Interview by Emily Chen
This abridged version of this interview was originally published in Issue #5 “FLOW (流)”. Get it now on BLURB. The full version of this interview was originally uploaded on Thursday, September 14, 2017.
Congratulations to Chen Chen, whose When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities was long-listed in the Poetry category of the 2017 National Book Award!
In honor of the publication, which also won the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, we are now releasing the full version of the interview we conducted with Chen for Issue #5 of sinθ magazine, which was abridged in the print edition. In dialogue with our web editor Emily Chen, the poet discusses the power of lyric and language in activism, lox in a box, & what it means to write in diaspora.
“I’m no mango or tomato. I’m a rusty yawn in a rumored year. I’m an arctic attic.
Come amble & ampersand in the slippery polar clutter.”
– “Self-Portrait as So Much Potential”
The opening poem in Chen Chen’s debut publication When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, “Self-Portrait as So Much Potential” sets an ambiguous, exploratory tone for the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize-winning collection. At turns contemplative and daring, regretful and irreverent, Chen’s poetry traces themes of family, sexuality, memory, and bitefuls of Chineseness.
A current PhD student in English and Creative Writing at Texas Tech University, Chen is dedicated to voicing the experiences of queer Chinese-American individuals through writing brimming with reflective vision, humor, and love.
Last month, I had the opportunity to speak with Chen about poetry, identity, and his still-baby pug.
Emily Chen: As someone who arrived in the U.S. at a young age, do you feel as though there are unexplored possibilities of who you could have been or become if your connection to Chinese culture was different?
Chen Chen: Great question. And it’s hard to say because hypotheticals like this tend to be idealized; I end up thinking about all the positive things that might’ve happened, if my parents had decided to stay in China. Like maybe I’d feel more confident in my body image because I’d see so many more people who look like me on screen. Maybe I wouldn’t have internalized white beauty standards at an early age and then have to unlearn, constantly, all these things that make me want to be someone else. Plus, I could always go to a barber who knew exactly how to cut my hair!
But if I really think about this parallel reality, where I grew up in China, I’m sure it’d be much more complicated than I’d initially imagined. I don’t know enough about modern Chinese history to know how I would be shaped and how I would respond to the whole sociopolitical environment there. I’ve visited my extended family, but only during summer breaks. I don’t know what it’s like to live there all the time, as someone who was raised and educated there. So I don’t want to make assumptions.
It would be nice, though, to be able to speak fluent Mandarin and also fluent Xiamenese (a form of Hokkien my whole family speaks). My Mandarin is decent, but I need to seek out more opportunities to practice it.
EC: Languages open doors to the idiosyncrasies of cultures, identities, and creative opportunity. Yiyun Li writes in her essay To Speak is to Blunder, “One’s relationship with the native language is similar to that with the past. Rarely does a story start where we wish it had, or end where we wish it would.” What would you consider your native language, and how has your relationship with it evolved throughout your time as a writer?
CC: So, as I sort of hinted at in my first answer, my first language was Xiamenese and then soon after that, Mandarin. But yeah, I came to the States when I was three and picked up English very quickly. I don’t primarily speak or write in the languages I learned first. I identify with English. I write poetry in English. On occasion, I’ve used Mandarin in my poems, but I doubt I’d ever write entire poems in Mandarin. For me, Mandarin and the tiny bits of Xiamenese I’ve relearned tend to be languages I speak with my parents and relatives.
Recently, though, I’ve wanted to expand and reshape my relationship to a Chinese identity. That is, I’ve wanted to stop thinking so much that my Chineseness is always or primarily tied to my (biological) family. Because I’m gay and my parents have not been very accepting, I’ve had negative associations with being Chinese. My parents have repeatedly expressed the idea that being gay is just a “Western” or “American” thing, which is absurd. They’re doing better these days, but definitely still learning about LGBTQ issues.
The thing is, I know that there are many Chinese and Chinese American people who are also queer or who accept queer people and are allies in the fight against homophobia. So I want to seek out more LGBTQ Chinese and Chinese American community, more accepting and also politically engaged folks. I used to believe I had to choose being one or the other — gay or Chinese — but now I see how these identities and experiences are intertwined, inseparable.
A friend of mine, who also identifies as queer and Chinese American, sent me some LGBTQ-related YouTube videos in Mandarin and I started crying, watching one of them, because growing up I just never heard someone talk about supporting LGBTQ people in this language. I wish these videos had existed before. I’m glad they do now. I don’t want to deny any part of who I am. So maintaining my Mandarin and at least some bits of Xiamenese remains important to me.
EC: You discuss the importance of media representative of different identities, particularly being LGBTQ and Chinese American. What makes poetry, as a form of media, an effective means of activism?
CC: Poetry, at its best, can alleviate or converse with the loneliness of those on the margins. When a high school English teacher introduced me to the work of Li-Young Lee, I realized that Chinese American poets exist — and that I could be one, too. Poetry can also expand and queer our sense of what’s possible for our worlds and futures. The work of fellow queer writers of color constantly moves and delights and pushes me.
All this said, I don’t think poetry alone can tackle the myriad and interlocking oppressions that we face. Collective actions like protests and boycotts and creating our own community spaces are necessary. Poetry can contribute to how we imagine and practice these actions. Poetry can also provide forms of nourishing joy that allow us to rest and to remember why we struggle.
EC: Your poem “First Light” was featured on Sine Theta Magazine’s online arts blog. It includes the lines: “the China of my first three years / is largely make-believe, my vast invented country, / my dream before I knew the word ‘dream’.” How have your conceptions of China and your first departure changed? As part of the Chinese diaspora, how have you come to understand China as a real body of people and political thought?
CC: I read a lot. I took classes in college. I ask my parents and relatives about things. But I still don’t know a lot about China, to be honest. It’s such a big country with such distinct regions with such a long history that I doubt, unless I did another advanced degree and lived there for an extended period of time (maybe), that I’d ever feel like I had a strong grasp on the country as a whole. A part of me just wants to laugh when white classmates or friends ask me something about China because how much do I know, really? I’m still learning and I’ll always be learning. I grew up in the States. I’m very American.
I used to have this deep longing for China, like if I came to understand China, I’d really understand myself. But now I feel like I don’t need China to hold these “answers” to who I am. There’s no final, singular, purely “true” me, ultimately. There’s a big complicated mess and I’m getting more comfortable with the messiness. Writing definitely helps because if I’m writing in an open-hearted way that feels right, the process tends to reveal how messy and ~alive~ life actually is.
EC: That makes a lot of sense. As members of the Sino diaspora, our understandings of the countries that were our homes, or were the homes of our parents, or are the homes of the friends and family we are meant to hold dear are often politicized and influenced by upbringings away from “home.” Why has writing been such a powerful tool for your movement away from nostalgia for China as a foundational part of understanding yourself?
CC: Writing is a way into the scary particular and the vast uncharted and the unchartable, unnavigable underside of what I “know.” Every time I sit down to write, it seems impossible, this poetry thing. If I’m doing it right, I don’t know what poetry is and I keep not knowing until the poem seems to know something. I just have to feel a sort of tingle, a kind of itch, a hum, and an hankering for the words to exist. So, the movement away from nostalgia for China and towards a more complicated relationship with homeland and nationality — this movement came about through writing. I couldn’t think my way out or in. I had to write my way through. I still get nostalgic for an imagined place. But now I understand the process — the act of writing — that can dialogue with that nostalgia and that imagination.
EC: Your parents likely have a much different view of and relationship with Chineseness than you do. How has their outlook impacted your portrayal of familial ties and any resultant burdens in your writing?
CC: My parents continue to identify as more Chinese than American, though they’ve spent basically the same amount of time here as I have. Part of this has to do with the fact that they left China when they were already adults — my mother in her mid-twenties and my father in his thirties. I think my mother, though, has been more comfortable adopting American attitudes and ways. My father, for example, still doesn’t like eating salad because he distrusts things that are uncooked. He believes that cold and raw things are bad for you. But maybe that’s just my father and not a “Chinese” thing.
Another reason my parents still identify so strongly as Chinese is that they didn’t really plan to stay in the United States. My father came here to study and my mother and I followed after his first year at an American university. At first the plan was that he’d finish his doctorate within a few years and that’d be it. But the doctorate took much longer and my father also wanted to have more children (this was when China’s one child rule was in full effect) and he wanted us to be educated in the States because he thought that’d make us more competitive and lead to high-paying jobs (surprise, my two brothers and I all became artists/teachers, oops).
The story’s more complicated than this, but I think I’m better at exploring it in poetry. The important facts for the purpose of this interview are: the fact that my father was the one who decided to come and then stay in United States, which led to conflict between him and my mother, who didn’t want these things and took a long time to adjust… and the fact that I, the eldest son, did not turn out the way my parents wanted me to — not just the artist/teacher part, but the gay part. Obviously. So, family has been the source of a lot of tension and sorrow and anger and arguing over fish ball soup.
My book traces these two main conflicts: the one between my father and my mother over moving to America and the one between my parents and me over my sexuality. The latter conflict mostly has to do with my mother and me, because I’m closer to her than to my father, so it’s just a lot more emotionally difficult. And poetry, I’ve found, gravitates toward the unresolved issues, the unanswerable questions. I’ve written happier family poems, too, that celebrate the (messy, messy) people my parents are, and my brothers. I keep returning to the subject of my family, but (I hope) from different angles and with different aesthetic approaches.
EC: Moving to the United States and raising children to both survive the new and remember the old, while doing the same themselves, must have been challenging for your parents. Poetry is a compelling medium of exploration of difficult feelings. Speaking more broadly, how is art useful for breaching generational culture gaps, especially in immigrant families?
CC: I don’t know if my art is useful in this way. I hope it can be. But I do know of a project called “Mother Tongues,” which is one of Kundiman’s amazing projects. As the website puts it, “Mother Tongues recovers diasporic narratives by chronicling the lives and experiences of mothers across three Asian American generations. Interviews, poetry and performances combine to form an archive that documents the triumphs and challenges of building lives in America.” I think this is so important: how the project involves interviews and the voices of Asian American elders.
I find it problematic, the idea that it’s always the younger generation who must tell the stories of the past on behalf of the elders. This idea assumes that the elders can’t speak for themselves — or that any language barrier is just insurmountable. I don’t want to claim that I’m speaking for my parents or for any of my elders, blood or chosen. When I write, I’m very much sharing things from my perspective. And I struggle with this issue. At the end of “First Light,” I shift to my mother’s voice — but I hope it’s clear that I’m constructing my idea of what she would say. The younger generation’s imagination of and engagement with older generations’ experiences is important, but these texts should not be the only ones. I also don’t think we should over-valorize “literary” forms of sharing immigrant experiences. After all, white folks tend to consume (tokenized) writing by immigrant writers and then claim to understand “The ___________ Experience.” Just because something has received a literary stamp of approval doesn’t mean it’s more valuable or true. So, more projects like “Mother Tongues” need to happen. We need more subversive work that questions codified narratives of generational identity and diaspora making.
EC: How does poetry function as an agent of intersecting identity? Why do you think language contains the power to package the odds and ends of something as complex as individuality into a comprehensible, legible thing that can often be shared?
CC: What a beautiful set of questions. Hmm. Well, it occurs to me that language that doesn’t make sense, not complete sense. Like, the spelling of the English language is just a terrible, terrible mess. Sometimes people like to pretend it’s phonetic but it’s really not. I mean, even the word “phonetic” is wonky. How do a “p” and an “h” come together to give birth to an “f”? WTF? Don’t get me started on “night,” one of my favorite words and also bizarre with its silent “g” and “h.” I guess those letters used to be pronounced but then one day they weren’t and yet people just held onto them, anyway? Whatever. Language is super weird, even when you do have phonetic spelling and clearer, firmer grammar rules. And language is weird because people made language and people don’t make sense, not complete sense. But then it makes so much sense, doesn’t it, that language has the capacity to explore and articulate human complexities?
Even if it doesn’t have that capacity (and sometimes I doubt language can really do it all), I still love language. I still love poetry. Specifically, it seems to me that poetry is the weirdest of genres. Probably all writers feel this special way about their genre. But poetry is pretty damn weird. Poetry can open up to complexity, to intersecting identity, to queerness, to the unsayable, to the power structures pinning us down, to a caterpillar who just wants to dance like nobody’s watching, to a kiss on the forehead of the drunken sea.
EC: What inspires?
CC: Anything. Last night I was at the supermarket and saw this product called “Lox in a Box.” Meaning: lox, with everything you need to consume it with delight, including cream cheese, crackers, a knife, and a napkin. The box said, “Ready where you are, work or play.” A poem is a sort of “lox in a box” — ideally, everything you need to experience the wackiness of life, plus a napkin (printed poems can double as this; online poems not so much; I love reading poetry online though; online journals are the bomb).
EC: Oftentimes, the poetic themes derived from past experiences, trauma, and failures can hinder the creative process with the magnitude of their emotional impacts. How do you overcome memory and employ it in writing?
CC: I tend to wait until I have enough distance from an experience that I don’t feel so overwhelmed trying to write about it. Or, I write about something closer to the actual event because I feel a pressing need to do so, and then I wait before revising it and finally sending it out to journals. The oldest poem in my book, the long narrative poem in section one called “Race to the Tree,” started as some not-great drafts in college. I felt like I finally knew what I needed to do with that poem in the middle of graduate school, three years later. Then a year after that, following further revision, it appeared in my first chapbook, in 2015. And now it’s in my book, after more revision. I was revising “Race to the Tree” up until the last minute, when I had to turn in my final version of the book manuscript to my publisher.
That poem — about the night I almost ran away from home after a physical fight with my mother over my queerness — was one of the most emotionally difficult for me to write. So, returning to it was hard, but it did get easier over time. I don’t think there are any shortcuts to this process, if you’re writing something that deeply matters to you. You just have to be patient and make the mistakes you need to make and trust that the poem is smarter than you are and taking you where you need to go. Having smart and compassionate readers by your side helps, too.
EC: I remember reading “Race to the Tree” for the first time so long ago! Do you find that, as you temporally move away from the experience itself during long-term revision processes, the outlook and perspective of the writing change?
CC: Definitely. Sometimes I forget what I was going for in a piece and that can be good. A new trajectory arises. Other times I feel too distant from the originating spirit of a poem and then I might over-revise or revise out something crucial. It can be difficult to tell what my precise relationship to a poem is, after a long “break” from it. We have to sit down again, poem and poet, ideally over some oolong tea. We have to re-establish trust and openness and rhythmic giddiness. I have to explore the person and the writer I’ve become. Often this means creating a poem that looks like a horrid lampshade or revising an older poem into an unrecognizable beast. I try to remind myself, though, that growing as a writer means getting uncomfortable, over and over. I still freak out. A lot.
EC: For whom and for what do you write?
CC: I’m trying to write for other LGBTQ Asian Americans and in particular other young gay Chinese American men whose families have disapproved of them. Maybe that seems like a small subset of my potential audience, but I think it’s white supremacist ideology that always tells us that and wants us to believe that white cishet men should have every work of art and bit of representation cater to them. Also, I don’t think my writing is as alive when I think about a big, general audience. For my process, it’s better that I think I’m writing for myself or to a good friend. I want that intimate and vulnerable voice to come through. If other folks want to listen in, too, that’s great.
EC: Writing for a specific group of people can be challenging, since others will inevitably consume it as well. Are you ever worried that people who are not LGBTQ Asian Americans may view or share your work in ways that detract from the narrative of the struggles of your own identity and the collective struggles of queer Asian Americans?
CC: The way I try to think about audience is that maybe the general audience won’t understand everything I’m trying to do and that’s okay. They’ll still understand a good amount — and this seems to be the case with the reviews and the overall response I’ve gotten so far. And then maybe the more specific audience of LGBTQ Asian Americans will understand more or understand differently or maybe not. I don’t really know. But I want to write with LGBTQ Asian Americans in mind and heart and language. I want to communicate something specific.
Some reviewers have said that I do the thing where poetry reaches the universal through the particular. I don’t think I believe in the universal or in universality, at least not as some free-floating, ahistorical and apolitical ideal. Too often, the “universal” is equated with how much a text appeals to white cishet people and mainly white cishet men. Like, “oh this book is about a trans woman of color but actually it’s about human beings!” Um, no. Saying a book is about a trans woman of color is already saying it is about humans.
As I say in a poem toward the end of my book, “I already write about everything.” I’d rather keep asking the question, “Why is this book about sad white people in suburbia supposed to be automatically universal?” I’d rather keep writing the poems I need to write than give a damn about readers who want to stay boring.
EC: How has the release of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities into literary consumption affected your feelings about the compilation? Does knowing that others read, analyze, and interpret your work with their unique lenses change how you view your own writing?
CC: I try not to think about reviews or other people’s perceptions of my first book while I work on the new poems. But of course, I can’t help thinking of all that, to some degree. I try to listen to the reviews and comments that I find useful for pushing me further in my writing practices. All the reviews so far have been super positive, but the ways in which some reviews hone in on certain aspects of my work are helpful. Like when a review highlights my anaphora, as a strength, I think 1) it’s great that they noticed I was employing that device for intentional effects, 2) maybe I should cut back on using anaphora so much, 3) if I use anaphora again, I should use it in a very different way.
My favorite reviews have been by fellow Asian American poets. In particular, Michael Schmeltzer’s review in International Examiner (which is also an Asian American publication!) and Victoria Chang’s review in Tupelo Quarterly. I appreciate how they both get at the heart of my book and seem to understand it on a deeply felt level. The way Schmeltzer discusses my “dream-logic” and my politicized sense of humor is so precise and delightful. And I love the way Chang discusses my relationship to traumatic memory and how the book circles back to the scene first introduced in “Race to the Tree” (and further explored in poems like “First Light” and “Poplar Street”). These reviewers make me feel like I really said what I needed to say with this book. They also make me feel like I should keep leaning into writing for Asian Americans. Reviewers who identify in other ways have picked up on these aspects of my book, but it moves me so deeply to see Asian Americans understand and enjoy these poems. Also, Schmeltzer and Chang are phenomenal writers themselves; their talents show in their reviews, too.
I grew up feeling lonely; I had few Asian American friends in high school. The other Asian Americans I met didn’t seem interested in writing. Or, sometimes, I didn’t want to be friends with them because I was afraid they would be homophobic, like my parents. So it means a lot to me, to be in the company now of Asian Americans who also love poetry and who are writing so thoughtfully and beautifully about my poetry. I’m filled with a joy I didn’t think possible.
EC: What should we await from you this coming year?
More issues of Underblong, the poetry journal I edit with my bestie, Sam Herschel Wein.
Sam and I are also working on a joint chapbook called Gesundheit! & other poems. We keep talking about going on tour eventually and the tour will be called Achoo and at the end of readings we’ll say Bless you to the audience. But first we have to finish editing the collection!
I’m also working on poems — a lot of prose poems, in fact — for a second full-length collection, tentatively titled Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency. I just love sentence titles and long titles. This one’s a bit shorter, though, which will probably be a relief to the cover designer.
EC: Finally, and undoubtedly most importantly, how is Mr. Rupert Giles doing?
CC: He’s doing very well, thank you for asking! He’s just over a year old now and has all this way-too-excited puppy energy (Mr. Rupert Giles is my pug dog, in case readers are wondering; and yes, he is named after the British librarian dude from Buffy the Vampire Slayer). My partner Jeff and I went to PetSmart today and it was clear from the hyper-giddy way Mr. Giles was wagging his tail and sniffing everything that he wanted us to buy ALL THE FOOD and ALL THE TREATS.
Original interview by Emily Chen. Photography provided by Emily Chen. Design by Elisabeth Siegel. Medium article re-uploaded by Jessica Ho.
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