{"id":4719,"date":"2011-12-07T07:14:51","date_gmt":"2011-12-07T12:14:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=4719"},"modified":"2011-12-28T12:42:52","modified_gmt":"2011-12-28T17:42:52","slug":"panax-ginseng-poems-places-habitations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2011\/12\/07\/panax-ginseng-poems-places-habitations\/","title":{"rendered":"Panax Ginseng: Poems, Places, Habitations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Panax Ginseng is a monthly column by Henry W. Leung exploring the transgressions of linguistic and geographic borders in Asian American literature, especially those which result in hybrid genres, forms, vernaculars, and visions. The column title suggests the congenital borrowings of the English language, deriving from the Greek <\/em>panax, meaning \u201call-heal,\u201d and the Cantonese <\/em>jansam, meaning \u201cman-root.\u201d The troubling image of one\u2019s roots as a panacea will inform the column\u2019s readings of new texts.<\/em><\/p>\n

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The "Fish House" in Berkeley (via SFGate.com)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

*<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cThe China Issue<\/a>\u201d of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal<\/em> presents itself with an ambiguous title. It is the journal\u2019s literary issue on China, but it might just as well be \u2018the issue of China,\u2019 i.e. the problem of it, a claim to authority and singularity; or simply \u2018the issue of representing China,\u2019 the question of it, the difficulty. \u2018China\u2019 as a thematic boundary is naturally complex for a journal based in Hong Kong\u2014but virtually, over the internet\u2014and presented in English. Most of this issue\u2019s poems are translations<\/a> from the Chinese, with the originals preserved; of these, few refer explicitly to or narrow themselves by locality\u2014except where those locations become outside points of reference (i.e. Zang Di\u2019s \u201cHistory of Daffodils\u201d referencing Fukushima, or Zhai Yongming\u2019s \u201cClimbing the Heights on the Double Ninth,” which is self-conscious about the literary tradition of hiking on a traditional occasion). Some of the poems written in English, however, announce their \u2018Chineseness\u2019 with archetypal localities, such as romanticized pastorals of farmland China, or romance recalled as manufacture in Sumana Roy\u2019s \u201cLove: Made in China,\u201d or the two poems with Beijing in their titles.<\/p>\n

Place is fascinating and troubling to define. Is place a city by name, by reference, or by index? Or a collocation of buildings and objects seen as an outsider might see them, or as an insider might? Within the spaces shaped by buildings are cultures and languages\u2014both mainstream and marginal\u2014and the subjectivity of people and their relationships to history and memory.<\/p>\n

Appropriately, a few of the poems in this issue deal with houses and architecture. From the English selections, Arthur Leung\u2019s \u201cEarthen Houses<\/a>\u201d is a poem finely wrought to formally mimic the tulou<\/em> buildings of which he writes. W.F. Lantry offers a close reading of the poem\u2019s rhythmic structure here<\/a>, discussing the way earthen houses are constructed and making the general argument that poems are spaces of empathy allowing us to dwell in the poet\u2019s mind. I wish to push his argument further and add that all architecture, real and linguistic, serves a rhetorical function. When Hisham Matar gave his recent Hopwood Roundtable Craft Talk in Michigan, he talked about his previous career in and passion for architecture; he said that architecture is not about geometry or numerical efficiency, but about people. The way a building is designed\u2014round table or long table, restaurant booth or bar counter, high ceilings or low, windows and exposure to light, door handles\u2014all of that affects the way people feel about themselves and the way they interact with others. Place is psychosomatic (in the old sense of the word, though the medical sense applies as well). He commented, therefore, that writing is not a \u2018thing\u2019 we do but a space we construct and enter. After all, what are buildings but walls\u2014boundaries carving the abstraction of empty space, narratives framing chaos?<\/p>\n

Arthur Leung\u2019s poem, in addition to the imitative form Lantry lauds, transforms the communal nature of earthen houses into voice and persona. It begins, \u201cPerhaps you wonder how mud fortifies,\u201d addressing the reader as a stranger to the buildings but not as a tourist, not as a consumer. It is campfire-conversational. The next line gestures at the physical in close proximity\u2014\u201crammed earth walls like these\u201d\u2014and the third line has a first-person plural that merges the speaker with the houses: \u201cas though our wood frame tulou<\/em> treads against \/ the weight of mountains.\u201d This fourth line continues into the fifth to speak directly of coalescence: \u201cWe blend with stones, branches, \/ bamboo chips and let gravity push together . . .\u201d That fifth line has no punctuation to separate one sequence of verbs and objects from another. These are intimate pronouns. The poem has no single \u201cI.\u201d Even the blending of languages can be seen in the italics: first \u201ctulou<\/em>\u201d is italicized to distinguish it as a Chinese romanization, then \u201ceat rice<\/em>\u201d is italicized to give a transliterated Chinese idiom, chifan<\/em>, to commence a meal in welcome and good faith. Italicizing foreign words often serves to alienate them from the rest of the text, making them non-diegetic. But the italics here are a blend that makes the strange familiar just as much as it renders the familiar strange. We might even read it as the transformation of languages into objects\u2014as an analogue for immersion in a good poem, in which we experience information as material.<\/p>\n

W.F. Lantry\u2019s poem \u201cForever Lasting Love<\/a>,<\/span>\u201d similarly has a tri-stanzaic structure imitative of Zhang Xiaogang\u2019s triptych panel, \u201cYongyuan Chijiu de Ai<\/a>.\u201d He \u201creads\u201d the painting from left to right, describing the scene in a present tense into which we are flung with a spondee: \u201cNow early April . . .\u201d Unlike paintings, poems are inevitably sequential. We have to see the images as they are concatenated in words; thus the speaker of the poem explains as much as describes, for instance prioritizing \u201cbreasts and leafless trees\u201d as the first painted image and establishing \u201cthis triptych\u2019s wings\u201d as a thematic frame which narrows into the birds and absence of birdsong this poet imbues into the piece. Thematic representation is the mode by which Lantry accomplishes an impression of visual synchronicity: echoes and the expanding ripples of naked figures and bare breasts, curled or bent forms, voicelessness, crocuses, birds. The stanza breaks indicate the panel folds, but by enjambing verbs along those spaces the poet keeps us suspended in two kinds of movement: linear travel (\u201cwhile foreign birds \/\/ move from the center\u201d) and motionless vitality (\u201cthose trees, dark stems uprooted, still survive \/ since in the final panel blossoms thrive\u201d). This poem, like \u201cEarthen Houses,\u201d sets its boundaries and then navigates between them. The process of the poem is an instruction in its own logic, and a constant movement between sound and sight, synchronicity and linearity, the thing heard and the thing witnessed.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Exile is a prominent theme among the poems translated from Chinese. Zhai Yongming\u2019s \u201cAbandoned House<\/a>\u201d looks at a house as an object for empathy, a double for the speaker\u2019s own sorrow and isolation; house and person become reflections of each other, both in gesture and perception:<\/p>\n

I often pass by there
\nIn a variety of nervous postures
\nI’ve always been feeble come dusk
\nAnd that abandoned house shuts its eyes tight
\nAs I stand and stare<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Duo Duo\u2019s \u201cNight<\/a>\u201d begins in what seems to be a traditional meditation on the moon and its metaphors, then ends with a sudden self-revelation: \u201cAh moonlight, hinting at the clearly seen exile\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

And Wang Jiaxin\u2019s long poem, \u201cCommemoration<\/a>,\u201d deals heavily with solitude and alienation. In the second section, the poet writes: \u201c \u2018In dream, you don\u2019t know you\u2019re a guest,\u2019 you try \/ Repeating it in a different language.\u201d In the fifth section there is the question of being \u201csarcastic in an alien land,\u201d and in the eighth, the poet now asks, \u201cWhat kind of fear needs to be quelled, so that alone \/ One can become?\u201d<\/p>\n

But these are loose interpretations of exile, in Albert Camus\u2019 sense when he argued again and again that we are existentially exiled from ourselves, from the nations in our bodies. Here is Camus in The Rebel<\/em>, explaining our impulse toward literature and so-called escapism: \u201cFar from always wanting to [escape the world, men] suffer, on the contrary, from not being able to posses it completely enough, estranged citizens of the world, exiled from their own country.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is this universality of exile that leads me to read some of the other translated poems as engagements with the alien self. Xiao Kaiyu\u2019s \u201cA Telegram<\/a>\u201d confronts the slippery facts of memory, beginning with a date, \u201cNovember 6, 1986,\u201d then moving into a retrospective issuedfrom the future, then returning with uncertainty to 1985. The location and destination fluctuates from Harbin to Xining to Qaidam, none of them certain until a grave and life-altering telegraph arrives from home in Sichuan. The speaker of the poem is both subject and object, a fixed point of view that is yet rotating in the attempt to encounter the self.<\/p>\n

Zang Di\u2019s \u201cHistory of Daffodils<\/a>\u201d sets off gargantuan, eschatological vibrations with the line, \u201cThe aftershocks continue in Fukushima\u201d and references (<\/span>to) maelstroms and extinction. Then our attention is diverted to the small, the local: daffodils. They are mirrors or refractions: \u201cThey are prepared \/ for us to see the different us.\u201d And in \u201cRise Up Like a Snow Mountain,\u201d we read:<\/p>\n

On the window is a piece of paper
\nthat tells fortune, but it will say the same thing whether you poke it
\nor not. On the paper is a small hole of poetry.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The ending note of poetry in this stanza points us toward fortune not as chance but\u2014as is often the case in literature\u2014as character, as inevitability. The unalterable fate, the unchangeable self: the poem as the process and attempt of transgression, perhaps as a way to see a different us.<\/p>\n

Lastly, Zhai Yongming\u2019s \u201cClimbing the Heights on the Double Ninth<\/a>\u201d takes up the long, solitary tradition of poets ascending peaks and writing about the smallness of man in a hulking, beautiful world. \u201cToday I raise a cup alone,\u201d she writes. \u201cWho will answer my echo? \/ Wine poured down the throat\u201d flows into the body. Here is where she does something different: \u201cProblems of desire and mortality \/ [of] separation and health \/ Also change inside the throat\u201d and these problems \u201cbecome nimble yet meticulous.\u201d Transformation occurs in the passage of the throat, downward with the wine and its troubles and simultaneously upward with the voice of the poet.<\/p>\n

The body as a site of passage. The poem as a site of entry, where understanding changes into vision. I\u2019m reminded of the ancient Greek sophists and their technique for memorizing speeches: by associating each section of the argument with a different room of their houses, such that their recited language was an enacted walkthrough of the home\u2014every outward expression also an inner journey. And I think again of the fifth section of Wang Jiaxin\u2019s \u201cCommemoration,\u201d where he asks:<\/p>\n

(But should Homer revise that flimsy ending
\nTo the epic?)\u00a0 You put down The Times<\/em>
\nAnd your mother tongue comes out in tears. . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And earlier, in the fifth section: \u201cBuy a copy of The Times<\/em>, not to read \/ But to bury one’s face into.\u201d He points us to the timelessness of language as emotion, of authorities and canons as things we reconfigure and engage with personally. History is a site to inhabit, too. When we narrate our dreams and say, \u201cI open the blinds and now I\u2019m in my parents\u2019 house,\u201d what we really mean is, \u201cNow I think<\/em> or recognize<\/em> that I\u2019m in my parents\u2019 house, that I\u2019ve been in it all along, and yet I haven\u2019t been in it at all because that\u2019s not all it is.\u201d We overlap everywhere with poems, with languages, with memories, with spaces of imagination and solitude across continents and times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Panax Ginseng is a monthly column by Henry W. Leung exploring the transgressions of linguistic and geographic borders in Asian American literature, especially those which result in hybrid genres, forms, vernaculars, and visions. The column title suggests the congenital borrowings of the English language, deriving from the Greek panax, meaning \u201call-heal,\u201d and the Cantonese jansam, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"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":[705],"tags":[735,739,191,734,736,446,744,740,741,737],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4719"}],"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\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4719"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4719\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4997,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4719\/revisions\/4997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}