A Conversation with Sally Wen Mao
By Chi Siegel. Originally published in sinθ #15: “MAGIC 魔”. Get it now on BLURB.
I ducked into Atticus Bookstore & Cafe out of breath on a quite balmy day for a February in Connecticut. I had just discovered that my Razor scooter — into which I had poured all of my faith, hopes, and dreams of zipping around Yale’s campus efficiently for the past two years — had been stolen out of a college common room. I stopped at the entrance to post a rather grumpy notice on my school’s lost and found page before looking up to scan the seated area of the cafe for poet and educator Sally Wen Mao.
I recognized the back of her head (don’t ask how) as she was wrapping up a chat with someone who turned out to be an old student of hers, now pursuing a PhD at Yale.
Only recently disembarked from a red-eye from San Francisco, Mao was in town for a reading and Q&A on the following day at Yale’s Asian American Cultural Center. We had met a few times before by chance, but never in depth or in a way that I would even refer to as ‘meeting’. I had basically caught glimpses of her, the first time at a reading that I had attended as an incoming sophomore in high school way back in 2014, while she was touring her first full-length poetry collection, Mad Honey Symposium. Her tour stopped at the writing program in Virginia at which I spent a few weeks that summer, and alongside poets Eugenia Leigh and Cathy Linh Che, she delivered lines that made my stomach flutter — me, in the throes of my 14-year-old pubescent woes and the incipient inklings of my own Chineseness and womanness.
“Wow,” she said, when I shyly brought up this first encounter. “And here we are now.”
That tour, according to her, had taught her to reinvent the entire post-book release experience for herself and for her audiences — by the time she had come to that tour stop, the years spent writing and working to death the poems in Mad Honey Symposium had taken some of the wonder out of reading them. And so, for Oculus, she switched things up, which leads to the most recent time I saw her: the 2019 Asian American Literature Festival in Washington, D.C. Among other events, Mao ran a book club talk on Ocean Vuong’s new novel. She had been on tour for her second book of poems, Oculus, and she was wearing the glitzy, metallic, sailor-moon-meets-space-punk outfit and matching pink wig that signified her book tour alter ego, ‘Anime Wong,’ a pun on seminal Chinese-American film actress Anna May Wong. That outfit starkly contrasted the pale blue collared dress shirt I saw her in now.
“I did get a little restless, [so] I decided to bring in something new to my readings, and I began doing events dressed up as ‘Anime Wong,’” May said. “So that was my way of processing what it meant to be in front of an audience and reading this book: it’s a dynamic process.”
Mao began as a poet quite young, anticipating the rare moments in elementary school during which she could have her creative writings read and workshopped. Her family emigrated from China to Boston when she was 5 and moved around the U.S. several times. Throughout middle school, her fascination with poetry grew, along with an interest in poets like Edgar Allan Poe and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and she tread swiftly off the beaten path of assigned readings and toward non-canonical writers, such as June Jordan, Audre Lorde and Yusef Komenyakaa.
She found her home at Carnegie Mellon University’s creative writing program, where she was finally able to begin academically engaging with the works she had long admired.
“The fact that Terrance Hayes was teaching these poets that I had familiarized myself with in high school was a great experience for me, because it wasn’t just Robert Frost or these other canonical [voices],” Mao said. As I asked about the significance of the other named poets in particular, she continued. “These are all big voices in black arts movements… Komenyakaa is a bit more contemporary obviously. There was a very distinctive emotional urgency in these poems.” These other poets’ voices excited her, and she began to read more work in translation. “We never looked at Chinese poets [in grade school], but I really wanted to know more about Bei Dao and Shu Ting.”
Mao admitted that during the first few years of her undergraduate experience, she had been focused on prose, until she “ran out of classes to take” and began taking poetry classes again.
“There’s this thing that happens at least to me as a writer: when I get deeply invested into one particular genre, I forget about how to write other genres,” she said. “When I returned to poetry in college, it was a big transition, but then the consequence was that I forgot how to write fiction, and I ended up applying for grad programs in poetry.”
Her academic journey continued to an MFA at Cornell University and to teaching posts at places like Hunter College, Cornell University, George Washington University, and the National University of Singapore. As an educator, I figured that she would have a take on the issue de jour of a ‘canon’ in the humanities, particularly in the fields of fiction and poetry.
“I tend to strongly resist the idea that if you haven’t read these particular authors deemed ‘classic’, then somehow you’re less than,” she said. “It’s more about your ability to critically write or critically read something. It’s not about what you have read; it’s more about how you read. I’ll be the first to admit, I never read War and Peace.”
After her junior year as an undergraduate, Mao was able to attend her first poetry retreat at Kundiman, a prominent Asian American poetry collective. She saw this retreat as particularly formative, as it provided her with a community of other Asian American poets who were pursuing a literary career.
Today, with two full-length collections under her belt, she has experienced the painstaking process of creation, compilation, and dissemination twice. Her most recent work, Oculus, traces the relationship between humans and being the objects of perception, specifically as it pertains to the experiences of several Chinese women through time. She jumps in time across three centuries, invoking the experiences of a Chinese woman livestreaming her suicide in 2014 on Instagram in the titular poem ‘Oculus,’ as well as telling the story of 20th century actress Anna May Wong acquiring a time machine, and going as far back as Afong Moy, the first Chinese person to ever arrive in the United States, and only as a human zoo exhibit to be gawked at.
“Some poems from Oculus are poems that I didn’t include in my first collection,” Mao said. “I noticed that my poems were going into this direction of looking at technology. Chronology is a big part of the book. There’s the contemporary timeline where we’re uploading our lives onto social media, and in essence that’s creating that artificial audience of people who are able to gaze or look into our lives and our bodies and our thoughts.”
The poem ‘Oculus’ is a stark reminder of social media’s dissonance: sowing both connection and deep, existential alienation.
“I saw a really natural link with Anna May Wong: this phenomenon of other people looking at you and you having no control over how they’re seeing you. Anna May Wong had that problem as a film star. Her roles in movies — so many of them were stereotypical,” Mao said. “Some of the earliest poems of the book were also the Anna May Wong time machine poems. The first poem that I wrote was ‘Anna May Wong Fans Her Time Machine.’ I [had] found out about [Wong] at a museum — the Museum of the Chinese in America — and I decided that I really wanted to learn about her life. She was struggling with so many things that Asian American women still face today. What if I decontextualized her from the time that she was living in? Because I felt such a strong reaction to her narrative, the way she was describing some of her experiences I could really feel that. I swear that I felt the same emotion.”
Finding out about Wong also led her to the story of Afong Moy, another story from another century about the same lack of control over perception — something that Mao has traced through forging a connection across timelines and identifying the psychological trial of being a Chinese American or Asian American and being looked at, much like as if in an exhibit, even in the modern day.
In the age of Crazy Rich Asians, the political discourse of an Asian American identity in 2020 has become preoccupied with this idea of representation. Oculus serves as a timely warning of representation’s double-edged nature. Read in today’s context, Oculus cautions for a more critical perception toward the rise in Asian American media representation and the sole focus of activism on that one tenet.
I asked her about her views on representation politics — especially from her standpoint within a larger literary community that has wrestled with such issues for the past decades.
“I do think there are limitations to this conversation [around representation],” she said. “Especially in the context of Asian America. One of the biggest critiques of Asian American activism is this fixation on representation, and film roles, and movies, and that kind of thing. A good way to pivot is to think about how we are going to empower marginalized communities beyond representation.”
She noted a recent trend she perceived within the Chinese American community, or within the Asian American community more broadly: Asian Americans have gradually become “less political,” feeding into the trope of a “model minority” in the U.S.
“I think that this is a dangerous direction,” Mao said. “One of the most important things to do is to remember our history, and to remember that this [Asian-American] identity is predicated upon solidarity with other struggles, such as the Black American movements in the sixties. This is where this whole political identity was formed.
She firmly believes that this remembrance is core to her own work and should be core to the work of others trying to navigate 2020’s political and literary landscape.
“It’s about not forgetting the history that’s important to our understanding of ourselves and where we belong,” she said. “I think that’s the role of the artist — the one thing that poetry can do.”
