Kassy Lee: poet/writer, organizer/experiencer, human of many talents. Kassy grew up in San Diego, California and spent the last four years living, working, and writing in Beijing, where she’s been a regular on the Spittoon stage as well as at various literary and arts events. At the time of writing, she’s getting ready to return to the U.S. and enter a creative writing MFA (Master of Fine Arts) graduate program. Our email conversation carried us from Beijing to Michigan, from #MeToo to the moon, into pain, empathy and dislocation–and how poetry is a current pulling these and all things together.
First off, who are you, in exactly 11 words?
I’m a poet who’s trying to be honest with the world.
Here’s one usually reserved for awkward expat bar chit-chat: what originally brought you to China? And more importantly, why did you stay?
Have you ever been fully, completely unmoored? I was twenty-three, and I didn’t have much of a reason to be anywhere at all really. I saw a job posting in Beijing to start an after-school arts and ESL program for middle schoolers. At that time I wanted to be an arts educator. I was surprised I got the job. I knew embarrassingly little about China or East Asia in general. I thought it was pronounced “Beige-ing.”
And, why did I stay?
I like that I can walk places and when I walk places I frequently bump into people I know. There’s enough people in town that you don’t feel like you know everybody, but you do feel only one or two Kevin Bacons away from everyone. I like that it’s flat, and that I can ride a bike or walk. I like that cabs are cheap. I like that there’s enough arts and culture that makes you feel like you’re in a global city, but there isn’t much red tape if you want to start something artistic or literary yourself. I like that people are friendly and will invite you to sit with them if you show up somewhere alone. I like that I never really feel alone here. I like that there are no guns and minimal street harassment. I like that it doesn’t really rain or snow. I like that I realize the world is “bigger” than the problems of my home country – I like destabilizing my conception of my home country.
But all that is just me trying to figure out details of ultimately, what is just a feeling–it’s ineffable. I do so many things I don’t understand. I push people away that I want closer. I do things I know I shouldn’t do because it’s briefly glamorous. I fall in love with strangers. I leave people on read for no reason. I get on a bicycle and pedal to nowhere and take pictures of children playing with their grandparents. I don’t know. I love life and I want to be in this world. I don’t want to sit in a dark room and watch television. I don’t want to sit in a car every day and listen to Drake on the radio.
In an essay on Xiao Shui‘s Stories from the Bohai Sea, you use the word “dislocation” to describe the fact that in his poems, “everyone is on their way to somewhere else.” Is this what drew you to Xiao Shui’s poems? Do you identify with that? What is the difference between dislocation and relocation? Do you think of yourself as a migrant? A traveler? Something else?
In truth, Xiao Shui’s poems put me in my feels. I was drawn to them on the level of pure emotion. That essay was me trying to figure out why that’s so from a literary perspective, but I feel connected with them personally. There have been many times in my life where I’m just sitting by a body of water and watching the boats sway on them, reflecting on all this moving I’ve done. When I read Xiao Shui, I feel like he’s sitting on a bench with me–he gets the sensation of not really needing to be anywhere. Our collective feeling of not needing to be anywhere collides with each other’s, and you get this feeling of dislocation. All of us don’t need to be anywhere, but to be with someone, you need (often) to be in the same anywhere.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a long layover in some city and had three brief hours or three brief days or three brief months with a friend. Meet me outside the customs and we can sit at the Starbucks in the airport and chat. Saying things like, “I haven’t seen you in three years, how are you?” . . . It’s just a constant state of flux. To me, Xiao Shui defines that longing, those airport hotels and airport express lines and all the parting and departing.
I don’t know if you know much about it, but I founded this art collective called transmigrant flow here in Beijing. We haven’t done anything since October, but we did about seven events or so during my time here. I think the “transmigrant flow” idea kind of encapsulates a lot of how I feel about the terms.
Being a foreigner in Beijing, we have to talk about language. And especially as a poet–it’s the primary medium, right? How has living in and with and around Chinese language, initially as an outsider, impacted your thinking and/or writing?
At first I was influenced by the weird ways Chinese is translated into English. I had a short-lived Instagram account called Oddly Poetic Chinglish.
Now, I’m more interested in how weird Americanisms sound to me when I hear them–since most of my colleagues and some of my friends are not native-English speakers, or they’re not American. So I think pretty hard while I’m talking if I’m using an idiom that doesn’t make concrete sense or if it’s an Americanism. Phrases like “She’s a goner” or “pickle ball”–like words that I wouldn’t think twice about back home, now I notice them. In terms of how that impacts my poetry, I really like the effect that it has on me–I think a big part of poetry is carving away at the normal loops we get on linguistically. Turning clichés into surprises, etc. I can see the idioms more clearly now, and I can mess with expectations.
In terms of loops and surprises, one thread I notice across your work is how your poems tend to take these celebrity names–like Steve Jobs, George W., God, and Beyoncé, to name a few–and sort of flatten them, maybe (by my reading) through a mechanism that has to do with the way pop culture moves and procreates. I’m curious: how do you view “pop culture” as fitting in with or against big-shit, capital-letter ideas like History, Culture, Art?
I’m not so much talking about these big names but the influence these people have had on all of us, including myself. I see myself as looking at how the ghosts of these people have permeated all of us. Zeitgeist is perhaps the best word to describe the phenomenon I’m talking about. I don’t know these people, but I know how their images have entertained me, made me angry, made me sad, etc. I think to everyday people like myself, these “people” are more like planets in orbit–I feel like I understand Steve Jobs at the same level I understand the moon, which is not very much. But I see the Apple logo in the sky every night and somehow it makes me feel things.
I don’t see much tension between pop culture and Culture these days for myself or for poets I’m interested in. It feels natural to me that you can reference El Greco in one line, Rihanna in the next, and Marx in the last. I suppose it was more of a deal back in the postmodern era with Frank O’Hara and Andy Warhol. Beyoncé shot her latest music video in the Louvre and it feels tired and passé. One thing I’ve realized I do need to be careful of is that technology and pop culture change so quickly that references can go out of date quickly. There’s a poem in zombia where I explained what a “#” is–at the time it seemed kind of experimental but now it’s banal.
I could also go on about how the Canon has been an exclusionary practice used to shore up white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, but I think talking about the moon makes more sense right now.
from “Tender Greens” (published in Apogee):
I read a Cosmo.com article about emotionally
unavailable deities, and I ask God if He thinks
He’s emotionally unavailable. “C’mon, girl, I’m
watching Game of Thrones,” He says. The voice
of God saying, “C’mon girl, atta girl, good girl.”
That’s what ropes me in when I think of leaving
Him and changing my Facebook profile pic for
good. I blow Him and bang my skull against His
desk in a casual rhythm. He makes a joke about
knocking the sense into me. I joke that I’d rather
have some cents instead of sense. It’s not a very
funny joke, but I’m not a very funny person . . .
You’ve published two chapbooks: zombia and The Period of Warring States. Can you say a bit about each? In what place, state of mind, or manner should a reader engage with these collections? Can you cite a specific poem or two from each that stand out to you?
What I love about literature is you have no idea who or why or where someone will engage with it. In a poetry-themed WeChat group chat I’m in, someone posted a woman on the Nanjing subway wearing a t-shirt with lines from a Philip Larkin poem. If you have a work of ceramics, people will have to see it in the MoMA or a gallery. But for writing, you never really know where it’ll be engaged with. I remember when Tracy K. Smith came to town a lot of Chinese people came up to her saying how much her writing had impacted them. I don’t know if she would have ever expected that – I for one didn’t. For that reason, I don’t think there’s any sort of ‘should’ around engaging with it.
I can say zombia is influenced by San Diego and The Period of Warring States is influenced by Beijing, but I don’t think you need to have been or go to either place to connect (well this is my hope). I was actually a little worried about this when I was trying to find a press to publish The Period of Warring States, that is was way too specific to being a black person in Beijing.
In zombia, I have a fondness for the poem “The Screw, The Cloud.” I created my own form for that one with repetition, meter, and rhyme. Can you figure it out? 🙂 I think it’s fun to write in form sometimes because it pushes you in directions you wouldn’t expect. I like patterns and math, so that was fun to write.
For The Period of Warring States, I definitely think the best poem I’ve written so far is in there, “THESAURUS dot COM.” I’ve published that poem under many different names, it’s in my chapbook, I published it at Perigee, and there was a short film about it for the Visual Poetry Project. That poem kind of scares me because I really don’t know how I made it and it gestures more to what I want to write in the future. I hope it wasn’t just dumb luck, like making a half-court shot.
What are you writing at the moment? Do you have any larger projects or obsessions brewing?
To distill: right now I have a series about the phenomenon of pain, both collective and individual. Pain is the body’s opinion of what’s going on inside it and to it. Pain is a relationship between bodies – whose pain registers empathy, whose pain is discarded as meaningless in the pursuit of other aims like medical advancement.
I’ve also been working on a longer series about the “black international”–black artists and intellectuals who did a lot of their thinking, dreaming, writing, painting, while living abroad.
Is this an old interest of yours, or is it more recent?
I have a wide variety of interests, and pain has come in and out of focus. I’ve always been interested in describing pain because, in a way, if you can perfectly describe a certain kind of pain, you can create a bridge to understanding. If you’re a reader who has felt that pain, and I describe it well, you’ll feel less alone in that pain. If you’re a reader that has never felt it, you’ll understand that there’s some part of the writer’s life you don’t understand, and hopefully that draws you closer to empathy for other people’s experiences. I’ve always been interested in describing what sensations actually feel like in the body. Like new love or boredom or sorrow or, yes, pain, what does it really feel like to touch, taste, smell it? Pain is not lofty or abstract. I like to write about things on planet Earth.
Speaking of pain and things on planet Earth, there’s a lot coming out of #MeToo in poetry and writing communities recently, impacting women of color writers particularly. What do you hope to see happen with all this in the next year? How do you hope to see communities of fellow writers respond? How have you responded yourself or how will you continue to respond?
In the next year, I hope we’ll continue to out people who’ve sexually assaulted other people, and that they will face consequences for their actions. Like all communities, writers should hold other writers accountable. I’d like to see women being appointed and given roles to fill in the positions vacated by abusers. We need the keys to be handed over to more women and women of color. That’s a true change in my mind.
I don’t see it as a response to any particular incident, but I have written many poems about sexual abuse and women of color for many years. Perhaps in a sad coincidence, I was asked to read at a Women’s History Month event this year in Beijing and they were planning to watch the movie The Hunting Ground, which is about campus sexual assault. The organizer told me the theme, and I was like, Oh great, I have a few poems about sexual abuse, which one do you like? I think it’s one of the deepest pains of women of color is to know the modern world is built on your rape, torture, and dehumanization–whether you are a Native American woman, a black woman, a Chinese woman, etc. I think part of why I love poetry is that it can communicate pain so well, and from pain, build empathy. The pain of being a woman of color in this world is so deep, and I hope to continue to carve its nuances into poems so that others may understand the sadness that is there within us.
You’ve also written about the historical and current notion of “blackness” in China, both in poems like your Langston Hughes one, and in essays like the one about the Beijing premiere of Black Panther. Where are you finding valuable conversations and/or art-making on these issues in the USA of 2018, with its very different relationship to the idea of “blackness”?
I find valuable conversations and art-making about these issues nearly everywhere in America if you’re open and listening–contemporary American poetry being one of them. I feel like there’s a tidal wave of young writers coming through that engage complexly with race, culture, gender, sexuality, etc., and I love it. Conversations about race are normal in America (finally), so it’s good to feel like I’m back on a turf I understand.
Thinking about race, nation, and diaspora in Beijing was often confusing for me. I found a lot of the common narratives around being black in China limiting. As an American, there are so many factors and subject points to understand as a writer and poet interested in these subjects. I have to think about the relationship between Africa and China, the USA and China, the USA and Africa, black Americans in Africa, black Americans in China, Africans in America. Added to this I usually like to write about women, so it was hard to get my head above water.
I’m grateful for the women and men taking on these issues in Beijing in their writing, but the conversation about race, gender, and nation is definitely not as normalized as it is America. For example, I tried to write an article about an African Feminism panel I attended in Beijing, and I just couldn’t get it to stick together, there were too many factors and things going on. I kept feeling like, “things fall apart, the center cannot hold.” In The Period of Warring States, I try to work through how messy it was trying to understand and speak of my subject-position while in Beijing. But I can look to history and the present to realize I’m not the only person who was or is thinking about this. Part of the reason why I wanted to write about Langston Hughes in China or give my two-cents about Black Panther is that I just want to say, this is the world the way it is and has been. Black artists and intellectuals have been moving around the world for decades. I’m not alone, historically speaking.
from “Langston Hughes in Shanghai“:
The white men tell me I’m
no longer black here, that I’m an American,
and better yet, a citizen of the world. They say
I’m free. But I still can’t find a damn
hotel that’ll let me stay and restaurants
make me use the back door.
Here’s a little story about me: I also went into my MFA upon moving back to the midwestern U.S. from Asia. In my case, I found it disorienting to transfer myself from years of international living into a community of writers wrapped up largely (though not entirely) in interior and aesthetic matters. I struggled to make my previous experiences feel relevant. I also struggled with imposter syndrome, but apparently a very large percentage of grad students do. That shit is real. Getting to the point, how are you thinking about all this? Do you anticipate a struggle to reshape yourself in a U.S. context?
First I will address moving to the Midwest. I want to keep the same kind of nonjudgmental gaze I’ve developed living and traveling abroad to my new life in the Midwest. I’ve had the opportunity to get on planes or trains in Asia and have no clue what it was going to be like at the end of that ride. I don’t want to make any snap judgements about Michigan before experiencing it myself.
At the same time, Michigan is a place in America I feel a connection to. Both my parents are from there. The majority of my extended family lives there, and I’ve probably been to Michigan a little over a dozen times. I want to go to flower festivals and county fairs and lakeside towns. I want to go to a pumpkin patch and a Bronners Christmasland. I want to visit my parents’ childhood homes in Detroit.
I visited Michigan in March, and I went to a smoothie shop. There was only one size of smoothie, and when it arrived it was 15 inches tall. I audibly said, “Oh my god, it’s so big,” and the guy who worked there just looked at me blankly. Then I took a bunch of pictures of it next to my thumb and sent them to people on WeChat, saying, “The food in America is so big!” It was a moment of reverse culture shock. One interesting thing about living abroad is you return to your country with new eyes. The first time I step into a supermarket like Meijer or Vons after being gone for a while is always jaw-dropping. Those are things like you don’t really have a frame of reference for if that’s all you know.
About impostor syndrome, grad school life, etc. I’m finally at a point in my life where I realize how much of a gift it is to be in school at all, to not have to wake up in the morning, take a shower, sit in an office all day, get home late, maybe have an hour a day to even try to do anything creative in. I have a friend who told me he hides in the bathroom sometimes at work and works on his short stories on his phone.
There’s so much that can pull you out of your creativity while you’re out in the ‘real world.’ You begin to numb yourself out in ways that make it hard to write. You start to observe less, think less, feel less. To be a poet in the world, you need to soften. Your heart, your skin, your mind need to be touched by the world. As I’ve grown older, I’ve become more closed off, more guarded, hardened like Metapod, easier to drift away. I hope this reprieve from the working world’s routine will allow me to return to feeling ‘impressionable’ like life is pressing into my skin again.
Of course, I’m nervous to go back to school. I feel like I forgot who Derrida was and how to pronounce Helene Cixous. I’m nervous that I’ll get writer’s block or feel performance anxiety. I’m nervous I’ll eat sea salt Wheat Thins with a ball of mozzarella cheese all day while staring at a blank page, overwhelmed with uncertainty.
I suppose part of the reason I like poetry as opposed to narrative prose, is that I’ve never really felt a “fixed” identity that needs to be remolded or reshaped with force. I feel like I’m water and I’ll change and adjust. I don’t care too much about acceptance or approval. I care more about saying exactly what I want to say. There are things I want to say that I don’t know how to yet.
Okay, you totally made me sound like an asshole with your nonjudgmental gaze. Any idea what you might do differently with your life post-MFA?
Do you mean like as a job? I just want to be a better writer.
This interview was edited and condensed from a series of e-mail exchanges in June and July, 2018.
Jennifer Fossenbell works as a news editor and mother in Beijing. Her poems, proses, translations, and other experiments have been published in Vietnam, China, and the U.S., most recently in Black Warrior Review, The Hunger, petrichor, where is the river, Posit, Spittoon Literary Journal, AJAR, and Yes Poetry. She completed her MFA in poetry at the University of Minnesota.