{"id":5629,"date":"2012-05-09T07:00:01","date_gmt":"2012-05-09T11:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=5629"},"modified":"2012-05-09T18:24:38","modified_gmt":"2012-05-09T22:24:38","slug":"process-profile-andre-yang-discusses-why-i-feel-the-way-i-do-about-sb-1070","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/09\/process-profile-andre-yang-discusses-why-i-feel-the-way-i-do-about-sb-1070\/","title":{"rendered":"Process Profile: Andre Yang Discusses “Why I Feel the Way I Do About SB 1070”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Andre Yang | Photo by Mary Yang<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Andre Yang is a Hmong American poet from Fresno, California. He is a founding member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle (HAWC), where he actively conducts and participates in public writing workshops. He completed the Creative Writing (Poetry) MFA program at California State University, Fresno, where he was a Philip Levine Scholar, recipient of the Academy of American Poets-sponsored Ernesto Trejo Prize, and the Graduate Dean’s Medalist of the College of Arts and Humanities. \u00a0Andre is a Kundiman Asian American Poetry Fellow, and has attended the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, the Napa Valley Writers\u2019 Conference, and recently completed an artist residency at the Ucross Foundation.\u00a0\u00a0He co-edited <\/em>How Do I Begin – A Hmong American Literary Anthology (Heyday, 2011), and his poetry has appeared in <\/em>Paj Ntaub Voice, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and the chapbook anthology <\/em>‘Here is a Pen’ (Achiote Press).<\/em><\/p>\n

For APIA Heritage Month 2012, we ar<\/em>e revisiting our Process Profile series, in which contemporary Asian American poets discuss their craft, focusing on their process for a single poem from inception to publication.\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>This year, we\u2019ve asked several\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/em>Lantern Review\u00a0contributors to discuss\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>their process for composing a poem that we\u2019ve published. In this installment, Andre Yang discusses his poem “Why I Feel the Way I Do About SB 1070<\/a>,”\u00a0which appeared in\u00a0Issue 3 of\u00a0<\/a><\/strong><\/em>Lantern Review<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

* \u00a0* \u00a0*<\/p>\n

In a way, I have been writing this poem all my life, and considering all the things I discuss in the poem, it really does span my life.\u00a0 The poem was written to express my feelings about the inception and implementation Arizona\u2019s Senate Bill 1070, though I also wanted it to capture my thoughts on the interconnectedness of humanity.<\/p>\n

I might not have written \u201cWhy I Feel The Way I Do About SB 1070\u201d had I not met Francisco Xavier Alarc\u00f3n at his Ce Uno One<\/em> book launch in Sacramento, California.\u00a0 \u00a0I overheard Francisco saying he was attending the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference later that year in Washington D.C. (2011), and since I too was planning to attend the conference, I used that as a conversation starter and approached him.\u00a0 He mentioned that while in D.C., he would be organizing two off-site Floricanto readings based on his Facebook page, \u201cPoets Responding to SB 1070,\u201d and that well-established poets like Mart\u00edn\u00a0Espada would be taking part in the reading.\u00a0 Five minutes into the conversation, he asked, to my complete surprise, if I wanted to participate in the readings. I said I\u2019d be honored, and told him I\u2019d contact him when I felt I had a poem worthy of the purpose.<\/p>\n

Months passed and I hadn\u2019t written a thing.\u00a0 When a friend and poet, Anthony Cody, emailed me a CNN article link that discussed the saola, a rare \u201cAsian unicorn,\u201d an intrigue arose from me.\u00a0 I\u2019d never heard of the saola, but I did some research and learned that it lives only in undeveloped, remote regions of Southeast Asia, and avoids areas touched by humans, to the extent that no biologist has ever seen it in the wild.\u00a0 The article mentioned that villagers in Laos once caught a saola and held it in captivity while awaiting the arrival of scientists, but that the animal died shortly after the scientists arrived.\u00a0 There has never been a successful case of anyone keeping a saola alive in captivity.<\/p>\n

Learning about this saola and its death reminded me of another article I\u2019d read a few weeks earlier about an elderly (and sickly) Hmong man from Visalia, California, who filed a lawsuit under the pseudonym John Doe Xiong. \u00a0Because of his deteriorating health, Mr. Xiong wanted to return to Laos, where his wife and children still lived, to die amongst his loved ones and be buried in the land of his birth. Because his Laotian passport was taken from him by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency when he took refuge in the United States, however, he was unable to make that journey back.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t help but relate his struggle with the captive saola, how their fates were determined by another\u2019s decisions.\u00a0 As a member of the first generation of Hmong people to be born in the United States, I\u2019m always aware of my Hmongness.\u00a0 How my people lived in the highest regions of the mountains of Laos in order to not be subject to the rules and laws of other lowland (and foothill) peoples.\u00a0 How we\u2019ve no place left on this planet to run to to avoid living amongst others.\u00a0 How, considering all we\u2019ve been through (the diaspora, the immersion into modern societies), so many of our elders are still so resistant to change.<\/p>\n

Reading about the saola also triggered a memory of my meeting Sherman Alexie at AWP in Denver.\u00a0 In a private conversation with Alexie, I mentioned that I was a Hmong American poet, to which he responded, \u201cI know the Hmong.\u00a0 The Hmong are the Native Americans of Asia.\u201d\u00a0 I somehow made it through the rest of the conversation without stumbling.\u00a0 Afterwards I immediately called my wife (fianc\u00e9 at the time) and, in a mix of tears and garbled words, expressed my surprise that Sherman Alexie, someone I didn\u2019t expect to even know the Hmong existed, not only knew of us, but identified with us so closely.\u00a0 To Alexie, our two peoples were metaphors for one another.\u00a0 I considered this with the fact that many Chicanos\/Latinos also have indigenous blood, and soon all these things converged, combined, and spilled onto the page as a poem.\u00a0 I went on to workshop the poem at the Hmong American Writers\u2019 Circle and in the Fresno State MFA Program, which helped me refine and reorder the material, but for the most part, it was my existence that guided the process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andre Yang is a Hmong American poet from Fresno, California. He is a founding member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle (HAWC), where he actively conducts and participates in public writing workshops. He completed the Creative Writing (Poetry) MFA program at California State University, Fresno, where he was a Philip Levine Scholar, recipient of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[318],"tags":[785,314,353,590,1051],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5629"}],"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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5629"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5670,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5629\/revisions\/5670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}