by Jefferson Hansen
[The font gets funky at one point in this review, and there doesn't seem to be anything I can do about it. Sorry. --Jeff]
Wang Ping's 2020 poetry volume My Name is Immigrant (Hanging Loose) presents some new poems by her along with, at times, radical reconfigurations of previously published work. I am thinking specifically of the long poem "Ten Thousand Waves," which appeared in and was the title poem of her 2014 collection. Here, it is renamed "The Cocklepickers." The poem gives voice to the 23 Chinese immigrants to England who died on February 5, 2004, when the tide came up too fast while they were working as cockle collectors. They drowned.
In My Name is Immigrant, the short sections of this poem, in the voice of various named victims, are placed throughout the book as a sort of musical refrain. What's more, Ping adds two prose sections that explain the genesis of the poem. (I refer to her as "Ping," which in English would be what we call her first name, because I know her personally.) She seems to have mixed feelings about it. Isaac Julien invited her to Morecombe Bay to write a poem for a film he was making about the tragedy. Ping writes: "So the tragedy of the cockle pickers is the tragedy of every immigrant, also mine. Their desire, their death and hope is also mine...Our story must be told and heard, through ten thousand waves" (12).
As we readers make our way through the various poems in this book, which address Hakka miners in China, Black victims of police violence in the U.S., and Central American refugees coming to the U.S., the short poems of "Cockle Pickers" keep appearing. Then comes the kicker. A prose piece entitled "Ten Thousand Waves" addresses the class and racial issues behind cultural productions. She describes the film showing at MOMA, in New York: "As the spectacle woos and wows the audience, as the filmmaker floats on Cloud Nine in full glory, twenty-three souls still linger on the floor of the Irish Sea, waiting to go home" (90).
Then Ping takes on the voice of the drowned:
Upon our hands your art is made
Upon our eyes your fame is established
Upon our feet you travel the world in luxury (91)
She ends the poem by asking "Look at us...See our shadows, flickering / in the deep of your conscience" (91)
When reading this, I was surprised by this analysis, and a little sickened. There is a whole cultural industry that makes prestige and money out of other people's suffering. Ping seems to be concerned that, in this instance, the cultural game erased the human tragedy. Certainly, as an award-winning, jet setting cultural worker herself, Ping couldn't be completely disavowing the cultural industry. But she is pointing out that, even in the telling of the stories of the dispossessed, they can be dispossessed again. What is Ping asking us to do? I think she is asking us not to be heedless of each other in our ambition. She is also asserting that her main identity is immigrant—the title of the book reveals this—more than prestigious cultural worker.
Ping gives voice not only to Chinese immigrants, but to other immigrants, as well. At one point, she seems a bit defiant about taking on the voice of a Honduras asylum seeker:
I don't have a choice. The voice chooses me, as a conduit, to feel, cry, breathe, write, so I can live, so we can live.
Call me appropriator, call me possessed, call me fraud...as long as my heart is in the right place, my voice anchored to the earth, the story will rise to the stars where all elements are connected (50)
I take it from this passage that Ping thinks we can be too precious about our differences. If we proceed with an open heart, empathy is possible. Indeed, in the poem that begins the book she writes "we came from the same mother in Africa / we're your children, sisters and brothers, father and mother" (7) The "we" here is immigrants the world over, and the implication is that we are all immigrants, and all, ultimately, from Africa, where humanity emerged in the evolutionary past. Are all humans united by our connection to earth, by our connection to Africa?
On a personal note, this book reminded me of many of my fellow workers in group homes, many of whom were African immigrants to Minnesota. From 2012 to 2017 I worked in three group homes—two for developmentally disabled adults and one for mentally ill adults. A couple of my fellow workers put in 16 hours a day: after working the evening shift with me, they went to another group home to put in an awake night shift. Five days a week. While I worried for their health, both of them were invariably cheerful. One was nearing 60 years old. In poem after poem, Ping gives voice to the desperation and pain of having to work so much.
But I also thought of another African immigrant I know. She came to the U.S. as a teenager knowing almost no English. She now has a Master's degree and runs her own business, with employees. She's my therapist. This part of immigration is addressed in Ping's book in a couple places. One is the back cover, where her many awards are mentioned, and where Gary Snyder, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, provides a generous blurb. Ping is a tremendous success, who came to America with only $28 dollars in her pocket, earned a Ph.D., and is a respected writer.
The second place she addresses success is when she says this is not enough for some in power:
I refuse to believe this powdered lie—
"Not good enough, will never be good enough"
Because of our accent, our immigrant hands and feet (81)
This poem obliquely addresses some employment issues Ping has dealt with over the past decade. While a lot of people, including myself, have suffered employment woes, they take on a harsher and more biting form when race and otherness is part of the equation.
And this happens even within China. In a poem I have been familiar with for a decade, "Hakka Man Farms Rare Earth Metal," Ping tells the story of a minority Hakka man working a dangerous mining job so that the privileged the world over can have batteries for their computers and cars. One of those privileged is his boss, who drives a battery-powered Prius: "Mongolia, / Our origin, now a rare earth pit for the world" (19).
Ping in several places asks us to look at immigrants and other dispossessed people, and see them in their full humanity. In "Blind Sight, Hidden Brain," she complicates this admonition. This wonderful poem demonstrates what poetry can do that journalism and history cannot: by using metaphor and contextualization, current and historical events are shown to depend on how we see. And this seeing has to do with not only the nervous system, but attitude and bias. Seeing, Ping shows, is relative: a dragonfly has "thirty thousand images in each eye" (87). What does this relativity mean? We choose what to see. Seeing is, therefore, an ethical choice. Do we choose to see a 12-year-old Black male playing with a BB gun as a dangerous threat? Do we choose to see a shaking submarine as grounds for nuclear war? Ping addresses these life-and-death issues in this poem, and shows how profoundly we need to attend to the structure of our seeing.
Reading this book and Ping's Ten Thousand Waves has taught me a lot about immigration and economics. Hers is a cosmopolitan world where we humans are all connected economically, ecologically, and spiritually. But we often don't see this connection because we are heedless of each other in our greed and ambition. Heedlessness leads to unneeded suffering. Ping writes, "My ex said I carry the weight of the world on my back" (50). By doing so, she is able to remind us to notice each other, particularly the forgotten and dispossessed, both in our neighborhood and in the world at large.
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In 2014 my review of Ping's 2014 book Ten Thousand Waves (Wings Press) appeared in the now defunct AlteredScale journal, which this blog accompanied. I reprint it below. Ping does tell me the book is out of print, but you may be able to find it used. Enjoy.
Ten Thousand Waves by Wang Ping
review by Jefferson Hansen
It is a truism that the luxuries and privileges of the few are often paid for by the sufferings of the many. Someone has to work in the factory to produce a board game that diverts the lucky for a few moments. Journalists, social scientists, and novelists have all addressed this relationship. Wang Ping, a Chinese-American poet, in her latest collection, Ten Thousand Waves, offers a variety of specifically poetic approaches to the issue. She uses precisely selected, usually one- to three-syllable words, to bear witness to and document the lives of Chinese and Chinese immigrant workers worldwide. She skillfully uses line breaks and prose poems that read like flash fiction to approach the issue from a variety of angles.
The “waves” of the title refers to literal waves of water in the title poem, to the waves of migrants within and immigrants from China, to the complex stasis of waves, the way they manage to move and not move at the same time. All is fluid, but all also stays the same.
The book is divided into three sections. The first, “Bargain,” explores the trade-offs made either for modern privilege or to simply survive difficulties. She shows the suffering behind our conveniences and wealth. In the second section, “The Price of a Finger,” she specifically addresses violence in factories, toward artists, and from various state apparati world wide. The final section, “Crossing the Line,” addresses the immigrant experience from the perspective of workers.
The book’s opening poem, “A Hakka Man Farms Rare Earth in South China,” which also appeared as a broadside published by TheAlteredScalePress, documents the lives of the miners who collect the materials that go into batteries. They are Hakka, nomads from Mongolia, who use ancient methods to leech metals from the “neon soil” that “the world/Wants—‘vitamins’ for I-pods/Plasma TVs, wind turbines, guided missiles” (5). The greatest irony occurs when the “boss” appears in “his Prius, powered by the sludge/That chokes my eyes, ears, nose.” The toxic chemicals the workers are exposed to allow the boss to oversee them in a car powered by a battery which uses the very chemicals they mine.
Meanwhile, the lives of the miners remain primitive. They use a fire stove while the metals and minerals that power modern conveniences invade their skin and organs. Wang documents the suffering necessary for the very existence of our modern conveniences. I-Pads, and those who use them, cause people to feel as if they are “Slaves on this earth.”
This poem serves as an emblem for much of this book. In most of the poems Wang returns to the theme of the suffering that underlies modern convenience and luxury. She does not, however, absolve herself from complicity. In “Bargain,” the second poem and also the name of the first section of poems, Wang herself bargains down a street vendor who is selling “homemade shoes/Awkward and lovely like the maiden behind the stand.” Not until Wang is home in Minneapolis (she lives in the Twin Cities), does she consider the full impact of what she did, “ ‘You saved a dime, fool, but lost your soul’” (11). In another poem, “Young Monk at Debating Court, Wang herself bargains with a young monk so she can take photographs (and most cameras use batteries, to return us to “A Hakka Man Farms Rare Earth in South China.”) This poem is written in prose (as with seven other poems in the section), and shares with flash fiction an economical plot, few characters, and a precise focus on an specific interaction full of implications.
The book is not simply a downer. Wang, more often than not, speaks through characters—young, old, male, female, but always Chinese or of Chinese descent. They are almost always of the working class, but they sometimes retain hope, if not for themselves, for their children—“A peasant’s belief is as stubborn as a mule’s in the grass” (25). The junk collector in one tells us that he will never get rich but he
sends our son
to a good school
. . .
And he laughs, showing
All his teeth, browned
By cheap cigarettes.
While the focus of the poem is certainly the main character, Wang makes him come alive with her precise attention to poetics. In the full stanza quoted above, she does not stop the lines with the punctuation mark. By doing so, she isolates the key words “showing” and “browned” at the end of the line. This characterizes the laughing man by emphasizing the very colors of his complicated hopefulness. His body decays, but his laughter, grounded in hope for his son, remains.
In one of the book’s most gorgeous poems, “Wild Pheasant,” Wang gives voice to a sex worker—“pheasant,” we learn in the notes, is a slang term for prostitutes. In this ballad-like poem a young man leaves his bride to find work. She never stops loving him, but to support herself and their five-year-old, whom he never sees, she becomes “a pheasant, or a spittoon filled with cigarette butts/My flesh rots beneath powder and rouge” (46). Through imagery, repetition, a powerful vaguely iambic line, and occasional off-rhyme Wang produces beautiful lyric cadences: “Dewdrops of faith bejeweling its upturned eaves” (46).
This poem concludes the section entitled “Bargain”: it is the ultimate bargain. In order to feed their son and do right by her absent love, she must “love” strangers for money. The lyric cadence helps to create this complex irony: there is great love and beauty in this painful story, a beauty at one with the very sound of the verse. As with many of Wang’s poems, the short words and seeming directness contain multitudes. This poem rivals the great ballads in its power.
The title poem of the second section, “The Price of a Finger,” is its centerpiece. A long collage poem, we learn in the notes that there is, indeed, a price put on fingers lost in factory accidents. A worker who loses any finger past a joint is awarded six months salary. The poem is divided into two columns, and combines quotations from factory workers, owners and advertisements with stark facts about what these factories produce. We learn about high-pressure hammers. We learn what it takes to make fake eyelashes. We learn about farmworkers who watch the trucks from the factories rush by on the highway. We learn about both the monetary and human costs of all of this. And we learn about the material success of the factory owners. Wang presents these facts and quotations without comment. The blocks of texts, staggered down the page, invites us to fill in the blank space, to draw conclusions and insights on our own, without the explicit help of the poet.
The centerpiece of the third, and last, section of the book addresses the tragedy of Chinese immigrant workers drowned while picking cockles (edible clams) from Morecombe Bay in England. It is the title poem of the book. Wang divides the it into 19 short sections, 18 of which are narrated by an immigrant—occasionally two immigrants—killed that day, and the 19th by a chorus of the ghosts. Ironically, the deaths occurred on the night of the Lantern Festival, traditionally a Chinese holiday. But these people had to work.
Wang orders the monologues so as to tell the story. The first one, by Xie Xiou Wen, begins “On the night of the Lantern Festival/We stream into the sea” (74). This creates the setting. Later poems address the problem: “we can’t make out the sea/No stars point our path to shore” (75). The storm confuses the immigrants and leaves every one drowned. Their job was to pick sea food for others.
Desire marks most of these monologues: for home, for the food of home, for the fruit of Fujian province, where most of the immigrants were from. Wang develops the irony of their dying on a Chinese holiday by placing so much emphasis on their desire for native food. They pick luxury food while pining away, during a cold death, for the simple fruits of their homeland that can be cut off a tree.
As we move toward the conclusion of the poem, many of the dying people apologize for leaving their families alone—forced to work and live without their help. I’m not sure what they apologize for: for immigrating, for taking this job, for the unforgiving sea itself. The reason is not given; the heartache is.
“We move with the sea/Plankton, eels, turtles” (81). In the end, the immigrants become mere fodder in the sea, material floating and ebbing. Or do they? This poem becomes their voices; this poem displays the cruelty of their death; Wang Ping gives them an afterlife, makes them more than mere corpses. No, they are ghosts, with spirit: “Our blood boils with longing” (82).
The book ends with “My Name Is Suni,” a poem that invokes the shamans of “the Nuosu or Yi people, an ethnic group of about eight million people who live primarily in the rural, mountainous areas of Vietnam, Thailand, and China” (notes 98). But it is in the voice of a beautiful young woman who commits suicide. The poem ends
My arms cardle eagles, ghosts and autumn weeds
In the soil
Potatoes await the thunder
To grow wings (91)
This book is about growing wings. It is about transforming the worst suffering, through the craft of poetry, into a crystalline beauty, one that makes us determined to do something about this pain. But the wings remain, the beauty remains, in the struggle, and in the making of it into art.
