Salzburg Global Fellow Mohan Ding analzyes how several Chinese American poets are expanding the boundaries of ethnic labels, tradition, and poetic expression
This article was written by Salzburg Global Fellow Mohan Ding, who attended the Salzburg Global American Studies program on “Crossing the Pacific: The Asian American Experience in U.S. Society and Discourse” in September 2024.
Since starting my Ph.D. project on Chinese American poetry, I have encountered prevalent expectations about how to read Chinese American poets. Most readers and scholars focus on themes related to these poets’ ethnicity and immigrant stories. The three poets discussed in my dissertation, Li-Young Lee, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Chen Chen, illustrate a significant shift. While their grouping reflects an identity-based approach, my analysis aims to move beyond ethnicity.
It is certain that these poets share a common Chinese heritage and, to varying degrees, their early works address the melancholy of immigration. Their poetry often intertwines feelings of dislocation, disjunction, and isolation with the challenges of assimilating into a new language, culture, and country. However, it is their entanglements with a variety of people, places, institutions, and traditions that make them central to my project. By engaging in dialogue with a broader range of influences and connections, these poets transcend the label of “ethnic poets” and demonstrate how ethnic identity can be complicated, enriched, and sometimes superseded by other forms of poetic sociability.
Li-Young Lee
Li-Young Lee is among the first generation of Chinese American poets to achieve widespread recognition in the American literary landscape. His poetry draws heavily on his experiences of exile and his upbringing in a strict, patriarchal Chinese family, where he was raised by a deeply religious father. This enforced belief in Christianity inspires Lee to reflect on his father’s flawed divinity, their sacrificial sufferings, and communal love. However, this rigid religious upbringing also creates a rift between father and son, leading Lee to choose Ralph Waldo Emerson as his poetic father. Lee’s work is influenced by Emerson’s transcendentalism, particularly the concept of “The Over-Soul,” which inspires him to envision a sense of unity that transcends individual differences among immigrants.
However, just as he rejects his father’s dogma, he also rejects, and even seeks to devour, Emerson. In the poem “The Cleaving,” Lee criticizes Emerson’s anti-Chinese sentiment by violently “eating” him and offering an agape feast for all immigrants. This poem exemplifies how he reinvents his Chinese legacy as both Emersonian and Christian, while boldly exposing the inadequacies of Christianity and transcendentalism in healing his racial and exile trauma. In this way, Lee’s work helps establish his voice as part of an American tradition while positioning him in a vigilant role in combat with it.
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Berssenbrugge has reinvented herself several times since the 1970s. While her Chinese heritage remains a consistent thread in her work, her focus has evolved from her active involvement at the Basement Workshop in New York City to exploring the landscape of New Mexico. At Basement, Berssenbrugge collaborated with director Frank Chin on her play “One, Two Cups,” and wrote poems for choreographer Teddy Yoshikama’s dance performances.
Her early immigrant narrative revolves around a sense of disconnection from other Chinese immigrant families and the disruption of her mother tongue, while her later poetry explores the ecosystem as a matrix that connects humans, plants, animals, light, and stars. In her recent book, "A Treatise on Stars", she examines how opening oneself to the sky fosters an interconnectivity of both earthly and cosmic entities. The book tackles the challenging themes of cellular communication and channelling with non-human beings, including extraterrestrial ones, using them as metaphors for a broader ecological conscience. Berssenbrugge’s ecological perspective is shaped by a fusion of influences, including the Taoist trinity of Heaven, Earth, and Man, Native American mythologies of star people, and the concept of the “more-than-human” world introduced by ecological philosopher David Abram. These influences reveal how her work reflects a complex web of social, cultural, psychic, and scientific entanglements. Her poetic voice serves as a compendium of these interrelations, continuously evolving over time.
Chen Chen
Chen’s unique position as a queer Chinese American poet distinguishes his work from that of Lee and Berssenbrugge, even as he shares thematic concerns with them. Like Lee, Chen explores the complexities of family conflicts. In his first book of poems, "When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities," Chen’s speaker, a queer youth, not only contends with generational clashes but also faces alienation from his predominantly white environment. The feeling of rejection, particularly from his biological family, opens space for a redefinition of family through chosen kinship, which aligns with Berssenbrugge’s themes of entanglement and interdependence with nature.
However, while Berssenbrugge’s focus is more ecological, Chen’s concept of a “found family” is a sociopolitical construction rooted in solidarity among Asian American poets, particularly through Kundiman, a network that offers both sanctuary and freedom to Asian American writers. For Chen, kinship is found in community building and solidarity across race, sexuality, and shared political struggle. His second book, "Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency," takes this further, empowering the speaker to voice not only personal grief but also a collective outrage against racism, homophobia, and systemic injustices, using poetry as a medium for both mourning and rebellion.
The invocation of Hermes as a trickster god in Chen’s work is particularly intriguing, especially when compared to W. H. Auden’s “precocious Hermes” in his poem “Under Which Lyre.” Auden’s portrayal of Hermes as a figure who disrupts authority aligns with Chen’s own revolt against the institutions of white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and capitalism. But Chen’s Hermes goes further, rebelling with the divine mission of fostering love and building a community.
Poets like Lee, Berssenbrugge, and Chen are redefining the portrayal of Asian Americans in poetry by situating themselves within broader literary, cultural, ecological, and political contexts. Lee grapples with complex Christian and Emersonian traditions; Berssenbrugge explores ecological interconnectedness through various cultures; and Chen’s eulogies of queer love and Asian American solidarity give voice to a generation caught at the crossroads of oppression and resistance.
Together, they illustrate how contemporary Chinese American poets are part of a larger whole rather than being narrowly ethnic or traditional.
Mohan Ding is a PhD student at the University of Göttingen in Germany. Her dissertation focuses on three Chinese American poets: Li-Young Lee, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Chen Chen. She explores their works that extend beyond immigrant narratives. She is also working on two new projects: one on queer perspectives in Asian American poetry, and the other examining cultural and literary diplomacy between U.S. and Chinese writers from 1982 to 1988.
Explore our digital publication, which includes more coverage from the Salzburg Global American Studies program on “Crossing the Pacific: The Asian American Experience in U.S. Society and Discourse.”
