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Of Flesh &
Spirit
by Wang Ping
Coffee House
Press, 1998
102 pages
Our Price: $12.95
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Language is resonant
and inescapable, and the poetry books chosen by
Coffee House Press are forms that follow function, as
Porsche would say, forms driven by language. As I've
mentioned before, Elaine Equi's books raise the
question of how much influence other people's
diction—absurd or familiar—has on our own
expression. And Wang Ping, in Of Flesh & Spirit, finds
herself uncomfortably bound, like her grandmothers'
lotus feet, by ten centuries of misogynistic language
and culture she must defy.
Wang has published
two other books with Coffee House, both fiction—American Visa (1994), a collection of
interconnected stories of a young Chinese woman in
America, and Foreign Devil (1996), a novel of an
outsider in her own culture. She edited a collection
of the young, avant-garde Chinese poets struggling
with language and political repression (published by
Hanging Loose Press in 1999), some of which was
excerpted last year in a special issue of the
literary journal, Manoa, called "The
Zig-Zag Way." Her dissertation is on the ancient
practice of deforming a woman's foot to the three
inch golden lotus men held to be highly erotic and
the radiant psychological and sexual denial of women.
As she tries to exorcise her anger over sexual
repression, her subjects, themes, and situations keep
coming back book after book, and they converge in
this collection.
That old rhyme from
our schoolyards—sticks and stones may break my
bones but words will never hurt me—is a tough
belief to have in China, where the word for woman is
also the word for slave, and curses to women range
from "may you bear no sons," to
"losing money commodity," "disastrous
flood," and "stinky whore," a culture
where parents will name a first-born daughter
"second girl" to trick the gods into taking
pity on them and deliver a son next time, and where
the second, third, and fourth girls are drowned in
chamber pots. One's paternal grandmother is
"breast-breast" while one's maternal
grandmother is "outside stranger, old
woman," though I would think it more natural the
other way around. "What Are You Still Angry
About" is a moving work that begins in lines and
flexes into a biographical record of the lives of the
women in her mother's family, women who supposedly do
not matter:
But I must be an
ungrateful beast
because I always feel like screaming with my
broken voice.
How can I explain the anger that prevents me from
breathing?
I want to scream
every time I bow to my family tree which hangs in
the clan hall.
It records the men of Wang family for over fifty
generations
whereas the names of my female ancestors
just vanish like tadpole tails.
And back we go,
suddenly in paragraphs, listing the
"outsiders" and defining each woman's name
in contrast to her life as far back as her great,
great grandmother, before she fast-forwards to
herself and the unhappy, torn-up lives of her younger
sisters. Throughout this book, there is a realization
of women's being as terrible to their own sex as men
are to them, that sex is evil and too much of it is
the root of all women's troubles, and that women are,
themselves, the root of all disaster in Chinese
history.
Wang's life is
remarkable against this backdrop. From her poems, we
know she paid for her own tuition to Beijing
University selling pigeon eggs and working in the
country. Her married boyfriend was going to abandon
his family and emigrate to America with her, but his
American cousin would only sponsor Wang, so she
arrived alone in New York City to start life anew.
New was not exactly fresh, shuttling from place to
place, job to job, meeting unfavorable expectations,
and yet she began writing here and obtained a
Master's degree. Her boyfriend thinks she's pretty
and smart, not a whore, not a flood. "I can
laugh as much as I want,/but I still feel like
screaming inside." And why not? By now, she is a
chorus of screams.
Wang's book is often
a relentless list of ironic or heartless examples of
China's righteous subordination of girls and women, a
series of anecdotes laid out for us like a researcher
presenting data to a panel. Though I can recognize
the courage she has exerted to assert her sexual
identity and individual voice, for nearly every
"poem" is a work of cultural defiance, I do
question this as a collection of poetry alone. Most
of the work in Of
Flesh & Spirit is prose, from the title
piece to "Born In the Year of the Chicken"
to "Female Marriage." And while largely
autobiographical, one of the best poems of oppression
in the book, "Song of Calling Souls," is
written in the drowned voices from the ship Golden
Venture—men who sold their belongings and bought
passage for their families to America but were forced
out of the ship in the New York harbor: "so we
jumped/into the night/into the raging sea,/our
breasts smothered/by foam and weeds,/our passions
tangled,/the breath beaten from our bodies/by despair
and hate." This poem appears in the final
descent of the book when Wang is in the new world,
the new language, at a geographical and ear distance
from her home. It and those that
follow—"Endless Embrace,"
"Ultimate Passage," and "Flash of Self
Consciousness" are more complete, combining the
passion of the fact (like the prose at the start of
the book) with the result of her struggle with the
facts. The title poem is about feminine sexual
identity, but so is the book. The difference is that
the poem is more flesh, and the book ultimately
acknowledges the whole identity—body and soul,
prose and poetry. By the end of the last poem,
"Flash of Self Consciousness," Wang knows
that she has wanted to escape her mother since she
first learned to walk, that, even then, she was ready
to be her own person. "I can hear the sound of
silence, the echo/of my inner silence, a
silence/which is not a void."
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