When Ping arrives to live in New Zealand in the 1960s, the young mother from Hong Kong is expecting “paradise”. On her first night, Ping compares her new home with her homeland.
Category Archive: Poetry
A family grocery store is the primary backdrop for Korean American writer Rosanna Young Oh’s debut poetry collection The Corrected Version: a backdrop refracted by memory and myth. Taken at face value, the grocery store—owned and run by Oh’s immigrant parents—represents the regular mundanity, tediousness and humiliation that accompanies the experience of starting over in America.
Sweet malida is a dish made from rice grains softened in water mixed with sugar and dried fruit and nuts. It’s enjoyed in Afghan, Indian and Pakistani homes, and it’s also a dish popular with the Bene Israel, a Jewish community with a 2000 year history in India. Zilka Joseph has written before about her Bene Israel background, but her new book, Sweet Malida: Memories of a Bene Israel Woman, is a more vivid account of the origins of the Bene Israel and its many delicious culinary dishes.
When Mark Twain interviewed the leader of the Mormon Church, Brigham Young, in 1861, he found the religious patriarch mightily preoccupied with the problems of equal treatment for his 56 wives. Young told Twain of gifting a handkerchief or a fan to one woman; before long, all the other wives clamored for similar attentions. Polygamy’s downside provides the starting point for the epic poem, The Theft of a Tree, composed in classical Telegu by Nandi Timmana for Krishnadeveraya, ruler of the 16th century, south Indian, Vijayanagara empire. Surely the maharaja, with three documented consorts, could relate to the problem described by Brigham Young. And surely, he would have been enchanted by the poetic treatment accorded to it by his court poet.
Deeply experimental, creative and thought-provoking, From From by leading Korean-American poet Monica Youn, looks at the complexity of race through myths, history and popular culture, comparing the ways “otherness” is seen in both East Asian and Western cultures and norms. Through these complex, original and tragic-comic poems, the poet explores the deep roots of human fear or hysteria against other bodies.
Issues of identity take center stage in Mary Jean Chan’s new poetry collection Bright Fear. Chan’s poems deal with a variety of uncomfortable personal experiences: growing up queer in a Chinese household, dealing with racism and racial prejudice when moving to the United Kingdom, and grappling with learning—and then eventually writing in and making a career out of—the “colonial language”, as Chan puts it, of English.
“Take up the White Man’s burden— / Send forth the best ye breed— / Go bind your sons to exile / To serve your captives’ need,” starts Rudyard Kipling’s notorious poem of American expansionism in the Philippines, “The White Man’s Burden”. Those lines will ring familiar to many, particularly those who have received an education in the United States—so widely has the poem become emblematic of American imperialism and the “civilizing mission” during the 19th and 20th centuries.