Seems to me we have had an awful lot of discussions recently about biography, autobiography and their roles in the writing of poetry. So I thought I would highlight two poets today: one, a contemporary woman writer, Chinese-American and the other, a classic(al) Chinese master from the Tang Dynasty (8th Century A.D.) whom the modern writer credits as influencing her own work.

This OPP will be put up in four consecutive posts, beginning with the more modern writer, Marilyn Chin. In order not to break the flow of the piece, would you please hold your responses until the series is completed? Thanks very much and of course, when it's up, "Thursday OPP, please comment." A-p.

"How I Got That Name
an essay on assimilation"

I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin.
Oh, how I love the resoluteness
of that first person singular
followed by that stalwart indicative
of "be," without the uncertain i-n-g
of "becoming." Of course,
the name had been changed
somewhere between Angel Island and the sea,
when my father the paperson
in the late 1950s
obsessed with a bombshell blonde
transliterated "Mei Ling" to "Marilyn."
And nobody dared question
his initial impulse for we all know
lust drove men to greatness,
not goodness, not decency.

******************************­*********

(pub. credits to follow in
subsequent post)

Activist poet Marilyn Chin was born in Hong Kong in 1955, where her father ran a restaurant. As a child, Chin immigrated to the United States and was raised in Portland, Oregon. Chin received her B.A. in Chinese Literature from the University of Massachusetts (1977) and a M.F.A from the University of Iowa (1981). Chin is the author of three distinguished collections of poetry, including Dwarf Bamboo (Greenfield Review Press, 1987), The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty (Milkweed Editions, 1994), and more recently Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (Norton 2002). In the late 1970s, Chin was also a translator for the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, where she co-translated The Selected Poems of Ai Qing with Eugene Eoyang. A widely-acclaimed and recognized poet and social activist, Chin has won numerous awards for her poetry, including two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Stegner Fellowship, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, four Pushcart Prizes, a Fulbright Fellowship, and numerous residencies. In addition, Chin's work can be found in a variety of anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Unsettling America, The Open Boat, and The Best American Poetry of 1996. Her poetry was also featured in Bill Moyers's PBS series The Language of Life.

There is more in her bio. which relates specifically to her drawing upon family, historic and ethnic-cultural roots but I don't want to spoil anyhone's fun, so will let them find it and post here. :-) (Sorry for the delays, I had these quotes all set up on WORD but sometimes with Macs and Mozilla Firefox and the Slate, one can lose things 'in translation.l"

Her poem "Family Restaurant" follows in the next post.

"Family Restaurant"

Empty Lotus Room, no patrons

Only a telephone rings and rings

Muffled by an adjoining wall,

He murmurs to a distant lover

His wife head-bent peeling shrimp

Hums an ancient tune about magpies

His daughter wide-eyed, little fists

Vows never to forgive him

His shadow enters the deep forest

Blackening the shimmering moss."

****************************

in her commentary on this poem, which I have been unable to copy over properly (sorry), Chin writes that the poem is a reference to "Deer Park," a famous quatrain or "chueh-chu" by the famed Chinese poet, Wang Wei. And more on him, in the next post. (I hope)

I.

“Seeing Off Yuan the Second on a Mission to Anxi”


"At Weicheng morning-rain has dampened light dust,
By the hostel, the willows are all fresh and green.
I urge my friend to drink a last cup of wine,
West of Yang Pass, there will be no friends."

II.

“A Song of a Girl from Loyang”

"There's a girl from Loyang in the door across the street,
She looks fifteen, she may be a little older.
...While her master rides his rapid horse with jade bit an bridle,
Her handmaid brings her cod-fish in a golden plate.
On her painted pavilions, facing red towers,
Cornices are pink and green with peach-bloom and with willow,
Canopies of silk awn her seven-scented chair,
And rare fans shade her, home to her nine-flowered curtains.
Her lord, with rank and wealth and in the bud of life,
Exceeds in munificence the richest men of old.
He favours this girl of lowly birth, he has her taught to dance;
And he gives away his coral-trees to almost anyone.
The wind of dawn just stirs when his nine soft lights go out,
Those nine soft lights like petals in a flying chain of flowers.
Between dances she has barely time for singing over the songs;
No sooner is she dressed again than incense burns before her.
Those she knows in town are only the rich and the lavish,
And day and night she is visiting the hosts of the gayest mansions.
...Who notices the girl from Yue with a face of white jade,
Humble, poor, alone, by the river, washing silk?"

III.

“Answering Vice-Prefect Zhang”

"As the years go by, give me but peace,
Freedom from ten thousand matters.
I ask myself and always answer:
What can be better than coming home?
A wind from the pine-trees blows my sash,
And my lute is bright with the mountain moon.
You ask me about good and evil fortune?....
Hark, on the lake there's a fisherman singing!"

IV.

“Bound Home to Mount Song”


"The limpid river, past its bushes
Running slowly as my chariot,
Becomes a fellow voyager
Returning home with the evening birds.
A ruined city-wall overtops an old ferry,
Autumn sunset floods the peaks.
...Far away, beside Mount Song,
I shall close my door and be at peace."

*************************

Wang Wei, 701-761 A.D. was a Chinese nobleman, prominent in the High Tang Dynasty, poet, painter (none of whose paintings still exist, sadly), calligrapher and Chancellor of China from 758 to 759 A.D.
Because many of his poems are set in the countryside and express a simple, nature-oriented Zen-like mindset, people often mistake him for a simple countryman, Chin writes. But he was, indeed, a high-ranking member of the Chinese nobility.

Because Wang's poems are so set in their place and time, and convey so much of both to us, all these years later, I enjoy them both within their historic context and as individual poems, on their own merit. Chin has written fairly extensively on the importance of the Chinese roots to her contemporary writing and I will leave it to the rest of you, if interested, to find those writings and discuss them here.

Personally, I have drawn a bit on my own Greek (and Levantine- and subject of Turkish imperialism) and Greek-American roots in a few of my poems and wonder if anyone else here does, as well. All comments on Marilyn Chin, her work, her life, and on the work of Wang Wei are welcomed. Sorry for the delay; I really did have all the selections set up last night but then my lack of ability in moving around on a Mac laptop and trying to coordinate same with the SLATE pages, held me up. Thanks for sticking with me, to this point, if you have!

Xie Xie Ni,

A-p.

Hi moonbird, what are "ganus?" and what do you think of the poems?

Zai Jian! A-p.

If it's good enough for a Tuesday Pinsky Pick, it's good enough for a Thursday OPP.

Rewriting Chin's "How I Got That Name" as a Limerick
by NoStar

I am called Marilyn Mei Ling Chin
That's why cultural confusion sets in
Although I am asian
My name is caucasian
Dad loved that blonde star, Marilyn

Very good & now this OPP has truly arrived. On a more serious note, anything to say about her poems or Wang's?

(AND NOT the rooster thing, please. You'll notice that poem did not make it onto the thread!)

Dang, but you are clever. "Mei," btw, means Sister in Mandarin and MeiMei means "Little Sister."

Hi Antipasto,

Here are a couple of translations of Wang Wei's "Deer Park" to complement Chin's reference to the poem in her own poem. Apparently there are some references to Buddhism in the poem.

Empty mountains:
no one to be seen.

Yet - hear -
human sounds and echoes.

Returning sunlight
enters the dark woods;

Again shining
on the green moss, above.

tr. Gary Snyder, 1978

No one seen. Among empty mountains,
hints of drifting voice, faint, no more.
Entering these deep woods, late sunlight
flares on green moss again, and rises.

tr. David Hinton, 2006

Thanks, Mary Ann. Of course, I wanted to post one version of it, but kept losing that cite. I like the way she 'echoes' the last two lines of Deer Park, in Family Restaurant.

Assume you'll be posting a bit more here, no? Would like to see your take on the ancestors connection, or anything else you would like to contribute, of course. In her Norton essay, Chin writes that How I Got That Name" is her most anthologized poem, which I found interesting.

Thanks again, XieXie Ni, A-p.

Here is a Web page that cites the same poem -- apparently there is more to it than is even on that page (if I'm to understand "from" in that sense). The page adds a few more lines at the end than Antipasto has cited:

I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin
Oh, how I love the resoluteness
of that first person singular
followed by that stalwart indicative
of "be," without the uncertain i-n-g
of "becoming." Of course,
the name had been changed
somewhere between Angel Island and the sea,
when my father the paperson
in the late 1950s
obsessed with a bombshell blond
transliterated "Mei Ling" to "Marilyn."
And nobody dared question
his initial impulse--for we all know
lust drove men to greatness,
not goodness, not decency.
And there I was, a wayward pink baby,
named after some tragic white woman
swollen with gin and Nembutal.”

– From “How I Got My Name”

Marilyn (who is only four years older than I, BTW) writes as well as any modern poet I've ever seen, at least by the standards I use to judge. She communicates -- as one would expect, for no activist would get very far if he or she wrote only for self-gratification or for a elitist peer group.

There is a bit of judgmentalism in the poem, which (as you might guess) I don't concur with at all:

his initial impulse--for we all know
lust drove men to greatness,
not goodness, not decency.

"We all know" nothing of the kind, even in this present evil world. I would argue that if Marilyn really thinks that, then either she is a dyed-in-the-wool cynic or else has never met any really great men (or women). What she says was evidently true of her father, as it was true of many in Marilyn Monroe's era (and is still true of many in this American Idol era). But then as now, there were some who sought to overcome the human nature we all have in common, and the world is not worthy of them.

I do wonder why Marilyn hasn't changed her formal name back to its original Chinese form. Perhaps by keeping her name as it is, she tries to argue against (or at least point out) the very ambiguity of identity she faces as an "Asian-American".

wr ()()

Marilyn Chin's "How I Got My Name" is a long, 4-part poem. Here is the entire poem --

<link>

I like her irony and anger toward her father in parts 1 + 3, her intermingling of Chinese and American references in part 2, and her acceptance of herself as both Chinese AND American in part 4.

(Chin's father was, indeed, a jerk. No only did he re-name his daughter after Marilyn Monroe, but he eventually left his wife and married a white woman. No wonder Chin is so angry.)

MA

I love classical Chinese poetry in translation, and Wang Wei's moves me the most of any I've yet seen. Such florid, yet simple and clear language. No one but someone intimately familiar with the astonishing luxury of the Chinese Imperial Court and the timeless beauty of China itself could write things like this.

Permit me then to wander off in some geopolitical musings inspired by the awesome level of culture that Wang Wei's poetry invokes...

The Middle East may be the true geographic center of the world, but it's not as if China has always called itself the Middle Kingdom for nothing. Even from high antiquity, it has always been the world's most populous nation, if I read my history right -- and for long centuries, one of the wealthiest. Isolated, yet in its own way central in the world (if one takes the Pacific Ocean's hemisphere and our present International Date Line rather than our present Prime Meridian as central), it has always been self-sufficient. Even at the height of the Roman Empire, there was nothing Rome could offer China in trade that China needed or wanted, save gold.

I understand that China today sees the last two centuries of Anglo-American (and Russian) dominance in the world as an historical aberration, and has ambitions to reassert itself accordingly. Talk about "never tickle a sleeping dragon" (the motto of Harry Potter's school of wizardry, as I recall)...

Thanks, Antipasto!

wr ()()

There is a bit of judgmentalism in the poem, which (as you might guess) I don't concur with at all:

his initial impulse--for we all know
lust drove men to greatness,
not goodness, not decency.

"We all know" nothing of the kind, even in this present evil world. I would argue that if Marilyn really thinks that, then either she is a dyed-in-the-wool cynic or else has never met any really great men (or women).

Hi Rabbit,

Chin is, I think, being ironic (saracastic) when she says "we all know..." since it's obvious that we DON'T all feel that way. Perhaps she's mocking the Chinese for not accepting the lustful ways of their men.

I very much like your last paragraph, and agree keeping the name "Marilyn Chin" does, indeed, reflect her dual identity.

MA

This is a very powerful emotional poem of an almost stereotypical (Chinese) stoicism in the face of betrayal, as I read it.

That the tune she hums is about magpies* (known for stealing other's treasure, indiscriminately) and that the tune is ancient, evoking the wife's link to centuries of wives and mothers left "peeling shrimp" with their "head bent" in seeming pained acquiescence as their husbands wander ... is particularly vivid. The daughter might seem a trifle too clichéd in her response and yet such is the more absolutist idealism of the young...

*Hm, well that is what I wrote before deciding to check for other possible symbolisms and sure enough, according to wikipedia:

In Chinese culture, the magpie is one of the most popular birds, and is seen as the messenger of good news and fortune. In fact, its name in Chinese means "bird of joy". Magpies also feature in the Chinese folktale of "The Story of Cowherd and Weaver Girl" (among others), where they form a bridge for the separated lovers every year on the day of Qixi.

Yet, the poet is a Chinese-American woman. Is she deftly drawing on both cultures here in this poem-in-English? An image of the betrayed wife both appealing to a daydream of joy but also telling herself the phoning lover is a magpie in the American sense of an indiscriminate 'collector'/thief? and thereby humming a tune that gets back at her husband by envisioning the woman on the phone as being indiscriminate?

The title "Family Restaurant" is also "loaded." While on the surface, it evoked memories of the film Eat Drink Man Woman, instead it was a more knife-in-the-heart kind of perspective of what kind of 'cutlery' makes this family restaurant tick. Inside, the Lotus Room, named for the beautiful, tranquil and sacred flower, is empty. Perhaps one allusion too many, but "lotus foot" also is a term for the terrible inhumane practice of foot-binding, which reminded a woman/wife of "her place" in a patriarchal society: that horrific practice per se may be history, but the symbols of subservience persist in this family restaurant's kitchen.

*

T, I had trouble parsing a line in the first poem of Chin's above, "How I Got My Name," and I went searching to see if there was in fact something that the fray machine might have chewed up in the post to account for it, only to discover -- which you probably already knew but didn't mention, that I saw -- that you only posted the very beginning first lines of that poem (indeed there was no chewed-up line, it seems, but also the poem is comprised of four sections and the opening stretch you presented is not quite half of just the first section).

So for anyone ignorant of the poem as I was, here is a link to the full poem:

<link>

But i'm still baffled by this line:

when my father the paperson

?? "paperson" ??

Also, I found two other poems of hers here:

<link>

The "Floral Apron" poem seems to share a spirit as well as physical setting with "Family Restaurant."

And there's a full website elucidation on her work by Cary Nelson here:

<link>