Conversations: Shin Yu Pai and Jaimie Li
In any encounter between people, there often exists two conversations in parallel: the one that they have and the one that they wish they were having. As I sat down to conduct a Zoom interview with Seattle-based artist and poet Shin Yu Pai on her new book of poems, Virga (Empty Bowl Press, 2021), I found that the latter blossomed organically out of the former, perhaps due to the incidental proximity of our lives. Each of us had grown up outside of Los Angeles as the daughters of Chinese immigrant parents—hers from Taiwan and mine from Mainland China—and left the West Coast for a period of time only to return eventually to Seattle. Or, perhaps the ease and depth of the conversation came down to Shin Yu’s willingness to discuss in detail the loss of someone close to her who had been a significant influence in her early twenties. In my own way, I too carry that place of grief.
As Shin Yu’s eleventh book and Empty Bowl’s first collection by an Asian American writer after a long history of publishing Chinese masters of poetry and Buddhist texts, Virga—named after a meteorological phenomenon in which a suspension of rain beneath a cloud evaporates before it touches the ground—clusters around the question of suppression and repression. The ninety-eight poems within it examine ways to work through these obstacles and move toward catharsis by passing through bewilderment, violence, love, spite, hope, fear, surprise, delight, and sensuality. The conversation stemming from these poems was therefore part self-confrontation and part self-reconstruction. Shin Yu’s forthrightness and generosity made me feel as though I could not ask her to reveal so much of herself without revealing, in turn, something of myself. For this reason, I have introduced some of my own experiences into the conversation in a manner that, for me, is uncommon. The resultant interview is edited for length, but the conversation’s shape and progression has been left largely untouched.
—Jaimie Li
Jaimie Li: Virga (2021)is your eleventh book. You’ve mentioned in other interviews that your tenth book ENSŌ (2020) is a survey of your creative practice across 20 years and that Virga therefore heralds a new beginning. Can you speak more about the genesis of Virga?
Shin Yu Pai: The first poems for Virga started emerging in 2018. They coincided with the death of Bill Scheffel, a poet and spiritual teacher who had been very important to me when I was an MFA student in the late 90s at the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University. At that time, I was in my early twenties and searching for a spiritual path, and Bill’s instruction on meditation through the lens and language of a poet helped me turn towards the decision to take vows of refuge in 1998, becoming a part of the Shambhala Buddhist community. After I graduated from Naropa, Bill and I kept in touch over twenty years. We would exchange letters—he’d send poems, and I’d send him work as well. He always made it very clear that he wasn’t interested in the hierarchy between teacher and student. Instead, he was always ready to see me and welcome me as a peer. That was tremendously important, since American Buddhism—transplanted Buddhism—often feels like a white supremacist project. As an Asian American child of immigrants who came from Taiwan, I felt a real disconnection from my cultural knowledge and experiences, so studying Buddhism and poetics in a western academic institution felt strange and vulnerable. But teachers like Bill were willing to meet me where I was.
JL: It’s striking to hear you describe transplanted, westernized Buddhism as a white supremacist project. Unlike yourself, the only encounter I’ve had with any form of Buddhism was the rare visit to Hsi Lai Temple in Los Angeles County on the invitation of a Taiwanese American friend who organized free health clinics on the temple grounds to deliver primary care to first the uninsured, and then—following the passage of the Affordable Care Act—the undocumented community. On that basis alone, it felt like such a safe space for people of color, and there were times in my own grief that I turned toward the thought of investigating whether or not this organization, or others like it, would be right for me. So, I appreciate you for contextualizing your own specific spiritual journey.
SYP: Yes—in 2018, the year of Bill’s death, the Shambhala Buddhist community was coming to terms with its history of Me Too scandals. Even when I was a student at Naropa, there were a lot of salacious stories about the root teacher and founder Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who had passed in 1987. The Shambhala tradition drew from Vipassana Buddhist meditation practices that were then adapted for a looser, westernized Buddhism that’s sometimes called “Crazy Wisdom.” Back then, there was a legacy of wild unruliness—sexual scandals and alcoholism—and, in 2018, after a couple of different lineage holders had taken the reigns of Shambhala, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s son, the Sakyong, was exposed as having coerced a number of female students into sexual relationships. These scandals really devastated the community, including a number of very deep, decades-long practitioners such as Bill. During this period, Bill—who had been going through some mental health issues—made the shocking decision to end his life by self-immolation. He drove to a rural part of Boulder near a rifle range, poured gasoline all over his car, and set the car on fire. Initially the news could only identify him as a John Doe. It was a very violent and painful way to see this beloved friend and teacher leave this world. I found out about his death in the worst way possible. On social media.
JL: I’m sorry for your loss, and I realize that it must be difficult, given the genesis of the book and the nature of interview, to revisit the moment of your teacher’s death. In your poem, “The news of your death,” you write: “I lose no sleep at the gossip / of the Sakyong’s sudden departure; / like father, like son— / the harm that cannot be undone / what I can’t get past / the meaning in your last act / of resistance, the vows / we take as teaching / to do no harm, to do / no harm, to do / no harm.” I felt that this repetition drew attention to the silence around self-harm and the question of whether self-harm is also a form of harm against others. What questions of harm, or self-harm, did you examine in your writing?
SYP: One of the unresolved questions for me with Bill’s death was: to what degree was he conscious of his actions and the impacts that they would have on his son, his students, and his community? There’s also the question of the suffering experienced by people who reach that dark place of needing to self-harm to relieve the pain. Perhaps there’s some element of grace or forgiveness that allows for our understanding of the deep place of pain that he was in—that he needed to shift or change in some way. In my writing, there is certainly some of my own self-reflection in terms of how his actions led me down a spiraling path of chaos. And I needed, for myself, to understand whether I would get sucked into that vortex of my own kind of self-harm. Bill’s death left a lot of unanswered questions, and it set me on a certain path of personal crisis. I had to re-evaluate my relationship to Shambhala—what those teachings had been to me at a particular time in my life, what I needed to let go of, and how I needed to evolve. A large part of the book is not just about that catalytic moment, but what it sparked for me in terms of needing to go to a different place on my path and on my journey.
JL: I appreciate your compassion around mental illness, as that’s so important. Moving further into and through this initial moment, I have to say that any act of self-immolation evokes, for me, the intensity of Malcolm Brown’s 1963 photograph of Thích Quang Dúc, which you also wrote about in your eighth book, Adamantine (2010).
SYP: Yes—the burning monk. Self-immolation is often associated with political resistance and, in the Buddhist context, can have particular spiritual implications and impacts. In Bill’s case, I’m not sure that’s what that was.
JL: It’s interesting to examine the crux of subconscious association and conscious perception. Your poem made me think of a moment as a law student in my late teens when I studied forms of political protest and conscientious objection. I cited that photograph as an example of nonviolent protest, and my professor really challenged me on it. As a result, I became very curious about the interplay of self-harm, self-destruction, duty to society, duty to family, and this whole branching network of human connection, as well as the forces that complicate, sever, or obstruct this connectivity. So, your poem as it appears early on in the book really drew this pivotal moment in my life to the fore. Going back to the monk—a striking feature of self-immolation is that the heart sometimes remains intact. This made me think of your introduction to your previous book ENSŌ: “I regard poems as embodying a certain quality of grace. Vessels that reach beyond words to approach the ineffability of an offering, alchemized through the heart.” What would you consider the offerings, ingredients, and themes that you alchemized through the heart for Virga?
SYP: There are a few. Certainly, grief is an ongoing theme throughout the book, and it’s one that I try to deal with in different ways. There’s letting go in grief because it’s changed, and letting go of a certain kind of attachment. Sometime grieving is positive; sometimes the letting go is necessary. I try to move towards a place in the book towards poems like “Embarkation” which is specifically a kind of grief ritual. There are a number of poems in the book that are about poem rituals or enactments in a way that try to break through these kinds of patterns or waves of being. I think other elements in the book include a grappling with desire, love—human attachments.
I would also say that social justice sneaks in there. The poem “White savior industrial complex” is about the 2017 Women’s March through the Chinatown-International District that disrupted their Lunar New Year preparations. And it’s there too in the commentary of “Chiang Kai-shek boneyard” regarding a sculpture park in Taiwan and the reckoning with history. In very careful, subtle ways, there is cultural commentary in these poems—a strong perspective—because as an Asian American woman born into a very traditional Taiwanese family with a very patriarchal father, I felt that I didn’t get to have an opinion. And then I didn’t have an opinion. Even in the writing of poems, which can be thought of as arguments, I never had opinions. I’d always find it strange that people would always try to pressure me into having them. Then, at some point, maybe in the past seven years, there was this big shift that happened to me. I don’t know if it was entirely just about having a child—part of it was probably just moving back to Seattle after living in the deep South for a while. I just felt like: I’m done with not having opinions. I’m done with being a certain kind of Asian woman. You know, I’m not the kind of Asian woman that you want or that you think I am. I’m allowed to have opinions and I have them, but I’m not going to have them like other BIPOC. I have them the way that I do.
JL: Thank you—I am nodding and grinning over here because your words give me energy. I lived in Far West Texas for a while, right on the border. The border patrol presence there is enormous—so omnipresent that on my daily commute to an arts organization, I would be pulled over every few weeks—and it changed me without me even realizing. It changed the way I expressed myself and it changed the way I thought within myself. I drew a chrysalis around myself, and when I moved back to the West Coast, it started to break open in the sense that you’ve just described to me. Even though you said that cultural commentary “sneaks” into the book, I feel like it busts down the door without breaking its stride.
SYP: [Laughs] Yes! I’m glad it reads as direct because many of my past books were, Poetry! Poetics! You know—you bury the narrative! In the last book and a half or two, I feel that there’s more directness in stating what is true for me.
JL: I feel that there is a relationship between becoming direct and moving through grief. When the eponymous poem comes up in Virga, there is that sense of the cloud breaking open. The lines, “As young people we are / taught to hold our tears / the feeling that could not / come to pass in the thundering / fallstreak” lead to “the lesson / now to pour down & resound.” I could feel the pounding of the water, old emotion, and grief, and I wondered, is this book a long overdue outpouring? But I think you’ve just answered that.
SYP: I don’t know what I needed to break through to get to that honest place. I also write personal essays and I feel like that’s the form where biography or the personal experience belong. But maybe writing personal essays helped me to bring that more into the directness, plain-spokenness, of the poems. Maybe they helped these poems to be forthright and helped me to be able to claim the emotion.
JL: Returning to your mention of the Women’s March in January 2017, I have a note in place of a question—it’s a response that was pulled out of me by the poem, “White savior industrial complex.” In 2017, I still lived in Texas, but visited Seattle and took part in the march as an out-of-towner with friends who lived in Seattle. We were all transplants from different parts of the country and didn’t yet have a sense of the city and our place in it. The march was slow-going, and so we stopped for lunch at a Chinese restaurant partway through. I was with a friend who was also of Chinese descent, and we crabbily sniped at one another over what constituted good table manners between those of us who spoke Mandarin and those of us who spoke Cantonese. This stemmed from an old prejudice, inherited from our immigrant parents, but the exchange felt more like an expression of, I’m hangry! than an espousal of some genuine, deep-seated belief. Afterwards, we stopped by an Asian grocers, and my friend bought a bunch of Satsumas and explained that the ones with the leaves and the stem still attached were lucky. I felt ashamed for not knowing that, as if I, myself, had been detached from this nuanced cultural understanding. Of course, I now know that there was a much larger conversation going on—the one that you note in your poem and not the conversation that the marchers thought was happening. The real subject was how the Chinatown-International District community had been rendered invisible by the actions of the organizers, the unknowing of the marchers, and the bickering of my friend and I that felt, in our exhaustion and hunger, so towering. Your poem contextualized my memory. I wonder, how does one stand back and see the bigger picture?
SYP: What an interesting experience! I did not march in the Women’s March. My son, at that time, was still very, very young, and while I know there are a lot of people who bring their kids to their first protests at one or two years old, I just couldn’t imagine that for my own son or my husband. [Laughs] I remember of that period that the organizers just didn’t know to ask. They didn’t know to consult the people or communities where the path was planned to be going through, or to think about those larger issues of planning and communication about where the parade—march—was taking place. It was a narrow window of notice, and there was no way to really interrupt the momentum of the social movement that was already happening. And I think it’s very hard to call that out, right? Because it’s one social issue, and many people are single-issue social activists. So they’re all about the women, but they’re tramping through Chinatown and destroying the economy on the most important weekend of the year. And this is not unusual.
For instance, with the shootings of the Asian women earlier this year in Atlanta—that was allowed to occupy the news cycle for maybe a month. Then it turned to mass-shootings in other parts of the country, but there was also the undercurrent that everyone had to be very careful about not taking the spotlight off of BLM. It’s super delicate because we didn’t want to take that spotlight away, or seem anti-black, or take up too much space, and I think that part of what I try to do in my poetry is to let different ideas and intentions coexist together so that people can see that complexity. It’s about trying to understand the difference between intention and impact. And it’s about taking a step back—as you did—to reflect on what your own intentions and actions have produced on the world and whether or not they have caused harm.
JL: In another interview, you spoke about completing a text-based audio piece, “she and her and he and him and they and them and I and we,” earlier this year in which you examined the alliances between Asian and Black communities. How was that experience?
SYP: That was a commission that I did for The Slants Foundation in conjunction with a friend of mine, Ibrahim Arsalan, for Kristin Leong who publishes a cultural newsletter, Rock Paper Radio. As far as the prompt for the project, that was the hardest thing I’d ever had to write. Usually I have a project, I have a deadline, and I know what I need to deliver, but I moved my deadlines and asked for an extension at least once, which is very atypical of me. I usually deliver early. What I realized was that I wasn’t ready to process Atlanta—the more that I tried to make myself look at what had happened and how I feel as an Asian American woman in this body right now as women all over the West Coast and our elders in Seattle are being brutalized, beaten in the streets, getting stabbed at bus stops, the more I realized that there was just something in me that made it very hard to dive into that subject matter as much as I wanted to.
Ibrahim is a very skilled and accomplished storyteller who describes his own work as being a librarian of culture and an archivist for community and ancestral stories. The times that I’ve seen him perform with others and in performances he’s done with me, he’s able to pull these archetypal stories—ancient as well as contemporary—to the fore to create these timeless narratives. Working with Ibrahim is challenging and interesting because culturally we communicate in very different ways. There was a directness on his part that I wasn’t always ready for. He made it very clear that before we could talk about alliances between Asian-Americans and BLM, it was very important for him to acknowledge the betrayals that have happened throughout the decade between Asians and African Americans. And I needed him to educate me.
Growing up outside of Los Angeles, I can remember the 1992 LA riots and the beating of Rodney King—I was in high school at that time. I remember that there were a lot of tensions between the Korean American and African American communities and Koreatown burning. But what Ibrahim was actually teaching me about, or helping me to understand, was the history that I’d never known. Ibrahim talked to me about how, during that period of the Second World War and Japanese American internment, there were a lot of African Americans that stepped up to try to protect Japanese Americans—took them in and protected their property. Decades after all of that happened, Japanese Americans were given reparations by the government, and African Americans felt, I think, betrayed by that development of events. It could have been a very powerful moment for Japanese Americans to advocate for reparations for African Americans. Again, as the daughter of immigrants, I couldn’t even fully conceptualize this history because it feels very distant—it wasn’t my history, specifically. But to understand that anger, rage, or betrayal, of course we have to talk through and work through these things before we can get to the heart of our stories overlap, converge, and are in agreement or parallel with one another. It was a very difficult project! In addition, Ibrahim’s a musician, which meant a lot of rehearsing and practicing, whereas I wanted to be like, one and done. Writing is very isolated, and in previous projects, I made recordings and handed them over, like, mix it up, man. But this project was not like that. I had to spend a lot of time with him during the pandemic, and we recorded in my backyard cottage studio—quite the experience.
JL: Thank you for taking the time to also educate me. As the child of immigrants, I’ve felt that I have only a partial perspective on America’s internal history, particularly if it pre-dated my parents’ arrival in the 1980s and didn’t show up in my public school textbooks or their study guides for the US citizenship test. It’s really only by encountering individuals, more so than texts, and staying open to things that do not make me comfortable that I’ve been able to begin filling those gaps. It sounds like you have a similar approach!
SYP: [Laughs] That’s the importance of listening to lived experience. But integrating that into a project that is being created in real time is challenging. You can imagine: okay, my mind is really fucking blown and now I have to figure out how I’m going to write my part of things so it makes space for this. It was messy, really messy.
JL: I am reminded of my experience last year when I was teaching a workshop series during the BLM protests after the murder of George Floyd. It felt so intense to be in community with a mixed group as I was processing his death, and I brought in June Jordan’s poem, “Calling on All Silent Minorities.” It was this incomplete, imperfect expression of where I was trying to get to. I didn’t find it punishing to read the poem—it was very much like, hey, this tree hasn’t been planted at it, but we’re going to meet there still. The potentiality of that would-be encounter sparked something in me. Speaking of planting after you mentioned Ibrahim’s work as an archivist for community stories, I noticed in Virga that you mention community gardens as a way of archiving history, names, traumas, losses, hopes, and people that should be honored. Can you speak more about them?
SYP: The gardens that I document and describe—the Donnie Chin International Children’s Park and the Danny Woo Community Garden—are places in Seattle that carry the intimate histories of these immigrant communities. When I started working in the International District, I learned that public parks were very slow to arrive in the ID. It didn’t really happen until the 1970s, and their arrival, as far as I understand it, was a concession as part of the negotiations around the construction of the Kingdome and the I-5, which invaded these neighborhoods. So, these public, green spaces—which hadn’t been previously included in the plan for the ID—are a little bit different because they arrived during a period of Asian American activism in the 1970s. They carry the legacy, the hope, and the promise of many people, and I think a connection or analogy can be made to the image of a virga as a dry thunderstorm that cannot break and rain down. I think of these public spaces as places of latent potentiality. They are spaces of the community that have fallen into disrepair and decay, and they are activated in a way that allows people who embody the memories of these places to come alive in relationship to them.
JL: To expand on the idea of coming alive, I noticed that the poem, “In the garden of Danny Woo,” tracks the garden’s devolution only to end on a moment of desire: “fallen now into decay rain-soaked / winter leaves rotting underfoot, / the reports of sex trafficking / in massage parlors down the way / replete with unhappy endings, / you startle me from remoteness / when you pull me near, to quiet / speech, our tongues entwined in / some scattering of verdancy come alive.” I felt that there was a quiet reclamation of sexuality, especially in the wake of the hate crime in Atlanta and the ensuing mass expression of anger from Asian American women who have lived in the fraught bargain of fetishized and dehumanized by someone else’s desire and yet still finding a way to maintain agency.
SYP: Yes. It’s very much a poem in the spirit of eros, about coming alive, in all the many ways.
JL: Around this point in the book, I begin to notice a certain tenderness emerge—a blossoming and a coming forth after the breaking open of grief. Specifically, I sensed the self-compassion that it took to write the following lines in your poem, “Upaya”: “I have choices like / that day one month ago / when I asked my son / to please stop / telling people / we are Chinese.” Given that you note later in your book that upaya is a Buddhist term meaning “skillful or expedient means,” I felt that the poem spoke to the fear, anxiety, and stress of Chinese Americans in particular this past year in the wake of the constant rhetoric that has fueled violent xenophobia. Did you grapple with any shame around hiding?
SYP: The circumstances that led to me writing “Upaya” were very complex. There’s denial and disavowal of self in that poem, in the interest of survival. In particular, I was concerned for my son, who is mixed race—he is sort of white passing but also not. He has a very Asian name, and he’s proud of his Asian American heritage, but that is something that could bring harm to him. So the question for us was: to what degree do we refocus or shift how we present ourselves in public? This question is so complex. In the case of “Upaya,” I think the poem is perhaps about the opposite of the shame of hiding. We are very proud of being Chinese, but we are making a choice for the preservation of our lives. That poem is about a conversation that I had with my partner about going to the grocery store in or around March 2020. There was a way in which my partner, a Caucasian man, could have made me feel very, very small. He was probably really tired of going to the grocery store—we share a lot of domestic duties but somehow going to the store had fallen on him. I think a less aware or patient man might have said: I don’t care if you’re freaked out or anxious—just go to the store. But he handled it with so much skill and tenderness and loving care. He made sure that I knew that I had a choice and that I had agency, but he was also worried about me. He wasn’t worried that I would get sick from the coronavirus, but that I would be attacked in a parking lot. We’ve seen mass shootings happen in supermarkets, right? I mean, is she going to the Asian market? Is she going to the tony white people Whole Foods knockoff? [Laughs] There was this moment of tenderness between my partner and I where I felt absolute seen. This poem, for me, is about wanting my son to know that he’s seen. That our choice isn’t a complete disavowal of who we are, but an absolutely necessary and critical strategic decision to ensure our safety. And that is a form of love. This is not about lying or gaslighting or hiding. It’s about knowing the complexity of the world that we live in at all times and knowing that it is a dangerous place for some of us.
JL: I understand this on a lot of different levels because I am married to a Caucasian man from northern Indiana. About a year ago, my parents moved up from Los Angeles to be near us, and I remember telling him that my parents would never say anything to us if something happened to them in public. They wouldn’t want to worry us, and, for them, it would be too humiliating to talk about these things. So, I asked my husband if he minded going to them and asking if they need help getting groceries or wanted to be accompanied to Home Depot and the like. I explained that I would feel a lot better if he offer to help first, because I know my parents would never indicate that they needed it. He had this immediate and compassionate response that told me that he understood my unspoken need. Instead of complaining about having to do things for my parents, he was like, yeah, I have privileges in this world. The fact that he was conversant in that meant so much to me.
SYP: That is a deep act of love and loving actively.
JL: On the subject of survival mechanisms, when I got to the poem, “Marine Science Center, Port Townsend,” in which you write of spending time with your partner and son at the touch tanks, I was struck by the lines: “I watched him / ease our child’s palm into sea / water to come into contact with / the purple tentacle tube worms / fan-shaped appendages pulled / back in a flash, fear transforms / into surprise, delight repeating / itself again and again, as our son / grows bolder with each reach.” That transformation of fear into surprise delight, and eventually courage made me feel as though the death spiral and terminal impulse earlier in the book with the repetition of “do no harm” has opened up into this moment of motherhood, which is to say something capable of continuing.
SYP: I think one of the great gifts of becoming a parent to a young person is that they’re always experiencing something for the first time. I’ve been able to re-engage with wonder in a way that I felt a little bit deprived of in my own childhood. I grew up with parents that were severely traumatized by the KMT and the long period of martial law that was the White Terror. My father was extremely overprotective and cautious about my socialization activities like dating and going to concerts. There was also this great fear of nature—as in, do not play with that dirty child from that other house who likes to hold caterpillars because caterpillars are poisonous and you do not touch them. [Laughs] There was a lot of fear ingrained in me as a girl from a very early age. With my son, what I notice is that he needs to be encouraged to be courageous and to practice that muscle. In those acts of courage—climbing higher and reaching towards something unfamiliar—there is the opportunity to come alive in all the ways and to claim that aliveness.
One of the best things that we can do for him as his parents is to be those reliable guides that help him to overcome that fear and anxiety of harm. With my parents, because life felt so uncertain, both in Taiwan and as working class, blue collar people living in the United States as immigrants, there was always so much fear of whether or not we would survive. Would we make it? Would we be homeless? Could we survive in this way in this country so far from anything familiar? The focus was always on survival versus exploration. It was never on taking any kind of risk because to take a risk was, to a degree, to be reckless with one’s own life, own body, own mind. I try to appreciate and be grateful for the care and protective intention that my parents tried to instill within me, which made it very hard for a lot of my life to take certain kinds of leaps or risks. Those kinds of opportunities to know yourself, to know your body, to know your limits are tremendously important. So, this transformation or movement into delight, joy, aliveness, and ability to process a spectrum of experiences in order to let those experiences ring and resonate throughout the body so they can transmute into something different…this is a way in which I had not thought about the arc of the book although I had sequenced it in a certain way beginning with death and ending with my son. What you’ve observed is absolutely true.
JL: Knowing one’s limits reminds me that there isn’t only one loss in Virga, that of Bill Scheffel, but also the loss of Kristin Kolb that you mention in your poem, “Elegy.” In the end notes, you write that Kristin was a writer and journalist who signed her columns with a quote from Albert Camus: “Always go too far, because that’s where you’ll find the truth.” Some of your poems feel almost kindred to this ethos: provocative, challenging and unflinching. It made me wonder—what, in your mind, constitutes going too far and how will you know when you’re there? I refer here not only the risks to life and in life but also to art and in art.
SYP: The death of a teacher, the onset of pandemic, the loss of a friend—these are all moments that test the limits of identity: who we thought we were, who we are in the process of becoming, and who we are now. The book is, perhaps, bewildering and emotionally arresting because I do go to those places. I do go to those places of letting myself love not just that other person but letting myself love myself. There are, of course, consequences of that—sometimes grave consequences. But, coming out the spiritual crisis that I was cast into, I wrote these poems that tell the story of having to go to the farthest limits of forgetting to find your way back home, and reassemble all of the parts.
JL: The idea of protectiveness, self-protection, and moving beyond into self-love brings to mind your poem, “Saline.” In it, you describe how the family environment that was very protective of you also failed to protect you in a critical manner. Where does one find one’s equilibrium amid telling truths about one’s most intimate kin and one’s greater society? How does one arrive at that place of honesty?
SYP: That was a challenging poem because it exposes parts of my personal history. It also reflects on that theme that we’ve been talking: fear and anxiety. In that case, it was a fear of drowning— being destroyed and obliterated by the ocean. The occasion of the poem arose out of a ritual cleansing in Hawaii performed for a group of artists that traveled there to learn about cultural traditions. I was really surprised at my experiences on that day. I thought I was trying to let go of an attachment to what I thought I needed love to look like in my life. But what I realized was that I wasn’t actually making the right request. There was this deeper revelation about the things that needed to be cleansed, which were older parts of myself that had been very harmed as a young person. As a result of those harms and trauma, I was not able to allow love into my life. I needed to start there. So, the thing to ask the ocean to release from me were much older—they still informed the present—I had this really powerful moment of setting my intentions.
JL: Listening to you speak, I feel the power of knowing one’s root. It seems to me that these poems could not have been written in absence of the acceptance of all aspects of one’s emotional tapestry. One of the difficult emotions in this book that really struck me was spite. In your poem, “Since form follows function,” you invoke a woman in Ballard who refused to surrender her house to developers—in China, these are called nail houses—and write: “I contemplate grudges, bad blood / expressions of enmity / spite mounds, spite house / the acid of a spite poem.” I got the sensation that parts of this book refused to skirt the uncomfortable and inconvenient, especially your talk poem, “Anything can go wrong, at any time,” which I found intensely provocative. Was it composed in advance or did it happen spontaneously?
SYP: I wrote the script for the talk poem with the idea that I would perform it in front of an audience while also making these clay reliquary objects. So, the text was my score. I performed it once and refused to let them record it. [Laughs] There are definitely elements of sauciness, resistance, or bitchiness. I kind of love the idea of a petty poem, because I have actually been given petty poems in response to poems that I’ve written for other people. Those people didn’t like how they were depicted, and so they wrote a really bitchy poem—I mean, bitchy in a way that I’d never be. The talk poem is complex too because I’m no longer involved with the spiritual community that invited me to perform it.
I was put on the spot by an ordained priest and asked to present a Dharma talk anytime on any subject. I am not a priest. Part of me thought, that’s your job. I had never given a Dharma talk, and I meditate maybe once or twice a month with a sangha, if I’m lucky, and even that’s a stretch. I didn’t appreciate being called upon in this way because I’m not just content for others. I understand the place of a warrior exam and to step into the moment of invitation. But sometimes as BIPOC artists and people in the world, it’s like: “Hey, what’s your opinion,” “Be part of this panel,” which can also mean “I need some content.” I feel really pissy that sometimes people just treat me like content. It goes beyond being tokenized—just turned into content. [Laughs] So part of that piece is just about: Yeah, I’m not Ocean Vuong, I’m not EJ Koh, I’m just who I am, and I don’t really feel like giving a Dharma talk and performing my devotion but what’s interesting to me is doing this thing and if you don’t like that, fuck you because that’s what I’m interested in. So, that’s a piece that has more attitude. It has a very different tone. “Since form follows function” is written in that same spirit, just like “White savior industrial complex” and “The Century Building.” I think these poems are the parts of me that wants to poke at the holes of people who think that they are woke.
JL: You reference those lines in the talk poem, “It’s reported that writers EJ Koh and Ocean Vuong spend hours of each day in meditation practice as their non-meditating petitioners marvel as this detail of their creative practice, agog in awe at the austerity of Asians. But I’m not that kind of Asian. I’ve got a six-year-old, and day-to-day life runs away from me.” Reading them, I had to sit back and think what is this? Where does the dagger cut deepest in those lines? Is it critical of the reporters? The writers? The petitioners? But the poem refuses to elaborate—all these feelings are nailed down at once and then the poem moves on.
SYP: Right! As Asian American women writers, a lot of shit is projected on us. Are we the Dragon Lady? Are we the docile, easy-to-walk-over kind? There’s so many stereotypes of Asian women, and one that I experienced when I was at Naropa was the presumption that I have the wisdom of the East because my ancestors are from Asia. So I have just a bit of annoyance in me.
JL: I appreciate these thorny parts in the book, because I feel that I’ve been set on this grief journey, and these are elements that I cannot go around but must go through. It’s a form of catharsis that also appears in the poem, “The lineage”: “there are times / when we must part with tradition, / like ending that relationship with the professor who sold / your letters to the archives, / never corrected his wife’s / belief that you were / paramours, let it all burn / to the ground, let yourself / take up the teachings that you / already knew the day you / set foot in the classroom.” A similar moment of disowning your duty to be someone else’s keeper happens in the poem, “On ceremony.” What made you choose to stop protecting someone else’s secrets or bad behavior behind the scenes?
SYP: It’s been a long process of being more of myself in my poems. As I evolve as a human, it gets easier to be vulnerable in the poems. Starting with my book Adamantine in 2010, there are more glimpses of my character and my perspective. But in the past, I have often thought of or talked about my work in terms of poetry as offering and gift—the aspect of the devotional has been a very important driver and characteristic of work for a long time. Then, when I wrote ENSŌ and had this kid who was really growing up, I felt like I had to shatter all my preconceptions about my art and what I was making. I think that ENSŌ really gave me the opportunity to be more tender with myself and to claim my practice in a different way which has allowed for Virga. This book, which is the first full-length collection after a long respite, allows me to go to different places than I was able to in the past. That is because I have been able to develop empathy for myself and my younger selves, and that’s very much due to having to develop empathy for a young child. In mothering the child, you mother the inner child.
JL: I appreciate your honesty in your work and your openness and generosity in this conversation. Do you feel the way that you present and speak about your work has grown more forthright with time?
SYP: It doesn’t make sense to hide or avoid things because it doesn’t give a full context or understanding. It’s not helpful. At the same time, it’s good to set the boundaries, but all this is critical to the understanding of the work and it’s also validating to your reading of the book. You know why it resonates and rings within you and the way that it does, and because of your experience as an Asian American woman who is a daughter of immigrants, there’s a lot that doesn’t need to be explained. As for being forthright, I think that it’s taken time. The way that I talk about my work has evolved a lot over the last twenty years, and I try on different things. Early on, my work was really grounded in writing about the visual arts and artists in a very coded way. I also approached writing about my Asian American identity through talking about different genres, which are like talking about different ethnicities and identities. I’ve gotten a lot better over time—more courageous with just being able to say it in a way that is meaningful and true to me. Going back to that part of the conversation about being BIPOC women who express themselves in a way that is particular, that way isn’t necessarily what people expect. Being in front of audiences at readings made me able to figure out how I’m saying it not just to myself, but to others. Writing and creative practice as literary citizenship and community are tremendously important to me, and I don’t look at those acts or ways of being in the world as just commodities. I feel like that ability to talk about oneself can be a very authentic exchange. I feel so lucky and privileged to have had this conversation with you—these are not everyday questions, and that means a lot. To have this kind of conversation is very special.
JL: Thank you—it is like that for me as well. This experience really has been exactly as you write in your poem, “All beings, our teachers”: “For many years my best / teachers were books, they / would not force me with / calloused ashen hands, no / way of being misread / this aversion to learning / to teaching sometimes I miss / sharing my mind with others / in these moments I turn / to you and say claim this / beauty that belongs to you / and make it yours.”
Jaimie Li is an MFA candidate at Goddard College as well as a workshop instructor at Hugo House in Seattle. Her recent interviews include Lawrence Ypil, Beatrix Gates, and Jeffrey Yang for Poetry Northwest, all of which can be found online.
