VIOLENCE, LANGUAGE, AND EMBODIMENT: REIMAGINING 
IDENTITY THROUGH WRITING IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 
ASIAN AMERICAN POETRY 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
by 
ERIC LANE 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
A THESIS 
 
Presented to the Department of English  
and the Robert D. Clark Honors College  
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of  
Bachelor of Arts 
 
May 2024 
 
 
 
 
An Abstract of the Thesis of 
Eric Lane for the degree of Bachelor of Arts (or Science) 
in the Department of English to be taken May 2024  
 
 
Title:  Violence, Language, and Embodiment: Reimagining Identity through Writing in  
Twenty-First Century Asian American Poetry 
 
 
Approved:        Corbett Upton, Ph.D.   
          Primary Thesis Advisor 
 
This project analyzes the poetry of Mai Der Vang, Ocean Vuong, Franny Choi and Victoria 
Chang within the larger context of Asian American literature. My research question is, “How do 
representations of language, violence and embodiment in twenty-first century Asian American 
poetry influence the formation of identity?” In order to answer this question, I utilize close-
reading of primary texts, social and historical context, literary criticism, and cultural studies to 
understand how these poets respond and contribute to a tradition of Asian American poetry. 
Through a close reading of Vuong’s “Notebook Fragments” and “The Gift” from his collection 
Night Sky with Exit Wounds as well as Vang’s “Mother of People without Script” and “Your 
Mountain Lies Down with You” from her collection Afterland, I argue that their poetry is deeply 
concerned not only with what is destroyed in war and displacement, but also what is created. 
Then, in analyzing Choi’s “Chatroulette” from her collection Soft Science and Chang’s “Home” 
from her collection Obit, among other poems from these collections, I argue that these poets use 
the dissolution of binary opposites (e.g. “Eastern” v. “Western) in order to construct a “home” 
within language. I identify three crucial aspects of Asian American identity—language, violence, 
and embodiment—that are ambiguated but also are reborn and reimagined in these poems. As 
such, these poems assert the importance of Asian American identity as a new creation of the self, 
despite the histories of violence that, in many ways, necessitated its creation. Thus, these 21st 
2 
 
 
century works suggest a development within the Asian American literary tradition towards a 
representation of the Asian American diaspora as a creation of a new culture, rather than a loss of 
a traditional culture.  
3 
 
 
Acknowledgements 
 
Many thanks to Dr. Corbett Upton, Dr. Paul Peppis, and Dr. Angela Rovak for their support of 
this project. Thank you also to the Karl Reasoner and the Humanities Undergraduate Research 
Fellowship for providing me with an opportunity to begin my research at the University of 
Oregon. 
 
  
4 
 
 
Table of Contents 
Introduction 6 
1. Asian American Literary History 9 
1.1. Inception of the Movement 9 
1.2. Early Canonization 14 
1.3. “Ethnic” Literature 15 
1.4. Diversification 20 
2. Identity in Asian American Poetry 23 
2.1 Language and Identity: English Language Hegemony, Violence, and the Body 23 
2.2. New Representations of Identity in Twenty-first Century Asian American Poetry 29 
3. Violence and Creation: Ocean Vuong and Mai Der Vang 30 
3.1. “Your Mountains Lie Down with You”: Geographies in Translation 30 
3.2. “The Gift”: Body Becomes Language 35 
3.3. “Mother of People without Script”: Writing and Hmong Subjectivity 41 
3.4. “Notebook Fragments”: Violence and Creation 46 
4. Boundary Destabilization and the Creation of “Home”: Victoria Chang and Franny Choi 52 
4.1 Asian American Identity as a Transgression of Dichotomy 52 
4.2. Form: Reinventing Formal Tradition 54 
4.3 Geography: Collapsing the East-West Divide 58 
4.4 Language: English-Language Hegemony and American Identity 61 
4.5 The Body: Inhabitation and Dis-inhabitation 64 
4.6 The Archive: History as Embodied Present 66 
4.7 Finding “Home” in Destabilized Spaces 68 
Conclusion 71 
Works Cited 74 
 
 
5 
 
 
 
Introduction 
 What is Asian American poetry? Perhaps the simplest explanation would be: the body of 
work encompassing all poets self-identified as Asian American. Even in this simplified 
conception, the central issue of the tradition is clear—identity. More so than the author’s 
background, what seems to define Asian American poetry is the way it grapples with, challenges, 
or affirms a sense of identity, a sense of belonging through language. As a diasporic community, 
Asian Americans have never quite fit into black-and-white identitarian discourses, always too 
“American” to be Asian and too “Asian” to be American. Thus Asian American poetry generally 
seeks to construct a space in which the arbitrarily dichotomized categories of “Asian” and 
“American” can coexist. Asian American poets have represented identity in a variety of ways, 
including affirming the beauty of Asian culture in an American context, rhetorically countering 
racist and xenophobic ideology, and deconstructing the very nature of race, ethnicity, nationality, 
and gender themselves. Such approaches poetically represent “cultural hybridity,” which 
“deconstructs the eurocentric hierarchy implicit in American society,” originating in the 
“interstitial passage between the fixed identifications of majority America, Asian American, and 
Asia” (Wallinger-Schorn 7). Asian American poets are “not interested in the boundaries marking 
different, fixed identities, but in the liminal spaces between these separated units” (7). Cultural 
hybridity is important to Asian American identity as it affirms the possibilities for diasporic 
identity to exceed the bounds of racist, nationalist thinking. 
 Yet equally important to acknowledge is the inciting factor of cultural hybridity, which I 
understand to be violence. Whether poems recount fleeing wars, losing loved ones, or 
experiencing racism in the US, violence is deeply embedded in their representations of identity. 
Though violence obviously generates destruction, I find that it also leads to the creation of 
6 
 
 
something new. Violence first produces trauma through loss of life, hardship, displacement, and 
alienation. During this process, a “blurring” occurs, in which different aspects of identity (such 
as language and embodiment), or supposedly diametrically opposed identities (such as “Asian” 
and “American”), become indistinguishable from each other. Finally, though, the poems tend to 
move towards a conclusion focusing on creation rather than destruction, in which something 
beautiful, often a connection to people, self, or land, is born out of the ashes of violence. I argue 
that the very category of “Asian American” is one built from violence as Asian migrants fled and 
continue to flee their homelands in search of safety, as well as facing racialized violence in the 
US. In tracing this diasporic movement, Asian Americans are challenged with the complex 
interweaving of identity as they navigate becoming both American and Asian. Yet in the end, 
this process creates the unique identity of “Asian American,” which, in the poems I discuss here, 
is a source of beauty, not just a manifestation of historical trauma. 
 In this paper, I center the movement from violence to hybridization to the creation of new 
identities in twenty-first century Asian American poetry. First, I analyze how Asian American 
poetry has developed as a cultural tradition from the start of the twentieth century to the early 
twenty-first century. This demonstrates how identity has been historically represented in Asian 
American poetry, and how the twenty-first century idea of the movement from violence to 
hybridity to creation represents a shift in the tradition. Second, I introduce the current body of 
scholarly work on identity in Asian American poetry, identifying three common themes: 
violence, language, and embodiment, which I find to be of importance to the process of 
“blurring” or hybridization in twenty-first century Asian American poetry. Then, I analyze the 
work of Ocean Vuong and Mai der Vang, looking into how they represent violence as both a 
destruction and recreation of identity.  Following this, I perform a close analysis of works by 
7 
 
 
Franny Choi and Victoria Chang, examining how their disruption of binary divisions of aspects 
of identity assumed to be antagonistic opposites (e.g. “English” v. “non-English,” “West” v. 
“East,” etc.) constructs a home within language. Finally, I argue that the relationship between 
violence and the creation of identity is a particularly relevant theme in twenty-first century Asian 
American poetry, which both pays tribute to and reimagines histories of violence in Asian 
American poetry since its foundation over 100 years ago.  
8 
 
 
1. Asian American Literary History 
 In this section, I generalize the Asian American literary tradition into a series of four 
major historical periods to illustrate the vast transformations in Asian American poetry and 
scholarship since 1900. Since its beginnings around the turn of the twentieth century, Asian 
American poetry, and Asian American literature more generally, has reflected the unique 
oppressions that Asians face in the United States. Asian American poets have likewise engaged 
in resistive work, challenging the notion of a hegemonic, white American identity and seeking to 
find a sense of home-away-from-home in a foreign land, or in a land which renders them foreign 
regardless of their actual nationality. The four major periods I identify in Asian American 
literary history are: inception, early canonization, “ethnic” literature, and diversification. 
Importantly, these movements are neither discrete nor separable—each issue bleeds into the next, 
and all of them remain central to the concerns of modern poets.  
1.1. Inception of the Movement 
 What I call the “inception” of modern Asian American poetry begins around 1900-1910 
with mass immigration from Asia to the United States, and lasts more or less until the 1970s. 
Several strains of literature arose during this period, including poetry of detained Asian 
Americans, poetry of free Asian Americans, and the rising influence of Asian culture on non-
Asian American poets. The poems of this period reflect contemporaneous violence targeting 
Asian Americans, such as detention at immigration stations and Japanese internment, and 
demonstrate some of the first representations of a connection between violence and creation in 
Asian American poetry.  
First, the poems produced at Angel Island Immigration Station and during Japanese 
internment constitute much of what would be called “Asian American poetry” before 1950. 
9 
 
 
Josephine Park notes how these “twinned crises” produced poetry that “marked out 
confinement,” expressed a “physically felt sorrow,” and reflected the poets’ “barely livable 
conditions” (101-103). Take, for instance, the closing lines of Poem 135, translated into English 
from the Chinese originally carved into the walls: 
From now on, I am departing far from this building 
All of my fellow villagers are rejoicing with me. 
Don’t say that everything within is Western styled. 
Even if it is built of jade, it has turned into a cage. (“Poems and Inscriptions,” 
Poem 135, ll. 5-8) 
The juxtaposition of “jade” and “cage” demonstrates not only the suffering and entrapment of the 
poet’s location, but a loss of hope. That which the speaker saw as jade (representing beauty and 
promise) has become a cage (a representation of physical confinement and loss of freedom). The 
line, “All of my fellow villagers are rejoicing with me” expresses the need for community and 
the reality of social depravation within the facilities. The phrase “fellow villagers” demonstrates 
a burgeoning Asian American identity through a feeling of collective suffering and eventual 
collective joy. The “fellow villagers” represent more than just people from the same country as 
the speaker—through the shared experience of violence, they become not merely Chinese, but 
Chinese American. Even in its more hopeful moments, however, the poem never forgets nor 
diminishes the harshness of the conditions of the immigration station. 
 These sentiments are echoed with eerie likeness in the poetry of Japanese Internment, in 
an “almost too-elegant pairing of Angel Island and interment poetry” (Park 104). Yoshiko 
Uchida’s translations of her mother’s poetry reveal the feelings of confinement and pain so 
familiar to the American immigrants at Angel Island: 
  
10 
 
 
Banished to this  
Desert land, 
I cherish the 
Blessing of the sky. 
….. 
Grown old so soon 
In a foreign land, 
What do they think, 
These people 
Eating in lonely silence? (Uchida p. 122, ll. 7-10, 15-19) 
 
The poet, a survivor of the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah, recounts the natural 
and spiritual desolation that she experienced. The words “banished” and “foreign” create a strong 
sense of displacement, and of being away from home. Yet these words take on meaning at 
multiple levels, painting America as a foreign land, but also Topaz specifically as a land foreign 
even within America, where it is located. The construction of the internment camp as a foreign 
space within a foreign space compounds the speaker’s feelings of loss and loneliness.  
 Though these two moments in American history clearly and distinctly shaped the legacy 
of Asian American poetry and identity, it wasn’t until decades after they were written that most 
of these poems were published. The poems at Angel Island were not rediscovered until the 
1970s, and Japanese internment poetry was not published “because those incarcerated were 
thought to have deemed it better to forget” (Park 103). Though their impacts on American poetry 
have since been acknowledged, these formative poems long existed in darkness, brought to 
attention only after Asian American studies had already begun to emerge as an academic field of 
study. 
11 
 
 
 Yet free American poets, contemporaneous with the two tragedies, also produced and 
published poetry, often in direct conversation with their Asian and American identities. The 
Philippine-born American poet Carlos Bulosan expressed the strength of his American identity in 
his famous poem, “I Want the Wide American Earth:” 
We are everywhere, we are everywhere. 
We are there when they sentence us to prison for telling the truth; 
We are there when they conscript us to fight  their wars; 
We are there when they throw us in concentration camps; 
We are there when they come at dawn with their guns. (30-34) 
 
The anaphora of “we are” and “we are everywhere” gives the poem a didactic and oratory 
quality. The emphasis created through this repetition signals a radical claiming of “here” and 
“everywhere” as spaces of Asian American inhabitation. This particular passage, with its 
examples of “prison,” “wars,” “concentration camps” and “guns,” certainly expresses a feeling 
of oppression and violence not dissimilar to the poetry of imprisoned Asian Americans. 
However, rather than concluding with loneliness, destitution, and foreignness, Bulosan instead 
argues that despite these feelings, Asian Americans have found a home in America, and no 
amount of violence can erase Asian American identity. 
 Not long after the rise in mass immigration from Asia to the United States, the influence 
of Asian art, poetry, and general aesthetics started to appear in poetry written by non-Asian 
Americans. Steven Yao argues that “the very establishment of a distinctively modern poetic 
idiom in English” in the twentieth century relies upon “a sustained engagement by some of the 
most renowned writers of the period with particular Asian cultural forms,” most famously the 
haiku, among many others (132). In particular, Ezra Pound’s famous collection Cathay “maps 
how the categories of ‘Asian,’ and in particular ‘Chinese,’ intersect with the category of ‘poetry’ 
within the dominant U.S. cultural imaginary,” which, according to Yao, makes it an “important 
12 
 
 
touchstone” in the history of Asian American articulations of  “ethnic and cultural identity,” 
despite the fact that Pound was not Asian (136, 152). In other words, the early twentieth century 
marked the inception of the Asian American poetic tradition not only due to the influx of Asian 
writers in the US, but also the growing influence of Asian culture on the wider American 
consciousness. Expressions of a hybridity of Asian and American cultures, peoples, and 
identities appeared in the writings of both Asian and non-Asian American poets, sparking a 
tradition that has continued to question the nature of identity to this day. 
 Though several other Asian American poets with popular profiles wrote during this 
period (such as Sadakichi Hartmann, Yone Noguchi, H.T. Tsiang, and Sui Sin Far), the few 
poems mentioned in this section exemplify how Asian American poetry has contended with 
violence, identity, and cultural hybridity since its beginnings. The fact that poetry was not only 
created but has survived Japanese interment and Angel Island Immigration Station is in itself a 
testament to Asian American poetry’s ability to create something new out of violence. In 
addition, the content of the poems expresses the connection between violence, identity, and 
home. Phrases such as “Western-styled” and “foreign land” create a sense of physical and 
cultural foreignness in the US. However, there is at the same time a burgeoning feeling of 
community or home in the connection the speaker feels to their “fellow villagers” or “people / 
Eating in lonely silence.” Bulosan’s claiming of “there” and “everywhere” as spaces of Asian 
American inhabitation also creates a sense of home amidst a vast array of violence. As this 
relationship between violence, identity, and home began to appear in Asian American poetry, 
cultural hybridity began to surface even in the works of non-Asian poets such as Pound, which 
laid the groundwork for questioning the extent to which “Asian” and “American” could be 
considered to be wholly different identities.   
13 
 
 
1.2. Early Canonization 
 Little has been written on the development of the tradition between the 1950s and 1970s, 
and it is reasonable to assume that the body of literature, even among what little did exist, was 
not widely studied, published, or disseminated. In fact, it wasn’t until 1970 that a park ranger 
noticed the Chinese writing on the walls of Angel Island Immigration Station, 30 years after its 
closure (Park 102). Japanese Internment poetry followed a similar trajectory, only reaching a 
wide audience, and often in translation, decades after being composed. Though scholars now 
acknowledge the importance of these bodies of work as the very beginnings of Asian American 
poetry, they only entered the discussion due to a new era, which I call “early canonization.” With 
rising awareness of minority and ethnic studies proliferating in the US scholarly conversation, 
Asian American literature emerged as a formal field of research and inquiry, which dramatically 
shaped the tradition. 
 Perhaps no publication was more important for the advancement of Asian American 
studies than Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers. Originally published in 1974, 
the anthology is considered by many to be one of the major impetuses driving the nascent field 
of Asian American literary studies. In her introduction to the 3rd edition, Fickle writes that 
Aiiieeeee! “continues to be relevant, and not simply because it remains Asian American studies’ 
controversial origin story” (“Foreword” xx). In the introduction to the 1974 edition, the four 
editors make clear the goals of the anthology: to represent the fact “that Asian American writers 
have been writing seriously since the nineteenth century, and writing well” (“Introduction” 3). 
This exists in opposition to “the destruction of an organic sense of identity, [and] the complete 
psychological and cultural subjugation of the Asian American,” which they call “white racism’s 
only success” (10). Clearly, the central issues for this anthology were with canonization in a 
14 
 
 
scholarly, academic, or even popular context. That Asian American writers had been “writing 
seriously since the nineteenth century, and writing well” suggests that the virtual nonexistence of 
Asian American literary studies at that point could be traced not to a lack of talent or material, 
but an intentional elision. The direct calls to “white racism” and white supremacy indicate that 
the editors sought not only to highlight Asian voices, but to dismantle a system of oppression. 
 Fickle argues that the book “is a part of a broader politicization of Asian Americans…to 
establish ethnic studies programs” in Californian universities (“Foreward” xix). Published by the 
historically black Howard University Press after a series of rejections, Aiiieeeee! was released in 
the heyday of the Civil Rights movement, the Black Power movement, and the Vietnam War 
(xix).  Aiiieeeee!’s legacy exists as one of the forces driving the burgeoning field of Asian 
American studies, paralleling similar movements in black, indigenous, Latinx, gender, and 
sexuality studies. Following Aiiieeeee!, several notable anthologies of Asian American literature, 
including many that include poetry, such as The Open Boat: Poems From Asian America (1993) 
and Bamboo Among the Oaks: Contemporary Writing by Hmong Americans (2002) have been 
published, among others. 
1.3. “Ethnic” Literature 
 Though the inclusion of Asian American literature in a widening field of ethnic studies 
pushed previously understudied texts towards the forefront of the American literary canon, the 
era following was marked by ambivalences concerning the validity of the category of “ethnic” 
literature more fundamentally. Though I generalize that this era began during or just following 
that of the early canonization in the 1980s and 1990s, it more or less appeared concurrently with 
the field of Asian American studies, and will likely persist as long as the field remains. This era 
is defined by a central question in scholarship—is separating American literature into ethnic 
15 
 
 
traditions useful, beneficial, or even possible? Alongside this question, Asian American poetry 
seemed to diverge around this time towards two different modes of representing identity—one 
“mainstream” and one “experimental.” 
 By labelling Asian American literature as “ethnic,” cultural and literary theorists have 
been concerned about how this category reproduces a mostly socially-constructed difference. 
Shirley Lim identifies a key question behind the making of an exclusively Asian American 
literary canon: “…how is it possible to identify the sources of Asian-American literary effects 
without falling into the trap of identifying Asian-Americans as ‘special’ or ‘different’ and so 
unwittingly confirming racist commonplaces?” (51). It is certainly true that the category of Asian 
American literature implies a distinction between Asian American works and “general” 
American literature which takes the demonym “American” without any other qualifiers. 
Separating the American canon along the lines of race or ethnicity could seem problematic, as it 
suggests that there exists a fundamental difference between races, and reifies white American 
literature as “standard,” and everything else as “ethnic.” Yet Lim argues that Asian American 
literature diverges from other American canons not simply due to the writers’ ethnicities, but the 
content of the writing itself. In particular, “the non-European character underlying their diverse 
styles, themes and forms” and “the incorporation of phrases or whole lines of the original 
language into the English text” can be used to distinguish Asian American literature (52, 54). 
Thus the difference is primarily cultural, rather than racial—Asian American writers have 
incorporated Western, Eastern, and American influences to create a tradition which is distinct 
from both Asian literature and American literature more broadly.  
16 
 
 
 Though this debate largely exists in scholarship, its effects can also be felt in the shifts in 
the poetry itself. Timothy Yu posits developments in Asian American poetry against those of 
Language poetry, arguing: 
While reading Asian American poetry exposes some of the strains and limits in 
the political Language poetry, particularly around the issues of race and identity, 
Language poetry's critique of mainstream poetry may also map the limits of the 
Asian American poetic project, insofar as it relies upon a commodifiable "ethnic" 
individuality. (Yu 424) 
 
In essence, Yu examines how the debate of the validity of “ethnic” studies appears in diverging 
traditions of American poetry. Asian American poetry “exposed the mainstream voice as a white 
voice” through calling upon distinctly non-white, non-Western cultural references (Yu 425). Yet 
at the same time, Language poetry sought to break down the very nature of identity itself through 
language, in opposition to Asian American “mainstream” poetry which uses language to 
reproduce identity. Thus Asian American poetry became divided into two strains. The first, 
“mainstream” or “ethnic” poetry, uses traditional signifiers of culture such as food, art, language, 
and religion to convey a distinctly Asian identity. Poetry of this style could potentially be 
described as “sentimental,” perhaps even venturing into the lyric realm, compared to the second 
strain of “experimental” or “Language” poetry. The latter style breaks down poetic convention as 
well as ethnic stereotypes in order to challenge identity. These poems are often not obviously 
“Asian” (that is, there are no clear references to Asian culture) and when they are, they seek 
more so to dismantle any concrete sense of identity.  
 Consider two of the poets that Yu investigates, Li-Young Lee and John Yau. Lee 
represents the “mainstream” tradition, calling upon traditional culture (such as art and language) 
17 
 
 
and exalting its beauty. In one of his most canonized works, “Persimmons,” Lee uses the fruit, 
which has been cultivated in Asia for millennia, to tell the story of the speaker’s family: 
Under some blankets, I find a box. 
Inside the box I find three scrolls. 
I sit beside him and untie 
three paintings by my father: 
Hibiscus leaf and a white flower. 
Two cats preening. 
Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth. (Lee 70-76) 
 
The “scrolls” and “paintings” depicting “hibiscus leaf” and “persimmons” imbue the poem with 
a deep sense of reverence towards the beauty of Asian art and culture. The invocation of the fruit 
as a symbol of this tradition is used to express a mix of grief and consolation at the father’s loss 
of sight, as he, presumably, approaches the end of his life: 
Some things never leave a person: 
scent of the hair of one you love, 
the texture of persimmons, 
in your palm, the ripe weight. (Lee 85-89) 
 
The connection between food and art, which appears in the father’s painting of persimmons, and 
how these ideas both relate to memory, constructs the poem’s main argument. Though apart from 
their homeland, the family finds comfort in all the “things that never leave a person,” that is, all 
the things they carried with them from Asia to America. Thus the use of cultural artifacts 
throughout the poem seeks not to reproduce stereotypes, but express a consolation. Though the 
father is blind and can no longer see his own paintings, he cannot forget “the texture of 
persimmons, / in your palm, the ripe weight,” symbolizing how diasporic people can lose their 
18 
 
 
homeland, but can never truly forget their own culture, which, for the speaker, seems to be a 
thing of beauty. 
 By contrast, John Yau’s poetry is imbued with ambivalence, breaking down any coherent 
sense of identity. In his poem, “ING GRISH,” the speaker employs a sort of anaphora of direct 
contradiction, saying “I do not know Chinese” and “I do know Chinese” several times, as well as 
“I do not know English” and “I do know English” (Yau 15, 22, 24, 28). Though the poem deals 
with similar themes of parenthood and language as “Persimmons,” the contradictory nature 
inherent in the speaker’s relationship with English and Chinese concludes in a much less 
consolatory fashion: 
I do not know English because when my father said he would like 
to see me dead, I was never quite sure what he meant 
 
I do not know Chinese because I never slept with a woman whose 
vagina slanted like my mother’s eyes 
 
I do not know English or Chinese and, because of that, I did 
not put a gravestone at the head of my parents’ graves as I felt no 
language mirrored in the ones they spoke (98-104) 
 
One obvious difference between this poem and Lee’s work is that “ING GRISH” feels decidedly 
less sentimental, flowery, and “beautiful” in a conventional sense. Beyond that, however, the 
poem’s movements are much more deconstructive. Where “Persimmons” finds consolation in the 
acceptance and preservation of Asian culture, “ING GRISH” finds the speaker lost in translation 
between two languages that they simultaneously know and do not know. Embedded in this 
linguistic conundrum is a breaking down of the boundaries between English and Chinese, and 
other languages. The very first line, “I never learned Singlish,” references a Singaporean variety 
19 
 
 
of English, which is only partially mutually intelligible with General American or British English 
(Yau 1). Whether Singlish is a variety of English or an entirely different language is impossible 
to say with certainty. Though “Persimmons” does deal with the struggles of English second-
language acquisition, it doesn’t make the same deconstructive moves as “ING GRISH.” For Yau, 
the very category of “English” is itself unstable, and the ability for anyone to “know” even their 
native or heritage language is constantly in flux. The concluding stanza in which the speaker 
asserts “I do not know English or Chinese” and thus “I did not put a gravestone at the head of my 
parents’ graves” ends not with the consolation found in reclaiming Asian identity (as 
“Persimmons” does), but rather, it allows the state of lacking, of knowing neither language, to 
exist on its own, without resolution. While both poets grapple with identity, the more 
“mainstream” side finds solace in an “Asian-ness” whereas the “experimental” side expresses the 
impossibility for Asian Americans to exist within any linguistic or cultural category. As George 
Uba puts it, for ethnic poets, “although in different ways, conceiving identity is only possible by 
foregrounding its partialities…for Yau every version of identity is radically contestable because 
of the unstable nature of the tools used to conceptualize it” (35-36). 
1.4. Diversification 
 Out of the debate concerning whether or not Asian American literature represents a 
useful division of literary traditions came a more fundamental question: what does “Asian 
American” mean? Who is included, and who is not? In recent years, the conversation has shifted 
towards diversity within the Asian American tradition, rather than thinking of “Asian” as a 
homogenous racial identity vis-à-vis categories of White and Black. In this way, Asian American 
literature is being examined with an intersectional lens, as more and more diverse voices enter 
the existing canon. 
20 
 
 
 Even Aiiieeeee!, back in 1972, acknowledged the diversity inherent in Asian American 
literature: “Asian Americans are not one people but several” (“Preface” xxv). Yet, as many have 
criticized, they go on to mention only “Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and Filipino 
Americans” (xxv). The entire anthology includes only writers of these three ethnic backgrounds, 
no poetry, and a significant majority of the authors are male. Despite its groundbreaking status, 
Aiiieeeee! has come under scrutiny for its narrow representation of different traditions within the 
greater umbrella of Asian American literature. In fact, the degree of criticism became so intense 
that “Asian Americanists have often been far more familiar with what is wrong with Aiiieeeee! 
than Aiiieeeee! itself” (“Foreword” x). Given the push to incorporate more diverse voices in the 
Asian American literary canon, I argue that we are currently entering a new era of Asian 
American poetry, which I call “diversification.” Here, the question concerns not the diversity that 
“ethnic” literature adds to “general American” literature, but rather how marginalized groups 
within Asian American poetry specifically add to the diversity of its canon. 
 In poet Franny Choi’s essay, playfully titled “(B)Aiiieeeee!: The Future Is Femme and 
Queer,” she argues that Asian American poetry is becoming diverse along all lines of 
oppression—gender, sexuality, nationality, lived experience, etc. According to Choi, 
There are hundreds of us: femme, women, queer, trans, and gender 
nonconforming poets from all corners of the Asian diaspora, speaking dozens of 
languages, spanning multiple legacies of American war and occupation, from all 
class backgrounds and migration histories. Here’s to our continuing arrival. (647) 
 
Though much of the essay focuses on the privileging of masculine and heterosexual 
expressions in Asian American poetry, the passage above highlights the sheer number of 
intersections that the field actually encompasses. In direct conversation with Aiiieeeee!, this 
argument demonstrates a new movement in the tradition which in many ways diverges from the 
21 
 
 
historical precedent set by the original anthology. In this new era, diversity is not just an arbitrary 
goal, but a necessary and constitutive part of Asian American poetry. Since no single poet can 
capture the breadth of all Asian American experiences, in order for the tradition to convey 
contemporary Asian American identity, it must embrace differences rather than shoehorn diverse 
voices into a historical archetype of what makes poetry “Asian American.” 
 As female and/or queer poets from various regions within Asia and America, I find that 
Choi, Chang, Vuong, and Vang fit into the new movement towards diversification in Asian 
American literature. Poems describing the harsh conditions of refugee camps in Thailand, native 
Hmong religious practices, cities torn apart by bombs and fire, robots and the internet age, 
sexuality and queerness, and the loss of parents who fled their homeland, broaden the scope of 
Asian American poetry beyond male, heteromasculine, second-generation Chinese and Japanese 
American experiences. Of course, their poems pay attention to the history of Asian American 
poetry and resonate with many concerns reflected in Angel Island’s wall poems, Aiiieeeee!, and 
the experimental and mainstream poets of the twentieth century. However, they challenge the 
existing canon through representing identity in new ways by emphasizing how identity formation 
occurs in the spaces of indeterminacy between violence, language, and the body. This mirrors 
Choi’s identification of the expansion of Asian American poetry to include a wider breadth of 
histories and lived experiences. 
22 
 
 
 2. Identity in Asian American Poetry 
 Throughout the diverse histories and writings that constitute what we call “Asian 
American poetry,” perhaps no theme remains as persistent as identity. Indeed, per the debate on 
the value of “ethnic literature” as a category (see section 1.3), exploration of Asian American 
identity could be said to be the single defining characteristic of all poetry labelled “Asian 
American.” As such, the study of identity and its representations is crucial to understanding the 
meaning and significance of Asian American poetry as a whole. In this section, I identify three 
elements of Asian American poetry that influence identity formation: language, violence, and 
embodiment. Then, I illustrate how the existing scholarship characterizes the relationship 
between these elements and Asian American identity. 
2.1 Language and Identity: English Language Hegemony, Violence, and the Body 
 Perhaps no topic has been discussed as thoroughly in the existing literature concerning 
Asian American identity as English language hegemony. The majority of contemporary Asian 
American poets write in English, which is for many their native language. Yet in doing so, they 
must contend with English as a hegemonic language that marginalizes Asian and other world 
languages. In addition, Asian American poets are keenly interested in how English proficiency is 
linked to humanization in the US. The relationship between English, power, and identity is 
deeply entrenched in nearly all Asian American poetry. In addition, the relationships between 
language, violence, and embodiment are so tightly intertwined that nearly all critical work on 
English language hegemony in Asian American literature also mentions violence and the body. 
In particular, I find that many scholars argue that violence (including the violence inherent in 
English language hegemony) maps racialization onto the body through language. In this section, 
I analyze how these scholars relate this idea to identity formation in Asian American literature. 
23 
 
 
 In her paper “English Before Engrish: Asian American Poetry’s Unruly Tongue,” Tara 
Fickle draws upon the proliferation of “Engrish,” or the translation of “Asian grammatical and 
semantic ‘failures’ into a source of national comic relief,” as one of the many manifestations of 
the dominance exerted by Standard American English (84). According to Fickle,  
“Asian uses—or misuses—of the English language are, however, more than just a 
source of American entertainment: they have become instrumental sites for the 
contemporary articulation of a national sovereignty that is increasingly being 
defined as, and through, linguistic sovereignty.” (85) 
 
This “linguistic sovereignty” expressed by the mockery of “’Engrish’” not only 
marginalizes grammatical and syntactic differences but does so by racializing those differences, 
thus tying English language dominance directly to “Asian American” as a racial category (85). 
Thus the valorization of “standard” English and the derision directed towards “Engrish” reflect 
“the reification of whiteness as the socially correct native ‘standard’ of American national 
identity” (85). For Fickle, Asian Americans are excluded in this way from the “socially correct” 
standard of whiteness, which hinges on one’s ability to speak “proper” English. Fickle 
essentially argues that Asian American poetry, vis-a-vis the racialization inherent in English 
language hegemony, responds with “language games” that disrupt the narrative of a single, 
correct, white-coded “English.” If dominant racist ideology maps syntactical and grammatical 
“errors” onto the racialized Asian body, Asian American poets break down the very nature of 
syntax and grammar to reflect the “recombinatory yoking of two identities, Asian and American, 
assumed to be not just independent but antagonistic” (103). 
 Xiaojing Zhou makes a similar argument, analyzing how racialization is mapped onto the 
body through language. Zhou writes that  
24 
 
 
“[u]sing the dominant language as a measure to separate the white national self 
from its racial others is part of a characteristic practice in essentializing racial 
“traits” by inscribing racial meanings on the body and mind of those labeled 
“nonwhite” in the formation of the American national identity.” (1)  
 
This argument acknowledges that language and race are inherently intertwined in 
American culture and national identity. Here, the link between language and the body becomes 
evident as well, as language “inscrib[es] racial meanings on the body.” The Asian American 
body is racialized not only in its visual, corporeal form, but also in the way English language 
dominance writes new, racialized meanings onto it. Similar to Fickle, Zhou finds that Asian 
American poets possess a keen awareness of this linguistic racialization, and form identity 
through writing in juxtaposition to it. Zhou asserts that “there is no fixed ethnicity to reclaim, no 
‘home’ to dwell in in English,” and instead, “Asian American poets reinvent new ways of saying 
and hearing in that language, rendering it inflected with ‘alien’ sounds or ‘foreign’ accents” (2). 
Since English, the language in which most Asian American poets write, fundamentally 
marginalizes and racializes the Asian body, these poets can find “home” only in the creation of a 
“new” English that is somehow freed from hegemonic ideals of “correct” Standard English. It is 
in this “home” that one may find identity, and a sense of subjectivity, self, and belonging 
historically denied to Asian Americans. Thus the nature of language itself is a crucial aspect of 
identity formation in Asian American poetry. 
 Dorothy J. Wang notes how the relationship between language and the Asian American 
body has become so tightly connected that regardless of one’s actual English level, the 
perception of a lack of English proficiency, and thereby a lack of “Americanness,” and 
personhood, remains. According to Wang, the very idea of “‘Americanness’” has been 
“inseparable from the belief that ‘Orientals’ are also constitutively nonnative speakers of 
25 
 
 
English,” citing how even fourth-generation Asian Americans “are often asked if English is their 
native tongue” (26). Poetry has a particular interest in these issues, as it is “the genre most tied to 
high culture, literary tradition, formal mastery, and ‘native tongue’—a literary tradition from 
which minority writers were largely excluded” (26). Here Wang also highlights a connection to 
the body, arguing that “since the racialized poet…is often apprehended in terms of the 
bodily…her poetry is inevitably posited in opposition to…the intellectual, the literary” (22). The 
racialization of the body in a culture of anti-“identity politics” leads to the exclusion of Asian 
Americans from the literary canon due to racial identity not being considered “literary” enough. 
Thus the relationship between the racialized body and literature is a troubled one. Not only must 
Asian American poets contend with English as a hegemonic language from which they are 
constantly perceived to be “outside of,” but they must also contend with the cultural and 
hegemonic history of English poetry itself. In particular, “the act of writing itself…takes on a 
heightened sense of self-consciousness because of [Asian Americans’] constitutive exclusion 
from the category of native speaker” (27). To write in English, then, is to write Asian American 
identity into existence through asserting some kind of relationship to the language and its poetry, 
whether that be in disrupting traditional form and style or finding a place within it. In any case, 
writing and language are fundamental to understanding how poets express identity in the context 
of English language hegemony and the category of “native speaker.” 
 Similarly to how racialization through English language hegemony relates to the 
formation of Asian American identity in poetry, racialized violence in the US has in many ways 
shaped Asian American identity. For one, English language hegemony as a system of power 
centering whiteness can be seen as a form of racialized violence towards Asian Americans in and 
of itself. Beyond just this, though, Asian American literature provides a lens through which the 
26 
 
 
nature of American violence itself manifests, especially in the context of gender, sexuality, and 
race, and thus influences the identities of the groups it targets. 
  The relationship between violence and masculinity in Asian American literature and 
culture has been discussed as an important aspect of the representation of Asian American 
identity in literature. Viet Thanh Nguyen identifies 1968 as a turning point in Asian American 
identity, as the year in which the term “Asian American” was coined, and when Asian American 
activists “began to see violence as a tool they could use for agency, rather than only as a weapon 
that targeted them as objects” (130). Despite the “emasculation of Chinese American men by 
exploiting their labor and excluding them from American society,” Asian Americans discovered 
around this time that “violence could also be used to remasculinize themselves” through 
dismantling stereotypes targeting Asian masculinity (130). This movement, which Nguyen 
identifies in the contemporary Chinese American novel, is clearly related to gender and identity 
as it pertains to violence in Asian American literature.   
 Asian American poets have instead responded to violence directly through language and 
form. Juliana Chang notes how Asian American poets often “construc[t]…alternative forms and 
structures that simultaneously reveal and disrupt more socially dominant structures” (94). Chang 
cites how Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee “recovers violence that is often ‘covered up’ in 
official discourse by enacting and embodying violence in the very form of her sentence 
structure,” through experimental elements such as sentence fragments with no clear subject or 
object, which she links to bodily violence, calling them “‘decapitated forms’” (94). In Chang’s 
analysis, violence towards the Asian body becomes language—physically manifesting in 
maimed forms and sentences. For Asian Americans, then, violence relates to both language and 
identity, as it is through language that poets represent and dismantle violence, as well as 
27 
 
 
expressing an identity in the context of such violence. Thus, in order to understand how poets’ 
use of language leads to the formation of Asian American identity, one must also face the 
violence that influences and becomes embedded in the poetry itself. 
 Another aspect of language and embodiment that Asian American poets must contend 
with is how to subvert the pervasion of the conception of the national body, and national identity, 
as a white one. Shimakawa writes about the Asian American body in performance, using 
“abjection” as a way to think about the body. Shimakawa argues that “scholars of the politics of 
representation, and particularly of performance, must grapple with the connections linking the 
body, the image, and the polis, in other words, connections between affect and effect” (4). 
Shimakawa identifies the link between this racism and the body as such: “[t]he immigrant body, 
then, poses a particular kind of threat to the (literal and symbolic) ‘American’ body” (7). The 
idea of the “literal and symbolic” American body can be seen in the way that immigrant bodies 
are posited vis-à-vis a figurative national body. Shimakawa writes that  
“[t]he bodily discourse that fueled the anti-immigrant, anti-immigration 
legislation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries…constructed the 
figurative ‘national body’ as an organism that must be protected from 
contamination or infection by the contagion…that the immigrant body 
represents.” (8) 
The representation of the nation as a body, itself “contaminated” by literal bodies, suggests that 
the Asian American body faces a two-fold oppression—once as a racialized body, and again as a 
threat to the white, “national” body. Just as Asian American bodies are perceived as a threat to 
the white national body, they are tied to Asian American identity, and American identity more 
broadly.  
28 
 
 
2.2. New Representations of Identity in Twenty-first Century Asian American Poetry 
 In the context of the history of Asian American poetry, I have argued that one of the main 
shifts in the twenty-first century was the newfound focus on diversity within the field. While the 
inclusion of more diverse voices has certainly become a focus in publishing, canonization, and 
scholarship, within the poetry itself the representations of Asian American identity have shifted 
beyond just the fact that “Asian American” encompasses more people than were previously 
accepted to fit the definition. These poets are not interested in merely hybridizing two cultures or 
languages, but place particular emphasis on the idea of creation, especially in relation to identity. 
I argue that the issues of language, embodiment, and violence must be blurred or ambiguated in 
order for an Asian American identity to be created within Asian American poetry. For Vang and 
Vuong, the violence of the wars from which they fled creates a new, distinctly Asian American 
identity through the ambiguity of language and body. For Choi and Chang, writing poetry 
functions as a way to find a new home within language that exceeds the limiting binary divisions 
that marginalize Asian American identities. In my argument, I build on the scholarly 
conversation which acknowledges how the racialization of language, violence, and the body in 
the United States creates a marginalized “Asian American” community through its relation to the 
standard, superior construct of the “white,” “normal,” American. As many scholars have noted, 
Asian American writers are deeply interested in destabilizing this racist paradigm through 
writing and language. I then argue that the ultimate result of this destabilization is the very 
formation of a new, twenty-first century Asian American identity that encompasses diverse 
histories and transcends the binary divisions that oppress them. 
29 
 
 
3. Violence and Creation: Ocean Vuong and Mai Der Vang 
 As poetry concerning the refugee experience, the works of Ocean Vuong and Mai Der 
Vang are deeply concerned with violence. For these poets, Asian American identity is contingent 
upon violence, such as the wars in Southeast Asia that created much of the Vietnamese and 
Hmong-Laotian diaspora. In their constructions of identity, I argue that Night Sky with Exit 
Wounds and Afterland represent three crucial components of diasporic identity. First is 
violence—the inciting factor which either forces migration or persecutes migrants once they 
arrive in their new homes. Second, I find that this violence typically results in a confounding of 
identity, in which crucial aspects such as the body, geography, and language blur together, 
reflecting the hybridity of Asian American identity. Out of this space, however, comes the third 
and final aspect—creation. Though the inherently destructive nature of violence is fully 
acknowledged, the poems also express that something new is being created out of this 
destruction. 
 In this section, I trace the movement from violence to troubled identity to creation in 
close readings of “Your Mountains Lie Down with You” and “Mother of People without Script” 
by Mai Der Vang, and “The Gift” and “Notebook Fragments” by Ocean Vuong. Though each 
poem represents these ideas differently, I find that the overall movement within each poem 
follows the pattern of violence leading to ambiguity and a final creation of identity. As such, the 
relationship between violence, identity, and creation is an important and innovative part of 
twenty-first century Asian American poetry. 
3.1. “Your Mountains Lie Down with You”: Geographies in Translation 
 The trauma of leaving one’s homeland manifests in both collections as an exploration of 
loss among Asian American refugees. The poems particularly emphasize a feeling of grief 
30 
 
 
created by both the physical displacement from and active destruction of the speakers’ 
homelands. However, they also emphasize how a new home sprouts from the soil of this grief. 
This relationship between diasporic peoples and their homelands drives the poem, “Your 
Mountain Lies Down with You.” Narratively, the poem describes the speaker laying her 
grandfather to rest, not in his native mountains of Laos, but in California. The representation of 
violence manifests primarily in the description of the grandfather’s experience of forced 
displacement, ostensibly due to the civil war. After the US pulled out of the wars in Southeast 
Asia, the Communist Pathet Lao targeted the Hmong since the Hmong were mostly allied with 
the US and Vang Pao (Moua 4). This led to the Hmong diaspora extending to the US and other 
countries in the Americas and Europe. The grandfather’s burial in a foreign land thus stems 
directly from war. 
 The poem opens with a description of the grandfather as “a refugee, an exile,” which 
further implicates the relationship between violence and homeland (“Your Mountains Lie Down 
with You” 2). Not just an “immigrant,” the grandfather’s status as “refugee” and “exile” suggests 
that he was cast out of his home country and forced to find a new space to inhabit. When the 
speaker asks, “Is that the jungle flower you plucked when you fled, the one you cradled / all the 
way to the ghettos of St. Paul where you first settled?” the flower becomes symbolic of the 
grandfather’s impossible desire to grasp onto his homeland despite being separated from it (16-
18). The word “cradled” implies intimacy and love, which contrasts words such as “fled” and 
“ghettos,” which invoke feelings of fear, loss, destitution, and violence. Thus the violence 
embedded in “Your Mountains Lie Down with You” creates the sense that despite the 
grandfather’s desperate wish to remain connected to his origin, he ultimately found himself torn 
away from it, buried in a distant land. 
31 
 
 
 The poem expresses how the trauma of the grandfather’s displacement complicates his 
identity (along with the speaker’s) through a blurring of the distinction between geography and 
the body. The embodiment of the landscape is crucial to the poem’s representation of violence 
and identity from the opening onwards: 
Mourn the poppies, the mangosteen and dragonfruit. 
 
But you come as refugee, an exile, a body seeking mountains 
meaning the same in translation. 
 
Here they are. (1-4) 
 
The first word, “mourn” sets the elegiac theme of the piece. Yet the imperative mood indicates 
that it is the grandfather who is mourning, rather than the speaker. Moreover, he mourns not the 
death of people but “the poppies, the mangosteen, and dragonfruit.” These plants, as integral 
parts of the Laotian landscape, represent the geography of the grandfather’s home. This links 
geography to the idea of the body, suggesting that just as people die when their bodies fail, so too 
do homelands. In this way, even as the grandfather dies, he grieves the death or loss of his 
former home, itself an embodied space. The importance of the body to geography and home 
extends to the next phrase, “a body seeking mountains / meaning the same in translation.” Here, 
the use of the word “a body” in the list containing “refugee” and “exile” emphasizes that the 
trauma of diasporic peoples is located in the body, not just the social or psychological self. This 
embodied state then extends to the land, as the body seeks “mountains,” which relates back to the 
Grandfather’s death, burial, and decomposition as a return to home as well as a physical and 
spiritual fusion of body and geography.  
 The connection between geography and the body continually develops throughout the 
rest of the poem, with the land taking on bodily signifiers and the grandfather’s body becoming 
32 
 
 
one with the land. For instance, the lines, “Place your palms on the grasslands. Feel the foothills 
rise / with gray pine and blue oak,” urge the grandfather to connect to the land through the 
physical touch of the body to the earth (5-6). The “palms” signify a closeness to the land, as 
placing one’s “palms” on the ground requires positioning the body such that the head and the 
chest are close to the ground, and the hands produce the most sensitive experience of touch. This 
expands in the next line, where the phrase “Feel the foothills rise” reveals how the intimacy 
achieved through the “palms” allows one to corporeally experience and appreciate the geography 
so often unnoticed beneath one’s feet. The motion of the “foothills ris[ing]” mirrors the body in 
two ways: one, its movement suggests that the land is alive and ever-shifting, just as a human 
body would be, and two, as the body lowers to touch its hands to the earth, the earth “rise[s]” in 
counterpoint. Thus, the body of the grandfather becomes “geograph-ied” in the same moment 
that the land becomes embodied, implying not only an intimacy between the Hmong man and the 
Midwestern soil, but a fusion of the two—they become both bodies and geographies 
simultaneously. 
 This naturally leads to the conclusion of the poem, where the embodiment of land 
materializes through the act of burial. It is here that the creation that arises out of the violence of 
dislocation becomes apparent, seemingly paradoxically: 
Grandfather, you are not buried in the green mountains of Laos 
but here in the Tollhouse hills, earth and heaven to oak gods. 
 
Your highlands have come home, 
and now you finally sleep. (19-22) 
 
Though the grandfather’s death becomes apparent here, the poem demonstrates how, 
even in death, a new body and geography are being created. Though the speaker at first reminds 
33 
 
 
her grandfather that “you are not buried in the green mountains of Laos,” they later assert with 
confidence that “Your highlands have come home.” The word “highlands” could refer to either 
“Laos” or “the Tollhouse hills,” thus conflating, or translating, the two mountain ranges. This 
suggests that despite the memory and suffering of losing his homeland in Asia, the grandfather 
has created a new home in the hills of America. The phrase “earth and heaven to oak gods” also 
indicates a level of geographic syncretism of sorts, in which the spirituality of the Hmong adapts 
to a new, and at first foreign, environment. Thus, rather than being a poem about the destruction 
of home and culture, “Your Mountain Lies Down with You” imagines the building of a new 
home, one that does not forget Laos, but still also incorporates all of the unique beauty of the 
United States. In the same way, the burial of the body allows new ideas of life to come into 
being. The line “Your highlands have come home” again presents the land itself as a moving 
body, paralleling the title of the poem. The fact that the land lies down with the body rather than 
the other way around thus reveals that the land is itself a body, and in dying the grandfather 
becomes a part of this body in the never-ending cycle of life and death.   
The importance of language and geography also traces how diasporic movement 
confounds these two aspects of identity, but ultimately creates something new. For example, in 
the third line, the word “translation” indicates that the geographical and bodily displacement of 
the poem is also linguistic, as the speaker urges their Grandfather to “translat[e]” the “the green 
mountains of Laos” to “the Tollhouse hills” (19-20). Finally, the short stanza, “Here they are,” 
asserts that, through “translation,” diasporic people can find a new home even in places that are 
far from their homeland. Later in the poem, the use of simile also makes an argument about the 
possibilities of translation: “You will see Mount Whitney is as beautiful as Phou Bia. / The moon 
is sharp enough to cut your ear as the one from your village” (12-13). The simile works as a 
34 
 
 
translator of sorts—though it does not imply that the two are the same in every way, it does 
assert that they are equally “beautiful” in their difference. Just the same, translation between 
languages does not replicate meaning precisely, but instead allows people to look at the same 
idea through a different cultural lens. Thus the poem views cultural, geographic, and linguistic 
translation not merely as a loss of history and identity but a manifestation of a new, multicultural 
existence. The personification of plants, such as in the lines, “And notice how these budding 
magnolias gesture / like the petals on a dok champa” further illustrates the importance of 
language. The word “gesture” ties back to the embodied landscapes, but also invokes the idea of 
non-verbal and cross-cultural communication. Here too, the English name “magnolias” (a plant 
native to Southeast Asia) is compared to the Laotian name “dok champa” (“plumeria,” in 
English). Both of these plants exist in North America and Southeast Asia, yet the poem utilizes 
the English name for one and the Laotian name for another, while again using a simile to 
compare how the flowers themselves “gesture” to the grandfather. Thus, as a Laotian American 
refugee, the grandfather (or perhaps the speaker) gains the ability to translate between languages, 
cultures, and geographies, rather than losing his native language and homeland. 
3.2. “The Gift”: Body Becomes Language 
 Ocean Vuong’s poem, “The Gift,” deals with the struggle of learning how to write in 
English as the speaker practices writing the alphabet with a woman (likely the speaker’s mother). 
In this poem, the body becomes intertwined not only with language, but with the particular issue 
of written and verbal language. It opens with the writing exercise itself, but quickly transforms: 
  
35 
 
 
a b c a b c  a b c 
 
She doesn’t know what comes after. 
So we begin again: 
 
a b c a b c  a b c 
 
but I can see the fourth letter: 
a strand of black hair—unraveled 
from the alphabet 
& written 
on her cheek. (1-9) 
 
The poem is self-aware of its own existence as a written artifact, one that can only be read by 
literate individuals. The inclusion of the “a b c” lines embeds the writing of the speaker and the 
mother into the text itself, drawing attention to the poem as a piece of writing. The poem must 
contend, then, with the fact that the subjects of the poem could not read the poem which 
represents them. Through blurring the line between the text as discrete object and text as 
metatextual collage, “The Gift” examines the ways in which writing, as a form of power and 
subjectivity, is still a privileged medium. 
 The violence of the poem, though unspoken, exists in the dominance of the English 
language in the US and the oppressions that such a system produces. The repetition of the “a b c” 
lines, along with lines like “So we begin again” and “Again. & again,” demonstrates the 
diligence of the characters, but it also implies the difficulty that they experience in attempting to 
learn English (“The Gift” 1, 3, 24). Concerning the politics of “correct” English in Asian 
American poetry, Fickle notes that “the persistent valorization of grammatically ‘Standard’ or 
‘proper’ English and the denigration of its ‘bastardized’ Engrish [sic] counterparts, then, is 
nothing less than the reification of whiteness as the socially correct native ‘standard’ of 
American national identity” (“English before Engrish” 85). Here, the characters’ struggles with 
36 
 
 
English language acquisition represent a social context in which non-English speakers 
experience heightened marginalization. The description of the mother, “Even now the nail salon / 
will not leave her,” also suggests a working class status, which combined with linguistic 
hardships, paints a picture of the immigrant family as one facing social oppression, despite their 
best efforts. It is here in which the violence lies—the pressures of English-language hegemony 
and its connections with class and race act as violent agents against the speaker and his mother. 
 However, the introduction of the “strand of black hair” challenges the conception of 
standard written English through representing the letter that “she doesn’t know” as a hair on her 
cheek, blurring the line between body and language. The hair’s status as “the fourth letter” 
indicates that, for the speaker and the woman, written language exists in forms other than the 
Latin alphabet. Her hair, in its ability to signify, becomes a form of writing “on her cheek.” Hair 
is also a part of the human body, and thus the poem ambiguates the distinction between language 
and the body through a moment of body becoming written language. The fact that it becomes 
“the fourth letter” which she “doesn’t know” also conveys a sense of redefining language. 
Though the fourth letter is made up of pieces of herself, she cannot put it into writing. The word 
“unraveled / from the alphabet” also suggests that refiguring writing such that hair becomes 
language requires an “unravel[ing]” of writing and the English language itself, a way of 
returning to an original state, the way cloth unraveled becomes thread. This leads to the 
conclusion that in undoing language, the speaker finds that his mother has, in her own body, the 
letters that she cannot put to paper. Later in the poem, the reverse also occurs, as tools of writing 
become embodied: 
  
37 
 
 
The b bursting its belly 
as dark dust blows 
through a blue-lined sky. 
 
Don’t move, she says, as she picks 
a wing bone of graphite 
from the yellow carcass, slides it back 
between my fingers. (17-23) 
 
The words “belly,” “wing bone,” and “carcass” describe the written letters, the graphite, and the 
pencil respectively, using corporeal signifiers. Where before the hair represented a body 
becoming writing, here, writing becomes the body. The use of alliteration (“b,” “bursting,” 
“belly,” “blows,” “blue,” “bone,” “back” “between”) heightens this relationship, since the letter 
“b,” as both a written construct and a body, is emphasized. The description of the letter “b” as 
having a “belly” demystifies it, acting as a reminder of the fact that “b” has no sound or meaning 
inherent in its shape—it is just that, a shape, a shape that resembles a “belly.” Yet at the same 
time, the repetition of the “b” draws attention to it, thus re-imbuing it with its associated sounds 
and meanings. This complicates the relationship between writing, language, sound, and orality—
though writing evokes sound, it does not produce sound in the same way that oral speech does. 
The letter “b” thus represents silence and sound, and body and writing, simultaneously.  
The ambivalence towards written and verbal language continues into the final stanza, 
which leads to even more new understandings of language: 
I see it: the strand of hair lifting 
from her face… how it fell 
onto the page—& lived,  
with no sound. Like a word. 
I still hear it. (25-29) 
38 
 
 
As the hair makes contact with the page, it begins to resemble language even more. Yet the word 
“lived” ties it back into the body. Hair, interestingly, is a part of the living, growing, and moving 
body, yet it is also in some ways dead, as hairs have no blood circulation. Language by extension 
represents itself ambiguously in “The Gift,” as both alive and dead, both visual and verbal. 
Though the hair had “no sound,” the speaker remarks, “I still hear it,” paradoxically blending 
silence and sound. This perhaps reflects the processing of written language as it pertains to 
spoken language—when readers consume a text, they often “hear” the language in their head, 
despite the fact that writing, almost by definition, has no sound. Thus, just as the body is 
simultaneously living and dying, the written poem calls attention to itself as both sonic and 
silent. If the “sound” of language brings it to life, and the silence of language represents a kind of 
death, then the auditory processing of written language represents a kind of life out of death, or 
rebirth, of both language and the body. Though the beauty of spoken language and oral traditions 
are somehow lost in the very process of writing them down, writing also preserves them and 
gives them a new life, one that differs in form but is not lesser. 
 “The Gift” also ties geography into its exploration of language and body. In the third 
stanza, the speaker describes their mother’s appearance and scent: 
Even now the nail salon 
will not leave her: isopropyl acetate, 
ethyl acetate, chloride, sodium lauryl 
sulfate & sweat fuming 
through her pink 
I ♥ NY t-shirt. (10-15) 
 
The poem concerns itself with the idea of bodies carrying geographies with them, albeit in a 
strikingly different way than Vang’s poems longing for the jungles of Laos. Nevertheless, “The 
39 
 
 
Gift” still explores how “the nail salon / will not leave her,” just as the mountains of Vang’s 
poetry cannot leave her characters. The list of chemical names highlights the complications of 
language once again, with their difficult spellings and their general unfamiliarity to most people. 
However, the last word being “sweat” rather than another synthetic chemical ties these scents 
back to the body, as sweat naturally occurs on the skin, suggesting that these chemical solutions 
have become embodied through her work. The final line, “her pink / I ♥ NY t-shirt” contrasts the 
chemical names preceding it with its sheer simplicity, use of visual symbols that even illiterate 
people could read, and its abbreviations. Yet it’s worth noting too that even this simplicity can be 
obfuscating, as it’s possible for people to be unaware that “NY” stands for “New York,” or that a 
heart translates directly to the word “love.” In addition, the location of “NY” once again calls 
attention to the importance of geography. As a metropolis and cultural center of the US, New 
York in many ways represents America. The placement of “NY” on the woman’s shirt suggests 
an embodiment of America and American identity in addition to complicating ideas of written 
language. 
 Though the writing exercise, the T-shirt and the nail salon symbolize the oppressions that 
the mother faces as an Asian immigrant, the poem’s conclusion transforms these representations 
of violence into a space of creation. The description of the hair as it “lived / with no sound. Like 
a word” feels ambivalent, as it “lived” but could not make a “sound,” and therefore could not 
become spoken language. The phrase “like a word” uses simile, which though it compares or 
even equates two alike things, it cannot entirely fuse them—it still acknowledges that they are 
different. Yet the final line, “I still hear it,” returns to the present tense and creates the sense that 
though the hair cannot fully become writing, it can transcend the boundaries of writing and 
language themselves. The ability for the speaker to “hear” the hair as language reflects the 
40 
 
 
importance of this moment in his relationship with his mother. This ties back into the title of the 
poem, “The Gift.” The poem never describes a literal gift, which draws attention to the odd title. 
Yet perhaps “The Gift” is the hair, or the relationship that the speaker builds with his mother, or 
the poem itself. Just as the poem draws attention to itself as written artifact, it becomes a gift 
through its representation of a love that thrives despite being surrounded by oppression and 
violence. 
3.3. “Mother of People without Script”: Writing and Hmong Subjectivity 
Vang’s “Mother of People without Script” also deals with language and writing, but this 
poem does so through telling the story of the creation of the Hmong script. Narratively, this 
poem focuses on the story of Shong Lue Yang, who created a writing system for the Hmong 
language. Until Lue Yang invented his writing system, the Hmong language historically had no 
standard writing system. Lue Yang acted as a messiah figure, often considered to be one of the 
twelve sons of God, and called “Mother of Writing” (“Niam Ntawv”) or “Savior of the People” 
(Koau Vang et al. 1-2).  The lack of a written literary and historical record eliminates Hmong 
subjectivity (their culture is always being described by non-Hmong writers) and centers 
“Imperialist powers, China and the West” who “maintai[n] the national paradigm” and 
“render…the Hmong…as illiterate and in need of civilizing” (Ma Vang 89). Within this context, 
the very premise of the poem can be seen as a response to violence. As Vang notes, “a history of 
colonial violence and Hmong running away as a form of resistance has been noted as the primary 
reason why the Hmong do not have a country” (89). Thus the relationship between violence, 
language, and geography historically has been of great importance to the Hmong, and this 
manifests in Mai Der Vang’s folkloric, poetic representation of how Hmong writing came into 
being. 
41 
 
 
In its ambiguation of language, “Mother of People without Script” centers the issue of 
translation. Near the middle of the poem, a set of indented stanzas use Hmong words to explore 
translation: 
Paj is not pam is not pab. 
Blossom is not blanket is not help. 
 
Ntug is not ntuj is not ntub. 
Edge is not wet is not sky. (6-9) 
 
 This section clearly deals with translation, as the paralleled sentence structures in couplets 
convey that the Hmong words correspond to the English words below. However, all of the 
Hmong words look similar, but create English words that appear unrelated. None of the English 
words have similar meanings or pronunciations, yet, in Hmong translation they become sonically 
similar, which reveals one of the difficulties of translation: the relationships between sounds in 
the original language is lost. In fact, the poem here plays with sound to further this difficulty. 
The last letter of syllables in Romanized Hmong reflects the syllable’s pitch, not its vowel and 
consonant structure. Thus, each of the Hmong words listed would be pronounced with the same 
“sound,” distinguished only by their different intonation patterns. English has essentially no 
words that are distinguished only by pitch, and thus monolingual English speakers often cannot 
distinguish words in tonal languages like Hmong. This in some ways draws attention to the 
information that writing includes, and the information it leaves behind. Though the Hmong script 
conveys pitch insofar as it distinguishes separate words, written language cannot convey 
precisely the tone, timbre, and intonation of the human voice. Therefore, though written 
languages come close to approximating the sounds of spoken language, the nuanced information 
conveyed in how people speak is lost in the process of putting language to paper. 
42 
 
 
 The transformative power of writing is further elucidated in the next section. The line, 
“Now you are Niam Ntawv” indicates that the addressee has become something new through the 
word “now” (18). The phrase “Niam Ntawv” (which translates roughly to “mother of writing” or 
“mother of paper”) also emphasizes creation, as motherhood entails the creation of life. This also 
ties back to the body, as motherhood represents the creation of a new body, thus suggesting once 
again that language, and particularly writing, is in a way a body. In the earlier lines in which 
writing will “leave behind the silver / your body won’t shed,” the word “shed” implies 
metamorphosis, like a butterfly shedding its cocoon (16-17). However, the body “won’t” shed on 
its own—rather, it is the “obsidian mask” of writing that will “leave behind” what the body 
cannot discard on its own (14, 16). Thus writing is instrumental not only in its ability to preserve 
pieces of the body and the mind, but also in the way it fundamentally transforms the body and its 
reality.  
 As the poem reaches its conclusion, the idea of remaining after death becomes central to 
its argument. The final three lines, “When they could take no more, / when all that you had was 
given, / you lined your grave with paper” directly ties the idea of death and writing together (22-
24). This section expresses ambivalence about the earlier parts of the poem, such as how “lining 
your grave with paper” contrasts the emphasis on life embedded in the phrase “Niam Ntawv,” or 
“mother of paper.” Yet still there exists a sense of defiance and creation through the act of 
“lining your grave with paper.” The lines before, “When they could take no more, / when all that 
you had was given,” imply that the second-person actor here has lost everything. The fact that an 
unnamed “they” took everything suggests that this loss was incurred due to violence or 
persecution by other humans. This reflects Lue Yang’s assassination in 1971, as his movement 
(involving various teachings including writing) was perceived as a threat by both the Pathet Lao 
43 
 
 
and the Hmong who opposed the Pathet Lao (Koau Vang et al. 2). This represents a historical 
moment in which violence targeting a specific group and elements of their identity (the Hmong 
people, language, and writing system) results in both loss and creation. The creation can be seen 
in the fact that despite that the “you” in the poem (Lue Yang) has nothing left, he still manages to 
line his grave with paper. Though the ending is melancholy, it asserts that writing somehow has 
the ability to supersede all the mortal loss of the body’s life. In both death and the creation of 
life, writing appears to be central in both preserving and reimagining the body.  
 “Mother of People without Script” is also concerned with geography and movement in its 
construction of writing. Particularly, the lines “On sheet of bamboo / with indigo branch” convey 
that writing is deeply connected to place (10-11). “[B]amboo” and “indigo” are native to tropical 
Asia, calling attention to the relationship between the Hmong homeland and Hmong writing. In 
addition, plants, though living beings, constitute a part of what we understand to be geography. 
Thus, the transformation of “bamboo” and “indigo” into paper and writing utensils marks also a 
transformation of the land into writing. This also reveals the materiality of writing—since it 
requires physical objects, writing can always be connected to the land from which these 
materials were sourced. Hmong writing, then, is built out of Hmong land, as the poem argues 
that language and geography are not separate ideas but that language comes out of geography. 
 The opening lines call upon culture and physical place in similar ways. The claim that 
“You swear the twin spirits / taught you to write” relates to Hmong traditional spirituality, again 
emphasizing the importance of Hmong culture to language (1-2). When “At night, you climbed / 
the leaves to hear the gods,” the movement functions on two levels: literal and metaphorical. On 
the literal level, the character climbs a tree (another plant and part of the Asian landscape) to 
“hear the gods.” The movement upwards through the leaves indicates a sort of bridging between 
44 
 
 
the land and the sky, and between the human and the divine. This then connects to writing 
through the image of “climb[ing] / the leaves” metaphorically representing leafing through 
pieces of paper filled with letters. The fact that this act allows one to “hear the gods” 
demonstrates how something new is created in the act of writing—in this poem, it moves one 
closer to the voices of gods. This line in particular calls upon Lue Yang, as his writing system 
“validated him as God’s messiah because Hmong mythology includes a theme that writing is a 
gift from God” (Koau Vang et al. 2). Writing thus functions not only as a way of simultaneously 
preserving and reinventing the body and the geography it inhabits, but a direct connection to 
God. 
Ma Vang notes that for Hmong in modern times, whose histories have traditionally been 
defined by outside powers with written records, writing itself is an act of resistance, of asserting 
Hmong subjectivity. In particular, Ma Vang argues that “Hmong American literary formations 
assert writing as a political project of existing and being” (90). In this sense, the second-person 
“you,” or Lue Yang, as himself the “mother of writing,” represents both the creation of a new 
way of writing and a new form of reifying Hmong existence. Beyond this, though, the poem 
itself, as a piece of writing partially in Hmong, written by a Hmong woman, and concerning 
Hmong language and identity, is reshaping the canon of existing knowledge of the Hmong 
people from a Hmong perspective. This calls back upon Choi’s expression of the need for 
diversification in Asian American poetry, as Hmong American poetry, which has been 
historically elided from the canon, creates new meanings out of its own particular histories of 
violence and displacement. The expression of writing as a form of creating new identities, 
beauty, and meaning out of spaces of violence confirms the importance of Asian American 
poetry in general, but especially for the Hmong. 
45 
 
 
3.4. “Notebook Fragments”: Violence and Creation 
 Perhaps no poem demonstrates the necessary relationship between violence and creation 
as clearly as Vuong’s “Notebook Fragments.” With lines such as “Grandma said In the war they 
would grab a baby, a soldier at each ankle, and pull… / Just like that” and “7:18. Kevin 
overdosed last night. His sister left a message. Couldn’t listen / to all of it. That makes three this 
year,” the poem’s interest in violence is without question (6-7, 15-16). Interesting to note in the 
poem is the sheer variety of violence reported, from war crimes in Vietnam to losing a friend to a 
drug epidemic. As the title suggests, “Notebook Fragments” consists of a series of free verse 
stanzas documenting reflections on brief moments or experiences. No stanza is more than two 
lines long, and many of them have seemingly little connection to the preceding and succeeding 
stanzas, though the poem often calls back upon them later. The formal choice here allows the 
poem to paint a full picture of the scope of American violence, as it affects the speaker in vastly 
different ways at different times, connected through the “notebook.” For the speaker, American 
violence itself can be understood as a series of “fragments,” seemingly distinct and unrelated at 
first, yet tied together in their shared sense of loss and injustice. The Vietnam War and the surge 
in overdose-related deaths appear at first two be separate phenomena, but the poem, in placing 
them in a collection of “fragments,” suggests that they are both pieces of the same, greater 
whole. “Notebook Fragments” is not concerned merely with violence, but the particular scope of 
American violence, and the ways in which it permeates every aspect of daily life. 
 Similar to other poems in both collections, the issue of translation plays a large role in the 
ambiguation of language in relation to identity. The speaker traces the possible etymologies of 
the Vietnamese word for “grenade,” remarking that “The Vietnamese word for grenade is ‘bom,’ 
from the French ‘pomme,’ / meaning apple. / Or was it American for ‘bomb?’” (32-34). The 
46 
 
 
poem plays with the sonic similarity between the French “pomme” and English “bomb,” and 
how their originally unrelated meanings became similar in Vietnamese. The use of French and 
English, especially in the context of the word “grenade,” signals legacies of colonialization and 
war at the expense of the Vietnamese people. The fact that these instances of violence permeated 
the language and became intractable suggests that the violence of the war is now embedded into 
the culture of Vietnam, even after the war. The relationship between violence and translation 
continues in a later stanza, which compares food to weapons: “Eggplant = cà pháo = ‘grenade 
tomato.’ Thus nourishment defined / by extinction” (42-43). The use of the equal signs implies 
that the meaning or content of each word should be equivalent. Yet the addition of each new 
translation, from English to Vietnamese to the literal English components of the Vietnamese, 
adds new meaning that was previously invisible to non-Vietnamese speakers. This demonstrates 
both the ambivalence of translation (it can convey “equivalent” meaning but is never exactly the 
same) and how violence shapes language. Just as the violence of the Vietnam War was largely 
unfelt by those outside Vietnam, the histories of violence in the Vietnamese language are 
impenetrable to speakers of other languages, even in translation. This also allows the speaker to 
draw the comparison between “nourishment” and “extinction,” which ties back to the theme of 
violence and creation. In “Notebook Fragments,” destruction and creation, and death and 
survival, are inherently intertwined and ambiguous, and this manifests in an exploration of the 
space in between the Vietnamese and English languages. 
 The body, especially in relation to sexuality, is also complicated by violence. In one of 
the longest stretches of continuous narrative in the poem, the speaker details an encounter with a 
man: 
  
47 
 
 
I met a man tonight. A high school English teacher  
from the next town. A small town. Maybe 
 
I shouldn’t have, but he had the hands 
of someone I used to know. Someone I was used to. 
 
The way they formed brief churches  
over the table as he searched for the right words. 
 
I met a man, not you. In his room the Bibles shook on the shelf 
from candlelight. His scrotum a bruised fruit. I kissed it 
 
lightly, the way one might kiss a grenade 
before hurling it into the night’s mouth. 
 
Maybe the tongue is also a key. (44-54) 
 
The passage begins with the body as a site of familiarity, as the speaker remarks that they were 
drawn to the partner because “he had the hands / of someone I used to know.” Quickly, though, 
the body becomes more than just the body, as the hands “formed brief churches / over the table.” 
The image of the “church” conveys both a sense of sacredness and danger, especially in the 
context of the persecution of sexuality within many religious spaces in the US. This manifests in 
the eerie image of how “the Bibles shook on the shelf / from candlelight,” in which the flickering 
light cast on the Bibles symbolizes the speaker’s wavering or ambivalent relationship to them. 
The figurative transformation of the body into a potential site of danger continues in the lines, 
“His scrotum a bruised fruit. I kissed it / lightly, the way one might kiss a grenade / before 
hurling it into the night’s mouth.” The “bruised fruit” calls back upon the “Eggplant” or “grenade 
tomato” from earlier. The scrotum then extends the idea of “nourishment defined / by extinction” 
48 
 
 
to sexuality, as the dangers of sex and sex as “nourishment” exist concomitantly for the speaker. 
The imaginative leap from scrotum to grenade evinces the way in which the body, even in 
moments of pleasure, contains within itself images of violence. The final image, “the tongue is 
also a key,” again takes a part of the body and assigns it an object or place, indicating its greater 
significance beyond just the body. In this case, the “key” seems to express more of the creation 
rather than violence. In its ability to unlock things, thereby opening them up and revealing what 
was hidden, the key represents how the body can be a tool to create new possibilities, even out of 
the violence suggested by the scrotal “grenade.” In any case, the body is certainly destabilized as 
an ambiguous space through the speaker’s process of coming to terms with violence and 
sexuality. 
 “Notebook Fragments” also deals with geography, albeit in a less direct fashion. Much of 
the language focused on geography also deals with movement, particularly passing through 
spaces as a process of arriving. One example occurs in two lines in which the speaker writes 
down timed memos: “6:24 a.m. Greyhound station. One-way ticket to New York City: $36.75. / 
6:57 a.m. I love you, mom” (70-71). This moment briefly illustrates the importance of traversing 
geography for the speaker, as they record moments of movement (just as they record violence) in 
the series of “fragments” of their life. The idea of the “One-way ticket to New York City” calls 
upon common themes in diasporic literature, such as a sense of leaving something behind in 
search of opportunity in a new land. In addition, the following fragment, “I love you, mom,” 
touches on the importance of family and the connection between geographic movement and 
familial relationships. The most striking moment of physical movement in the poem, however, 
occurs in its closing lines: 
  
49 
 
 
God must be a season, grandma said, looking out at the blizzard drowning 
 her garden. 
 
My footsteps on the sidewalk were the smallest flights. 
 
Dear god, if you are a season, let it be the one I passed through 
 to get here. 
 
Here. That’s all I wanted to be. 
 
I promise. (78-84) 
 
The idea of “passing through” also ties to diasporic themes, as it is the space of passage that in 
many ways defines the diaspora. The fact that the passage is through “the blizzard / drowning out 
her garden” again ties into ideas of destruction and creation. The “blizzard” covers the “garden,” 
which suggests that an object of beauty and cultivation (i.e. the garden plants) has been 
destroyed. Yet the emphasis on the passage of seasons implies that spring will return, even after 
the losses induced by cold winters. Thus, for the speaker, passing through “god, if you are a 
season,” represents the life and creation that comes out of a harsh winter. The concluding 
declaration of “Here. That’s all I wanted to be. / I promise,” invokes a sense of arrival at the end 
of a journey or passage. The use of the word “Here” is not fixed or concrete, but it indicates that 
wherever the speaker currently is, that is where they “wanted to be.” This mirrors the diasporic 
arrival in a new land as a radical claiming of a new sense of “here,” an idea which allows for the 
creation of an identity based on desire and hope (indicated by the word “wanted”) rather than 
merely loss or estrangement.  
  “Notebook Fragments” uses violence to complicate aspects of identity such as language, 
the body and geography, and its ultimate emphasis on creation is directly linked to violence. In 
one fragment, the speaker writes that “An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. Thus 
my mother exists. / Thus I exist. Thus no bombs = no family = no me” (38). The second line, “no 
50 
 
 
bombs = no family = no me” draws a clear causal link between the violence of the war 
(“bombs”) and the very existence of the speaker themselves (“me”). Despite everything that was 
lost during the war, the speaker would not exist without it—the world would simply not be the 
same in any way. The speaker’s identity, their body, their traversed geographies, and their 
languages, were all born out of violence. Despite the tragedy of violence that the poem 
constantly contends with, it also acknowledges the way that violence predicated the existence of 
the speaker, their family, and their identity as an Asian American. 
51 
 
 
4. Boundary Destabilization and the Creation of “Home”: Victoria Chang and 
Franny Choi 
 Choi’s poetry of robots and sexuality appears to be wholly unrelated to Chang’s 
sentimental expressions of grief at first glance. Yet in both Soft Science and Obit, there exists a 
distinctly twenty-first century expression of Asian American identity—one that is born out of 
violence and a blurring of ideas considered to be diametrically opposed (such as “Asian” v. 
“American”). Whether in comments received on social media and in online chat rooms as a 
queer Asian woman, or in a white writer’s representation of anti-Asian violence, both Choi and 
Chang write about the small acts of violence towards Asians that permeate contemporary 
American society. As the poems represent these acts of violence they also question the 
distinctions from which that violence often arises, distinctions such as what it means to be Asian 
or American, embodied or disembodied, or a native or non-native English speaker, rendering 
them misleading, ironic, or even nonsensical. In this section, I analyze the poems of Choi and 
Chang, arguing that through disrupting these black-and-white distinctions, both poets find a 
“home” in language that they create through writing.  
4.1 Asian American Identity as a Transgression of Dichotomy 
The term “Asian American” inherently defies binary, as Asian Americans inhabit a space 
which cannot be accurately described as merely “Asian” or “American.” Thus, any attempt to 
force Asian American individuals into a crude dichotomy will fail, as the identity itself cannot be 
understood as a single thing, but rather it represents a nebulous, multifarious space of 
indeterminacy. Asian American poets, who are denied a “home” in a discrete, self-contained 
unity or community, have adopted the task of constructing a new, linguistic “home” which 
allows them to inhabit spaces in between binary divisions. I draw upon Zhou’s argument 
52 
 
 
concerning how “there is no fixed ethnicity to reclaim, no ‘home’ to dwell in in English” to 
argue that just as “Asian American poets reinvent new ways of saying and hearing” in order to 
construct a linguistic “home,” they also reinvent form, geography, embodiment, and history 
(Zhou 2). Franny Choi’s collection, Soft Science, and Victoria Chang’s collection, Obit, both 
grapple with the struggle of escaping the oppression of the binary. In particular, the poems from 
these collections, “Chatroulette,” “Home,” and “I can't say with faith,” oppose binary 
oppositions in both content and form. I identify five main binaries or tensions which these poems 
navigate, including form (“high” form v. “low” form), geography (“East” v. “West”), language 
(“English” v. “non-English”), the body (inhabited v. uninhabited), and the archive (past v. 
present). I argue that Choi and Chang’s poems fully destabilize all of these binaries, thereby 
inventing a new, distinctly Asian American “home” embedded in language, writing, and poetry. 
Asian American poetry not only disrupts these five binaries, but constructs a space of 
safety, home, and beauty within the grey space between supposedly black and white distinctions. 
The binary distinction between “Asia” and “America” makes the possibility of Asian American 
identity impossible, insofar as “Asian American” cannot fit into this binary since it has elements 
of both Asian and American identities separately, but is not wholly one nor the other. Per Zhou’s 
analysis of finding “home” in English through inventing new ways of saying, Choi and Chang 
find “home” in multiple other ways by inventing new ways of understanding form, geography, 
language, the body, and history.  
Choi and Chang play with a variety of forms with different relationships to both Eastern 
and Western poetic traditions (such as the crown of sonnets, tanka, and obituary). In both form 
and content, Choi and Chang draw upon both “Western” (Anglo-European) and “Eastern” (East 
Asian) poetics and philosophies in order to construct a uniquely Asian American style, which 
53 
 
 
indicates the impossibility of understanding “Eastern” and “Western” culture as discrete, 
unrelated units. At the same time, both poets grapple with writing in America’s dominant 
language while having parents of marginalized linguistic backgrounds. Chang’s use of 
Romanized Mandarin (such as the word “lao mei,” which also invites questions of Chinese and 
American identity) blurs the line between the two languages and the two identities (“Home” 17). 
In addition, Choi’s examination of English-language “impersonation” examines the relationship 
between the Asian poet’s assumed “whiteness” and how this relates to English. The poets also 
question the nature of the body, and contend that the “self” (or identity) is also a part of the body. 
For Choi and Chang, the consequence of “racial dissociation” (the construction of a false self in 
order to protect oneself from racism) is a feeling of bodily dis-inhabitation, thus opposing the 
idea of the body as either fully dissociated or fully inhabited (“Imitation Games”). Finally, the 
poems blur the distinction between the past, present, and future, as both Choi and Chang build a 
poetic archive constituted by both memories of the past and hopes for the future. The disruption 
of all five of these binaries symbolizes the nature of Asian American identity—for Asian 
Americans to find a “home,” they must exist in between the divisive categories of “Asian” and 
“American.” In doing so, they construct the diasporic “home:” a space that resists both the call 
for assimilation into English and a return to the distant homeland of Mandarin, creating a 
distinctly Asian American language that is capable of expressing the complexities of a hybrid 
existence. 
4.2. Form: Reinventing Formal Tradition 
Both Soft Science and Obit utilize a variety of forms, such as tanka, sonnets, blank verse 
and obituaries, all of which disrupt the binary division between “high” and “low” forms of 
poetry. “High” forms of poetry usually have institutional power (in education, politics, and 
54 
 
 
literary studies), are popular in elite circles, and have a long tradition of being revered as an 
important art form, such as sonnets and elegies. On the other hand, “low” forms of poetry 
represent traits opposite of these, namely a lack of institutional or popular recognition as a deep 
and complex form of art. Some of these forms, such as Chang’s obituaries, are typically not 
considered to be poetic forms at all. For Choi’s Soft Science, the destabilization of “high” and 
“low” poetry occurs largely in the tensions between form and content. For example, her poem, 
“Chatroulette,” is a crown of sonnets, and while it adheres rather strictly to an iambic 
pentameter, it is almost entirely unrhymed. The use of sonnets here directly calls upon a form 
which “has been held up as poetry’s epitome…and a cultural talisman” due to both “English 
imperial power” and its ability to adapt to contemporary readers (Cousins and Howarth 1). While 
the sonnet form therefore enjoys a status as an archetypal “high” poetic form, Choi plays with 
the formal rules and thematic conventions of traditional sonnets in order to reinvent it as a form 
beyond the limiting binary of “high” and “low” through the use of an elevated form with content 
reflecting filth and sexual excess. This is evident from the first stanza: 
To see, to come, I brought myself online. 
O dirty church. O two-way periscope, 
Refractory for Earth’s most skin-starved cocks. 
O hungry sons of helicopter palms 
In hopeful carousel. (“Chatroulette” 1-5) 
 
The first line (even the first two words) establishes the metric atmosphere in a distinct 
and almost exaggerated manner, due to the commas which separate the feet: “To see, to come, I 
brought myself online.” Yet the rhyming departs from this formal compliance completely, as 
most of the lines do not rhyme at all. Thus in “Chatroulette” the sonnet form itself becomes a site 
of indeterminacy, as the poem balances a strict meter typical of traditional sonnets and an 
55 
 
 
amorphous rhyme scheme which departs from these formal conventions. More importantly, the 
content of the poem departs from the traditional themes associated with the sonnet. In the poem, 
a lexicon of disgust (“dirty,” “foul,” “filthy,” “disgusting,” “rot”) contrasts a simultaneous 
lexicon of religion (“church,” “congregations,” “god,” “marry,” “christen”) (“Chatroulette” 2, 
10-11, 14, 22, 32, 45). The lexical tension fuses the high, elevated theme of religion with a 
manifold exploration of decay, hunger, and filth. Importantly, the form here is not merely a 
series of sonnets but a crown, in which the last line of one sonnet becomes the first line of the 
next. Traditionally, such as in the famous prologue to John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, crowns of 
sonnets deal with Christian themes (“Corona”). As such, the poem acknowledges the history of 
the form through its lexicon of religion, while disrupting it with a lexicon of disgust. Though the 
sonnet has historically dealt with many themes, traditional sonnets often concern “love, politics, 
or religion” in a “lyrical mood” (“Sonnet”). Choi’s depiction of an online chatroom filled with 
“skin-starved cocks” and a space full of lust and perversion, however, certainly departs from all 
of the traditional themes, such as love and religion, associated with the form. The poem is neither 
“high” nor “low,” since it seamlessly blends a prestigious, elite form with content that the revels 
in both filth and religion. Thus “Chatroulette” opposes the distinction between “high” and “low” 
poetry through its ambivalence towards its own form, which expresses a simultaneous disgust 
and reverence towards a space of complex, intertwining filth and beauty, or, as Choi puts it, a 
“dirty church” (2). 
 Chang’s collection, Obit, invokes a similar exploration of different forms of poetry, 
though in addition to playing with the relationship between form and content, it uses multiple 
disparate forms throughout the collection to challenge notions of prestige. The majority of the 
poems in Obit follow an obituary form, which is typically not considered to be poetry but a form 
56 
 
 
of journalism. The “high” poetic form of the elegy dates back to Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, 
and the “Roman love elegy” still enjoys “popularity and prestige” (“Elegy”). The elegy often 
features powerful emotions, such as “sorrow, shock, rage, longing, melancholy, and 
resolution…often in quick succession” (“Elegy”). Obituaries, by contrast, are written in prose 
with tight margins reminiscent of newspaper formatting rather than poetic verse. In terms of 
content and prestige, the obituary is a form often associated with the everydayness of the 
newspaper and detached, pragmatic reportage. However, obituaries actually serve a variety of 
literary purposes. They “can be an engaging newspaper accompaniment” and compared to a 
“news story’s concentration on death,” the obituary creates an “emphasis on life” through 
detailing the deceased person’s characteristics, achievements, and peculiarities (Starck 6-7). The 
obituary, especially when used in the context of poetry, breaks down distinctions between “high” 
and “low” art, not only through its constant tension between “[o]rnate expression” and 
biographical information, but through concurrently exploring life and death, spectacle and 
austerity, and the newspaper as both an icon of banal everydayness and titillating 
newsworthiness (32). In Chang’s poetry, the obituary does not merely capture the literal death of 
a person, but the many little deaths that occur throughout a person’s life. For example, her poem 
“Home” opens with the lines, “Home—died sometime around 1960 / when my mother left 
Taiwan. Home / died again on August 3, 2015” (“Home” 1-2). Here, the speaker mourns the 
death of “Home,” which died once when her mother left Asia, and again when her mother 
literally died. This plays with the conventions of the obituary form by representing the 
amorphous concept of “Home” as something worthy of an obituary, and as something that can 
die many times throughout a person’s life.  
57 
 
 
Despite the collection’s focus on exploring the obituary, tanka poems are interspersed 
throughout the volume. Unlike obituaries, tanka poems have “a long history in Japan” as a 
prestigious poetic form known for “emotion” and “wordplay,” and hold a defining position in the 
Japanese literary canon (Ishikawa 32-35). However, in a similar fashion to obituaries, tanka 
poems are “familiar to men and women of all ages” as “[a]ll the major newspapers in Japan print 
reader-submitted poetry in tanka columns,” while still maintaining an elevated status as a “high” 
form (Ishikawa 32-33). While the tanka form may initially appear to be a more prestigious form 
than the obituary, tanka poems are also widely disseminated, popular, and easy to understand. On 
the other hand, obituaries have been recognized as deeply valuable “instrument[s] of historical 
record” and an art form capable of “conveying personal bereavement,” despite their commonness 
(Starck 16, 46). The seemingly random interweaving of tanka and obituary forms reveals both 
the banality and the artistic capabilities of both forms. The combination of these two forms in 
Obit fully destabilizes “high” and “low” forms through creating a formal atmosphere in which 
every act of linguistic creation, ranging from elevated, traditional poetry to newspaper columns, 
is an aesthetic, artistic, and deeply personal act of exploring oneself. 
4.3 Geography: Collapsing the East-West Divide 
 In the context of diasporic identity and form, Chang draws from both Asian and 
European aesthetics and poetics in order to shape a new, distinctly Asian American style. The 
most obvious example of this is Chang’s weaving of Japanese tanka poems throughout Obit, 
which reveals the collection’s deeply “hybrid” nature—in a sense, the eclectic and diverse poetic 
forms and ideologies of Obit symbolize the dual identity of “Asian American.” This exemplifies 
Wallinger-Schorn’s concept of “formal hybridity,” which indicates how Asian American poetic 
forms “destabilize genre definitions and dogmas and contribute to the ever shifting possibilities 
58 
 
 
of cultural hybridity” (182). Essentially, the hybridization of different poetic forms considered to 
be disparate in Asian American poetry parallels the hybridization of culture associated with 
Asian American identity. Obit juxtaposes two different forms (obituary and tanka, associated 
with the “West” and the “East” respectively) to explore the universal human phenomenon of 
grief, and thereby challenges the distinction between “Eastern” and “Western” forms. Wallinger-
Schorn also observes “a formal revival in contemporary American poetry” despite a conventional 
understanding of twenty-first century poetry’s focus on “a postmodern deconstruction of formal 
stability” (180). Even though twenty-first century poetry is perhaps best known for free verse 
and the dissolution of formal restrictions (such as meter, rhyme, and structure), contemporary 
Asian American poets often utilize various traditional forms from both within and beyond the 
English-language tradition (such as Choi’s sonnets and Chang’s tankas). This simultaneous 
return to form and deconstruction of form relates to identity, as poets explore the omnipresent 
tension between taking pride in one’s cultural and racial identity while also destabilizing the very 
basis of race itself. In “Home,” the mother’s imagined speech pulls at this tension: 
……………………………When 
a white writer has a character call  
another a squinty-eyed cunt, I search  
for my mother. I call her name but I  
can’t remember her voice. I think it is  
squinty. She would have said, Don’t  
listen to lao mei, we all end up in the  
same place. But where is that place? (“Home” 11-18) 
 
59 
 
 
 Here, “lao mei”1 sows difference between Chinese Americans and non-Chinese Americans, 
while “we all end up in the / same place” expresses a humanistic universality that transcends 
such differences (16-18). The mother’s speech is a clear response to the violence embedded in 
the phrase “squinty-eyed cunt,” which produces a space of indeterminacy, in which “lao mei” 
indicates that the speaker is fundamentally different than the “white writer,” but despite that they 
both “end up in the / same place.” For Asian American poets, “formal hybridity” has become a 
necessary mode of expressing both the beauty of a culturally-mixed identity and the 
impossibility of being fully “Asian” or fully “American.” 
 In addition to playing with different forms, Chang uses an Asian philosophical and 
artistic tradition to inform her work. One of the most frequently cited Eastern ideas, which can 
vaguely be described as “nothingness” or the void, is “difficult…to understand vis-à-vis 
binary…constructs like being/nonbeing” (Stalling 9). An Asian ontological reframing of 
“nothingness” as a central part of both art and human existence especially appears in Chang’s 
tanka, “To love anyone:”  
To love anyone 
means to admit extinction. 
I tell myself this 
so I never fall in love, 
so that the fire lights just me. (“To love anyone” 1-5). 
 
The acknowledgement that “to love anyone / means to admit extinction” particularly stands out, 
as the word “extinction” implies not only death, but nonexistence, or the utter erasure of 
something from the face of the planet (6-7). The following lines, “I tell myself this / so I never 
 
1 Mandarin word meaning “American person/people,” usually referring to Americans not of 
Chinese descent.   
60 
 
 
fall in love” seems to indicate a rejection of “nothingness” along the lines of Stalling’s 
identification of “the fear of ‘nothing’ in the Western psyche” (“I can't say with faith” 8-9, 
Stalling 11). However, the penultimate poem of the collection, also a tanka, transcends this fear: 
I am ready to 
admit I love my children. 
To admit this is  
to admit that they will die. 
Die: nobody knows this but words. (“I am ready to” 1-5). 
 
As the speaker proclaims, “I am ready to / admit I love my children,” they come to accept that 
the nothingness of death is what allows them to finally “love” others, rather than live in fear. 
This radical shift appears in large part due to “cultural hybridity,” or, the balancing of Asian and 
American cultural thought in order to construct a new identity, one that is capable of loving 
fearlessly. Per the idea of a “home” constructed through reinventing language, the last line, “Die: 
nobody knows this but words” ties into the relationship between language and embodiment. To 
die is a wholly bodily experience, as death manifests in a ceasing of the body’s necessary 
functions. Yet it is not the body that knows death, but “words.” There is a capacity for language 
to “know” more than the body, which ties into the idea of language creating a “home” through 
becoming more than violence and the body. In Chang’s tankas, freedom from the specter of 
death and grief can only be found in destabilizing the boundaries between Asia, Europe, and 
America, and the building of a new formal and poetic language. 
4.4 Language: English-Language Hegemony and American Identity 
 Moving beyond form and content, Asian American poets also find themselves embroiled 
in reinventing language itself, as they navigate the complexities of deconstructing English-
language hegemony. As all of Choi and Chang’s poems are written primarily in English, these 
61 
 
 
texts reflect the dominance of English over Asian languages in both American vernacular 
language and American literature. Yet Choi and Chang find ways of resisting this dominance 
while writing in a colonial, hegemonic language. According to Zhou, “there is…no ‘home’ to 
dwell in in English” (2). As such, “[r]ather than seeking refuge in English, Asian American poets 
reinvent new ways of saying and hearing in that language,” and this question of a linguistic 
“home” appears in Chang’s poem of the same name, “Home” (2). For instance, the use of the 
Mandarin word, “lao mei,” in the mother’s imagined dialogue redefines “home” through 
redefining English (17). The word blurs the distinction between native and foreigner, as it is a 
Romanized Mandarin word that situates the speaker outside of the category of “American.” 
Thus, “lao mei” becomes, in a sense, a word written not in English nor in Mandarin but in a new 
language, one in which the very line between languages is ambiguated. Per Zhou’s observation 
that “Asian American poets reinvent new ways of saying,” Chang’s poem interests itself not only 
in resisting English-language hegemony but in building a linguistic home that imagines a space 
in which diasporic people are not constrained to a particular ethno-national-linguistic identity, 
but exist comfortably in between these binary divisions. 
  Choi’s work also engages in reinventing language, albeit in a strikingly different fashion. 
Though “Chatroulette” does not integrate non-English words, it engages in what Michael Leong 
calls the “surreal mode,” particularly the “surrealist act of face transplantation” (33). Leong notes 
how “it is assumed that Asian American poets—by default—write with white faces,” yet they 
often subvert such presumptions through “a making of performative faces” (33). Since there is 
something “surreal” about a single self with many faces or personae (the assumed “white” face, 
the true Asian face, etc.) constructed through language, the surreal mode allows poets to 
62 
 
 
linguistically impersonate various characters. The “face” as a false performance appears in 
Choi’s “Chatroulette:” 
[I am a] live action hologram projected on 
their basement brains. My foul amygdala 
Prince Thirstings, desperate congregations, pink 
or blue-brown mammals begging for my face. (“Chatroulette” 9-12) 
 
The description of “blue-brown mammals begging for my face” parallels Leong’s surreal “face 
transplantation,” as the poem relates how, in this online chatroom, the “face” (as a representation 
of identity) is always shifting, always desired, yet never more than a “live action hologram.” The 
speaker here calls herself a “live action hologram,” emphasizing the way her body is performed 
online, just as the poet’s self is performed through language. The performativity of faces also 
appears in a later moment:  
I’ll make you liquid men. I’ll watch you eat 
my image, icon, rumor of a god 
who wants you back. Who wants to watch you dance 
your crooked dance, your sad attempts at flight. (“Chatroulette” 23-26)  
 
Here, the use of the word “who” (rather than “what”) implies a personalization of the speaker’s 
“icon,” suggesting that they have constructed an alternate self (or a “performative face”) to cater 
to the “mammals begging for my face.” For Asian American poets, abstracting the self through 
surrealism and “impersonation” mirrors the blurring of the boundaries of English as a self-
contained entity (Leong 34). Choi finds the surreal within the literal face itself, examining the 
ways in which the anonymous chatroom user can become multiple people at once. In doing so, 
Choi blurs the lines not only between different languages and cultures, but between language and 
the “face,” with the face representing both the body and the self. 
63 
 
 
4.5 The Body: Inhabitation and Dis-inhabitation 
 The body is among the most prevalent spaces of indeterminacy in Choi and Chang’s 
work, as they explore with particular interest the simultaneous inhabitation and dis-inhabitation 
of the Asian American body. The body here represents not only one’s physical flesh, but also the 
self (or the body’s idea of itself). For an example of this, in Choi’s essay on language and 
poetics, “Imitation Games,” she utilizes the concept of “racial dissociation.” This term is defined 
as the construction of “a ‘false self’ that is compliant, competent, and acceptable” in order to 
adhere to “a social contract of Asian American model minority citizenship” (“Imitation Games”). 
Choi recalls being mistaken as a part of a museum exhibit as an example of forced 
disembodiment of the Asian American body, essentially redefining her body as an object through 
refracting it as an art piece: 
I’m in an art museum in Dallas, sitting alone on a bench to listen to a sound 
installation… Suddenly, the door swings open, interrupting my focus, and a 
couple walks in. Like most of the museum’s guests, they’re white, middle-aged. 
 
“Oh my god!” exclaims the man, pointing at me. “I thought she was real!” 
 
Angry at the disruption, I turn my head to scowl at him. 
 
“Oh!” he says. “She is real!” He laughs and turns to the woman. “I thought she 
was part of the exhibit,” he says to her. (“Imitation Games”) 
 
If what separates the body from an object is its ability to register as “real,” and thereby human, to 
others, then the man’s exclamation that he “thought she was real!” represents the disembodiment 
and dehumanization of Choi’s body. It is only through turning her face towards him that he 
realizes that she is a “real,” fully embodied person, not a part of an art exhibit. In this moment, 
the line between a body and a non-body becomes ambiguous—to be, even for a second, not 
64 
 
 
recognized as a body, transforms the body into an object, questioning whether or not it is 
embodied.  
In “Chatroulette,” however, dissociation through the construction of a disembodied image 
occurs through the screen, as in the lines, “My body is its image, here. My image, / just an 
always dying thing” (30-31). The phrase, “is its image,” demonstrates grammatically the 
destruction of subjective embodiment, since “My body” is redefined quite clearly as only “its 
image.” The subsequent “here” also implies embodiment (as “here” is where the body is, and 
“there” is where the body is not), suggesting that the speaker has entered a paradoxical space in 
which they are separate from the body through its stratification as an “image” of itself, and also 
inhabiting it as a subjective “here.” This is precisely what “racial dissociation” refers to—the 
“false” and “compliant” persona is also embodied, tied inherently to racialized, objectified flesh.  
In Chang’s “Home,” the racialized aspect of this dissociation is even clearer, as the 
speaker recalls a moment “When / a white writer has a character call / another a squinty-eyed 
cunt” (11-13). The white writer’s attempt to capture racial violence again merely transforms the 
Asian body into an “image,” brought to life through invoking the corporeal (“squinty-eyed”). 
The speaker’s subsequent recollection of their mother’s voice (“I think it is / squinty”) 
demonstrates how the white writer’s “image” of the Asian body has penetrated the speaker’s 
memory of their own mother (15-16). Here, the “racial dissociation” occurs directly at the site of 
the white writer’s appropriation of racialized violence, even though the “false self” is the self 
which is racialized in a bodily manner (as in the phrase “squinty-eyed”). The poem then shifts to 
the speaker standing next to her mother’s grave, leading to a final epiphany that concludes the 
poem: 
  
65 
 
 
I lie down 
next to her stone, close my eyes. I know  
many things now. Even with my eyes  
closed, I know a bird passes over me.   
In hangman, the body forms while it is  
being hung. As in, we grow as we are  
dying. (“Home” 23-29)  
 
In the line, “I lie down next / to her stone, close my eyes,” the speaker lies above the mother’s 
grave with her eyes closed, paralleling the position of a body in a casket (23-24). The tension 
here lies in the simultaneous closeness between the bodies created by the speaker’s imitation of 
the mother’s bodily position beneath the earth, and the distance that they have between the 
realms of above ground and below ground, death and life, and parent and child. The ability for 
the daughter to symbolically re-inhabit the mother’s body while maintaining distance represents 
her newfound ability to embody her past and her heritage while still existing as her own, unique, 
living self. It is this realization that allows for the sudden epiphany: “I know / many things now” 
(24-25). In a dramatic rejection of the image created by the white writer, the speaker returns to 
the physicality of the body (even, in this case, the buried body) in order to rewrite the Asian-
American body not merely as a site of dissociation, but as a shared body between the self and the 
mother. 
4.6 The Archive: History as Embodied Present 
 Exploring the body also delves into questions concerning embodied histories through the 
construction of an “archive.” Here, I use the “archive” to refer to embodied histories and how the 
use of found documents or artifacts in poetry represents these histories. Chang’s use of the 
obituary form in particular, which represents a “valid instrument of historical record” capable of 
66 
 
 
gaining “insight…of what it was like to be a citizen of a particular community at a particular 
time,” becomes a way both of making history through documentation and reliving history 
through writing (Starck 46). The ability for her poetry to document history through the obituary 
form becomes apparent towards the beginning of Chang’s “Home:” 
Now home is a looking glass called  
Rose Hills Memorial Park. How far she  
has travelled from Beijing to Taiwan to  
New York to Pennsylvania to Michigan  
to California to Rose Hills.  
(“Home” 8-11) 
 
This passage directly relates to the quality of a “brief biographical sketch” that many obituaries 
possess, rather than constituting a mere death notice (Starck 10). To this end, the obituary is both 
a way of reifying the past (for example, the mother’s migration) as the present, while also 
historicizing and preserving the present (the death of the person) as the (soon-to-be) past.  
 This blurring of past and present through the archive mirrors a trend in Asian American 
poetry that Leong calls “the documental mode,” which roughly describes “poems that 
incorporate prior records” such as “found text” or “images” (36-7). One of the poems in Choi’s 
Soft Science, “The Cyborg Wants to Make Sure She Heard You Right,” demonstrates this idea 
precisely. The poem is preceded by a brief preface: “Composed of tweets directed at the author, 
processed through Google Translate into multiple languages, then back into English.” Choi’s use 
of the documental mode builds an archive in which the hatred of the past cannot be obscured 
even through altering the found text technologically and linguistically. The intention of the tweet 
composing the very first line, “Mrs. Great Anime Pornography, the fruit of the fields” is 
relatively clear despite the methodical augmentation that the author used on the text (“The 
67 
 
 
Cyborg Wants to Make Sure She Heard You Right” 1). Objectification of the body by 
representing it as “Anime Pornography” relates back to Choi’s exploration of (dis)embodiment 
and objectification in online spaces. In addition, the translation resulting in jumbled but still 
intelligible English is reminiscent of the idea of “proper” English, and how technology 
complicates language. By incorporating text that she did not literally write but rather found and 
altered, Choi demonstrates how the “documental mode” allows for the building of a poetic 
archive that reflects the ways in which the speaker has been linguistically embodied and 
disembodied.  
While Choi uses found text in a literal sense, Chang’s “Home” plays off of this idea in a 
new, inventive way, using an archival form but writing her own content. For Chang, the “found 
text” is not a physical artifact but a psychic one, as revealed in this moment: “I / can’t remember 
her voice…She would have said” (14-16). Since the obituary form of the poem marks it as a 
documental space, the content becomes imbued with historic significance, even though the 
phrase “She would have said” implies that the information is imagined rather than concrete. Thus 
Obit rewrites the archive as a collection of possibilities, imaginaries, and internal desires rather 
than a representation of the past. In “Home,” history as past, present, or future is destabilized, but 
even beyond that, the poem pulls at the tension between history as objective documentation and 
history as internal, psychological, and lived reality. 
4.7 Finding “Home” in Destabilized Spaces 
  Contemporary Asian American poetry’s interest in the dissolution of binary divisions 
seems at first to fit neatly into a general shift towards postmodern deconstruction. Yet, this 
phenomenon carries particular weight in Asian American poetry specifically, since it is 
inextricably tied to diasporic identity. The dissolution of binary oppositions is not only an 
68 
 
 
abstract philosophical concept, but a directly inhabited experience of defying categorization. 
Diaspora is by definition a transgression; it is a shattering of a worldview contingent upon neatly 
dividing humanity into discrete, identity-based groups. For Asian American poets, blurring 
supposedly opposed ideas functions as a necessary building block for survival. Perhaps this is 
why so many of the binaries identified in this paper in some way relate back to the idea of 
“home,” as Asian Americans construct a new home in poetry and language, a home that allows 
for all the beauty of complexity and contradiction to flourish. Asian American poets actively 
resist the forced dis-inhabitation of bodies, histories, and languages that racism produces through 
rewriting and redefining these terms, thus, in a sense, re-making language and identity 
themselves.  
Despite the vast thematic and formal differences among “Home,” “Chatroulette,” and 
Chang’s tanka poems, all of these works grapple with the necessity of dissolving binaries. Their 
poetry asserts that the ultimate goal of dissolving binary oppositions is the construction of 
“home” within the indeterminacy of language. For example, rather than representing death and 
life as polar opposites, the poets blur them in a way that parallels the construction of Asian 
American identity. In a final epiphany in “Home,” the line “we grow as we are / dying” is similar 
to Choi’s exploration of “My image, / an always dying thing” and even the lines of the final 
tanka of Obit: “To admit this is / to admit that they will die” (“Home” 28-9, “Chatroulette” 30-1, 
“I am ready to” 3-4). For both Choi and Chang, life comes into focus only when one accepts that 
death and life are not irreconcilable opposites but mutually constitutive, amorphous entities—to 
live is to die, and to die is to live. Just the same, Asian Americans are neither Asian nor 
American, yet both Asian and American.  
69 
 
 
In Obit and Soft Science, the acceptance of this contradiction lays the foundation for a 
new Asian American language by rewriting the eternal tensions of indeterminacy and ambiguity 
as “home.” 
70 
 
 
Conclusion 
 In their essay, “Being Hmong Is Not Enough,” Bee Cha argues that “The future of the 
Hmong should be what we are trying to create and not just what we are trying to preserve. 
Having said that, we need to rethink the notion of who we are in light of what we are, and not the 
other way around” (11). Clearly the issues of identity (“who we are” v. “what we are”) are of 
central concern to Cha, and this extends to Hmong and Asian American literature more 
generally. Yet what’s particularly striking about this argument is the emphasis on “what we are 
trying to create and not just what we are trying to preserve.” Public discourses on Asian 
American identity sometimes narrowly focus on “preservation,” of trying to rekindle what has 
been lost and destroyed in the violence of war, migration, and assimilation. I certainly agree that 
protecting traditions from the homeland is an important part of the goal of Asian American 
poetry. Yet in my readings of twenty-first century Asian American poetry, I find less longing for 
a return to traditional practices and more emphasis on the creation of something new, something 
unique to Asian Americans. Though elements of the dominant culture of both Asia and the US 
exist within Asian American poetry, the poems do not simply “preserve” these artifacts as they 
come. Rather, they interrogate, hybridize, and blur them, expressing the need for the creation of a 
new identity, one that exceeds the limiting and artificial boundaries of “Asian” and “American.” 
Twenty-first century Asian American poetry, which deals with themes of war and racism, is not 
only interested in what violence destroys. It is interested in what violence creates. 
 Part of this creation seeks to transform the ugliness of violence into the beauty of 
surviving and thriving in the US. On the symbolic meanings of the wall poems at Angel Island 
Immigration Station, Josephine Park writes: “To turn a prison wall into something of great 
beauty is finally the transformative power of the work of art—and it has been the project of 
71 
 
 
Asian American poets and scholars to preserve, enliven, and continue this significant labor” 
(113). In carving language and culture onto the very walls that imprisoned them, the poets at 
Angel Island found a way to take the tools of oppression and use poetry to transform it into an 
expression both of beauty and identity. In literally leaving their mark on American institutions of 
injustice, Asian American poets both created something beautiful out of violence and carved 
their own subjectivity into American history. Just as “Hmong literary formations assert writing 
as a political project of existing and being” through rewriting their own histories rather than the 
hegemonic records in Chinese, French, and English, Asian American poetry politically reframes 
identity from an Asian American perspective (Ma Vang 90). As such, the movement finds beauty 
in violence and thereby resists violence’s destructive power. 
 In many of the poems in Afterland, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Soft Science, and Obit, 
the final act of creation, also working in many ways as a consolation, comes in the form of 
inhabiting space, of being “here.” Whether it’s Vang’s line “But you come…seeking mountains / 
meaning the same in translation. / Here they are,” Vuong’s line, “Here. That’s all I wanted to be. 
/ I promise,” or Choi’s line, “My body is its image, here,” the poems trace the movement from 
being lost in diasporic identity to an arrival “here,” as a proud Asian American (“Chatroulette” 
30, “Your Mountains Lie Down with You” 2-3, “Notebook Fragments” 83-84). This calls back 
all the way to Bulosan’s anaphora, “We are there…We are there,” suggesting that for nearly as 
long as the tradition has existed, Asian American poets have expressed their presence in America 
as a way of creating a strong Asian American identity, resistant to “wars,” “concentration 
camps,” “guns,” and more—regardless of all of that, “We are everywhere, we are everywhere” 
(30-34). Thus the creative impulse driving Asian American poetry’s representations of violence 
does more than convey the beauty of a hybrid, diasporic identity. It also radically carves out a 
72 
 
 
space for Asians to inhabit America in its creation of identity. Asian Americans have always 
been “here,” “there,” and “everywhere,” and their poetry sends that message out to the world. I 
can only imagine that this movement will expand as more poets of various backgrounds and 
intersections, such as Vuong, Vang, Choi, and Chang raise their voices. As Choi puts it, “Here’s 
to our continuing arrival” (647).  
73 
 
 
Works Cited 
Bulosan, Carlos. “I Want the Wide American Earth.” Academy of American Poets, 1950, 
https://poets.org/poem/i-want-wide-american-earth. 
 
Cha, Bee. “Being Hmong is not Enough.” Bamboo Among the Oaks: Contemporary Writing by 
Hmong Americans, edited by Mai Neng Moua. Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2002.  
 
Chang, Juliana. "Reading Asian American Poetry." Melus, vol. 21, no. 1, 1996, pp. 81-98. 
Chang, Victoria. “I am ready to.” Obit, Copper Canyon Press, 2020, p. 105. 
 
Chang, Victoria. “To love anyone.” Obit, Copper Canyon Press, 2020, p. 39. 
 
Chang, Victoria. “Home.” Obit, Copper Canyon Press, 2020, p. 94. 
 
Chin, Frank, et al. “Introduction.” Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers. 3rd 
edition, University of Washington Press, 2019. 
 
Chin, Frank, et al. “Preface to the First Edition.” Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American 
Writers. 3rd edition, University of Washington Press, 2019. 
 
Choi, Franny. “(B)Aiiieeeee!: The Future Is Femme and Queer.” The Massachusetts Review, vol. 
59, no. 4, 2018, pp. 644–48. 
 
Choi, Franny. “Chatroulette.” Soft Science, Alice James Books, 2019, pp. 61-65. 
 
Choi, Franny. “Imitation Games.” Gulf Coast Literary Journal, 
http://gulfcoastmag.org/journal/34.1-winter/spring-2022/imitation-games/, Accessed 13 
May 2022. 
 
Choi, Franny. “The Cyborg Wants to Make Sure She Heard You Right.” Soft Science, Alice 
James Books, 2019, pp. 26-27. 
 
“Corona.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 4th ed. 2012. 
 
Cousins, A. D., and Peter Howarth. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, 
edited by A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth, Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 1–5. 
 
“Elegy.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 4th ed. 2012. 
 
Fickle, Tara. “English Before Engrish: Asian American Poetry’s Unruly Tongue.” Comparative 
Literature Studies, vol. 51, no. 1, 2014, pp. 78–105. 
 
Fickle, Tara. “Foreword.” Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers. Edited by Frank 
Chin et al., 3rd edition, University of Washington Press, 2019. 
74 
 
 
Ishikawa, Mina. “About Tanka.” Translated by David Boyd, Jung Journal—Culture and Psyche, 
vol. 10, no. 1, 2016, pp. 32–36. 
 
Koau Vang, Chia, et al. The Life of Shong Lue Yang: Hmong “Mother of Writing”. Center for 
Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota, 1990. 
 
Lee, Li-Young. “Persimmons.” Poetry Magazine, 1986, 
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43011/persimmons. 
 
Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. “Reconstructing Asian-American Poetry: A Case for Ethnopoetics.” 
MELUS, vol. 14, no. 2, 1987, pp. 51–63. 
 
Leong, Michael. “Traditions of Innovation in Asian American Poetry.” The Cambridge 
Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry, edited by Timothy Yu, Cambridge 
University Press, Cambridge, 2021, pp. 31–47. 
 
Moua, Mai Neng. “Introduction.” Bamboo Among the Oaks: Contemporary Writing by Hmong 
Americans. Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2002. 
 
Park, Josephine. “Asian American Poetry.” The Cambridge Companion to Asian American 
Literature, edited by Crystal Parikh and Daniel Y. Kim, Cambridge University Press, 2015, 
pp. 101-113. 
 
“Poems and Inscriptions.” Angel Island Immigration Station, https://www.aiisf.org/poems-and-
inscriptions. Accessed 21 June 2023. 
 
Shimakawa, Karen. National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage. Duke University 
Press, 2002. 
 
Stalling, Jonathan. Poetics of Emptiness: Transformations of Asian Thought in American Poetry. 
Fordham University Press, 2010. 
 
“Sonnet.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 4th ed. 2012. 
 
Uchida, Yoshiko. Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family. University of 
Washington Press, 2015, p. 122. 
 
Vang, Mai Der. “Mother of People without Script.” Afterland, Graywolf Press, 2017, pp. 60. 
 
Vang, Mai Der. “Your Mountain Lies Down with You.” Afterland, Graywolf Press, 2017, p. 82. 
 
Vang, Ma. “Writing on the Run: Hmong American Literary Formations and the Deterritorialized 
Subject.” MELUS, vol. 41, no. 3, 2016, pp. 89–111. 
 
Vuong, Ocean. “Notebook Fragments.” Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Copper Canyon Press, 
2016, pp. 68-72. 
75 
 
 
Vuong, Ocean. “The Gift.” Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Copper Canyon Press, 2016, pp. 24-25. 
 
Wallinger-Schorn, Brigitte. “So There It Is”: An Exploration of Cultural Hybridity in 
Contemporary Asian American Poetry. BRILL, 2011. 
 
Wang, Dorothy J. Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian 
American Poetry. Stanford University Press, 2013. 
 
Yao, Steven G. “Toward a Prehistory of Asian American Verse: Pound, Cathay, and the Poetics 
of Chineseness.” Representations, vol. 99, no. 1, 2007, pp. 130–58. 
 
Yau, John. “ING GRISH.” Conjunctions, no. 37, 2001, pp. 381–84. 
 
Yu, Timothy. “Form and Identity in Language Poetry and Asian American Poetry.” 
Contemporary Literature, vol. 41, no. 3, 2000, pp. 422–61. 
 
Zhou, Xiaojing. The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry. University of Iowa 
Press, 2006. 
76