Chinese memory in American forms

CHINESE MEMORY IN AMERICAN FORM

Review of Jianqing  Zheng.  Enforced Rustication in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.  Huntsville, TX: Texas Review Press, 2018.  ISBN 9781680031768, pp. 36.  $ 15.95   (paperback).

                Jianqing Zheng is an Asian American writer who quietly makes a difference in American poetics and literary history.  Despite the burden of administrative duties as chair of the Department of English at Mississippi Valley State University, Zheng founded and still edits Valley Voices, a literary journal, and the peer-reviewed Journal of Ethnic American Literature.  He is a talented photographer, who like the cultural historian  William Ferris, has produced striking visual documentation of sites and life in the Mississippi Delta.  His special interest in poetics , ethnic literatures,  and  haiku as a genre which has cross-fertilizing functions, has occasioned his editing such books as The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku (2011), African American Haiku: Cultural Visions (2016), Conversations with Sterling Plumpp (2016), Sonia Sanchez: Poetic Spirit through Haiku (2017), and Conversations with Gish Jen (2018).  An accomplished poet, Zheng has published his work in the chapbooks The Landscape of Mind (2001) and Minis (2008).  Most recently, this native of Wuhan, China who lives in the Mississippi Delta has synthesized the multiple layers of his creative and scholarly sensibility and penchant for aesthetics in Enforced Rustication in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. His depiction of cultural memory in poetic forms is rewarding, for it invites us to ponder vexed issues in contemporary poetics.

                One compelling issue is lack of consensus regarding what has aesthetic validity in poetry, and smart poets resort to formal experimentation to minimize discord.  For example, certain readers who  overlook the political implications of a poem by Walt Whitman  might rail against those in  a poem by

Allen Ginsberg;  one key element, often masked  in interpretation and judgment , is the reader's beliefs about ethnic expression.  Often such readers can be won over by the use of ambiguity.

                  In addressing the overtly political  significance of the Chinese cultural revolution (1966-1976), Zheng cleverly adopts strategies one might associate with the poems of William Carlos Williams, a swerving away from directness by way of tone, use of lyric narrative, and imagery that provokes ironic humor.  He exploits American  lyric forms of subjectivity to critique what was destructive in rustication and uses the subtle range of traditional haiku to achieve effects.  It is noteworthy that in dealing with zhiqing (sent-down educated youth), a special feature of the revolution, the first-person narrator selectively  ends a  narrated episode , resonant of classic Chinese fiction, with a very Americanized illusion of haiku as in

"summer stars

jasmines blooming

all at once" (2)

or

"dock fishing ------

waiting for a bite

from the moon" (20).

The cultural bridging of form makes the remembering of Chairman Mao's China and efforts to obliterate class distinction a poignant matter, one that is greatly more revealing than non-fiction accounts of the

fate-filled decade in Chinese history generally are.  In a few of the poems, characters and snippets of their dialogue are reminiscent of blues discourses, a touchstone of synthesis, and of Frank X. Walker's use of personae in African American poetry of remembering.

Enforced Rustication in the Chinese Cultural Revolution is a most rewarding book, an opportunity to think about hidden parallels between Chinese and American histories, parallels that are emotionally galvanizing.