New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018. 224 pages. $26.95.
Marilyn Chin has dedicated A Portrait of the Self as Nation to her students, presumably the students with whom she began working at San Diego State in 1987 (also the year she published her first book, Dwarf Bamboo). As this volume suggests at many points, teaching has informed Chin’s writing, sometimes directly and sometimes by serendipity: one of the haiku included here—“Don’t touch him, bitch, we’re engaged and besides he’s wearing my nipple ring”—stemmed from overhearing a student.
Unsurprisingly, Chin has also taught a course on the comedy of Dave Chappelle, Margaret Cho, and others (as she mentions in an interview with Catherine Cucinella). The comic vein in Chin’s own sensibility struck many readers in the much-anthologized “How I Got That Name.” Its speaker begins by introducing herself, with an I am, and by celebrating “the resoluteness / of that first person singular / followed by that stalwart indicative.” But she swiftly admits that names are not so simple, that hers changed when the speaker’s father “transliterated ‘Mei Ling’ to ‘Marilyn’”:
And there I was, a wayward pink baby,
named after some tragic white woman
swollen with gin and Nembutal.
My mother couldn’t pronounce the “r.”
She dubbed me “Numba one female offshoot”
for brevity [ . . . ]
These lines could fit in stand-up: caricaturing the accent of a parent, for example, is an element in Cho’s routines, or Russell Peters’s. And there is something uncomfortably funny in the way the images of baby and actress keep intermingling: the orderly parallels of adjective adjective noun, the way that the description of Monroe also calls up the slightly dissipated expression of a baby. That macabre joke at Monroe’s expense is set within a bitter joke at the expense of the parents—the father’s “obsess[ion],” the mother’s effort to deal with its result—and is the tonic note for a long, ironic reflection on how one assimilates into another culture.
Audacious in both senses of the word, Chin is willing not only to be colloquial but to ramble (“Now, where was I, oh yes, now I remember”); not only to spell you as “ya” but to write “hunky-dory” and “Orchids doth not” in the same poem; not only to be bawdy or goofy, but to be sophomoric—to turn an iconic speech from Macbeth into “To Maui, to Maui, to Maui.” What’s interesting is how much else such jokes take in. Consider the first stanza of “Chinese Quatrains (The Woman in Tomb 44)”:
The aeroplane is shaped like a bird
Or a giant mechanical penis
My father escorts my mother
From girlhood to unhappiness
First, there is the blasé suggestion of the second line, the idea that planes owe something not just to biomimicry but to a phallic world (that of the refueling plane in Dr. Strangelove). The stanza’s intensely flat rhyme serves both as deflation and as a tiny link to the next stanza:
A dragonfly has iridescent wings
Shorn, it’s a lowly pismire
Plucked of arms and legs
A throbbing red pepperpod
The quatrains Chin works in, here and elsewhere, splice American and Chinese forms (while also calling to mind Harryette Mullen’s sometimes rhyming, always punning quatrains in Muse & Drudge). As an endnote explains, the point is that each stanza is a self-contained unit and yet also is quietly tied to those around it. One such minute, uncanny link is between the plane and the de-winged dragonfly, that “throbbing red pepperpod”; another link, though, is the way that ppiness is “plucked” of letters to expose the partial anagram of penis. (This phonemic tinkering might seem far-fetched, but there’s a similar kind of weird resonance between Nembutal and Numba.)
Just as she draws on multiple verse forms, Chin observes the sound and look of writing in multiple languages; in “Cauldron,” a mad horse “danced a ribbon / around the character for ‘chaos.’” Elsewhere, meditating on what one takes or loses or barely retains from one’s languages, Chin sees
the rest is fading.
A slash dissects in midair,
ai, ai, ai, ai,
more of a cry than a sigh(and no help from the phoneticist).
To portray the self as nation is to spell out the multiple eras and cultures acting within one person; it’s a wonderful summary for poems that telescope China and the modern US. “Composed Near the Bay Bridge,” for example, takes in the “spiked dog collar, black leather thighs” and “bad guitar” of the West Coast, and then ends:
I watch the traffic
hone down to a quiver. Loneliness. Dawn.
A few geese winging south; minor officials return home.
This quieter, barer scene recalls Du Fu’s “Spring Night in the Left Office,” where one minor official hears night go by: as translated by Tien Tran, it ends, “Not sleeping, I hear golden keys / on the wind imagine jade harness chimes // With papers to prepare for dawn court / Several times I’ve asked how late it is.” That solitary night is audible behind Chin’s California traffic.
While returning again and again to race, culture, and immigration in the US, Chin also documents the abuse of women, across countries and decades. She makes the treatment of women almost literally palpable in “Cauldron,” a ranging meditation that glances, every few lines, at the progress made by “my grandmother / running after” the man who is trying to “sell my mother / for a finger of opium.” The grandmother “totter[s] / down the grassy knolls / in her bound feet,” later seen as “hooves” and as “painful lotuses.” Such steady references—the grandmother then “hobbles,” then “inches”—trace her determination and her physical pain. The following poem, a short sequence called “Variations on an Ancient Theme: The Drunken Husband,” takes up domestic violence, each stanza spinning into another contemporary American version of the theme.
These concerns continue in the last quarter of the book, the new work. “Scary Poem (Inaugural Etude, 2017),” with its creepy, stretched off-rhymes (like scrotum, speculum, pendulum, gyzym, pogrom, museum), might be read alongside Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018). One of Chin’s prose poems, “Immigrant Dream: Eat Crow,” turns humiliation into a menu:
Crow chop-suey, crow lettuce cups, crow ala queen, crow soufleecrow-frappe, crow pate, crow tartar, stuffed buffalo crow wings, and for dessert, they feed you lemon crow crumpets, flaming crow jubilee and crow tart à la mode.
Just when this list seems over, it resurges in a dire pun on “crowbars.” As with Chin’s earlier books, such poems work exceptionally well aloud (crow tart à la mode), while excoriating.
If the book’s dedication appreciates one’s students, its very last words tell off institutions. The final endnote of A Portrait of the Self as Nation, explaining the event for which “Brown Girl Manifesto, One of Many” was composed, simply notes: “Of course, [the poem] was totally inappropriate for the occasion.” It’s an apt way to close a book where humor and anger whirl so closely together.