{"id":2786,"date":"2010-11-23T10:00:44","date_gmt":"2010-11-23T15:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=2786"},"modified":"2010-11-22T15:02:50","modified_gmt":"2010-11-22T20:02:50","slug":"review-shin-yu-pais-adamantine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2010\/11\/23\/review-shin-yu-pais-adamantine\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Shin Yu Pai’s ADAMANTINE"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Shin Yu Pai's ADAMANTINE<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A Guest Post by Stephen Hong Sohn, Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University<\/strong><\/p>\n

Adamantine<\/a> by Shin Yu Pai <\/em>| White Pine Press 2010<\/em> | $16<\/em><\/p>\n

Adamantine<\/em>, as\u00a0the title reflects, is a collection filled with luster, gleaming with deep insight, and further characterized by an ethereal landscape, focused on emotional connections, on spirituality, on death, and on the afterlife.\u00a0 Pai\u2019s work travels both within and outside of ethnic and racial frames, thus complicating any transparent categorization of the collection as \u201cAsian American\u201d literature.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Stephen H. Sohn<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Nevertheless, the political character of many of her poems does make Adamantine<\/em> speak to many of the field’s traditional concerns.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0I begin this review further into the collection, with what I believe is the larger project of the work.\u00a0\u00a0 In \u201cThirteen Ways of Looking at a Vulture,\u201d\u00a0 Pai\u2019s lyric speaker considers the responsibilities of one who chronicles the lives of others:<\/p>\n

eye
\nof the witness
\nthe I of the commentator<\/p>\n

grubby children at the rim
\nof a Guatemala dump
\nstunned orphans in Russia (76)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The homonyms of \u201ceye\u201d and \u201cI\u201d function in different contexts, both on the level of ‘one who watches’ and ‘one who speaks.’ The following lines accordingly consider the\u00a0issue of witnessing, with respect to the plight of global poverty. What is the responsibility of the lyric speaker, Adamantine<\/em> continually asks, with respect to voice and sight?\u00a0 In that vein, I\u2019d like to concentrate on one of the overall lyric approaches that Pai takes, which is to place current events and historical figures in comparative perspective.\u00a0 As part of Pai\u2019s relational approach, the collection opens fittingly with an epigraph from Michael Ondaatje\u2019s novel Anil\u2019s Ghost<\/em>.\u00a0 The passage from which Pai excerpts refers to prayers and mantras and explores how such spiritual inscriptions speak to individual loss and to aesthetic beauty.\u00a0 At the same time, by invoking Anil\u2019s Ghost<\/em>, Pai sets Adamantine <\/em>firmly within a tradition that queries human rights and global conflict.\u00a0 Perhaps we are not surprised, then, when we find that the first poem\u2019s title is \u201cThis is not My Story,\u201d as if to immediately query the autobiographical impulse of the confessional lyric.\u00a0\u00a0 The lyric stories of \u201cAdamantine\u201d are often those of Asian or Asian American figures\u00a0who move beyond the speaker, including Thich Quang Duc in \u201cBurning Monk,\u201d where the lyric speaker repeats, as a kind of mantra, \u201chis heart refusing to burn \/ his heart refusing to burn \/ his heart refusing to burn\u201d (19).\u00a0 Of course, Thich Quang Duc is most famously known for his self-immolation in protest of the Vietnam War.\u00a0 The use of the word \u201cheart\u201d arcs out across this collection.\u00a0 We are reminded in the very first poem, \u201cThis is not my Story,\u201d that the \u201chuman heart is \/ a wholly different animal, \/ we must sense when to give in \/ before the other gives up\u201d (11). \u00a0The importance of\u00a0emotion and affect imbues the lyric speaker with a kind of power, leading her toward a pathway that\u00a0involves spiritual reawakening. \u00a0Another figure invoked is James Kim, the Korean American who died tragically when he and his family were caught in a winter snowstorm in Oregon. The lyric speaker gestures again to loss, but contextualizes his death within the frame of sacrifice, as James had attempted to situate help for his family despite the possibility that he could have succumbed to the austere weather conditions.<\/p>\n

One of the most deliberate and fascinating sequences within Adamantine<\/em> is the successive poems\u00a0\u201cModel Minorities,\u201d \u201cRequiescat,\u201d and \u201cBody Worlds.\u201d\u00a0 Pai\u2019s lyric speaker first invokes the lack of recognition that mental illness receives within Asian American communities, especially as it was exposed during the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings.\u00a0 \u201cModel Minorities\u201d is, not surprisingly, the poem that most clearly evokes Asian Americanist themes, focusing on the damaging expectation that Asian Americans maintain a perfect, salubrious, and mentally agile image.\u00a0 In \u201cRequiescat,\u201d the lyric speaker purposefully juxtaposes two events in terms of their impact on a university campus: the court hearings of Amanda Knox and the death of In Soo Chun.\u00a0\u00a0 While the lyric speaker points out that Amanda Knox\u2019s hearing receives much more attention from media outlets, In Soo Chun\u2019s death requires remains unmourned:<\/p>\n

I find his name
\nthe death of a 61-year-old
\nimmigrant laborer<\/p>\n

won\u2019t make headline news
\nunnamed in the UW Daily<\/em>,
\nI find his identity in The Stranger<\/em><\/p>\n

learn he was assigned
\nto the Ethnic Studies building
\nto empty trash baskets<\/p>\n

scrub toilets, mop floors
\nwhen no one is looking<\/p>\n

I lie down to sleep (71).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here, the lyric speaker is clearly perturbed by the focus on Amanda Knox as opposed to this custodial worker, who is apparently so unimportant as to not merit a mention in the university\u00a0paper.\u00a0 What I appreciate here, too, is the irony of his death within the Ethnic Studies building, which gives us the sense that even within such a location, his life does not necessarily bear increased importance, as he works at a time when\u00a0\u201cno one is looking.\u201d\u00a0 The sense of uneasiness faced by the lyric speaker is most clearly related by the break in the tercets that occurs with the line, \u201cI lie down to sleep.\u201d\u00a0 The line is haunting in the way it references death as well as in the kind of disappointment that the lyric speaker experiences at having had to witness another overlooked life.\u00a0 The next poem, \u201cBody Worlds,\u201d clarifies yet another level of erasure through its poetic consideration of the notorious museum exhibit, which was critiqued for the way in which the cadavers were acquired:<\/p>\n

knee joints replaced
\nwith steel, corpses<\/p>\n

stolen from mental hospitals
\nthe undocumented bodies<\/p>\n

of the executed, bullet holes
\nfound in a specimen\u2019s head-<\/p>\n

quartered in Dalian & Krygystan
\nthe humanity of bodies stripped<\/p>\n

of skin, fatty tissue, age & eye color (75)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The lyric speaker constructs the human being as one who possesses a specific and individual existence, rather than as a generic representation that can only be understood through a skeletal or muscular structure.\u00a0\u00a0 Humanity is thus \u201cstripped,\u201d as a fully configured and contextualized life cannot be denoted from what remains in those exhibits.\u00a0 Adamantine<\/em> opposes this stripping effect continually and effervescently.<\/p>\n

Pai ends with yet another stunning poem of biographical scope entitled \u201cDouble Happiness,\u201d which twines together the marriage of Bao Xishun, who is considered to be one of the tallest individuals in the world, with Kim Bong-Seok\u2019s \u201creunion with his father.\u201d Kim Bong-Seok, otherwise known as Toby Dawson, won a bronze medal in moguls at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin.\u00a0 That Pai\u2019s collection ends on this felicitous note returns the reader to the many significations of the word \u201cheart,” so that we leave the lyric terrain within the bounds of familial and romantic love.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Stephen Hong Sohn<\/a> is an Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University.<\/em>
\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Guest Post by Stephen Hong Sohn, Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University Adamantine by Shin Yu Pai | White Pine Press 2010 | $16 Adamantine, as\u00a0the title reflects, is a collection filled with luster, gleaming with deep insight, and further characterized by an ethereal landscape, focused on emotional connections, on spirituality, on death, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[3,20,4,217],"tags":[459,458,106],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2786"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2786"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2786\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2863,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2786\/revisions\/2863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}