APIAnionated: A self fragmented by diaspora: A Review of Emily Lee Luan’s 回 / Return

In Emily Lee Luan’s 回 / Return, war, and language, and motherhood all coalesce. This poetry collection, moving fluidly between languages, geographies, and time, is deeply rooted in silence, inherited history, and the experience of exile, both linguistic and geographic. 回 / Return engages, through poems that linguistically move fluidly between Chinese and English, in multifaceted ways with questions of the nation, motherhood, war, and loss, and ultimately, always circling what it means to be in diaspora, in loss of language and of homeland. Throughout the collection, there’s a striking, deeply loving voice that echoes, always. Even in spaces not explicitly about motherhood, Luan’s compassionate love for homeland, for mother, for history, for all that is left behind voluntarily or involuntarily is always present. Luan’s poems are reminiscent of both the formally inventive, sparse poetry of poets like Don Mee Choi and Myung Mi Kim, and also of the lyrically-abundant poetry of poets like Suji Kwock Kim and Aria Aber, with language equally economical and luxurious as it grapples with the after-effects of war across generations.

In “Ars Poetica,” more than halfway into the collection, Luan writes: “I’ve been / bitter, sick for home, bought flower bulbs / just to capture them folding inside out.” (65) I find this articulation of Luan’s project here particularly compelling — the tension of “bitter” and “sick” alongside the “flower bulbs,” followed by the attempt to document. Loss is contained alongside love in these poems, always guided by a desire to document history, language, and family. In diaspora, the only possibility for Luan is to document the loss she lives with in exile. In “Ars Poetica,” Luan combines the interior landscapes of the speaker’s affective response to loss and longing for home with images of nature, that are economical in how they are used, even if not in language — the image of the leaf recurs thrice, alongside abundant lines chronicling the speaker’s desires and losses. Luan writes: “Walk me along / the barren summer to cacti withering / on the avenue. I’ll break my finger into bleeding.” (65) While this poem does not feature Luan’s formal inventiveness that appears elsewhere in the collection, as the ars poetica of 回 / Return, it situates Luan’s project: lyrically abundant poetry that utilizes the possibilities of the economy of language in order to understand the affective experience of exile, both linguistic and geographic.

Luan opens the first poem of the collection, “Elision,” with the lines “My mother’s mother grew up under Japanese occupation.” (1) I’m struck by how this opening line immediately gets at the three central themes that shape and organize this collection — war and its aftermath, motherhood and daughterhood, and the tensions of language — the resonance of “mother’s mother,” combined with the echoes of the nation, war, and belonging that follow from the mention of Japanese occupation. But most importantly, motherhood, in many ways, grounds this collection, roots it in the immediacy of family, before the broader tensions of belonging to the nation. The first word of these poems then is “my,” situating the speaker’s self immediately in relation to her mother, her mother’s mother. Lineage shapes this collection immediately as it begins, and so as we move forward here, we are always carrying the weight of the past, its echoes shaping Luan always.

Melancholy and loss always shapes these poems. In “When My Sorrow Was Born,” Luan personifies the affect of sorrow, reclaiming the experience of sorrow, letting it linger. Luan’s poems, full of nuance and complexity, never shy away from loss and loneliness and the bitterness of her exiles. In giving voice to sorrow, Luan finds and constructs a self fragmented by diaspora: “And my Sorrow let me say I, I, mine.” (6) The emphasis here on the self, repeated thrice at the end of the line reminds us, early on in the collection, of this speaker’s desire to find a self amidst language. The poem ends with the line: “We waited for my Joy to come.” (6) And joy exists here briefly, only as possibility, never in the space of the poem itself, but yet, Luan finds comfort in lingering in sorrow, in what is present in the immediacy of her exile, yet simultaneously hopeful for the possibility of the future.

Formally inventive, these poems always circle what it means to be a self in loss of homeland. In a later poem, “I can’t go back,” the only text is the line “I was born here,” repeated over and over again, in the shape of a cylinder that closes inward. Here, we feel, visually, the claustrophobia of the line collapsing inward in the image. Luan’s economy of language is on display here — with one line, she creates a resonant image anchored in the racism she must respond to as a diasporic Asian American woman in the United States. The tension of place is ever present, with the tension of the “back” in the title, and the “here” of the poem. As she too is trapped in the claustrophobic in-between geography, the image, too, echoes the emotional affect of this: two cylinders of “I was born here” on two ends, both collapsing inwards into three circular planes.

Language is especially central, and in these poems that move between Chinese and English, we are always reminded that ultimately, it all comes back to language. Language shapes how the world is experienced here; in one delightfully experimental poem, “My Grandfather Returns to 兗州 After the War,” Luan moves fluidly between English and Chinese, prose and fragment, through sections connected by abundant white space. Generationally, too, here, we are reminded always that to leave is perpetual, as all her grandfather’s losses come through, even in the sparseness of the page. And later in a prose poem, “何處別魂銷?” documenting the relationship of the grandfather and granddaughter that are all titled in Chinese, the densely packed text of the prose poem form stands in direct contrast to the white space of the earlier poem about the grandfather. Here, Luan writes: “My grandfather brings me to the old family well. It’s just a cylinder of stones in a yellow field, and the sky is grey. We are in no country.” (48) Again, even as Luan returns to the past, two generations before the speaker’s self, we are still always reminded that the nation is impossible; here, language makes meaning, affect makes meaning.

Luan’s poems are formally, experimentally, and lyrically rich and luxurious, always reminding us of the fraught, tense nature of exile and diasporic belonging. 回 / Return is always deeply rooted in the work of Asian American women poets who come before Luan, drawing on a long lineage of writing exile and diaspora. Luan’s inventiveness with language, generosity with the self, and reminders of possibility anchor this collection; always, we are reminded of the compassionate love for home, exile, and family that shapes this collection.