Xiao Yue Shan’s debut chapbook How Often I Have Chosen Love recently won Frontier Poetry’s 2018 chapbook contest. You can read and download the complete chapbook for free through Frontier. We are particularly proud to love these poems because Xiao Yue was our very first Spittoon Monthly featured poet and is now managing editor on the upcoming issue of Spittoon Literary Magazine.
These poems are overflowing with a unique personal history, aesthetic, and philosophy. Below, Xiao Yue reflects on some of this backstory in dialogue with Simon Shieh, SLM’s editor in chief.
Tell me about the genesis of this chapbook. How did you come to write the poems and organize them into a coherent collection?
The first of these poems were written in 2015, and the last in 2017. “when I was four years old my parents took me to tiananmen square” was the first poem I wrote about China, catalyzed by a very strange photo of me circa 1997, looking extremely solemn in the Square, wearing a red star cap and holding hands with someone invisible. It’s always curious and a little disarming to look at photos of yourself as a child, but in this case, that child is asserting herself in a place that has such significant historical and personal resonance, and lifting the image (and existence) of her out from a stagnant memory was tremendous for me. From then on a mild outpouring assumed itself within my poetry of travelling and collecting the disparate selves that have been left living elsewhere, throughout all these instances of migration.
Why do you write poems? Or, more specifically, why did you choose to represent these stories, ideas, and emotions in the form of poetry?
Poetry is the distillation of reality’s enchantments. When something moves us profoundly, we describe it as being poetic. Writing is very much like photography in a philosophical sense; it is the act of using a common medium—in this case, everyday language—to unveil the deep ecstasy and inscrutability and strangeness and beauty amongst all things. I’ve always been dazzled by the way a photograph can render a platitudinous scene into art, merely by seeing it a certain way, in a certain light, for a certain category, moved by a certain hand at work. It seems to me a myth that writers have some enigmatic insight into the deep centre of things; I, at least, fail to understand the world fully if not through the process of writing it. It is the act of taking these structures invented to comprehend human existence—words—to summon forth just the right light. To make blue bluer.
Creation myth is a phrase that comes to mind when I read these. To what extent are these poems an attempt to articulate your own story and history?
I read something during my studies that made me really self-conscious of the way I write. It was something along the lines of—all poets start off writing I-poems, until they grow up and start writing with a wider grasp of the world (and therefore, in the third person). There’s, of course, very little truth in that notion, as the “I” is a capsule that may very well contain worlds, but it still made me critical about enforcing a personal presence into all my work so completely. But there is no way of extricating the “I”. Much like a documentary, someone is always behind the lens. These poems are very much about the assembly of that lens, but also about unstable perspectives and conflicting narratives and the lack of clarity. Myth engages with creation in a way that disregards factual truth in favour of Dionysian truth; so it is that this story does not begin with my birth but takes on the actual proportions of myth, with the birth of love, and rage, and joy, with the lives of my parents and their parents, with bullets and various bodies of water and moonlight.
The idea of place—both political and personal—is really foregrounded in this collection. What role does place play in this collection and in your writing process?
In my work I have always capitalized on the very simple notion of being somewhere and noticing its various-ness, and then observing yourself within it. With this collection I began the process of escalating that into the innumerable number of worlds that recollected me, or at least, an aspect of myself. The places within these poems are as real to me as my hands before me now, even if certain elements have been imagined, or impossible to have been witnessed. Poetry wipes away the limits of our physical existence to allow us a thousand more ways to be. The way these poems travel is not chronological but all-at-once. Saigon sun during Tokyo dawn. The Hong Kong apartment staircase suspended mid-air upon the Pacific coast. Place is as volatile as time is; there are several pervasive motifs here of looking at things through other things, or looking at things that were invisible in the preceding moment, or looking at things by hearing them.
What does China mean to you and how, in your own opinion, do you express that in your work?
I write in English now, but there are qualities essential to my poems that are completely attributed to my first language, Chinese—visuality, precision, strong notations of colour and light. I was born in my father’s hometown, on the family farm in Shandong province, which is overall quite poor and rural. My mother was born in Harbin, Heilongjiang, a city that is possessive of its absolutely fascinating history—having witnessed both Russian and Japanese occupations—and which retains the extraordinary qualities that result from unlikeliness. We moved out of China in the year 2000 and there was the usual tumult of assimilation and repression, but due to an intense obsession with semiotics, I worked my way back to my home country by way of her language. Certain poems, like “ideogram of morning”, for example, are completely about trying to recreate the impact of a Chinese character with English.
It’s also funny because my mother sometimes says that I’m not Chinese at all, and I always get offended and we argue about it. It’s difficult to say what China means to me because she means everything, yet I arrive upon her with more of an external perspective than an internal one. She is my most engaging and outspoken conversation partner, and the most elusive and multitudinous muse.
How did the title, “How Often I Have Chosen Love,” come about?
The collection shares its title with the concluding poem, which is also the most recent poem amongst them. I can’t help it, to insert tenderness into all my work, and “how often I have chosen love” is probably the most tender of them all. It’s unabashed, absolute joy.
Allowing that title to gather the rest of the poems was something I did without even thinking—I suppose my intention was to have that joy be the beginning and ending of things.
Some of the themes I notice in your work are gender inequality and politically motivated violence. What role do these themes play in the story you’re telling in your poems?
Whether or not poetry should be political is an issue that I do not feel the need to veer back and forth on; the poem decides that. But those experience of violence and inequality are common in daily life, it’s not about including them as outstanding components of the poems, or have them play certain roles, but as part of the landscape itself, which is absolutely a political statement. The fact that the world we live in forces us to incorporate injustice so seamlessly into our lives is something I want to call attention to. There is always responsibility to speak boldly about the things that matter to you.
What did you write that surprised you?
“the diaspora roommate” was a difficult one. At certain points I found myself almost playing devil’s advocate in the discussion on immigration, which, as an immigrant twice-over, I never imagined was even possible. Of course the whole ideology of nationhood is fundamentally unjust, but what I wanted to achieve in that piece was to imagine negotiating with someone who perceived your presence as an invasion, to contend with the idea that “sharing” a country feels sometimes impossible to someone who was there “first”. I tried to be as kind as possible to those who feel resentment towards immigrants and—this sounds absurd—was a little surprised at how I was able to meet that feeling. It is, of course, obvious to me that hostility and antagonism are not emotions one should empathize with, but it was important to me, in the process of writing that piece, to extract a modicum of the immense issue of migration and contain it in a common, quiet space: one room. So that we may come towards one another as people, instead of impressions. I think it is an idea I will return to time and time again.
What did you learn about poetry through the process of writing these poems? What did you learn about yourself?
I learned about the vastness of a moment, and the distance between two lines of dialogue. I learned amor fati—love of fate. I learned how the winters in Harbin literally dig holes within your body to live inside you. I learned that I laugh like my father. And that the fruit in Vietnam is impossibly sweet. I learned patience, or maybe not. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I learned a lot about the woman who wrote these poems, to use poetry to mediate the variant and the absolute, which is to say, the practice of living, and oneself within it.
Xiao Yue Shan is a poet and essayist born in Dongying, China and living in Tokyo, Japan. Currently working with Spittoon, Tokyo Poetry Journal, and Asymptote Journal. Find her online at shellyshan.com