Asa Drake | Contributing Writer
then telling be the antidote
Xiao Yue Shan
Tupelo Press, 2024
There’s one sentence from Xiao Yue Shan’s then telling be the antidote that I think everyone must know: “if I can I would like to live a long time / eternal going in all wrong directions and as far as imagining.” If right directions are finite, if they limit possibility, might we better contextualize our futures and our histories in the fuller breath of a fractal telling?
Shan’s is such a telling, traversing the distance from Hong Kong to Montreal to Tokyo, from the court of the Qin dynasty to the 2019 anti-government protests in Mong Kok. The poems in then telling be the antidote invoke time and place, and they ask for change in a multiplicity of directions. In doing so, Shan confronts the difficulty of writing as a mode of protest and dissent.
In “taking note,” when Shan describes one possibility of lineage, she addresses a complicated inheritance:
or how someone once told me in kindness
that having daughters was the only way to heal from the loss of a mother.
there is an ethics in all of this—in the meeting of branch and rightness
That weight, “in kindness,” is another kind of distance she must cross. In diaspora, the daughter is a figure of the future, capable of contextualizing “rightness” and wrong directions, but how can anyone be such a daughter? When Shan next mentions loss, in “in love as in tourism,” it’s to chart the distance between “lost and losing” where “the latter informs negation” and “the other is / duplicitous with potentialities.” Exile is the starting point of Shan’s collection, an origin from which she spins possible futures from the infinite variety of the present participle. Hers is a poetics of finding, or as she writes in the same poem, “it is so wonderful to not be found / but to be finding,” to reject the object-state of the lost and to engage instead as the subject whose recursive narrative finds a way home.
This month I’ve been in correspondence with a friend who’s visiting the Philippines, the country where our mothers grew up. When we write to each other, sometimes we fail to bridge the space between who we are and who we have been collectively, our multiple versions of self across the offshoots and possibilities of our own diasporic history, even as we exist and expand over the exact distance our mothers traversed. In 2019, my Lola’s house was demolished. This month, my friend visited her Lola’s house before it was sold to a new owner. We console each other about these properties. They are not ours, but they shape our memories and our futures. How much of those houses manifested some version of the women we did or did not know? And how much of our conversation is an attempt to enter a history without feeling alone?
When Shan invokes a plural speaker (“when I wake I think, we’ve had the same dream again”) she makes an invitation. We are caught between panels of intimacy and displacement, “patient for ourselves to arrive” —home or to one another. I like how, when one destination seems less conceivable in the face of totalitarian regimes, urbanization, and economic barriers, the body becomes a familiar companion, a part from the whole that was once home. Shan’s poems, like “exile hong kong,” explore that gap between being part of a space and being removed from it:
. . . as what we had built
solidly with hands, with work, with years collapsed noiselessly
behind us. to bear its silence we insisted aloud to one another,
we’re here, even as my own voice called singingly from the past.
We remember the place we’ve left and how we might return. The specifics of that return are “made by mothers into song,” something the body must render; the lyric is a tender map that Shan studies as it shifts and abbreviates between singers.
In a following poem, “on the last day of the heisei era,” interpretation and fabrication become linked concepts:
. . . names
for homes in this world we’ve interpreted
in stone-language, imagined intensely enough
towards safety. today the archipelago stills
itself innocent in definitions. tomorrow
the year, polished new, will sell us back the words
we live in.
If we cannot identify who “will sell us back the words / we live in” then we must live within our own “stone-language, imagined” with our own intentions.
I’m deeply invested in what it might mean to illustrate a geography that isn’t one’s own any longer, a place that might have been (or was once, or will yet become) familiar, a place where one’s very self is made familiar again. In her poems, Shan explores a familial and collective history with a sense of personal agency. In “inheritance,” when the speaker returns to Hong Kong, she states “I think I am in control / of this liminal indecision, where nothing / ends. where ruins are rebuilt with all that / is thought to have been there.” She can touch the door of her childhood home, but she cannot enter. As someone raised in between places by a parent who hopes that I’ve rerooted, perhaps what resonates most is just how hard it is to hold on:
my mother says about hong kong:
that wasn’t your life. that was my life.
she meant the chicken boiling with anise
on the stove and the rouge pinking the edge
of the wooden spoon. the broth she raised to
her mouth to taste. she meant I couldn’t taste.
It’s so rare to read a collection that’s so cohesive. These poems, with their shared motifs, string together a single protest through “the scripture of thin broths, secrets, ceremony.” As Shan expresses in a later poem, “it takes a lifetime to make a meal.” What feeds us is generations in the making. A lineage is a fractured history, even as we try to parse out the most basic elements:
it is as her grandmother has taught her mother,
how salt teaches the falls,
and how her mother has taught her,
how iron teaches the oil,
and how she has taught me.
It’s impossible to miss the sting between generations. Salt and iron and oil between each line, the lineage continues but is also partitioned—“her grandmother” is positioned only in relation to “her mother” who is her mother’s mother. It’s a generational distance we see repeated later in Shan’s “montreal” sequence. In the epistolary “montreal IV,” the letter writer, “S,” states, “it is very strange that the world I live in is still connected / to yours.” I’m interested in how “strange,” a word repeated within the poem, further estranges the correspondent. Even as I read this sentence, I know that by writing it, Shan has estranged herself from “S.” The poem becomes S’s alternate version of events, suggesting that “facts are being suspended in the air on / puppet strings of people telling.” The epistolary, like the papers the poem describes, “traps” or preserves in amber a version of the speaker:
I think the person in the picture
looks like someone who never smiles, so you will not say
she looks like me.but a precious object nonetheless. you know how you
say—it is strange, how paper traps things. this document
is where my whole life lies, an answer to the questions
of history, like a small death in amber.as soon as I can
I will send more money.
From the passport, where “the photograph is a ghost, but recognisable, features / and all of their exclusion,” to the medium of exchange (the letter, which is also a promissory note: “as soon as I can / I will send more money”), the poem itself becomes another artifact, a fixed node within a non-linear telling. But each alternate version of events creates room for another. If we are going in wrong directions, if they are infinite, then there is no past and no future too impossible to see.
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Xiao Yue Shan was born in China and lives on Vancouver Island. then telling be the antidote won the Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize and was published in 2023. How Often I Have Chosen Love won the Frontier Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published in 2019. She has received the New Millennium Award for Poetry and the Juxtaprose Poetry Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, the Artlyst Art to Poetry Award, and the Ambit Poetry Competition. Poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry Magazine, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Poetry Northwest, and more. Prose works have appeared in Granta, Cleveland Review of Books, Socrates on the Beach,3:AM Magazine, Electric Literature, The Shanghai Literary Review, and more. Poem-films have shown in London, Vienna, New York City, and Athens. Her work has been supported by the Canadian Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, and Arts Council Tokyo.
She translates from the Chinese and acts as editor-in-chief of the Chinese-English bilingual literary journal, Spittoon Literary Magazine. She also edits the Asymptote Journal blog and Cicada.
Asa Drake (she/her) is a Filipina American poet and the author of the chapbook One Way to Listen (Gold Line Press, 2023). Her poems have been published in The American Poetry Review, the Georgia Review, and The Paris Review Daily.