On Monica Youn

Monica Youn’s​ fourth book of poems, From From (Carcanet, £14.99), is her first to dwell at length on her Korean American background, and on the history of Asian America more generally. It’s also her first to rely primarily on long prose poems, or lyric essays, advancing sparely perspicuous, caustically disillusioned arguments about myth and history, cravings and reactions, racial distinction and white supremacy. Some of them deploy monostichs, single lines or sentences separated by white space, as if to leave room for rebuttal. Youn practised law from the early 2000s until 2017 and the crisp and careful paragraphs in From From suggest the close reasoning of legal prose.

The title is ironic, playing on the question people of colour so often get asked: ‘Where are you from?’ (Answer: Rhode Island, Denver, Seattle, wherever; Youn grew up in Houston.) ‘No, where are you from from?’ America is a country sorted by colour, literally and figuratively, as on the bar graph about Amazon employees Youn describes in ‘In the Passive Voice’, the longest poem in the book. Unsurprisingly, white people dominate upper management; Asians are well represented in lower white-collar tiers; Black and Latinx ‘hourly labourers’ linger in warehouse work. Youn looks both at anti-Asian bigotry and at how that bigotry interacts with anti-Black racism. She finds in a history book the astonishing claim that Korean American neighbourhoods were a ‘buffer’ between white and Black areas in the 1980s: ‘the buffer has to stay in place,’ she remarks, ‘above the Black and Brown, but below the White. Obedient. Docile. Abject.’ If self-hatred and status consciousness aren’t enough to keep such a buffer in place, the police will do it: a cop in a prominent hate crime investigation ‘has been promoting anti-Chinese T-shirts on Facebook: “Covid-19 imported virus from Chy-na”. I don’t understand the misspelling of China. Understanding holds little interest for me.’

Youn comes across as the most rigorous of self-editors, the kind of poet who strikes out twenty lines for each one she keeps. At the same time, her scope is large. ‘In the Passive Voice’ also considers ‘the LA uprising’, the violence that followed the 1992 acquittal of the four police officers who beat Rodney King: ‘The LAPD largely abandoned Koreatown during the uprising … bottling up Black, Latinx and Korean residents to vent their anger and fear on each other.’

Such excerpts make From From sound too much like reportage, and it’s true that the facts are what strike us most on a first reading. Return to the poems, however, and the images pop and shine. Much of ‘In the Passive Voice’ takes place on a beach, another sort of buffer, where ‘tiny clams – rosy and translucent as baby fingernails – wash up with every wave.’ Sandpipers fight over individual clams, though the beach holds shells enough for all. The sandpipers are like the Asian American immigrants who pick their way across a new land, and like the ‘gleaners’ Youn keeps on invoking: second-class citizens, followers, like Ruth behind Boaz, or the gleaners in Millet’s painting, surviving on what the prosperous discard. The gleaners and the sandpipers in turn resemble the caterpillars raised by the poet’s young son – growing, climbing and leaving a grey strip of faeces (another buffer) behind.

From From is a book that admonishes everybody, not least the poet herself, the child not of impoverished migrants but of 1950s immigrant engineers. She finds in her notebook the sentence ‘YOU ARE IN NO POSITION TO CRITICISE ANYONE,’ and tries to reconcile it – after reading about anti-Asian hate crimes – with an emotion she can at last name: ‘Rage’. Youn (now a professor at the University of California Irvine) has climbed to the top of various hierarchies in American life, but (so the book implies) has found these victories hollow. She compares herself to that magnificent and misunderstood bird the magpie, a quick, even hyperintelligent learner, subject to the same malignant slanders that follow all Asian Americans: they copy and do not originate; they specialise in ‘emulation’; ‘they’ll eat anything, you know.’

Common magpies share their Latin name, Pica pica, with the medical disorder in which people eat, or swallow, things that are not food. Pica in turn resembles cravings for money, romance, security and prestige: ‘who was/it who//taught you/to want//what will/not feed//you.’ The clipped lines – unusual here, but frequent in Youn’s previous books – present us with questions to which there’s no answer. No ‘who’ stands to blame, just a ‘what’, a whole social system, a set of institutions that keep some people safe and other people down. That system replicates itself, for Youn, as early as primary school, where ‘the cadre of sadists returned//to their lunch period routine:/paying hard-up kids, Chicanos,//to eat live lizards.’

Youn’s prose poems – spiky, memorable and concise – double as politically charged essays that attack white supremacy. She sets them amid other, equally suggestive, less expository poems in verse. From From thus bears some resemblance to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014), the collection that now seems to mark a watershed for the entire bulky ship of American verse, from fragmentation and introspection towards something outward-facing and provocative. Youn’s own career made that turn too. Ignatz (2010) deployed kaleidoscopic references to the great modernist comic strip Krazy Kat in depicting an up-and-down romance; Blackacre (2016) addressed pregnancy, miscarriage, sexism and poetic vocation in starker, more available terms. (Youn has since worked with Rankine on an ambitious multimedia project called the Racial Imaginary Institute.)

There is a grim, unblinking quality to From From, but there’s plenty of wit here too. The poems give a Swiftian pleasure, as Youn fillets individual words, separating their meat from the bones. Consider the twelve strange works that comprise ‘Study of Two Figures (Dr Seuss/Chrysanthemum-Pearl)’. This sequence follows Theodor Geisel (Dr Seuss), his first wife, Helen, and their imaginary daughter, Chrysanthemum-Pearl. (The couple were unable to have children.) The same sequence addresses Geisel’s anti-Japanese propaganda before and during the Second World War, offering a many-sided scrutiny of Orientalism, as well as of the shame our culture projects onto infertility. The bravura sound patterns in the sequence become the sad obverse of Seuss’s own euphoric euphonies. Helen ‘scrubs herself/with saltwater with sand her/scouring only serves to polish/her to a serener sheen.’ Theodor watches ‘seaside cypresses’, ‘a protective palisade to barricade/our sleeping beauty in her pacific/innocence he scowls he squints/his eyes he selects his inkiest pen.’ The pen that attacks, and complains, holds the ink that consoles: ‘what is a pearl/but a cyst sent to finishing school.’

Bodily failures and bodily shame held together the elegant lines in Blackacre, which also concluded with an ambitious prose poem. Youn’s readers will see that book’s ideas revisited in From From through an anti-racist lens. There’s also the return of Krazy Kat and his beloved enemy, Ignatz Mouse, chasing each other indefinitely across pages where ‘blankness means whiteness,’ and individuality itself – the absence of stereotypes – gets racially coded. ‘In order for the expression to be legible’ on the face of a black-outlined character such as Ignatz, ‘the face must remain white.’ Ignatz dealt in sexual longing, enticing and maddening in the moment, racialised only – or only obviously – in retrospect: ‘Ignatz now feels his anger//dissipating in that self-same gap between//the trigger and the smack,’ Youn wrote of the cartoon mouse, ‘the way one eyebrow//can never meet the other in a true unbroken v//no matter how doomy how dour//how darksome his invariable frown.’

One poem in monostichs from the middle of Blackacre examined a Twinkie, yellow outside and white inside. The word was used as a playground slur directed at Asian Americans: ‘as if this whiteness had been your original condition/as if it hadn’t been what was piped into you, what seeped into each vacant cell’. Whiteness – being unmarked, being the default – means agency, individuality, choice and power: ‘To the extent that the poet is not contained, the poet is allowed to pass for White.’ Blackness, brownness and yellowness mean subordination, obedience and abjection in the racial economy of the symbolic beach, or the LA riots, or the myth of King Midas: ‘Everything he touches turns yellow./We are meant to understand this as a form of death.’

From From is a painful book. Much of this pain comes from the way it sees race and racism, but it has other arrows to fire too. Its central figures – the poet, the magpies, the Geisels – try to live by mimesis, by making replicas of what they cannot literally have. In doing so they are types of the frustrated artist, as well as types of the scholarship kid. One short poem speaks for Marsyas, the ambitiously musical satyr whom Apollo flayed and left in constant pain. Youn’s Marsyas regrets ever trying to play a music reserved for the gods, ‘as if emulation could engender/equality … It all stains me.’

Sixteen pages into the longest poem in the book, Youn hides an aside: ‘My own marriage recently ended.’ No wonder she looks long and hard (as she had, fitfully, in Ignatz) for ‘a version of desire that doesn’t disgust me’, ‘a model of desire that doesn’t seek to consume’, an erotic affect that will not insult its object. She finds it at last in one poem that she did not write: ‘Lust’, by Yusef Komunyakaa, quoted on page 127, and worth the wait.

The guiding consciousness of From From feels quadruply alienated: Youn is not fully or comfortably American, not Korean, not an immigrant, permitted neither to see herself as a victim nor to take action against the cruelty she sees everywhere, now that ‘the poem can no longer pass as a White poem.’ That cruelty inheres not in any one person, but in the hierarchical structures of safety and blame, of violence expected and violence done, that stand in every part of the West. Youn never lets us forget that she, and we, are part of the problem. ‘You are a member of the English-speaking audience,’ she concludes. ‘I let you see into the box, into what is private, into what is foreign.’

Who seems foreign to whom? Who decides? The boxes in which we put other people can hurt or kill, like the one in the Korean story of Prince Sado: a rice chest in which the king leaves the prince to die. That box reappears throughout From From as a parallel to Youn’s many Western equivalents: ‘A television is a box that allows us to put people inside it.’ A real Korean rice chest would have no cracks, holes or (a word she insists on) ‘chinks’. A version of Prince Sado’s story made for Korean television gave the chest cracks and holes nonetheless, so that the dying prince could see out and his family could see in: ‘the chinks allow the gaze to penetrate what would otherwise be impenetrable.’ Can a non-Asian observer ever see Asian American lives without seeing, or seeing through, ‘chinks’? This book has its doubts. In ‘Deracinations: Eight Sonigrams’, Youn remembers a piece of homework set by her teacher in science class: ‘Go back four generations.//Then colour in which of your ancestors/had blue, green or brown eyes,//who had blond or red, brown/or black hair.’ A friend taps her on the shoulder: ‘Holy shit!//you totally lucked out! … the same answer all the way down://black/brown, black/brown, black/brown.’