Note: This essay, which was published in Brigham Young University's Insight magazine, served as the basis for my Honors Thesis, completed in August 2001.

"...It all depends
on the course of your memory.
It's a place
for those who own no place
to correspond to ruins in the soul.
It's all mine.
It's all yours."

—Li-Young Lee
"With Ruins," 53-60

Because of their colonial origins, most of America's traditions have long existed in fragments borrowed from other cultures, leaving many modern American literary critics to doubt the possibility of establishing a true American literary tradition. In spite of this, writers such as Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot succeeded in developing a tradition founded upon the attempt to reconstruct the American memory from uncertain and fragmented origins. Over the last few decades, rising immigration from Asian countries has brought awareness to previously unexplored subjects in American literature. This raises the question of whether or not these subjects can be considered "traditionally" American. This essay examines the role of Asian American literature in the American literary tradition through one of its most accomplished contemporary poets, Li-Young Lee. The realization that Lee's poetry escapes the confines of an "Asian American" classification allows the reader to see that Asian American literature, at least in the case of Li-Young Lee, does not only fit in the American tradition—it is, because of its preoccupation with the loss of origin, the essence of the American tradition.

Misinterpreting Tradition

As is the case with much of our "Asian American" literature, critics often subject Li-Young Lee's poetry only to a purely Asian American reading. Naturally, the foreignness with which Lee admits he approaches the English language lends a sense of validity to an Asian American critique.¹ Yet at the same time, such criticism permits the reader to rob Lee's poetry of its much wider significance. Zhou Xiajing notes:

Ethnocentric readings . . . are not only misleading, but also reductive of the rich cross-cultural sources of influence on Lee's work and of the creative experiment in his poetry. Their readings presuppose a misconception that a pure and fixed Chinese culture has been inherited and maintained by Chinese immigrants and their descendants in America. This tendency in reading Asian American writers risks relegating their works to a marginalized niche.²

This tendency results from two misinterpretations, which are: first, that Asian American literature, in order to retain its validity, must find its meaning entirely in Asia; and second, that Asian American literature cannot fit comfortably within the canon of American literature. Before one can see how Asian American literature is traditionally American, it is important to understand the sources of these misinterpretations, and then dispel them.

Lisa Lowe, in her book "Immigrant Acts," describes the source of these misinterpretations as the "inevitable paradox" consequential to the institutionalization of an Asian American canon: "Institutionalization provides the material base . . . for a transformative critique of traditional disciplines and their traditional separations, and yet the institutionalization of any field or curriculum . . . submits [to the] educative function of socializing subjects into the state."³ Examining the latter half of her argument first—there exists an increasing fear among Asian Americans that acceptance in white America comes at the cost of "cultural genocide." For example, Elaine Kim's 1982 critical study of Asian American literature cites the fear of the Wakayama Group that "'Assimilation' is in fact 'cultural genocide' because it threatens to rob Asian Americans of their true past while preventing them at the same time from full and equal participation in the present."⁴ This fear implies an Asian American desire for Asian American literature to remain meaningful only insomuch as it remains purely Asian. Thus, the fear leads many Asian American critics to the misinterpretation that Asian American literature should be read only from an Asian perspective. Furthermore, the group argues that Asian Americans can never truly claim American heritage: "An Asian is an Asian until he proves himself white by his actions. He cannot, therefore, ever say 'we' and mean the people who produced Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, or even Bob Dylan and the Beatles."⁵ This, in turn, gives rise to the second misinterpretation, the impossibility of Asian American literature finding its context in the American literary canon.

White America perpetuates these misinterpretations through its fear that embracing Asian American literature outside of its foreign context will alter the American literary tradition, implying that Asian American literature lies outside the American tradition. Asian America's insistence that its literature remain purely Asian consequentially gives white America an even greater excuse to ignore Asian American literature's role in the American tradition. This perhaps subconscious impulse towards separation blatantly neglects Asian American literature in its attempts to define the American tradition, as is evidenced in Robert Pinsky's recent essay "Poetry and the American Memory." This separation impulse also renders it virtually implausible that a literary critic would apply the critical theory of T.S. Eliot's admittedly Euro-centric, yet distinctly American, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," to Asian American literature.⁶ Neither Asian nor so-called traditional America see consistency between their respective traditions.

Fusion of Traditions

Zhou Xiajing, however, shows that to properly understand Lee's poetry, the reader must discover consistency in these two traditions; a consistency found in Lee's incorporation of both Chinese and American elements in his poetry. Careful consideration of Lee's poetry reveals that, stylistically and thematically, it exhibits characteristics of traditional American poetry. Consistent with Eliot's insistence that "no poet . . . has his complete meaning alone,"⁷ Lee relies on past poets. In an interview, Lee reiterates this idea, commenting that poets constantly talk with their dead. Essential to his claim as an American poet is the fact that Lee's "dead"⁸ consist not only of his Chinese ancestors, but of the biblical writers and English-speaking poets who serve as the foundation for the American tradition. Many critics applaud Lee for incorporating both influences. Judith Kitchen, for example, identifies Robert Lowell as a source for Lee's poem "The Cleaving." For Lee's "Furious Versions," she suggests the influence of both Chinese poetry and the Bible, to which his Chinese father, a Protestant minister, introduced him.⁹ Carol Muske describes the effect of Lee's work as pairing Walt Whitman with the great Tang dynasty poet Tu Fo [sic]."¹⁰

In "With Ruins," Lee's reliance on an American poetic tradition becomes more involved, alluding directly to Robert Frost's "Directive."¹¹ Like "Directive," the poem deals with the dilemma of a disintegrating heritage, creating the effect of Lee's simultaneous composition with the dead Frost. The effect is such that through Lee's writing, to use Eliot's words, "the dead poets . . . assert their immortality most vigorously." Surely, then, Lee possesses Eliot's "historical sense" of tradition, which, with the dead poets, Chinese and American alike, creates a "simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order."¹² Furthermore, this sense qualifies his work as representative of a new breed of Asian American works, which Donald Goellnicht labels "not so decidedly 'local'. . . they are historically mediated forms, but they also mediate history, questioning and affecting our understanding of the past and how that past is conveyed through language."¹³ This ability to act and react within America's past poets is exactly what Robert Pinsky insists "contributes with bold directness to the American memory."¹⁴

A greater fusion of the two traditions emerges when examining Lee's reliance on Eliot in "Furious Versions." The City in Which I Love You, the compilation in which "Furious Versions" appears, has been compared to Eliot's The Waste Land because of its fragmentary style, wording, and symbolism, evident as early as the sixth line in "Furious Versions," where the narrator informs the reader that, "I lie / dismantled." Ruth Hsu points out that the lines "Will I rise and go / out into an American city?"¹⁵ hint at the wording of Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."¹⁶ However, the most significant allusions are directed towards "Little Gidding."¹⁷ Lee draws a parallel to Eliot's use of the rose through his use of "the wandering rose"¹⁸ as a figure of time. Lee also echoes Eliot's repetition of "Quick, now, here, now, always"¹⁹ with his own repetition of "Here, now." Both poems discuss memory in a redeeming role. "Memory revises me," reads line 49 of "Furious Versions."²⁰ For Eliot, the "use of memory" is "for liberation."²¹ A focus on there constructive power of the past, evident in lines 250 through 254 of "Furious Versions": "The past / doesn't fall away, the past / joins the greater / telling, and is," closely mirrors the "Little Gidding": "We are born with the dead: / See, they return and bring us with them."²² Through these allusions, Lee presents the past in the manner prescribed in "Tradition and the Individual Talent"—the past as an active element in the poetry of the present.

By partaking of the established American tradition, Lee situates his own Asian American tradition within it. Part five of "Furious Versions" powerfully alludes to Eliot, through its resemblance to the latter half of part two in "Little Gidding." In these parts, both Lee and Eliot describe a dreamlike walk through the streets of their hometowns during which they meet the ghosts of dead poets. Eliot runs into the "familiar compound ghost"²³ of Yeats, Swift, and Dante, among others. Meanwhile, Lee meets the ancient Chinese poets, Li Bai and Du Fu. For Eliot, the compound ghost represents, as Peter Ackroyd observes, "a recognizable entity called English literature,"²⁴ of which Eliot envisioned himself apart. One easily imagines Li Bai and Du Fu serving the same function, representing a Chinese tradition from which Lee draws inspiration. Lee's usage of past poets incorporates elements from both traditions, and, in so doing, brings both the American and the Asian tradition into his work. In answer to Lee's implied question, "What, are you here?",²⁵ the dead poets reply in line 293, "What did you expect? Where else should we be?" The poets, it seems, are surprised to discover that Lee finds their presence in America surprising. This paints a picture of not only Lee's simultaneous composition with his Chinese heritage but also of a Chinese tradition that comfortably transplants itself on American soil. Redefining both the Chinese and American tradition, Lee displays the uniqueness of the American tradition in that it creates an environment where Li Bai and Du Fu can stand next to both Eliot and Eliot's Italian mentor, Dante.

Tradition and Lost Origins

At the same time, this redefinition of tradition and, essentially, history is exactly what Asian Americans sharing the same attitudes as the Wakayama group are fighting against. Frank Chin makes the strongest argument against this redefinition of history. In his essay "Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and Fake," Chin strongly criticizes the redefinition of Chinese myths such as "The Ballad of Mulan." Says Chin:

To legitimize their faking, they have to . . . argue that the immigrants who settled and established Chinese America lost touch with Chinese culture, and that faulty memory combined with new experience produced new versions of this story. . . . Losing touch with England did not result in English whites losing touch with the texts of the Magna Carta or Shakespeare.²⁶

Chin's argument that Chinese American writers have lost touch with their past seems especially applicable in the case of Lee, who says in regards to his family history, "I grew up in a state of unknowing, and that unknowing was terrifying and rich and true and authentic."²⁷ Yet, this sense of unknown origins is tantamount to both Asian American and traditional American literature, as both, due to the nature of an ever-changing culture, must continually be renewed."²⁸ Although America inherited the name Shakespeare, films such as "West Side Story" or the Baz Luhrmann's 1996 version of "Romeo and Juliet," give evidence to an American tendency to reconstruct its own inherited tradition.

Furthermore, the American literary tradition exists separate from the English tradition Chin describes; it exists as a tradition that finds commonality in the lack of tradition. James Oppenheim, in his 1920 essay "Poetry—the First American Art," observes that there was never an American" tradition to begin with. "One might expect that an American art is an impossibility," states Oppenheim.²⁹ "Our poetry had been Colonial—whether English or European. Hence the first task was to throw overboard those traditions and the second was to find an expression more native to ourselves."³⁰ This leads to the essential observation that all Americans are immigrants, searching for a nonexistent traditional mode of expression.

Oppenheim offers Walt Whitman, a primary influence of Lee, as an example of an inherently multi-cultural American tradition. Whitman gave America "something universal. . . . something equally the property of every race. . . . We are this universal masked in Americanism. . . . Walt was Dutch, yet Carl Sandburg, who is Swedish, can prance his soul out to the same tune and get a national expression with only a slightly different tinge."³¹ The interaction between Frost's "Directive" and Lee's "With Ruins" achieves the same effect, arriving at a national expression of confused origins. Pinsky, in fact, uses "Directive" in the closing arguments of his afore-mentioned essay. He notes how Frost, instead of re-creating in exactness his cherished New England, explores tradition as a "mysterious spiritual reality"³² attainable only in a journey through memory. In "With Ruins" Lee must also rely on a mysterious past as the source of tradition.

For both poets, the journey to the past inevitably arrives at "a house no more a house."³³ In Frost's case, this ruin results from nature reclaiming its once settled parts of New England. However, the haunting nature of American colonization underlies this reclamation. Regarding Native Americans, the present condition of whom epitomizes the effect of colonization, Pinsky observes that "the march of empire, colonization, and obliteration has made the dispossessed people simultaneously haunting and unattainable, a violent symbol of the past as unrecoverable yet operative, and vaguely shaming."³⁴ Any search for an American past inevitably leads to an unattainable connection to the land, making it painfully obvious that Americans, once the possessor, have become the dispossessed. Lee, meanwhile, arrives at a dispossessed and "ruined" America as a consequence of his lost Chinese heritage. By virtue of this lost past, Lee finds himself an American in tradition.

Search for Origin as Tradition

Part of this American tradition is a motive for writing that Pinsky describes as "self-contradictory in its yearning toward a past that in one way seems forgotten and sealed off, yet in another way is determinant, powerfully haunting the present."³⁵ In it, as Goellnicht states, memory serves as "the very proof of existence. . . . The act of remembering, of putting fragments back together . . . is presented as essential for survival."³⁶ The binary conflict of Lee's desire to both remember and forget the past is omnipresent throughout his poetry. "For a New Citizen of These United States," for example, presents a narrator in conflict with an invisible audience that wishes to forget the past. Only, as the poem progresses, Lee leaves the reader with the impression that the conflict is within the narrator. The narrator insists that his audience won't remember the past and that he therefore "won't mention" it.³⁷ Yet the poem consists entirely of the memories he has "so meaninglessly preserved."³⁸ The narrator seems to speak more for his own benefit than for his forgetful audience, convincing himself of the need to remember his origins. Unfortunate to the process of memory, the unattainable past has little effect on the present, and therefore becomes "only our / life, our life and its forgetting."³⁹ The need to remember—the need for heritage—becomes confused with a need to forget the pain of a past to which no one can return.

American tradition finds further definition in the hope that one may still find origin in spite of this ruin. Pinsky's essay attempts to show that American memory, in spite of "the absence of continuity" can perform its "cultural work."⁴⁰ He comes to the ironic solution that "Directive" and other poems that explore "the fragile, heroic enterprise of remembering" succeed in creating an American memory because of their subject matter.⁴¹ If that is so, then Lee's poetry also becomes an important element of the American memory in that it offers the possibility of finding meaning within the ruins of tradition. The house of ruin in "With Ruins" is at once "an idea / receding into indefinite rain, / or else that idea / emerging, skeletal / against a hammered sky."⁴² In "Furious Versions," Lee describes his poetry as "something about to be dispersed, something about to come in to being."⁴³ In both poems, the same discontinuity that threatens to disintegrate tradition becomes a source for a new, formative tradition in which the Chinese immigrant plays as much of a role as does the displaced American. Lee boldly proclaims the dual ownership of this heritage—this reconstructed memory—"It's mine. / It's all yours."⁴⁴

If, as Eliot articulates, tradition "cannot be inherited," but must be "obtain[ed] . . . by great labor,"⁴⁵ then the primary "labor" of American literature is the constant formation and reformation of the American identity. Pinsky insists that Americans "are perpetually in the process of devising ourselves as a people."⁴⁶ Lee becomes a part of the labor in his conscious effort both to obtain and develop a tradition. The title "Furious Versions" implies this constant structuring of tradition and memory. Parts six and seven of the poem become Lee's commitment to concrete his "human story," Chinese and American at once, through "ceaseless invention, incessant / constructions and deconstructions."⁴⁷ In this manner, the past lives as "the old poem / birthing itself / into the new / and murderous century."⁴⁸

Understanding American literature as a search for origin permits Lee's poetry meaning beyond the confines of an Asian American stereotype. Lee, despite the Wakayama group's fears, can honestly say "we" as an Asian and mean the American tradition. His poetry reveals the fact that the life and experiences of an Asian American are, in reality, the quintessential subject of American literature. Like Robert Frost or T.S. Eliot, Lee finds a place in the American tradition through his articulation of the problem of origin in a country shaped by immigrants. His attempt to define identity in spite of a lack of origin, and to thereby form an origin, is a commonality that transcends ethnicity and permits dialogue between the traditional American writers of the past, and Asian American writers of the present.

This document is a slightly revised version of an article that appeared in the April 2000 edition of Brigham Young University's Insight magazine (Volume 15, Issue 2, pages 32-39). Click here for a pdf copy of the original article.

Endnotes

1. Lee says, "I can't tell if my being Chinese is an advantage or not, but I can't imagine anything else except writing as an outsider." He added: "It's bracing to be reminded [that] we're all guests in the language. any language" (quoted in Zhou Xiajing, "Inheritance and Invention in Li-Young Lee's Poetry," MELUS (Spring 1996), 113, 131.
2. Xiajing, 114.
3. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 41.
4. Elaine Kim, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to Their Writings and Their Social Context (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 228.
5. Ibid.
6. "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is perhaps the most important essay on literary criticism written during the twentieth century. Eliot uses it to introduce many of the formalist ideas that the New Critics eventually embrace. In this essay, however, I am mostly concerned with the first part of Eliot's essay, in which he establishes the idea of a European literary tradition that is constantly shaped by dialogue between writers of the present and their predecessors. When I call Eliot's essay "distinctly American," I refer to its insistence that there is a need to find a tradition. This search for a sense of traditions, and to thereby arrive at a sense of origin, is the underlying motive held by expatriates in Europe. It is also of primary concern to my exploration of the American tradition in this paper.
7. T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the individual Talent," in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th ed., ed. M. H. Abrams (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993), 2:2171.
8. "Voices of Memory," Interview, Public Broadcasting System, 1989.
9. Judith Kitchen, "Review of The City in Which I Love You," Georgia Review (spring 1991), 161.
10. Ruth Y. Hsu, "Li-Young Lee," Dictionary of Literature Biography, vol. 165, ed. Joseph Conte (Detroit: Gale Research, 1996), 146.
11. Frost wrote "Directive" in 1947. In it, he takes his reader on a spiritual journey to an area of New England once occupied, but now abandoned. In watching the New England forest reclaim the land, Frost suggests that the American reader may find a sense of origin in the confusion caused by the merger of nature and civilization. (Robert Frost, "Directive," in Robert Frost: Poetry and Prose, ed. Edward Connery Lathem and Lawrence Thomas [New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972], 156-57.)
12. Eliot, 2171.
13. Donald C. Goellnicht, "Blurring Boundaries: Asian American Literature as Theory," in An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, ed. King-Kok Cheung (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 351.
14. Robert Pinsky, "Poetry and American Memory," Atlantic Monthly (October 1999): 68—69.
15. Li-Young Lee, "Furious Versions," in The City in Which I Love You (Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 1990), 13:10—11.
16. Hsu, 146.
17. This poem, more so than any of Eliot's other poems, attempts to define Eliot, a foreigner, within the English tradition. In it, Eliot reacts to the impending doom to which many English citizens felt resigned during World War II. Through retelling events of English tradition and history that have survived death, Eliot assures both himself and his readers meaning that could outlast even the death of England, herself. Essential to the poem, of course, is that Eliot presents himself as an example of English tradition. I suggest that "Furious Versions" has the same purpose for Lee within the American tradition; in it, he attempts to define his place in the American tradition.
18. Lee, "Furious Versions," 20:187.
19. Ibid., 22: 252.
20. Ibid., 19: 168.
21. Ibid., 18:157.
22. T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," in The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909—1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1980), 230-31.
23. Ibid., 95.
24. Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984), 271.
25. Eliot, "Little Gidding," 98.
26. Frank Chin, "Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and Fake," The Big Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature, ed. Jeffrey Paul Chanet al. (New York: Meridian, 1989), 3.
27. Lee quoted in Matt Miller, "Darkness Visible," Far Eastern Economic Review (30 May 1996): 35.
28. Xiajing also provides support for this statement. He says, "One's heritage is not possessed once for all, nor is it necessarily inherited through ethnic lineage. Rather, it is changed and renewed with the changing conditions of human life and human consciousness" (115).
29. James Oppenheim, "Poetry—Our First National Art," The Dial (February 1920): 238.
30. Ibid., 240.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 70.
33. Li-Young Lee, "With Ruins," in The City in Which I Love You, 43:3-4; Frost, "Directive," 156:5.
34. Pinsky, 64.
35. Pinksy, 62.
36. Goellnicht, 352.
37. Li-Young Lee, "For a New Citizen of These United States," in The City in Which I Love You (Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 1990), 41: 15.
38. Ibid., 42:38.
39. Ibid., 42:42-43.
40. Pinsky, 40.
41. Ibid., 70.
42. Lee, "With Ruins," 43:14-18.
43. Lee, "Furious versions," 15:65—67
44. Lee, "With Ruins," 45:54-55.
45. Eliot, 2171.
46. Pinsky, 62.
47. Lee, "Furious Versions," 25:295-96.
48. Ibid., 29:411.