plan.
It’s strategic, sparse,
menacing. It stutters at nothing, a tin present tense, perhaps
a new VCR
in two years. A good Chinese American daughter washes
windows and retains
curvatures. And when I revise my five-year plan
to exclude window-
washing, to include speaker of the house in two years, in four,
maybe president (28).
This poem extends more largely Chang’s concern for the position and experiences that women have in contemporary life. Here, the lyric speaker upends the desire for certain legitimate trajectories. In this respect, the poem already dialogues with the “A Good Housewife Has A KitchenAid,” by the more active resistance suggested by this speaker who “revises” the five year-plan and expands her ambitions to include major governmental positions. Whether or not such possibilities are likely is not the concern, but rather to de-stabilize the expectation that the Chinese American housewife should be expected to wash windows. The reference to the five year plan also has other potential resonances, especially as these are commonly employed in governments as reform measures, with five-year plans being particularly employed in Chinese communist governmental policies. Such a conflation is welcomed by Chang’s Circle as the collection can and does move transnationally and through different temporalities. The first poem in “Limits,” entitled “Lantern Festival,” takes on the atrocities that occurred during the “rape of Nanking”:
Some hang like accordions, honoring the arrival of a newborn,
others hang still like moons,
red ones line up in a row on a metal thread over scents
of sticky rice balls smoking in soup,
round ones glow in the wind, sockets firing up
one after another.
No! I am wrong, the round ones lash in the wind:
they are human heads, gutted and plucked from bodies that were
sipping stalks of choy sum, or
excavating daikon, or stabbing fish in the river, or trimming
pork loins for evening porridge.
And they hang in a row for decoration, foreheads bumping
into each other,
glowing like a galaxy of holiday lights, honoring
the arrival of the new,
that always, always turns into the next target,
the minute it is named (47).
This poem is particularly gruesome as it begins with the promise of another generation in comparing what seem to be lanterns to “accordions,” an ambience of merriment amid festivals. The turn that appears in the fourth stanza re-orients and disorients the reader as well as the lyric speaker who comes to realize that these hanging lanterns are actually human bodies. The future is not simply terminated by the presence of so many dead. Instead, these severed heads mark the reproductive cycles of violence, “that always, always turns into the next target, the minute it is named.”
In Salvinia Molesta, Chang continues some of the themes made apparent in Circle. For instance, she investigates the tragic death of scholar and journalist, Iris Chang, author of Rape of Nanking, who committed suicide before the completion of her book that was to be on the Bataan Death March. Prior to her death, she had been experiencing significant psychological problems, but none that necessarily prefigured her early demise. Chang’s “Ode to Iris Chang” honors Iris Chang’s life and continues an archival lyric depicting the incredibly savage Nanking massacre. This particular approach grants Chang a larger space to consider Japan’s imperial and colonial campaigns during the early 20th century that included it’s the Sino-Japanese War as well as the colonial occupation of Korea. “Bindweeds” considers the ways in which historians are complict with problematic versions of the past:
A Japanese historian
hunches over his desk,
prints characters on warm paper
about rising buildings,
new postures of steel,
invention of the rice cooker.
He leaves out the soldiers
who had paid a fee, obtained
a ticket and a condom,
who had been led to a space
partitioned with sheets—
a pillow, a tatami mat,
a Korean woman (17).
Here, there is the immediate sense of historical revisionism, at least in the sense that there is not a multiperspectivalism that generates the problematic valences of Japan’s past. The lyrics underscore how the historian sees fit to draw Japan through its heroisms and its various modernities, where “invention” and new buildings overtake any references to Korean comfort women, sexual slaves for the Japanese army. What other “inventions” the lyrics seem to suggest exist beyond technological innovation. How then might history be considered an “invention” and what then does it erase. It is the first section that moves most transnationally to consider this question, as Chang moves on to also re-envision the 2-28 Massacre that occurred following the KMT’s occupation of Taiwan.
In “Union,” Chang returns to lyric considerations of the Nanjing massacre. In this case, the lyric speaker considers the ways in which her scholarly study of the event and her research collide against her own reality:
Red-lidded, I have been here for hours,
old books smell of wood with flattened
moths. Pictures of Chinese hung by
their tongues. Bodies heaped into one
another—a man’s head, another’s arms,
a woman’s white legs. Munch’s lovers
kissing so hard, their faces fatten into one.
My stack of dollar books, the cash register
opening like a tongue stuck out, the old
one-armed man at the desk, his glasses that
have begun to drowse—what it must be like
to hug him, how his one good arm and
my right one might circle our bodies, how
they might shiver, form a perfect set (19).
One is reminded of “Lantern festival” here, but Chang is more deliberate in situating the lyric speaker’s own reaction to visually gruesome photographs. In the process of an aestheticization of violence, “Union” seems to consider the impact of such historical events on one’s reality. In this case, the speaker imagines her place in what seems to be a used bookstore in relation to the cashier. Their connection to each other is placed in a grotesque comparison to the dead from the Nanjing massacre, so one reads the last lines dubiously, “how/ they might shiver, form a perfect set.” It would seem that the word “shiver” is the “tell” here in challenging the so-called perfection of the titular union. But, more largely then, if individuals are so easily melded together, there is a sense that bodies and their parts cannot be extricated from the collective that posits them as victims. The poem therefore seems to be a meditation on the possibilities of excavating personal histories in the form of mass trauma.
Much of the third section from Salvinia Molesta is devoted to lyric considerations of Clifford Baxter, as a way into thinking about commodity capitalism. Clifford Baxter was one of the individuals connected to the Enron executive collapse and who later killed himself. It is this section that seems to evoke Chang’s background as someone in finance. The first poem from this section, “Currency,” sets up the final sections consideration of the global economy. Given the current economic crisis, this poem seems particularly prescient:
Currency
The Federal Reserve adjusts, raises,
lowers, and we follow, predictably,
to purchase the milk or to hold off
on the love seat. In God We Trust
labels the backs of bills to reveal
that bills are backed by faith,
while we are and search pockets for
more. Days never change tempo,
a metronome stuck on moderato,
even on our last day, when flies
seem to crawl and sparrows suspend
in air. Each day a thirsty dog and
an old man wanders the streets, no
longer in season, or having currency,
they leave the same smell behind—
of resin, of garbage, that near-death
odor—how easily we exchange them.
how easily we create more (53).
There is the sense here of economic monotony pervading contemporary life, reducing all things and individuals to desultory relationships. As a conclusion to the collection, the various poems that focus on Clifford Baxter and economic relations more generally serve to contour the problematic ways in which intersubjective encounters are increasingly contained through monetary concerns. We see strains of Karl Marx and Georg Simmel influencing a “financial politics” that the collection advocates.
In the incredibly rich terrain of Asian American poetry, Chang shines as a major literary and creative force in the years to come. Like many of the poets I have already reviewed here, we can only hope that she continues to produce such wonderfully nuanced work.
Buy the books here:
http://www.siu.edu/~siupress/titles/s05_titles/chang_circle.html
http://www.ugapress.org/0820331767.html
I primarily know of Victoria Chang through the introduction to one of the most recent Asian American poetry anthologies, a polemically structured work that delineated generational lines between earlier activist-centered poets and the generation currently producing many of the newest poetry collections, many of which I have been reviewing on this blog. In this Victoria Chang mega-post, I review Circle (2005, Southern Illinois University Press) and Salvinia Molesta (2008, University of Georgia Press). One of the interesting tidbits about Chang’s background is that she holds an MBA degree and one can see how this educational and professional trajectory influences her work.
The title of Chang’s first work clearly articulates one of the lyric goals of the entire collection, which “revolves” around various poems that together formulate a figurative geometry. The first section, “On Quitting,” certainly mobilizes this geometry in considering the intricacies in various relationships, often romantic in nature. One poem that demonstrates this circularity is “KitchenAid Epicurean Sand Mixer,” which is partly reprinted here:
KitchenAids still line the shelves at Williams-Sonoma
In military formations on her thirty-third birthday.
Their smooth bodies feel like butterfat,
Curves covered with enamel, boasting form and function.
Her eyes meet the hunter green one in the middle,
Everything she’s wanted in life in this box,
Never imagined she would not be married by now,
And still living with a roommate in a flat,
Intimate with a new man every weigh months,
Dancing in circles, spinning round and round (17).
The inventiveness of this poem lies partly in seeing that the first letter of each line corresponds to another lyric that moves vertically down the page, written out as “A Good Housewife Has a KitchenAid,” with the KitchenAid portion shown here. Of course, there is a sense of domestic expectations for the lyric speaker here, who finds her life “dancing in circles, spinning round and round,” but many of the lyric characters who appear throughout “On Quitting” are suffering some sort of challenge in their lives. The images here are ones of contradiction, where even as the KitchenAids are “smooth… like butterfat,” they nevertheless appear in “military formations” and “boasting form and function.” There is the sense of a genuine disconnect between her life and the one she idealized and it is this emptiness that pervades the poem.
In “Five Year Plan,” Chang highlights the more transnational nature of her poetics, where some poems reference immigration, Asian American identity, and Chinese history, and the ways in which these various rubrics might be seen to function in tandem or in collision with each other. In the opening lines, the lyric speaker considers what it means to be a Chinese American woman:
A good Chinese American housewife has a five-year plan.
It’s strategic, sparse,
menacing. It stutters at nothing, a tin present tense, perhaps
a new VCR
in two years. A good Chinese American daughter washes
windows and retains
curvatures. And when I revise my five-year plan
to exclude window-
washing, to include speaker of the house in two years, in four,
maybe president (28).
This poem extends more largely Chang’s concern for the position and experiences that women have in contemporary life. Here, the lyric speaker upends the desire for certain legitimate trajectories. In this respect, the poem already dialogues with the “A Good Housewife Has A KitchenAid,” by the more active resistance suggested by this speaker who “revises” the five year-plan and expands her ambitions to include major governmental positions. Whether or not such possibilities are likely is not the concern, but rather to de-stabilize the expectation that the Chinese American housewife should be expected to wash windows. The reference to the five year plan also has other potential resonances, especially as these are commonly employed in governments as reform measures, with five-year plans being particularly employed in Chinese communist governmental policies. Such a conflation is welcomed by Chang’s Circle as the collection can and does move transnationally and through different temporalities. The first poem in “Limits,” entitled “Lantern Festival,” takes on the atrocities that occurred during the “rape of Nanking”:
Some hang like accordions, honoring the arrival of a newborn,
others hang still like moons,
red ones line up in a row on a metal thread over scents
of sticky rice balls smoking in soup,
round ones glow in the wind, sockets firing up
one after another.
No! I am wrong, the round ones lash in the wind:
they are human heads, gutted and plucked from bodies that were
sipping stalks of choy sum, or
excavating daikon, or stabbing fish in the river, or trimming
pork loins for evening porridge.
And they hang in a row for decoration, foreheads bumping
into each other,
glowing like a galaxy of holiday lights, honoring
the arrival of the new,
that always, always turns into the next target,
the minute it is named (47).
This poem is particularly gruesome as it begins with the promise of another generation in comparing what seem to be lanterns to “accordions,” an ambience of merriment amid festivals. The turn that appears in the fourth stanza re-orients and disorients the reader as well as the lyric speaker who comes to realize that these hanging lanterns are actually human bodies. The future is not simply terminated by the presence of so many dead. Instead, these severed heads mark the reproductive cycles of violence, “that always, always turns into the next target, the minute it is named.”
In Salvinia Molesta, Chang continues some of the themes made apparent in Circle. For instance, she investigates the tragic death of scholar and journalist, Iris Chang, author of Rape of Nanking, who committed suicide before the completion of her book that was to be on the Bataan Death March. Prior to her death, she had been experiencing significant psychological problems, but none that necessarily prefigured her early demise. Chang’s “Ode to Iris Chang” honors Iris Chang’s life and continues an archival lyric depicting the incredibly savage Nanking massacre. This particular approach grants Chang a larger space to consider Japan’s imperial and colonial campaigns during the early 20th century that included it’s the Sino-Japanese War as well as the colonial occupation of Korea. “Bindweeds” considers the ways in which historians are complict with problematic versions of the past:
A Japanese historian
hunches over his desk,
prints characters on warm paper
about rising buildings,
new postures of steel,
invention of the rice cooker.
He leaves out the soldiers
who had paid a fee, obtained
a ticket and a condom,
who had been led to a space
partitioned with sheets—
a pillow, a tatami mat,
a Korean woman (17).
Here, there is the immediate sense of historical revisionism, at least in the sense that there is not a multiperspectivalism that generates the problematic valences of Japan’s past. The lyrics underscore how the historian sees fit to draw Japan through its heroisms and its various modernities, where “invention” and new buildings overtake any references to Korean comfort women, sexual slaves for the Japanese army. What other “inventions” the lyrics seem to suggest exist beyond technological innovation. How then might history be considered an “invention” and what then does it erase. It is the first section that moves most transnationally to consider this question, as Chang moves on to also re-envision the 2-28 Massacre that occurred following the KMT’s occupation of Taiwan.
In “Union,” Chang returns to lyric considerations of the Nanjing massacre. In this case, the lyric speaker considers the ways in which her scholarly study of the event and her research collide against her own reality:
Red-lidded, I have been here for hours,
old books smell of wood with flattened
moths. Pictures of Chinese hung by
their tongues. Bodies heaped into one
another—a man’s head, another’s arms,
a woman’s white legs. Munch’s lovers
kissing so hard, their faces fatten into one.
My stack of dollar books, the cash register
opening like a tongue stuck out, the old
one-armed man at the desk, his glasses that
have begun to drowse—what it must be like
to hug him, how his one good arm and
my right one might circle our bodies, how
they might shiver, form a perfect set (19).
One is reminded of “Lantern festival” here, but Chang is more deliberate in situating the lyric speaker’s own reaction to visually gruesome photographs. In the process of an aestheticization of violence, “Union” seems to consider the impact of such historical events on one’s reality. In this case, the speaker imagines her place in what seems to be a used bookstore in relation to the cashier. Their connection to each other is placed in a grotesque comparison to the dead from the Nanjing massacre, so one reads the last lines dubiously, “how/ they might shiver, form a perfect set.” It would seem that the word “shiver” is the “tell” here in challenging the so-called perfection of the titular union. But, more largely then, if individuals are so easily melded together, there is a sense that bodies and their parts cannot be extricated from the collective that posits them as victims. The poem therefore seems to be a meditation on the possibilities of excavating personal histories in the form of mass trauma.
Much of the third section from Salvinia Molesta is devoted to lyric considerations of Clifford Baxter, as a way into thinking about commodity capitalism. Clifford Baxter was one of the individuals connected to the Enron executive collapse and who later killed himself. It is this section that seems to evoke Chang’s background as someone in finance. The first poem from this section, “Currency,” sets up the final sections consideration of the global economy. Given the current economic crisis, this poem seems particularly prescient:
Currency
The Federal Reserve adjusts, raises,
lowers, and we follow, predictably,
to purchase the milk or to hold off
on the love seat. In God We Trust
labels the backs of bills to reveal
that bills are backed by faith,
while we are and search pockets for
more. Days never change tempo,
a metronome stuck on moderato,
even on our last day, when flies
seem to crawl and sparrows suspend
in air. Each day a thirsty dog and
an old man wanders the streets, no
longer in season, or having currency,
they leave the same smell behind—
of resin, of garbage, that near-death
odor—how easily we exchange them.
how easily we create more (53).
There is the sense here of economic monotony pervading contemporary life, reducing all things and individuals to desultory relationships. As a conclusion to the collection, the various poems that focus on Clifford Baxter and economic relations more generally serve to contour the problematic ways in which intersubjective encounters are increasingly contained through monetary concerns. We see strains of Karl Marx and Georg Simmel influencing a “financial politics” that the collection advocates.
In the incredibly rich terrain of Asian American poetry, Chang shines as a major literary and creative force in the years to come. Like many of the poets I have already reviewed here, we can only hope that she continues to produce such wonderfully nuanced work.
Buy the books here:
http://www.siu.edu/~siupress/titles/s05_titles/chang_circle.html
http://www.ugapress.org/0820331767.html
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