Picture Bride, a collection of thirty-one poems covering a range of topics including family history, life in Hawaii, childhood memories, sibling relationships, love, art, character studies, ethnic experience, and the quest of the self. The book is organized according to two interrelated frameworks or principles. To take the title poem as the focal text, the book is apparently a collection of poems structured around the immigration and assimilation experience of the Song family, beginning with the arrival of her Korean grandparents—her grandmother in particular. Seen from this perspective, the book is essentially autobiographical in nature, with the poems serving as miniature memoirs and chronicles of the family’s history and as memories of parents, relatives, and siblings. It is important to note, however, that such an ethnicized principle of organization was not Song’s idea but her publisher’s.

Even as it stands, the book, which Song originally intended to title From the White Place, also incorporates another framework of organization. This framework is derived from a five-part sequence, “Blue and White Lines After O’Keeffe,” a poem placed at the center of the collection. The subtitles of the volume’s five divisions (“Black Iris,” “Sunflower,” “Orchids,” “Red Poppy,” and “The White Trumpet”), which were suggested to Song by Kathleen Spivak, in fact come from this strategically positioned text. Used as a structuring device, these subtitles imply that the book can be perceived as a poet’s attempt, by way of visual art (the work of Georgia O’Keeffe and Kitagawa Utamaro), to fashion personal experience into esthetic experience and thereby define her vision as an artistic one.

Reading the book according to this framework tends to deemphasize the ethnic elements of the poems, but the risk of viewing the book as an ethnographic document is also reduced. Such an artist’s framework is not without its problems, as it poses the danger of diminishing the peculiarity of Song’s experience and her voice. Taken alone, neither of the two frameworks is entirely satisfactory, but as Fujita-Sato explains, “What results . . . from the interlocked frameworks provided by the book’s title and sections titles, is a structure embodying synthesis.” Corresponding to this synthesis, Fujita-Sato proposes, is the technique of “singing shapes” derived from O’Keeffe’s paintings, by which two often dissimilar objects are juxtaposed and become mutually illuminated and transformed into “a fluid shaping and reshaping of energy.”

The motivation toward synthesis in Picture Bride is further developed in Frameless Windows, Squares of Light, in which Song concentrates on personal experiences in various stages of her life as a daughter, sister, wife, mother, and Hawaiian and Asian American woman. In this collection, her voice as a poet who is not only a woman but also an artist also matures. The volume consists of twenty-six poems and is divided into four parts (“The Window and the Field,” “A Small Light,” “Shadow Figures,” and “Frameless Windows, Squares of Light”) that are named after the title poems of each section. The organization recalls but transcends that of Picture Bride; the aesthetic rendition of personal experience no longer relies on the appeal of ethnic elements or the authority of another artist but rather disseminates from the play and interplay of framed and frameless blocks and touches of light and shadow—vignettes of life as lived.

The higher level of unity in this second collection also stems from Song’s technique—related to that of “singing shapes”—of juxtaposing and transposing (or compressing) different segments of time, in the manner a telescope is collapsed or expanded, so that memories of the past and realities of the present merge into one another. For example, she shows how what happened to herself and her brother as children in the past would recur, with variations, in the present when she looks upon her son and daughter growing up. This unique approach to experience, by which the personal is merged with the familial and the mundane is elevated to the aesthetic, suggests that Song’s attempt to bridge the hiatus, and hence resolve the dilemma confronting Asian American writers, is, in fact, feasible.

Song continues with similar efforts in bridging the hiatus between the mundane and the aesthetic in her third collection, School Figures, in which she concentrates on the local world of Hawaii’s Asian American communities, exploring personal experiences of family, history, ethnicity, and cultural conflicts. Such personal explorations further intensify in her fourth collection, The Land of Bliss, in which the poet embarks on extended narratives about the sickness and dying of her mother, and the pain and suffering of those affected by her, and about life itself in its many spectacular or quotidian ways; such moments, and their attendant memories of warmth and fondness, however, are invariably recollected for the purposes of transformation, through poetic mediation, resulting in their transcendence in the spiritual realm of bliss.

“Picture Bride”

First published: 1983 (collected in Picture Bride, 1983)

Type of work: Poem

A young woman leaves Korea to marry a sugarcane field laborer in Hawaii.

“Picture Bride,” the title poem with which Song’s volume begins, serves as the seminal text of the collection, in a way defining the thematic direction of the book. In this poem, the poetic persona, aged twenty-four, attempts to imagine what it was like for her maternal grandmother, at the age of twenty-three, to leave Korea for Hawaii to marry a laborer thirteen years her senior, a man she had never seen before. The entire poem, except for the first three lines, consists of a series of questions intended to re-create not only the scenes of the departure, the journey, and the arrival but also the psychology and emotions of the picture bride throughout the process. The concluding question, which speculates on how willing she might have been with regard to her conjugal obligation (“did she politely untie/ the silk bow of her jacket,/ her tent-shaped dress”), focuses an entire economic and sociohistorical phenomenon onto the question of sexuality, making the poem linger on a moment of truth in human terms. This ability to crystalize the general into the personal is characteristic of Song’s poetry.

The figure of the picture bride serves as a muse of sorts for the poet, in part because the questions raised in “Picture Bride” are either answered or contextualized in the volume’s other poems. For example, in “Untouched Photograph of Passenger,” Song contemplates the picture of a man dressed in a poorly tailored suit who is gazing into the camera; she observes, “Rinsing through his eyes/ and dissolving all around him/ is sunlight on water.” The portrait is probably of the speaker’s grandfather, and the poem captures the optimism with which the emigrant embraces the promise of a foreign land.

The other poems in the volume, which loosely chronicle the proliferation of the first generation through two more generations, can be regarded as indirect answers to the question of sexuality raised in “Picture Bride.” As an older woman, the bride jokes about her extraordinarily big breasts, which the poet describes as being like “walruses” and imagines to have been sucked by “six children and an old man”; certainly the breasts are symbolic of the bride’s fecundity, but they are also realistically personal. Always keeping her focus on the personal dimension, when Song finally writes about the death of the grandmother in “Blue Lantern,” she makes it clear that what matters in the picture bride phenomenon is, ultimately, the human element. Prearranged marriages and love are not mutually exclusive under certain circumstances, as is evident from the grandfather’s mourning: “He played for her each night;/ her absence,/ the shape of his grief/ funneled through the bamboo flute.”

“A Pale Arrangement of Hands”

First published: 1983 (collected in Picture Bride, 1983)

Type of work: Poem

The poet pays tribute to her mother by way of recollections of childhood.

“A Pale Arrangement of Hands,” also from Picture Bride, begins with the poet sitting at the kitchen table listening to the all-night rain. Seeing her own hands on the table, she remembers her mother’s hands, which always seemed nervous “except when they were busy cooking”: “Her hands would assume a certain confidence/ then, as she rubbed and patted butter/ all over a turkey as though/ she were soaping and scrubbing up a baby.” The poet further recalls that her mother used to describe the rain in Hawaii as “liquid sunshine” to her three children. Further associations bring back memories of the mother applying lipstick; the poet remembers the mother using her discarded tissues for a surprising purpose during rainy afternoons when the children were idle: She shows them “how to make artificial carnations . . . with a couple of hairpins.” As the memory unfolds, many more mundane but fond episodes emerge.

By detours, the poet’s memories begin to reel back to the present, concluding with one more memory—of the children’s habitual refusal to take a nap in the afternoon, which for the mother was the longest part of the day: “Sleep meant pretending. Lying still/ but alert, I listened from the next room/ as my mother slipped out of her damp dress./ The cloth crumpling onto the bathroom floor/ made a light, sad sound.”

Although the poem appears to be unstructured and plain, and although the moments captured are mundane, Song’s ability to re-create the vivid and even noisy scenes of childhood is unmistakable. The poem also exemplifies Song’s favorite device of bringing the past and the present together. More important, however, “A Pale Arrangement of Hands” is a good example of what Song and Juliet S. Kono have characterized as women writers’ voices. The mother in the poem is not deified, but the poet, through negotiations between her subjectivity and her subject matter, has given an ordinary mother a voice—a tribute to women who have most of the time been silent. The poem “The Seamstress,” from the same book, can also be interpreted from a similar perspective, as can “Humble Jar” from Frameless Windows, Squares of Light, a poem occasioned by the memory of an assortment of buttons that the mother kept in a jar.

“Heaven”

First published: 1988 (collected in Frameless Windows, Squares of Light, 1988)

Type of work: Poem

A mother ponders the significance of her son’s childish ideas about an afterlife.

“Heaven” appears toward the end of Frameless Windows, Squares of Light. By this time, the poet has already married and is the mother of a son and a daughter. The son, who has blond hair (which comes from his father), “thinks when we die we’ll go to China,” causing the mother to pause at the thought of “a Chinese heaven.” The poet further imagines how her son’s hand “must span like a bridge/ to reach it.” She continues to wonder how such an idea could occur to her son, as she herself has never seen China. As the question of identity and ethnicity is pressed, the poet’s thoughts are rerouted to a historical time when a boy in southern China started his long journey to the United States to make a living at the gold mines and the railroad, indefinitely prolonging his stay. Switching back to the present, the poet muses that “It must be in the blood,/ this notion of returning./ It skipped two generations, lay fallow,/ the garden an unmarked grave.” This realization, triggered by the innocent thoughts of a child, leads the poet to call to the children to look to where “we can see the mountains/ shimmering blue above the air.”

Although one of the themes in “Heaven” is innocence, this poem obviously contradicts Song’s earlier statement that she would try not to write on the Asian American theme. Her observation that “it must be in the blood” can be seen as a bold correction of that earlier declaration. The question of returning to China is a symbolic rather than a practical concern, especially after an entire generation of Asian American writers has worked furiously to establish the legitimacy of Asian Americans as Americans. Yet the poem raises a fundamental issue about the nature of Song’s poetry in particular and American literature in general: To what extent is it possible, or desirable, to purge the American experience of ethnicity? Song’s return to this issue is an important signal because, unlike her earlier, mostly retrospective treatments of the Asian American experience, “Heaven” involves a future generation and is forward-looking. The fact that Song can raise such a controversial issue at all intimates the arrival of another stage in the Asian American writer’s search for identity.

“Sunworshippers”

First published: 1993 (collected in School Figures, 1994)

Type of work: Poem

A young woman reflects on the care of the body in different cultures and her experience of anorexia.

“Sunworshippers” is included in School Figures, a collection populated by various characters from Song’s family. As the idiosyncrasy of relatives often gets on her nerves, she cannot accept them at face value and must negotiate, with herself, for ways of coming to terms with her family heritage. “Sunworshippers,” like Song’s many other poems characterizing members of her family, exemplifies this position.

The poem begins with the poet’s recollection of her mother’s preachy lectures about sunbathers: “Who will marry you/ if your skin is sunbaked and dried up like beef jerky?” Raising her daughters by Old World precepts, the mother would make them wear hats and gloves when they went for a drive and would use an umbrella under the sun. Contemplating her mother’s philosophy about the body now that she is a woman, the speaker relates how, in her struggles against those disagreeable preachings, she became anorexic. In a voice that is at once sarcastic, resentful, and perhaps mixing delight with regret, she satirizes the mother’s view of the body. Taking a deliberately confrontational stance, she interprets the mother’s cautions against exposure to the sun in terms of prohibitions against loving oneself “too much.” As if to retaliate, she eats less and less.

Despite its alarming development as a health issue, anorexia also serves as a conceit for the speaker’s construction of her identity. Akin to being a portrait of the artist as a young woman, the poem reaches some sort of epiphany by celebrating the speaker’s hypersensitive and even mystical capabilities. As someone with a heightened awareness of self, she “devoured radiance,/ essential as chlorophyll.” It is under these strange circumstances that she experiences an intellectual coming-of-age, so that she can finally claim that “Undetected, I slipped in and out of books,/ passages of music, brightly painted rooms// to weave one’s self, ropes of it, whole/ and fully formed, was a way of shining/ out of this world.” Since the context for this experience is anorexia, there is an implied irony that this moment of extreme brilliance may be a form of delusion induced by fasting. The tension between mother and daughter that started the poem remains unresolved. Paradoxically, this lack of resolution is what keeps the poet motivated to write.

“Ghost”

First published: 2001 (collected in The Land of Bliss, 2001)

Type of work: Poem

A Hawaiian Asian woman muses upon the issue of race, challenging preconceived stereotypes.

“Ghost” appears in The Land of Bliss as a critical reflection on the issue of racial difference in the multiethnic context of Hawaiian society, where, in 2000, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and native Hawaiians made up about 51 percent of the population and white people were a 24 percent minority. To understand this poem, it is useful to consider the fact that, historically, “ghost” (gwai) was a term often used among the Chinese to refer to people of other races (typically white Caucasians) perceived to be oppressive or repulsive. Although an epithet suggesting repugnance and contempt, “ghost” also signifies a sense of helpless subjugation, as racism against Asians had been rampant historically. Typical of the younger generation, the poet does not endorse the sentiments underlying the epithet.

In the first part of the poem, the speaker, a schoolteacher of Asian descent, refers to herself as a “yellow ghost” who flutters “like a moth/ invisible to these/ children of soldiers.” Despite this invisibility and potential lack of authority and recognition, the speaker acknowledges that she occupies a position of power. However, rather than perpetuating the pattern of domination, the speaker attempts to restructure the interracial self-other relationship in nonconfrontational terms, offering to share with her pupils “a jeweled seeded fruit,/ a poem I pare and peel/ that has no flesh,” a poem that “tastes like nothing/ they want to eat.” Song, who has been involved in the Poets in Schools program, thus raises questions about the meaning of the prevalent epithet. The color of power can be white, and it can also be yellow, but, more important, it needs to be vested not in the form of racial hierarchies but rather, as the poet seems to suggest, in culture and education.

In the second part of the poem, the speaker challenges her mother’s offhanded use of the term bok gwai (white ghost). The daughter does see the mother’s point about white privilege, but she questions the mother’s categorical myopia: “Bok gwai, white ghost,/ she chose to call them./ By choosing, she chose/ not to see/ them/ as she so surely saw/ she was not seen.” Fortunately, this is a vicious circle that the daughter is able to short-circuit when she starts dating a white man. The mother recoils at his “odor/ of a meat eater,” but eventually she is pleased enough with him to invite him back—thus paving way for the daughter’s interracial romance and, perhaps metaphorically speaking, the construction of a sustainable relationship for people from different cultures and ethnicities.

“Ghost” is hence a poem that bridges racial gaps on personal terms. In the context of the main action of the collection—the deteriorating health of the mother, and how that dying process intimately leaves a deep impact on the feelings, memories, and anxieties of the daughter—“Ghost” also bridges existential gaps between the two women. The mother might have accepted the daughter’s choice of a “round eye,” but it appears as if it is the daughter who grants the terms of reconciliation: The mother will be remembered and honored, but her flaws stay on the record even as she is immortalized in the land of bliss created by the daughter’s poetry.