Abstract
SLANTED ALLUSIONS charts how Marilyn Chin and Russell Leong deploy Chinese allusions to defy Chinese and American social mores. Disagreeing with scholars who consider Chinese references in Asian American literature inescapably Orientalist and with critics who advocate a wholesale reclamation of an Asian tradition, I track how these two poets retool indigenous expressions to convey two-way critiques. Chin turns a Tang poem into a feminist parable and transmutes traditional sites of female confinement into a creative room of one’s own. Leong spins a homophobic slur into a transnational term of compassion and turns an exotic proverb inscribed in the Huntington Library's Chinese garden into a testimonial about the exploitation of transpacific migrant laborers. The two poets reprise the wen-wu dyad—fighting through writing.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. Caryl Emerson. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Bing Xin, 冰心. 《冰心全集 [The Complete Works of Bing Xin]》. 9 Volumes. Ed. 卓如 Zhuo Ru. Fuzhou: 海峡文艺出版社 [haixia wenyi chubanshe], 1979, 2012.
Brecht, Bertolt. “Questions From a Worker Who Reads.” https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/brecht/ (accessed 10 April 2016).
Chen Shu, 陈恕. 《冰心全传 [Complete Biography and Works of Bing Xin]》. Beijing: 中国青年出版社 Zhongguo Qingnian Chuban She, 2011.
Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Chin, Frank. The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon: Two Plays. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981.
Chin, Marilyn. “An Interview with Marilyn Chin.” Indian Review 26.1 (2004): 112–120.
——. “Parable of the Guitar.” The Revenge of Mooncake Vixen: A Manifesto in 41 Tales. New York: Norton, 2009. 189–194.
——. The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1994.
——. Rhapsody in Plain Yellow: Poems. New York: Norton, 2002.
Jin, Ha. The Writer as Migrant. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. New York: Vintage, 1976.
Lee, Rachel C. The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies. New York: New York University Press, 2014.
Leong, Russell C. “Bie You Dong Tian: Another World Lies Beyond.” Amerasia Journal 37.1 (2011): 41–42.
——. “Your Tongzhi Body.” Asian Americans: The Movement and the Moment. Ed. Steven G. Louie and Glenn K. Omatsu. Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, 2001. 234–235.
Liu, Cynthia. “‘Phoenix Eyes and Other Stories’ by Russell Charles Leong.” Tricycle (Spring 2001): 1–2.
Loomis, Laura Hibbard. “A Chinese Sappho, with Translations by Wan Ying Hsieh.” Poet Lore 41 (1930): 132–139.
Shan, Te-hsing. “Phoenix in Transit: An Interview with Russell Leong.” Exploration and Expansion of the Frontiers of Chinese American Literature and Culture: A Collection of Interviews and Research Papers. Ed. Te-hsing Shan. Tianjin: Nankai University Press, 2006. 273–287.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.
Skindrud, Erik. Liu Fang Yuan–Garden of Flowing Fragrance, A Chinese Gem: An Ancient Landscape Art Comes to Southern California. 20 April 2013. http://www.landscapeonline.com/research/article/10862
Stern, Julia A. The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Wang, Dorothy. Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.
Whitman, Walt. Song of Myself (1892 Version). Ed. David McKay. Poetry Foundation. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174745 (accessed 15 January 2016).
Wong, Andrew, and Qing Zhang. “The Linguistic Construction of the Tongzhi Community.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 10 (2000): 248–278.
Wong, Andrew D. “The Reappropriation of Tongzhi.” Language in Society (2005): 763–791.
Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Yao, Steven G. Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Yu, Timothy. Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.
Zhao, Wenshu. “Why Is There Orientalism in Chinese American Literature?” Global Perspectives on Asian American Literature. Ed. Guiyou Huang and Wu Bing. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2008. 239–258.
Zhou, Xiaojing. The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cheung, KK. (2016). Slanted Allusions: Marilyn Chin and Russell C. Leong. In: Chinese American Literature without Borders. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44177-5_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44177-5_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-45353-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-44177-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)