Jennifer Wong's book is an imaginative project. It collects a group of poets whom one would not normally consider a coherent community, let alone gather for a reading that testifies to their affinity and shared aesthetics. The author manages to hold her project together by introducing the politically exigent concept of identity, the poetically wonted theme of home, the philosophically alluring idea of writing elsewhere, and most importantly, the socio-culturally intriguing phenomenon of the Chinese diaspora. None of these terms is new, and I do not think Wong has advanced their meanings beyond what we already know, but their presence in Wong's eclectic summary from multidisciplinary resources has provided a context for these poets to speak to us individually and together through Wong's skilful readings of their selected works.
The book starts with an introduction that attempts to illuminate the concepts of home, identity and diaspora, illustrated by plentiful quotations from various scholars who are enlightening in their own ways but are not always in agreement with each other. The conclusion, instead of the usual summary of points and ideas, offers a field report on the scenes of Asian American poetry in the US and Chinese diaspora poetry in the United Kingdom. It reflects an intimate perspective that Jennifer Wong uniquely holds as a poet herself. Next comes a long appendix of interviews with poets conducted by the author herself. The ten interviews not only offer interesting contrastive readings to the discussion of poetic texts in the book (except for one interviewee, Xichuan, who is not a subject of the study), but they also can serve as a very useful resource for classroom teaching or further research by other like-minded scholars.
The main body of the book consists of the six single-poet chapters (Bei Dao, Li-Yong Lee, Marilyn Chin, Hannah Lowe, Sarah Howe and Mary Jean Chan) and the two chapters on poets of Chinese origin writing in the UK (eleven poets) and Hong Kong (nine poets). I do not know if “Chinese origin,” which Jennifer Wong did not use, is the best term for this group of 26 living poets. Origin in the Chinese language or in China as a place? Which place in China? Clearly, not all of these categories fit. The poets were born in mainland China, in Hong Kong or in the UK, and they speak Chinese or English or both. In terms of recognizable conventional cataloguing, they could be Chinese, Sinophone or Anglophone, or a hyphenated expression of the three. Jennifer Wong is aware of this labelling issue as she frequently uses parentheses or qualifying remarks to describe an individual poet who does not fit a constructed identity. As we all know, poets in general are not friends of labels. Bei Dao famously refused to be called a “dissident poet,” and Li-Yong Lee once said he is simply a poet, not an Asian American poet. Identity in literary studies is a tricky affair: while identity in the discourse of minority politics demands clarity and certainty, the manifestation of identity in literature is exactly the opposite – fluid, multiple and becoming. Quoting Ien Ang that “Any identity is always mistaken” (p. 2), Wong perceives the relevance of identity for this diverse group of poets: indeed, questioning the rigidity of identity is the primary muse of their poetry.
There is no doubt that home provides the strongest thematic unity for all of these poets, about which Jennifer Wong demonstrates her prowess as a literary scholar. The rich texture of imagining home – leaving, returning or longing – made visible by Wong's insightful readings is the best part of the book. A compelling example is in two poems by Bei Dao and Nina Mingya Powles respectively:
In her separate analysis of these two poems, Wong makes it clear how the poetics of home is central to the experience of writing in diaspora. Even though home has a uniform appeal to us all and we are bound to it physically and emotionally, the meaning of home is generated by a productive distance from it. For Bei Dao, who is leaving once again, home is a measure of his life on the move without a destination; for Nina Mingya Powles, who longs for a home where she has never been, it is a source of imagination for belonging and possibility.
It is on this theme of home that this book convinces us that the 26 poets are both Chinese and diasporic. It is easy to notice in them the classical echoes of travel, journey and nostalgia of pre-modern Chinese poetry that still address our poetic sentiments about home today. These sentiments can be diasporic in the sense that they mark the absence of home as a signifying force. Indeed, these poets are united in their endeavour to express these sentiments in full while experiencing the home as lack or as dispersal.
