Orienting Traces: (Re)Viewing Chineseness in Modern

ORIENTING TRACES:

(RE)VIEWING CHINESENESS IN MODERN AMERICAN POETRY

ANASTASIA WRIGHT TURNER

(Under the Direction of Jed Rasula)

ABSTRACT

While numerous studies have been published detailing Modernism’s interest in Asia as well as Asian Americans’ minority subject position within American culture, few books realize the inherent interconnectedness between the two topics. This project proposes to fill this lacuna by reconsidering the legacy of American Modernist poets’ interest in and glorification of Chinese language and culture against the parallel history of Chinese immigration to and participation in the US nation state. I begin by probing the sociohistorical factors that allowed for the art object of China to become elevated while the makers of such objects were refused entry into the United States. I then discuss the varying shades and levels of appropriation, mimicry, inspiration, and translation apparent in Modernists’ poetic usages of Chineseness. Next, I trace the poetic lineage of a single Chinese character from the work of Ezra Pound through contemporary American poetry. The second section of my dissertation explores how contemporary Chinese American poets Marilyn Chin and John Yau negotiate such legacies of cultural borrowing. While Chin writes back against this history by claiming America and refusing to ignore or aestheticize China, Yau’s poems disrupt traditional poetic form in order to question the process whereby identity was determined in the first place. My project contends that paralleling these disparate works reflects the complex and conflicted influence of Chinese language, literature, and culture on American poetry.

INDEX WORDS: American Poetry; Chinese American Poetry; Chineseness; Modernism; Influence; Multiculturalism; Postmodernism; Identity; Orientalism; Cosmopolitanism; Ezra Pound; Marilyn Chin; John Yau

ORIENTING TRACES:

(RE)VIEWING CHINESENESS IN MODERN AMERICAN POETRY

ANASTASIA WRIGHT TURNER

B.A., Wofford College, 2000

B. S., Wofford College, 2000

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial

Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

ATHENS, GEORGIA

2010

Anastasia Wright Turner

ORIENTING TRACES:

(RE)VIEWING CHINESENESS IN MODERN AMERICAN POETRY

ANASTASIA WRIGHT TURNER

Major Professor: Jed Rasula

Committee: Kam-ming Wong Susan Rosenbaum

Electronic Version Approved:

Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2010

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to all of those who have supported my academic endeavors over the past years. First, thanks to Benjamin Dunlap, who started me on this quest so long ago at Wofford

College. This project also benefitted substantially from the tutelage of Jed Rasula; thanks for

“removing the shroud” and pushing me ever forward. Susan Rosenbaum equipped me with the critical skills necessary to undertake such a project. Barbara McCaskill has long served as a mentor, personal cheerleader, and role model; her enthusiasm and support never cease to amaze me. Kam-ming Wong provided guidance on all aspects of Chinese language and literature and contributed greatly to my appreciation of it. The Fulbright office of Taiwan also aided me in numerous ways. Without my year’s sojourn there, none of this would be possible. In addition,

I’d like to express my gratitude to the many colleagues and dear friends who have assisted in the completion of this manuscript. Wang Fang-Yu, Liu Ying, Chen Chung-An and Rita Kung submitted to numerous inquiries along the way. Neal Lin supplied encouragement, humor, and perspective. Valerie Morrison’s futon and reassurance always helped me feel more comfortable, while Keely Byars-Nichols and Shannon Whitlock Levitzke provided invaluable feedback on numerous less-than-stellar drafts. Finally, this whole thing wouldn’t have come together without the love and support of my extended network of friends and family and the constant encouragement of my husband. This is for each of you.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iv

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 1

2 ANXIETY AND DESIRE:

AMERICAN VISIONS OF CHINESENESS AT THE TURN OF THE

CENTURY ...... 14

3 “AS A CHINESE VASE STILL”:

CHINESENESS IN AMERICAN MODERNIST POETRY ...... 53

4 新日日新:

A CASE STUDY OF INFLUENCE ...... 87

5 “(AND NO HELP FROM THE PHONETICIST)”:

MARILYN CHIN’S DIALECTIC OF ASIAN AMERICANNESS ...... 120

6 WHO’S AFRAID OF JOHN YAU?:

RESISTING RESISTANCE IN ASIAN AMERICAN EXPERIMENTAL

POETRY ...... 148

7 AFTERWORD ...... 193

REFERENCES ...... 204

CHAPTER ONE:

INTRODUCTION

As Ezra Pound entered the British Museum of Art’s exhibition of Chinese paintings, the

Angel Island immigration station opened its doors. Pound began his study and imitation of

Chinese poetry at precisely the same moment the Chinese inmates of Angel Island were

inscribing poetry on the walls of their barracks, detailing the racism that both jailed and

systematically stripped them of their hopes and dreams. At the very height of the Chinese

Exclusion Act, the newly formed little magazines competed to bring out imitations and new

translations of Chinese poems. These snapshots reveal America’s diverse representations of

Chineseness. While legally Chinese were positioned as separate and apart from the US majority,

their cultural advancements were lauded in the burgeoning Modernist literary movement. The

simultaneity of discriminatory practices against Chinese immigrants and interest in and

glorification of Chinese literature and culture begs the question of America’s discrepant

engagement with China.

Though the West had been “imagining” the East for centuries, the discovery of gold at

Sutter’s Mill in 1848 would drastically change the terms by which it was perceived. The

eighteenth century presented a heightened interest in chinoiseries while early nineteenth century travelogues and adventure stories like Herman Melville’s Typee chronicled exotic worlds and cultural traditions. However, 1849 marked a turning point in such imaginings as Chinese began immigrating to the US in increasingly significant numbers. Encouraged by famine and poverty as a result of economic debt incurred during the Opium Wars, 325 Cantonese speaking laborers

1 from the Guangdong province disembarked on California’s shore in 1849 in search of Gam Saan or Gold Mountain. Leaving family behind and disregarding the imperial government’s decrees against emigration, these “sojourners” heeded American employers’ calls for cheap labor.

American businessmen brokered the Chinese arrival through a credit-ticket system where laborers would repay the agents with their employment wages after arrival in the United States.

From 1849 on, the population of Chinese in the United States continued to increase exponentially due in large part to the Central Pacific Railroad Company’s avid recruiting of the

Chinese as well as many businesses’ use of Chinese workers as scabs. By the year 1870, 63,000

Chinese lived and worked in the United States. No longer a far away people, China had become real for Americans and an integral part of the creation of American capital.

Yet, for most Americans the future of the United States did not include this new labor force. Concepts like Manifest Destiny reflected Protestant desires to create a “new Canaan” on the North American continent. In keeping with this idea, the population was imagined as pure; naturalized citizenship was restricted to “whites,” effectively prohibiting Native Americans,

African Americans, and the later Chinese Americans from participation in the official making of

America. Thus while American businesses seemed to openly invite Chinese to partake in the riches of the United States, they tacitly expected the Chinese to leave once their labor had been exhausted. Encouraged by perceived Chinese passivity, the United States viewed the Chinese more as tools of production than as potential citizens. Restrictive, racially targeted laws silently disenfranchised these immigrants upon their arrival in America. With the completion of the transcontinental railroad and a surplus of Chinese American labor, Americans were forced to reconsider the place of the Celestial in the making of America. The shortage of jobs coupled with fears about Chinese assimilation and racial intermarriage increasingly turned public opinion

2 against the integration of these immigrants into the body politic. Acquiescing to the demands of popular opinion, congress passed the Exclusion Act of 1882 as an answer to the “Chinese question.” This act represented the first national immigration law targeting a specific ethnicity.

As Lisa Lowe rightly notes in her study of the intersection of Asian American history and politics, “the life conditions, choices, and expressions of Asian Americans have been significantly determined by the US state through the apparatus of immigration laws and policies”

(7). In effect, the law legislated the Otherness of Chinese Americans by equating them with characteristics anathema to American culture. The law also disrupted their familial lives by separating husbands from wives and parents from children. Even with its repeal in the wake of

World War II, the Chinese would wait until the Immigration Act of 1965 to be allowed to emigrate in the same proportions as immigrants from Europe.

The racialization of such legal restrictions coupled with the public’s continued perceptions of Chinese as “inassimilable” and “alien” led to the ghettoization of Chinese

Americans into self-sufficient ethnic enclaves in the late 1800s. These Chinatowns quickly grew into tourist locales where the typical Euro American could enjoy the intrigue and exoticism of

China without leaving the comfort of America. In addition, turn of the century freak shows often framed their “exhibits” as overtly Asian so as to magnify the spectacle. This legacy of exoticism persists today as Chinese Americans still remain prodigal in diverse forms. In film, television, and the US literary imaginary, the Chinese are variously portrayed as deviant martial arts experts,

“dragon ladies,” or as frozen within the cultures and traditions of the Qing dynasty. Others are ultra-sexualized; in the continuing trend of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly , men are viewed as overly feminine while women are still viewed as submissive. Perhaps the most telling and pervasive stereotype, the “model minority,” insidiously works against Chinese (and Asian)

Americans on a daily basis. This erroneous appellation codifies Asian American achievement as a function of the seemingly incompatible conditions of complete assimilation into the American melting pot myth while retaining race-based characteristics which predispose them to success.

As fulfillers of the “American Dream,” Asians are denied much of the assistance and privileges given to other ethnic groups. Yet, most markedly, the “model minority” stereotype reinforces the conceit that Asian Americans are first and foremost a minority and not Americans. Once again “alien” and “inassimilable,” Chinese Americans have become scabs in America’s minority discourse. Flouted as the “good” or successful minority, they are often held up as an example of what other minority groups should strive for. Under such pressure, both anger and violence against Asian Americans has erupted in major cultural centers such as New York and Los

Angeles. Though these backlashes against Asian Americans were perpetrated mainly by other minorities, the root cause still lies in the majority’s understanding and perpetuation of Asian

American stereotypes.

Against this history of exclusion and racialization also stands a parallel phenomenon of artistic cooptation and fetishization. Modern American poetry most interestingly complicates

American images of Chineseness and poses the question of how a nation’s poetry can exalt a certain sect of people while its laws and policies restrict them. The Modernist movement followed on the heels of the first Chinese exclusion act and subsequent “Driving Out,” and coincided with the building of Angel Island and the rise of bachelor societies in California.

Despite their contemporaneity, American Modernism, a literary movement largely fueled by white, college educated, affluent men and women from the Northeast, seems completely separate from the plights of Chinese Americans. Yet, Modernism’s complex interest in and use of

Chinese literary and linguistic forms begs a reconsideration of the inherent interconnectedness

4 between these two fields of study. Pound’s 1915 statement to his fellow poets that “Liu Ch’e,

Chu Yuan, Chia I, and the great vers libre writers before the Petrarchan age of Li Po, are a treasury to which the next century may look for as great a stimulus as the renaissance had from the Greeks,” stands in stark contrast to the US’s imagining of Chinese Americans as shuffling, dirty workers who would take on the most menial tasks for limited pay ( Literary Essays 218).

How is it possible that these writers propagated such a differing view from the one advanced by the legal declarations of the United States? And, what impact did and does this have not only on

Chinese Americans, but also the American populace at large?

The bulk of the following book attempts to theorize the reasons for and effects of such inconsonant imaginings of Chineseness by actuating historical texts alongside the flourishing critical field of Modernism and Asia. This field, in effect inculcated by Zhaoming Qian’s book

Orientalism and Modernism , has blossomed in the past decade and a half; the work of critics such as Robert Kern, Ming Xie, Eric Hayot, and Guiyou Huang each focus on elucidating the extent to which Modernist writers were influenced by Asia. Invariably, the question of Pound and China figures largely in each critic’s work. Pound, the most vocal of his generation on the importance of China, makes a good study due both to his voluminous legacy of miscellanea and his continuing presence and importance within the American poetic canon. Though much of the work complicating the impact of Asia on Modernist poetry may be new, interest in Pound’s entanglement with China evidenced itself in earlier criticism of his poetics. Achilles Fang’s work on Pound and Fenollosa in the fifties gave way to Woon-Ping Chin Holaday’s study of the relationship between Pound and Binyon in 1977. In addition, the current outpouring of scholarly interest in China and Pound draws largely from the early biographical work of Ira Nadel and

Hugh Kenner as well as builds off the critical inquiry of Ronald Bush, Anne S. Chapple, and

John Nolde in the 1980s. This scholarship coupled with the corpus of work interrogating

Pound’s translational abilities promulgated by multilingual scholars like Wai-lim Yip, James Liu, and Stephen G. Yao set the stage for Qian to recognize modernism as “a phenomenon of internationalism / multiculturalism” (5). Qian’s groundbreaking analysis pinpoints the process through which Asian arts and texts became constitutive in the works of Pound and Williams.

Arguing against earlier understandings of Modernism as an event contained within European and

American literature, Qian broadens the discussion to show how China functions as a generative force in Modernist poetry.

Though Qian’s work admirably amplifies the presence of China within Euro American writing, his focus on elucidating these sites of borrowing ignores the more complex postcolonial nuances of such exchanges on both the American literary canon and Asian American literary production. His thesis of “argu[ing] for a multiculturalist model that recognizes the place of the

Orient among all other influences in the Modernist movement” unfortunately stops short of interrogating the cultural and critical implications at play (5). While I agree with Qian’s depiction of Modernism as inflected by multiple cultural phenomena outside of Europe, I worry that his assessment falls prey to a liberalized notion of multiculturalism predicated on ideas of premature pluralism. In his recuperation of the importance of China to Williams and Pound,

Qian takes pains to distance his use of the word “Orientalism” from that of Edward Said.

Contrary to the Saidian paradigm of locating the self against the other’s shortcomings, Qian argues that these two writers looked to the East for commonalities as “crystallizing examples of the Modernists’ realizing Self” (2). Qian’s dismissal of Saidian Orientalism in favor of a new kind by which Pound and Williams sought out affinities with the East not only sanitizes the term but also the very real appropriations going on within Modernist poetry. While a much needed

first step in terms of recognizing the global impulse of Modernist American poetry, Qian’s work

points out the impact of China while suppressing the agency and history of Chinese Americans.

In this model, Chinese influence becomes a part of the canon of Euro American knowledge

without questioning the means by which it came to be there or connecting such cooptation with

the historical reality of Chinese America’s political position.

Currently the bulk of scholarship on Modernism and Asia still centers on elucidation and

legitimization of the effect of the East on Western poetry. The field has yet to fully engage the

historical moment of such a cultural exchange, one in which the object of Modernism’s affection

was simultaneously excluded from American society. As Steven G. Yao laments in his review

of Yunte Huang’s Transpacific Displacement ,” “the extent of this generative interaction, as well

as the complexity of its dynamics, have gone largely under-theorized across the range of relevant

academic fields” (213). Few texts query the effect of the China-Modernism partnership on Asian

American textual production and the American literary canon; the field of Modernism and Asia

has largely been self contained, content to gesture toward the multicultural nature of Modernism

without probing the sociocultural and historical dynamics of such cross-cultural exchange. It is

time to move beyond disciplinary boundaries to cross-examine the implications and

ramifications of such textual borrowings.

Yunte Huang’s Transpacific Displacement begins to address the absence of critical

thought across various disciplines through his exciting and innovative approach to

representations of the Chinese language. In his work, Huang reformulates the Black Atlantic of

Paul Gilroy in terms of theorists like Lisa Lowe and David Leiwei Li. Huang then goes on to define his premise of “intertextual travel” as including the practices of both ethnography and translation. These separate fields work in concert to create representations of Asians and Asian

Americans that move backwards and forwards across the interlingual and intercultural routes of

the Asian diaspora. For Huang, these textual migrations not only indicate the plurality of Asian

American experiences and representations, but also the ramifications that appropriations of these

cultural and signifying markers may have on both the Other and the borrower. Viewing the

appropriations of Modernists like Pound and Lowell as “ethnography,” Huang posits these works

constitute “a historical process of textual migration of cultural meanings” which reveal the

transnationalism and interlinguality of the American canon (3). Huang continues this study

forward into the works of Lin Yutang, John Yau and Maxine Hong Kingston to demonstrate

these writers’ linguistic challenges to such signifying practices. Overall, Huang’s work examines

the anthropological and linguistic nuances of Pacific textual migrations and sets the standard for

critical literature connecting the separate arenas of Asian, American, and Asian American

literature. His text also argues for a transnational understanding of American literature and a

revaluation of the canon.

My purpose in the following book mirrors some of the broader concerns at work in both

Huang’s and Qian’s texts. First, I build off of Huang’s premise of formulations of Chineseness; however, whereas Huang focuses on linguistic appropriation and a framework of intertextual migrancy, I instead highlight the process through which the images and objects of China become charged signifiers of Chineseness as a means of evaluating the sometimes hidden, always ambivalent influence of China on much of modern American poetry. Here, I share Qian’s overarching thesis that Chinese language and literature are fundamental components of

Modernist poetry. Yet, I complicate this thesis by resurrecting the historical moment of cultural borrowings, one in which the art object of China became elevated while the makers of such objects were refused entry to the United States, as well as interrogating the mode in which these

8 borrowings continue to echo in later American poetry. Within this history, I mobilize a sociohistorical account of the factors surrounding American imaginings of China that also remembers both the literary and sociopolitical history of Chinese America. In lieu of denying the extant Chinese influences in post-1910 American poetry or investigating and isolating such moments, I actualize critic Eric Hayot’s call to develop “a history of the West’s cultural and literary representations of China that [is] not squeamish about Orientalism…living instead inside the more complicated space that combines uncertainty and discomfort” (530). By situating

Modernist representations of China in their historical moment and tracing forward the implications of such representations to the poetry of Gary Snyder, Marilyn Chin, Fred Wah, and

John Yau, I foreground the inconsonant treatment of Chinese and Chinese Americans by the

American government as well as indicate the permanence of these Chinese influences on the

American poetic canon. Much as Chinese Americans have proved they are not “sojourners,” so too have the Chinese influences interwoven into Pound’s poetry become a recurrent and trenchant force in contemporary American poetics. My hope is that foregrounding the less- confronted and more ambiguous texts concerning China and Chinese Americans against the currently circulated (mis)understandings of both will evince a more accurate collage of American poetry that may enable further Chinese American political and literary parity.

To begin to address these questions, the first chapter offers a socio-historical picture of

America’s conception of China from the pivotal year of 1849, when the Gold Rush first brought over scores of Chinese, to the beginning of the Modernist movement. Reading the disparate cultural images of the Chinese across early newspapers, poetry, dime museums, interior design, and travel narratives intimates the complicated and sometimes contradictory reactions to China and Chinese Americans. Though early cultural works cast Chinese Americans as inassimilable

9 aliens, or, borrowing from Susan Stewart’s work, “freaks,” by the turn of the century a parallel vision of China as a cultural mecca began to emerge. Blending together the work of scholars of museum studies, historians, and Asian American activists, this chapter erects a critical framework which theorizes that such a shift was possible due to the abstraction of Chineseness from the corporeal Chinese body.

With this framework in place, Chapter Two focuses on the American Modernist movement. Much like the cultural ephemera after the turn of the century, Modernist poets also conceived of China in more laudatory terms. Contrary to the early casting of the Chinese as

“dirty” and “inscrutable,” Modernist poets often used China as a touchstone for their poetic imaginings. Though much work has been done previously on the role of China in the works of such major figures as Williams, Pound, Moore, and Stevens, few studies address these poets’ use of China or offer a more complete picture of the manner in which an image of China manifested itself in American poetry. Though Pound would go on in his later years to find within the

Chinese character a new poetic method, his and other poets’ early interactions with an idea of

China beg the questions of appropriation and ascendancy. This chapter addresses the question of

“why China?” as well as offers several literary exhibits of the different ways in which

Modernists appropriated, translated, and imagined China in their works. It also addresses the questions of intertextual colonization as well as the lasting effect of these “translated” texts.

Focusing not only on poets traditionally linked with China such as Pound and Lowell, the chapter additionally interrogates poets outside the “Modernism and Orientalism” canon. By drawing on recent market theory that reassesses Modernism against its era of capitalist growth, it argues for a more pragmatic understanding of the different avenues through which how

Chineseness was framed and disseminated for public consumption.

Chapter Three, “‘Translucencies’: Chinese Myths Rendered in English,” conjoins critical

inquiry on Pound’s literary use of China with research on his continuing importance to present

day poetics. Adding to the work done by Lazlo Géfin and others, I focus not on Pound’s

transformation of prosody but rather on the literary heritage of a single Chinese word, 新 (xin).

First revisiting the concomitant discovery of the ideogrammic nature of the Chinese character with Pound’s ascent to Vorticism, I trace the term 新 from its earlier uses in the Confucian

Chung Yong ( also translated by Pound ), 4 th century BCE poet Lu Ji’s Wen Fu, and the Shi Jing or Book of Odes, adapted by Confucius in 600 BCE, through to its presence in the Cantos and later revival in Gary Snyder’s “Axe Handles,” Fred Wah’s “Tracks,” and John Yau’s “Chinese

Villanelle.” Tracing these roots and routes of 新 fleshes out its various meanings and the

avenues through which these meanings change/are changed and enrich/are enriched in each

poem. The literary etymology of 新 both explains and illuminates the translation methods by

which Modernist poets, as well as the poets who came of age in the years following Modernism,

not only created new means of translating, but also allowed these translation practices to resonate

within their poetic innovations. Finally, acknowledging 新’s importance underscores the extent to which Chinese literature and language remains an integral piece of American poetics.

Chapter Four complicates the arguments of the previous two chapters by focusing on the techniques used by contemporary Chinese American poet Marilyn Chin to undermine the

Modernist use of Chinese images. To write poetry as a Chinese American requires engagement not only with issues of racism, but also with the legacy of American Modernist poetry’s interaction with Chinese literature and language and its projection of China as enlightened, aesthetic Other. Claiming a dual literary and linguistic heritage, Marilyn Chin’s poetry confronts these issues by probing the tripartite relationship between Modernism, the Chinese American

11 literary tradition, and the Chinese language. In so doing, Chin constructs an interlingual poetry that concomitantly celebrates and calls into question her identity as twice-removed (female, minority) Other. The chapter investigates how Chin distances her poetry from a singular reading to create a dialectic that disavows Orientalist imaginings of China and the Chinese language while creating a liminal space where Chinese and English, American culture and Chinese culture, can be equally represented and owned. By situating Chin’s poetry amidst current debates of liberal multiculturalism, ethnic publishing, and the continuing study of Modernism, China and

Orientalism, I proffer a more difficult and complicated (re)vision of Chinese Americanness.

Chapter Five continues the dialogue between Chinese American poetry and the Poundian legacy by engaging the experimental poetics of John Yau. Unlike Chin, Yau’s poetry intersects with the formal innovations inspired by Pound and other Modernists and is less likely to rely on an autobiographical lyric I. As such, his disjunctive poetics has only recently been considered by

Asian American literary critics who are eager to refute the perception that ethnic American poetry is unconcerned with formal innovation. Yet, in responding to such critiques, these theorists often neglect to take into account the Asian American literary paradigms which have unwittingly laid the groundwork for such essentialized readings. From its inception, Asian

American criticism has focused on narrating a coherent tradition of socially engaged writing that actively challenges dominant Eurocentric ideals via the evocation of a markedly Asian American content. Works which do not conform to such paradigms have often been overlooked or only tangentially engaged. Investigating John Yau’s position within both Asian American studies and poetry criticism at large elucidates the complicity of multiple groups in delineating authorized versions of Asian Americanness that adhere to specific poetic markers and as well as gestures towards the complicated nexus that narrates which versions of ethnic poetry enter into the

12 mainstream. I contend that understanding how these theoretical paradigms both constrain and encourage certain modes of reading allows us to create new flexible frameworks that may fully engage experimental works and again widen our conception of not only contemporary American poetics but also of the nuanced connections between the traditions which inform it.

CHAPTER TWO

ANXIETY AND DESIRE:

AMERICAN VISIONS OF CHINESENESS AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

“Most important of all, these poets have bowed to the winds of the East”

-Harriet Monroe 1

Harriet Monroe’s above assertion should by now seem passé. In the past two decades,

numerous studies detailing the relationships between Modernist poets and all things Asian have

appeared. Critics like Zhaoming Qian and Eric Hayot have intricately followed the historical

interactions of Modernist figures such as Pound and Williams with Asian literature and art, while

others such as Steven G. Yao have speculated on the extent to which these poets fully understood

the Asian texts they worked with. This reality has in effect become canonized by the Bedford

Anthology of American Literature’s assertion that “the art of [China] strongly influenced

Modernist poets and painters in Europe and the United States”; students are now taught from the

minute they learn about Imagism that Asia figures largely in the Modernist canon (Belasco and

Johnson 531). Yet, in teaching American literature from the Civil War forward, the historical

record offers an incongruous story. Reading texts such as Pound’s translations of Li Po (李白) alongside historical accounts of the struggles of Chinese Americans begs the question of the overwhelming inconsonance between Modernism’s designation of China as “a treasury to which the next century may look for as great a stimulus as the renaissance had from the Greeks” (Pound,

Literary Essays 218) and the US government’s systematic removal and exclusion of Chinese

1 Monroe qtd in Patricia C. Willis’s "Petals on a Wet Black Bough: American Modernist Writers and the Orient." 14 from US shores. How can we accommodate the factual and generative influence of Chinese literature and art with the equally real history of Chinese disenfranchisement and racism?

Excavation of the historical perceptions of Chineseness from the influx of Chinese labor to 1914 reveals the variety of political and social forces which acted in concert to alternately objectify and fetishize China and Chineseness. Due to the United States’ rapid modernization,

Chinese subjects oscillated from economic necessity – labor essential to the taming of the Wild

West – to financial and cultural scourge, the ghettoized, unseen cogs in America’s economic machine. Yet in the decades surrounding World War I, the previous image of the Chinese as oppositional to American nationhood gave way to a third depiction of China – that as foil to

America’s fragmented and over-industrialized condition. Whereas nineteenth century Americans largely viewed the Chinese as underdeveloped, by the early twentieth century the cultural objects produced by such a society had proven to be authentic treasures. The following chapter reconciles these representations of China at the turn of the century by explaining the sociohistorical forces that objectified, othered, and enfreaked Chinese Americans. By mobilizing historical sources, travelogues and the ephemera of dime shows, museums, and interior design magazines, I effect a broader comprehension of the different avenues through which Chineseness was deployed and displayed from the moment of Chinese immigration to the beginning of the

Modernist movement. Reading across these sources evinces the multiplicity of ways the anxieties of the US were historically displaced to China and its objects. Such displacement culminated in an abstraction of Chinese cultural products from their human producers, consequently freeing Chineseness from its association with negative “yellow peril” images of the

Chinese and allowing for a new fetishization of Chinese art, language, and poetry.

A History of Difference

Though a handful of Chinese had come to the US prior to 1849, the discovery of gold at

Sutter’s Mill and the ensuing gold rush caused Chinese to sail for America in earnest. Frustrated by a declining economy due to recent droughts, California’s promise of Gam Saan or Gold

Mountain lured Cantonese speaking Chinese by the thousands from the Guangdong province to the rough-and-tumble seaside town of San Francisco. Here, the Chinese mixed with an assortment of men from different cultures, backgrounds, and professions. Australian, Irish,

English, Chinese, Mexican, and American prospectors all frequented the city to procure necessities, eat a good meal, and enjoy the robust nightlife. In addition to these prospectors and other intrepid youths looking to secure their futures, San Francisco also attracted business proprietors and investors eager to exploit the opportunities afforded by the bustling frontier town; in fact, by 1853 San Francisco enjoyed a number of newspapers and a large share of the nation’s college graduates (I. Chang 36). Thus, in the early days of the Gold Rush, the Chinese merely contributed another exotic element to the odd admixture of San Francisco. As the Chinese population rapidly increased (by 1852 over 2,000 Chinese had entered through San Francisco’s port) however, curiosity quickly gave way to unease over their alien customs. Accordingly,

California imposed a foreign miner’s tax aimed at crippling the Chinese mining business. By

1855, these sentiments had made their way East to Congress as legislators apprehensive of the perceived threat the Chinese mounted against Christian American culture lobbied for additional

Chinese restrictions.

Despite these fears, the Civil War and its aftermath momentarily stayed any national legal action against Chinese immigrants and instead extended another labor opportunity. Following the trauma of internal war, Americans looked to the transcontinental railroad as a healing

measure that would figuratively and physically link together the lands America now claimed.

Though the Central Pacific Railroad Company initially hired only white men, the pool of white

labor available on the frontier was often scant; hard labor on the railroad was less enticing next

to the ever imminent chance to strike it rich in the mines. The company’s initial drive for 5,000

workers brought in only 800, many of whom were “unsteady men, unreliable” (qtd. in I. Chang

55). When these workers struck in 1865, the Central Pacific replaced them with Chinese

laborers who would perform the same work for a lower price. Pleased with the industry of the

Chinese, the company not only kept them on after the return of the white laborers, but eventually

extended its recruiting front to China; as Collis Huntington, one of the executives of Central

Pacific wrote, “It would be all the better for us and the state if there should half a million come

over in 1868” (qtd. in I. Chang 57). For many of these Chinese, the harsh working conditions

and low wages in comparison with their white counterparts were a small price to pay to escape

the poverty of Guangdong province. Thus, over the next 4 years, the Chinese became a driving

force behind the timely completion of the railroad in 1869. 2

While the Chinese were highly sought after before 1870, economic crises as well as a

surplus of labor conspired to turn the Chinese American of the 1870s into a scapegoat for

American financial woes. In the early years of Chinese immigration, the gold rush, a thriving

economy, and the headlong drive to “establish” California had all conspired to present an open

labor market for Chinese eager to escape famine and violence in their homeland. As late as 1869,

Charles Robinson in the Overland Monthly proclaimed prohibiting Chinese labor would be “the

height of folly,” in that it threatened to stall the transformation of the California frontier (Takaki,

A Different Mirror 28). Yet by 1870, overspeculation and the monopolization of major

2 Equally telling of the invisible labor of the Chinese was the exclusion of Chinese American workers from the celebration of the completion of the railroad at Promontory Point on May 10, 1869. At this fete, the historical picture of the driving of the golden stake is framed only with Euro American workers. 17

companies such as the Union Pacific led to a drastic increase in unemployment. As Iris Chang

notes, “by the end of 1870 there were one Chinese and two whites for every job in San Francisco”

(117). The increased competition for jobs exacerbated race tensions, pitting white workers

against Chinese.

As Euro Americans grew more and more frustrated with what they felt was the unfair

advantage of the labor capital of the Chinese, attitudes towards Chinese labor began to shift.

Cast as “sojourners” by the American populace, it was widely believed the Chinese had come

merely to earn money and would leave soon enough. These racially motivated and historically

incorrect notions served to further distance and disenfranchise early Chinese Americans from

their Euro American counterparts. 3 Perceived as interested only in bettering themselves and their home nation, they did not fall in line with the popular American notions of Manifest

Destiny and the errand into the wilderness; Chinese pursuits were seen as monetarily motivated while American settlers answered the call of a higher power. The term “sojourners” also cemented the dominant culture’s idea of the Chinese as “being brought to this country about the same as foreign cattle and horses are” ( Laramie Daily Sun , qtd. in Sorti, 71). Highly illustrative of this view is a receipt from the Davies Company in1890 which lists “a Chinaman” alongside other commodities such as “bonemeal [sic]” and “canvas” (Takaki, A Different Mirror 25). This image of Chinese not as immigrants but as labor capital “brought” into the States by pro(a)gressive American businessmen coupled with the “Chinaman’s” perceived nonparticipation in the great American experiment laid the groundwork for the scores of discriminatory laws and practices enacted against Chinese laborers as California’s booming economy came to a screeching halt.

3 In fact, as Takaki notes, Western European “Americans” returned to their home countries in sizable numbers between 1895 and 1918. (See Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore , 11.) 18

In this climate, articles and editorials that examined the potential negative impact of

Chinese immigration proliferated. Bret Harte’s “Plain Language from Truthful James,” perhaps better known as “The Heathen Chinee” became one of the most popular texts of 1870. Though the story itself pokes fun at both Chinese and Irish immigrants, the final exclamatory line, “We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor!” resounded throughout the US and echoed popular sentiment against Chinese Americans. The story became so popular that the Union Porcelain Works in

New York used a drawing of the climactic scene where Ah Sin is discovered cheating on a bar pitcher in the 1870s (Denker 55). Reputable institutions like the American Medical Association also contributed to the growing xenophobia by funding a medical study of the proliferation of syphilis by Chinese prostitutes. Despite its inconclusiveness, the president of the AMA charged

“even boys eight and ten years old have been syphilized by these degraded wretches” and a major medical journal published the incendiary “How the Chinese Women Are Infusing a Poison in the Anglo-Saxon Blood” (qtd. in I. Chang 123). Acquiescing to the fears of the public,

California passed several racially motivated laws aimed at restricting Chinese Americans both at work and at home. Legislation like the Sidewalk Ordinance disrupted Chinese laundries while the Cubic Air Law cracked down on overcrowded Chinese American apartments while ignoring equally crowded Euro American ones (I. Chang 119). The institutionalization of Anti-Chinese sentiments via legislation served to ignite violence against Chinese immigrants and worked hand in hand with the passage of other exclusionary laws. In 1871, a number of Chinese Americans in

Los Angeles were massacred. By 1876, the Chinese question had become a political problem as

Republicans in Wyoming concluded Chinese labor to be “fraught with serious and dangerous consequences,” and several Wyoming governors held they “are not to be regarded as a desirable element in our civilization” (Sorti, 98-99). The rise of the strongly anti-Chinese orator Dennis

Kearney and his catch-phrase “The Chinese Must Go” intensified these sentiments to the point of

violence. On March 13, 1877 five Chinese workers in Chico California were murdered by

Kearney’s Workingmen’s Party. Four months later a riot against the Chinese broke out in San

Francisco’s Chinatown. The urgings of anti-Chinese groups like the Workingmen’s Party as

well as anxiety over loss of capital prompted Congress to pass the Exclusion Act of 1882. As

Lisa Lowe expounds in Immigrant Acts , “immigration has been historically a locus of racialization and a primary site for the policing of political, cultural, and economic membership in the U.S. nation-state” (174). The Exclusion Act, the first immigration act based on race, not only barred Chinese from immigrating to the United States, but also racialized Chinese

Americans within the national polity, marking them as perennial outsiders to American life. By

1884, the law was amended to prevent the reentry of Chinese who had claimed residency prior to

1882. The extended 40 year tenure of the act coupled with citizenship restrictions and other ethnically prohibitive legislation cemented an impression of Chinese Americans not as citizens, but as “the foreigner within” (Lowe 5).

Though the majority of news-worthy White/Chinese confrontations happened on the frontier, the Chinese American population and anti-Chinese sentiments were not restricted to the

West Coast. As the widespread reception of Bret Harte’s work suggests, the proliferation and modernization of media and publishing served to bring the average Euro-American in contact with the Chinese. The Rocks Springs Massacre of 1885, which resulted in an estimated two dozen Chinese deaths and 150,000 dollars in property damage, was reported promptly by the

New York Evening Post . The article went on to note how a Mrs. Osborn shot and killed two

Chinese and “is applauded for her public spirit” (qtd. in Sorti, 117). Additionally, in the years following the close of the Civil War, numerous Chinese fled the California area to try their luck

20 in the East. While some became shop owners in the South, many flocked to metropolitan areas throughout the East Coast. New York’s Chinatown was firmly established by the 1880s; by

1900, more than 7000 Chinese Americans lived in New York (Waxma). Though widely believed to be a frontier problem, by the early 1900s the Chinese question reached across the nation.

Hence, the first and only contact many Americans had with China or Chinese Americans was mediated through print. The growth and diversification of the US publishing industry further helped to bolster this phenomenon and bring China to the States. As new technology made printing both faster and less expensive, a multiplicity of texts, including those authored by a nascent American literary scene, began to find their way into the market. These American authors, much like the general public of the US, sought to define American literature over and against that of Europe. Especially in the years following the aftermath of the Civil War, authors and critics assayed to identify specific styles and themes that reflected the rapidly changing and growing make up of the States. Despite this cultural push, few publishers were willing to take a chance on lesser-known American authors and instead relied heavily on reprinting older British classics. American travel literature, however, managed to escape the financial binds that would prevent its proliferation and enjoyed an unprecedented popularity among the Americans. As

Benjamin Moran states in his 1859 article “Contributions towards a History of American

Literature”:

This would seem to be the age of travel literature, judging from the many

narratives now published, and the general excellence of such works. No nation

has given more good books of this class to the world since 1820 than the United

States, considered with regard to styles and information (qtd. in Melton 17).

By allowing the American-at-home to tour the far reaches of the world with his fellow countryman, American travel literature offered a compatriot understanding of the outside world that British texts could not provide nor compete with.

Travel narratives of this period largely drew their popularity from the American public’s love of adventure and search for an authentic American experience. Many early travelogues recorded the opening of the American West and exploration of the Pacific Islands. These texts allowed Americans in the Eastern states a front row view of the cultural expansion guaranteed by

America’s Manifest Destiny. As the infant country entered the world scene through industrialization and imperialism, travelogues became another venue by which a sense of

American identity could be constructed and its fetishization of progress evinced. Through its presentation of opposing cultures and its very narrative frame, travelogues delineated an

American uniqueness. Travel narratives to even familiar locales such as Europe became fraught with imagery that positioned Europe as the past and America as the future; as Washington Irving summed up, “my native country was full of youthful promise: Europe was rich in the accumulated treasures of age” (qtd. in Melton 20). Americans who participated or wrote of the

“Grand Tour” of Europe most often did so as a means of affirming their prior history and setting

America apart as advancing ever forward. Regardless of the travelogue’s setting, the confident

American authorial voice reaffirmed readers’ nascent sense of American identity through the contrast produced between the narrator and the culture under review.

For most travelers to China before 1900, China directly contradicted the Western paradigm of progress; while Western science and industry moved forward at an ever-quickening

pace, China remained locked in archaic traditions. As the Reverend Karl Gützlaff observes in

his 1838 volume China Opened ,

comparing the whole mass [of Chinese] with the inhabitants of Europe in the

present age, we look up with veneration to the spirit of improvement which has

constituted the latter the empires of the world. Once they were on a par, they

even fell beneath the Chinese; but now they have risen to a height almost to

dazzle the Asiatic eye (qtd. in Goodrich and Cameron 26).

As an early example of a missionary text, Gützlaff’s account appeared at a time when China

seemed off limits to the Western world. Therefore, despite its many textual shortcomings, his

two volume description became highly influential due to its rarity and realism. 4 Like Gützlaff,

many travelers read China’s primitiveness as symptomatic of the nation’s over-civilized culture

and believed with General Wilson that Confucianism served “to arrest all intellectual

development and progress in China” (qtd. in N. Clifford 56). China’s stubborn hold on tradition

was not the only impediment to progress; it also suffered from laziness symptomatic of its

paganism. None of the cultural markers of progress in the West could be mapped onto China.

When measured against the West’s standards for improvement, the East had fallen conspicuously

short. Thus, for many a travel writer and his or her audience, only Christianization and

enlightened Western ideals could raise China out of its perennially archaic condition and propel

it forward into enlightened advancements.

The treaty of Nanjing in 1842 and subsequent additional treaties in the following year

served not only to open commerce between China and the Western world but also to increase the

amount of knowledge circulated about China. Intrepid travelers could now enter China and

4 Patrick Hanan discusses many of Gützlaff’s English and Chinese works as well as provides an excerpt of an 1938 review of China Opened . 23 record its intricacies and exotic characteristics for an eager American audience at home. Within these narratives, the travelers almost invariably made reference to the filth of the Chinese masses.

In the eyes of many American writers, the pervasive grime of the country and its residents served as an outward indicator of the country’s backwardness (Denker 46-50). When held beside

Christian European standards of cleanliness as a measure of industry, this dirt symbolized

China’s want of progress. The Chinese in travelogues were often presented as a scrambling mass which distracted and sometimes prevented travelers from fully appreciating the natural vistas of

China. Travel narratives generally focused on the scenery and strange customs of China, rarely including descriptions or interactions with an individuated Chinese person. This continual recourse to the undifferentiated Chinese masses worked to reiterate both the threat of the “yellow peril” to a White Protestant America and the inability of Chinese to assimilate to the US ideals of progress, individuality, and independence. The Chinese, like the Europeans, were stuck in the past, while the United States moved constantly forward in science and industry. Bayard Taylor, one of the most prolific travel writers of his time, serves as a barometer for US feeling on China in the 1850s. Introducing China in his narrative as “the land of bizarre artifice and cunning, a culture lacking,” the well-established poet and writer helped buttress the growing American vision of China as inferior (Harvey 2). Toward the Chinese, Taylor felt an aversion that

“amounted, in effect, to a horror,” causing him to proclaim: “Their touch is pollution, and harsh as the opinion may seem, justice to our own race demands that they should not be allowed to settle on our soil” (qtd. in Ziff 152-153). These views, gathered first hand by one of their own, were avidly sought and considered by the American populace; in the lecture season of Winter

1853-1854 alone, Taylor “gave 130 lectures, all of them to packed houses” (Ziff 154). Through

Taylor’s eyes, many Americans gained a first-hand look at the Chinese at the very instant that

Chinese immigrants began to enter America.

Desiring America

By the middle of the century, America itself had become a cultural myth; its image as a

new nation where anyone from any country could “make” something of himself was widespread.

To be American awarded one a sense of pride and ownership in the making of a new country

further engendering within immigrants a fierce desire to be and be perceived as American. Yet, as many immigrants learned, the term American was primarily restricted to Western European

Protestants. To accommodate this reality, those born to less desirable parentage and those of mixed race often did everything within their power to “pass.” Immigrants anglicized their names, tamed their accents, and copied the manners and dress of old-stock Protestant Americans. Light- skinned children of mixed parentage denied their non-Caucasian heritages and fully embraced their whiteness in order to ease their paths in the US. Many moved far away from their birthplaces so as to start over as “American” and ensure participation in the great American project. For Chinese Americans, often viewed as the lowest race in the Asian hierarchy,

“passing” was largely out of the question. Marked by physical difference, it was nearly impossible for Chinese to merge into mainstream American society. Though mixed race children of Chinese ancestry were few, thanks in part to strict miscegenation laws prohibiting such relations, “Eurasians” often claimed an ancestry apart from China. The Eaton family, from which sprang the earliest examples of Asian American writing, represents the avenues by which

Asian identity was negotiated in the New World. Born to a Chinese mother and an English father, the Eaton family’s children alternately declared Chinese, Japanese, English and Mexican heritage with the latter two siblings living “in nervous dread of being ‘discovered.’” (Far 227).

While Edith Maud Eaton represented herself as ethnically Chinese through her pseudonym Sui

Sin Far, her sister Winnifred Eaton claimed Japanese ancestry. Winnifred’s choice of the

Japanese pen name Otono Wantanna and her focus on mediating a Japanese perspective led to

her immense popularity over that of her sister. Her literary status also attests to the elevated

station occupied by the Japanese in comparison to the Chinese in the late 1800s.

In addition to their marked racial characteristics, these “strangers from a different shore”

were also immigrants to a different shore. From the moment they landed in California, Chinese immigrants were treated as sojourning foreign labor, not as potential Americans. Chinese

Americans therefore offered a standard by which recent white immigrant groups could oppose themselves; as such, they became a target for racism and exclusion. Irish Americans, whose immigration also began in earnest in the1840s, represent one of the most outspoken groups on the subject of Chinese labor. Discriminated against by the more established American Protestants who viewed “the massive immigration of deeply impoverished Irish…as a Roman Catholic challenge to an American republicanism deeply grounded in Protestantism,” Irish Americans had continuously struggled to gain a foothold in American society (Lee 67). Like the Chinese, the

Irish initially faced xenophobia rooted in fears over their different culture and religion. Often compared with blacks, the Irish were envisioned as both savage and dim-witted. Economics played a major role as well; worried that Irish labor would take away the jobs of Protestant

Europeans, the opportunities for Irish workers were scant, poorly paying, and often dangerous.

As the Irish began to gain a foothold in American society, the influx of Chinese labor proved a growing threat to their job security and precarious position in the States. While the Irish immigrants began the transcontinental railroad in the East, they saw these same jobs go to

Chinese immigrants in the West. In 1870, Chinese workers were used as replacements for

26 striking members of the newly formed Irish labor society the Secret Order of the Knights of St.

Crispin at a shoe factory in North Adams, Massachusetts. The use of Chinese labor to break

Irish American strikes fueled the rising conflict between the two groups. Yet, while Irish

Americans blamed Chinese labor for economic downturn and decreases in labor demand, they also used Chinese immigrants as a measure against which they could prove their Americanness; by loudly speaking out against Chinese immigration and galvanizing a white supremacist solidarity against Asians, Irish Americans aligned themselves with the more widely accepted versions of Americanness and reignited the idea of the United States as a white republic.

This fierce desire to be perceived as American coincided with and fueled the rise in dime museums and side shows in the middle of the nineteenth century, both of which made pointed use of the extraordinary body. In her introductory essay “From Wonder to Error – A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity,” Rosemarie Garland Thomson traces the historical development of narratives concerning the anomalous body, proposing that “freak discourse is both imbricated in and reflective of our collective cultural transformation into modernity” (3).

As Thomson explains, early conceptions of monsters and unusual phenomena as extraordinary portents indicative of divine will persisted until the Enlightenment when science reformulated the freak not as wonder but as error: “the prodigious monster transforms into the pathological terata; what was once sought after as revelation becomes pursued as entertainment” (3).

Concomitant with these shifts, natural oddities become curiosities, inaugurating the age of

Wunderkammern or curiosity cabinets. As the precursors to modern museums, curiosity cabinets were private collections held together by a scientific narrative that marshaled various man-made and natural objects of the fantastic into an organized whole. In nineteenth century Victorian

America, modernization and capitalism served to reconfigure the fantastic; as Rachel Adams

27 reminds us in her study of the images of freak shows in the twentieth century, “While individuals have been exhibited as freaks for hundreds of years, the orchestrated spectacle of the freak show was born in the mid-nineteenth century of a conjunction between scientific investigation and mass entertainment” (27). Many of these shows took place as standalone operations in rented halls, others travelled across the country, and still others became permanent fixtures in the dime museums that began sprouting up across the country in the 1800s. As an inexpensive mode of entertainment that catered to a wide cross section of society, dime museums offered “a democratic and ostensibly ‘educational’ form of entertainment in which neither language, literacy, sex, nor the size of one’s wallet was an issue” (Dennet 5). Like the Wunderkammer of the renaissance, successful entrepreneurs touted their museums as arenas not only for pleasure but also for learning, thus adhering to Victorian beliefs that one’s leisure time should be spent in the pursuit of edifying diversions.

Yet while dime museums and freak shows still retained aspects of wonder and the quasi- scientific underpinnings of their antecedents, the incorporation of these shows as public attractions also suggested new modes of display and narration. The growth of side shows in the middle to late nineteenth century shadowed the rapid social changes and modernization of the

US. Addressing the American public’s apprehension of the effects of these changes on one’s spiritual framework, freak shows reassured Euro American onlookers of their normality and offered a unilateral view of difference. As Thomson explains in Extraordinary Bodies , these exhibits “reaffirm[ed] the difference between ‘them’ and ‘us’ during a time when immigration, emancipation of the slaves, and female suffrage confounded previously reliable physical indices of status and privilege such as maleness and Western European features.” (Thomson 65).

Capitalizing on human deformities and cultural difference, dime museums were part curiosity

28 cabinet, part ethnographic study. Presenting everything from midgets to “fatboys,” dime museums became “a place where deviance [was] enhanced, dressed, coiffed” (Dennett 134). The display of the freaks as animate exhibits narrated by a hawker or program literature allowed difference to remain static, nonthreatening and a subject for quasi-scientific study. By showcasing difference in such a way, freak shows offered a chance to safely view Otherness along with the opportunity to reaffirm one’s own normality; audience members confirmed their commonality and solidarity with the mainstream American public merely by their participatory presence as voyeur.

Through their revolving cast of characters, the rise of freak shows and dime museums also echoed the century’s changing political and social challenges, many of which centered on questions of ethnicity. As Rachel Adams argues, freak shows “performed important cultural work by allowing ordinary people to confront and master the most extreme and terrifying forms of otherness they could imagine” and acted as “a stage for playing out many of the century’s most charged social and political controversies, such as debates about race and empire, immigration, relations among the sexes, taste, and community standards for decency” (Adams 2-

3). The prominence of “missing links” in the latter half of the nineteenth century belied a growing preoccupation with evolution theory and a desire to “place” African Americans within the US cultural strata. P.T. Barnum’s famous “What Is It” capitalized on this desire through its stylized presentation of a short, mentally-retarded African American fashioned to represent the connection between man and beast. Asking “Is it a lower order of MAN? Or is it a higher order of MONKEY?” Barnum’s display invited onlookers to determine for themselves just what “it” was – man or beast – while the exhibit’s race complicated that question and elicited speculations on ethnicity (qtd. in Adams 37). Though Dennett avers that Barnum “avoided making a racial

statement,” the very alignment of the exhibit with the animal spoke volumes in favor of

prevailing opinions (both public and scientific) on the lesser nature of the African American

while underwriting the racist argument for their protection through slavery (Dennett 31). In the

“What Is It” exhibit and other racialized exhibits occurring in museums nationwide, the

predominant stereotypical assumptions about a specific ethnic group were enhanced and

extended.

By the close of the nineteenth century, the opening of Eastern markets coupled with an

expanding global presence and diversifying populace led to an increasing American interest in

the exotic. Multiple museums that centered on Asianness sprung up around the country as

sideshows increasingly showcased “freaks” of Asian ancestry alongside Orientalized non-Asian

acts which represented deviance by means of their size, disability, or indiscriminate gender.

While this growing assortment of Asian exhibits bespeaks the nation’s residual anxiety towards

the specter of Chinese labor and those Americans of Chinese descent already within its borders,

it also remembers an earlier American curiosity with China. The first recorded Chinese curiosity,

“The Chinese Lady,” toured multiple venues in New York and Philadelphia from 1834 to 1838. 5

As a cultural display, Moy offered onlookers an introduction to Chinese culture. Displayed with various silks and tapestries, Moy engaged audiences through her use of chopsticks, her language

(she counted in Chinese), and her small bound feet. Largely ethnographic in purpose, Moy’s display enticed voyeurs by allowing them to view the exotic at a safe distance. Like later exhibits, communication was not allowed; rather, Moy existed separately from her audience, as a specimen. Not disfigured or disproportionate in any way, Moy’s “freakishness” arose solely from her ethnicity and her display alongside other curiosities. Thus “The Chinese Lady” served

5 Afong Moy is also “the first recorded Chinese woman in America” (I. Chang 26). 30 to bring one of the first accessible pictures of Chineseness to the West; for the price of admission, the everyday American could get a first hand glimpse of the East.

The proliferation and popularity of Asian exhibits during the “peak years” of 1865 to

1900 testifies to the democratizing social function of dime museums and freak shows in the increasingly turbulent later years of the nineteenth century (Dennett 41). These acts capitalized on what Bogdan describes as the “exotic mode,” whereby a “racist presentation of them [Others] and their culture” drew voyeurs eager to partake of difference (29). Perhaps the most well known Chinese curiosity, the Siamese twins Chang and Eng were so successful as sideshow freaks that they managed to retire to a North Carolina plantation with their respective wives.

While Chang and Eng’s most substantial draw was their conjoined bodies, their racial makeup also played a role in their prominence and success. Often pictured in traditional Chinese garb with queues hanging down their backs, the story of their rescue from a bleak Siam existence, their portrayal as youths, and their purported joy and interest in American life all added to a domesticated vision of the twins and reassured onlookers of their essential exoticness. Similarly, other Orientalized exhibits took advantage of the public’s image of Asians by casting European

Americans as Asian through make up and dialogue. These exhibits drew customers by highlighting the exotic persona advanced by the hawker or showman and “appeal[ing] to people’s interest in the culturally strange, the primitive, the bestial, the exotic” (Bogdan 28).

Regardless of the exhibit’s ethnicity, the silence of the freak acquiesced to the overarching narrative sold by the show at large and reaffirmed his or her own extra-humanness. In effect,

“the common strategy of attributing non-Western origins to people with developmental disabilities” constitutes a growing American standard that equated whiteness with normality and racial characteristics with deviance (Adams 30). For example, the “Wild Men of Borneo”

31 depended largely upon the overarching narrative produced and systematized by the scenery, props, and back story of the exhibit. While the “Wild Men” were in reality two short, mentally challenged brothers who grew up in Ohio, the show’s exotic narrative and trappings created two savages from the Pacific domesticated and brought to America. The efficacy of this exotic mode is evidenced in the near 53 year tenure of the “Wild Men” exhibit and a proliferation of similar displays. The narrative delineated by the hawker alongside the backdrop and costuming thus took on a far greater role than the human exhibit itself by insisting upon the foreignness and exceptionalness of the freak, which served to further define the normality of the audience through its showcasing of difference.

While Orientalized side show acts continued to serve as “edifying curiosities” that reassured Americans of their place in American society, a new site for the performance of

Chineseness also arose in the Chinese Museum. By 1838, the display “Ten Thousand Chinese

Things” occupied a floor in the same building as Charles Wilson Peale’s famous natural history collection. This assortment of Chinese cultural objects, gathered by Nathan Dunn during his expedition to China, enhanced the few Chinese curiosities (including a life size carving of a

Chinese man in native garb) already housed in Peale’s dime museum (Denker 21). Ostensibly the first public museum housing an extensive number of Chinese items, Dunn’s collection remained open in its Philadelphia location for three years. Following much the same formula as

Dunn, John Peters Jr.’s “The Great Chinese Museum” opened in Boston in 1844. Peters, a member of the small party sent to secure trade agreements between the US and China in June of

1844, returned to Boston with a significant store of Chinese artifacts. Peters’s museum purported to be “ a Picture of the Genius, Government, History, Literature, Agriculture, Arts,

Trade, Manners, Customs, and Social Life of the People of the Celestial Empire ” (Tchen 113).

His various exhibition cabinets featured a variety of Chinese items ranging from crafts and everyday household goods to expansive dioramas replete with life size Chinese figures.

Discreetly sectioned off and presented in neatly organized rows, Peters’s displays offered visitors a scientific and catalogued look at Chinese culture as represented through its various objects.

His use of goods to signify Chinese culture indicates not only America’s growing interest in the exotic, but also underscores the continuing perception of Chinese culture as archaic and inferior.

Much as early travelers commented on the backwardness of the Chinese people at large, Peters similarly remarks in his catalogue, “They live in the past, we in the future, and consequently they are not to be judged by our standards” (qtd. in Tchen 117). Such a conception of China’s underdevelopment served to buttress the American fetishization of progress as realized through scientific and industrial advancement. When measured against the stagnant culture of China,

America’s growing industry and imperialism revealed just how far the States had come.

P.T. Barnum would additionally cement this connection between the freak show and the dime museum through his addition of the “Chinese Living Family” to Peters’s museum in 1850.

Moved about from Boston, to Philadelphia, and finally New York, Barnum rented The Great

Chinese Museum, renaming it Barnum’s Chinese Museum, during renovations on his own building. In addition to the name change, only one other change took place: the inclusion of the live exhibit of Miss Pwan-Ye-Koo and her assorted entourage. Barnum touted the debut of Pwan as “the most extraordinary curiosity yet,” and “the first Chinese lady that has yet visited

Christendom” (qtd. in Tchen 118, 119). The authenticity of Pwan, bolstered largely by her bound feet, substantiated both the exotic and authoritative nature of Peters’s collection. These apprehensions translated well to Barnum’s audiences; according to the New York Express , Pwan was “so pretty, so arch, so lively, and so graceful, while her minute feet are wondrous!” (qtd. in

Tchen 118). Unlike the side show exhibits, Pwan’s display did not operate primarily on bodily

abnormality nor did it document the progress of the States by producing a narrative of savagery.

Instead, the success of the exhibit rested largely on cultural difference. As Adams incisively

notes, “freaks are produced not by their inherent differences from us, but by the way their

particularities are figured as narratives of unique and intractable alterity” (56). Pwan’s

costuming, staging, and the alien cultural practice signified by her bound feet laid the foundation

for her popularity. Though Pwan and her attendants were only displayed for a total of eight

weeks, Tchen estimates that Barnum earned $10,000 in their display. The ethnographic interest

in China manifested by Pwan’s debut served as an impetus for the American tour of Barnum’s

Great Asiatic Museum from 1851 to 1855 and prefigured the proliferation of other “Chinese”

museums in Boston and elsewhere in the second half of the nineteenth century. While many of

these displays continued to define Americanness by showcasing difference, these museums also

bespoke a growing American curiosity toward Asian goods, thus laying the groundwork for the

later fetishization of Chinese cultural objects and the transformation of Chinese goods into a

form of symbolic capital.

Acting in concert with the enfreakment peddled by dime museums and carnival side

shows, the cessation of incoming Chinese due to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 removed

Chinese Americans from public view (and history books). 6 As the mining and railroad industry slowed, the majority of Chinese Americans began working in independently owned shops, laundries, and restaurants largely concentrated in Chinatowns. To interact with Chinese

6 After the Exclusion Act, the majority of mainstream history books tend to gloss over any Chinese American presence until well into the twentieth century. Ronald Takaki’s revisionist A Different Mirror recaptures their presence against similar omissions of the specific histories of other ethnic groups. Tellingly, perhaps, most mainstream literary anthologies also figure early Chinese American textuality in terms of exclusion, generally reproducing texts like Sui Sin Far’s “In the Land of the Free,” which offers a fictional account of the results of the Exclusion Act legislation. Following such inclusions, Chinese American literature is usually not revisited until the outpouring of ethnic texts in the 1980s. 34

Americans now required one to seek out these stores in one of the increasing numbers of

Chinatowns located throughout the US. The formation of Chinatowns as a result of Chinese

American urbanization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries afforded another vista for viewing the Celestial. Here, everyday Americans could visit an authentic China and experience the spectacle it presented. Numerous advertisements touted tourists could “‘wander in the midst of the Orient while still in the Occident’ and see throngs of people with ‘strange faces’ in the streets” all while experiencing the ‘sounds, the sights, and the smells of Canton’”

(Takaki, A Different Mirror 247). Thus, tourism served a double function for Euro Americans and Chinese Americans. For both, as Takaki notes, “tourism became a new ‘necessity’” (231).

While Chinatowns offered first and foremost a sense of community and protection away from

Euro American prejudice, they also offered employment much in the vein of dime museums and side shows. Here, as there, visitors could engage the exotic and gain first hand ethnographic views of Chineseness. Unlike the sideshows, however, Chinatowns also allowed for dialogue through interaction with an actual Chinese American and the potential for significant intercultural communication. At the same time, the very foreignness of the Chinatowns

“reinforce[ed] both the image and condition of the Chinese as ‘strangers’ in America” (Takaki

231). Tourists were advised not to stay within Chinatown after dark when danger and lawlessness was apt to become more prevalent. Chinatowns became tourist attractions that offered an exotic view and a chance at travel within America’s boundaries. In contrast to the

Euro Americans who visited them, Chinese Americans did not return to homes beyond the walls of Chinatown at the close of the day. While Chinatown tours offered a discrete place for the exchange of culture, the very ghettoization of these areas also reinscribed the Otherness and objectification of the Chinese.

The renewal and strengthening of various exclusionary laws reduced the population of

Chinese in America and concentrated them into self sustaining units within Chinatowns,

effectively limiting their contact with mainstream Euro Americans. In addition, the racial

underpinnings of the Exclusion Act legislated and affirmed the un-Americanness of Chinese

immigrants. No longer needed as labor capital, the unwanted Celestials alternately represented

an exotic form of life that reified the American standard through its obverse paradigm. The

ghettoizing result of Chinatowns further cut off many Chinese from mainstream American

culture, confirming their position as exotified Other. 7 As silent, anonymous exhibits in

Chinatowns and freak shows, the Chinese body became objectified and historicized outside of the continuing American progressive model and as such assumed colonization by it. Relegated to the back alleys of Chinatown, the silent stages of the side shows, and the display cases of dime museums, Chinese Americans of the late nineteenth century became accessible primarily as exhibited objects for curiosity and comparison. Functioning similarly to the disabled studied by

Rosemarie Garland Thompson, Chinese Americans became “icons upon which people discharge their anxieties, convictions and fantasies” (56). China, and by extension Chinese Americans, represented the ignorance and primitiveness of the past, which America had long since conquered and corrected. No longer a labor threat or a menace to the nation’s cultural security,

Euro Americans measured themselves against Chinese Americans and began to use their

Otherness as imaginative fuel.

(Re)Visioning China

Though “the Euroamerican image of the Chinese and Chinese Americans from 1850 to the turn of the century was almost completely negative,” the latter half of the century also

7 Ronald Takaki’s Strangers from a Different Shore details many of these attitude shifts as well as the migrations of Chinese Americans. 36 realized a concomitant increase in interest in Chinese objects (Williams 95). Such an interest proceeded paradoxically from stereotypes of China’s historicity; while the pastness of China conflicted with paradigms of American progress, its perceived continuation of traditional ways of life fixed many of its objects as not only curiosities but examples of cultural attainment. Freed from negative associations with the potential power of a culturally alien populace, the exhibits of

Chineseness during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century detached Chinese Americans from their cultural products. Objectified as exhibit, Euro Americans were able to dissect

Chineseness at will and rearrange and reorder it to fit into a dominant Western world view. Thus, as the Europe gradually turned toward war in the early 1900s, China’s backwardness became situated as a positive attribute in a world increasingly fragmented by industrialization. Whereas early travelogues were apt to critique China’s seeming disinterest in Western paradigms of progress and innovation, it was precisely this underdevelopment that began to gain praise in the twentieth century. Now that the Chinese were no longer a threat to domestic life, the idea of

Chineseness formulated in the late 1800s could modulate into a symbol of culture, cosmopolitanism, and wealth.

The new American museums of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century serve as a primary reference point for delineating the growing interest in things Chinese. The cultural antecedents of these museums, earlier Chinese museums like Peale’s and Peters’s, also reflect this shift toward the perception of Chinese culture as aesthetically advanced. Though Peters’s and Peale’s for the most part worked as arenas by which to showcase the exotic essence of the

Chinese, Peters’s, in particular, anticipated the later fetishizing of Chinese objects as refined, cultural art. As Zboray and Zboray successfully argue, the underlying political message of the museum argued for increased trade and treaties between the US and China. Not fully bent on

exotification, the museum was largely couched on the premise that the Chinese represented a

suitable venue for increased trade. Thus, the museum’s cases introduced the visitor to a life-size

diorama of the signing of the Wanghia treaty followed subsequently by a life-size rendering of

the empress and other cases which testified to the cultural attainments of the Chinese people.

Accompanied by a catalog which explained many of the cultural differences between the

Chinese and Americans, this assemblage tacitly alluded to the suitability of trade with China on

the basis of the Orient’s refinement and civility. As such, the museum countered many of the

previously held connotations of Chinese as dirty and backwards by indicating how its cultural

objects could be of aesthetic interest to Americans.

Despite the aims of the museum, the American public of the nineteenth century was still strongly influenced by the image of the Chinese they had envisioned via authors such as Gützlaff and Taylor or through the news accounts of the frontier. However, Britain’s dominance in the

Opium Wars concluded that, despite its difference, China offered no threat to the American way of life. In addition, the eventual permanence of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1902 and the continued ghettoization of Chinese Americans acted in concert to allay prior economic and xenophobic apprehensions of Chinese on American shores. With no new Chinese immigrating, and Chinese Americans already taxonomized in Chinatowns and side shows, the Chinese labor menace virtually disappeared from popular view. Such invisibility reinforced the reality and the legitimacy of Oriental displays, which in turn created a market interested in the authentic cultural objects of the Chinese and the history and aesthetics to which they alluded. Participating in the process of what Rosemarie Garland Thomson refers to as “enfreakment,” the arrangement of

Chineseness and Chinese Americans in museums, side shows, and travelogues, conflated the

Chinese self with its cultural antecedents. As Thomson explains,

Enfreakment emerges from cultural rituals that stylize, silence, differentiate, and distance

the persons whose bodies the freak-hunters or showmen colonize and commercialize.

Paradoxically, however, at the same time that enfreakment elaborately foregrounds

specific bodily eccentricities, it also collapses all those differences into a ‘freakery,’ a

single amorphous category of corporeal otherness. (“Introduction” 10)

Such voyeurism abstracts the human from the corporeal, leaving only an objective shell as each

cast member of the side show is reduced by the audience to a non-participatory inhabitant who

exists only on the stage and in the imagination of the onlooker. The body displayed abdicates

agency and becomes immobilized as object. Accordingly, the totality of the exhibit itself

becomes representative rather than its specific parts. In the case of Chinese exhibits, the myriad

orientalized side show exhibits working in what Bogdan terms the exotic mode serve as example.

In these displays, no ethnic Chinese was required; instead, Asian costume or trappings served to

delineate Chineseness. Here, the presentation and display became more important for audience

members than the human exhibited as the shell became by proxy the image and signifier of

Chineseness. The body and cultural object were further conflated by the selling of souvenirs at these venues. According to Susan Stewart, the hawking of souvenirs “allow the tourist to appropriate, consume, and thereby ‘tame’ the cultural other” (146). Without the ready comparison between Chinese Americans and the orientalized memento, objects or tokens serve to explain and replace Chineseness. The object substitutes for the missing Chinese American, thus becoming the signifier of a culture; it is more “real” in its tangibility than the removed human representation of the culture. This concrete reality of the object allowed visitors uninitiated to China to exclaim Dunn’s museum to be “China in miniature,” “a perfect fac-simile

[sic],” and “a perfect picture of Chinese life” (Denker 21). Even without having known or seen

China or a Chinese, audience members could verify the reality of the displays due to their

preconceived notions and the wholesale marketing of the orientalized product for Chineseness.

The mounting prevalence of Chinese objects in American museums and the domestic

sphere also reveals the growing impression of China as culturally and artistically superior. Over

time, the private collections of Chinese artifacts exhibited by entrepreneurs like Barnum and

Peale would give way to the public collections displayed throughout the US in various art

galleries. As Denker notes in the exhibition catalogue After the Chinese Taste , “by the end of the

1930s, many distinguished public collections of Asian art were available to students throughout

the United States” (Denker 42). The proliferation of these venues began around 1890 through

the work of Ernest Fenollosa. Fenollosa, perhaps most famous for the inspiration he provided

Ezra Pound, returned from his study in Japan to become the curator of the new Oriental

Department at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (Denker 42). By 1895, Fenollosa had begun

lecturing on the finer aspects of the arts of China and Japan. In 1893, the Springfield Museum

opened an exposition of Asian art, while 1907 saw the display of Chinese porcelains in the

Metropolitan Museum. In 1919, the railroad engineer Charles Freer bequeathed to the

Smithsonian both his extensive collection of Asian art and a substantial sum of money earmarked

for constructing a gallery to house it. The Freer Gallery’s opening in 1923 also had the

distinction of being the first Smithsonian museum dedicated to the fine arts. That Asian art

would constitute the contents of the first Smithsonian fine arts museum speaks volumes of its

perceived aesthetic value. 8

These proliferations of Chinese exhibits in public museums also paralleled another

growing trend in the antebellum era: that of international interior decoration. As the United

8 The Freer collection continues to boast one of the most extensive public collections of Asian art in the US. 40

States entered the global stage in the late nineteenth century and tested the waters of imperialism

in the early twentieth century, changes in interior design mirrored a growing interest in the

international and turned away from the pre-war colonial revival styles. Fueled by the new sense

that interiors were “expressions of the women who inhabited them,” housewives desired décor

that readily evinced their individuality and articulated their membership in a growing sense of

Americanism (Hoganson 58). In contrast to the seventeenth century chinoiseries, the post- bellum vogue of amassing Chinese objects was more widespread and affected a larger section of society. According to Denker’s survey of the Asian aesthetic in American decorative arts, “prior to 1860, most of the Chinese objects available to Americans were trade goods made to Western taste” (Denker 41). By the late 1800s, increased trade agreements between China and the US resulted in the wide availability of Chinese art. Aided by the diversifying markets of the US, women could more easily and cheaply acquire objects from the global scale to present a worldly ethos to their visitors. Thus, what Hoganson calls cosmopolitan domesticity , or the incorporation of foreign objects in household decoration, became a style accessible by multiple echelons of society.

The appropriation of international design elements by late nineteenth century families were part and parcel of the “orientalist craze that swept the nation from 1870s to the turn of the century” (Hoganson 62). Though certainly not all of the objects amassed hailed from China, a large sector and the more easily discernible did. While notions of the Chinese as a challenge to the fabric of the Euro American families and a symbol of all that America was not still persisted, the continuing taxonomy of Chinese as Other coupled with the 1882 Exclusion Act and the concomitant rise of Chinatowns served to both lessen the threat of the Chinese. Such welcoming of Chinese products into the domestic sphere also manifests the separation between maker and

41 product accomplished by the forces of objectification and exclusion. Chinese goods that entered the marketplace did not retain the taint of Chinese in America and the associated fear of “yellow peril,” but rather signified to Euro Americans the long and exotic history of a foreign land.

Sanitized of their association with Chinese Americans, these culturally alien objects entered the feminine sphere allowing for the domestication of the foreign art object and the transference of the cultural capital symbolized by the object onto the US. As Hoganson perceptively notes,

“globalization did not threaten cultural loss so much as promise cultural gain, in a very literal, materialistic, sense” (78). Much in the same way the tourist of the early nineteenth century visited Europe to define a sense of history the US lacked, cosmopolitan domesticity appealed to housewives as an avenue by which they could signal their worldliness and celebrate the success of the United States in foreign fields. Chinese curiosities affirmed their possessors as worldly women of wealth and distinction. While these women may not have traveled abroad, the objects served, nonetheless, “as traces of authentic experience” (Stewart 135). In much the same vein as the exotic souvenir Stewart theorizes, these objects’ “otherness speaks to the possessor’s capacity for otherness,” marking the owners as cosmopolitan in an increasingly globalized world

(145).

Though authentic Chinese art was certainly more valued than American reproductions,

Chinese design elements nonetheless exerted a strong influence on multiple spheres of American art from the late nineteenth century throughout the twentieth. Not restricted merely to painting, this phenomenon is remarkable in the multiple spheres of art it affected including pottery, china, furniture design, among others. Hobbs, Brocunier & Company’s “peachblow” vases represent one of the earlier instances of American appropriation of Chinese design. Capitalizing on the public interest surrounding the 1886 sale of a rare “peachbloom” glazed vase for $18,000, the

firm created and marketed similar vases to “considerable success” (Denker 42). The early

twentieth century also saw a revival of Chinese Chippendale furniture. As Denker notes, the

prevalence of these designs in antique and second hand stores connotes their popularity (47). In

addition, respected companies such as Lenox released China patterns that mimicked traditional

Chinese designs; for instance, the Ming pattern, featuring a cherry blossom in its center, was

marketed from 1917 to 1965 (Denker 68). However, this new image changed little for Chinese

Americans of the 1900s, as they still reported various forms of both random and institutionalized

discrimination. 9 In fact, though China left a distinct imprint on interior design, designers often

preferred to ascribe Chinese designs with the moniker “AngloJapanese” as “the menial position

of Chinese workers in Western society at that time led writers in this field to ignore the influence

of the Chinese” (Denker 43). Such misnomers further underscore the separation taking place

between Chinese Americans and the aestheticizing of their cultural and artistic products.

Travel writers of the early twentieth century also began to offer a new vision of China

proper. The closure of Britain’s Opium Wars and Japan’s seizure of Taiwan along with the US’s

Open Door Policy left China more open to travel and tourism. Coupled with the prevailing idea

of tourism’s commodification of Europe and the death of “real travel,” a renewed interest in

seeing the unspoiled wonders of China emerged. In addition, the completion of the

transcontinental railroad and the settling of the “Wild West” engendered within many Americans

the desire to explore a new borderland to rejuvenate America’s pioneering spirit. Travel

remained “something like an obligation for the person conscientious about developing the mind

and accumulating knowledge” (Fussell 129). According to Justin Edwards, “by 1850…as many

as thirty thousand Americans traveled to Europe each year” (7). Travel to the European cultural

9 Both Ronald Takaki and Iris Chang list a number of discriminatory acts against Chinese Americans in the early 1900’s, the least of which is the continued enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the resultant “bachelor societies.” 43 meccas of yesteryear were now fraught by 1905 with “what [Henry] James refers to as ‘one’s detestable fellow pilgrim’” (Caesar 53). In contrast, travel to Asia, and more specifically China, escaped the abundance of tourists and the reality of America by offering an exotic experience and a “new frontier” unmitigated by other Europeans. As early as 1881, Thomas W. Knox noted,

“the brainless idiots that add a pang to existence on the transatlantic voyage are rarely seen so far away from the home as the coast of China” (qtd. in Fussell 466). In China, it was imagined, one could retreat from the industrialized West by indulging in the civility and leisure of the East. In the wake of the European world’s fracturing at the break of World War I, China’s previous status as an over-civilized nation mired in tradition turned into a positive draw. Unlike India, the

Philippines and other Asiatic countries, China was virtually untouched by Europe’s imperialistic hand. Save Hong Kong, China resisted colonization, just as it had previously resisted Western relations. Thus, following the opening of China to trade in the late 1800’s China became for the

Westerner, in Kowalewski’s words, “terra incognita.” As Scidmore incisively notes, “neither

Murray nor Baedeker has penetrated the empire…and Cook has only touched the edge of it at

Canton” (qtd. in N. Clifford 19). China seemed to offer the last frontier for true “travel,” where the traveler could experience the exotic, in its full historical splendor.

Many travel writers embraced the changing face of travel in the early 1900s by delineating to their readers the perceived improvements between China now and China of ten years before. Whereas earlier travelogues focused on the differences between China and the US, later works found it useful not to dwell extensively on these differences but on the changes occurring in China that allowed for a more comfortable journey. At first blush, these narratives seem to offer China on its own terms – different but nonetheless an area to be visited and appreciated. However, the recurring designation of the European ideal of Christian progress as

44 the future toward which China was approaching underlines the deep-seeded Eurocentrism in many of the travelogues. For instance, Edwin Dingle, travelling to China in 1909, first notes:

“China is changing… although the movement may be hampered by a thousand general difficulties, presented by ancient civilization of a people whose customs and manners and ideas have stood the test of time” (8). Similarly, Isabella Bird Bishop devotes the final chapter of her work to debunking prevalent themes of a decaying China; though this theme had been recurrent in pre-1900 travelogues, a changing global scene coupled with a growing question over the end result of industrialization led to a growing perception of China as a symbol of continuity.

Instead of using the citizens of China to demonstrate the disrepair and backwardness of the country, Bishop points to governmental problems as the font from which China’s major issues flowed: “the people are straight, but officialism is corrupt” (325).

However, as much as Dingle and Bishop represent a changing understanding of China, they nonetheless retain many of the opinions of earlier travelers. On the page following Dingle’s assessment of China’s change, he notes “there are huge areas absolutely untouched by the forward movement and where the people are living the same life of disease, distress, and dirt, of official, moral, and social degradation, as they lived when the Westerner remained still in the primeval forest stage” (9). Unable to shake off previous conceptions of China and an overarching belief in the superiority of Western customs, the subtext of Dingle’s observation substantiates the hierarchical location of the Chinese under that of the West. Like Dingle,

Bishop also placed China within a Western framework. For Bishop, the major fault retained by the country was its religion: “the strongest power in China to-day is Confucius; but the admirable theory has proved weak in the presence of the neglected factor of the downward tendency of

45 human nature in a pagan nation” (326). Without the enlightenment of Western Christian ideals,

Bishop feared the country could never equal that of the Western world.

Although the 1900s represented a burgeoning change in the attitude of travel narratives towards China, these attitudes were by no means universal. Eliza Scidmore, writing at the cusp of the new century, still hearkens to many of the previous images of China. Constantly remarking of the filth and degradation she saw in the inns, homes, and streets of China, she affirms China “has been dying of old age and senile decay…slowly ossifying for this hundred years. During this wonderful century of Western progress it has swung slowly to a standstill, to a state of arrested existence, then retrograded, and the world watches now for the last symptoms and extinctions” (qtd. in N. Clifford 28). For Scidmore, as for many other travel writers, this arrested existence had less to do with backwardness or a want of civilization and more to do with a perceived over-civilization and outdated modes of interaction. Thus, as Nicholas Clifford rightly observes, China by the turn of the century “no longer reflected the kind of unchanging and essentialized Orient that we today perhaps take too easily as the subject of colonial discourse”

(33). Yet, while the opinions and images published by travel writers after 1900 do offer divergent views of China, more often than not Western imperialism would inform even the most positive views. In these accounts, changing China, and a China changing for the better, did so in order to accede to the demands of an increasingly Westernized world.

As the world reeled from international war, another distinctive shift occurred in the theme of Chinese travelogues. Though some of the travelogues written in the years surrounding World

War I and World War II still retained traces of the exoticism found in earlier works, a great many began to offer up China as a distinct refutation of the ills of the modern world. McGovern’s

1929 account of his entry into the “Forbidden city” by way of India presents China in the exotic

46 mode: “we had not only crossed the Rubicon, we had also burned our bridges behind us” (117).

Once in China, everything was expected to be foreign, different, and cut off from the Western world. Similarly, like many earlier travelogues, educator and philosopher John Dewey’s 1929 account highlights the primitive aspects of China. However, for Dewey, this association with the past and dedication to conservative values “is that of old China at its best, a kind of Confucian paternalism” (248). Dewey would go on to become a major proponent and caretaker of this view of an ancient China in an attempt to protect it against encroaching modernization and degradation through industrialization. Stating China’s resistance to modernization as “in truth the manifestation of a mighty social instinct,” Dewey’s China recalls a refined Europe of time gone by and positions China as America’s enlightened counterpart (251). Writing from China shortly after World War I, Bertrand Russell continues this portrait by pitting the condition of

China against that of the West:

China may be regarded as an artist nation, with the virtues and vices to be expected of the

artist: virtues chiefly useful to others, and vices chiefly harmful to oneself. Can Chinese

virtues be preserved? Or must China, in order to survive, acquire, instead, the vices

which make for success and cause misery to others only? And if China does copy the

model set by all foreign nations with which she has dealings, what will become of all of

us? (10)

Russell’s characterization of China as an “artist nation” reifies the increasing perception of the aesthetic value of the country. Yet, Russell’s quotation also signals an increasing anxiety over the state of the Western world and a growing desire to return to a pre-industrialized state. Thus, as Nicholas Clifford avers, via Dennis Porter and Peter Bishop, “ideas of racial difference might coexist quite easily with a Western belief that the East, in its inheritance of an unchanging

wisdom, knew how to draw on sources of knowledge that the West had never attained, or in its

headlong rush toward material progress and bourgeois satisfaction had lost” (25). China, then

symbolized what had been forgotten or destroyed in the race for “progress.” 10

Even as attitudes towards China began to change, these new perceptions were directed

more to the cultural objects of the Chinese and less towards the Chinese themselves. In

surveying the balance of American travelogues to China in both the eighteenth and early

nineteenth century, only a handful allude to a specific Chinese individual. Scidmore’s impression

of the Chinese as “cast in the same unvarying physical and mental mold, the same yellow skin,

hard features, and harsh, mechanical voice” indicates the indifference she evinced towards the

Chinese (qtd. in N. Clifford 57). Scidmore’s envisioning of the Chinese as an indiscriminant

mass objectifies the group as a whole in much the same vein as the earlier tradition of dime

museums. Dingle similarly describes the populace of the “great metropolis of Shanghai” as

“swarming masses of coolie humanity carrying or hauling merchandise amid incessant jabbering,

yelling, and vociferating” (Dingle 10). Despite his interest in the changing face of “Wonderful

Shanghai,” Dingle, like many of the travel writers of this period seems to care little for the

people who inhabit it; asserting both “it is for such [natural beauty] that China holds out an

inviting hand, but she holds out little else to the Westerner” and “thank god there are those

uninvaded corners,” Dingle makes clear that China could be improved just by simply removing

the Chinese component (10, 29, 41). Echoing the earlier sentiments of pre-1900 travelers, the

majority of these travelogues viewed China as a feat of natural and artistic excellence marred by

its indistinguishable masses of residents.

10 Interestingly, travelers like Russell who opposed the development or modernization of Asia were censured in 1925 by Lu Xun for their Orientalist views of China. Writing at the beginning of the Chinese revolution, Lu Xun viewed the Western vision of China as adored other as connected to the West’s desire to keep China from participating in the modern global economy. 48

For travelers to China in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, interaction with

Chinese was not a prerequisite for having traveled; on the contrary, souvenirs that could authenticate one’s visit to an exotic location, and by extension testify to one’s cosmopolitanism and wealth, were avidly sought. Mirrored by the lack of individuated Chinese in the majority of

American travel accounts in China, this idea is most clearly featured by Carl Crow’s A

Traveller’s Handbook for China . The guidebook, set up in a number of smaller chapters, begins with everyday concerns including money, the use of Pidgin English, the art of haggling, and so forth. However, the book quickly turns to “Arts and industries,” which covers in detail the bronzes, laquerware, paintings, and embroideries one could purchase. In the updated introduction to the 1922 edition, Crow entices readers promising: “the artist finds new and rich treasures…for the curio collector there are great stocks of rare brocades, bronzes, pictures and porcelains” (2). Much like the museums and interior decorating schemes of the previous century, this turn away from the humanity producing these objects and toward the objects themselves emphasizes the extent to which the Chinese cultural object served as a token of Chineseness.

The potential of these commodities exists not in “the conditions authored by the primitive culture itself but from the analogy between the primitive/exotic and the origin of the possessor” (Stewart

146). Under the exchange economy of the US, these objects became disengaged from their corporeal antecedents and instead represented a kind of cultural capital wieldable by Euro

Americans. As cultural capital, these art works worked both by “reproduc[ing] the established social order and conceal[ing] relations of domination” (Ong 89). Crow inadvertently substantiates this understanding in the 1913 version by stating “many travelers carry home one of their carved camphor wood or teakwood boxes as the richest trophy of a trip to the Orient” (76).

Thus, not only did “the traveler’s search for a real China…risk reducing China to an exotic

object that reflected Western fantasies, turning it almost into a kind of theme park” (N. Clifford

92), many a travelogue did reduce China to its tangible objects. “Engendered by an experience of lack within the subject for which the desired object provides imaginary compensation”

(Figuiera 9), the recently forced open doors of China offered a new repository for the American imagination that culminated in a projection of the traits of cultural superiority, aesthetic achievement, and timelessness onto the disembodied and objectified arts of China.

By the beginning of the Modernist poetry movement in 1914, Chinese artifacts could be seen on display in museums and private collections throughout the US. Owning one of these pieces “offer[ed] an authenticity of experience tied up with notions of the primitive as child and the primitive as an earlier and purer stage of contemporary civilization” (Stewart 146). Similar to the African objects d’art gathered at the turn of the century, Chinese objects denoted the possessor’s capacity for Otherness and bespoke his or her individuality. And, just as Picasso would draw on Africa to initiate his revolutions in the Modernist art world, many a Modernist writer would find in the literature and art of China the germ of “modern” writing. As Simon

Gikandi explains in his work on Picasso’s entanglement with African art forms, Africa “could not be relegated to antiquity nor could it be considered modern; rather it occupied a middle space temporally located both in the childhood of mankind and yet very much part of the living world”

(459). In much the same way, China provided Modernist poets an alternative to both contemporaneous and traditional poetics; its exoticness allowed Modernists to challenge dominant Western poetic modes while its antiquity signaled a revaluation of traditional aesthetic values. The “unmodern” of China accommodated resistance to both classicism and modernity.

Toward Modernism

The foregoing mobilization of political, cultural, and historical forces at work in the US from the gold rush to the rise of Modernism sets in bold relief the avenues through which

Chinese in the US were systematically enfreaked and objectified while their cultural objects moved into the nimbus of artistic treasure. While the specter of Chinese labor and an ardent desire to be perceived as American led to a view of Chinese as freaks in the formative years of the nineteenth century, the turn of the century’s marked valuing of Chinese objects in the domestic sphere and public museums points to the disassociation of Chinese Americans and their cultural products. Reading travelogues across these two time periods further documents

America’s discrepant engagement with the Chinese and affirms that despite the later intrigue and intellectual response to China, the very fact of its otherness kept most Americans from approaching China or the Chinese in more than an objective sense. The pervasive climate of anxiety and desire coupled with the ghettoization of Chinese and subsequent rise in stock of

Asian artifacts ultimately led to the bifurcation of Chineseness into two distinct notions both predicated on exotification and objectification. While this binary view of China cannot completely capture all of the ways in which Chineseness was imagined, the two poles of freak and fetish nonetheless provide a frame for understanding the way the “yellow peril” of the mid eighteenth century was able to provide aesthetic imperatives for cultural achievements in the early twentieth century. When cast as freak, the earlier Chinese sojourners offered a racially nervous dominant society a way measure themselves and be found sufficient. As fetish, the disembodied Chinese object could be reinvented to symbolize the cultural and aesthetic achievements that American society had lost in its upward climb toward progress. Adhering to the rules of capital and desire, the freak and the fetish resulted from the objectification and

dismemberment of Chineseness; two halves of the same coin, the Chinese American of the early

1900s was relegated to the side show while the uncoupled art objects from his ethnic past were

appropriated as capital. Thus, removed from the human, the Chinese fetish 11 was free to

influence various forms of art, finally galvanizing the poetry of many Modernist writers through

its generative offerings.

11 My use of the term fetish indicates not a sexualized representation but instead an object imbued with denotative meanings and ideas. 52

CHAPTER THREE

“AS A CHINESE VASE STILL”:

CHINESENESS IN AMERICAN MODERNIST POETRY

As the previous chapter details, the reaction of early twentieth century Americans to

American imperialism, globalization, and the impending world war culminated in a shift in the manner in which Chineseness was perceived and represented. Whereas Chineseness had heretofore generally been viewed negatively and China conceived of as regrettably underdeveloped and stagnant, anxiety over the US’s increasingly fragmented condition as a result of industrial progress led to a reconsideration of China’s historicity. In addition, the

Exclusion Acts and cessation of incoming Chinese allayed fears of the “yellow peril,” freeing

China and Chinese goods from the specter of Chinese American labor. Against the over- industrialized United States, China maintained an enviable connection to tradition, and its goods and cultural objects became sought after specimens of aesthetic excellence that offered authenticity in the face of a growing market of mass produced items and signaled the cosmopolitanness of their possessors. As Chinese objects became more popular in the marketplace, they also became more prevalent in the nascent Modernist poetic movement.

Interest in Chinese poetry stretched beyond the initial Imagist movement as an increasing number of writers including Pound, Williams, Stevens, and Moore all manifested significant relationships with China and its literary history. Accordingly, Zhaoming Qian, Marianne Stamy, and Ming Xie have each produced well researched and documented critical studies on both the extent to which China influenced these Modernist poets as well as these poets’ understandings of

both Chinese language and poetic forms. 12 However, despite the large number of critical essays

dedicated to China and Modernism, few move past the study or comparison of one or two

representative poets who established direct textual links to China via either their study or

translation of Chinese poetry. In addition, most of these studies read the poet’s style of

engagement as a manifestation of his or her individual affinity to specific aspects of Chinese

language, literature, or culture, overlooking a growing interest in China among Modernist poets

at large. While such critical inquiry importantly demonstrates how China and Chinese poetry

infused and inspired the work of many an individual Modernist poet, the extent to which Chinese

objects pervaded the culture of Modernist poetry has yet to be probed. 13

Far from being a textual interest for a handful of Modernist poets, China and objects of

Chineseness figure largely in the Modernist movement, stretching beyond individual interest into

something of a vogue. Harriet Monroe’s introduction to The New Poetry (1917) offers a

narrative of the growing interest in Chineseness in Modern American poetry as well as gives

another vantage point by which to assess its mode of use. In the essay, Monroe distinguishes the

key characteristics of the poetry currently being published in Poetry magazine from poetry of the

previous decades. In lieu of following contemporary European traditions and tropes which

“represent a treasure trove for the second rate,” Modernist poets “seek a vehicle suited to their

own epoch and creative mood, and resolutely reject all others” (v). The search for new forms

reflected not only innovation on the part of these poets but also evinced Modernism’s “less

provincial, more cosmopolitan” temperament (xii). In his essay “Provincialism the Enemy,”

Pound defines provincialism as “(a) An ignorance of the manners, customs and nature of people

12 See Zhaoming Qian’s Orientalism and Modernism for information on Pound and Williams, his The Modernist Response to Chinese Art for Pound, Stevens and Moore, Cynthia Stamy’s Marianne Moore and China , and Ming Xie’s Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry . 13 See the Introduction for a discussion of these texts and a brief literature review. 54

living outside one’s own village, parish, or nation. (b) A desire to coerce others into uniformity”

(Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose 245). Against such shortsightedness, Pound prescribes what he

refers to as a Jamesian internationalism. Thus, for both writers, the revolutions in Modernist

poetry stemmed from a repudiation of provincial or traditional English language forms and a

resistance to commodified verse structures. To achieve these effects, Modernist poets drew

largely from the culture and literature of foreign nations so as to foreground their poetry’s

difference from that of previous epochs. As Monroe details, Modernist poets first experimented

with French, Italian, Greek and Provencal lyrics, before at last, “but perhaps most important of

all,” turning to Asian forms such as such as the Japanese hokku (haiku ) and the “delicate and

beautiful art” of China (xi, xii). Noting the “special exquisite perfume” of Chinese poetry, she

explains its substantial difference from other poetic traditions in terms of its historicity: “it flows from deep original streams of poetic art” (xi). In situating Chineseness as the far pole of textual interest, Monroe figures China as more exemplary of a worldly ethos than some of the other, less exotic, countries she lists. Similarly, her historicizing of it parallels the cosmopolitan domesticity of turn of the century housewives; China, with its connotations of aesthetic excellence, temporal remove, and exoticism registered for these writers as an excess of cosmopolitanism.

Though China was by no means the only culture mined by American and British

Modernists in their revolution against conformity, it nonetheless permeates a large deal of writing during the Modernist movement. As Monroe intimates, China’s Otherness offered a touchstone for Modernists eager to showcase their cosmopolitanism. Fearing a “compromise with the public taste,” Modernists avidly sought to distance their work from that of the mainstream. In addition, the movement’s pervasive beliefs in the primacy of art and the

55 deteriorating effects of capitalism and consumption on culture manifested themselves in many a poet’s use of Chinese images and forms. China, with its connotations of timelessness and artistic elegance symbolized a way of life significantly removed from the West’s capitalistic endeavors and allowed poets a means by which to foreground their dissatisfaction with what they saw as the ailing culture of a Western society torn from its roots. Appalled by the three-headed hydra of mass production, technical advances, and world war, these poets mourned the loss of original

Western arts. As Andreas Huyssen explores in his work on Modernism’s relationship to popular culture, Modernists retained an intense “anxiety of contamination” from any association of their art with the economic inner workings of publishing and marketing (vii). In what has become a rather popular understanding of Modernism, writers and artists concerned with maintaining the purity of their artwork against commodification strove to conceal any acknowledgement of the exchange value their works ultimately held; to apprehend a work’s market value, and to profit from it in any way, signaled ideological shortcomings and sacrificed the genuine creativity of the work. Thoroughly disillusioned with the mass marketing of American taste, China’s handmade objects, timeless aura, and traditions offered something that could transcend market capitalism.

Drawing upon China’s objects, then, offered marked immunity from the encroaching ideologies of mass culture and refused the taint of mass marketing. Pulling from the Other to critique the status quo, Modernists used distinctly Chinese images and objects to mark their work as cosmopolitan and simultaneously convey their disillusionment.

Though Chinese objects offered a viable avenue for Modernist rebellion, Chinese goods had already become prevalent commodities in the domestic sphere as indicators of wealth, status, and worldliness. Thus, while China was figured as a reaction against mass marketing, in practice it, too, became a marker of a certain type of Modernist product. As recent works by Timothy

Materer, Michael Murphy, and Lawrence Rainey propose, Modernists, far from eschewing

commodification, participated in its reconfiguration. In Institutions of Modernisms , Rainey explains that Modernist artists relied on a system of patronage and publishing which constructed a new schema of commodification outside the realm of mass production. Modernist writers

“entertained no illusions about utopian alternatives; to live completely outside of market relations was no more possible than breathing without air” (Rainey 170). To this end, the vogue of including Chinese objects in Modernist poetry can also be read as a reaction to market demands. As Celena Kusch writes, “far from breaking boundaries, Modernist ideals of intellectual cosmopolitanism connect to and even mirror the modern economies of colonial entrepreneurs” (41). In much the same way the colonies of Western powers brought capital to the mother state through their production of goods, so also was the colonial body or object appropriated and disseminated in texts to signify worldliness. For Kusch, such a cosmopolitanism “operat[es] from the center of empire, [where] cosmopolitans could appreciate, even don the costumes of, global others, but global others in their own cultural dress remained native while those in the dress of the metropole were merely assimilated” (Kusch 45). Thus, in

Kusch’s view, the exhibition of Otherness by Euro Americans authorized these writers as cosmopolitan and improved the marketability of their literary products while at the same time maintained a separation between the writer and the Other and circumscribed real cultural exchange.

Yet, while Kusch’s analysis offers an intriguing critique of Modernism’s interest in China, it can also serves to counteract any study of the way the salient aspects of Chinese language and culture affected American Modernism. As Dennis Porter points out in his critique of

Orientalism , such readings evacuate the interplay of East and West, thereby reinscribing

Eurocentrism by refusing Chinese agency from the outset (150). To follow this line of thinking in effect substantiates Eliot’s claim that “Pound is the inventor of China for our time”; without looking at the very real connections between China on Modernism, a complete picture of the interplay between the economic and social desires that necessitated a estimation of the other and the consequent effects of this estimation on the Modernist poetic project is obfuscated. Instead, drawing on a wide array of Modernist exhibits of Chineseness mobilizes a composite image of

China as created by Modernist poets. Though the most easily recognizable manifestations of

China in Modernism occurred via translation, early writers also constructed literary chinoiseries , poems meant to seem Chinese though they were not translated from nor even based on Chinese works. In addition, Chinese images figured largely in the writings of poets with no professed interest in China or its literature or language and in poems with no other connections or references to China or Chinese culture. Reading across these different presentations articulates a more flexible understanding of both Modernism’s interaction with and fetishization of China as well as how this interaction inspired and transformed twentieth century American poetry. The purpose of such a display is two-fold; first, it allows for an appreciation of the width and breadth of China’s presence within the Modernist canon. Second, it permits a comparison between those poets overtly influenced by China such as Pound and Lowell, with other seminal Modernist figures who often remain outside the purview of the study of Modernism and China. Displaying these images of China side by side presents a new conceptualization of the complicated

Modernism/China relationship that supersedes the current lenses of post-colonialism to recognize the different modes in which such images were produced and presented.

Chinoiseries

The first Modernist to test China’s currency in the literary marketplace is paradoxically a

man generally relegated to the footnotes of any work on Modernism – Allen Upward. 14

Upward’s interaction with China and Confucianism began around the turn of the century through

his collaboration with the sinologist Lancelot Cranmer-Byng on a small printing company called

the Orient Press (Qian, Orientalism 19). Upward himself gained notoriety as a writer and

subsequent approval from Pound with his 1907 book The New World. 15 However, it was his

“Scented Leaves from a Chinese Jar” which offered the first model for the excavation of Chinese poetry as a new mode for English poetics. Written sometime after his collaboration with

Cranmer-Byng, Upward’s verses first saw light in the September 1913 edition of Poetry and were subsequently reprinted in Des Imagistes and Monroe’s The New Poetry. In the poems,

Upward’s specific attention to individual, exotified objects coupled with his prose form exemplifies the new poetry exhorters like Monroe and Pound hoped to bring out. 16 Upward’s use of images and traditions geographically and culturally removed from Europe add to the poems’ objectivity. People, when present, are stripped of their subjectivity and treated as objects.

Even when given voice, characters are moved to secondary and objective relevance by their positioning in the poem. For instance, the poet in “The Intoxicated Poet” seems at first blush to have agency as he describes his beloved: “more fragrant than the heliotrope, which blooms all the year round, better than vermilion letters on tablets of sendal, are thy kisses, thou shy one!"

Here, though the poet articulates his thoughts, he himself is overshadowed by the exotic and elusive “shy one” who we know only through her metonymic descriptors of “heliotrope,”

14 Though his poems are often left out of anthologies of Modernism, Upward remains a constant figure in any study of Pound and Orientalism. See Donald Davies, “The Mysterious Allen Upward.” 15 According to both Qian and Kern, The New World was reviewed positively by Pound in 1914. 16 K.L. Goodwin notes that Upward was among the first poets Pound referred to as “Imagist.” 59

“sendal,” and “vermillion.” “The Marigold” carries this idea farther, highlighting the

insignificance of the poet while gesturing toward removed “mandarins”:

Even as the seed of the marigold, carried on the wind, lodges on

the roofs of palaces and lights the air with flame-colored

blossoms, so may the child-like words of the insignificant poet

confer honor on lofty and disdainful mandarins. (353)

By subjugating the words of the poet to both the nameless mandarins and, most significantly, the

marigold seed, Upward centers the poem on the image of the seed as an encapsulation of the

truth lurking in the elusive “child-like words.” Both the poet and the government officials

disappear in the imagistic description of the wind-tossed seed.

Formally, Upward’s poetry integrates the Imagist constructs Flint put out in March 1913.

Employing “absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation,” Upward’s “leaves”

look to the casual reader less like poetry and more like prose. Additionally, his strict

engagement with only the flora and fauna of China fulfills the imagist mantra of “direct

treatment of the thing” ( Literary Essays 3). However, the most striking element of Upward’s

poetry to readers like Pound was most surely its exotic flavor. Through continual recourse to

such exotic signifiers like “Ming,” “mandarins,” and “junks,” Upward’s poems displayed a

Chinese aestheticism heretofore rarely seen in American poetry. 17 Pound’s enthusiastic response to Upward’s verses confirms the new ground he had broken with “Scented Leaves.” As Pound wrote to Dorothy on September 17, 1913, “the Chinese things in ‘Poetry’ [sic] are worth the price of admission” ( Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear 256). A week later, of his work on

Des Imagistes , Pound would add, “Upward of the Chinese poemae is quite an addition” (259).

Of note in this response is the way in which Pound casts Upward’s poems. His characterization

17 The word junk was coined in 1555 to describe “native sailing vessel in the Chinese sea” ( OED ). 60

of them as “Chinese things” underscores the extent to which Upward’s verses acted as a display

case presenting his readers with a singular Chinese objectivity. It also presages Pound’s growing

fascination with “things,” and Chinese or Asian things in particular. Additionally, the

christening of his verses as “Chinese poemae” echoes T.S. Eliot’s famous statement crediting

Pound’s Cathay as inventing Chinese poetry. For Pound, Upward at this point had converted the very real colors and subjects of Chinese paintings into equally objective poetic verse.

Though Upward would later tell Pound his verses had been constructed based on “a certain amount of Chinese reminiscence,” Pound’s excitement over “Scented Leaves” did not flag (Letters 59). By 1913, Pound himself had already explored a number of international poetic traditions in his attempt to discover what “could not be lost by translation,” and he saw in

Upward’s presentation of Chinese writing another tradition which might serve him in his poetic quest to generate a poetic reawakening (qtd. in Xie 229). As he writes in 1914, “The first step of a renaissance, or awakening, is the importation of models for painting, sculpture or writing.”

(Literary Essays 214). Hence, Pound spent his early years combing the globe for such models; he studied a number of different languages including Latin, German, Italian, French and

Provençal during his university career, earning a Master of Arts degree in Romance languages in

1906. 18 By the time he issued Cathay , Pound had already published translations in Provençal,

Italian, and Old English. 19 For Pound, translation itself is a poetic act, the “highest honor of the arts” whereby the translator “tried to preserve the fervor of the original” ( Spirit of Romance 87,

Literary Essays 200). Pound’s attempts to “bring over” the original meaning into the target

language also infused his early personae, as Pound notes in Gaudier Brzeska : “I began this

search for the real in a book called Personae , casting off, as it were, complete masks of the self

18 See Noel Stock’s The Life of Ezra Pound for further information on Pound’s course of study in foreign languages (12-27). 19 See Xie’s Chapter Eight, “Pound as Translator: An Overview,” for a list of Pound’s early translations. 61

in each poem. I continued in a long series of translations which were but more elaborate masks”

(85). Pound’s conflation of his translations and the poems in Personae reveals his indifference

to traditional demarcations between translation, adaptation, and original composition. Thus,

Upward’s “reminiscences” directed Pound eastward as he continued to experiment with different

poetic forms that could serve to capture the spirit of the age and return poetry to its rightful post

as a record of the people.

Upward’s importance to both the Imagist movement and Pound cannot be overestimated.

Chronologically, the publication of Upward’s poems occurred in tandem and likely influenced

Pound’s collecting and editing of works for Des Imagistes . As Qian, pace Flint, substantiates,

Pound was at work on Des Imagistes between October and November of 1913. 20 In addition, it was also in late 1913 that his enthusiasm for Upward’s poetry along with his apprenticeship to

Lawrence Binyon culminated in his own study of Chinese literature via Giles’s History. 21 As

Pound writes in a letter to Dorothy dated October 2, 1913, “I seem to be getting Orient from all

quarters…I’m stocked up on K’ung Fu Tze and Meng Tze, etc.” ( Ezra Pound and Dorothy

Shakespear 264). Another letter to Dorothy a week later confirms “K’ung Fu Tze and Meng

Tze” to be mediated through Giles’s text. 22 Within the pages of Giles’s work, Pound met fellow

Imagistes Chu Yuan ( 屈原), Li Bo ( 李白), and Liu Ch’e ( 劉徹 or the Emperor Wu of Han). His enthusiasm for these three poets overran in his letter to Dorothy on the 13 th : “THE period was 4 th cent. B.B. [sic] – Chu Yuan, Imagiste – did I tell you that before?” ( ibid. 267) . “Further

20 Earlier biographers had erroneously assumed Pound shipped the draft of Des Imagistes to the US in the summer of 1913. However, as Qian uncovers, this assumption was predicated on a date imprecisely remembered by Alfred Kreymborg. For a detailed analysis of the facts leading to this conjecture, see Qian, Orientalism and Modernism , 48-51. 21 Though many credit Upward with introducing Pound to Giles’s work, it remains unclear exactly how Pound came to it. 22 In his letter to Dorothy dated October 11, 1913, Pound offers her several texts, including Giles: “In lieu of the print-room you can have Giles’s ‘History of Chinese Literature,’ a book of Japanese ditto, & the new Tagore, & Upward’s ‘Divine Mystery’” ( Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear 270). 62

Instructions” and “Xenia,” published in the November 1913 edition of Poetry, additionally mark

his growing appreciation of the Chinese forms and colors he saw in Upward and Giles. “Further

Instructions” begins as an evaluation of Pound’s “songs,” or poems: “You are very idle, my

songs / I fear you will come to a bad end” ( Personae 95). However, the “newest song of the lot,”

offers a different future: “You are not old enough to have done much mischief / I will get you a

green coat out of China / With dragons worked upon it.” Reading in retrospect, this “green coat”

is perhaps the new Chinese idea of image and prosody he learned via Upward, Giles and

Fenollosa; certainly, from this point on many of Pound’s poems would wear the “coat” of China

in terms of images and objects. Another line from “Xenia,” later reworked into the first line of

“A Song of the Degrees” in Lustra , further substantiates Pound’s preoccupation with China by

declaring, “O rest me with Chinese colours” (95). Pound’s first solid introduction to China

occurred through his frequent visits to the British Museum and his acquaintance with Binyon.

As Qian notes, the Chinese pieces displayed in the museum evidenced “intensity, precision,

objectivity, visual clarity, and complete harmony with nature – all key elements of Modernism

itself” ( Orientalism 3). Thus, Pound’s specific reference to “colours” in “A Song of the Degrees”

mirrors his growing appreciation of Chinese art as well as foregrounds the visual basis of his

early perceptions of Chineseness. Pound’s interest in Chinese art would lead to his perusal of

Giles and finally to his work with the manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa and Cathay . From this moment forward, much of Pound’s poetry would indeed be colored with Chinese images.

Des Imagistes itself also speaks to Pound’s increasing turn toward the poetic images and models of China. Though many of the poems Pound selected for inclusion are predicated on

Greek models, four of Pound’s six entries are conspicuously Chinese in nature; “After Ch’u

Yuan,” “Liu Ch’e,” “Fan-Piece for her Imperial Lord,” and “Ts’ai Chih” all re-create Giles’s

translations via Upward’s technique of reminiscence. Though Pound would go on to boast a

working (though somewhat flawed) knowledge of Chinese language and literature, it is

important to note his reimagining of the four poems in Des Imagistes occurred prior to such an

understanding. First mention of Pound’s “Chinese poems” occurs in Dorothy Shakespear’s

request for them on November 20, 1913. Responding in the affirmative, Pound warns her that

they are “only very small 3 ½ poems” ( Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear 276). Though

Pound had met Mrs. Fenollosa in late September, he would not receive the entirety of

Fenollosa’s work until mid-December ( Letters 65). 23 Therefore, the four “Chinese poems” in

Des Imagistes are written in a mode very similar to that of Upward’s reminiscence. As

representations of what Pound thought Chinese poetry looked and sounded like, they are

predicated more on his reception of the Chinese translations he had read and the Chinese

paintings he had studied. Yet, the overarching success of Pound’s early chinoiseries differentiate

his poems from Upward’s. This success coupled with Cathay ’s later prominence among

translations has enticed some critics to read Pound’s pre-Fenollosan chinoiseries as markedly

Chinese or as translation instead of just Pound’s imaginings of China. The recent New

Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry includes Pound’s four early chinoiseries

among its Chinese translations. Even Qian, though noting Pound’s ignorance of Chinese at the

time, is tempted to imbue Pound with a curious sixth sense about Chinese language and literature

that allows him to get closer to the original than Giles. Xie perceptively explains the desire to

place such poems as translations: “when the results of such translation or adaptation are

successful English poems in their own right, it is often tempting to assume that they are in fact

23 Pound appears to have received the Fenollosan materials between December 5, 1913, when he writes to his father “I am to have all Prof. Fenollosa’s valuable mss. To edit & finish” (qtd in Qian, Orientalism 56), and December 19, 1913. On the latter date, his correspondence with William Carlos Williams affirms “I’ve all old Fenollosa’s treasures in mass” ( Letters 57). 64

closely and directly derived from their Chinese models” (3). However, this is a critical

movement that must be scrutinized. Certainly, in the case of Pound, these poems do include

within them a grain of truth about China, as they are reworked from Giles’s translations. Yet,

unlike his later collaboration with the Fenollosa materials, in these renderings, he maintains no

connection to the poems in the original. As such, Pound’s work may (and I would argue does)

amplify the creative liberties Giles took in his primary translation while failing to recoup any

missing elements. In basing his “translations” on Giles’s with no recourse to the original,

Pound’s poems become “recreations” or projections of what he thought the original Chinese

might look like. The tendency to read Pound’s early chinoiseries without question as Chinese

reflects the extent to which readers and critics alike have allowed Pound to create and modulate a

certain image of China. However, reading this idea against its historic moment offers a vision of

how China was perceived during the early years of the Modernist movement.

Like Upward’s before them, Pound’s “small 3 ½ poems” are impressions of Chinese poetry gathered both from his own speculations about China as well as Giles’s source material.

As such, they reproduce the concomitant image of China present in both Europe and the US and are not exceedingly faithful representations. One clear example of this lies in Pound’s

(mis)understanding of Chinese prosody. Because only about a dozen English translations of

Chinese texts were readily available prior to 1909, Giles (and Fenollosa in terms of Pound) described and delimited Asian poetry for Modernist poets who in turn framed it for American consumption. This is most clearly seen in the (mis)conception of Chinese poetry’s vers libre form. As many a critic has noted, Pound likely read with pleasure Giles’s assertion “in the fourth century B.C., Ch’ü Yüan and his school indulged in wild irregular meters which consorted well with their wild irregular thoughts. Their poetry was prose run mad” (qtd. in Xie, 170). For

a poet known for his defiance of Victorian norms, Pound surely felt a kinship with the “wild

irregular thoughts” of these Chinese poets. In addition, the subversive nature of these poet’s

eschewal of basic Chinese forms meshed well with Pound’s own project of revisioning Euro

American poetry and culture though an excavation of overlooked models. However, as Xie

notes, Giles overstated the extent to which Ch’ü Yüan and his poetic group worked in vers libre ;

though Ch’ü Yüan’s poetry along with other poetries of the time did differ metrically and

thematically from previous Chinese poetry, it still retained its own form and metric strictures

(170). Nonetheless, the growing understanding of China as culturally and artistically advanced

coupled with Modernism’s own interest in cosmopolitanism led the idea of Chinese prosody to

become a touchstone for Pound and others. Essentially, adhering to this foreign structure

reaffirmed their break with provincial European forms and signaled their worldliness. In

addition, the idea of Chinese form also reaffirmed Pound’s and the Imagists’ assertion that

prosody should be second to the image or the idea presented, for, as Pound stated, rhyme “tends

to draw away the artist’s attention from forty to ninety percent of his syllables….It tends to draw

him into prolixity and pull him away from the thing” ( Selected Prose 42). The affiliation such

Modernists felt toward the presented idea of Chinese poetry by Giles and other prominent

sinologists led to the canonization of such (mis)understandings of Chinese poetry by American

poets. 24

To this end, examining several of Pound’s chinoiseries next to Giles’s originals gives some insight into Pound’s conception of China prior to his extended conversation with Chinese poetry through the notes of Ernest Fenollosa. While much has previously been done to estimate the extent to which he “got at” the original, here my focus is less on Pound’s ability to recoup the

24 Ming Xie offers an insightful look at Giles’s misperceptions concerning Chinese writing and the ways in which these perceptions were extended through poets such as Pound. 66

meanings intended by the Chinese poets and more on the ways his use of Giles reified his own

poetic project and vision of China. The most imagistic of the four poems, Pound’s “Fan Piece

for her Imperial Lord” has been traced to Giles’s original translation of a poem attributed to Ban

Jieyu ( 班婕妤), an imperial consort during the Han dynasty: 25

O fair white silk, fresh from the weaver’s loom,

Clear as the frost, bright as the winter snow –

See! Friendship fashions out of thee a fan,

Round as the round moon shines in heaven above,

At home, abroad, a close companion though,

Stirring at every move the grateful gale.

And yet I fear, ah me! That autumn chills,

Cooling the eddying summer’s torrid rage,

Will see thee laid neglected on the shelf,

All thought of bygone days, like them bygone. (101)

In Giles’s version, Lady Ban offers an apostrophic meditation on her advancing age and fear of

abandonment. Her use of the fan is symbolic; not only does the fan’s color and brightness

represent her youth and beauty, the fan’s exquisiteness and rarity suggests her social status as a

consort. In reading the poem, Pound seems to have been captivated first and foremost by the

image of the fan:

O fan of white silk,

clear as frost on the grass-blade,

You also are laid aside. (Personae 111)

25 The literal translation of Jíeyú or 婕妤 is concubine . 67

The image of the fan stands as the main thrust of the poem. On first reading, only the title and

the “also” in the last line point to anything beyond the almost photographic rendering of a

delicate fan. The passive voice Pound implies here also acts to focus attention on the thing in the

poem, overshadowing any accompanying movement. Additionally, such passive voice points to

the lack of agency evinced by both the lady and the inanimate fan.

Pound’s (re)presentation of Giles’s translation concretely underlines Pound’s fascination

at this juncture of his career with Chinese colors and objects above an understanding of its

language and prosody. By foregrounding the fan in the poem, Pound uses a Chinese cultural

signifier to emblematize his doctrine of the image. Modernist poetry like Pound’s sought, in the

words of Monroe, to present the “concrete and immediate realization of life,” by highlighting the

“individual, unstereotyped” essence of the object under review (vi). By drawing on an exotic

Chinese image, Pound’s poetry continues past the immediately observable and into the realm of

the objective; the fan’s lack of lexical collocations in English guaranteed Pound’s poem be read

as Imagistic over and against the metaphoric tendencies of French symbolism – where the object

always signified another idea – and into a new poetry that privileged the object only as object.

As Douglas Mao explains in his work on objects, the new poetry differed from that of previous

movements most significantly in “the implied reversal of poetic value that made the ‘objective’

thing, with or without symbolic import, not only worth including in poetry but poetry’s very

marrow” (14). The object, and most especially the exotic object retains “the profounder

innocence of an immunity to thinking and knowing” and thus stood outside the reach of ideology

and politics (Mao 9) .26 The fan, a notable cultural referent in the artwork and designs of China that had begun to permeate museums and drawing rooms alike, affords Pound’s poem cosmopolitanism as well as freshness. Like Upward, his use of a Chinese cultural emblem reads

26 Mao carries these ideas to fruition in his introduction to Solid Objects . 68

as “new” amidst other hackneyed European images. In this sense, then, the success of “Fan

Piece” lies in its cooptation of a single Asian image. 27

Though “Fan Piece” represents a successful Imagist exercise and would later serve as an

emblem of the Imagist movement, the other poems Pound adapted in Des Imagistes are less

strikingly imagistic and brief. Nonetheless, the longer “Liu Ch’e” additionally exemplifies

Pound’s early use of Chineseness to supplement his poetic program. Placed in tandem, here are

the two renderings. First, Giles:

The sound of rustling silk is stilled,

With dust the marble courtyard filled;

No footfalls echo on the floor,

Fallen leaves in heaps block up the door….

For she, my pride my lovely one, is lost,

And I am left, in hopeless anguish tossed. (100)

And Pound’s:

The rustling of the silk is discontinued,

Dust drifts over the court-yard

There is no sound of foot-fall, and the leaves

Scurry into heaps and lie still,

And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them:

27 Qian suggests that Pound’s early introduction to Lady Ban via a painting by Gu Kaizhi hanging in the Oriental Gallery of the British museum greatly influenced the composition of “Fan Piece For Her Imperial Lord.” Though this line of thinking may be valid, no textual evidence exists to supports it. However, regardless of whether or not Pound connected Giles’s “Song of Regret” with Gu’s evocation of Lady Ban, Chinese paintings most surely influenced the final imagistic rendering of “Fan Piece.”

A wet leaf that clings to the threshold. (Personae 110-11)

Here again, Pound crafts a poem that focuses on specific images in order to evoke a feeling of loss. However, whereas Giles’s piece uses heavy rhyme and cadence to bespeak how the physical setting echoes the loss of the foreign sounding “my lovely one,” Pound’s focus on the scenery obscures the human “she” in the poem and creates a more complex picture. His final line, set off by space and a colon, creates a lasting impression in its reference to and connection with the disarray beforehand. Pound displaces the woman in the poem through his evocation of the delicate and beautiful image of “a wet leaf that clings to the threshold”; the lady is invisible, but the mental picture of the wayward leaf remains as a signifier of loss. As Kern notes, the poem “is calculated to take us out of our own time limits and space limits and into the presence of a rendering of things that has transcended ordinary speech” ( 187). Pound’s use of natural images coupled with the poem’s foreign title itself allow for a poetics that moves beyond the test of production. The articles in phrases like “ the rustling of the silk” outdistance the immediate and knowable, while the odd moniker “the rejoicer of the heart” confirms the translation or cultural removal augured by the poem’s title. Such foreignization imbues the poem with

“Chinese colours,” which insist not only on its objectivity but also its historicity. China, still viewed as timeless and separate from the Western world, works to make Pound’s poem “new” and at the same time transcendent.

After Cathay

Pound’s imagistic success with Des Imagistes marks an interesting and seldom researched area in China-Modernism studies. The Chinese pieces presented in it alongside

Pound’s later fame from Cathay would indoctrinate Modernism to the fashion through which

China could be mined for generative images and objects. Prior to Pound’s and Upward’s poems,

Chinese objects rarely found their way into poetry; instead, Victorian poets and the early

Modernists relied more on images closer at hand. Indeed, Des Imagistes itself pulls much more

staunchly from images of ancient Greece; only Pound and Upward’s voices turn outside of the

European literary tradition. Yet, the publication and commercial and artistic success of Cathay

in 1915 signify another important moment in the representation of China in American poetry.

Unlike the chinoiseries of Des Imagistes , Pound abandoned imitation for more engaged work with the original Chinese poems through the notebooks of the late Ernest Fenollosa, a sinologist who had spent a number of years studying Chinese poetry in Japan. The cribs Pound found in

Fenollosa’s notebook provided the raw material and basic translations from which he constructed

Cathay .

Regardless of the longstanding debate over Cathay’s status as either poetry or translation, its publication nonetheless served as a major event for both translation practices and Modernist poetry. 28 Foremost, Pound’s deviant “translucencies” ushered in a modern era of translation.

While prior to Cathay only a dozen or so translations of Chinese poetry were available, “by 1930, published work on Chinese art and history as well as commendable, if not definitive, translations of Chinese poetry were readily available in English” (Stamy 29). Many of these new translations followed Pound’s lead in the rejection of Victorian forms and rhyme in favor of free verse renderings. Like Pound’s, many of these translations attempted to recreate the original Chinese by refashioning English to suit the grammatical and syntactical demands of the Chinese language

28 The response to Cathay has been marked with dissension; while many hail the collection as “literary miracle” others see it as “literary fraud” (Hayot 518). Much of this disagreement lies in the way in which the poems are perceived. For critics like Kenner who read Cathay as beautiful poems first and foremost, Cathay succeeds on the basis of its poetic innovation. For other critics who read Cathay as translation, it fails in its in ability to conform to accepted translation standards. Yet while early studies of Pound’s translation methods worked to correct Pound’s “literary narcissism” (Unger 59), recent studies like those of Qian and Yao have found Pound’s translations to be in line with contemporary Chinese translations. Other critics like Xiaomei Chen have explored Pound’s “‘misunderstanding’ as a legitimate and necessary factor, as a dynamic force, in the making of literary history” (Chen 82). 71

rather than constructing literal translations which obscured the act of translation by presenting

seamless poems in the English idiom. Translation, and especially Chinese translation, also

became a commendable practice for poets. Alongside the “definitive” editions by sinologists

emerged a number of poems based, like Pound’s, on earlier English translations. For instance,

Djuna Barnes published “To the Dead Favorite of Liu Ch’e,” her own reworking from the

translations of Giles, in the Dial in 1920 (73). 29 As Amy Lowell insightfully remarked in 1919,

“Chinese poetry is much in people’s minds at present” ( Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell 76).

Following such demand, the so-called little magazines competed for the right to publish poetry

steeped in Asian images or the newest Chinese translation (Qian 4). In the wake of this Chinese

vogue, many poets began to publicly acknowledge their debt to China. Certainly, the early

Imagists Hulme and Flint had already “left” Japan for China. However, other writers like

Stevens and Fletcher would also later claim Chinese influence. 30 As Fletcher declares of his early Visions of Evening , “What had happened was that I had somehow, as a poet, guessed at the

way the Orientals had constructed their poems….the self same quality is omnipresent in Ezra

Pound’s Cathay ” (qtd. in Xie 7). Fletcher’s quote denotes the growing perception that sustained contact with Chinese culture or language was unnecessary to the understanding and reproduction of China; the success of creating a “Chinese” poem centered more on appreciating the art and translations available. His quote also underscores that the success of Cathay , as poetry or as translation or both, was something everyone wanted a piece of.

Foremost among those hungry for the fame associated with Cathay was Amy Lowell.

Known for her shrewd business acumen, Lowell had already availed herself of Pound’s Imagist

29 Herring and Stutman also note that Faulkner quoted two of Barnes’s lines from “To the Dead Favourite” in Intruder in the Dust . This again points to the way in which ideas of China codified in the Modernist period continue to reverberate in later writings. 30 See Qian’s chapters on Stevens and China in The Modernist Response to Chinese Art . 72

movement in the years prior to Cathay and had in effect become the impresario for Imagism on

American soil. Her early “schism” with Pound is legendary; too similar in temperament and too

dissimilar in writing style, the two had clashed over the future direction of Imagism. Lowell,

wanting to substantiate her vocation as poet, argued for equal representation and democratic

selection processes in future Imagist volumes. Concerned that others would see her as a

benefactress and not a poet in her own right, Lowell also demanded she be paid, however little,

for her work. However, whereas Lowell saw poetry as a vocation, Pound saw it more as a

calling. He was significantly less concerned with the economics, publication and publicity end

of the poetry business. 31 Alternately, Lowell believed “Publicity first, Poetry will follow”; only

through fame as a writer could she successfully shed the Lowell name and make a new one for

herself (Lowell qtd. in Bradshaw 141). It may well be this desire and not a firm commonality

with the Imagist movement that led her to travel to London to find out the secrets of Imagism

first hand. Lowell realized association with the Imagist movement would lead to more publicity

and enhanced visibility within the poetry scene. Once established within the movement through

her inclusion in Des Imagistes , Lowell capitalized on Imagism’s currency through her

subsequent organization of several collections of Imagist poetry. A shrewd businesswoman by

birth and an actress by chance, Lowell parlayed these two traits into an unstoppable combination.

Characterized as “perform[ing] the service of a barker at a circus, as from the lecture platform, in

the press, and almost the street corner, she cried aloud, ‘Poetry, Poetry, this way to Poetry’” (qtd.

in Bradshaw 143), Lowell’s poetry readings recalled the spectacle of the late nineteenth century

31 Timothy Materer makes an interesting argument regarding Pound’s marketing skills in “Make It Sell! Ezra Pound Advertises Modernism.” In his article, he demonstrates how Pound’s staging of Imagism successfully generated publicity and interest. 73

side shows, while her audacious behavior, insolence, disrespect for conventional (read:

provincial) verse and outrageous performances all aided in the dissemination of her poetry. 32

Cathay , however, offered to Lowell a new challenge. With all of the excitement over

Pound’s “Chinese translations,” Imagism seemed to take a backseat in the journals and magazines of the day. Eager to capitalize on the public’s capricious tastes, Lowell decided to

“knock a hole in” Pound’s verses through the publication of her own version ( Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell 43). To help her in this task, Lowell tapped Florence Ayscough, a long time resident of China and her own “native informant.” Lowell was introduced to Ayscough in 1917 and entertained her at Sevenels in the Summer of 1919. During that summer, Lowell and

Ayscough began preparations for their joint effort of Chinese translations, Fir Flower Tablets , published in 1921. Correctly assessing the public’s desire for Chinese verse at the time, Lowell made use of this relationship much in the same way Pound capitalized on his relationship with

Fenollosa. Both brought out poetic translations mediated through a number of other players. For

Pound, the Chinese originals were twice removed from him through Fenollosa’s reliance on his

Japanese tutor’s comprehension and translation. In addition, Fenollosa’s misunderstanding of many of the facets of the Chinese language were accepted by Pound as fact and represented in his work. Similarly, Lowell’s translations were predicated on Ayscough’s elementary grasp of

Chinese vis-à-vis her Chinese tutor Nung Chu with whom she communicated in pidgin. 33 While

Ayscough provided extensive cribs and annotated translations for the poems, Lowell, like Pound,

held the final say in terms of the poetry; both changed and cut what they felt necessary in order

to present a “modern” rendering. Accordingly, the translation ventures of both poets reflect the

32 For further information on Lowell’s advertising movements throughout her life, please see Melissa Bradshaw’s essay “Outselling the Modernisms of Men: Amy Lowell and the Art of Self- Commodification.” 33 Pidgin Chinese was largely English stripped of its tenses and plurals. Often words hard to pronounce in Chinese would become altered slightly to fit English tongues. 74

power structures at work in recreating China for the US as well as gesture toward the importance

of conveying authenticity.

To guarantee the success of Fir Flower Tablets over and above that of Cathay , Lowell

flaunted foreignness and exoticism in her translations. Reading Lowell’s “Cha’ang Kan” against

Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” exemplifies the differences in the ways these

two poets approached Chinese poetry. Though Pound’s Cathay represents his growing investment in Chinese ideals and Chinese poetry, Fir Flower Tablets reveals the underlying commodification of Chinese culture inherent in many “Chinese works” of this time. Pound’s famous translation begins

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead

I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.

You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,

You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.

And we went on living the village of Chokan:

Two small people, without dislike or suspicion. ( P 134)

In contrast, Lowell’s poem opens

When the hair of your Unworthy One first began to cover her forehead,

She picked flowers and played in front of the door.

Then you, my Lover, came riding a bamboo horse

We ran round and round the bed, and tossed about the sweet meats of green plums.

We both lived in the village of Ch’ang Kan.

We were both very young and knew neither jealousy nor suspicion. (28)

Barry Ahearn’s work on Cathay argues that Pound intentionally exotified his renderings as part of his plan to diminish his role as translator thereby circumventing any questions as to his ability

(38). However, in looking at Pound’s poem in tandem with Lowell’s, a more significant exotification seems to be taking place in her presentation. Immediately noticeable in Lowell’s translation is the designation of the first person narrator as “your Unworthy One.” Lowell here attempts to distance and subjugate the narrator through third person references. In addition, her constant use of the word “we” sets the actors of the poem apart from the reader. The effect is two-fold; the distance created through the awkward use of a formal third person appellation also creates an exotic tone that consciously works to orientalize the poem as a translation. Though both poets make reference to the exotic locale (Ch’ang Kan and Chokan), Pound deemphasizes it through his indication of culture: “We went on living the village of Chokan.” Lowell’s direct syntax points up the alien location: “We both lived in the village of Ch’ang Kan.” Her decision to use the elongated and punctuated English transliteration for the place name emblematizes

Lowell’s program of pandering to the demands of the market for an orientalized poem.

The conclusion of both poems further points out the marked foreignness of Lowell’s translation. Here is Pound’s:

The paired butterflies are already yellow with August

Over the grass in the West garden;

They hurt me. I grow older.

If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,

Please let me know beforehand,

And I will come out to meet you

As far as Cho-fu-sa ( P 134)

In contrast, here is Lowell’s:

It is the Eighth Month, the butterflies are yellow,

Two are flying among the plants in the West garden;

Seeing them, my heart is bitter with grief, they wound the heart of the Unworthy One

The bloom of my face has faded, sitting with my sorrow…

Prepare me first with a letter, bringing me the news of when you will reach home.

I will not go far on the road to meet you,

I will go straight until I reach the Long Wind Sands. (29)

Against Pound’s imagistic “paired butterflies,” Lowell spells out the feelings of the main

character thereby creating an opportunity to refer to her again as “the Unworthy One.” In

addition, whereas Pound’s speaker simply states, “They hurt me, I grow older,” Lowell

specifically compares her speaker’s face to a fleeting “bloom,” suggesting the exotic flora of

China. Throughout Fir Flower Tablets , Lowell’s continued use of archaic diction and

convoluted sentences reinforces the exotic nature of the poems and underlines that these are, in

fact, translations. Her conscious decision to leave the majority of the place names in Chinese

instead of translating them into English adds to this effect. As she tells Ayscough, “It does not

go well in English, and, by keeping the Chinese name in the title of a place or province or things

of that sort, we keep the Chinese flavor” ( Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell 103). Ultimately,

Lowell is most interested in capitalizing on the current vogue of Orientalism.

Understanding the nuances behind Lowell and Ayscough’s collaboration on the translations of Fir Flower Tablets additionally exposes the relationship of China to the final poems. Writing Ayscough in January of 1920, Lowell remarks to Ayscough, “You misunderstand, I think, my function in our collaboration.” She then goes on to remind her of the

77 structural arrangement of their poetic venture: “I consider that it is for you to give me the translations, and for me to put them in English from your material, but emphatically not for me to do anything whatever with the original Chinese” ( Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell 104).

Here, Lowell makes clear the labor divisions and hierarchy of their partnership as well as her opinions on the original Chinese. Ayscough’s use lay in her willingness to perform the drudgery of translation. Lowell was to take this knowledge and “make” something of it. Ayscough, overwhelmed at times due to her limited proficiency in Chinese, would often offer Lowell more information than the latter deemed necessary or encourage her to read a text like Giles’s to help her better get at the source material. However, Lowell’s emphatic rejoinder highlights her discernment of the original as ineffectual: “It is quite impossible for any Chinese words, or any knowledge of them, to help me in the least” ( Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell 104). For

Lowell, the success of the translations would come more from her own poetic insight than from

Ayscough’s painstaking work to offer correct translations. In effect, Lowell saw the Chinese source materials as secondary to the final translations; these were English, not Chinese poems.

Perhaps even more important for Lowell than Ayscough’s translations was the latter’s status as a resident of China. Though Ayscough had only begun to study Chinese a few years prior to her work on Fir Flower Tablets and spoke an English-based form of pidgin to her

Chinese servants, her birth and subsequent tenure in China lent the collaboration an authenticity that other concurrent translations did not have. Exploiting this, Lowell publicized Ayscough’s qualifications at every available juncture. Writing to Ayscough in 1918, she describes her pitch to Harriet Monroe:

I also gave her a great song and dance as to your qualifications as a translator. I told her

that you were born in China, and that it was, therefore, in some sense your native tongue

(Heaven forgive me!), although you had only taken up the serious study of it within the

last few years. I lengthened out your years in China until it would appear that you must

be a hundred years old to have got so many in, and altogether I explained that in getting

you, she was getting the ne plus ultra of Chinese knowledge and understanding.

(Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell 38)

Lowell’s “native informant” served first and foremost as a marketing tool; by advertising

Ayscough’s longtime residence in China, Lowell could one-up Pound by claiming a closer, less mediated translation. Whether genuine or not, Lowell’s publicizing of Fir Flower Tablets catapulted Ayscough to fame as a Sinologist and chronicler of China. In the years following,

Ayscough would become known for a number of well-received books as well as numerous lectures she delivered worldwide (Y. Huang 51).

Within the same letter, Lowell also makes mention of Nung Chu, Ayscough’s tutor and an immense asset in the production of Fir Flower Tablets . For Lowell, Ayscough and Nung were her ace in the hole; unlike Pound, she had a living breathing Chinese to speak for his own literature, language, and culture. Yet, the way Lowell refers to Nung reifies his subject position within the venture. Lowell seems put off by his audacity to second guess her own poetic impulses. Noting “your teacher undoubtedly knows a great deal of Chinese, but he does not know anything about poetry,” Lowell reaffirms that the final poems published in Fir Flower

Tablets succeed more on the basis of their ability to seem like Chinese poetry that on their fidelity to the original texts (103). She goes on to say Mr. Nung “has entirely misunderstood Li

T’ai Po’s meaning” (105). These statements clarify the hierarchical arrangement of Ayscough,

Lowell, and Nung; whereas Lowell and Ayscough are collaborators possessing cosmopolitan knowledge that sets them apart from the everyday poet, Nung himself is ranked as a silent and

invisible part of that venture. Much like the early Chinese workers in the US, Nung is pushed to

the sidelines and erased from the literary history of Modernism. Only when it is profitable to

bring him out, does he become a salient part of the endeavor. Lowell’s letter to Florence in 1922

makes this abundantly clear. Worried over Witter Bynner’s “blowing like anything” about the

high standing of his own Chinese native informant, Lowell asks Florence to “give me some sort

of an account of Mr. Nung – and make it sound as grand as possible” so as to bolster she and

Ayscough’s claims as to the authenticity of the translations.

Lowell’s interaction with Nung foregrounds the question of the Other’s place in

American poetry. As Gikandi asks in his work on Picasso and Africa, “How else can we explain the paradox that runs throughout the history of modernism, the fact that almost without exception the Other is considered to be part of the narrative of modern art yet not central enough to be considered constitutive” (457)? Indeed, as Lowell’s relationship with China shows, though

China comprises a major part of her creative output, she also necessarily reduced the Other to a non-participatory member of her final product. Lowell primarily made use of Nung for his authenticity; however, as quickly as she flaunted him she also foregrounded herself as author and her product as American. By using Nung only for publicity, Lowell was able to retain complete control of the final product while using his Chineseness for her own profit. 34

Chinese Objects

The proliferation of Chinese translations and chinoiseries were also echoed by a third,

less conspicuous trend. As Modernism moved forward and poets like Williams, Stevens, Lowell,

and Moore, began experimenting with Chinese verses, prosody, and language, other poets began

34 Though Lowell’s relationship with China in Fir Flower Tablets presents a certain Orientalist attitude, her poem “Guns as Keys” shows a more sympathetic and understanding side. See Yoshihara’s work “Putting on the Voice of the Orient: Gender and Sexuality in Amy Lowell’s ‘Asian’ Poetry” for an extended discussion. 80 recuperating Chinese images in substantially non-Chinese poems. While the writers alternately included such images to mark their cosmopolitanism, signify wealth, or connote their participation in (or rejection of) global issues and norms, such continuing recourse to material images confirmed for the public China’s removal from modern day developments, its historicity, and above all its objectivity.

T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound’s protégé and longtime friend, represents one poet who remained largely uninfluenced by the vogue of China in Modernism. Eliot’s relationship with Pound began in 1914, when, as Eliot says, “my meeting with Ezra Pound changed my life” ( Letters of

TSE xvii). In grooming his friend for the rigors of a life in poetry, Pound introduced Eliot to his first “artistic milieu” (Gordon 99). Among this group were Wyndham Lewis, Hilda Doolittle, and from time to time, Chinese translator Arthur Waley. Yet, while many of these poets dabbled with disparate literary forms, Eliot worked more within established English literary traditions rather than pulling from outside sources. When he did look to the East, it was to India and not

China. Nonetheless, his lasting friendship with Pound as well as his enthusiasm for Pound’s work surely introduced him to Pound’s idea of China and Chinese poetry. Perhaps because of this relationship, “Burnt Norton,” the first movement of Eliot’s later work Four Quartets , curiously contains a Chinese vase and points to the manner through which certain poets unwittingly affirmed China’s place in the Modernist canon. The poem itself is largely a meditation on time and its inescapability; our existence in time and the distractions of reality prevent us from transcendence and an appreciation of the eternal. Throughout the work, Eliot grapples with the moment of transcendence, describing it in the second movement as the still point where “There would be no dance and there is only the dance” (2. 21). The still point thus represents a release from the flux of life. In this moment, Eliot moves past the trappings of time

81 and false illusions to envision the all-encompassing eternal. However, this understanding is fleeting and almost impossible to sustain due to the “enchainment of past and future / Woven in the weakness of the changing body” (2. 33-4). Our existence and subjugation to time conspire to keep us locked in the temporal.

However, the final movement of “Burnt Norton” offers one means of transcendence: art.

In this important section, Eliot recalls the idea of the “still point” and advances art’s ability to move one past the temporal:

Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness. (5. 4-7)

Through the pattern of art, and its ability to move us from one plane of understanding to another, we may transcend time. The Chinese jar, much like Keats’s Grecian urn, represents the capability of art to function in multiple eras and to allow us, the viewer of that art, to transit between those eras. By using a Chinese jar, Eliot also calls upon the perceptions of China as historicized and lasting. There is no sense that the “Chinese jar” is modern; alternately, its foreignness and objectivity allow Eliot to most fully express his vision of transcendence. In other words, the exoticness of the Chinese jar coupled with the prevailing ideas in Modernist circles of China as artistically and culturally superior further buttress the ability of the jar to transcend not only time but also culture; moving from the East to the West its beauty collapses time and space. Hence, while Eliot capitalizes on the current impression of China so as to fully realize art’s transcendent properties, he also reifies the idea of China as the apotheosis of wisdom.

Like Eliot, Gertrude Stein also includes Chinese objects in Tender Buttons . However, the complex construction of her poems and general lack of critical agreement on her writing processes tend to complicate the reasons behind her inclusion of Chinese objects. Some read

Tender Buttons as Cubist, where her choice of words reflect her shifting of perspective to reveal the thingness of the object she is working with. Others see Tender Buttons as an experimental work where Stein calls into question the orders imposed by man on words. In this respect, Stein refuses to use collocations and plays with grammatical and syntactical forms to reclaim English from its predictability. The recent work of Catherine Paul offers yet another way to view Stein’s verses. Paul argues that Tender Buttons is a meditation on collecting which “both represent[s] what it means to collect things and redefine[s] the ways in which her own collection could be defined” (196). Paul’s approach mimics the way uninitiated readers come to Stein’s verses.

Without the exegesis of critical research, Stein’s eschewal of expected patterns forces each reader to make sense of the sections on his or her own terms, in a sense re-ordering them. In this respect, the reader works through these sections much as he or she would work through the exhibits in a museum. Such a process democratizes the objects in the poem, thereby allowing the reader to negotiate the item’s meaning and station in the room.

Stein’s arranging of Chinese objects then would seem to be a moot point; if each reader makes sense of the object as he or she encounters it, no lasting interpretation can be made.

Indeed, her first recourse to a Chinese object in the section entitled “Rooms” proves immediately disconcerting: “A little lingering lion and a Chinese chair, all the handsome cheese which is stone, all of it and a choice, a choice of a blotter. If it is difficult to do it one way there is no place of similar trouble. None. The whole arrangement is established” (44). In my reading, the section “Rooms” itself is a long meditation on the state of the rooms in which she lives. As such,

83 the Chinese chair and the lion are decorations within the room. Stein’s repetition of choice indicates choice in presentation of these pieces of decoration so that the “whole arrangement is established.” She closes out the paragraph noting that “there is a suggestion…that there can be a different whiteness to the wall” again noting the impermanence of the items in their current state and their susceptibility to rearrangement (44). Stein gives us the power to rearrange words just as we would rearrange furniture. Yet, my ordering of Stein may prove altogether different from another reader’s. In this sense, Stein’s use of a Chinese chair is no more exotic than the

“lingering lion” she puts next to it.

However, Stein’s second recourse to China on the next page complicates the image of the

“Chinese chair”: “Alike and a snail, this means Chinamen, it does there is no doubt that to be right is more than perfect there is no doubt and glass is confusing it confuses the substance which was of a color” (45). While Stein’s work is known for its arcane and inscrutable use of words, the insertion of “Chinamen” begs the question of objectification. If this is indeed “a whole collection made,” what role do “Chinamen” play in that collection? Stein answers this question in the lines following her assertion of the nature of a collection: “A damp cloth, an oyster, a single mirror, a manikin, a student, a silent star, a single spark, a little movement and the bed is made. This shows the disorder, it does” (46). The litany of unrelated objects including the

“corporeal” student demonstrates that Stein’s use of disconcerting words and syntax is meant to force readers to do work in meaning making. The collection can only be “made” by our patterning.

While Stein’s use of Chinese objects escapes easy reading, one thing remains clear: even in the experimental poetry of Stein, China had a place. As an avid collector of art, her salon most likely included a Chinese chair or artwork alongside its Picassos and Matisses. This

Chinese artifact acted upon Stein and became integrated into her poetry. Stein thus offers the

Chinese chair to her readers, again asking us to value it against the other parts of the room.

While Eliot’s Chinese vase has a clearer centrality and connotation in “Burnt Norton,” Stein’s

Chinese chair nonetheless remains an important element of her work. The inclusion of Chinese images in the major Modernist works of Eliot and Stein underscores the continued intrigue and effect of China on American Modernist poets. In addition, the sustained use of these images illustrates Modernism’s estimation of China as primarily aesthetic, historicized, and timeless.

(Re)Orientations

The foregoing literary exhibits of various authors’ visions and use of China sets in relief the multiplicity of ways Modernists presented China as well as validates the need for a broader, more flexible way of viewing such imaginings. Whereas Lowell’s negotiation of her relationship with Nung along with Imagism’s insistence on itself as a largely American movement seem to exemplify Simon Gikandi’s characterization of Modernism that “almost without exception the

Other is considered to be part of the narrative of modern art yet not central enough to be considered constitutive,” Pound’s later sustained engagement with China conforms more to

Qian’s multiculturalist vision of Modernism’s entanglement with China (457). Both, in their own ways, are right. Imagism, in order to enter the halls of “art,” had to foreground its status as an English literary work and minimize, except in reference, its reliance on Chinese images.

Similarly, Lowell used Nung for publicity, yet his contributions and role in the creation of the final translations of Fir Flower Tablets are largely undervalued. Eager to foreground and substantiate herself as a poet, Lowell relies on China more as signifier than informant, in effect fulfilling the Saidian theory of Orientalism. Nonetheless, despite Lowell’s commodification of

China for material gains, she did translate from Chinese originals. Though less successful as a

85 poem in the eyes of today’s critics, Lowell’s work offers more explanation of Chinese ideas and myths than Pound’s early translations. Though this is due in large part to the labor of Ayscough, it nonetheless points to a grain of truth in Lowell’s translations.

What becomes clear then is that no single theory of China’s interaction with Modernism holds true across the wide variety of approaches Modernist poets took to China. Instead, what this study calls for is an examination of Chinese objects and images in Modernism that isn’t conscripted by Orientalism or liberal multiculturalism. By pushing beyond discussion of real influence versus Orientalist imaginings, we may begin to grasp the changing image of China within American poetry of the twentieth century. Much like the fetishizing of cosmopolitan domesticity, the first uses of China, and it subsequent use as object in later poetry, certainly point to the objectification of Asia. However, to read these exhibits as solely objectifying misses the very real cultural exchange going on between China and the US. We must remember that each of these poets’ images of China are predicated on both the real and the imaginary. Though China was indeed commodified by many writers of the Modernist movement, it also played a very real and constitutive role in the making of Modernist poetics. While significant evidence of this role exists in the writings of critics like Stamy, Qian and Hayot, my work here has concentrated more on the various other schemes of Modernist engagement with China. This is not to undercut the reality of Chinese influence, but rather to broaden the discussion of China’s relationship in

Modernism by complicating Qian’s assertion “Modernism is a phenomenon of internationalism/ multiculturalism” with Kusch’s idea that “performance of otherness is one of the most common strategies of literary modernism” (5, 40-41). Only by doing so can the very complicated relationship between China and Modernism be truthfully presented and the lasting presence of

China (both real and imagined) in American poetry be elicited.

CHAPTER FOUR

新日日新:

A CASE STUDY OF INFLUENCE

The previous chapter’s focus on the widespread use of Chinese images in American

Modernist poetry highlights the centrality of Ezra Pound to the practice of (re)presenting China.

The success of Pound’s Cathay mirrors the growing Modernist interest in the Chinese object as poetic material. While Cathay undoubtedly marks an important moment in the history of the

West’s textual interfacing with the East, it represents only the beginning of Pound’s extended

study of Chinese language and literature. 35 Pound maintained an interest in China throughout his career, and his conceptualization of Chinese literature and language informed and inflected both his poetics and the composition of the Cantos . Accordingly, “Pound and China” has become its own field of study, and numerous scholars have sought to estimate and clarify the role of China in Pound’s oeuvre. 36 Against this line of critical inquiry also appears a rich

tradition of literature that traces Pound’s persistent importance to American poetics. Works like

Christopher Beach’s The ABC of Influence and Charles Altieri’s The Art of Twentieth-Century

American Poetry suggest direct linkages between Pound and his poetic heirs, while others like

Michael André Bernstein’s The Tale of the Tribe and Laszlo K. Géfin’s Ideogram: History of a

Poetic Method trace Pound’s innovations in terms of specific Poundian legacies. His almost

35 The continuing debate over Cathay ’s position as a Chinese or English product additionally adds to its importance. See Hayot’s “Critical Dreams: Orientalism, Modernism, and the Meaning of Pound’s China” for a meditation on the textual scholarship Cathay has produced. 36 See the Introduction for a brief discussion on the genesis of scholarly work on Modernism and Orientalism. 87

palpable influence has created not only a rich avenue of critical inquiry by individual scholars

but also an entire scholarly journal – Sagetrieb .

Yet, the amassing critical corpus on Poundian influence continues to go largely

untouched by the parallel tradition of literature that treats Pound’s interaction with China. While

Steven G. Yao’s Translation and the Languages of Modernism and Lazlo Géfin’s Ideogram both

implicitly argue that China, or perhaps more accurately Pound’s idea of China, exerted an

important poetic effect on later American poets, neither formally announces such a corollary. 37

The inability to combine these two fields of study is predicated on Pound’s changing

understanding of the Chinese language as well as the difficulty in defining the parameters

necessary to read for such influence. For the majority of these critics, influence is traced via a

specific mode or stylistic trait; for instance, Perloff, who provides perhaps the most sweeping

analysis of the Poundian poetic lineage in “The Contemporary of our Grandchildren: Ezra Pound

and the Question of Influence,” narrows down his influence to four specific traits: verbal

precision, verse libre, translation as creation, and “the example of the Cantos as ‘a poem

including history’” (Perloff 122). However, while Pound’s specific modes of paratactic

juxtaposition and translation were informed by his interest in the Chinese language, constructing

37 Steven Yao’s Translation and the Languages of Modernism begins to treat this lacuna via his focus on translation as a harmonizing force in Modern American poetry. Throughout his text, he probes the ways Pound and others use translation to further their own poetic innovations. The final chapter of his book connects the Modernist legacy of translation with its later heirs Robert Lowell and Louis Zukofsky. While Yao’s book duly notes the importance of Chinese translation in Pound’s poetics, the impressive scale of his work fails to substantially elucidate the effect of Pound’s China on these two later writers. Géfin’s Ideogram comes closest to treating the nexus between Pound’s influence and interest in China through his focus on the ideogram as a mediating center. Géfin first painstakingly explains the particularities of the Poundian poetics of juxtaposition by reading Pound’s understanding of Fenollosa’s “Chinese Written Character As a Medium for Poetry” against the text itself before briefly analyzing how such juxtaposition works in the Cantos . After concretely defining the ideogrammic method, the balance of Géfin’s text traces the influence of the method on later poets including Williams and the objectivists. Yet, whereas Géfin’s work provides an excellent analysis of Pound’s method and its extension via the objectivists, it centers more on the practice and implementation of the juxtapositional techniques which he, following Pound, designates the ideogrammic method, and pays less attention to what other vestiges of China may continue to inhabit the poetry of those in the Poundian lineage. 88 a case for the continuance of Chinese influence via a specific literary technique that was adopted and reconstructed by Pound ultimately remains problematic.

To concretely evidence the extant Chinese influence handed down by Pound requires the use of a different paradigm of influence, one that draws on Wai Chee Dimock’s theories of deep time and resonance as well as the notion of intertextuality. In “Deep Time: American Literature and World History,” Dimock advocates a shift in the frame of reference by which intercultural texts and translations are compared and evaluated as “neither a single nation nor a single race can yield an adequate frame for literary history” (757). Dimock’s assertion denotes her belief that

American literary theory’s tacit reliance on linear historicism and national boundaries reinforces the Eurocentrism and limitations implicit in the reading and teaching of American texts. Texts cannot be relegated to specific time frames or bordered nation-states as they are “diachronic objects” which extend across the arbitrary boundaries imposed by man. In these journeys, texts pick up different resonances; these reverberations in turn make a text ‘literary” by continually changing our perceptions and interpretations, thus “annoying and inspiring more and more readers” (“Theory” 1068). In lieu of periodization, Dimock calls for the employment of deep time, where texts are read nonlinearly across a larger time and space continuum defined by a significant event, belief, or idea. Dimock’s paradigm of deep time evinces the ways certain texts pick up, share, and become transformed by other texts, and such intertextuality intimates a concrete example of influence.

Dimock’s suppositions offer a theoretical framework that bridges the gap between the

Poundian legacy and Pound’s Chinese influences. Following Dimock’s idea of deep time, this chapter trades in the traditional boundaries of American studies in favor of a “different input map” which takes as its starting point Pound’s maxim “make it new” and its emblematic signifier the

Chinese word 新38 or xin (“Deep Time” 761). I follow the transpacific literary migrations of 新 as it appears across the Cantos , the Confucian Shi-ching (诗经), Lu Ji’s Wen Fu (文赋), a 600

BCE Chinese folk song, Gary Snyder’s “Axe Handles,” Fred Wah’s “Dead In My Tracks,” and

John Yau’s “Chinese Villanelle.” So doing exposes a web of interconnected poetries and linguistic resonances and attests to the extent to which Pound’s idea of paideuma – as imagined through 新 – continues to inflect American poetics. Reading 新 across two continents and two

millennia acknowledges its centrality in American literature as well as illuminates how each of

these poems intertextually acts on the others, elucidating new readings and forcing a temporally

diachronic comparison that illustrates the intercultural transmissions in these poetic innovations.

Although 新 first appears in Canto LIII (published in 1940), tracing Pound’s interaction with the Chinese language to this point is necessary to constructing not only his evolving theory of the ideogrammic method but also his increasing appreciation of the Chinese language and the changing content and theory of the Cantos themselves. Such a brief account of the history of

Pound’s interest in China alongside the production of the Cantos also reveals the way 新 came to function in Pound’s poetics. In keeping with Dimock’s interest in developing a diachronic history, examining a text through the lenses of resonance and deep time does not entail abandoning traditional historical readings; Dimock’s paradigm breaks open such linear readings to “engage history beyond the simultaneous, aligning it instead with the dynamics of endurance and transformation that accompany the passage of time” (“Theory” 1061). 新 in Canto LIII represents the center of such a diachronic history that encompasses not only Pound’s use of the term but also its continuing resonance in a multitude of other poetries. Therefore, an

38 Throughout this essay, I will refer to the Chinese word xin ( 新) in its Chinese form so as to retain the cultural and graphical nature of the character. 90

understanding of how 新 and the Chinese language came to be embedded in Canto LIII and

representative of the ideogrammic method is germane to the following study.

While Pound had demonstrated curiosity for Chinese literature as early as 1908 during

his involvement in Hulme’s Poets Club and had been reading Herbert Giles’s History of Chinese

Literature (published in 1901) on the recommendation of Upward, his sustained interaction with the Chinese language began with his reception of the late Ernest Fenollosa’s notebooks in 1913.

A renowned investigator of Chinese art, Fenollosa had been working on translations of numerous

Chinese poems in Japan with Professors Kainen Mori and Nagao Ariga (the latter acted as translator) at the time of his death. Fenollosa’s widow, familiar with Pound’s work, felt that he would be the best person to inherit Fenollosa’s notes. 39 After several meetings with Pound,

Fenollosa’s widow transferred the bulk of his work in Japan (eight notebooks plus voluminous notes on Noh plays and other assorted notes) to him in December. As he notes in “Dateline,” his receipt of Fenollosa’s manuscripts happened “when I was ready for it”; by 1914 Pound was simultaneously involved in construction of Vorticist principles as well as preparing Cathay from

the drafts of Fenollosa ( Literary Essays 74). Disgusted with the cooptation of Imagism by Amy

Lowell and other poets and their subsequent inferior verse, Pound turned to Vorticism as a way to redefine his idea of the image against these second rate poems that recorded visual, overly descriptive, and static images.

Pound’s ascent into Vorticism coupled with the Fenollosa manuscripts succeeded in fortifying the doctrine of the image he had begun formulating in his Imagist years. Against

Imagism, which he began to see as “a movement of criticism rather than of creation,” Vorticism offered creativity in a wide range of art forms ( Gaudier-Brzeska 82). Most immediately, Pound

39 Qian offers several different accounts of Mrs. Fenollosa’s meeting with Pound in Chapter Two of Orientalism and Modernism . 91

found an affinity within the sculptural, modern art forms of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and

Wyndham Lewis. The intensity he saw in their works reflected the passion he had captured in

his finest images. Key to this intensity was the Vorticist penchant of using the past to comment

on the present. 40 Surpassing primitivism, Vorticist artists were “concerned with the relative

intensity, or relative significance of different sorts of expression” ( Gaudier-Brzeska 90). Unlike

the Futurists, the Vorticists drew from the past to critique the present via the associations forced

by paralleling the two. For Pound, whose early poems had come from imitating or translating

past literary figures, such a dynamic realization of the influence of the past on the present

pointed the way to a more engaged use of early texts. These commonalities led Pound to partner

with Lewis to launch Vorticism as a pan-artistic movement. Though the first assertion of this

new poetics alongside its moniker “Vorticism” occurred with the publication of Blast on July 2,

1914, Pound would impart a clearer definition of its precepts in “Affirmations II: Vorticism,” published just two months before Cathay :

Vorticism is the use of, or the belief in the use of, THE PRIMARY PIGMENT, straight

through all the arts. If you are a cubist or an expressionist, or an imagist, you may

believe in one thing for painting and a very different thing for poetry. You may talk

about volumes or about colour that ‘moves in,’ or about a certain form of verse, without

having a correlated aesthetic which carries through all of the arts. (277)

Vorticism offered Pound an aesthetic that could stretch across and bind different art forms while

at the same time setting in bold relief the differences between them. By elucidating each art

form’s “primary pigment,” the vital, indispensable feature used to convey an idea in one art form,

insinuated the limitations of another. For example, the viewy, showy, later Imagist poems failed

40 See Dasenbrock’s chapter “The Aesthetic of Vorticism” for a more extended treatment of Vorticist artists’ use of these relationships. 92

precisely because they borrowed the primary pigment of the visual arts; in contrast, poets needed

to rely on their own primary pigment, the dynamic image, to achieve the “still point” or center of

energy in their own poems. By eschewing a poetry which competed with the visual arts for

something the latter could accomplish more completely and correctly, Pound acclaimed a new

standard concentrated on a firmly defined conceptualization of the image as “a radiant node or

cluster…a VORTEX, from which, and through which and into which, ideas are constantly

rushing” ( Gaudier-Brzeska 92), effectively setting the image in motion and carrying it beyond

the merely pictorial.

For Pound, the first fruit of Vorticism would come through his engagement with Chinese

literature via Cathay . While Cathay is often read primarily as Imagist, Pound constructed it as he was already transitioning to Vorticism. Unlike his 1913 “In a Station of the Metro,” the poems in Cathay surpass his earlier definition of the image as that which presents “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” by emphasizing the connection between the earlier

Chinese poems and his contemporary translations ( Literary Essays 4). Gaudier-Brzeska’s comment from a trench in war-time France that the poems of Cathay “depict our situation in a wonderful way” concretized for Pound the new ground he had broken ( Gaudier-Brzeska 54). In

Chinese poetry, Pound had stumbled on to the raw materials of the vortex; using modern language to (re)present ancient voices, Pound produced both “a sense of awakening and of our belief in the present” by mobilizing the past to clarify the present ( Gaudier-Brzeska 110). As

Ming Xie explains, “translation enables the poet to have access to trans-cultural and trans- historical universals while at the same time making it possible for the poet to effect original transformations in a given local language” (245). Through his mobilization of early Chinese

poetry, Pound had managed to both create and translate, giving his readers “new eyes” with

which to view the present ( Gaudier-Brzeska 85).

While Cathay initiated Pound into the Vorticist movement, Fenollosa’s “The Chinese

Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” offered Pound a form for his poetic goals. Though

Pound received Fenollosa’s manuscript along with the rest of his notebooks in1913, there is no

indication that he perused the draft before 1916. Rather, Pound began with Fenollosa’s Noh

plays before moving on to the Chinese poetry notebooks in November 1914 (Qian, Orientalism

26). Pound’s first mention of the essay occurs in a 1916 letter to Iris Barry. In the letter, Pound

seems most taken with Fenollosa’s appraisal of the Chinese language as devoid of grammar and

more “active” than the English Language; he characterizes Fenollosa’s work as a “big essay on

verbs” where he “inveighs against ‘IS,’ wants transitive verbs” ( Selected Letters 82). In the

essay, Fenollosa asserts that the language itself lacks a “to be” verb and insists that the meaning

of a Chinese sentence depends singly upon the relationships between its words. 41 This elimination of unnecessary syntax is what Pound had been aiming for in his earlier Imagistic years through his study of Japanese Haiku. Furthermore, Fenollosa holds that the Chinese language’s lack of articles and reliance on active verbs over nouns underscores “how poetical is the Chinese form and how close to nature” (“The Chinese Written Character ” 314). Using the much cited example of “ 人見馬” or “man sees horse,” Fenollosa argues that the Chinese language’s syntactical forms mimic the processes of nature; action moves from the doer, to the doing and finally to the object forming a continuous moving picture (“The Chinese Written

41 In “The Chinese Written Character,” Fenollosa offers the example of the verb 有 (you3) as the closest in meaning to the English “to be.” 有 (you3) is generally regarded to mean have, while 是 (shi4) approximates “to be.” Nonetheless, again Fenollosa is partly right in his understanding of Chinese; Chinese grammar does eschew the 是 (shi4) in many cases where it is required in English, most notably sentences which describe one’s own characteristics. For instance, the English sentence “I am very tall” would translate to the Chinese “ 我很高,” or in word to word translation: “I very tall.” 94

Character” 308-309). Unconstrained by what Géfin terms “connectives” such as prepositions

and articles, Chinese is linguistically less specific than English; many verbs can be nouns and

vice versa. As Yip explains in Chinese Poetry: Major Modes and Genres , Chinese retains a

syntactic freedom [which] promotes a kind of prepredicative condition wherein words,

like objects in the real-life world, are free from predetermined closures of relationship

and meaning and offer themselves to us in an open space. Within this open space we can

move freely and approach words from various vantage points to achieve different shades

of the same aesthetic moment (30).

Such directness in writing immediately appealed to Pound as it echoed his earlier convictions in

“A Retrospect” that “the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction”

(Literary Essays 5). For Pound, Chinese syntax succeeded in “throwing light upon our forgotten

mental processes” by using juxtaposition to confirm the more natural relationships between

words (“The Chinese Written Character” 319).

While Pound’s early references to Chinese poetry highlight his interest in its concision

and immediacy, he would additionally come to find within “Fenollosa’s treasures” the ideogram

and “the poetical raw material which the Chinese language affords” ( Selected Letters 27; “The

Chinese Written Character” 319). As Fenollosa explains, the ideogrammic structure of Chinese

written words provides a condition whereby “things work out their own fate” (309). Fenollosa

elucidates these pictographic properties through the character 東, or East, glossing it as “the sun

sign [ 日], tangled in the branches of the tree sign [ 木]” through the sentence “ 日上東” (329).

His conception of Chinese as primarily logographic led him to proclaim:

the Chinese written language has not only absorbed the poetic substance of nature and

built with it a second work of metaphor, but has, through its very pictorial visibility, been

able to retain its original creative poetry with far more vigor and vividness than any

phonetic tongue (“The Chinese Written Character” 321).

While these lines no doubt resonated with Pound as he strove to define and refine Vorticism as a

pan-artistic method, they would become more compelling when Pound returned to his study of

Chinese in the 1930s. Regardless, in his first reading of Fenollosa, Pound saw in this gloss of 東 the example of a language that could “speak at once with the vividness of painting” (“The

Chinese Written Character” 309). Armed with Morrison’s Chinese dictionary, he amplified this notion changing “ 日上東” to “ 日昇東.” 42,43 By adding sheng “ 昇,” which also means rise but

contains the sun radical “ 日,” Pound magnified the ideographic qualities of the sentence. Thus,

while Pound’s more overt propagandizing of the ideogrammic method would occur in later

publications, it is clear that his interest in the pictographic composition of Chinese characters

stems from his first interaction with Fenollosa’s manuscript.

Pound’s Imagism, Vorticism, and his revision of the “The Chinese Written Character”

laid the foundation for his half-century dedication to “an endless poem, of no known category,

Phanopoeia (light or image-making) or something or other, all about everything” ( Pound/Joyce

102). From its earliest stages, the Cantos mimicked Pound’s interest in translation and reemphasized its inextricability from poetry. By the Cantos , Pound makes use of voluminous

(sometimes untranslated) sources in his personae creations, so that his “translation esthetic is transformed into a completely new process in which the juxtaposition of language upon language in its original form only implies a translation in the context of its constituent elements”

(Maerhofer 105). Opening with Odysseus’s descent into hell, the epic grasps toward moments of

42 The Morrison dictionary Pound often consulted conceived of Chinese characters ideogrammically. Morrison’s entry for 新 echoes Pound’s understanding of it. 43 Yunte Huang is the first critic to realize Pound’s substitution from Fenollosa’s original. See pages 70- 73 of Transpacific Displacement for his discussion of this change. 96

light defined by erudite, juxtaposed excerpts from the cultures, histories, and literatures of more

than fifteen languages. Pound would give voice to this method some ten years after beginning

his “poem of some length.” In the ABC of Reading , Pound describes his approach as akin to that

of modern science, and he cites Fenollosa’s monograph as “the first definite assertion of the

applicability of scientific method to literary criticism” (18). For Pound, Fenollosa’s study of the

Chinese character offered a distinctly scientific model and also served as his answer to the

overwhelming Modernist problem of what Altieri calls the “new realism” ( The Art of Twentieth-

Century American Poetry 4). Given by the Romantics a poetry rich in false sincerities and an

ever present narrator, Pound and many of the other Modernists strove to follow emerging science

in isolating the expression or feeling of an event and not the actual event itself. Modernist poetry

often reacted to oppressive Victorian ideals of universality by foregrounding the particular,

immediate, and concrete over the abstract. These poetic experiments effaced the poet himself,

removing him from his mediating position in much earlier poetry, in an attempt to fashion a new

form capable of expressing the contemporary psyche. 44

In direct opposition to Victorian abstraction, the Chinese character’s uninflected

representations of the concrete offered discrete scientific particulars from which an overarching

connection could be determined. Drawing from Fenollosa and the Chinese character, the

ideogrammic method served to fulfill Pound’s dicta that “The proper METHOD for studying

poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful first-hand

examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON” ( ABC 17). Such “COMPARISON”

also accented his own poetic processes and the structure the Cantos would take. Pound explains

his concept more clearly in Guide to Kulchur : “The ideogrammic method consists of presenting

44 See Altieri’s “Introduction” to The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry for a more detailed discussion of the new realism. 97

one facet and then another until at some point one gets off the dead and desensitized surface of

the reader’s mind, onto a part that will register” (51). The juxtapositional technique succeeded

by presenting enough particulars in concert that a reader would be able to deduce the ideas

holding them together.

By the 1930s, Pound’s construction of the Cantos was acting in concert with his return to

Chinese studies. While Pound first published a translation of the Confucian Ta Hio from

Pauthier’s French version in 1928, he subsequently began his own translation publishing a

pamphlet entitled Confucius: Digest of the Analects in 1937; the pamphlet would become the

first chapter of Guide to Kulchur , published in 1938. Pound continued to work on translations of

other Confucian texts throughout the next decade.45 Correspondingly, Pound’s ideogrammic

method became colored by his Confucian readings of the Chinese language as a model for the

connection of nature and politics. Pound’s belief in the logocentric basis of many Chinese

characters as direct, uncompromised representations of natural phenomena freed the Chinese

written language from the vagaries of misuse; because they were formed as a mirror of the

natural world they were exempt from ideology. Confucius’s philosophy advocated adherence to

the correct social order where a man’s actions mirrored his words and his title defined his life. In

the Confucian scheme, the poet acted as a sage; in a sense, the poet was the purveyor of wisdom,

the voice of the people. Confucianism’s centering tenet of a just moral order allowed Pound to

align poetry with both nature and politics; a man’s politics were nothing more than an extension

of his moral duty within the correct Confucian order.

It was in this frame of mind that Pound published what would come to be known as the

Chinese History Cantos in January, 1940. As Hugh Kenner contends, the inclusion of China,

“though not wholly unprepared for, is a surprise”; while Canto XIII centers on Confucius and

45 Pound published The Great Digest and The Unwobbling Pivot in 1947. 98

Canto 49, the Seven Lakes Canto, offers an ekphrastic meditation on a Japanese screen book,

Asia to this point has played a relatively minor role in Pound’s epic (432). 46 Pound concludes the Fifth Decad of Cantos’ images of Geryon and indictments of usura, with 正名 (zhèng míng), the Confucian ideal of right naming and Confucius’ starting point for setting up good government ( Confucius 249). Canto LII thus begins with the “Rays” ideogram copied from

Fenollosa’s notebooks, returning to Pound’s motif of light and his use of early Chinese history as an exemplar of proper government. The addition of Cantos LII – LXI deepens the intertexuality and ideogrammic form of the epic and emphasizes its fugal character; Fenollosa’s text is invoked, while the history of China becomes juxtaposed with Pound’s previous interest in European texts and history. The Chinese Cantos also recall and highlight Pound’s invocation of Confucius

(Kung) in Canto XIII, thus recentering and realigning the work as a whole.

From the Chinese Cantos onward, Chinese characters figure prominently in the poem. It is also within these Cantos that 新 makes its first appearance. Though Pound had obviously

stumbled onto the maxim “make it new” before the publication of a collection of essays by the

same name in 1934, the origin of the phrase is not revealed until Canto LIII:

Tching prayed on the mountain and 新 wrote MAKE IT NEW 日日 on his bath tub 新

day by Day make it new

cut underbrush,

pile the logs

keep it growing. (265)

46 See Qian’s “Painting Into Poetry: Pound’s Seven Lakes Canto” in Ezra Pound and China for an extended discussion of Pound’s use of the screen book. 99

Generally translated as “renew thyself completely each day; do it again and again and forever again,” the inscription on Tang’s bathtub is traditionally seen as a reference to the perseverance which allowed Tang to overthrow the reigning emperor and begin the Shang dynasty. Pound abbreviates the original Chinese phrase “日新, 日日新, 日新” to its major components 日 and 新 and removes the connective “ ” (you) so as to rectify the “dominance of the verb” (“The

Chinese Written Character” 29). In reworking the phrase, Pound also mimics Chinese chengyu

(), idiomatic literary expressions constructed from four Chinese characters that often allude

to a historical or literary proverb or adage. The collage of words within Canto LII extends the

ideogrammic method of the Cantos by juxtaposing English and Chinese; whether or not a reader

comprehends both languages is immaterial – he can get at one by way of the other. As Pound

famously remarks in a letter to Sarah Perkins Cope, “Skip anything you don’t understand and go

on till you pick it up again. All tosh about foreign languages making it difficult. The quotes are

all explained at once by repeat or they are definitely of the things indicated” ( Selected Letters

250). For the largely Mandarin-illiterate audience, the Chinese text serves as both aesthetic

juxtaposition and a graphic (re)presentation of the poetry to the left.

Pound’s belief in the ideogrammic constitution of the Chinese language additionally

imbues the single word 新 with other valences of meaning. Thirteen pages after its initial

appearance, Pound shortens the phrase to 新, appending the phonetic approximation “sin / jih /

jih / sin” to it. 新 thus becomes emblematic of the entire phrase. 47 Following Fenollosa’s belief

47 While I focus on 新 as a model of Pound’s project of paideuma, it is perhaps interesting to note that 日 (rì) also remained important in Pound’s ideogrammic project. As the radical for sun, Pound often reads words containing it as indicative of his theory of light. For example, he glosses (míng), which literally combines the radicals for sun and moon, as “the total light process, the radiation…hence, the intelligence” (Confucius 20). He also instructs readers to “refer to Scotus Erigena, Grosseteste and the notes on light in my Cavalcanti,” further connecting his ideogrammic readings with Neoplatonic light philosophy. (See 100 that each Chinese character “bears its metaphor on its face” and echoing the entry for 新 in

Morrison’s dictionary, Pound envisions 新 as comprising three distinct pieces which combine

ideogrammically to infuse the word with metaphorical significance:

lì or wèi - woodpile

新 jīn - axe 木 mù - tree

Pound hints at this connection in the lines “cut underbrush / pile the logs / keep it growing” in

Canto LIII. He further expounds on the gist of 新 in his updated translation of the Ta Hio (

/Da Xue ) in 1947; here, the 新 ideogram breaks down into three constituent parts: “axe, tree and woodpile” and outpaces its simple definition of “new” to mean “renew the people” ( Confucius

39).

Renewal for Pound, as translated through Confucius, depends upon ascertaining the root of history, so that “to know what precedes and what follows, is nearly as good as having a head and feet” for “if the root be in confusion, nothing will be well governed” ( Confucius 29, 33). By reading 新 ideogrammically, Pound is able to align the “root” of Confucian wisdom with the

“tree” radical, intimating that to make it new requires an excavation of what has gone before. Its

first appearance in Canto LII alongside the portrayal of the successful reign of Yao , Chun ,

and Yu emphasizes the continuation of right rule as well as recalls the Confucian “root” of such an enterprise: “Virtue is the daughter of heaven, YU followed CHUN / and CHUN, YAO having one root of conduct” ( Cantos 278). Imbued with this significance, 新 as metaphor recreates not only the ideogrammic method but also recalls one of Pound’s major themes of the

also Mary Cheadle’s excellent essay on the intersection of Pound’s Confucianism and Neoplatonism in “The Vision of Light in Ezra Pound’s The Unwobbling Pivot .” 101

Cantos : the repeat in history. As he explains in “The Tradition,” “a return to origins invigorates because it is a return to nature and reason” ( Literary Essays 92). Like Fenollosa, Pound believed that the radicals of Chinese, the smaller components that make up each character, each referenced pre-historic renderings of concrete natural things. As such, placing these “pictograms” in concert with each other provides for a moving picture “almost invariably tied to myth, and through myth to the fundamental process of nature” (Géfin 40). By collapsing much of the distance between man and word and thereby precluding political or religious misreadings, the

Chinese character served as the perfect medium and symbol to ground Pound’s poetic project of voicing “the tale of the tribe.”

While 新 is clearly associated with Chinese literature and Confucianism in its earlier manifestation in the Chinese Cantos, its reappearance in later Cantos extends its sphere of associations as its meaning widens to reflect Pound’s shifting estimation of his ability to create a paradiso in light of World War II, his imprisonment at the DTC, and his stay at St. Elizabeth’s.

Notably, the Pisan Cantos are recorded in the same notebook as Pound’s translations of the Da

Xue and The Unwobbling Pivot , and the three texts create a palimpsest, each informing the other.

Pound pursued his Confucian studies at St. Elizabeth’s, translating the Shih-ching or Confucian

Odes as he continued work on the Cantos . Pound’s interest in 新 resonates throughout the later

Cantos becoming a radiant node, a fugue-like, vibrating image aligned with Pound’s conception

of light and representative of his notion of paideuma as “the grisly roots of ideas that are in

action” ( Guide to Kulchur 58). 新’s appearance in Canto LXXXV serves as an example. The

Canto itself opens with an ellipsis, indicating its allusiveness to the previous Canto and inviting juxtaposition. The section then proceeds in an indictment of the “infantilism” of usurious practices before lamenting the passing of American leaders dedicated to the prevention of

102

“paideuma fading” (589). In contrast to demands to “Remove the mythologies before they establish clean values,” Pound proclaims “hic est medium” and subsequently offers examples of leaders and works that affirm the continuation of cultural growth:

Ocellus:

jih 日

hsin 新

the faint green in spring time.

The play shaped from ϕλογιξόευου

gospoda ηάειρα λαπρά συβαίυει (591)

Here, 新 is recreated and mirrored in both Ocellus and Sophocles’ play Trachiniae . Pound, who was translating the Shih-ching poems around the same time he was translating Trachiniae (the former published in 1954, the latter in 1953) sees in the two a compatibility, a shared vision of the light the Cantos moves toward. For Pound, Heracles symbolizes the “solar vitality,” the ephiphanic light that can illuminate man’s darkness. As Xie explains, in Pound’s translation

Heracles, not Daineira, is the main character and “the embodiment of the play’s essential meaning.” (239). Ocellus, affiliated with the light philosophers, also references Pound’s quest for light and his continuing interest in Neoplatonism. The juxtaposition of the different languages forces the reader to construe a relationship between the two; 新 becomes interpretable through its location alongside Ocellus and the Greek, while 新 in turn also defines and amplifies the meaning of the Greek and the allusion to Ocellus.

Pound’s use of these different cultural traditions underscores his image of a universal paideuma as “the tangle or complex of the inrooted ideas of any period” ( Guide to Kulchur 57).

By Canto XCVIII, 新 becomes additionally linked to the Egyptian composite deity Ra-Set, who

103 first appears in the context of Ocellus and the “acorn of light” in Canto XCI, as well as the

Soninke legend “Grassire’s Lute” through Pound’s use of “Agada, Ganna, Fasa”:

The boat of Ra-Set moves with the sun

"but our job to build light" said Ocellus:

Agada, Ganna, Fasa, 新 hsin Make it new (704).

Pound’s combination of the male sun god Ra with the female moon deity Set connotes a balanced whole while “Grassire’s Legend,” the myth of the founding and re-founding of the nation of Ghana, resonates with Pound’s Confucian emphasis on right rule. Invoking both traditions alongside 新 further internationalizes Pound’s ideogram.

The presentation of 新 at the end of Canto XCIV most clearly associates the ideogram with light:

“To build light 日 jih 新 hsin said Ocellus. (662)

For Pound, to achieve a new paideuma that will restore the world requires the excavation and recognition of older models and traditions. 新 stands as an emblem of this procedure, lighting the darkness through the recovery of truth. While the Chinese and Confucian roots of 新 are

certainly indispensable to his final estimation of the character, 新 nonetheless by the end of the

Cantos incorporates truths gained from a number of different sources including Neoplatonism.

Much like 新, images of Neoplatonic thought repeat throughout the epic confirming Pound’s

104 interest in the intellectual tradition begun by Erigena, extended by Grosseteste, and supported by the writings of Guido Cavalcanti. 48 His enduring interest in both Confucianism and light philosophy results in a conflation of the aspects of the two; much as Pound read meaning into the ideograms of Chinese, he saw in Neoplatonism and Confucianism certain resonances that illuminated and changed both. 49

Throughout the Cantos , Pound attempts to relay his prescription for producing a new paideuma . 新, as illustrative of that quest, recalls Pound’s belief in honoring the traditions of the

past as well as making use of them in recreating the present. The process embodied by 新 bespeaks not only the Confucian ideals of right government and renewal, but also the theories derived from his study of a number of other literary traditions. 新 becomes a vortex

encompassing Neoplatonism alongside Greek mythology and Egyptian wisdom and

metaphorically represents both Pound’s ideogrammic practices and his poetic goals. While the

Pound of Drafts and Fragments seems skeptical of the ability to effect a new paideuma (“And I

am not a demigod, / I cannot make it cohere”), he nonetheless still proffers to future writers an

image of light that reverberates in his interpretation of 新: “I have brought the great ball of crystal / who can lift it? / Can you enter the great acorn of light?” (816, 815). Subsequent writers

48 See Walter B. Michaels’s “Pound and Erigena” in Paideuma 1:1 for a chronology of his interest in Erigena and the light philosophers. 49 Mary Cheadle’s article “The Vision of Light in Ezra Pound’s The Unwobbling Pivot” also provides an interesting account of the growth of Pound’s interest in Neoplatonism alongside his translations of Confucius. Cheadle suggests “Neoplatonism salvaged Pound’s Confucianism from the political and historical morass into which the fate of fascism threatened to take it by enabling his Confucianism to transcend the very ends and limits that his earlier Confucianism had valued” (Cheadle 124). While I am not sure her essay fully supports such a conjecture, it nonetheless provides valuable information concerning Pound’s parallel interests in the two ideas and the ways in which he allowed one to influence the other. In particular, her translation of the typescript draft of Pound’s Italian edition of The Unwobbling Pivot confirms his perceived connection between the two: “Confucian metaphysics arises from light; students should compare it with scholasticism; with Grosseteste, or with the poetry of Guido Cavalcanti (in Donna mi prega)” (qtd in Cheadle 122). 105 have accordingly taken on the challenge offered by Pound, remaking not only his ideogrammic method and moving forward his idea of paideuma, but also capitalizing on the idea of 新. Yet, just as 新 is (re)visioned and infused with different valences throughout the Cantos , its

subsequent appearance in the works of poets like Gary Snyder, Fred Wah, and John Yau deepens

its meaning by adding more resonances to it and entrenches Chinese literature, among other

traditions, in the making of American poetry.

The poetry of Gary Snyder has long been situated in the Poundian tradition; both

Christopher Beach and Laszlo Géfin expound on Snyder’s relation to Pound in their work on

Poundian influence while Robert Kern connects Snyder to Pound in terms of an interest in Asia.

Indeed, Snyder himself testifies to the influence Pound provides: “I grew up with the poetry of twentieth-century coolness, its hard edges and resilient elitism. Ezra Pound introduced me to

Chinese poetry, and I began to study classical Chinese. When it came to writing out of my own experience, most of modernism didn’t fit, except for the steer toward Chinese and Japanese”

(“Afterword” 65). Following Pound’s example, Snyder became an avid student of both Chinese and Japanese and has produced a number of translations, most notably those of the T’ang dynasty poet known as Han Shan. Snyder’s own major mode of poetic production, which he calls riprap , also pulls from his study of Pound, the five years he spent “doing finger exercises”

that mimicked the Modernists, and his interest in Asian languages ( The Gary Snyder Reader

323). Snyder asserts Pound’s Cantos “touched me deeply and … I am still indebted” (324).

Similar to the ideogrammic style of the Cantos , Snyder’s technique of riprap uses a poetics of

collage which juxtaposes words together so as to construct a meaning out of their positioning.

Yet Snyder’s abbreviated parataxis is also informed by his study of Chinese and Japanese poetry

106 and his approximation of the grammatical patterns in these works; eschewing connectives,

Snyder forces the reader to create his or her own associations and understandings.

The force of these influences on Snyder’s operation of riprap is perhaps best exemplified by his first collection Riprap (Gary Snyder Reader 404). Snyder’s own comments on the construction of the poems in Riprap affirms the composite influence of environmentalism and the Chinese language on his own poetics. Written “under the influence of the geology of the

Sierra Nevada,” Snyder constructed “poems of tough, simple, short words, with the complexity far beneath the surface texture. In part the line was influenced by the five and seven-character line Chinese poems I’d been reading, which work like sharp blows on the mind” (qtd. in Géfin

128). The title poem of the collection succinctly explains Snyder’s poetics:

Lay down these words

Before your mind like rocks.

placed solid, by hands

In choice of place, set

Before the body of the mind

in space and time:

Of note is Snyder’s placement of “words” before “the body of the mind” – the act of the poem precedes the act of the mind. The words, in Snyder’s estimation, are concrete items “placed solid” by hands, construct an unbroken path forward on which the reader’s mind may travel.

Much as Pound views the ideograms of Chinese as tangible recreations of ideas, Snyder envisions words not as abstract entities but rather a solid force in the construction of reality. As

Géfin succinctly summarizes, “‘riprapping’ is the re-creation of an ongoing ceaselessly unfolding movement of things and events…an act of conscious and intuitive participation in the universal

107 scheme of eternal change” (128). “Riprap” thus not only embodies and explains Snyder’s poetics but also expresses his cosmology and belief in the world as a place of multiple components – man, animal, nature – connected in a constant flux. Accordingly, Snyder extends his created trail with a “riprap of things” including the “Cobble of milky way / straying planets /

These poems, people, / lost ponies.” Within this space, he also imagines “The worlds like an endless / four-dimensional / Game of Go .” His inclusion of the Japanese game of Go references his extended study and appreciation of Asian cultures and languages as well as his respect for tradition; the game dates to 4 th century BCE China. For Snyder, though, Asian tradition can be

incorporated into American tradition. While the poems themselves speak from the Sierra

Nevada Mountains, they nonetheless reference images from his 8 year sojourn in Japan and offer

Snyder’s own ideogram of cultural experience. By the end of the poem, “each rock a word”

becomes “a creek-washed stone” moved and shaped by reality but ultimately remaining, as in the

last line, “Granite: ingrained.” The relationship created by the words’ proximity to one another

ultimately allows the reader to construct her own trail through the poetry, which offers a foothold

in and an understanding of the impermanence and interconnected materiality of the world.

Snyder’s interest in Pound and Chinese language and literature alongside his reimagining

of the ideogrammic method clearly situate him as an heir to the Chinese inflections of Pound’s

poetics. As Robert Kern rightly remarks, “Snyder’s work…is arguably the premier example in

post-Poundian American poetry of an Orientalized verse in the Modernist tradition and of

English-as-Chinese” (223). Yet, while Pound provides Snyder with the impetus to study Asian

languages, Snyder’s avid interest in and mastery of Japanese and Chinese make it difficult to

separate Poundian mediated Chineseness from Chinese influence gathered through Snyder’s own

translations; in other words, if Riprap stems from Snyder’s imitation of Chinese syntax, does this

108 influence take precedence over Pound’s ideogrammic process in Snyder’s composition of the poems? Snyder himself avers that Chinese poetry provided a greater impetus for his poetics than his study of Pound. In response to Eliot Weinberger’s inquiry “were you getting the ideogramic

[sic] method from Pound or from the Chinese poetry directly?” Snyder answers, “From the

Chinese poetry directly. I could never make sense of that essay by Pound….What I found in

Pound were three or four dozen lines in the Cantos that are stunning – unlike anything else in

English poetry” ( The Gary Snyder Reader 324). While Snyder himself privileges the influence

of the Chinese on his poetics, both clearly color his work. Untangling the two to delineate a

direct transmission of Poundian Chineseness to Snyderian form would be impossible. Thus,

while Kern and others concentrate on Snyder’s forms, what is more useful and concrete for this

study is the way Snyder picks up and unpacks Pound’s idea of 新 in his poem “Axe Handles.”

Snyder’s inclusion of 新 comments specifically on the lasting legacy of Pound’s comprehension of the single Chinese word. Tracing the ways he adds to the resonance 新 points to the extent to which the idea has become entrenched within the American poetic idiom.

Like “Riprap,” Snyder’s “Axe Handles” focuses on the parallels between poetry and meaning making while concomitantly underscoring his belief in the primary role tradition plays in the continuation of human life. Similar to Pound, Snyder believes in the power of ancient traditions: “As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the late

Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil; the magic of animals, the power-vision of solitude, the terrifying initiation and re-birth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe”

(qtd. in Géfin 126). “Axe Handles” exemplifies these beliefs, offering Snyder’s own tale of the tribe. The poem itself mediates on the power of such a tale through its metaphoric comparison of the creation of poetry with Snyder’s literal creation of an axe handle and concomitant

109 transmission of this centuries old practice to his son Kai. The poem opens “one afternoon the last week in April / Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet.” From the outset, Snyder mediates his own handing down of specific practices to his son. As the poem continues, Kai remembers the

“hatchet-head / without a handle in the shop” which he then wants for his own. Repurposing a

“broken-off axe handle,” the two proceed to literally reconstruct the hatchet:

Then I begin to shape the old handle

With the hatchet, and the phrase

First learned from Ezra Pound

Rings in my ears!

“When making an axe handle

The pattern is not far off.”

The “phrase” Snyder alludes to resonates keenly with Pound’s reading of 新 as wood, woodpile, and axe as presented in The Cantos and The Great Digest . Indeed, Snyder is “making it new” in

a Poundian sense, creating a new handle through the pattern of the old and passing this

knowledge onto the future. Yet, like Pound, Snyder’s reconstruction also necessarily changes

the original; Kai and Snyder create a hatchet handle from an axe handle, reimagining the form

handed down to them.

Though Snyder’s invocation of the axe recalls Pound’s presentation of 新 in the Cantos ,

it actually refers to Pound’s own translation of the Chinese Shih-ching or Book of Odes published in 1959. 50 The 350 Odes are traditionally believed to have been compiled by Confucius (or one of his followers) around 600 BCE. They thus represent some of the earliest recorded examples

50 Pound’s translation of the Odes joined only a handful of other translation attempts. Legge’s seminal translation appeared in 1871 followed by the small press distribution of Lawrence Cranmer-Byng in 1908 and Waley’s more definitive edition in 1937. 110 of Chinese poetry and constitute one of the Confucian Five Classics – the traditional canon of required reading for any higher study in China. Essentially folk idioms, these poems illustrate themes of the common man, or in Pound’s words, the “tale of the tribe.” Pound’s translation of

Ode 158, or the fa ke 51 begins: “How cut haft for an axe?/Who hacks / Holds a haft” ( Shih-ching

78). Pound’s adaptation of the folk wisdom of the fa ke uses strong, short lines of single

syllables, emphasizing the action of each line. The practice of constructing a new axe handle

with the pattern of the old further engages his conception of 新 as the ideographic emblem of creating a new paideuma from a revaluation of older traditions. His final line, “Let who weds never pass too far from his own class,” veers from the original to gloss the metaphor of the axe with another example of the Confucian right order of things. With these resonances, 新 not only

encompasses the Shih-ching and the folk idioms it evokes but also offers a new and concrete

example of the practice; to “pile the logs / keep it growing” as in the Cantos requires the

51 Below is the text of the 伐柯(fá k ē). I include the Chinese with its pinyin transliteration. Next, I include my own close word-to-word translation and finally David Hinton’s recent translation: 伐柯 fá k ē

伐柯如何 cut axe how? How do you cut an axe handle? fá k ē rú hé 匪斧不克 useless to cut Without an axe it can’t be done. fěi fǔ bú kè 取妻如何 marry how? And how do you marry a wife? qǔ q ī rú hé 匪媒不得 no match maker, cannot Without a matchmaker you can’t. fěi méi bù dé

伐柯伐柯 cut axe cut axe Cut an axe handle, axe handle fá k ē fá k ē 其則不遠 that standard not far the pattern’s close at hand. qí zé bù yu ǎn 我覯之子 I meet it unexpectedly Waiting to meet her, I lay out wǒ gòu zh ī z ǐ 籩豆有踐 bean basket is enough offerings in baskets and bowls (32). bi ān dòu y ǒu jiàn 111 excavation and (re)visioning of the wisdom housed in ancient texts as a means by which to

“renew the people.”

Yet, while Snyder deepens the Poundian image of 新, he also gestures toward other resonances that extend its web of meaning. At the very moment of Kai’s recognition of the transformative power of the axe, Snyder’s 新 widens to encompass not only Pound’s notion of it but also his teacher’s instruction of Lu Ji’s Wen Fu :

And he sees. And I hear it again

It's in Lu Ji's Wen Fu, fourth century

A.D. "Essay on Literature"-in the

Preface: "In making the handle of an axe

By cutting wood with an axe

The model is indeed near at hand.

My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen

Translated that and taught it years ago

Handed down not only by Pound, 新 has also come to Snyder through Chen, and through Chen

from the fourth-century BCE poet Lu Ji. Lu Ji’s Wen Fu ( 文) or Rhymeprose on Literature is

essentially a meditation on the many facets of the art of writing meant, in Lu Ji’s words, “to tell

of the consummate art of past writers and to present the why and how of good and bad writing as

well” (424). In sentiments Pound would not have disagreed with, Lu Ji argues that the practice

of writing is concomitant with the reading and studying of good writing. Lu Ji thus appropriates

his own version of the fa ke in terms of poetic production: “Surely, hewing an axe handle with a

handle in hand, the pattern should not be far to seek” (424). Lu Ji thus rounds out the metaphor

by connecting the poetic act concretely to the maxim of the fa ke . Like Pound and Snyder, Lu Ji

112 believes one must study the masters before he or she engages in his or her own masterpiece.

However, Lu Ji tempers his advice with caution: “The difficulty, then, lies not so much in the knowing than the doing”; the creation of poetry, whether guided by the hands of the masters or not, is inevitably harder and more complicated than mere imitation would suggest (424). As many a student of Pound and Pound himself came to recognize, imitation without (re)creation renews nothing. Thus 新 comes to represent the difficulty facing each successive generation of poets in their quest to “make it new.”

It is this paradoxical difficulty that Snyder’s “Axe Handles” picks up and plays on.

Snyder sees the tradition in broader terms outside of poetry; his instruction of Kai on the building of an axe handle is grounded in the commonplace, the necessary, the natural. Snyder’s 新

resonates with the continuity of life or “how we go on” and hearkens to the everyday maxims of

the Odes . Lu Ji’s use of 新 complicates these ideas; as Lu Ji proceeds with his rhymeprose, he revisits the 新 inscribed on T’ang’s bathtub and through it to the 12 th century Book of Changes (I

Ching )52 : “It inscribes bronze and marble, to make virtue known, it breathes through flutes and

strings and is new always” (Lu Ji 432). More than just “renewal,” Lu Ji’s 新 also means virtue:

“the daily renovation which it produces is what is meant by ‘the abundance of virtue’” (Legge).

This new description adds a fresh valence to the foregoing meanings of 新. For Lu Ji, 新 is composed of an axe and a tree, but not a woodpile; alternately, he sees the third component, ,

for its extended Chinese meaning of “virtue.” 53 This notion of virtue is reflected in Pound’s and

Snyder’s understandings of 新. For both, poetry is more than writing – it involves social

52 Fang’s footnote quotes Legge who attributes Lu Ji’s invocation of the T’ang bathtub to The Book of Changes (I Ching ). Although traditionally associated with the mythic emperor Fu Hsi (approximately 2000 BCE), Legge dates the I Ching to the 12 th century BCE (3). 53 According to my Chinese dictionary sources, (lì or weì) does in fact mean “stand, erect, establish,” and can be understood as virtue in a Confucian sense. 113 engagement and a grounding in the strengths and beliefs of the past. For Pound, this contact occurs via his invocation of various personae, his didactic texts on literature and politics, and the

Chinese language through his belief in each character’s intrinsic ideogrammic properties that mimic the processes of the earth. Snyder demonstrates these values through his Buddhist meditations – a practice rooted in Chinese history – and his commitment to living as closely to the earth as possible. For Snyder and Pound, then, poetry is a way of “inscribing” virtue and extending paideuma by pointing towards the values and beliefs modern society has overlooked.

Snyder’s use of 新 indicates concretely how Pound’s images of Chineseness persistently serve as an influence in modern American poetry. Pound’s now commonplace maxim of “make it new” coupled with the image of the axe handle mediated through Snyder have indeed become repeated motifs in modern poetry. Fred Wah makes this point clear in “Dead in My Tracks:

Wildcat Creek Utaniki.” The poem, written in the form of utaniki or journal entries, hearkens to

Gary Snyder’s prose poems in Earth House Hold and many of his longer poems in the more

recent Mountains and Rivers Without End . Here, as in much of Wah’s other poetry, the focus is

on process; as he states in Faking It , “the purpose of art is to relate the sensation of things as they

are perceived and not as they are known” (49). The poem opens with the date “ July 29/89 ” and

narrates the trek to the campsite on the “continental divide ridgeline of the B.C./Alberta

boundary.” Yet, the seemingly straightforward manner of the journal entry is shifted by the

inclusion of italicized print:

My Borders are Altitude

and silent

a pawprint's cosine

climate from the lake to the treeline

114

all crumbly under foot at the edges

cruddy summer snow melt

soft wet twig and bough-sprung alpine fir

but more than this

height

is my pepper

Wah’s concrete description of the trek to the campsite is also amplified by this section’s elliptical description of the area itself. The images of the “pawprint” and the “crumbly” snow against the sensations of “height” and “altitude” attempt to approximate Wah’s sensory experience at

Wildcat Creek. Much like the poetry of Snyder and Pound, Wah’s poetics proceeds by juxtaposition; the collage he presents in the italicized section offers resonance against the opening lines.

Wah cements this association in the third utaniki . The entry records Wah’s hike up a nearby valley. As he ascends, he notes “those rocks this morning on the way up appeared full of signs and messages. So I walked around in a meander and kind of grilled each striated spot for information, news of the conglomerate earth.” As his mind “meanders” over the earth, he lights upon the idea of 新: “The wooden handle of an ice axe stuck in the snow: ‘When making an ax

handle,’ the pattern is occasionally too far off. Somewhere else. Out of sight, ‘man.’ Out of

mind.” Wah’s 新 resonates with Lu Ji’s Rhymeprose and the idea of the cavernous divide between thought and speech; though his poem tries to approximate his perception of his experience through its juxtaposition of utaniki and italicized parataxis, the exact recording is

“occasionally too far off.” However, unlike Pound and Snyder who gesture towards the source of their uses of 新, Wah expects the reader to know the maxim already and to recognize that he is

115 reworking it and inverting its intended meaning. Such an expectation attests to the fixed location of 新 within not only American poetry, but, given Wah’s Canadian citizenship, North American poetry as a whole.

Wah’s consideration of the adage is additionally complicated by its resonance with his own poetic practice of the “synchronous axe.” As an Asian Canadian poet (Wah’s father is

Canadian born Chinese/Scotch-Irish, his mother, Swedish-Canadian), much of Wah’s poetics centers on “the hyphen, that marked (or unmarked) space that both binds and divides” ( Faking It

72). As he explains in his long prose poem to his father Breathin’ My Name With a Sigh , “I’d better find that double edge between you / and your father so that the synchronous axe / keeps splitting whatever this is the weight of / I’m left holding” (n. pag.). In limbo between the

Chinese heritage of his father and his own Caucasian appearance, Wah’s poetry explores the positionality of his mixed identity through the act of cleaving, which both separates him from his ethnicity and binds him to it. In this case, the axe handle that is “too far off” may reference his own father’s Chinese heritage, which he feels disconnected from as his appearance at times moves his ethnicity “out of sight.” Regardless, as Breathin’ explains, the “weight of / I’m left holding” always remains. Like the axe of 新, the synchronous axe of Wah’s poetry creates a

dialectic that recalls Wah’s identity even as it constructs new images of that identity.

The ambivalence in Wah’s treatment of the maxim begs the question of its effect on

Asian American writing. The double sided nature of such a tradition to Chinese American

writers is made apparent in John Yau’s poem “Chinese Villanelle.” Written in the villanelle

style, the poem from the outset calls into question just what is “Chinese” about it; the ostensibly

European form and nonracially marked content offer little explication of the Chinese adjective in

the title. The poem begins, “I have been with you, and I have thought of you / Once the air was

116 dry and drenched with light / I was like a lute filling the room with description” ( RS 24). The

poet here is active, producing something through his writing. However, as the poem continues

and the “you” and “I” form a “We,” the autonomy of the lute changes. In the third stanza, the

lute becomes filled with descriptors instead of actively offering something: “Like a river worthy

of its grown / And like a mountain worthy of its insolence… / Why am I like a lute left with only

description.” The final stanzas of the poem complete the lute’s conversion from a solid, centered

production of seeming substance to one unable to fully communicate its own self:

How does one cut an axe handle with an axe

What shall I do to tell you all my thoughts

When I have been with you, and thought of you

A pelican sits on a dam, while a duck

Folds its wings again; the song does not melt

I remember you looking at me without description

Here, Yau includes the idea of the axe, recalling Pound’s own dabbling with ideograms. Despite the innovation and inspiration Pound’s poetics offers, the legacy of his literary Orientalism nonetheless serves as a stumbling block that Yau must attend to. The lines “How does one cut an axe handle with an axe / What shall I do to tell you all my thoughts” echo the writer’s struggle to create something new, something that hasn’t already been said. In terms of Yau, a Chinese

American writer, such a problem also stems from saying something that hasn’t already been proscribed, from constructing a poem that circumvents the mold of Chineseness handed down by

Pound. That the “song does not melt,” testifies to Pound’s legacy, its force, and its permanence.

117

The unnamed “you” envisions the author “without description,” as he has already been narrated by Pound’s images of China. Yet it is the final lines that fully capture the poet’s predicament:

Perhaps a king’s business is never finished,

Though “perhaps” implies a different beginning

I have been with you, and I have thought of you

Now I am a lute filled with this wandering description ( RS 24)

Rather than creating his own subjectivity, the “I” is imbued with the “wandering description” built from Pound’s collage of Chineseness.

Perhaps more decidedly than Snyder and Wah, Yau’s incorporation of 新 gestures toward the enduring relevance of Pound’s imaginings of Chinese poetry to Modern American poetry at the same time as it complicates such a legacy. In titling the poem “Chinese Villanelle” and invoking 新, Yau invites comparison to Pound’s presented ideas of Chineseness. Yet in direct

contrast to the translational poetics of Pound and Snyder which imagine Chinese poetry as

paratactic and free of description, Yau’s poem openly thematizes such description, arguing that

the poetics of Pound, despite their revolutionary forms and continued importance to the

development of American poetics, nonetheless describe and delimit what is considered Chinese

in American poetry. The tendency to associate Snyder’s riprap more closely with Pound’s

ideogrammic method than with Snyder’s translation of Chinese poetry additionally registers such

an assessment. In effect, Yau’s poem intimates that Eliot’s famous declaration “Pound is the

inventor of Chinese poetry for our time” still rings true in the twenty-first century.

In “A Theory of Resonance,” Dimock avers “the passage of time, deadening some words

and quickening others, can give the past text a semantic life that is an effect of the present”

(1061). The abstract concept Pound represents in the word 新 exemplifies her assertion. The

118 diachronic web of meaning surrounding 新 encompasses verse as disparate as a 400 BCE

Chinese folk sayings and the contemporary poetry of John Yau, highlighting the interconnected and international qualities of 新 and the ways it inflects the poetry of the present. That Pound’s idea of 新 has become a recurrent theme in American poetry offers a concrete example of the continuing influence of Chinese language and literature on American poetry. Yet, despite the generative nature of China on modern American poetry at large, the prevalence of these imitations and approximations has nonetheless canonized certain expectations of the mode in which Chineseness operates and is presented. In this respect, Pound retains his position as curator of exhibits of Chineseness in modern American poetry. As the next two chapters explore, negotiating the Modernist legacy of Orientalism has become a key aspect of much Chinese

American poetry as writers like Yau and Marilyn Chin continually revise what constitutes

Chineseness in the American poem.

However, while Pound’s and Snyder’s borrowings of 新 does qualify as an orientalizing

of sorts, the course each took in his pursuit of the essence of 新 points to a third space of

orientalizing, between fetish and freak. In this space, these poets seek common ground where

their own culture can resonate with what they have found of interest in Chinese culture. Much

like Lu Ji in his invocation of both the I Ching and T’ang’s bathtub, Pound and Snyder act as mediators who pass on images and motifs gleaned from Chinese language through the palimpsestic construction of their fugal poetics. By interrogating 新 across its many contexts,

the multiple resonances within it come alive, changing and restructuring the manner in which we

read each poem. Though entangled and nonlinear, this web of influence is clear on one point: to

fully appreciate both Modernism and American poetry after Pound, we must look past our

borders and own language to understand, in the words of Snyder, “how we go on.”

119

CHAPTER FIVE

“(AND NO HELP FROM THE PHONETICIST)”:

MARILYN CHIN’S DIALECTIC OF ASIAN AMERICANNESS

In the corpus of literature treating the presence of China in modern American poetry and the American imagination at large, one important authorial group has been noticeably absent –

Chinese Americans. Much like Euro American poetry, Chinese American poetry boasts a generative yet complicated relationship with the Chinese language. Yet, due to the double bind of ethnicity and Orientalism, Chinese American poets remain silenced in the discussion of post-

WWI poetry and China. As critics like David Palumbo Liu, Timothy Yu, and Juliana Chang have investigated, Asian American textual production at large continues to be hindered by a widespread notion of the inherent ethnicity of its “hyphenated” authors. In our current post- multiculturalist world, texts authored by an ethnically marked name are often times first read for

Otherness; only secondarily are these works read on the grounds of being “good literature.”

Such a response reflects the common conflation of Asian Americans with Asians and the continuing perception of Asian Americans as foreign and Other. In terms of literature, this conflation haunts Asian American textual production by positing a residual “Asianness” that marks the Asian American experience as irreconcilably different from the Euro American experience. As Juliana Chang explains, Asian American texts are often perceived as providing

“direct access to cultural difference and Otherness” which allows readers to view cultural difference without actually engaging it or its history (Chang, “Reading” 87). Yet, this Otherness also paradoxically works to elide cultural difference and undergird narratives of mainstream multiculturalism. Timothy Yu furthers these assessments, expounding that when texts “speak

120 out” by moving into publication they fall prey to the “marketplace of wider culture” where “the ethnic differences displayed by minority writers become marketable commodities, name-brand variations on a uniform product” (436). These commodities are serviceable products of what

David Palumbo Liu terms “liberal multiculturalism,” where the ethnographically marked texts are presented for their foreignness so as to point to the diversity present in the U.S. while eliding the historical, cultural, and economic challenges that continue to mark and complicate the reality of Asian Americans (6). 54 When read ethnographically, these texts buttress the ailing image of the melting pot by offering a circular argument whereby the domestication of the foreign through assimilation to Euro American cultural norms envisages the illusive diversity of the US.

This commodification of Asian American texts is most clearly evidenced in the publishing and popular acceptance of “ethnic memoirs.” Texts that center on the immigrant trope, particular moments of Asian American history (such as Japanese American internment), or linguistic concerns continue to dominate high school and college reading lists. 55 These memoirs

are often taught unilaterally as wholly representative and explanatory of a singular time period,

cultural struggle, or entire ethnic group. The publication history and popularity of Maxine Hong

Kingston’s Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts demonstrate a sound example of the cooptation and commodification of Chinese American memoirs. As Kingston herself notes, the book’s presentation is “mildly deceiving”; marketed by her publisher under the category of “non-fiction” and saddled with an Orientalized title chosen by the book’s editor,

54 This term as coined by Palumbo-Liu indicates a whitewashed multiculturalism that forgets the historical and current conflicts of ethnic groups. I would view this idea as analogous to Stanley Fish’s indictment of “boutique multiculturalism.” 55 Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior , Joy Kogawa’s Obasan , and Chang Rae Lee’s Native Speaker appeared as suggested texts to respond to on the 2007 AP exam. Kingston’s text is often read solely for its “Asianness” in terms of her use of Chinese myths, while Obasan details Japanese Canadian internment and Native Speaker focuses on a Korean American’s feelings of isolation in terms of language and culture. 121

Kingston’s project of (re)asserting Chinese Americans into American culture is often read through an exotified lens (Kingston qtd. in Chae 46).56 Though her works tackle an extensive number of issues at play in the Chinese American community as well as disrupt the “either/or” divide, Woman Warrior is frequently co-opted in the classroom as a simple “memoir” about the two fold struggle of growing up as a minority and as a woman. Read obliquely and as history, students often do not interact with the current concerns of the larger Chinese American community and instead meditate on issues of acculturation and immigration only in terms of difference, disregarding the more ambiguous notion of identity so finely wound into Kingston’s text.

Recently, critics such as Youngsuk Chae have attempted to respond to the dilemmas posed by ethnic publishing and liberal multiculturalism. Chae’s volume Politicizing Asian

American Literature: Towards a Critical Multiculturalism summarizes the debates on the

cooptation of Asian American texts by centering on the question of Asian American complicity

in the propagation of a multiculturalism predicated on capitalism and Eurocentric ideals. As

Chae perceptively notes, “If Asian American literature functions as a mere ‘ethnic’ literature by

reproducing a typical image engraved on Asians, those narratives eventually function as an

‘exotic commodity’ and their cultural, racial, or ethnic differences become ‘essentialized’” (17).

From this vantage point, Chae attempts to read various Asian American texts within a historical,

political, and socioeconomic framework that yields a binary where works are either “politically

acquiescent” (in line with Eurocentric notions) or “politically conscious” (aware of limiting

socioeconomic forces within the American value structure.) However, Chae’s work does not

tackle the shift in perception that occurs when a text, like Kingston’s, moves into the public

56 See Kingston’s censure of such readings in her article “Cultural Mis-Readings by American Reviewers” in Guy Armirthanayagam’s Asian and Western Writers in Dialogue: New Cultural Identities. 122 realm. If the marketing and reception of Kingston’s text falls prey to preexisting notions of

Orientalism despite her best efforts at subverting it, should Kingston be relegated to the

“politically acquiescent” realm? If, as Juliana Chang notes, the preponderance of exoticism in the reading of these texts “elide[s] the possibility of an ‘Asian American’ cultural production distinct from ‘Asian’ culture by positioning ‘Asian’ or ‘Chinese’ as a monolithic cultural essence detached from historical change, unmarked by processes of migration and displacement,” what recourse is left to the politically conscious writer? (“Reading” 89). Despite the best intentions of

Asian American writers, the larger public’s misreading of ethnic memoirs often unwittingly reinforces the idea of the Asian American as exotic Other. As such, these texts become commodities that underpin essentialist narratives of Asian Americanness despite the authors’ original intentions.

The cooptation of Asian American literary texts by publishers and the mainstream reading community at large not only reifies a homogenous view of Asian Americans, but also serves to conceal the connections, conflicts, and tensions between modern American poetry and

Asian American poetry from critics and readers alike. While works like Chae’s continue to critique multiculturalism and theorize new understandings of the heterogeneity of Asian

Americanness, few critics consider works of poetry in their analyses. 57 This almost constant refusal to interrogate Asian American poetry alongside the more well-known field of Asian

American literature may be seen as a response to the larger misreading of these texts by mainstream critics; the misperceptions of the reading public at large offer ethnic critics a solid platform on which to critique current multicultural polity. Yet the poetic innovations of many

Asian American poets often succinctly capture the multiplicity of identity that these same critics

57 Here Yunte Huang’s Transpacific Displacement is truly an exception. His work deftly negotiates the many different modes of Asian American writing as well as the disparate portrayals of the Chinese language and China at large. 123 argue for. Poetry’s easy dismissal of the linear, plot-based structures of prose allows Asian

American poets to experiment with language through techniques that more easily resist cooptation and one-sided readings, thus allowing for heterogeneity. However, it is paradoxically the lack of linearity in the forms of much Asian American poetry that both removes it from critiques of liberal multiculturalism and dooms it to relative obscurity. 58

While Chinese American poetry offers an under-researched vehicle for declarations of

Chinese Americanness, it nonetheless boasts its own limitations in terms of reception. Haunted

by what Josephine Nock-Hee Park refers to as the “loose horse” of America’s fetishization of the

East as aesthetic Other, Chinese American poets “write within the constraints of an American

poetry indelibly marked by Orientalism” (Park 123). Accordingly, any bilingualism within

ethnic poetry is always already marked by Pound’s interest in ideograms and American

modernism’s projection of China as transcendent; accordingly, the Chinese-influenced

innovations Pound engineered continue to inspire American poetics today and further perpetuate

the perception of China as historically frozen, exotic, cultured, literary and learned land and an

Other for America’s short history. By including China or Chinese words into their work, Euro

American poets convert the borrowed culture of China into capital of their own, effectively

reflecting a static view of a historicized and material China. This capital, however, does not

translate for Chinese Americans. Unlike Pound, Chinese American poets have not enjoyed much

fame for their use of the Chinese language. Viewed as immigrant regardless of their tenure in the

country, any recourse to Chinese literature or language in Chinese American works is seen

purely in terms of ethnicity. As Lim notes in her call for ethnopoetics, Asian American poets are

consistently read as either incomprehensible or Other; while the dominant approaches to

58 While most critical compilations include at best an article or two engaging Asian American poetry, Zhou’s 2006 volume The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry represents the first book length work to treat Asian American poetry. 124

“reading” poetry privilege a Eurocentric assessment, reading a poet as a Chinese American paradoxically limits that reading to expected ethnic tropes and devices. In short, Chinese

Americans cannot turn their bilingualism into literary capital in the same fashion as Euro

American poets in the Poundian tradition.

The poetry of Marilyn Chin confronts these paradoxes of reception by working within rather than against the dual constraints of ethnicity and Orientalism. In her poetry, Chin forces both the question of American poetry’s reverence for China and the effect of this poetic tradition on Chinese Americans. To do so, she creates an interlingual poetics that concomitantly celebrates and calls into question her position as twice-removed (female, Chinese American)

Other. In addition, her poetry’s refusal to be firmly categorized within any one tradition or school emblematizes her overall project of defining identity as a slippery, non-static complex.

Chin distances her poetry from a singular reading though her employment of lyricism, history, sharp wit, self-deprecating humor, bawdy sexuality, and pointedly American idioms. Her largely self-referential poetics both claim America and refuse to ignore or trivialize Chinese culture;

Chin confronts both Orientalism and identity politics through her use of multiple voices, repetition, and non-linear narratives. 59 The result is a poetics of self that refuses reduction and

elucidates the kaleidoscopic reality of the twenty-first century’s diasporic, interlingual Chinese

American.

Chin’s departure point in her de-aestheticization of China centers on the reverence with

which poets such as Pound treat the Chinese language. As the previous chapters indicate, by

World War I, a large portion of the West had come to see Chinese literature and China itself as

59 As Chin notes in her interview with Bill Moyers, her poetry speaks from her own personal experience: “when I talk about myself the ‘I’ is always personal and also always representative of other Chinese Americans like myself.” Thus, in my treatment of Chin’s poetry, I will often reference Chin herself as the speaker. 125 representative of artistic elegance, transcendence, and wisdom. In the US’s drawing rooms and publishing houses, Chinese objects offered a foil to the fragmented and over-industrialized status of the West. After Pound’s early success with Cathay , Modernist writers increasingly capitalized on these connotations by either including Chinese objects in their poetry or offering their own translations of Chinese poetry. Pound’s exaltation of the Chinese language as poetic medium and his continued use of Chinese characters to emblematize his doctrines still resonate with writers today. In addition, his ideogrammic method, drawn in part from his study of the

Chinese written character, continues to inspire poetic innovations. Even more specifically, as the previous chapter explains, pieces of Pound’s subject matter have become integrated into the

American poetic vernacular. Thus, in many a poem, novel, or movie, Chinese culture remains situated in the American imaginary and is, more often than not, externalized as ancient, mysterious, and erudite.

Chin undermines this veneration through her juxtaposition of the Chinese language with vulgar American sayings and slang as well as her employment of numerous puns. By using

Chinese language and literature matter-of-factly, she strips the language of its exotic veneer and lays it bare as just another way of speaking. The first two stanzas of “Turtle Soup” from Chin’s second collection The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty characterize this approach (24). The poem opens with her mother preparing turtle soup, a traditional Cantonese dish. The speaker then exclaims, “Ma, you’ve poached the symbol of long life!” (line 5). In this brief line, Chinese symbolism and tradition collide with culinary practices to reveal the ordinariness and fallibility of Chinese culture. No longer exotified as transcendent wisdom, Chin uses tongue-in-cheek humor to familiarize without colonizing China; because the irony of the situation is relatable,

Chin prevents her use of Chinese cultural traditions from becoming Orientalized. Such a move

126 allows Chin’s poetry to be read as both poetry in and of itself and as important cultural and ethnic work.

Chin extends her project of familiarizing China in the seemingly romantic “And All I

Have Is Tu Fu” ( Phoenix 79). On title alone, the poem gives the impression of a longing for a

mythical Chinese past and seems ripe for an ethnicized reading which posits Chin as orientalized

Other. Tu Fu, one of the most revered Chinese poets of the T’ang dynasty and one of Pound’s

Chinese muses appears at first glance an apt match for the collection’s title, which alludes to the

translation of the title of a Tang dynasty poem. 60 However, “And All” is far from a simple meditation on the transcendent qualities of Chinese poetry. As John Gery avers in his brief reading of “And All I Have Is Tu Fu,” Chin invokes both Western and Eastern philosophy as well as formal and colloquial language to “reconfigure both [heritages] to become part of the poet’s own language” (Gery 35). Chin’s literary references and allusions juxtapose her vulgarity and in turn create a new dialectic emblematic of Chin’s (female) Chinese American subject position.

As the poem opens, two traditions are literally colliding:

Pied horse, pied horse, I am having a dream

Twenty-five Mongolians on horseback, twenty-five;

Their hooves gouging deep trenches into the loess

Now they enter a hole in the Wall, now they retreat.

Freud snickers; Jung shakes his head. (lines 1-5)

An ethnopoetic reading would immediately make note of the allusion to Chinese literature’s trope of the piebald horse, which traditionally represents a wandering husband, never to return.

60 As Zhou notes in “Marilyn Chin: She Walks Into Exile Vowing No Return,” the title The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty is a translation of the title of a famous Li Po (李白) poem. 127

The Mongolians and the Wall signal China’s most recognizable symbol, the Great Wall of China.

Yet, as quickly as Chin piles up these images in a seeming Modernist gesture of aestheticized

Orientalism, she just as quickly grounds the entire stanza in the sexual theories of Freud and

Jung. The dream is perhaps a nightmare of “Mongolians” raping her through a “hole in the Wall” of her Americanness, reminding Chin of her inescapably two-fold heritage.

The next stanza continues her dream and introduces a soldier “who “calls himself Tu Fu”

(6). Just as in any dream, all one’s preconceived notions are done away with; Tu Fu is not Tu Fu, but a soldier who portends the speaker’s disembowelment by means of reading a cartouche which “issues” from his mouth (7-10). The final stanza appears to be an interpretation of the dream as a whole as it begins “Pray, promise me, this not what the dream portends” (11). The speaker’s construal of the dream strikes a chord both with her allusions to Freud and with the general public’s perception of Chinese culture as one of fantastic dreams and prophecies where folk wisdom still prevails. However, the ending two lines move back to sex as she states rather bluntly, “my roommate’s in the bathroom fucking my boyfriend, / and all I have is Tu Fu” (12-

13). The loss of the boyfriend either in her dream or in real life (her punctuation obscures whether or not the act is mere presentiment or actuality) returns to the image of the pied horse in the first stanza and of the woman forever abandoned. By tying together Chinese literary allusions with a boyfriend “fucking” another woman, Chin modernizes the Chinese trope with an

American tone.

While Gery reads “All I have is Tu Fu” as emblematic of Chin’s “self-consciousness of the Eastern and Western patriarchal webs from which she hopes to extricate herself” and “the speaker’s fear of erasure,” I find it more in line with Chin’s greater project of creating a poetic language capable of projecting her complex selfhood (34). Though her poetry does protest

128 patriarchy, in this poem she focuses more on mobilizing the different forces that inform her reality by pulling equally from Chinese literature, Western philosophy, and everyday life.

Within the poem, her fear of “erasure” stems from the realities of assimilation and her nonparticipation in the events of the poem. In “All I Have Is Tu Fu,” Chin capitalizes on the larger public’s different cultural context to poke fun at America’s obsession with white-bearded

Confucian wisdom. As Shirley Lim elaborates, “the differences in cultural contexts create significant differences between readers’ expectations and authors’ intentions” (56). Chin manages to control these expectations by understanding and then subverting preconceived notions of Tu Fu and Chineseness. The sexuality of the poem additionally symbolizes the cultural miscegeny of Chin’s identity. Chin deliberately mixes cultural metaphors in her work to rebuff “the trained readers’ ethno-sensitive interpretations” and thereby forge a new, unpredictable and changing dialectic capable of representing the nuanced identity of a twenty- first century Chinese American woman (Lim 56).

Another example of Chin’s refusal to be read linearly is the assimilationist poem gone awry “That Half is Almost Gone” from Chin’s latest collection Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (17).

At first blush, the poem seems to follow the predictable and stereotypical multicultural trope of lamenting acculturation: “That half is almost gone, / the Chinese half, / the fair side of a peach, darkened by the knife of time, / fades like a cruel sun” (lines l-4). The imagery at work, the luscious “peach” which connotes both the exotic reminiscence of “peach blossom pavilions” and the eroticism of Prufrock’s unconsummated desires, the domineering “knife of time” under

America’s “cruel sun,” all seem to underline and define this poem as another jeremiad lamenting assimilation. Yet, Chin subverts such a simple reading by positing the remark as reflective of the speaker’s inability to write “the character / for love” in a letter to her mother (8-9). Until this

129 point, the speaker has very much been writing a letter, composed most likely in Chinese (and if we take Chin to be the speaker of the poem, definitely in Chinese as she has stated her mother communicates largely in Chinese). The speaker’s ability to compose in Chinese, to create sentences which then perhaps are not translatable into words on a page, hardly seems to support the poem’s opening remarks. After all, the complicated structure of Chinese words allows for even native speakers who have never left a Chinese speaking nation to sometimes forget a word. 61 Chin’s assessment of “that half is almost gone” seems instead to spotlight society’s dominant perspective of exactly what is Chinese about Chinese Americans – the ability to write and speak in a language one may not have even grown up listening to – a perspective dating back to the early twentieth century’s obsession with the Chinese character.

As the poem continues, Chin demonstrates that she remembers more than originally conveyed. She recalls the “radical” or base component of the word for love, 心 (xin), as well as its phoneme ài and the general shape of the word where “a slash dissects in midair” (16). The composition and etymology of ài emphasize Chin’s deeper knowledge of the word’s meaning; the “slash” that dissects, the second radical 夂 (yǒu), is traditionally read as cutting through the heart indicating that the word ài represents a love worth dying for. Though Chin may not initially remember how to write the word, she nonetheless thoroughly understands its meaning and usage as well as its linguistic grounding. Chin’s delineation of the way a certain Chinese character looks and sounds seems oddly suspect to those who fear the commodification of

Chinese American poetry solely on the context of its Chineseness. However, Chin’s impartation of the wisdom of her “ancestors” and constant recourse to Chinese writing are mitigated by her

61 By way of contextualizing, at a McDonald’s in Taiwan, a woman who was writing down customer orders so as to speed up processing was stymied when she realized she couldn’t remember how to write a certain word. (The actual word escapes me now.) In explanation she offered, “I don’t use that word often, so I can’t write it.” 130 tongue-in-cheek repetition of “ ai , ai , ai , ai , / more of a cry than a sigh / (and no help from the phoneticist)” (17-19). The melancholy “ai , ai , ai , ai ” sounds vaguely sexual signaling a return to the erotic while the assonance undercuts what could be read as packaged Confucian wisdom of what “the ancestors won’t fail to remind you (12). The use of four “ai’s” is perhaps a further reference to Chinese language and the four tonal counterparts of Mandarin so that “ ai ” can be read alternately as sorrow or even “oh dear”. 62 The appended parenthetical statement extends

Chin’s biting humor while also referencing the non-Chinese linguistics practitioners for and by

whom pinyin was created; the phoneticists who merely understand the tones of Chinese offer

Chin no help in her plight as her desire to retain her Chineseness goes beyond the linguistic.

By the end of the first page of “That Half is Almost Gone,” Chin has stymied a

conventional reading of her poem by refusing to align her identity firmly with either side.

Additionally, she has questioned the impulse to read her work as either assimilatory or exotic by

pitting the two ends against each other in the crucible of language. Chin’s usage of both Chinese

and English throughout her poetry indicates an interlinguality that in Chang’s estimation “would

change the shapes and sounds of dominant languages like English by pushing the language to its

limit and breaking it open or apart” (“Reading” 93). The use of these multiple languages

reference Chin’s birth in British colonized Hong Kong to ethnic Chinese parents and her

subsequent upbringing in the American Midwest, thus underscoring the complex tangle of the

two languages in her identity. Through her interlinguality, Chin subverts any attempted

reduction of her inherent multiplicity and hybridization. Unlike Modernist usages of Chinese as

largely aesthetic, Chin’s invocation of it reveals her deep, natal ties to the language as well as the

tenuous power relationships between the two languages of her birth. Chin forges an interstitial

62 The popularly used ( 哎喲) pronounced ai-yo, indicates interjection and can be used much in the way of “hey” or as a sigh. 131 dialectic from the coupling of her dueling mother tongues to de-exotify American notions of

Chineseness while referencing the complicated and inextricable ways in which these languages, and their attendant cultures, are equally constituted in Chinese American reality.

Chin also makes use of interlinguality and her Chinese American dialectic in the title poem of Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (96). The poem begins with the line “Say: 言,” which highlights the author’s bilingualism: say and 言(yán) represent approximate meanings (line 1).

The remainder of the poem is a collection of phrases headed by the imperative: “Say:” and

punctuated towards the end by two intrusions of the author’s own voice. The longest poem in

the collection and arguably the most experimental of Chin’s oeuvre, “Rhapsody in Plain Yellow”

creates a sense of the speaker’s life and inner thoughts through piling phrase upon phrase of

snatches of conversation. Her inclusion of “ 言” reminds the reader of the speaker’s biculturality

and bilingualism while the body of the poem, characterized by Chin as “mock[ing] the fu form”

also borrows from the Blues tradition and African American poetic expression ( Rhapsody 108).63

Chin artfully mixes the pedestrian such as “Say: I don’t give a shit about nothing / ‘xcept my cat, your cock and poetry,” and elevated diction such as “sonatina,” “dictatorial,” and “celebrant” with an allusion to a Chinese fairytale where “a prince came on a horse, I believe it was a piebald” and the Buddhist incantation “amadoufu” (阿弥陀佛) (lines 71-2, 22). Chin’s piecing together of two distinct, highly idiomatic languages establishes the broad linguistic space she inhabits as well as affirms the multiple cultural influences in American poetry. By forcing snatches of conversation in two languages to work in concert, Chin complicates Chinese with English and vice versa, underscoring her post as master and creator of a third, new language equally comprised of both.

63 Chin explains the impact of blues on Rhapsody in Plain Yellow in her Writer’s Chronicle interview with Calvin Bedient. 132

Chin continues to explore, familiarize, and complicate her identity in “To Pursue the

Limitless” ( Rhapsody 85). Incorporating a Chinese saying or cheng yu (成語)in the very middle of the poem, Chin uses puns and antonyms to subvert the Orientalist tendency to view Chinese aphorisms as transcendent truths. Though the poem’s title seems grandiose, its first quatrain begins by de-elevating this perception through coupling it with “a hair brained paramour” (line

2). Here, the “limitless” is made banal through a trivialized lover. Chin continues to conventionalize her poem through contrasts such as “To chase a dull husband / with a sharp knife” and “to speak to Rose / about her thorny sisters” (3-6). This array of antonyms and collocations evinces the juxtaposition of Chin’s two cultures within her “limitless” imagination. The poem turns to second person in the next few stanzas:

You are named after

Flower and precious metal

You are touched

By mercury

Your birth-name is Dawning

Your milk-name is Twilight

Your betrothed name is Dusk

To speak in dainty aphorisms

To dither

In monosyllables

Binomes copulating in mid air (9-20)

133

In these first two stanzas, Chin makes use of Chinese diction and imagery common within

Chinese literature. Yet, again, she censures the imagery, in effect censuring the reader who might slip into a purely ethnicized reading of Chin as Chinese and not Chinese American, with the lines “to dither / in monosyllables.” 64 Unlike Pound’s vision of Chinese as precise and transcendent, Chin understands the Chinese language to be just as full of confusion and frustration as English. In addition, her use of second person calls into question just who the “you” is. Grammatically, the “you” references someone else, most likely the reader to whom Chin is speaking and not Chin herself. However, the intimacy of Chin’s knowledge of the “you” as well as the latter’s relationship to the Chinese language seems to denote Chin herself as the “you.”

This ambiguity complicates any reading of Chin as the romantic “Dawning” and invites the reader to consider his or her relationship to the Chinese language itself; perhaps it is “you” the reader who “are touched / by mercury,” and not Chin. Or, perhaps the “you” emphasizes the community from which Chin speaks; as Chinese Americans go unheard as an “I” within much of

American poetry and politics, Chin’s best representation of her political condition is the second person, the more formal and distanced “you.” The ending image of “binomes copulating in mid air” completes the knotty picture Chin creates by referencing the middle ground occupied by

Chin and the miscegenetic nature of the two cultures of her identity.

Like much of Chin’s poetry, “To Pursue the Limitless” does not contain one emotion or one tone. It instead mediates the complexity of Chin’s status as a Chinese American female writer through its mixing of high and low diction and Chinese and American imagery as well as the Chinese and English languages. The eighth stanza adds to this amalgam by incorporating

Chinese characters and amplifying Chin’s earlier banal contrasts into a more complicated,

64 Chin’s employment of “monosyllables” references each Chinese character’s single syllable pronunciation. Chinese works off of separate syllabic words which may be used together to effect a third meaning. 134 dichotomous vision: “ 美言不信信言不美 / Beautiful words are not truthful / The truth is not beautiful” (25-7). Though the juxtaposition of a Chinese aphorism with its English translation seems Poundian in a sense (and in fact incorporates one of Pound’s ideogrammic representatives,

which he reads as “a man standing by his word”), its placement within the paradoxical world of “To Pursue” bars its reception as such. Unlike Pound’s one-to-one translations in the

Cantos , Chin disturbs the notion of easy transmission of Chinese into English with the next line:

“You have translated “bitter” as “melon” / “fruit” as “willful absence” (28-29). Here, Chin

reifies Juliana Chang’s supposition that poetic interlinguality allows Chinese American authors

to foreground “the multiplicities, contradictions and hierarchical relations within and between

languages” (Chang, “Reading” 92). In these lines, Chin reiterates both the difficulty by which

one language or culture is translated into another as well as questions the aestheticization of the

Chinese language by American poets. The ludicrous translation of “fruit” hearkens to the

idealization of Chinese language and culture; Chin takes to task the image of Chinese poetry

promulgated by Modernist translations by underlining how simple mistakes allowed felicitous

imaginings to be forced onto the Chinese language. Read alongside these lines, the first half of

the aphorism, “Beautiful words are not truthful,” expands in meaning to encompass the continual

imagining of China as emissary of transcendent wisdom while the second half, “the truth is not

beautiful,” calls into question the ability to fully translate between English and Chinese.

Chin further affirms the complicated makeup of the Chinese language in the fifteenth

stanza as she notes the difficulty of managing its tones:

You said My name is Zhuang Mei

Sturdy Beauty

135

But he thought you said Shuang Mei

Frosty Plum (41-4)

Chinese has its limits too; contrary to Pound’s notion of the language as the most precise, its homophony often leads to confusion. Chin’s use of English to negotiate the elusiveness of such

Chinese homophony accentuates the tangle of both languages in her identity. Chin accentuates this fact through “To ( 二) err is human / To ( 五) woo is woman” (35-6). A play on the

homophonous pronunciation of the Chinese words for 2 ( 二 or èr) and 5 ( 五 or wŭ), Chin shows the inescapable interrelatedness and confusion between her two languages and two cultures and how the two work against each other to mediate her selfhood. By continually juxtaposing

English with Chinese and the fantastic with the banal, Chin unmasks and challenges the continued orientalized images of China, while introducing the duality and inseparability of the two cultures within Chinese Americanness. It becomes clear that perhaps the “limitless” that

Chin wants to pursue is indeed the paradox of her Chinese American identity.

Though “the unleashed fantasy of the ideogram can’t be retrieved,” Chin negotiates its presence by her meditation of wryly ordinary representations of the Chinese language (Park 134).

Her continual recourse to it in poems such as “To Pursue the Limitless” also affirms her connectedness to not only her first tongue, but her ethnic Chinese roots. In her work on ethnopoetics, Lim argues, “The linguistic survival of first language expressions, whether actual or translated into English, points to the poets’ awareness that there exists in the original language itself certain values, concepts, and cultural traits which are not discoverable in English” (Lim 54).

Similarly, Chin’s poetics value Chinese as a mediating factor in her own identity. Without both languages, Chin cannot fully capture her own hybrid reality. Yet, at the same time, Chin works to distance her use of Chinese from cooptation and orientalization through her use of satire and

136 doublespeak. Chin’s dialectic continuously undercuts itself to frustrate and destabilize specifically ethnic or assimilationist readings; in so doing, Chin clears a liminal poetic space where Chinese and English, American culture and Chinese culture, can be equally represented and owned. By including Chinese, Chin “writes back” against the dominance of English while at the same time owning it and creating within it her own Chinese American dialectic.

In addition to Chin’s interlinguality, her poetry works on a second, more subtle level to subliminally accustom the reader to her Chinese American dialectic. Throughout her three collections of poetry, various symbols, words and images recur, acquainting the reader with the interstitial space Chin inhabits. Unforgettable lines such as “the gaffer-hatted fishmonger / sings to his cormorant” in “That Half is Almost Gone” from Rhapsody in Plain Yellow are transformed into “the gaffer-hatted fishmonger / and his songs of the cormorant” eighteen pages later in

“Cauldron” (18, lines 32-3 and 36, lines 70-1). This image recollects the “cormorant” referred to twice in “Clear White Stream” from her earlier collection The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace

Empty’s (45). Chin also makes use of other, less overt repetitions to draw the reader into her world. Older words such as “cauldron,” are used throughout her works; while “Cauldron” appears as a title of a poem in Rhapsody , it is used in four different poems in Phoenix

(“Barbarian Suite,” “Turtle Soup,” “Gruel,” and “First Lessons, Redux”). By reprising similar images across poems, readers experience déjà vu and the dialectic Chin presents seems increasingly natural and conventional. Such familiarization invites the reader to experience

Chin’s hybrid, shifting position as a Chinese American.

Chin continues to indoctrinate the reader into her world by recycling specific characters and literary allusions. “Rose Wong” appears twice in Rhapsody (“That Half Is Almost Gone”

(19) and “To Pursue the Limitless” (85)), while Chin’s mother is a constant character in Phoenix .

137

“Mrs. Lookeast,” Chin’s somewhat caustic nickname for herself, appears in three different poems in Rhapsody (“Where We Live Now” (57), “Tonight While the Stars Are Shimmering”

(72), and “Rhapsody in Plain Yellow” (96)), and reminds the reader of the double bind of Chin’s hybrid identity as a Westerner with Eastern roots. Repetition of “pearl” as both the semi- precious stone itself and as the name of a character occurs across Rhapsody in Plain Yellow .

“Tiny Pearl / too precious to be included in their story” in “The Colonial Language is English”

grows into “Yellow Pearl, I bemoan your preciousness” in “Summer Sonatina” (20, lines 20-1

and 88, line 15). In between, “pearl” is alternately associated with female children and

concubines in “Chinese Quatrains” (24) and “Rhapsody in Plain Yellow” (97) respectively. Yet,

while Pearl becomes a familiar inhabitant of Chin’s poetic work, her changing representations

and status underscores the shifting character of both Chinese American identity and its

impression on the public. Finally, the image of the “pied horse,” which occurs in both “All I

Have is Tu Fu” from Phoenix and “Rhapsody in Plain Yellow” from Rhapsody , weaves into

Chin’s poetry the Chinese legend of the wandering husband. Regardless of whether or not

Chin’s readers make the connection between the pied horse and the piebald horse of Chinese

mythology, the image oscillates between the two books of poetry creating new allusions and

meanings within American poetry that echo the resonances produced by Pound, Snyder, Wah

and Yau.

The familiarizing effects of these repetitions also clear the way for Chin to advance a new vision of Chinese American identity and to enter into the ongoing arguments over what exactly being Asian American means. During the ethnic studies movements of the1960s, the term

“Asian American” arose out of a need for solidarity and one strong, singular voice; the many ethnicities that make up the Asian diaspora melded together under the flag of “Asian America”

138 in order to forge a critical mass and evoke change. In the decades following however, many

Asian Americans became suspicious of this unifying term as it elided the historical and cultural realities of each separate ethnicity. New Asian immigrant groups found little in common with other groups who had been here for generations; the political struggles of third and fourth generation Asian Americans were alien to newly immigrated groups like Korean Americans who managed their own set of struggles in adapting to American life. King-Kok Cheung summarizes these changes in “Re-Viewing Asian American Literary Studies”: “whereas identity politics – with its stress on cultural nationalism and American nativity – governed earlier theoretical and critical formulations, the stress is now on heterogeneity and diaspora” (1).

This shift in perception is symbolically linked to the very term “Asian American.”

Known early on as the “hyphenated minority,” Asian American theorists first collectively rejected the hyphenation of “Asian” and “American” affirming “we’re not a wobbly balancing act but something together, a solid wholeness” (“A Perspective” Ling 77). Yet, the changing landscape of Asian American political subjectivity has led to divergent views in Asian American cultural criticism as evidenced most clearly by Lisa Lowe and David Leiwei Li, two leading

Asian American theorists. While Lowe argues for a diasporic tradition, where the term “Asian

American” is polarized toward “Asian,” Li calls for restoration of Asian American political power through emphasis of the “American” over the “Asian.” The theoretical stances of Lowe and Li are analogous to the impassioned debates about Chinese American authenticity and representation between Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston. As a fifth generation Chinese

American, Frank Chin’s literary project emphasizes (re)writing Chinese Americans into

American history, both literary and otherwise. In his work, Chin (re)claims America through asserting his nativity even at the expense of his Chinese heritage. In direct opposition to Frank

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Chin are those newer writers like Kingston with less distance between China and America. In

Frank Chin’s mind, these first and second generation Chinese Americans invoke “too much” in their writing allowing what he sees as a packaged ethnicity to color the final product. 65 As a more recent immigrant, Kingston and writers like her inhabit a limbo Frank Chin may not fully understand in terms of language and acculturation; in turn, they also do not completely comprehend his rage with regard to his “stepson” status. The disparity between these two sides reemphasizes the heterogeneity of the term Asian American and the slipperiness of identity altogether; if Chinese Americans, one subset of the Asian American collective, are so dissimilar how can those of completely different ethnic backgrounds fit inside one overarching term?

Marilyn Chin’s poetry seeks to arbitrate an answer to these issues of representation by elucidating the unfixed nature of identity. Through her recourse to different modes of speaking and her interlinguality, Chin redefines the term American by continually interrogating and challenging her relationship to the US nation state and her Chinese inheritance. Her best poems question both the impulse to assimilate and resistance to it by seeking a third ground representing and celebrating all the forces within her identity: American, Chinese, and Chinese American. As

Chin elaborates in an interview with Bill Moyer:

I see myself and my identity as nonstatic. I see myself as a frontier, and I see my limits as

limitless. Somebody once accused me of being a leftist radical feminist, West Coast,

Pacific Rim, socialist, neo-Classical Chinese American poet. And I say, "Oh yes, I am all

of those things." Why not? I don't believe in static identities. I believe that identities are

forever changing. (n. pag.)

65 Much of Chin’s issue with these writers returns to the commodification of ethnicity and its cooptation in the publishing realm. Specifically, Chin views Kingston’s work as acceding to and amplifying the Chinese stereotypes fit onto Chinese Americans. 140

Following the work of recent theorists like Cheung and Lim, Chin is more concerned with “the quandaries and possibilities of postmodernism and multiculturalism”; her poetry thus attempts to destroy preconceived notions of identity in favor of an approach that understands heterogeneity, exile, and the possibility of a double consciousness (Cheung 1).

The widely anthologized “How I Got That Name” plays with the notion of identification by presenting a doubleness that Chin’s works are known for. In it, Chin asserts an identity predicated on the dual historical and literary traditions of both the US and China ( Phoenix 16).

The first line “I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin” asserts with Whitmanesque finality Chin’s identity as well as allows the poem to become more personal; in a sense, it is Chin’s manifesto. The

“resoluteness/ of that first person singular” also seemingly mitigates the subtitle of the poem, “an essay on assimilation.” At this point, Chin revels in the “stalwart indicative / of ‘be,’ without the uncertain i-n-g / of ‘becoming,’” announcing herself as an autonomous “I” (4-6). Yet, by line 6,

Chin qualifies her first assertions with “Of course.” With this interference, Chin disrupts a linear reading of the poem as well as her identity; to understand the poem is to wrestle with the different conceptions of Chinese Americans as well as their history of exile and discrimination and the role immigration plays in constructing her own identity. As the poem continues, we learn the origin of Chin’s first name, “changed / somewhere between Angel Island and the sea” by her father “the paperson / in the late 1950’s” (7-10). Though Chin would have immigrated to the States after the close of Angel Island and the passage of the Magnuson Act, her announcement of these facts owns one of the most resonant and recognizable periods in Chinese

American history. Chin’s claiming of this history underlines both her separation from earlier

Chinese American immigrants and her connections to them.

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Balancing national history with personal history Chin continues to narrate her dual cultural inheritances by eroding the strong voice of the first six lines with the uncertainty and intermixing that characterize her hybridity. While Gery rightly reads this section of the poem as demonstrating Chin’s self-erasure through her own delineation of the “grotesque inappropriateness of her own name,” Chin’s consistent balance between East and West keeps her

“renaming” from signaling complete assimilation and instead allows for a fuller understanding of the forces which comprise her identity. Her name, “transliterated ‘Mei Ling’ to ‘Marilyn’” by her father, remains equalized in her own assertion at the beginning (12). While she underlines patriarchy through her mother’s inability to pronounce her Anglicized name, she also intimates the cultural and familial ties which bind her to China as her mother “dubbed me ‘Numba one female offshoot,’” an English translation of the term reserved for oldest sister, ji ě () (21). The

assimilatory influence of her father as symbolized in her renaming is moderated by her mother’s

continued insistence on Chinese naming practices, even if translated (somewhat comically) into

English. The section concludes with Chin’s sardonic explanation of her father’s questionable

integrity marked by a patriarchal system which “Nobody dared question,” further elucidating the

constraints she works against as a “nice, devout daughter” to a “tomcat in Hong Kong trash” who

“bootlegged Gucci Cash” through his “chopsuey joints / in Piss River Oregon” (26-32). Yet,

while the section closes with her acquiescence to patriarchy, her continued satirical voice

alongside the mixing of references to Hong Kong and the US undercuts her own supposed

assimilation.

The second strophe of the poem takes up these images of filial piety to expand on the

binds that constrain Chin’s identity. Much as the patriarchy in the form of her Chinese father

renames her “Marilyn,” American society has also cast her as the model minority. Connecting to

142 the previous section’s “devout daughters” and industrious sons,” the second strophe opens with the exclamation, “Oh, how trustworthy our daughters, / how thrifty our sons!” (1.32-33, 2.1-2).

Within the context of Chin’s satirical tone, the exclamation resonates both as pride and lamentation as the positive attributes of Chinese Americans are inverted to embody the cunning stereotype of the model minority. Chin doubles back on this image as she empties out the model minority stereotype as false:

How we’ve managed to fool the experts

In education, statistics and demography –

We’re not very creative but not adverse to rote-learning.

Indeed, they can use us.

But the “Model Minority” is a tease.

We know you are watching now,

so we refuse to give you any! (3-9).

Chin’s italicization of “ use ” implicates Euro American society in its envisioning of the Asian

American as an honored minority, one which other minorities should strive to be like.

Stereotyped as “rote learners” who excel in math and sciences, Asian Americans evidence the true American dream by clawing their way up the academic and economic ladders. As the model minority, they are effectively pitted against other minorities and moved into the category of

“neither black nor white” (4.9). Yet Chin’s use of “fool” and “tease” belies her disavowal of the model minority stereotype (Chin’s own status as a Chinese American writer in and of itself is an affront to the stereotype), while her refusal to “give you any” intimates the performative effect of

Chinese Americanness. The next line, “Oh, bamboo shoots, bamboo shoots!” underscores the ethnicized condition of Chinese Americans and echoes the opening lines of the strophe; whether

143 it is a lament or a call to arms, it turns on the orientalization of Chinese Americans via both the model minority stereotype and their innate Chineseness.

As section two continues, Chin moves from clichéd images of Chinese Americans to present a more complicated picture that questions Chinese Americanness and Americanness at large. “Bamboo shoots!” modulates to read as a clarion call for Chinese Americans:

Oh, bamboo shoots, bamboo shoots!

The further west we go, we’ll hit east;

The deeper down we dig, we’ll find China

History has turned its stomach

on a black polluted beach

where life doesn’t hinge on that red, red wheelbarrow,

but whether or not our new lover

in the final episode of “Santa Barbara”

will lean over a scented candle

and call us a “bitch.” (2.10-19)

The ideas of “hit east” and “find China” build off of “bamboo shoots” to reify the vision of

Chinese Americans as the mystical recipients of the historicized culture of China, thus reflecting the common misconception that ethnicity lies in blood relation and not lived experience. Chin evidences the predicament of the first generation Chinese American, stuck between two cultures with one’s nationality constantly in question from both sides (the expectation that Chinese

Americans speak Chinese rather than surprise that one does, in fact, speak Chinese). Such a vision denies Chinese Americanness by insisting on Chineseness. Chin negotiates this vision by incorporating Williams’s pastoral image of the “red wheelbarrow” and “Santa Barbara” to

144 parallel Chinese American participation in American cultural norms. Yet, such participation is further called into question as “history has turned its stomach”; Williams’s pastoral idea of the

“Red Wheelbarrow” is lost in today’s soap opera world. In Chin’s developed picture of America,

“we” wait for our favorite heroine to be called “bitch.” Chin’s use of “we” stacked among such

American allusions not only articulates the manner in which Chinese Americans have become integrated, for better or for worse, into American culture, but also entangles the reader in its familiar American world. The section’s final two lines, then, are aimed not solely at Chinese

Americans, but Americans at large as she asks, “Oh God, where have we gone wrong? / We have no internal resources!” (2.20-1). The section’s consistent use of stereotypical images both

American and Chinese American works to empty out assimilation by questioning its motivation as well as its process. If assimilation is judged by the model minority stereotype, it is unsuccessful as the stereotype is a sham. However, the “we” watching “Santa Barbara” offers a different (although sarcastic) marker of Chinese American participation in the American dream that moves beyond the merely ethnic.

Against the meditation on assimilation in the second section, the third strophe introduces the “Great Patriarch Chin” who offers a view of the author as “not quite boiled, not quite cooked”

(3.2, 10). Stationed midway yet again, the section offsets the previous one’s focus on the US by including Chin’s paternal grandfather. Her grandfather’s vision of her and her “metaphorical” death at the end of the strophe question Chin’s supposed assimilation in the foregoing section.

And yet, as it is Chin’s grandfather’s understanding of her, the assimilation does not seem quite complete; the line “plump pomfret simmering in my own juices” indicates Chin’s inability to fulfill the wishes and demands of her grandfather or fully assimilate into the American world

(3.11). She remains apart, symptomatic of a new version of Chinese Americanness.

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The final strophe picks up at her “metaphorical” death by offering an obituary which lists the names she is associated with by marriage or family. This attempt to contextualize Chin reveals nothing about her person as she is “survived by everybody and forgotten by all” (4.8).

Only Chin herself, in the end, remains to fully articulate her own identity as well as her own death and rebirth:

and a chasm opened where she stood.

Like the jowls of a mighty white whale,

or the jaws of a metaphysical Godzilla,

it swallowed her whole.

She did not flinch or writhe,

nor fret about the afterlife,

but stayed! Solid as wood, happily

a little gnawed, tattered, mesmerized

by all that was lavished upon her

and all that was taken away! (4.13-23)

The concluding lines of “How I Got That Name” establish Chin not as either/or, but as both/and; balancing between the Moby Dick of the West and the Godzilla of the East, she exists, though somewhat scathed, in her own poetry as something beyond West and East, beyond naming. This

“solid” selfdom refuses the totalizing definitions of the US and China, and instead recognizes the effacing effects and generous gifts of both sides. Though the final line rings with loss, the poem as a whole coheres in her acceptance of “all that was lavished upon her”: the different fluctuating forces of her identity. As Chin summarizes in her interview with Moyer, “assimilation is inescapable….everything must merge, and I’m willing to have it merge with in me, in my poetry.”

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Chin pragmatically owns both the pain and losses inherent in acculturation and the gains afforded by it to envision the uneasy equilibrium of her own hybridity.

In her essay “Reviewing Asian American Literature, King-Kok Cheung asserts that Asian

American criticism must “both ‘claim America’ – assert and manifest the historical and cultural presence of Asians in North America – and use our transnational consciousness to critique the polity, whether of an Asian country, Canada, the United States, or Asian America” (9).

Throughout her oeuvre, Chin responds to Cheung’s demands by devising a new dialectic which disallows exoticism and dismissal as “the foreigner within,” while crafting a space for the incorporation of Asian culture and remembering “the rough grain of politics and history”

(Palumbo-Liu 2). Working against Modernist appreciations of China as a cultured and historical foil to the United States, Chin speaks from her postmodern position as cultural Other to remake and (re)present Chinese American culture as dynamic and shifting. Through her continuous aligning of East against West, high culture against low, and the pedestrian against the esoteric,

Chin mobilizes a vortex of images that reveal the porosity and malleability of identity. Her biting satire capitalizes on these effects by preventing the reader from lapsing into complacent perusal; to read Marilyn Chin is to confront one’s own preconceived notions about Chineseness as well as Americanness. The resulting network of intertwined images gestures towards the complex and paradoxical political identity of Chinese Americans and creates a new (Chinese)

American dialectic which invites the reader to (re)assess and (re)learn history, identity, and

(Chinese) Americanness.

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CHAPTER SIX

WHO’S AFRAID OF JOHN YAU?:

RESISTING RESISTANCE IN ASIAN AMERICAN EXPERIMENTAL POETRY

As the foregoing chapter explores, Chinese American poetry voices a complex relationship to Modernist poetry and American poetry at large. Given the experiments of Pound and others with Chinese language, literature, and culture, to write poetry as a Chinese American requires a negotiation with this tradition of literary Orientalism. Yet, Modernist poetry offers another legacy to both Chinese American poets and American poets at large – innovation. The poetics of Pound disrupted previous standards of poetry ushering in a renewed interest in formal innovation. These innovations have served as a touchstone for later experimentation in

American poetry. According to Laszlo Géfin, “All postmodernist renewals and upheavals in

America…have invariably stressed the seminal importance of Pound” (xiv). Thus, while the poetry of Marilyn Chin represents the most commonly framed way Chinese American poets respond to the Orientalist legacies of Modernism, the disjunctive poetics of John Yau offers another form of engagement; whereas Chin’s translingual poetics undermine static definitions of identity, Yau’s poems are more likely to play with poetic form in order to question the very terms of the argument and the process whereby identity was determined in the first place. Yet, despite Yau’s early success with Corpse and Mirror and his interest in exploring the processes of ethnic signification, his poetry has only recently earned a place in Asian American criticism and discourse. In addition, while he was featured in both Hongo’s The Open Boat and Walter K.

Lew’s Premonitions , two Asian American anthologies published in the 1990s, Yau has not

148 appeared in any major anthologies outside of Asian American discourse. 66 Yau’s use of a wide variety of poetic forms and his focus on the limits and possibilities of language locate him, as he titles his essay in Amerasia , “between the forest and its trees.”

Despite his absence from mainstream anthologies, Yau’s poetics have recently served as a touchstone for a number of critics seeking to interrogate the often supposed incompatibility between ethnicity and formal innovation in poetry. As Christina Mar sums up in her essay “The

Language of Ethnicity,” “ethnic poetry is often constituted in a disabling opposition to poetry that is engaged in the politics of aesthetic innovation by resisting representation and refusing the tyranny of the signified” (71). For Mar, “It is this refusal to address the full complexity of ethnic

writing by some publishers and mainstream critics that facilitates the marginalization of poetry

and eclipses the heterogeneity of ethnic texts” (72).While many critics like Mar tend to lay the

blame for this separation at the feet of mainstream publishers and other critics, the recent focus

in Asian American studies on valorizing and recovering the aesthetic points to the unwitting

complicity of early Asian American theoretical paradigms in the production of such readings.

Much like the criticism of other ethnic groups, the early focus on sociohistoric concerns and on

articulating a coherent Asian American identity over and against Eurocentric constructions has

ultimately positioned Asian American literature as unconcerned with or disconnected from the

aesthetic inquiry more readily found in the interpretations of Euro American experimental works.

Meditating on some of these issues, Nathaniel Mackey reminds us in Discrepant Engagement

that “our interest in cultural diversity – diversity within a culture as well as the diversity of

cultures – should lead us to be wary of hypostasis, the risk we take with nouns, a dead end that

will impede change unless ‘other,’ ‘self,’ and such are given the possibility of ‘infinite’

66 Yau has appeared in the 1988, 2000 and 2002 The Best American Poetry collections as well as Primary Trouble , published by Talisman. 149 qualification” (276). When used as a monolithic designation, words like “ethnic” separate and encompass these works so that they are read only within self-contained paradigms. As Mackey points out, such “failures or refusals to acknowledge complexity among writers from socially marginalized groups, no matter how ‘well-intentioned’ condescend to the work and to the writers” and result in the tendency to only read ethnic writers “racially, primarily at the content level, the noun level, as responding to racism, representing the ‘black experience’” (18, 284). Such a one to one correspondence between identity and poetry denies ethnic writing the agency to produce formal innovation while also situating it as politically active only in its reification of cultural themes.

Yau’s poetry, with its interest in signification practices and distrust of an autobiographical, lyric I, takes as its base Mackey’s interest in the verb and carries on many of the innovative practices of a number of schools that base their inspiration on the poetics of

Modernists like Pound. Alternately taxonomized as a member of the New York School, a surrealist, an Ashberyite, and an Asian American, Yau’s oeuvre defies categorization, rendering each label inaccurate and incomplete and evincing his own interest in destabilizing such classifications. Nonetheless, Asian American critics often seize on Yau’s status as an Asian

American poet and his experimental tendencies to combat charges of the banality and lack of innovation in Asian American poetry. While these critics offer a much needed reconsideration of the importance of situating Yau within Asian American studies, such studies continue to operate largely on the critical paradigms of resistance and community forged in the early years of ethnic studies forcing a reading of Yau predicated largely on the way his poetry conforms to the theoretical and political interests of Asian American discourse at large, thus inadvertently refiguring interest in Yau’s subjectivity over his aesthetic experiments. Reading his engagement

150 by Asian American critics establishes the parameters through which Asian American poetry has been conceived and the limits of its criticism. In this chapter, I investigate John Yau’s position within both Asian American studies and poetry criticism at large to gesture towards the complicated nexus that narrates which versions of Chinese Americanness enter the mainstream.

Reading for the absence and presence of Yau in Asian American criticism as well as the assessment of his work in the “mainstream” elucidates how these theoretical paradigms both constrain and encourage certain modes of reading. Realizing the possibilities Yau’s poetry offers for reconfiguring such poetic discourse argues for new, more flexible frameworks that fully engage these experimental nuanced versions of Chinese Americanness and connects Chinese

American poetry to the Modernist traditions of innovation celebrated in American poetry at large.

While an ethnic Asian background serves as the sole basis for designating someone as an

Asian American poet today, Asian American studies initially emerged as a movement predicated on sociocultural and political concerns. In its early years, Asian American discourse was largely autonomous, and the writers labeled as Asian American adhered to the shared political aims of the movement. Thus, the publications of nascent Asian American discourse privileged activist and populist lyrics which offered a reflection of the social and material reality of Asian

Americans, in the hopes that such literature, once recognized, could effect political changes through the transformation of public consciousness. Aion , the first Asian American literary magazine, furthered these aims through its focus on supplying “a forum for Asian American self- definition and expression on issues relevant to problems and needs of our communities” (qtd. in

Yu, Race 77). Edited by Janice Mirikitani, then a young activist poet involved in the Third

World strike, Aion exemplifies the political project of the poets who identified as Asian

American in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the editorial that opens the first issue, Mirikitani

151 draws attention to the method by which Asian Americans “have been conditioned by stereotypes imposed upon us by the white middle class and have internalized the consequent insecurity and confusion.” Against such a process and its abiding “cultural destruction,” Mirikitani argues,

“We must join the international movement to end the exploitation of all Third World peoples and work to create our own revolutionary culture in this country” (qtd. in Yu, Race 78). As

Mirikitani’s invective suggests, much of the poetry in Aion drew from a cultural nationalist sensibility that offered a third choice between the binary of being cast as either solely Asian and thus inassimilable or exclusively American, assimilated, and invisible. Such a focus was extended in the 1970s through the critical discussions surrounding the publication of the

Aiiieeeee! anthology. Seeking “the history and source of the yellow literary tradition and

sensibility” the editors of Aiiieeeee! exemplify the importance of history in the articulation of

Asian American experience. The Aiiieeeee! editors couch their explanation of selections and omissions in terms of stereotypes and capitulation to Eurocentrism. Works which conform to mainstream notions of “icky gooey Chineseness” were read as co-opted by dominant forces, or in Frank Chin’s more derisive prose, “fakes.” Against these fakes, the authors valorized Asian

American works that challenged stereotypes of Asian Americans as either Asian or Other.

Given the early focus on community, history, and a recognizable ethnic voice among

Asian American critics, it is perhaps not surprising that Yau’s work went largely unremarked in

Asian American discourse. Yau, who published his first book of poetry in 1976, offers little to

this textual fabric of Asian Americanness. Speaking in an interview with Dorothy Wang in 1993,

Yau describes his absence from Asian American discourse of the late 1970s as a result of his

work’s dismissal by critics like Frank Chin as “not Asian enough”; “there was literally nobody

sympathetic to me. Nobody. They couldn’t see what I was getting at because they didn’t

152 perceive me as being an Asian American poet” (qtd. in Wang 136). Unlike the work of the more readily recognized Asian American poets like Mirikitani, Yau’s poetry does not immediately attend to social realities or identity politics and offers little purchase by which to promote an ethnic consciousness. In the nascent years of Asian American discourse, works chosen for the pages of Aion and Aiiieeeee were more often thematically geared to counter negative stereotypes and produce acceptable versions of Asian Americanness.67 Aesthetically, these works were marked by realism and accessibility; in order to be efficacious in the political project of defining race and community, texts had to be read and understood. Janice Mirikitani’s “We, the

Dangerous” offers an example:

We, the dangerous,

Dwelling in the ocean.

Akin to the jungle.

Close to the earth.

Hiroshima

Vietnam

Tule Lake

And yet were not devoured

And yet we were not humbled

And yet we are not broken. (qtd. in Kim, Reading 223)

67 While Yau was not viewed as an Asian American poet in these years, it is interesting to note that Mei Mei Berssenbrugge, also an experimental poet, did receive quite a bit of exposure and appeared in the Breaking Silence , the first Asian American poetry anthology. Berssenbrugge, however, was also active in the Asian American studies movement. 153

Speaking in a collective voice, Mirikitani connects American aggression against Japan and

Vietnam to the domestic racism of Japanese American internment camps, offering up a tribal sensibility that attempts to speak for the composite Asian American. Her use of the politically charged nouns “Hiroshima” and “Tule Lake” refuses to aphorize the atrocity of nuclear war and the degradation of forced relocation. Like many of the poems prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s,

“We, the Dangerous” runs counter to more formal, lyric poetry by engaging and mimicking orality; instead of the elite literary devices of the academy, Mirikitani uses plain speech to

“deliver poetry to the People, who, apprehending its ‘essentials,’ would renew it in the spirit of emerging political freedom” (Uba, “Versions” 33). Such political goals are additionally demonstrated in the first collection of Asian American poetry, Breaking Silence . Edited by

Joseph Bruchac, the volume borrows its title from Mirikitani’s poem of the same name and aims to present how Asian Americans are “breaking both silence and stereotypes with the affirmation of new songs” (xv).

Unlike Mirikitani’s mobilization of a pan-ethnic consciousness, Yau’s early poetry rarely takes part in the autobiographical style prevalent among other Asian American poets, and seldom includes any overt ethnic textual markers of his Chinese Americanness. When these markers are present, as in several of the poems in his first book Crossing Canal Street, his poetry does not engage Asianness in the manner expected of an Asian American poet. For example, “Cameo of a Chinese Woman on Mulberry Street,” subsequently reprinted as the first poem of Radiant

Silhouette , does not draw any connection between the ethnicity of the speaker and that of his subject:

Her face this moon a house

always nearing the end of its road

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from within each room

rising rising

slowly up through their sleep

for a breath

the pale fur and dark wings

the silver beak and silver talons (Radiant Silhouette 15)

Against Mirikitani’s desire to claim Asia in “We the Dangerous,” “Cameo” maintains a scholarly distance between poet and subject. The objectivity inherent in Yau’s description reads scientifically, operating in a much different vein than the self-reflective poetry of Asian

American studies proper. In lieu of claiming a coherent identity, the poem mediates an outside perspective, an estimation of the woman filtered through comparisons. In fact, the first line’s parataxis almost effaces the woman altogether; her face becomes a moon figured as a house which moves and shifts representation until its final metonymic comparison to a bird of prey.

Working primarily as description, “Cameo” thus offers no political comment on the situation of

Asian Americans nor does it serve to narrate Asian American reality.

Yet, while “Cameo” and several of the other poems in Crossing Canal Street do not fit the modes commonly adapted by writers like Mirikitani, they nonetheless express Yau’s active

engagement of ethnic subjectivity and the processes of his own signification. As Priscilla Wald

has noted, the title itself gives an indication of the poet’s subject position; Canal Street serves as

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the border between Chinatown and Yau’s downtown New York existence (135-6). For Yau, writing as a young poet in New York outside of the Asian American movement located on the

West Coast, the “crossing” of Canal Street registers his interest in Chineseness while at the same time the gerund form of the verb underscores his discomfort with casting himself (or being cast) as Chinese American. Disconnected from the Asian American scene and its proponents, Yau came to Chineseness in American poetry in much the same fashion as many a student of

American literature – through the work of Ezra Pound and the Imagists. Speaking of the composition of Crossing Canal Street , Yau remarks Pound’s Cathay poems, “were very, very meaningful to me then....For me, they were about being Chinese, about some kind of identity”

(44). Indeed, “Cameo” and numerous other poems in Crossing bear the impress of Imagist technique through their short lines, parataxis, and concentration on Chinese images. As Dorothy

Wang notes, unlike Marilyn Chin’s works “Yau’s do not read as direct imitations of Tu Fu or Li

Bai but as imitations of imitations (filtered through Ernest Fenollosa) of classical Chinese poetry”

(141). For Wang, the poems lack the parodic edge of Yau’s later work and suggest that his understanding of his own poetic subjectivity as a Chinese American writer has been circumscribed by his overt mimicry of Pound’s translucencies. However, in “Cameo,” as in

“Suggested by a Waitress at YEE’s” (which I will discuss later), Yau mobilizes a subtle critique of the Modernist portrayals of Chinese poetry. Specifically, the effacement of the woman in

“Cameo” parallels the way Chineseness is always already spoken for in the poems of Pound and other Imagists; her selfhood is processed through images of the house, the moon, and finally, and most disconcertingly, a bird of prey, moving Yau’s representation of her further away from her actual being. Thus, while “Cameo” lacks the satiric edge of later more overt works like those of

156 the Genghis Chan series, it nonetheless can be read as emblematic of Yau’s experimentation with form as a means of negotiating identity and his own poetic modality.

Despite the questions “Cameo” poses to ethnic signification, such an overt poetic debt to white tradition in the 1970s was more likely to read, in Frank Chin’s terms, as “fake.” In addition, the poems in Crossing Canal Street do not embody the material realities of Chinese

Americans nor do they agitate significantly for social change, making it hard to align Yau’s project with that of Asian American discourse at large. Moving from the highly Imagistic style characteristic of Crossing Canal Street , Yau’s publication of Sometimes in 1979 evinces his increasing inclination toward more experimental forms. Many of the poems written in this period foreground Yau’s interest in the operations through which narratives both construct and restructure meaning. In the volume, Yau reprints “The Reading of an Ever Changing Tale”

(which, as its title perhaps indicates, will be reprinted again in Corpse and Mirror and Radiant

Silhouette ) a poem that deals explicitly with the how language and ideas are received: “But / what of the phenomena whose /colors can only be imagined?” Radiant Silhouette 20). Here also,

Yau presents “Ten Songs,” a poem that subjects words and syntax to numerous substitutions and permutations. The form will become a Yau signature in poems like “Variations on a Sentence by

Laura Riding Jackson” in Forbidden Entries: “There is something to be told about us for the telling of which we all wait. S omething to be told. There is something about the telling of which we all wait to be told. Something telling. About something which we all wait for the telling to be told” (13).

Yet, while Yau moves into more experimental constructions that subvert the primacy of institutionalized European or American forms, the poems in Sometimes offer even fewer overt signifiers of identity or ethnicity, again rendering them outside the paradigms of nascent Asian

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American discourse. One notable exception, “Shimmering Pediment,” emerges from what begins as an autobiographical I/eye and alludes to “an ancient Chinese poet” (Radiant Silhouette

21). But, in a manner which Yau will adopt again and again, the “I” here resists accessible understanding, instead working and reworking itself against its own location. In so doing, it reifies Yau’s distrust of the stability and authority of language and identity: “Might not this I be a false mirror?” (“Between” 38). Similarly, the allusion to Chineseness serves as misleading ornamentation, or what Wang terms “a stray line” (142). In the poem, the assertion “I wandered in as a child/ a fenced-in field” is revised four lines later as “Actually, I never played on this knoll / Though I think somehow I must have.” The immediacy of “this” knoll is once more called into question by the next lines, in which the poet makes his “return to that silent and empty / Amphitheater.” The seeming inversion of “this” and “that,” the nearness intimated by

“this” in his reverie against his actual presence at “that” field, makes the speaker’s physical location and trustworthiness both suspect. The last lines, “my plane spiraling / In a diminishing circle, as I flew / Parallel to where I am now standing” continue this disorientation. The poem itself becomes more about the position of the “I” and less about the “I” itself. In fact, we learn nothing concrete about the “I,” as the continual revision of memory disrupts any transmission of ego. In contrast to the narratives of poets like Mirikitani, Yau’s poem defies the accessibility necessary to interact in dominant Asian American discourse while his lack of overt ethnic signifiers also offers little to a movement predicated on self declaration and identity politics. In addition, against the cultural nationalist impetus to claim a coherent and distinct singularity,

Yau’s poems reiterate his skepticism of such a gesture; as he asks in “Between the Forest and Its

Trees,” “Might it not be possible that the self is made of up of many selves, incomplete and fragmented?” (41). In terms of the prevailing critical Asian American ideologies at work in the

158 late 1970s, such a distrust of the stable lyric I ultimately worked to undermine projects predicated on pan ethnicity and accordingly circumscribed the possibility of “speaking out.”

The challenge to community posed by Yau’s poetics that seemingly forestalled his recognition as Asian American in the 1960s and 1970s paradoxically underwrote his insertion into Asian American discourse in the 1980s and 1990s as its contours shifted to accommodate the mainstreaming of Asian American studies as well as the more widespread acclaim of a new cohort of Asian American authors. Yet, while some of the Aiiieeeee group’s masculinist rhetoric and more proscriptive criticism was dismissed by emerging Asian American theorists, the focus on the unique sociohistorical record of Asian American experience – and poetry which bespeaks this record – continued to resonate in the 1980s. The publication of Elaine Kim’s Reading the

Literatures of Asian America: An Introduction to the Writings and their Social Context by

Temple University Press serves as an important marker of the growth of the field. As the first book length theoretical treatment of Asian American writing, it codified for the public a nascent

Asian American literary theory and history. In her work, Kim expands on the theories of Aion and Aiiieeeee by foregrounding Asian American women’s writings and including Filipino

American literature as she explores “the topography and rich textures of the Asian American experience as it is expressed in Asian American literature” (xi). Noting that “one of the fundamental barriers to understanding and appreciating Asian American literary self-expression has been the existence of race stereotypes about Asians in American popular culture,” Kim’s first chapter surveys American configurations of Asianness and situates Asian American writers with the task of challenging such stereotypes by “defining their own humanity as part of the composite image of the American people” (xv, 22). She justifies her focus on the contexts of the writings rather than their formal qualities by explaining that the larger reading public’s ignorance

159 of Asian America’s sociohistorical situation likely contributes to a misapprehension of the literature itself. In her paradigm, Asian American writing is expressive of Asian American experience so that “by studying Asian American literature, readers can learn about the Asian

American experience from the point of view of those who have lived it” (xviii). Though Kim does highlight the multiplicity of approaches taken by Asian American writers by engaging both earlier activist and cultural nationalist writings alongside the growing number of works which focus on individual experience, she nonetheless reads these as ultimately connected: “the theme that underscores the contemporary body of Asian American literature is the need for community”

(278). Like her forbears, Kim’s work constructs a theoretical paradigm which reads Asian

American writing as acts of resistance sociologically marked by the effects of immigration and racism.

The emphasis Asian American literary theory placed on cultural nationalism, identity politics, and historical specificity mirrors the larger trends of early multiethnic studies practices.

Born the same year as the Aiiieeeee anthology, MELUS, the Society for the Study of the Multi-

Ethnic literature of the United States, represents the first professional group dedicated to multicultural literary criticism. Constructed from a panel at the December 1973 Modern

Language Association committee, MELUS quickly established a quarterly journal and yearly conference. As Katherine Newman remembers, “MELUS was conceived in anger and brought forth into academe in words of defiance” (99). Chief among its early priorities was the excavation of neglected literary texts authored by a diversity of writers with the long range purpose of “writing the full history of American Literature” (107) that would contextualize the incorporation of minority texts in the classroom. The growth of MELUS into the early 1980s also paralleled an increase of interest in multiethnic studies by its parent organization the MLA,

160 which recommended in 1982 that departments continually review their course offerings and methodologies "in the light of women's studies, minority literatures, theories of composition, and emerging ideas in linguistics, philosophy, and other branches of critical reflection" (953). The

MLA subsequently dedicated space in the Spring 1985 ADE bulletin to Amy Ling’s “Asian

American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Selected Bibliography.” Following the work of

Elaine Kim, Ling argues “any study of Asian American literature must take social contexts into account”; accordingly, Ling situates her overview by offering brief histories of the different immigrant constituents under the umbrella term “Asian American” (29). Ling asserts that “the study of Asian American literature is often a study of white America” insofar as the relationship between Asian American writing and the publishing realm betokens the changing relationship between Asian American and Euro American communities at large (31). Ling’s essay confirms that Asian American and multiethnic studies took their places in the broader landscape of literary criticism primarily through a focus on the material history and social contexts of Asian America.

By the time of the first publication of the Heath anthology in 1989, the study and appreciation of

Asian American literature centered largely on the history, sociology, and ethnicity of specific authors as well as a fetishization of resistance as a political gesture.

The mainstreaming of Asian American studies also paralleled the growth of Asian

American poetry itself. Whereas the politically and socially minded works of earlier poets like

Mirikitani and Merle Woo had struggled to find print, the lyric subjectivity in the work of poets like Cathy Song, Garret Hongo, and David Mura were readily accepted and rewarded; Song’s

Picture Bride was published as part of the Yale Younger Poets series in 1982, Hongo was awarded the Lamott Poetry prize in 1987, and Mura was selected for the National Poetry Series in 1989. Written in a form alternately called “official verse culture” and the “MFA mainstream,”

161 these poems echo the prevailing workshop style of the 1980s and adhere to the Romantic ideology that poetry belongs to a realm outside the political. Against the difficult and experimental poetries of Modernist writers like Pound, this poetry utilizes a neorealist style which offers up the private, I-based lyric for public appraisal. The poems themselves aim for sincerity and clarity, and the poets view language as a transparent medium allowing for unhindered communication. Unlike the activist poets, however, much of the Asian American poetry of the 1980s is not overtly oppositional; the poetics of authors like Song and Mura resemble the aesthetic privileged in the mainstream while offering variety in terms of themes and ethnic images. The success of these Asian American poets outside of ethnic studies also served to redefine the parameters of Asian American poetry; their popularity in the mainstream coupled with their decidedly ethnic publishing presentation (Song’s collection, originally entitled From the White Place was retitled Picture Bride ) signaled a shift whereby Asian American writers became identified not by Asian American discourse on the basis of perceived solidarity with

Asian American political aims but rather by the wider reading establishment primarily on the basis of identity. Song, Hongo, and Mura, as the first widely published and publically acknowledged Asian American poets, served as an introduction to Asian American poetry for many readers, thus hastening its perception as principally engaged in a poetics of lyric subjectivity. 68

68 Song, Hongo, and Mura, along with Mirikitani and the Angel Island poets, were the three modern Asian American poets chosen to represent the movement in the first edition of the Heath anthology. Twenty years later, their poetry along with the work of Li-Young Lee still remains emblematic of Asian American poetry in major anthologies. The Norton includes Lee and Song, while the Heath still exhibits Mirikitani and Hongo. The most recent edition of the Heath , however, also includes early protest-based poems by Hagedorn as well as the more experimental works of Kimiko Hahn. Yet, Hahn’s works, unlike many of Yau’s, are overtly tinged by ethnicity, allowing her to be read in line with the works of Hongo as representative of Asian American reality. 162

Asian American discourse quickly responded to the mainstream success writers like Song and Mura by critically engaging them, further securing their image as representative of Asian

American poetry. Despite the more personal focus and less overt political stance of this poetry, its accessibility and use of the first person fit into previous paradigms of poetry as social expression. Continuing the content-based sociohistorical approaches begun in the 1970s, criticism in the late 1980s and early 1990s focused on the how these poets, while mimicking dominant poetic modes, offered a poetry distinctly different from mainstream American poetry.

This difference was articulated largely through a continued focus on thematic concerns and the incorporation of Asian language in English poetry. For instance, Shirley Lim’s 1987 essay

“Reading Asian American Poetry: A Case for Ethnopoetics.” argues that reading Asian

American writing requires readers trained in the stylistic, linguistic, and contextual particularities of Asian American writing so as to understand this poetry’s largely non-European cast. Lim’s first component, the stylistic, refers to the Asian and Asian American images mobilized to

“create a style of nostalgia which looks eastward, forsaking entirely the American contemporary scene” (54), while her second point insists that sensitivity to Asian languages enriches these writers’ projects. Her last injunction focuses on the necessity of reading Asian American authors against their specific sociohistorical context. Lim’s thesis points up the growing tension in Asian

American poetry between the first and the second halves of the term. Lim asserts, “This stubborn residual identity which refuses oblivion characterizes much of not all of Asian-

American [sic] writing today. Even an avant-garde third-generation Chinese-American writer such as David Henry Hwang works and re-works elements of his original culture” (52). Her continual recourse to terms like “original culture” and “first languages” presupposes a flatness of

Asian American identity whereby a writer does, in fact, have a “first language” or “culture.”

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Such slippage between Asian and Asian American is also indicative of the need to articulate difference in the face of an easily commodified Asian American poetic production. Thus, Lim’s essay mimics the paradigms put forth by Kim and attempts, as Kim does, to codify a coherent cohort of Asian American writing by stressing its difference from the mainstream.

Even as Lim’s essay maps the rather narrow theories developing to deal with an Asian

American poetry that formally echoes American mainstream poetry, she also inadvertently complicates that thesis by including John Yau in her assessment. Like the handful of other critics who named Yau as an Asian American poet in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lim mobilizes Yau as an example of difference but does not formally engage or investigate his poetics. To support her third point of contextualization, Lim reads two oppositional reviews of

Yau’s award winning work Corpse and Mirror . Here, Lim argues, the key disparity between a favorable diagnosis of Yau’s poems rests on the critic’s ability to identify him as Chinese

American. Unlike Richard Elman’s evaluation of Yau as an “unanchored poet,” Clayton

Eshleman’s review turns on the fact of Yau’s Chineseness, including the word “Chinese” eight times in his assessment (55). Though Lim importantly is among the first Asian American critics to situate Yau as an Asian American poet, her use of Yau pivots not on an analysis of his work, but on reviewers’ responses to it. 69 The paradigms constructed by Lim and others to evaluate

Asian American work are unfortunately poorly suited to an investigation of Yau’s early surrealist

style. Lim ultimately summarizes Yau’s work as “juxtaposing ancient Chinese images and

69 The success of Corpse and Mirror in the mainstream seems to have afforded it a tenuous position in Asian American discourse. Amy Ling appears to be the first to include Yau in Asian American conversations by including Corpse and Mirror in her bibliography for the ADE. In the 80s, Lim alludes to Yau in two separate essays, but does not engage in any reading of his poetry. Notably for this argument, Lim’s first reference to Yau is in her favorable review of Bruchac’s Breaking Silence where she observes his absence. Finally, Elaine Kim also alludes to Yau as a writer “all the more Asian American” as he “contribute[s] to the broadening of what that term means” in her 1987 essay “Asian American Literature” in the Columbia Literary History of the United States (821). 164 contemporary American cultural graffiti,” a project that falls flat for Elman due to his inability to recognize these allusions (56). Lim’s analysis of the two reviews hinges largely on Yau’s identity and not his poetics per se ; Eshleman’s foregrounding of Yau’s Chineseness is viewed as culturally affirming, not orientalizing, while Elman’s bewilderment with Yau’s poetry must surely come from his lack of an “ethnosensitive” reading, despite the fact that the poem Elman alludes to, “An Ever Changing Tale,” contains no markers of identity. Lim leaves no room for

Elman’s dismissal to modulate on the basis of his dislike or misunderstanding of Yau’s experimental poetics. At the same time, Lim herself refuses to formally engage Yau’s poetics; her reading of Yau as Chinese American within the dominant paradigms of Asian American discourse cannot account for some of the finer liberties he takes with language to undermine his own positionality and call into question the permeability of language. Any investigation of the way the formal composition of Yau’s work stylistically affronts Euro American poetry would ultimately detract from Lim’s shadow narrative of a unified community of writers working together to extend the cultural boundaries of Asian American poetry.

Yau’s ascension into the “mainstream” of Asian American poetry was also prefigured by a certain amount of currency in mainstream experimental discourse. His poetry appeared in the fourth issue of Clayton Eshleman’s experimentally-oriented magazine Sulfur with poets like

Robert Blackburn, Jed Rasula, and Ron Silliman. The selection of Corpse and Mirror by John

Ashberry for the National Poetry Series in 1983 brought Yau additional acclaim among experimental circles; in 1985 he read alongside such renowned experimentalists as Rachel Blau

DuPleiss, Michael Palmer, and Clark Coolidge. In 1990, Talisman dedicated an entire issue to his work. The multiplicity of reactions to Yau however emphasizes the difficulty in gauging and responding to an avant garde Asian American writer, especially one with so many different

165 writing styles. In the Talisman issue alone, David Chaloner offers a somewhat orientalizing assessment of Yau’s work as drawn from “an inheritance from the more ancient culture of China” while Joseph Donahue’s essay does not engage Yau’s ethnicity at all (114). These reviews interestingly contrast with Ed Foster’s short essay on Yau, published in The Multicultural Review in 1990 where, despite the absence of any sustained criticism on Yau either within or without

Asian American discourse, Foster declares “Yau has been seen as a major Chinese-American poet, perhaps the most important of our time” (36). Such pronouncements are further complicated by Marjorie Perloff’s 1997 review of Forbidden Entries , which asserts of Yau’s early works, “there was no indication, at this stage of Yau’s career, that the poet is in fact

Chinese-American” (n. pag.). These diverse understandings point to the efficacy of Yau’s questioning of identity. Clearly, ethnicity is and has been a factor in Yau’s works, yet the extent to which it is engaged (or overlooked) in these essays illustrates the difficulty in assessing whether and how identity functions in Yau’s poetics. When ethnicity is mobilized as in

Chaloner’s review, it is often filtered through a distinctly Chinese – not Chinese American – lens.

Kris Hemensley, for instance, moves from characterizing Yau’s work as one that “affords

Imagist collision” to one “as funny as Wang Wei’s, Tu Fu’s, Li Po’s” (117, 118). In the majority of these reviews, and here Foster’s is truly an exception, Yau’s writing has no bearing on or exchange with Asian American poetry. Instead, if ethnicity comes into play at all, such readings generally locate the exceptional qualities of Yau’s writing in China, not in any politicized ethnic

American discourse.

The difficulty in seeing Yau as Asian American reads counter to the widespread acceptance of poets like Song, Hongo, and Mura as Asian American. Unlike his lyric counterparts, Yau’s more experimental poetics obstruct wholesale understanding of his work as

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Asian American regardless of his ethnically marked name and the author photos present on the book jackets of works like Corpse and Mirror ; in short, Yau’s poetics do not offer up ethnic subjectivity in the form that has come to be expected. As Charles Bernstein explains in A

Poetics , “signature styles of cultural differences can be admitted into the official culture of

diversity if they are essentialized, that is, if these styles can be made to symbolically represent

the group being tokenized or assimilated” (7). Artists who write against these expected forms,

like Yau, will “find themselves falling through the very wide gaps and tears in the fabric of

American tolerance…the price for being less interested in representing than enacting” (7). Like

Palumbo-Liu, Bernstein reads the willingness of “official culture” to include diversity as part of

a larger scheme of commodification where the ethnic poets who gain fame and publishing

opportunities are those whose works fit into national metanarratives of American progress and

democracy and reinforce notions of liberal pluralism without critiquing the parameters of such a

concept too closely. Yau himself realizes the stakes of such narrative form. Echoing Bernstein,

Yau contends “The rules are clear: if you want to write in the language of others, and thus the

official language, they will accept you” (“Between” 40). He further dramatizes such a process in

“Avila I,” “You learn to accommodate yourself to others, to fit into the space left by their

shadow. This is one way of disappearing into the smile meant for the body you have left on the

carpet, where every rose is a perfect instrument of writing” (qtd. in Foster 38). Yau’s poetry

proceeds from the questioning of such processes rather than mere acceptance of them, balancing

between complete eschewal of authorial intent and total acceptance of language as a transparent

medium conducive to producing a singular self.70

70 Yau explains his position vis-à-vis poetic voice in “Between the Forest and Its Trees”: “I don’t believe in the lyric I – the single modulating voice that names itself and others in an easily consumable narrative – writing in a language that is transparent, a window overlooking a world we all have in common. It is not a world which includes me. It does not speak for me or to me….At the same time, I do 167

Yet, in attending to a poetics akin to that of the language poets with their “dismissal of

‘voice’ as the founding principle of lyric poetry,” the Asian American subjectivity encoded in

Yau’s writing has often been overlooked, and Yau’s poetics understood as interested in aesthetic innovation over engagement in the politics of ethnicity (Perloff, “Language Poetry” 405). This supposed mutual exclusivity of a poetics interested in aesthetic form and those interested in politics was reified in the rather acerbic exchange ignited by Yau’s unfavorable review of Eliot

Weinberger’s American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders . In his review, Yau contends that in positing a tradition issuing from Pound and continuing through Williams and

HD, Weinberger’s editorial method has restricted innovation to the domain of white poets and validated an aesthetic "which promotes assimilationism and imperialism" (45). While Yau’s assessment of Weinberger’s lack of ethnic diversity may, as Perloff believes, “pla[y] the minority card rather too piously,” the response he elicits from Weinberger underscores the seeming incompatibility between aesthetic, experimental poetry and that poetry engaged in identity politics (“Whose New”110 ). Weinberger first accuses Yau of “creat[ing] a remarkable new persona for himself: that of the angry outsider ‘person’ of color” before enumerating a comparative list of Yau’s ethnic shortcomings against his own multicultural qualifications:

“[Yau] has probably never written a topical social-protest poem in his adult life….I spent years studying Chinese – which John barely speaks and cannot read….John has never, before this, written on any minority writers” (43). Though Weinberger’s comparisons are more an ad hominem attack, his list nonetheless evinces the predominant mode for reading Yau’s work.

Yau’s perceived lack of community affiliation, his inability to speak his parent’s language, and his disinterest, until now, in ethnic resistance characterize him as an ethnic opportunist and not a not subscribe to the death of the author, the postmodern belief that there is no self writing. That injunction is the most recent way for the academy to silence the Other, keep the Other from speaking and writing” (“Between” 40). 168 valid voice in issues of identity politics. That these are the characteristics required for an “ethnic”

Chinese American reiterates Asian American writing’s firm connection to a narrow cultural

definition that privileges ethnic themes.

By the late 1990s, the challenge of Yau’s poetics to both ethnic and experimental

paradigms had become an important site of inquiry for critics of both camps. Yet, as the reviews

of Forbidden Entries show, such an interest nonetheless manifested itself in very different

assessments of Yau’s place in American poetics. Marjorie Perloff’s review, published in the

Boston Review in 1997, begins by alerting the reader to Yau’s increased attention to ethnicity;

Perloff asserts while Yau “has always cultivated the image of Angry Young Man,” his more recent poems have “increasingly defined his oppositionality as the resistance to what he calls….’the aesthetics of the assimilated’” (n. pag.). Yet, for Perloff, “the more overt representations of racial oppression in Forbidden Entries are, to my mind, the volume’s least successful poems.” Contrary to her misgivings about poems such as “Genghis Chan: Private Eye

XXIV,” with its emptying out of stock stereotypical Chinese signifiers, Perloff is more favorably impressed by his work in poems like “Blue Lizard Lounge” and the Angel Atrapado sequence which make use of “a splitting of selves” instead of overt references to identity. In “Angel

Atrapado XXII,” such a splitting occurs through confusion of the subject/object. The poem begins, “The one who says,” forestalling recognition of the speaking voice. The phrase recurs again and again modulating as “the voice who says,” “the one who answers,” and “the voice who stammers” (124-125). Identity is decidedly conflicted in the second stanza: “Someone is speaking into a tape recorder / someone with a name that sounds like yours / someone who claims she (or perhaps he)… / saw through your eyes, and did the things they did / to someone else” (124). The interpenetration of the you and I elicits an almost erotic intimacy which

169 suggests the ability of discrete identities to mutually construct each other. According to Perloff, unlike the controlled chaos of “Angel Atrapado XXII,” Yau’s more ethnically inflected poems

“don’t quite grapple with the poet’s own conflicted identity, his own relation to an Asian-

American community that interacts, in complex ways, with the sophisticated, urban New York poetry/art world in which Yau came of age.” Ultimately, for Perloff, Yau’s work is at its best when it refuses what she has elsewhere critiqued as the “metanarrative of ethnic amelioration” by resisting strong Asian American overtones (“Postmodernism” n. pag.).

In contrast to Perloff, Juliana Chang’s review in MELUS largely turns on Yau’s work as

“an intriguing site of investigation into questions of racial authenticity” (226). She begins by alluding to Perloff’s review and Weinberger’s comments about Yau’s ethnicity to question whether or not such exchanges imply a sense of betrayal on the part of these authors that the

“presumably passive, assimilative, and grateful Asian American” has participated in “an act of dis-identification with white power” (226). Alternately, for Chang “to use criteria of cultural, ethnic, or racial authenticity in evaluating the writing of John Yau, however, is to miss the point of his writing”; Yau’s poetry alternately approaches notions of identity by probing the means by which Asian Americans are “always already reproduced in the media and mass culture and the

Asian American subject as to some extent part of this reproduction” (227). Here, Chang mobilizes the “ethnic” poems discounted by Perloff. As one of the first Asian American scholars to critically review Yau’s work, Chang’s take gives us a sense both of Yau’s growing importance as an Asian American poet in the 1990s as well as how his poetry was perceived as fitting into

Asian American discourse. Against Perloff’s preference for Yau’s less ethnically inflected poems, Chang valorizes his parodic interference with constructions of Asian American subjectivity. Yau plays with orientalist constructions of Chinese language as in “Genghis Chan

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Private Eye XXV”: “Dump fun /dim sum… Strong song / Oolong” (103). Such play affords Yau the opportunity to intimate the alterity of Chineseness as well as the how this perceived alterity has been understood in the broader cultural sphere. As Peter Lorre who portrayed the Japanese villain Mr. Moto in a number of films asks in “Peter Lorre Wonders Which Artist Should Paint

His Portrait,” “Can you see me without remembering my trimmed voice boiling in the cauldrons of rural drive-ins?” (86-7). Chineseness has come to be a produced artifice. In situating her review in this manner, Chang manages to call mainstream readings of Yau’s ethnicity into question while at the same time focusing her analysis on how Yau’s work resists Asian

American stereotypes squarely in terms of his ethnicity. Yau’s poetry thus becomes centered in

Asian American discourse in terms of its ability to articulate resistance by deconstructing subjectivity.

Reading Chang and Perloff’s reviews in tandem reifies the dilemma of forcing John

Yau’s work into the schema of either experimentalists or Asian Americanists. While Perloff prefers Yau’s poetry when it displaces any strong sense of Yau’s ethnicity, Chang sees his identity as central to his writing project. While both agree that “Yau is no more a ‘language poet’ than he is a typical multiculturalist,” each nonetheless emphasizes the side of Yau that most underwrites her own poetic interests (Perloff, “Review” n. pag.). As Ikyo Day writing of Fred

Wah’s poetry explains, the opposition and resistance cultivated in ethnic studies which legitimates accessibility as a key component in propagating social good leaves little room for disjunctive, language centered poetics. Likewise, the autonomous restricted field of cultural production, like that from which the Language poets operate, modulates on an aesthetic basis which attempts at least on the surface to eschew the commodification multiculturalism must submit to so as to ensure the publication and reading of resistant texts. Day summarizes:

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the appeal to autonomous production as a more politically resistant alternative to ‘realism’

or the popular makes the reading of ‘resistance’ available only to those with an unequally

distributed cultural capital. It is this delimiting of resistance to the field of restricted

production that nevertheless enables a traditionally white male avant-garde to assert its

detachment from not only market relations but gender, race, and class relations as well.

(46)

Whereas multicultural paradigms traditionally legitimate mimetic representation as the primary method of effecting social change, thus equating form with social function, the same constraints are a nonissue for experimentalist poets whose writing, freed from essentialist readings of representation, becomes situated as more resistant due to its detachment from market demands.

Perloff’s response stops short of interrogating Yau’s constructions of ethnic identity and lyric subject position, while Chang’s focus on his representations of identity attempts to read his work primarily for resistance. Unfortunately, situating Yau’s texts squarely in either camp overlooks the totality of his project. Multicultural analyses based largely on Marxism are likely to undervalue the aesthetic while experimental analyses of poststructuralism tend to focus on textuality in terms of an overarching Western ideology which conflates issues of identity and class.

Since 2000, a number of Asian American critics have sought to engage and overcome the incommensurability of multicultural and experimentalist approaches. Timothy Yu’s “Form and

Identity in Language Poetry” provides the first essay length investigation of Yau’s poetics and initiates a reconsideration of the importance of experimental poetics like Yau’s to Asian

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American discourse. 71 Placing Yau in the tradition of language poets like Silliman and Bernstein,

Yu elucidates that the concerns of language poetry and minority writing may be in some ways

complementary. He begins by foregrounding the seeming incompatibility of the two historically

synchronous literary movements through the now infamous object/subject argument advanced by

Silliman in 1988:

Progressive poets who identify as members of groups that have been the subject of

history – many white male heterosexuals, for example – are apt to challenge all that is

supposedly ‘natural’ about the formation of their own subjectivity. That their writing

today is apt to call into question, if not actually explode, such conventions as narrative,

persona and even reference can hardly be surprising. At the other end of this spectrum

are poets…who have been the subject of history….These writers and readers – women,

people of color, sexual minorities, the entire spectrum of the ‘marginal’ – have a manifest

need to have their stories told. That their writing should often appear much more

conventional, with the notable difference as to who is the subject of these conventions,

illuminates the relationship between form and audience. (63)

From this starting point, Yu sets these two narratives in fruitful opposition to illustrate how

“Asian American poetry exposes some of the strains and limits in the political project of

Language poetry, particularly around the issues of race and identity,” while Language poetry’s

implicit refusal of mainstream American forms, “map[s] the limits of the Asian American poetic

project, insofar as it relies upon a commodifiable ‘ethnic’ individuality” (424). In this respect,

Yau’s use of signifiers and clichés works to remind readers of the centrality of his Chinese

Americanness while still unsettling our understanding of those terms. As Yu succinctly puts it,

71 While Yu is the first Asian American scholar to consider Yau centrally in a critical essay, Americanist Priscilla Wald offers an insightful piece entitled “Chaos Goes Uncourted” in the collection Cohesion and Dissent in America (1994). 173

“while we do still wish to ask ‘Who speaks?’ Yau shows us that we should never be comfortable with our answer” (443). Ultimately, Yu reads Yau’s poetry as the productive synthesis of these two traditions and accordingly focuses on poems like those in the Genghis Chan sequence or

“Toy Trucks and Fried Rice” where racial identity and history are kept in constant negotiation.

Yu argues that Yau’s “hanging on to history is crucial if the project of ethnic writing is to remain coherent” (448). Rather than allow the totality of Yau’s poetic project to fully resonate against that of mainstream Asian American discourse, Yu investigates only Yau’s poems that offer an overt ethnic voice or theme. Thus, while Yu does depart from earlier theoretical models like

Lim’s which read Asian American poetry primarily in terms of Asian origin, the division he posits between experimentalist form and Asian American themes remains; in reading only those poems which explicitly demonstrate an Asian American subjectivity, Yu refigures the divide between ethnic themes and experimentalist tendencies rather than fully investigating how Yau’s poetry resists engaging in the discourse of “official diversity.”

The important cultural work of Yu’s essay has been followed up by a number of Asian

American critics who continue to utilize Yau’s poetics as an affront to the supposed opposition between experimentation and politically enabled ethnic productions. 72 For instance, in his expansive investigation of American manifestations of Chinese language, Yunte Huang briefly examines Yau’s counter mockery of racist parodies of the Chinese language through

“pidginizing racist literature’s pidginization of Chinese” (137). More extensively, Zhou

Xiaojing’s 2004 “Postmodernism and Subversive Parody” gives an extended reading of the

Genghis Chan series to uncover the “postmodern aesthetics of multiplicity, fragmentation and indeterminacy” Yau uses to fashion an “irreducible, uncontainable Otherness that disturbs

72 Yu also extends his argument in his 2009 book Race and the Avant Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965 . 174 dominant notions about the racial, cultural Other” (77). She begins by locating Yau’s title character as the fusion of the stereotypes of the model minority (Charlie Chan) and the yellow peril (Genghis Khan) and continues to investigate the techniques Yau uses to displace reader expectations of the raced subject; in specific, she traces how Yau makes and remakes the “I” of the series alternately as Chan himself and the ventriloquism of Earl Biggers as Chan. While

Zhou’s reading unpacks much of the word play and intricacies of the series, it nonetheless focuses, like Yu’s and Huang’s, primarily on the techniques Yau uses to adapt an “anti- assimilation poetics” that offers “possibilities of a politically enabling Postmodernism for minority American literatures” (98). 73

For each of these critics, the Genghis Chan series is important because of its indictment of stereotypical portrayals of Asian Americans. The sequence, which operates in a film noir- esque world where a gumshoe detective named Genghis Chan investigates crime, cobbles together a variety of different poetic styles. From the elongated and fairly syntactically sound style of the first entries collected in Radiant Silhouette , to the shorter, more staccato entries found in Edificio Sayonora, the sequence is held together not by a coherent style but rather by

the continual processing of Genghis Chan’s identity. This project is extended in the section

entitled “Hollywood Asians” in Forbidden Entries which combines new Genghis Chan poems

with several poems starring Peter Lorre, the white actor who played Mr. Moto in eight films

between 1937 and 1939. The first poem of the section “Peter Lorre Improvises Mr. Moto’s

Monologue” opens, “I float outside your windows on rainy nights, a blanket of gray mist you

can’t peel from the glass. My mechanized eyes are spherical rooms” (77). Yau’s bodiless

portrayal of Moto with his “mechanized eyes” reveals the constructed nature of Asian identity as

73 I will deal only tangentially with the Genghis Chan series as Zhou does a thorough job with it in “Postmodernism and Subversive Parody.” Please see her reading for further information on the way the series resists appropriation. 175 presented on the Hollywood screen. Further enhanced with “upgraded teeth” and “matching black eyebrows and hair,” Lorre declares of his character, “I’m better than a laboratory frog because I don’t need batteries to send my electricity.” The presentation of Moto depends on exaggerated, stereotyped features including the shifty, “mechanized,” and cold eyes of Asian villains and their “upgraded” (read: buck) teeth. Resembling something of a Frankenstein, Moto is made up of discrete parts that only taken together signify his entity. Lorre’s performance of

Moto remembers early exotified productions of Asianness in dime museums and affirms that these physical markers of Asianness have come to stand in for and betoken popular understandings of Asians. This image is one “you can’t peel from the glass,” ingrained as it has become on the silver screen. The last lines reemphasize the constructed otherness of Moto: “I’m an engine of rebuilt fur. I’m what slips through your purified crave” (79). Moto’s piecemeal portrayal brings attention to the constuctedness of Asian American identity as Other.

However, it is the elliptical word play of poems like “Genghis Chan XXIV” which most often becomes a centerpiece in the readings of Asian American critics. The poem extends the racial constructions of “Peter Lorre Improvises Mr. Moto’s Monologue” by calling notice to the participation of language in such a construction:

Grab some

Grub sum

sub gum

machine stun

Treat pork

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pig feet

On floor

all fours

Train cow

chow lane

Dice played

trade spice

Makes fist

first steps (FE 102)

The poem’s abbreviation of syntactic connections focuses attention on Chinese stereotypes moving from food images and the “trained cow” of Chinese labor to the gambling vices like those of Brett Harte’s Ah Sin, while also alluding to the spice route and the first contact between

East and West. Yet, his unexpected use of rhyme and homophony denotes the shifting essence of such stereotypes and perceptions. For instance, the lines “sub gum / machine stun” subvert the anticipation of the collocate pair “machine gun,” while his use of internal rhyme as in “train cow / chow lane” disrupts typical rhythmic constructions. Yau’s highlighting of the artifice of the poem mirrors and emphasizes the artifice of identity constructions, while the constantly shifting rhymes and patterns call expectations of identity into question. For critics like Yu, such poems are a “case study” of how the techniques of language writing might be used to further the

177 aims of Asian American poetry (454). The lack of syntax locates Yau within the realm of language and other experimental poets, while the form intimates the construction of Chinese

American stereotypes; the nonsensical and choppy sing-song of the lines approximates the pidgins of characters like Ah Sin. As Perloff rightly summarizes in her review of Forbidden

Entries , “Yau is calling attention to the lingering Orientalism of U.S. culture, the labeling that

continues to haunt Asian Americans.” As such, Yau’s interest in this litany of stereotypes easily

fits into the dominant paradigms of resistance in Asian American criticism while also violating

the standards of accessibility found in much Asian American poetry. For Zhou and Yu, his

attention to the history of racism via a poetics that privileges form over content situates him as a

triumphal example of Asian American themes rendered in experimental form, contradicting

assumptions of the incompatibility of formal experimentation with political and social contexts.

Yet, in concentrating largely on poems like “Peter Lorre Improvises Mr. Moto’s

Monologue” and “Genghis Chan XXIV,” these critical works are still circumscribed by the

double bind of identity and form in terms of Chinese American poetry. While these critics

construct useful paradigms for reading Yau as an alignment of the experimental with the ethnic,

such readings generally overlook poems where ethnicity or ethnic signifiers are not overt.

Despite the lip service given to the rapidly changing Asian American theoretical constructs in the

late 1990s, these critic’s reliance on Yau’s Asianness continues to reify the same themes of the

cultural nationalists in the early 1970s, namely, the sociopolitical project of resistance to

dominant culture. 74 In reading these critics’ readings of Yau, it becomes obvious that the turn to

the diasporic resulted not in a reconfiguration of Asian American theory so much as the

valorization of new forms of content; in this sense, Lowe’s call for “heterogeneity, hybridity,

74 It should be noted, however, that resistance to dominant culture constitutes a central concern of any avant-garde project. 178 multiplicity” worked primarily on the thematic level, engaging writers like Li Young Lee whose works might have previously seemed too Asian to be included in Asian American discourse, effectively continuing the project of maintaining a discourse oppositional to the canonical status quo. This is not to say that race and ethnic identity are not important in the reading of John

Yau’s works, but rather to propose that the constant reiteration of his Otherness detracts from his

project of questioning the terms of that Otherness altogether. Yau’s work is most interested not

in unearthing a cogent Asian American cultural identity, but in looking at the processing of this

identity via language. Yau’s project is in this respect analogous to Mackey’s call in “Other:

From Verb to Noun”; instead of probing his Otherness, Yau probes the terms whereby one is

constituted as an Other. For Yau, “[o]ne’s color is neither something you can put on and take off,

like a coat, nor an ideology you announce one moment and ignore at another”; it is always

present (qtd. in Wang 153). However, the terms of that identity are constantly shifting,

constantly changing, and it is this effect Yau wishes to showcase with his poetry. Whether

through his more surrealistic poems which engage a constantly metamorphosing I or via his later

engagement with ethnic signifiers, Yau is primarily concerned with language and the way it

creates and contains identity.

Such a concern can be seen early on in “Suggested by a Waitress in YEE’s,” a poem from

his first collection Crossing Canal Street :

Holding the pencil like one lonely chopstick

& grasping the pad like an empty plate

waiting to be filled:

words such as shrimp almonds pork rice

thoughts of brocade pearl silk rain verbs (n. pag.)

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Here the title of the poem supplies the subject: the waitress herself, who is suggestive of a litany of Chinese signifiers. The non-presence of the waitress in the poem points up her erasure at the hands of the speaker. The disruption of syntax due to the lack of a referent in the opening two lines allows the third line to resonate not only with the plate but the woman herself. She becomes a vessel waiting for the narrator’s estimation of her; she is “waiting to be filled” with his Orientalized imaginings. Her submission in this procedure mirrors the speaker’s stereotyped construction of her as passive and servile while also gesturing to the strength of language to capture and (re)present. The last word of the stanza, “verbs,” underscores the poet’s creation of her and the process of othering his looking has enabled. The final two lines of the poem,

“nothing decorous but our own clinging minds / & the piling of her smooth black hair” complete the transformation; “clinging minds” pinpoints the centrality of the I/eye in creating and inculcating the vision of the woman, who is, after all, “nothing decorous” except in the mind’s creation. The deferment of any attention to the speaker until the plural “our” of the last line dislocates the poem from firm alignment with Yau as the raced speaker, while the orientalizing of the waitress inverts any orientalizing tendency on the part of the reader toward the author yet at the same time engages the reader in the action of orientalizing the waitress. Yau’s choice of

“our clinging minds” emphasizes the unwitting participation of the reader in the “making” of the waitress as well as alludes to the inevitability of such constructions. His interest in these constructions as suggestions , here figured as the system through which language and culture have inculcated certain ideas of identity, closely follows Mackey’s interest in the verb form of

“other.” However, though Yau’s works may draw fodder from his life as a Chinese American,

Yau will not perform the part of the signified; his refusal to step firmly into the authorial role or to comment or condemn the theme of signification in the poem critiques Asian American

180 discourse’s participation in orientalization via labels. Here, perhaps more successfully than in the

Genghis Chan series, Yau foregrounds the mind’s act over any orientalizing tendency. Whether in poems that explicitly call attention to ethnicity or poems which contain no ethnic markers,

Yau’s work is primarily concerned with the nouns, the signifiers, which constrain and delimit our identities.

While Yau often draws on images of reified Chineseness in his works, he is also open to

a host of other influences. Reading Yau as part of the continuing tradition of resistance in Asian

American works overlooks other poems which exhibit the ways language constructs and

reconstructs perceived identities. Resistance in Yau’s poems is established in confrontations

with the overarching signification of language. That Yau is Chinese American is supplemental

to this ongoing negotiation. Though the critics outlined above provide insightful and challenging

readings of Yau’s importance to Chinese American literature at large, assessing Yau’s poems

which do not overtly articulate a Chinese American identity offers a larger affront to

essentialized notions of Chinese American poetry. For instance, “The Reading of an Ever-

Changing Tale” investigates signification and its importance in constructing reality. Reprinted in

several of his collections, “The Reading of an Ever Changing Tale” is, as Priscilla Wald points

out, emblematic of much of Yau’s poetic practices. The poem begins, “Certain colors got lodged

/ under the fingernails before their names / came to grace our speech” ( Radiant Silhouette 20).

Here, Yau explores the movement of an already existent object into reality via the act of naming

which legitimates and concretizes the abstract. Such a progression is interrupted with the next

line’s “But,” which leads to the question “what of the phenomena whose / colors can only be

imagined?” What happens to concepts outside of our speech? Are those things which are

outside our vocabulary illegitimate? Yau continues the line of questioning with more mundane

181 questions, “What did you do with the pills? / And why were you without any gasoline?” subjugating his existentialist questions to the banality of other questions, which also remain unanswered. The continual processing of questions shifts the tale, circumscribing any answer as

“these questions / are a restraint on your memory.” The question interrupts the seamless remembering of the tale, presumably the naming of the colors, and changes it, so that “’blue’ is a box opened up /like a sky.” Here, Yau switches the progression of the signification of “blue” by beginning with its name rather than its abstract condition; the blue is sky rather than the sky is blue. And, while blue abides in language, the color green, lingers outside speech. Under the sky,

“no grass grows / but traces remain,” the color caught under the “fingernails” by the changing of the tale. Yau’s shifting of color and signifier recalls the arbitrariness of our naming processes as well as the at times rather nonsensical paths they take.

Yau’s “Ten Songs” also works to evoke the shortcomings of language in capturing or expressing reality as well as offers a glimpse of the poet’s own process of writing. As Yau tells

Foster in the Talisman interview, “For the poet, one way to resist assimilation is to follow suggestions the words themselves offer rather than the poetic conventions and traditions one has been taught to impose on them” (38). “Ten Songs” evidences this conviction through its interrogation of the permutations of a fixed set of words. The poem begins, “Trying to find a way to say something that would make it / make its sense” ( Radiant Silhouette 18). The continual present of trying articulates both the progressive idea of “try” along with its uncertainty and the possibility of transformation. The act of trying is further attached to the verb “make,” underlining the force of the writer in constructing meaning. Yet, the meaning is not wholly determined by the author; conversely, he attempts to allow it to “make its sense,” speak on its own terms. The continual deferment of change by a subject “trying” to force “something” to

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“make its [own] sense” alludes to the dependence of the writer on the meaning of the words themselves. The complexity of the first sentence is paralleled and questioned by substitutions in the second: “Trying to find a way to weigh something that would make / its own lens.” “Weigh,” the homophone of “way” stands in for “say,” insinuating both the slipperiness of language and its very gravity. “Lens” similarly substitutes for “sense” and points up the existence of parameters that confine and define the reception of language. The final four lines of the first stanza continue the permutations and reflections and depict through their syntactical forms the act of the brain trying to make something “make sense”:

Finding it trying to say something they would make

a lens of

Finding the saying of something

weighing the sense of it trying

The rearrangement of “Finding” to the beginning of the sentence reconfigures the process of communication again, while the introduction of “they” discloses the exterior constraints and concomitant possibilities of cooptation that public discourse places on communication. The last two sentences similarly remake the phrase, ultimately breaking off only halfway through.

“Finding the saying of something” illuminates the act of speech, its orality, while “weighing the sense of it trying” gauges the actual meaning of the oral act. Separating “saying” from

“weighing” foregrounds the separation of the signified from the signifier underscoring the disconnection of a word’s meaning from its sound.

The remainder of the poem continues the attempt to communicate a “something,” which

is ultimately made into “something else”:

Making the trying something that would find its sense

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Sensing the making trying to find something it says

Saying the finding is there to find is making it make sense

Making it make sense is finding something to say

Something to say is finding a lens to sense the making

Something making the making something something else

The continual processing of the verbs “say,” “try,” and “make” connotes the impossibility of unmediated one to one communication. The title signifies the arbitrariness of grammar and syntax. While each line maintains the same words, their positioning and repositioning revalues them and constructs new meaning. Additionally, Yau’s attention to gerunds allows him to refigure words alternately as nouns and verbs and gives a sense of immediacy, a perpetual presentness. Ultimately, the syntactical mess of “Ten Songs” seemingly rights itself in the final lines where “something” becomes a clear subject. Yet, the final line also defers explanation:

“something making the making something something else.” Meaning drops out and the forced making creates for the “something” a new “something else.” Meaning is thus changed in the shift from writing to reception as the receiver’s attempt to create coherence instead creates the undefined something else.

Alternately, Yau’s “You Must Remember” traces the development of a “you,” not an “I,” as it is formed and shaped by language. His choice of the imperative form emphasizes the demands the formless “you” is subject to as well as obscures the identity of the “you” or the speaker. In the poem, the title vies as the first sentence, again asserting the power of the speaker who continues throughout the poem to offer instructions of things which the “you” must remember. The first stanza reminds the “you” “not to mumble / not to mangle” the words held

“in your hands / in your head” (Radiant Silhouette 171). The metonymic combination of “your

184 hands” and “your head” with their insistence on possession contrast sharply with the autonomy of the “words” they hold. The similar syntactic structure also conflates the two, signaling the evocation of the connection between mind and body, the Cartesian self. The next stanza continues the subjugation of the mind and the body to discourse:

You must remember

to deliver your head

to the auditorium

where it will be mounted

along with the others

your hands and head

going together

to the auditorium

where someone

maybe more than one

is waiting for you

to deliver your voice

mangled as

it was

formed

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The predetermined voice, echoes the formation of the “you” mounted alongside heads and hands of the Others. Again, the division between the possessive hands and head and the objective words register the preexistence of the words, which always already exist to order the reality and understanding of the “you.” The repeating of hands and head, metonymic representations of the body, continuously situate the “you” as unimportant, immaterial to its purpose of entering the auditorium and performing its part. The repetition of “deliver” also infers a required action not of creating but of transmitting, underscoring the conscripted and (re)produced essence of the

“you.” Just as one delivers on a promise, the “you" must deliver his aforesaid identity into the awaiting prestructured realm of language.

The second half of the poem opens similarly, yet in it Yau begins to work more with associations and substitutions, further abstracting the “you” by aligning the head and words with plate and page: “you must remember / to return bread / to plate / lift head / from page.” The idea of consumption of identity underscores our willing acceptance of the function of discourse; the

“you” takes its “head,” its outward identity, from the page containing the words constructed to describe it. In effect, we each “must swallow / what’s on / plate or page,” must passively consume the ordering words given to us. Head and plate become connected, one the item to be delivered, the other the mode of delivery. Yau completes the association in the next to last set of directions:

You must remember

to deliver the words

mounted on the page

your head

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sitting on

the plate

The “words / mounted on the page” echo the head previously mounted in the auditorium, while the substitution of the head for the bread on the plate draws allusions to the presentation of John the Baptist’s head, his distinct outward image, to King Herod. The repetition of “deliver” again recalls the servility and submissiveness of the “you,” which “must” in effect decapitate itself to fulfill its role as display. This continued predetermination of the “you” seems to presuppose

Yau’s alliance with postmodern conceptions of the death of the author and the irretrievably commodified status of language. Yet, for Yau, “This model proposes the existence of an auditorium where everything that has ever been said has been heard and understood” (40).

While such an auditorium has seemingly been created in “You Must Remember,” this stanza situates the words as displays pre-established and “mounted” as the head will be on the page.

The words themselves are not hegemonic; another power arranges them as it sees fit, producing the reality it desires. Such an ordering is analogous to anthologies, which generally frame their selections with introductions and author biographies often replete with a photograph of the poet himself. In order to be accepted into dominant discourse as an ethnic poet, Yau’s work must “fit” the parameters decided for it by the paradigms of multicultural studies and the editorial aims of the anthology itself; quite literally, his “head” must match the “words” mounted as representative of a specific ethnic experience or reality.

Yau’s poem then serves as much as a caution against such a liberal multiculturalism as it

does an indication of the restrictiveness of language. Rather than succumb completely to the

lack of agency occasioned by such rhetorical positioning, Yau offers one more set of instructions

that recast the previous:

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You must remember

these things

as things

that once kept you

from speaking from

a book or box

Yau’s separation of “things / as things” emphasizes the concrete fixedness of words; they are things used and moved around, yet things we can also use and move around ourselves. The speaking voice here admonishes the “you” to remember words are accessible to all and can be rearranged and (re)presented to allow for speaking, for a self-articulated identity beyond that which is written in a book or the showcased, mounted, “boxed” version of selfhood. Far from eschewing the value of speaking out, Yau explores the double bind between speaking out and the commodified existence of the writing subject. Thus, while Yau’s “You Must Remember” does not contain any ethnic signifiers or allusions to Asian American writing or culture, its formal analysis of subjectivity and subject making can be easily read as mimicking the predicament of multiculturalism and the bound space Asian American literary discourse finds itself in as the price of its institutionalization. As Palumbo-Liu describes in his introduction to The Ethnic

Canon , the ethnic texts moved into the canon of American literature are those chosen as representatives of “authentic” ethnic experience; “yet the critical and pedagogical discourses that convey these texts into the classroom…may very well mimic and reproduce the ideological underpinnings of the dominant canon, adding “material” to it after a necessary hermeneutic operation elides contradiction and smoothes over the rough grain of history and politics” (2). In

188 this way, the self-assertive political works which seemed culturally enabling on the inside of the movement run the risk of being co-opted when moved into the broader reading public. Yau’s surreal substitutions, which disembody the head and hands, illustrate the disarticulation of the author from his work and the way in which multicultural texts, once situated in anthologies, may in turn “speak” in the service of “official discourse,” offering a voice “mangled as it was formed.”

Yet, in their continual play and rearrangement, these words nonetheless also resist such a reading.

Yau, the ethnically marked author, refuses to ethnically mark the you; thus, if we read the poem as attending to a specific ethnic contingent, we the reader perform the “mangling” or the signifying process Yau describes. We “box” the author and his speech. The poem is thus the double bind incarnate.

Throughout Yau’s work, identity is processed, questioned, and its limits laid bare. While

Yau recognizes and owns his identity as a Chinese American writer, he focuses not on the limits of such an identity but rather how language preconceives his alterity and the means by which he can recreate discourse to suggest new identity constructions. While he mobilizes signifiers of

Chineseness to attend to the dialogue that has previously situated him as a specific kind of writer or poet, much of his work is more broadly focused on the othering processes of language and developing measures that complicate and subvert these procedures. His acceptance into Asian

American literary discourse, while tying Yau tightly to a Chinese American identity, nonetheless also pigeon holes him as Asian American, inviting ethnicized readings which focus at the content level on the themes common to Asian American poetry. Yau’s most recent book, Paradiso

Diaspora , seemingly confronts his authorial stance, attesting that he is a poet who happens to be

Chinese American, not a Chinese American who happens to be a poet. As he states in the

Talisman essay, “You know, who you are is simply an accident of birth….. And I don’t want to

189 deal with the accident of my birth as a right or entitlement. But I don’t want to ignore it either, and so it becomes to me an interesting dilemma: how do I deal with it? How do I write about it?”(49). Yau’s ethnicity doesn’t define his poetry but instead serves as material to be incorporated and explored, probed and examined.

The “Introduction” to Paradiso Diaspora attempts to locate this issue and dispense with it. The poem opens, “It had to be from someone whose grandparents were born in Shanghai,” which seemingly fulfills the purpose of the autobiographical head note often supplied by publishers publishing ethnic works (1). Situating himself ethnically here, Yau recenters the poem a few lines later via his characteristic use of anaphora to shift reception: “It had to be from a distant or dissolute descendant (yes, moi ) / who can sing praises unworthy of even a flicker of your attention.” The connection between the Shanghai relatives and Yau is emptied out in his evocation of distance, while the inclusion of “moi” introduces other linguistic and cultural influences that also color Yau’s identity. His self-deprecating tone does indeed, as he announces in the second stanza, “sound like it might turn into a love poem or a prayer,” or at the very least the ethnically inflected lament of assimilation with its contingent issue of losing the ethnic quality that would encourage the “flicker of your attention.” Yet, as “a man of the people / which I am not nor will ever be,” Yau won’t succumb to the solipsistic musings of a solitary author. The last three stanzas offer different definitions of the author premised in the same vein.

The first centers on the absence of a number of personal characteristics, the arguably most important being “truthfulness.” The break from truth indicates Yau’s anti-autobiographic standpoint and essentially declares all contained within to be fiction, again moving himself out of ethnic classification. The next lines complicate and constrain who this writer could be, as “it had to be from someone who could take my place / after I left the room / never to return.” By

190 removing himself as the author, Yau invites realization of his constructedness as an entity, asking the poetry be read on its own and outside the projection of identity he explores in “You Must

Remember.” Finally, the poem concludes, “it had to be from someone who didn’t exist / before this poem / began writing itself down.” Yau’s final line seemingly enters the debate over his post as an ethnic or non-ethnic writer by displacing authorship completely. Yau acknowledges that the very act of writing the poem, a creative act which will undoubtedly be read for communication and understanding, necessarily constructs and delimits the way he is perceived as an author. Throughout “Introduction,” Yau strips away layers of his perceived identity piece by piece to offer an unmediated collection of poems. By emptying out the signifiers associated with his name, Yau offers his work to be read as poetry that investigates language first and foremost, and as a poetry that investigates positionality and implicitly the positionality of a racially marked author only secondarily.

Attending to the non-overtly ethnic poems of Yau is not a call to read his poems apolitically, but rather an indication of how reading across Yau’s poetic oeuvre can question essentialist assessments of not only his work, but Asian American poetry in general. As “Ten

Songs” and “Introduction” perhaps best evince, Yau’s poetics continually engage in a critique of the manner in which identity, and his identity in particular, is always already established in

American and Asian American discourse. Against this reproduction, his poems work dialectically to question and destabilize such significations. In terms of anthologies, including

Yau’s work alongside more traditional representations of Asian American poetry as well as experimental poetry reveals the tensions it creates within both. His use of form and breaking of syntax record not Yau’s exclusion but the processes by which such exclusion is manifested. For

Yau, understanding these processes is more important than rehashing the social history

191 underlying them. Multicultural readings which foreground Yau’s material position overlook the efficacy of his poetics in pointing out the complicity of language in such constructions. Rather than focusing on his history, he looks at how that history has been narrated and can be used to serve Orientalist purposes. Above all, his poetry is concerned with the process of looking, both ours and his, and the field on the page where the impetus to assert identity confronts accepted instantiations of identity. From his early poems which produce visions of Chineseness to later poems which call into question the reader’s formulation of his subjectivity, Yau encourages us to reconsider the paradigms by which we produce our own critical readings. He proffers that limiting his poetry to a multicultural or Marxist reading may overlook the universal predicament of signification, while submitting it to poststructuralist readings that deny author positionality ignores the complex nexus of social structures that mediate identity. Just as his poems constantly question identity, Yau’s poetry requires critics to reconfigure the demarcations of Asian

American literature and create flexible critical frameworks that may in turn constantly shift, develop, and evaluate the continual movements of identity and the means by which it is imagined.

As he writes in “Between the Forest and the Trees,” “where the I begins is in a sentence”; it is ultimately our readings that define it (38).

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CHAPTER SEVEN

AFTERWORD

As the foregoing chapters have illustrated, images of Chineseness continue to be a prescient element of American poetry. From the Modernist’s use of Chinese objects to effect a cosmopolitan aesthetic to Pound’s extended study of the Chinese language, images of

Chineseness pervade Modernist innovation. Such an interest in China continues throughout the works of twentieth and twenty-first century poets. A recent poem by Billy Collins, the former poet laureate of the United States, further testifies to American poetry’s enduring conversation with China. In “Liu Yung” Collins satirizes the poetic penchant of using Chinese poetry as an aesthetic touchstone:

This poet of the Sung dynasty is so miserable.

The wind sighs around the trees,

a single swan passes overhead,

and he is alone on the water in his skiff.

If only he appreciated life

in eleventh-century China as much as I do —

no loud cartoons on television,

no music from the ice cream truck,

just the calls of elated birds

and the steady flow of the water clock. (99)

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Collins’s longing for a quieter, simpler lifestyle seemingly echoes poets like Pound and Snyder who evoke China as a measure against which to judge the over-industrialization of the West.

However, his tongue-in-cheek proclamation, “If only he appreciated life / in eleventh-century

China as much as I do” both participates in a dialectic with China while simultaneously questioning his interaction with Chinese literature both in “Liu Yung” and a number of other poems in Ballistics . The line also serves as a reminder of our ability to look backwards and alludes to the rather small frame of reference by which many of these poets imagined China.

The images of China most often referenced in American poetry hail from the past; few poets

(and here Snyder serves as an exception) engage China on a contemporary scale. Such a historicized and frozen version of China continues to haunt the poetry of Chinese Americans as well as colors its public reception. Nonetheless, as the previous chapters attest to, the legacy of including images of Chineseness is a complex tradition with varying shades and levels of appropriation, mimicry, inspiration, and translation. While Pound’s interests in Chinese history and culture continue to delineate a certain image of China and accordingly circumscribe Chinese

American poetic production, they also nonetheless demonstrate the very real connections

American poetry evinces to both the language and literature of China.

My purpose throughout this project has been to actualize the conflicting currents set in motion by the Chinese influence on American poetry. At its base, the foregoing work aims to reimagine current approaches to modern American poetry so as to more adequately conceptualize the multiplicity of ways China inflects American poetic production. My intention in this brief conclusion, then, is to elucidate how my previous arguments may be extended in the classroom and in future studies to understand and combat stereotypical images of Chineseness.

Especially in our current “wired-in” and globalized society, students and scholars alike are

194 finding more and more cross-connections between seemingly unrelated national and cultural literary products. The profusion of multicultural classes in the wake of the cultural renaissances of the 1970s and 1980s and the subsequent proliferation of ethnic poems and texts continues to change the face of American poetry by challenging and widening its very nature. The culmination of these phenomena indicates that it is not only time for us to reevaluate on a more transnational scale the means by which authors are selected for canonization but also that is time for us to reassess our approaches to and understandings of the authors already enshrined there.

This is not to advocate that new critical work can only be done outside the borders of traditional

American criticism. Nor is it to serve an anti-multicultural multiculturalism that assumes if

American works are already inherently multicultural there is no need to reassess the American canon. Rather, the future of American studies depends upon a both/and approach. Such study would foreground the resonances suggested by the extensive interactions (both face-to-face and via texts and translations) of American poets with China while emphasizing the international impulses of many currently canonized poets. Whereas postcolonial and multicultural studies have traditionally relied on pinpointing cultural difference in an attempt to right discrimination, these fields must grow to encompass sites of borrowing and collaboration, not just resistance and imperialism. A genuine study of the generative possibilities of cross-cultural contact would do more than repair the broken metaphor of the melting pot; rather than assume the process of cultural transference always from the majority to the minority, it would actively explore the back and forth of contact without privileging one group over another thereby engendering a critical framework that resists Eurocentrism while not over-weighing the importance of other ethnic traditions.

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The type of comparative study I am encouraging here would likewise take into account the history of Chinese Americans and confront the way American images of China bolster the perception of Chinese Americans as foreign and Other. Despite the seeming success of the multicultural movement, Chinese Americans are often seen in terms of their Chineseness and not their Americanness. And, while Modernist constructions of Chineseness most often modulated on the basis of aesthetic ideas about China, these constructions nonetheless operate hand and hand with stereotypical assumptions predicated on the physical appearances of Chinese

Americans. Though present and participatory in American nation and capital building, they have long been regarded as foreigners. This identity is reflected in the “nicknames” historically ascribed to this group; both the “coolies” of the nineteenth century and the “model minority” of the twentieth connote Asian American difference; while the coolies were externalized as sojourners, the “model minority” epithet of the twentieth century moves Asian Americans outside of both dominant American and minority American paradigms alternately settling them in a limbo between the two groups.75 The daily result of these views has been variously illustrated by Asian American theorists and writers, each of whom describes his or her own story of the inevitable “Where do you come from” question. The gist of these stories can be summarized by my own witnessing of a similar event. Lara, a Stanford educated, American born

Asian American with a prestigious record of American service in both the Peace Corps and

Fulbright programs, is chatting with me about her experience in Mongolia when a bartender asks her “Hey, where are you from?” Lara replies “California.” Slightly flustered, the bartender asks again changing his intonation, “no, where are you from ?” Lara, understanding his meaning,

sighs and responds, “My parents are from China.” “Ahhh.” As the bartender turns back to his

75 The model minority stereotype also serves to buttress the myth of American equality by suggesting that minority success is predicated on personal choice and not affected in any way by racism. 196 work, Lara and I discuss the issues underlying his question. Lara has no foreign accent, and is dressed in typical American fashion; however, regardless of her “American” traits, her ethnicity marks her as foreign, apart from the Euro American mainstream. Ronald Takaki relates a similar story in the Introduction to Strangers from a Different Shore (3). Thus, regardless of the strides

made in recent years for cultural parity, Asian Americans often still invite unwanted curiosity

and scrutiny about their heritage due to their visible racial difference from Euro Americans.

While current mainstream multicultural 76 propaganda such as the image of the melting

pot suggests a dwindling of these views, the growth of China as a national power has resulted in

heightened tensions, and the image of Chinese Americans as “outsiders” has been demonstrated

yet again through a discomfort with their perceived power in American politics. This fact was

unfortunately reified by the National Review’s March 1997 cover which presents President

Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Vice President Al Gore all in caricatured yellow-face to allude to

alleged campaign funding scandals. Though the cartoon itself is scandalous enough – in it both

Clintons possess buck-teeth and slanted, squinting eyes – it is perhaps the response of the

Democratic National Committee to these allegations that fully explores the extent to which Asian

Americans – and Chinese American in particular – continue to be viewed as outside,

inassimilable aliens. In order to satiate the larger demands of the public, the DNC began

contacting contributors with Asian American names and “demand[ed] they verify their status as

citizens or permanent residents” (Lee 4). As Lee explains, Asian Americans who refused to turn

over personal financial information were “threatened” and additionally investigated by the FBI.

Documentation of legal American citizenship did not prove enough for Chinese Americans;

instead, the perceived allegiance of Chinese Americans to their “home” country led investigators

76 By mainstream multiculturalism, I mean the non-critical multiculturalism Stanley Fish critiques in his essay “Boutique Multiculturalism.” 197 and the public at large to believe substantial contributions were gathered from Communist China.

This inability to separate Chinese Americans from Chinese was undergirded by a survey distributed by the Anti-Defamation League. In the survey, out of “1,216 randomly selected adult

Americans, close to half thought that Chinese Americans “passing secrets to the Chinese government is a problem” (I. Chang 396).

Though some of the foregoing incidents may seem innocent enough, the continuing perception of Asian Americans as foreign does not always end in a polite explanation of one’s family heritage. The labeling of Chinese Americans as “outsiders” forever connected and allegiant to China regardless of their cultural removal belies an American xenophobia that when unchecked can manifest itself in potentially harmful ways; the internment of Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor stands as a historic reminder. Racial hate crimes against Asian

Americans continue today, and, interestingly, many of these confrontations arise from Asian

American stereotypes. In 1982, Chinese American Vincent Chin was killed in Detroit in 1982 for being a “jap” who endangered American jobs. Graduate student Lili Wang was murdered in

2002 for refusing the advances of a European American attracted to Asian American women for their docility and submissiveness. The spy plane incident of April 2001, when a Chinese fighter pilot collided with an American surveillance plane, further served to fuel Anti-Chinese American sentiment. Springfield deejays placed crank calls to Chinese Americans and advocated Chinese restaurants be boycotted while a national talk show host went so far as to propose Chinese

American internment (I. Chang 396). As Iris Chang perceptively notes, such actions signaled to

Chinese Americans that their acceptance “was linked to the ever-shifting relations between the

United States and China rather than to their own particular behavior” (397).

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Despite the expansive corpus of critical literature aimed at correcting such misperceptions as well as the canon wars and the multicultural movements of the 1980s and

1990s, we have yet to dispel the trenchant and varied stereotypes of “the foreigner within” (Lowe

6). This is due in part to the lack of a sustained critical pedagogy that addresses the issues at hand in teaching Chinese American literature. As Laurie Grobman points out, we have

“adequately addressed changing the texts we bring to class but inadequately addressed what we do with those texts in the classroom” (221). Yet, as my discussion of John Yau intimates, perhaps an “adequate” revision still falls short of moving beyond existing literary paradigms.

Too often, the failure to successfully incorporate a variety of Chinese American texts into already existing curricula unwittingly reinforces stereotypes. This lack of diverse Chinese

American voices denies the long historical, cultural, and political tenure of these citizens and gives credence to stereotypical ideas envisioning Chinese Americans as a lately arrived (and staunchly foreign) immigrant group.

Reevaluating American poetry in more international terms may help address some of these misperceptions by necessarily interrogating the different images of Chineseness presented throughout these texts. If both Pound’s idea of China and the images of China produced by writers like Yau and Harte represent different versions of “Chineseness,” a more accurate picture which includes the history of immigration of Chinese to America and the establishment of a diasporic culture alongside Imagism’s mimicry of the initial departure point of this diaspora needs to be promulgated. Foregrounding the less-confronted and more ambiguous texts concerning China and Chinese Americans against the currently circulated (mis)understandings of both manifests a more authentic collage which may enable racial and political parity on the part of Chinese Americans. In addition, understanding these writers as both extensions of the

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American poetic tradition as well as extensions of other cultural poetic lineages constructs a vision of modern American poetry that is at once both more cohesive and more diverse. Though much work has already been done with respect to China and Modernism by authors like Kern and Qian, many anthologies and critical studies still situate Pound and American Modernism as largely European American events, effectively glossing over the very real international exchanges occurring in the early 1900s. 77 While some textbooks have begun to address this

lacuna by including a paragraph or two about Modernism’s interaction with China, none situate

this ascendancy sociohistorically so as to question the inconsonance of these poetic borrowings

against a growing Chinese American populace. Tracing how Modernism both participates in the

perpetuation of aesthetic stereotypes through its deployment of images of Chineseness and at the

same time paved the way for Chinese American writers is necessary.

Mobilizing poetic voices that round out the full length and breadth of Chinese American

poetry and paralleling these works against those of writers like Pound invites a fuller image of

the presentation and use of Chineseness in American poetry. For instance, incorporating

comparative teaching tactics that set the poetry of the inmates of Angel Island side by side with

Ezra Pound’s Cathay extends the goals of critical multiculturalism by expanding current

definitions of literature and challenging the parameters by which previous literary standards were

erected. 78 Just as Pound imagined China through his work with Fenollosa and Binyon, these

77 Yunte Huang notes, “most studies of Imagism either ignore its intrinsic cross-culturalism by presenting a myopic nativist account of this exhilarating episode of America’s transpacific experience or disregard the significant ethnographic aspect of Imagism, which has much larger cultural implications than the model of comparative poetics can recognize. They either conceive of Imagism as a modern revolt against the poetry of the immediate past that took place inside the Anglo-American literary tradition or regard it merely as an interlingual, aesthetic project devoid of ethnographic contents” (15). 78 As David Palumbo-Liu summarizes, the purpose of critical multiculturalism is “to recover the marks of historical and ideological contradiction and to map out possible spaces of resistance” (2). Fundamental to this process is the eschewal of what Anna-Louise Keating calls the “commonsense” idea that “ethnic identities are permanent, unchanging categories of meaning based on biology, family, history, and 200

Chinese immigrants only imagined the U.S. from their internment on Angel Island. Kept from coming ashore by racist laws, they recorded their imaginings of the U.S. on the walls of the barracks that confined them. Setting these voices side by side gives agency to these immigrants as well as posits a deeper lineage of Chinese American poetic writing. In addition, reading these

Chinese language poems as American poetry questions seemingly static terms such as literature, identity, and nation. Such historical contextualization moves beyond the binary of Said’s

Orientalism and Qian’s liberal pluralism. Rather than casting all borrowings as imperialistic or uncritically multicultural, the recuperation of the poetic voices of these Chinese Americans allows for their agency as well as demonstrates the contested texture of such borrowings. The formal style and juxtapositions in many of the Angel Island poems recalls similar forms in the works of Snyder and Pound. In addition, presenting the original Chinese poems next to word- for-word translations invites students to assess both the liberties Pound took with the Chinese language as well as the beauty and innovation he was able to achieve through his translational poetics.

Following the intersection of these poetic traditions forward to the work of Marilyn Chin and John Yau emphasizes the ways in which China – and Modernism’s conception of it – continues to modulate in American poetics. Chin’s poems confront the images of Chineseness handed down by Modernism as well as contradict stereotypical renderings. Acting in concert with much of the prevalent work in Asian American studies, Chin provides a clear understanding of the difficulties faced by Chinese American poets. In addition, her work confronts and dispels many of the more stereotypical ideas of Chineseness. Unlike Chin, Yau, a poet admittedly affected by Pound’s Cathay as well as one with natal ties to China, examines and complicates the

tradition” (96). Instead, critical multiculturalism reveals the interplay and construction of complex hybrid identities by locating analysis on both the collaboration and conflict inherent in their creation. 201 generative results of Modernism’s dialogue with China. Yau’s poetry, though indebted to Pound, uses subtle formal nuances to question static representations of identity and the possibility of unmediated speech. Through his elliptical syntax and distrust of the lyric I, Yau echoes and extends the experiments of many of the most innovative American poets writing today.

Including both Yau and Chin underscores the hybridity of Chinese American poetic production while extending and challenging current conceptions of both Chineseness and American poetry.

Such study of the poetic representations of Chineseness from these different angles also requires expanding our scholarly business to include the literary histories of various other cultural traditions. As critics like Guiyou Huang, Ming Xie, and Wai-lim Yip have explored,

Pound’s poetics are informed by his study of Chinese language, literature, and culture.

Furthermore, as I discuss in Chapter Three in terms of the Chinese character 新, certain Chinese ideas and poetics have been passed down to those poets in the Poundian line. Acknowledging and examining texts such as the Da Xue (大學) as well as the work of poets like Tu Fu ( 杜

甫)and Li Po (李白) alongside study of American poetry broadens our understanding and appreciation of a number of poems which allude to these texts. Whereas study of Greek and

Roman literature claims a space in most high school curricula, devoting time to the study of

Chinese texts would suggest additional resonances and invite new readings. Perhaps more importantly, though, engaging these Asian texts fulfils the tenets of critical multiculturalism by shifting the parameters generally used to evaluate American poetry. Instead of relying solely on reading practices informed by European tropes, symbols, and inferences, students would be asked to include Chinese literary traditions as part of the constitutive framework of current

American poetry.

202

Like Yunte Huang, I believe “literature does its cultural work not only by passively reflecting social reality but also by actively producing and changing reality” (186 emphasis mine ). As a scholar and teacher, my greatest efficacy lies in shifting and extending canonical readings of American poetry through broadening the frame by which it is approached. This project has aimed to do just that; by creating a dialogue between a number of different American poets, each transformed in some way by Chinese literature, and reading these poets as indicative of their specific historical moments, my work encourages seeing such a “new reality” of the embedded nature of Chinese language, literature, and culture in much American poetry as well as the conflicts and contradictions inherent in these images of Chineseness. Ultimately, I hope my work has succeeded in complementing the existing canon of literature on China and Modernism by extending it to assess the ramifications of Modernism’s interest in China on later American poets and Chinese American poets in particular. While my study has necessarily focused on

Chineseness and modern American poetry, additional studies of both Chinese and other international influences on the full spectrum of American literature are still needed. I anticipate future studies will continue my interrogation of the increasing globalization of many countries’ modern textual products and the possibilities of recognizing and confronting, without favoring, these globalized roots against traditional national-based scholarship. Investigating the interstices of these lines of inquiry offers a rich future to critical studies.

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