Shin Yu Pai is a poet and visual artist in Seattle. She was nominated for a Stranger Genius Award in 2014, the only poet to be nominated.

IO: When you think about Seattle and Anger, what are some of the first things that come to mind?

SYP: I rent in Ballard where there is a lot of anger around the changes to the neighborhood and newer real estate developments displacing long-time residents, blocky modern mid-rise buildings and green townhomes replacing older single-family homes. From my balcony, I can look in any direction and see construction cranes looming in the distance. On my block of mid-rise apartments that date back to the 50s, there is only one house that remains and it is completely encroached upon on all sides. Think Edith Macefield. Less than a block away from my apartment, at the intersection of 22^nd and 59^th, two homes were recently torn down and fenced off pits await new construction. The rise in rents, the costs of home ownership make me angry. Businesses on Market Street turning over regularly – the closure of Great Harvest Bakery, La Tienda… to be replaced by yet another beer brewery or vodka distillery.

IO: You often touch on race, ethnicity, and gender in your poetry. How does anger play a role in that?

SYP: I’m interested in evoking emotional reactions, creating a sense of outrage in my readers by presenting carefully constructed scenarios and environments that invite reaction. At the same time, I do not hold back from implicating myself in my poems – it’s not my intention to condemn the characters that I write about. I write about my own biases, moments of confusion and paralyzing fear – I judge myself. In a poem like “Chit-chat at the Super Wal-Mart,” I observe my own resistance to being mistaken for a nail parlor worker. I had to ask myself if I thought I was too good for that line of work, or what my objection was to being mistaken for Vietnamese in a state where most Asians immigrated as a result of their refugee status. I had to really get underneath that interaction to try and figure out where all the disconnects were happening.

the cashier catches me
off guard when she wonders
aloud – I’m emptying out a cart
full of moving supplies: polymer totes,
packing tape, solvents to scrub
down a greasy stove, glass cleaner
for a bathroom mirror trying to see
things from her view, no polish,
I ask her the question again
to be sure I hear her right:
Do you do nails? she repeats

I look down at unmanicured hands,
my own ragged cuticles, gnawed
nail folds feeling how the heart
wants to tack down the nail
that sticks out, put you in your place –
this is not my immigration story
yet to sense how I’ve already turned away –
picturing Asian nail parlors in every town
across America, ubiquitous even here,

-excerpt: Chit chat at the Supermarket

IO: That is a really interesting point. I think often we place our response to racism within the White Patriarchal lens. We forget that responding in direct opposite to those actions, instead of creating an authentic response, is still playing by the rules created by others. I catch myself doing that as well. Forgetting that there are real people behind a lot of these stereotypes and those real people are not the problem.

SYP: That language of “those people” is something that I internalized as a young person. As immigrants who are very close to their Taiwanese roots – my parents always drew the distinction between being Taiwanese and Mainlanders, i.e. those Chinese, those people. Which is really complicated, because most Taiwanese are ethnically Chinese with ancestors historically from China, but don’t identify with modern Chinese culture or politics. I try to talk about this rift in some of my work too, in a poem for instance like “Footprint” which is about reconciliation.

the dharma’s spread to

distant places; Sheng Yen

 

 

 

retraces the path, returning

the Buddha to his origins

 

from plane to bus

escorted from Beijing

to Shandong Province

 

a ceremony that makes

headlines on both sides

 

of the Taiwan Strait

-excerpt: Footprint

IO: As an Asian American woman, do you find that there are certain pressures to display your anger in a particular way?

SYP: Asian American woman, at least in my experience, are expected to keep their cool and avoid showing negative emotion. Picture popular media images of AAPI women, like Sandra Oh’s Christina Yang on Grey’s Anatomy. They maintain a mask. They show restraint, as if losing control of one’s emotions would be equivalent to “losing face.” People project fantasies onto anger. I am not capable of maintaining a poker face. For most of my life I’ve been perceived as angry, morose, or that I “should smile more” and be less serious. I was very excited to learn about Bitchy Resting Face.

Outside of the AAPI community, I feel like there’s been an expectation, for instance when I lived in the South, that Asian woman should be cheerful, easygoing, and servile – and that strong displays of emotion put me in a whole different category of Asian woman – i.e. the “dragon lady.” Displays of anger, or shall we say resistance, got me death threats in Texas. I was stalked at work. Conveying a more contained anger has solicited a weird variety of perverse responses from some men who assume that a “good fucking” would set me straight.

AAPI women do not have a lot of leeway to express complexity of emotional range. There’s a lot of silence and restraint. Oppression.

IO: You lived for a while in both Texas and Arkansas. When I think of both of those places in regards to race and gender, I think of both the genteel politeness and “bless your heart” but also a much more on the surface anger and tension. What was it like living there in comparison to living in Seattle now?

SYP: In the Northwest, we’ve got “nice ice”; in the Deep South, there is a passive aggressive gentility that operates on the surface of social interactions.

But I also came across a couple of young Asian American women in Arkansas whose behaviors were very contrary to any sort of politesse. One teenager worked at her family’s restaurant on Main Street. The first time my husband and I walked into her restaurant, she accosted me about my reasons for moving to Conway – complaining vociferously about her experiences of race. That people commented on how well she spoke English all the time.

I used to swim at the college pool and would end up using the locker room when the high school swim team had practice. I saw that same teenager at the pool where she worked very hard to fit in with her blonde counterparts by being a giggly ditzy airhead. The girl that had confronted me in her family restaurant was unrecognizable. I did not blow her cover. I pretended not to know her.

Once, when she had stepped out of the locker-room, her teammates imitated their perception of this Asian girl – who was really playing white. And then someone egged on the girl doing imitations to do “Black.” The ringleader stated that she only knew how to play Asian. I walked out of the shower stall and interrupted the scene. They had no idea how offensive they were being. These same girls who on other occasions talked about being good Christians.

There was a second Asian girl that I met at the swimming pool who hated her teammates for calling her slow. Instead of talking back to them, the minute everyone left the locker room, she would swear up a storm. I was impressed. A little sad too.

Other strange experiences included going to lunch with a co-worker from the college who used the example of the poet Frank O’Hara relationship with the painter Larry Rivers, to obliquely suggest that I give him a blowjob. Rivers was straight and O’Hara was gay, but O’Hara would get depressed and Rivers would indulge his friend to “cheer him up.”

Main Street

fresh from mailing notes
to a college search committee,
I turn over the last question asked

snap back to earth
when sputum lands
inches from my leather

dress shoes three teenage
white boys parked outside
the post office,

the one in the passenger seat
who watched me walk
out, synchronized throat

clearing just then – spitting
towards isn’t any crime
this isn’t China w/

no government
ban on discharging
in public – the veil

between town &
gown torn down
by the local welcome

wagon, I climb inside
the rental car where
my partner notices

enough to ask if
everything’s fine
I am careful when

I try to describe spittle
coming in my direction,
thinking of our next-door

neighbors back “home”
town, proud to wag
the Southern Cross
displays we bristle
against & those which
we resign ourselves to

IO: Your stories of these young girls really hit home for me, having grown up in Lynnwood. It’s very hard to reconcile the absolute necessity of code switching for survival as a minority, with the anger that such self denial can produce. You can’t survive adolescence without friends, but none of your friends are real. It really forces a lot of that self discovery out into adulthood.

What is your earliest memory of anger in Seattle?

SYP: When I first moved to Seattle in 2007, I attended open office hours held by a venerable elder poet for a local literary center. I was new to town, curious about a Pacific Northwest literary sensibility and the local writing community.

As I sat down with the Master Poet, he shuffled through a dozen pages of my work wanting to know, “How long have you been writing?” “Where did you come from?” And finally “Is English your first language?” The Master Poet was sure the only excuse for my writing was a lack of proficiency with language. My appearance marked me as an outsider.

The Master Poet proceeded to rewrite my lines and line breaks in front of me. He ended the meeting muttering, “I can’t help you.” I left Capitol Hill that day wondering whether I would find the support for my writing that could help to sustain an artistic practice, alongside whether I would feel a sense of belonging here, both in my skin, and in my writing.

IO: That’s so insulting on so many levels. The very fact that he read your words through a racial lens that you didn’t ask for, the fact that he assumed that he could rewrite your voice. The absolute whitewashing of your words coupled with the ridiculous assumption that your words on their own are not a part of American culture. Do you find that, without your name or gender, your words are taken more at face value? That seems difficult though, because your experience as an AAPI woman are also a valid part of your story. It seems like such a tough balance.

SYP: I made a choice in my 20s to go back to using my Chinese name, versus my legal name. And that is the name that I publish under and that I am known professionally. My father named me after a 1950s actress that was the epitome of American wholesomeness. And I have felt absolutely that in making that decision to claim that part of my heritage and identity that the byproduct in part has been the unintended result of exotifying myself.

On the first day of one of my grad school classes, the professor did roll call – he was surprised when I requested to use my Chinese nickname. All of the international students from China and Taiwan in the class wanted to go by names like “Fiona” and “Jenny.” I was asking the reverse. Foreign-ness has played out in strange ways.

Once I was in a museum studies practicum with some classmates where we were cataloguing and describing collections related to Chinese culture. I was very direct with the supervisor about not being a cultural expert in terms of either knowledge of Mandarin (being able to read information inscribed on these objects) or these particular artifacts. My classmates were told that “Jenny” and I could answer any questions about the objects. Some of the objects seemed at least somewhat familiar – the ubiquitous red envelope, for instance, given at new year’s with monetary gifts. But I knew not to assume anything. The look of one specific red envelope seemed irregular. A classmate asked me about the artifact and I mentioned the possible connection to new year’s festivities. “Jenny” loudly put me in my place for not knowing the difference between a new year’s hong bao and one given at a wedding.

I think what I want to try and communicate through that story is something of the impossibility of standing between worlds and identities – what I have felt has been placed upon me in terms of cultural expectations and expertise and the ridiculous situations that I confront which often bring anger rushing to the surface. The idea of representing your entire culture and experience of the collective – functioning as a spokesperson – or at the worst, being expected to perform culture.

IO: What is the most beautiful display of anger you’ve ever encountered?

SYP: My father was a college adjunct/freeway flyer for nearly 20 years. As an immigrant, he never quite figured out how to navigate the system and parlay his talents as a native Chinese speaker into more permanent work within academia – as a result he was taken advantage of over and over again. He operated within an internalized traditional Confucian worldview of virtue, reciprocity, and group harmony, volunteering countless hours to facilitating lucrative partnerships and agreements between his university and schools in Taiwan and China. He weathered several different administrations and changes in leadership and persevered, hoping his work would eventually be recognized and rewarded. At the end of his teaching career, he was pushed into retirement by his university on terms that were not fully his own. He had accumulated decades of rage, alongside the frustration of being an immigrant with a complicated backstory that brought him to the U.S. – he came of age in Post World War II Taiwan, in a time when the leadership was transitioning from Japanese colonial rule to a Chinese Nationalist government and Martial Law. He suffered a lot of trauma and channeled that rage when he confronted the university’s administration in connecting the suffering that his family experienced under colonial rule to his experiences as a 70-year-old adjunct. My dad does not read or have any interest in political theory or systems of oppression, but he effectively re-narrated his life experience to articulate and make sense of his rage.

IO: What is your current relationship with anger?

SYP: My thinking about anger has evolved over time. In my teens and 20s, I used to feel a strong identification with anger – some of that was projection and some of that was perception – I have been told by many people, particularly men, “You are an angry person.” In my 30s, I started to think and talk about anger in a different way. I started to use different language to describe the experience of anger – namely the idea of being someone who experiences anger in a moment and that moment passing or moving through you versus being in a continual and permanent state of upset.

Anger, as an emotion, is impermanent and separate from identity – something that is not a permanent quality or state. All emotions have their enlightened and then their negative/neurotic qualities. When appropriately harnessed and understood, they have the potential for great transformation and empowerment.

I also feel that what often lies beneath anger is far more complicated – sadness, fear – more complex emotions that deploy anger as a mask. I come from a family line where there was a lot of rage over patriarchy, gender roles and colonialism – angry women that cursed the menfolk – it is hard to shake that legacy – but I live in a different time and that ancestral anger is not mine to own or pass on. Anger served me well in my youth as defense mechanism, as a tool for survival – to armor up. Now, I am older, and interested in personal disarmament and shedding what does not belong to me, a different idea of warriorship.

IO: What are you angry about now?

SYP: I recently read an advance copy of prose writer Elisa Albert’s forthcoming novel After Birth, which is on the experience of giving birth and early motherhood. The lead character in the book has a medicalized birth, despite doing everything she can to prepare for a natural birth. She navigates the new waters of being a mom in groups where the women don’t share her values or interests. She rages at the way in which her friends and relatives are willing to outsource their births to medical experts, planned C-sections. She feels the frustration of not having strong female figures in her life to help initiate her into motherhood. While my experiences of becoming a mother in 2013 do not directly mirror the narrative of After Birth, I have felt anger towards the cult of motherhood, what is said and left unsaid about the experiences of becoming a mother. And that anger that is partly the result of sleep deprivation combined with the disappearance of time and energy that are just part of the chaos. Of course, there is a flip side to all of the anger – which is joy.

IO: I remember being a new mother and feeling the absolute aloneness of it. Nothing is more amazing and more horrible than being a new mother. The juxtaposition of absolute love, with complete loss of power – being defeated by a screaming infant when you are so sleep deprived you can’t even speak in coherent sentences is the most powerless feeling. But you can’t be honest about it. You can’t say, “I really didn’t like my child today” without people thinking you aren’t a good mother.

SYP: Yes, exactly. Or it seems subversive to say that, “I love my son, but I do not love being a ‘mother.’” [Blank stares.]

One other thing that I’m angry about, or at least irritated about – the media brownout concerning the student protests in Taiwan that happened earlier this year. How little press they got, in contrast to the news coverage of what’s been happening in Hong Kong. The disposition of Taiwan and its sovereignty is a subject that will always be close to my heart.