How did you come to the book’s title, Bone Symphony, and its title poem?
I was interested in the sensation of being scrutinized to the point of speechlessness—where anything you say can and will be held against you. How do we do language when war and conflict shatter not just our material world, but our symbolic world—when words lose meaning, and reality bifurcates? I wanted to map, sonically, the agony of the psyche undergoing scrutiny and cognitive dissonance in spaces produced by war—re-education camps, asylum hearings, public memorials—where there’s asymmetry in who controls the narrative, and anything the exile says (or represents) is interpreted to justify their suffering and prove criminality—imprisoned as they are within a system of signification that will inevitably indict them.
As the poem grew in scope, I pulled forward seemingly arbitrary words into contexts that troubled and trembled their meanings. What emerged was a lyric cacophony of sign and signifier that allows the speaker to skirt, sidestep, and stand up to those who police the imagi/nation. The book, as a whole, became this project of wresting that “straitjacket of symbols” from my being—not necessarily to be understood, but to move freely—careening through a host of sounds, metaphors, and longings, and picking up some unexpected associations along the way.
The title, Bone Symphony, emerged quite organically. The phrase felt animate and dissonant enough to approximate the sensation of making do with the ruins at hand and reconfiguring them in such a way that makes living possible, even pleasurable. The title also seemed to enact the book’s attempt to revive the “dead language” Toni Morrison warns has deadened our imaginations. When I revisited the title’s component words, I liked how Bone—associated with death and decay, but also: bare bones or the bones of a house—could be animated by Symphony—soaring, orchestral music that arouses the dormant actor and summons the audience (“audience as the dead are audience,” writes Solmaz Sharif) to take up agency and aliveness within these poems’ rooms. And if Symphony can animate the bones, perhaps the book assembles that essential, integral structure—the bones of a house, a structure of feeling—that offers the exile a place to dwell.
The figure of the enemy surfaces in several poems throughout the book. What led you to circle this figure or idea?
The reason my family ended up in the U.S. at all was because Vietnamese people were seen as the enemy—either by the U.S. military who couldn’t tell them apart, or by their own people who served the opposing side. During the war, U.S. soldiers were notorious for failing to discern comrade from enemy. So the enemy became “anything that moves,” justifying the racialized, indiscriminate killing of Vietnamese civilians that led to atrocities like the My Lai massacre, or the case of the 21-year-old woman who was running from her Viet Cong captors to a nearby U.S. military base to seek shelter, only to be misread as a threat by a U.S. soldier, who killed her point blank. I was thinking of my grandfather, who was imprisoned in Vietnam’s re-education camps, where inmates were tortured until they confessed to crimes that were only crimes because political power had shifted into enemy hands.
The fickleness with which nations define the enemy made me question the comrade/enemy binary as a productive way to understand conflict at all. The crisis of misidentifying the enemy—and the racist pattern of viewing Asians and Asian Americans as disposable and interchangeable—had massive ramifications, and I was haunted by the ways it shaped ordinary, intimate life: how easily we cut off our enemies, how we write people off based on markers associated with the enemy, or how a perceived threat might actually be an ally or friend or someone seeking shelter. Poetry gave me a way to be particular and granular, writing against that overly capacious method of categorization that nations deploy to criminalize entire people groups and a broader culture that skims and dismisses that which we don’t understand.
When we talk about having enemies, there’s the interpersonal enemy—someone you’ve had beef with, someone you’re against, or someone against you. There’s also the enemy of war or enemy of the state—a vague, often abstracted Other or dissident of some kind whose punishment and annihilation are deemed necessary by the state. Then there’s Jesus’ teaching to “Love your enemies,” a completely paradoxical phrase popularized by Dr. King’s principles of nonviolence that I was wrestling with throughout the writing of the book. On the one hand, it’s a command regularly weaponized to coerce marginalized groups into enabling—even empathizing with—abusive, racist, misogynistic, and homophobic behavior within the church. On the other hand, I was intrigued by the strangeness of that phrase, enemy love. There was something so counterintuitive and unexpected about it that could break cycles of violence and break into the unknown, which was exciting to me as a poet. hate x hate = hate2 but hate x love = ???
As I began to study and practice the principles of nonviolence as part of my faith community, I noticed how the object of that enemy love would constantly shapeshift, so that “No one is a permanent enemy,” as local activist Kerry Ellington says. “A Plea to the Enemy” and “Chorus of the Scorned” explore those dimensions, while “After Salvation” interrogates that fickle designator of enemy in the history of Asian America, applying a decolonial reading of Jesus’s teaching in light of the church’s legacy of colonialism and white supremacy that entangles the speaker as she tries discerning who the enemy is, how she got to be the enemy, and how she might see that enemy as beloved. Poetry enabled me to play with how slippery those designations of enemy/beloved really are, troubling its binary and allowing for ambiguities, tensions, and lack of resolution to come through in conflict of all scales—from war to interpersonal animosities—without hardening any figure into the forever enemy.
Many of your poems take hybrid forms. What does hybridity or genre-fluidity mean to you?
For me, hybridity is more than a melding of forms—e.g. a novel in verse, an image-text collage—it’s a way of being, thinking, and making that exceeds given categories, that cannot be rendered legible without shapeshifting into and across different forms. Some of my “poems” have become liturgies, gatherings, actions, dances, installations, and performance work—so that the original text no longer feels necessary to publish in print form. In the case of “Poetics of Limbo,” I was researching the prevalence of false confessions in Vietnam’s re-education camps and became interested in a poetics that resisted pressure to produce speech simply to prove allegiances or satisfy what the “captor” wants to hear. I wondered: What if we didn’t jump to fill a chasm with coerced words? What if we withstood the agony of an impasse and let the breach speak? As I gathered archival materials, quotes, hand-drawn sketches, and written text circling those questions over the course of seven years, each element seemed strangely affiliated and in need of the others—and the spaces between them—to speak.
I think of my friend Haejin Park, a painter who typically works with watercolor on paper. When she began experimenting with canvas, layering and sanding and reworking that surface, she found that the watercolor paint behaved differently; she had to relearn the material, manipulating and responding to its movements in utterly new ways. Likewise, I think of working with the field of a page as an act of responsiveness—I must experiment, improvise, layer, subtract, and constantly reshape the materials I adhere to it, depending on how they behave, and sometimes what they want to do is bleed off the page.
In the process of writing the book, were there any poems that opened up formal possibilities and surprised you with its final shape?
I wrote “Chorus of the Scorned” during a period when I was meeting people, particularly women, who reminded me of older versions of myself, of people I’d disowned or who had disowned me. It felt like this uncanny experience of being given a second chance at loving the despised parts of the self or the people I’d once failed to love. I later learned from a psychologist friend that these are called reparative relationships.
That living accompanied my writing. I must’ve revised “Chorus” a thousand times. Something about the continuity of a poem with a stable lyric “I” didn’t feel right. I was about to throw it out and be done with it—the way we can be “done” with a person—until, at a residency, I had the impulse to cut the poem up and lay out all the pieces in front of me. In this disjointed, defamiliarized state, the fragments seemed to speak to each other in new ways, allowing me to see how I could recover the discards and rearrange and organize them into sections from there. It was its own reparative process.
A mentor of mine later suggested doing away with sections altogether—or rather, allowing each section to bleed into the next, which felt truer to the content. Rather than portraying the self as having discrete, independent parts, the poem reflects the porousness and fluidity of relations that allows for interdependence among women, which is central to surviving the patriarchal order and is, as Audre Lorde says, “the way to freedom that allows the I to be.” So rather than delineating harsh borders, the numbers became a kind of metronome, a way to keep time, as each voice sings its piece and blends into the chorus.
Tell us the origin story of the book—the initial impulse, the first seed, or the oldest poem in the collection, and how those shaped the book.
There came a point when narrative no longer worked. The narratives I’d been relying on to make sense of my life and my family’s life—master narratives of refugee resilience, the model minority myth, salvation by whiteness—failed to hold the reality of our very fractured lives. And these narratives wouldn’t save us. They were meant to save America’s face. I was trying to assimilate my life into storylines that rendered me into a productive citizen within the very empire responsible for our suffering. The result was that I was rendered speechless—mute. I couldn’t complete my sentences. My psyche and body refused to metabolize the cost of the empire’s lies into anything narratively whole.
So I leaned into writing in fragments. I wrote pages and pages of disjointed prose, nonsensical speech. I started building my own archive, writing down little facts about the war, the number of boat people who perished at sea. This material would never make it into the book, but served as the undercurrent that carried me to a vantage point from which I could begin to see the poetry in all the wreckage.
The oldest poem I wrote that did make it into the book was “The Long Afterlife,” which I began in 2018. I wanted to research this feeling and condition of self-destructiveness—in my own psyche, in my father as he struggled with cancer, in nations divided by war. “What makes a body turn on itself?” the poem asks. Or: What makes us keep wanting the things that kill us? Where does one learn the desire to die? I learned that Agent Orange and other toxic herbicides that the U.S. military poured all over Vietnam—poisoning the soil, waterways, entire communities—have been documented to last up to four generations after initial exposure. Death and destruction are embedded in our genetic material—literally the water we swim in. I saw a world bent on death—cells and families and nations that keep dividing and destroying themselves, a kind of suicidal earth. How do we survive this? How do we cultivate the desire to live? The book became this project of taking those very materials tainted by war, bent toward death, and imbuing them with meanings connotative of and conducive to living—refashioning them in such a way that beckons toward flourishing and possibility. The book offers its own creation story: it begins with dirt filling a grave, dirt soaked with toxic rain, and moves toward a world in which dirt heals how everything is seen.
