1. What is your favorite piece of literature and why?

This is an impossible question for a reader like me. At different stages in my life, I had fallen in love with a writer, a genre, a subject. I like both high-brow and low-brow literature, although I have re-read certain classics through decades for pleasure, because I discover more nuances and learn different lessons from the books and about myself with each reading. For me, literature is hearing the human voice and absorbing civilization’s imagination from prehistory to our future, and from every region in the world. Current news, archival records, scientific writing: I would not give up reading any of these other forms of literature.

2. How has your Chinese-Malaysian identity influenced your poetry?

My original familial, communal, language and home identity form the foundation for my poetry. That Chinese-colonial British Malaysian identity is manifested in the organic correspondences that my sensibility snaps together in making sense of a moment, in the ways many of my poems break conventional syntax, interrupt formal lines, and more. My poetry never drawls.

 
3. How do you think writing and literature influence social discourse about the Asian-American experience?

Writing and literature obviously influence the ways in which mainstream America sees Asian Americans. These works speak, they represent, they advocate. The legalized historical invisibility and silence of non-white and minority communities only lifted in the 1960s and 1970s, and writers like Maxine Hong Kingston have contributed enormously to the cultural transformations that have shifted America to a multicultural discursive society.

4. Could you tell us about your experience of immigrating to the US and how you were able to learn to love America?

Every immigrant has a different story to tell, stories that cluster around shared specificities. I came to the U.S. at 24, a single woman drawn by Fellowships to study American literature at a top research university in Massachusetts. My July departure coincidentally was a few weeks after the worst race riots in Malaysian history. Before May 13, 1969, I saw myself as a pioneering English-language writer. The trauma of racialized violence stayed with me, unable to heal through the years of homecoming reunion dinners with family and friends. The intensifying divide-and-rule state policies amplified my disillusionment, and I lost my early national idealism. I did not so much leave Malaysia as that the Malaysia of my youth left me.

Coming to love America was an organic evolution. The 1960’s Civil Rights movement changed the U.S. from a one-race supremacist society to a multicultural state, governed by the Constitution that enshrines the rule of law, separation of state and religion, with freedom of speech and justice and equality for all. This evolution toward a more perfect union, government of the people, for the people, and by the people, stands in stark contrast to many other countries that are devolving into corrupt rule of authoritarian politicians, for oligarchs, and by race supremacists. Immigrants like me know how fragile democratic governance is; how lucky we are to be living in a country where opposing views are lawful, and how much we need to embrace this place in order to pass it on to the children who come after us. Only love can secure the U.S. from extremist divisive hate.

5. How did immigration affect how you viewed your identity?

My twelve poetry collections and my memoir Among the White Moon Faces track my identity shifts, from a subject whose student visa noted my temporary residence in the U.S. to a green-card holder, whose marriage to a citizen and birth to an American son anchor her as an American. American citizenship has introduced a host of new identity layers, as in voter registration, increasing communal and institutional bonds replacing early familial ties. My most recent poetry publication, Dawns Tomorrow, is my most American-situated collection.

6. How did your perception of America and your home country change over time?

I addressed this question in questions 4 & 5.

 
7. What is your writing process like? What inspires your work?

My writing process involves days if not months of solitude, but it begins with a moment, a moment when a phrase or idea or character or sensation is generated out of air—air during a walk, a breath on waking at 3 a.m., an in-breath at a melody heard or recalled, unheard. IF that moment is privileged by space and time, it will grow into lines of a poem, or dialogue, or a narrator’s voice over, or a point-of-view that presses on me.

Almost anything may “inspire” me. The word “inspire” is related to breath; its antonym is “expire,” to lose breath, to die. Related words like “aspire” remind us that breath (as in speech, metrical rhythm, living, and so on) is a heartbeat by heartbeat phenomenon. For me, at any moment of any day, some thought, feeling, memory, newness, sound, may “inspire” me to write.

 
8. How did your identity as a Chinese-Malaysian, and as a woman:

• Affect your employment?

• Impact how your coworkers treated you?

• Impact your success as a poet?

I talked about how my identity as Chinese and a woman negatively affected my employment in Malaysia. When I was denied a position in 1969 at the University of Malaya, then the only university in the nation, I immediately apprehended that this opportunity based on my merit would never be offered to me in my homeland. My co-workers did not remark on this obvious discrimination and injustice. That led me to leave the country for a more just society.

How did it impact my success as a poet? It had no impact. My poetry does not come from a place of grievance. While my poems may sometimes include a political edge, it is my breath, myself as a living, breathing human, imagination, and woman who writes my poems.

9. Do you have any words of advice for people who struggle with their cultural identities?

Anything in life that is a struggle signifies how worthy it is of our full attention. To quote a poet who urges us to “learn to love the question,” I advise us to learn to love the struggle. Cultural identities are not written in stone. Nothing that is human is written in stone. Nor in sand or quicksand. Culture is made every day, through the eons, and as we inherit it from long pasts, so we remake it in our present image, with our restless imaginations, our fickle passions, our intense confusions, our too human love.