Feng Na, Chinese Poetics and Chiasmus
When I’d just gotten Feng Na’s poems published in this last edition of Drunken Boat, Trump had won, which meant something very new for a group of people among which I count myself — returnees from the diaspora, people who’d decided, after being told for twenty years that there was a string hitched to our feet, to see where that string ran from. I’d been spending summers in China since I was little: I saw it as the place I’d get a bit of oomph to triumph over the bland, white culture I’d grown up in, so powerful that it could make itself unseen, claim to be not white culture, but culture par excellence. Which is why the first attempts at fiction I wrote suffered, I think, from imposter syndrome. Hard not to want to feign Protestantism, immerse myself in suburban drives and waffle houses, when people like me in the books were bucktoothed and shifty-eyed, or, if the books were contemporary, brainy but inarticulate. I got over that, of course, but China remained a place from which I got stories — exotic currency — which my friends who pretended to cosmopolitanism had never seen. It never occurred to me that the opposite would happen, that one day I would have to explain to my Chinese classmates what gerrymandering was, why so many people — white people, no less — were suddenly afraid. These were the liberals, I told them. They are thunderstruck at having been called to a fight they never believed was real. To them, before now, racial difference is like a cereal ad.
I came up with an easier image. Imagine glass. Imagine all the birds who kill themselves smacking themselves on what they don’t see, what they think is air. Imagine a bird — poor bird, huh — that flies so fast, so tremendously fast, into the glass that its body cracks that surface. You’ve seen a pane of glass crack? The cracks radiate out, like a spiderweb, from the point of impact. Take this bird, and imagine he is a dead black boy. Now no one, not even the millionaires who made the glass, can pretend it’s not there. And the other people, the ones who bought the glass just so they could make houses out of it and pretend it wasn’t there when all the poor black and yellow boys try to get in, now they can’t pretend anymore either.
That’s sort of what’s going on in America now, except it’s always been going on, and I’m just now old enough to see.
White precarity had become the subject of the day. And now I want to shift, for a bit, to Noam Chomsky’s speech on the climate summit in Marrakech. Chomsky, who must have felt the change happen too, said the climate summit was a “quite astounding spectacle”, because, now that Trump would begin rolling back the changes in environmental policy that Obama had made, “The hope of the world for saving us from this impending disaster was China — authoritarian, harsh China.”
And so chiasmus performs one’s duty to be humble, while absolving one of the hard work of learning, not how the other is, for a brief and convenient moment, “superior”, but how the other is different. And by difference I do not mean otherness, I mean a complex set of lived experiences which can seem as mundane as what time of day someone drinks tea, but which, taken in total, make intricate worlds of meaning.
Authoritarian, harsh China. It is not my intention to impugn Noam Chomsky’s progressivism, yet I will say, that in that moment, I found the rhetorical figure that he used discomfiting. It was, in the words of Eve Sedgewick, a chiasmus. Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country; it was not that I loved Caesar the less, but that I loved Rome the more; it’s when the going gets tough that the tough get going. As Sedgewick cannily points out, chiasmus can often work by masking a crisscrossing and uneven set of power relations with a catchy symmetry. By way of example she gives the phrase, A man’s home is his castle. “The man who has this home is a different person from the lord who has a castle; and the forms of property implied in the two possessives are not only different but…mutually contradictory”. So difference is turned into symmetry.
Chiasmus is something that well-meaning but uninformed liberals trip over themselves to make. Things subject to chiasmic valorization: poorer countries’ academic achievements, the kindness of blue-collar people, rare acts of goodwill by authoritarian leaders, black and brown (though not yellow) excellence. People like me, the returnees, the hyphens — British- and Canadian- and Australian- Chinese (if we are catering to a different crowd, we usually invert the scheme so that Chinese- goes first) are all too familiar with chiasmic inversions. They all tend to be, more or less, similar to Chompsky’s. Such inversions are ultimately disappointing because an American can conceivably do it with any culture they are unfamiliar with. Of course they’re better than us, goes the formula, I’m not surprised at all. Are you?
And so chiasmus performs one’s duty to be humble, while absolving one of the hard work of learning, not how the other is, for a brief and convenient moment, “superior”, but how the other is different. And by difference I do not mean otherness, I mean a complex set of lived experiences which can seem as mundane as what time of day someone drinks tea, but which, taken in total, make intricate worlds of meaning. And it is hard not to be threatened, not to be overwhelmed by that difference. One never escapes one’s small town roots. In Beijing, when I’m driving around in my Vespa, I always behave as I would in rural New Jersey — I drive, steadily and smoothly, on the side of the road. I’m unassuming. I never honk. Yet despite this, I am always overtaken by drivers, who, passing me by, slam their hands on their horns — a beat that’s either martial or flatulent or droning — I’ve heard them all. It always startles me. I know, abstractly, that I am wrong, having confused signal — here, in one of the most densely packed cities in the world, where honking is a courtesy-move, like calling, on your left — for noise. But in the moment, it is my suburban, polite-to-a-fault instincts that kick in, and I must try very hard not to think nasty thoughts about the person behind the wheel. Pile enough of these thoughts together and you get a disastrous result: an expat who, for all intents and purposes, “knows” an awful lot about what a loud and rude place Beijing is — no, what a loud, rude soul the Chinese person has. Who doesn’t, in other words, know a thing. This is the ugly side of a chiasmic inversion, a chiasmic inversion that has died on the lips of a person whose goodwill has run out and who has never really had to learn about the recipient of that goodwill.
I met Feng in one of my classes last year where she was a visiting speaker. My classmates were Slavic, Eastern European, Latin American, Thai. There were two other boys from the US. Feng was a friend of my professor’s — they’d met at Capital Normal University, where Feng lived as the university’s poet-in-residence (since concluded). We listened to Feng speak about her admiration for Karen Blixen, how Faulkner’s little quote about the postage stamp had helped her, as someone who was from rural Yunnan, and so on. She was speaking, of course, of mostly Western writers — not because she only read them, but because she rightly thought that they were the only names we would all know. My classmates kept quiet out of shyness, and I out of a sense of not wanting to be combative or showoffy — something I always do when impressed, or threatened. Our teacher tried to relieve the silence — she asked us whether we had questions, her eyes settling on mine. I looked away; the Thai student raised her hand. She asked Feng what sort of audience she wrote for. Feng said she didn’t couldn’t think about that — she could never know what sorts of people read her poems, and anyway, they are almost never who you expect them to be.
She thought about it, in other words, all the time. Consult “Whom Are Poems Written For”, for a fanciful, self-effacing take on this. Poems, the speaker tell us, are for:
Early risen travelers, sweepers of snow,
mothers departing sickbed-ridden lives,
mountaineers who find wisdom in the wingbeats of a moth.
The tramp leaning on a tree thinks suddenly of a guitar twanging at home.
To fell a tree in winter, someone else must pull the rope,
a singular work
to make the wood into boats, into vessels
for food, well water, crematory ash,
using the profits to bribe a callous hitman
who, however, finds himself in a hesitation like love.
A reader of poetry mistakes the poet’s meaning.
Each gropes for the world’s switch amid her own darkness.
I’d read this before coming to class. It was, I think, one of the first Chinese poems I’d read which made me jealous the author hadn’t been me. Always a good sign, for translators. Feng, I was going to discover, was a poet who hated not confessionalism, but attempts to sensationalize the self—she’d been bothered by the recent popularity of a movement called “Below the Pants” poetry. One of its leading lights commonly publishes things like this:
Once
she was stopped by a couple of hoods
one of them squeezed my sister’s ass
said: not bad, feels like a persimmon
“Poems like these shouldn’t count as poetry,” she later told me.
Many of the poems in her new collection, Orchard of Numberless Lights, are about transit, migration, yearning, the great fight for recognition and the pain of its being denied us. But each passes a sort of aesthetic Turing test — they could be about her, but they could just be “figuration”. Of all the poems I have read by Feng Na, the one that is most painfully confessional is called “On My Thirtieth Birthday, an Earthquake”. Its speaker uses most of her lines to talk about her mother’s fragile, beloved body sleeping beside her, as the mountain near their home piles up under, and threatens to overspill with, snow. The final line is like a piece of ice dropped down the back: “Mother’s greatest fear is that there is not a younger man to love me.” As is often the case with Feng, a historical detail has intruded into descriptions of the natural world— hers is the first generation of Chinese women who are not getting married in their twenties, and who feel immense blowback from their friends and family— not just, as Feng has reminded me, from men.
In most popular Chinese shows now, there is a type, a woman professional, conspicuously single, that everyone is worried about. What’s wrong with her? She’s pretty enough. Is she too picky? Did she have a horrible ex? Does she — does she like men? For women like these, transgression is often as simple as dating casually. In “Searching for Cranes”, for example, the poet imagines going into the wilderness of Bayinbukele, Mongolia and having a failed tryst with a rearer of cranes: “She has a hundred and eight ways of hiding/ the rearer of cranes needs only one to find her:/ in Bayinbukele/ all the cranes he’s touched must come home to roost”. One hundred and eight is the number of heroes in The Water Margin, that crypto-anarcho epic from the Northern Song. Yet the romance here is Flaubertian, the speaker wanting to be pulled back, reigned in, and mastered.
So I wouldn’t presume to know who I write for, said Feng. She looked around, waiting to see if we had anything more to ask. When no one spoke, she said, with a bit of disappointment, that she supposed we weren’t too familiar with Chinese poetry.
Hold on, I said.
I’m afraid what I said next was huffy. I told her that I did, in fact, know something about Chinese poetry. In fact, what I “knew” came from a single volume of biographical essays about contemporary poets, so she wasn’t off the mark — yet isn’t it a single volume (or two, if you split the old and new testaments), stuffed into the hero’s dinner jacket, that stops the bullet? It was enough. The book had several essays on the prominent Misty Poets, and I’d read it meticulously enough to remember what some of them had done, what they’d been like. Gucheng, I said, was very good. What a gift for compression. But nearly impossible to translate. Yi dai ren just didn’t sound the same in English.
Well, said Feng, taken aback. And did I, perhaps, write poems myself?
I had, once. But I’d been quite bad at it.
But how did I know I was bad if I’d quit so early?
I hadn’t “quit”, exactly — I’d won one of those high school poetry contests, and self-published a little chapbook. But even then, I think, I knew I was an imposter.
But who could tell, if I’d only kept at it, what I might have produced? I could hardly call myself a “failed” poet if I was this young.
I had to take a breath. She was trying to console me, but I didn’t need consoling. I was trying to tell her that —
I don’t do poetry anymore, I said, because I’m more interested in prose. Essays, too. Translations.
By the end of the lecture, I’d given her my information.
In our correspondence since then, I’ve explained to her that poetry, of the kind I envied as a high schooler, was exactly the same as the fiction I wrote: I always found myself wanting to break off and talk about an imaginary China.
Feng and I have a long email correspondence. She became, I suppose, a pen pal before she became my working partner. Through our emails to one another, I learned that in China, most young poets, even good ones, had to self-publish. There are fellowships and grants and awards, of course, and with those come book deals, but she and several others she knew had had to put out several books with their own money, even after they’d secured a measure of fame. And speaking of books, she was surprised that in the states, people read pamphlets — chapbooks, I corrected — when she was only guaranteed publication of a book of poems if it was over 100 or so pages.
So it’s to be expected that Stephen Owen, an eminence of Chinese Classical Poetry at Harvard, would say in an interview that all contemporary Chinese poetry was inferior, because as long as it was trying to abide by Western forms, it would never catch up; he forgets to add that as long as he lives, he and the other gatekeepers will be sure to raise hell for scholars working in China to catch up to conservative East Asian Studies departments in the West.
In her first email, she’d attached her bio. Born in 1985 in Lijiang, Yunnan. A graduate of Sun Yatsen University, in Guangdong. A member of the Chinese Writer’s Association, and a commissioned writer for the Guangdong Literary Guild. Books include Searching for Cranes, A Season in Tibet, and Orchard of Numberless Lights. Winner of the Huawen Young Poet’s award, the Benteng Poetry Award. She’d made a valiant effort to translate the whole thing into English. She is learning English, and sometimes translates herself, but it’s hard going, and she started late— Feng often tells me what a great shame it is how few mainland Chinese poets speak fluent English.
China is still, on the whole, a monolingual country. This is hardly surprising — Bei Dao, its most international poet, and perhaps its best-known, was in his early teens when the Cultural Revolution struck. Before that, Russian was the only language most people bothered to learn. For years and years, owning certain types of foreign books — yellow or black, as they were called — could get you thrown in jail. One of my favorite poets, Ouyang Jianghe, got his start because his father, a cadre, had a secret store of these confiscated books — Ouyang frequently tells his students that despite all the honorary degrees he’s been awarded, his lack of a real degree means that all of us are luckier than he was. Nevertheless, it is almost certain that for him and other talents growing up in the 60s and 70s, this influx of foreign writing, combined with the tumult of the cultural revolution, resulted, in 80s, in their becoming the leaders of the second boom of Chinese literature. The first was the New Culture movement, whose 100th anniversary, depending how you draw the line, is this year. It was a movement, in many ways, more cosmopolitan than anything that came after. Many of its leaders, like Lu Xun or Hu Shi, came back from study abroad programs speaking two or three foreign languages.
The 80s was not quite the same. True, novelists like Ge Fei and Can Xue and Yu Hua began writing stories influenced by Freud, Kafka, and Borges — though these are just the Western writers that they claim as forebears, which one invariably has to do when one wants to be taken seriously. But it was translations of these modernist writers which they read.
Feng felt ambivalent about this — she appreciated that it was translated texts which had brought in something from the outside, but she had a word, fanyiti, which means “translationese”, for writing that has become indistinguishable from translations of foreign text. Chinese poems that sound awfully like fanyiti are often welcomed by, because they are legible to, Western readers. Partha Chatterjee has mentioned a similar dilemma that Bengali drama faces. “[It] had two models available to it: one, the modern European drama as it had developed since Shakespeare and Moliere, and two, the virtually forgotten corpus of Sanskrit drama, now restored to a reputation of classical excellence because of the praises showered on it by Orientalist scholars from Europe…their aesthetic conventions fail to meet the standards set by the modular literary forms adopted from Europe… Having created a modern prose language in the fashion of the approved modular forms, the literati, in their search for artistic truthfulness, apparently found it necessary to escape as often as possible the rigidities of that prose.” India is India, and China China. But replace “nationalist” art with “dissident” art, and the basic statement of where the power lies rings true. Can Xue, for example, is a beloved in the United States, but she is relatively unknown by the literate middle classes in China. On the other end, a Chinese poet like Haizi, whose poems most rural Chinese, though they might not have finished high school, can recite, head to tail, has suffered total international neglect, due, I think, to the fact that he’s neither a dissident nor a fancy formal innovator — he is, one might say, a romantic. As for the classical route, very few Chinese poets go it because, well, it’s considered pat — like an English writer’s deciding to try their hand at sonnets. So it’s to be expected that Stephen Owen, an eminence of Classical Chinese Poetry at Harvard, would say in an interview that all contemporary Chinese poetry was inferior, because as long as it was trying to abide by Western forms, it would never catch up; he forgets to add that as long as he lives, he and the other gatekeepers in conservative East Asian Studies departments in America will be sure to raise hell for scholars working in China. It’s to be expected, yet every time I think about it, I am still hurt.
Feng, when reading a draft of this article, thought I was being too political. She did not understand, for example, why I had to mention so many popular movements, why, moreover, I had to drag gender into it.
One can find, in Feng’s poems, two types of disavowal. There is ethnic disavowal, which succeeds in large part, I think, because Feng is “Han passing”. A quick note — race, in this country, is not talked about so much as ethnicity, and ethnic minorities, so designated by the government, are not always distinguishable by how they look, the color of their skin (though some ethnic minorities, like the Uighyrs, both dress and do look different). Rather, it is a combination of custom and tradition that determine one’s ethnicity. For many of these groups, to pass into Hanness is merely to move to the city and don a t-shirt and a pair of jeans. I’ve known several Chinese people who speak, wistfully, of their family being “Zhuang” or “Mongolian” or “Manchu”, the way many white Americans speak wistfully of being part Cherokee.
The speaker in “Birthplace”, for example, says:
People always bring up my birthplace，
a cold Yunannese place with camellias and pines.
It taught me Tibetan, and I forgot.
It taught me a tenor; I have not yet sung
in that register, hidden somewhere, hard as pine nuts.
there are Muntjac in the summer
and fire pits in winter
the locals hunt, harvest honey, plant buckwheat
because it’s hardy. Pyres are familiar to me:
we don’t pry in Death’s private affairs
or those of comets striking ruts in the earth
They taught me certain arts
so that I might never use them
I left them
so they would not leave me first
they said that people should love like fire
so that ashes need not burst back to life
Feng is Bai, an ethnic minority that hails from southwest China. She grew up in a small village in Yunnan, close to the border with Tibet. Yet her Bainess has all but disappeared — even in poems where the poet is unabashedly ethnic, like “Drinking with the Yi” — “They say, let the leopard out of your chest/I smile: drinking wine is like stringing a bow/…We use Han words to play a finger-guessing game, blood running into the cups…” — her presence is still that of an observer, who, though she might not be totally transparent, is nevertheless not quite ethnic. Strange for someone like me, who associates Chineseness with nothing but ethnicity, to read a Chinese poet’s aestheticized, distanced account of a “minority” group. After all, I will never pass for white.
But gender has proven to be something which Feng cannot shrug off. If there is little wiggle room for women professionals, then there is less for women poets. Despite having won numerous awards, she is told time and again that her poetry is too sweet, too lyrical. She was told by one critic, at a reading I attended, that she might do well to incorporate roughness into her poetry. She should embrace the prospect of failure. Such heroic male clichés made me wince — Feng, for her part, kept cool. She smiled at the critic and made notes on a sheet of paper. She said she was grateful for the advice and would keep it in mind. The “reading” was a kind of genre one doesn’t find in the States — almost like a roast, where the subject being honored is present and is expected gamely listen to suggestions from other attendees — academics, writers, and critics.
I’d been invited by Feng, as her translator — there was even a placard for me. Everyone with a placard was expected to speak, and so I found myself, for a few, terrifying moments, in the position of cultural ambassador. Sweating, I defended a few of my choices (using “guitar” instead of “guqin” and “moth” instead of “butterfly”). But I was mostly, mercifully, ignored. One woman, the editor of Poetry (shi kan) remarked about how direct, how almost naively plainspoken, America had made me. I didn’t correct her. Later, when I prompted Feng, she said that a male poet never would have received such criticism. She hated being read as merely a woman.
Her reaction to my draft made me feel, uncomfortably, that the tables had been turned in a way that I never thought they would be. I waited, rereading it, thinking how to respond. Finally I wrote back: when I said “woman”, I did not mean that one should use this tag to draw conclusions about her writing —only that, as long as others saw her as a woman, the force of their thoughts would be like one of those chalk squares drawn on the playground: once you see it, you can either jump past it, or step on it. But neither behavior is innocent of the knowledge that a square exists.
After all, it had taken me this long to believe that all my good grades, my crisp American accent, so regular I must sound like a newscaster — on the phone — would still not make me anything other than Chinese, nor stop people from treating me so. It had taken me longer to begin to trust that, writing from my Chineseness, I would know certain things that even the most virtuosic white writers could not (though what they knew, what they could write, about me was truly stunning).
After the reading, had she herself not bemoaned how shortsighted, how naively sexist many critics were — did she not understand that, assuming she managed to one day be read as some genderless “poet”, the social reality she lived in would remain unchanged? That, even if she won this battle, she would still merely be recognized as a “poet” from “harsh, authoritarian China” ?
Bei Dao is just this sort of figure. He’d gotten famous in the 80s for being a dissident. Pen America’s bio of him says that “In 1989, Bei Dao was accused of helping to incite the events in Tiananmen Square and was forced into exile from China. Since then, he has lived in seven countries, including Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France and the U.S. Since 2007, he has been a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.” Yet PEN America, and many other foundations and websites concerned with freedom and human rights, ignores Bei Dao’s own resistance to such a tag. And by the way, to progressive critics who don’t know very much about Tiananmen, it might be fruitful to follow up on its leaders’ whereabouts. There were, essentially, two factions — a student faction, and a blue collar workers’ faction. Several leaders of the student faction ended up on Wall Street. The workers they “represented” were not so fortunate. Rather than call Bei Dao a “reactionary”, one might see him as someone who has noted the way that “freedom” gets subsumed by neoliberal humanitarianism, which fundamentally denies certain people rights because they don’t qualify as human.
I must say that Feng’s reply confounded me. She said, gently, that while she appreciated my efforts on her behalf, she sometimes thought this kind of theorizing was arid. She said that it was not that she thought being a woman didn’t make you a certain way — she had no problem accepting certain things about social reality — the possibility of motherhood, the lack of emotional incontinence — all things she shared in common with most other women. But she simply did not want to have to be read as doing — here I cannot help but use a word that is pure American — identity politics.
And suddenly I heard the apparitional sound of car horns. Since moving here, I had met many Chinese-Americans who’d said things about the regressive politics of “locals”. I desperately did not want to be one of these people. Nor does Feng, I think, want to become a member of some cosmopolitan, transatlantic group of progressive Chinese. The biggest vanity in some of the writing and thinking of us hyphens is that our middleness is somehow a virtue.
Bei Dao, who is more cosmopolitan than I will ever be, wants to go home. Before him, for a long time now, has been a choice— stay in the West, accept speaking invitations and touring universities where he will be bombarded about why he is no longer protesting the CCP, and where no one, absolutely no one, will talk about his poetry in aesthetic terms— or make peace, yes peace, with the country in which he was born — a country of people, mind you, and not merely a “regime”. He’s chosen the latter. In an interview a few years ago, Bei Dao expressed the desire to go back and teach at his high school, where he was when the Cultural Revolution broke out — of his own free will, and not because of some affirmation of “socialist values.” Why, really why, he chose is not for me to say — I can’t understand what, for someone else, makes home home.
Bei Dao expressed the desire to go back and teach at his high school, where he was when the Cultural Revolution broke out — of his own free will, and not because of some affirmation of “socialist values.” Why, really why, he chose is not for me to say — I can’t understand what, for someone else, makes home home.
These are the differences that, no matter how they may threaten us, make up someone’s daily life, their home. As to exactly what the content of that “it” is, exactly, I cannot say. I still hear that honking, in my end-of-day commute, when I am tired and life seems like something on the other side of a keyhole, and I have to admit, these are the times it is hardest not to hear it as something threatening. I think my home raised me to think this way.
Perhaps it’s good end with an excerpt of Feng’s poem, “Rifle”:
I’ve memorized the order: open the breech, load powder and bullets,
close the breech. […]
The metallic cold gives off a living stench.
Since growing up I’ve often smelled it in crowds.
I know the trigger pull and the instant of fire.
I’m glad to live in a country where guns are not for sale.
On the face of it, “Rifle” is a poem about first- and second-order hate, the deed and the deed deferred through writing. It is with the sixth line, “Since growing up I’ve often smelled it in crowds,” that we understand the smell of sulfur is similar to the simmering anger that people feel, that the speaker feels. The final line is tantamount to her saying, “If not for this obstacle, well, you know what I’d do to those people, you know which people I’m talking about.” The obstacle doesn’t matter, if we are going to be psychoanalytic: were the poet not in China, she would find some other excuse not to do what part of her knows, already, is forbidden.
Yet most readers living in the U.S. and versed in poetics will not be reading the poem like this. I’d wager most of them will read it and react in one of two ways: either they will feel disgust at another “regime apologist”, or they will want to say, flippantly, “Of course it’s harsh, authoritarian China where we find an example of restraint.” The impulse then is to say the poem has been decentered by an overly politicized reading; yet doesn’t the poem itself, embedded with this incidental and highly historical detail, become like a piece of amber, embedded with a shard of bone? This would make the poem different both from apologetics and from dissent, different from apolitical writing and different from intentionally political writing. It would be, instead, about the perniciousness of the hyphens we and our imagined doubles, reading halfway across the world, always find ourselves resorting to in order to explain ourselves.
