I'm going to begin with the self introduction of sorts.
It's called "How I Got That Name,"
an essay on assimilation.
I always begin with this poem because it grounds the reading
with biography, a little biography.
OK.
There's some made up stuff as well.
"How I got that name," an essay on assimilation.
I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin.
Oh, how I love the resoluteness of that first person singular
followed by that stalwart indicative of "be"
without that uncertain I-N-G of becoming.
Of course, the name had been changed somewhere between Angel
Island and the sea when my father, the paper
son, in the late 1950s obsessed with the bombshell blonde,
transliterated Mei Ling to Marilyn.
Nobody dared question his integrity,
given his nice devout daughters, and his bright, his just
industrious sons, as if filial piety
were the standard by which all Earthly men were measured.
Oh, how trustworthy were their daughters,
how thrifty our sons, how we manage
to fool the experts in education, statistics,
and demography.
We're not very creative, but not adverse
to rote learning, rote learning, rote learning.
Indeed, they can use us, but the model minority is a tease.
We know you are watching now, and we refuse to give you any.
Oh, bamboo shoots, bamboo shoots.
The further west we go, we'll hit east.
The deeper down we dig, we'll find China.
History has turned its stomach on a black polluted beach,
where life doesn't hinge on that red, red wheelbarrow,
but whether or not our new lover in that final episode of "Santa
Barbara" will lean over scented candle and call us a bitch.
Oh, Lord.
Where have we gone wrong?
We have no inner resources.
Then, one redolent morning, the Great Patriarch Chin
peered down from his kiosk in heaven
and saw that his descendants were ugly.
One had a squarish head and nose without a bridge.
Another's profile, long and knobbed as a gourd.
The third, the sad, brutish one may never, never marry.
An I, his least favorite, not quite boiled,
not quite cooked, a plump pomfret simmering in my juices,
too listless to fight for my people's destiny.
To kill without resistance is not slaughter,
says the proverb.
So I wait for imminent death.
The fact that it's death is also metaphorical
is testament to my lethargy.
So here lies Marilyn Mei Ling Chin,
married once, twice to so-and-so, a Lee and a Wong,
daughter of the virtuous Yuet Kuen Wong
and G.G. Chin the infamous.
Sister of a dozen, cousin of a million, survived by everybody
and forgotten by all.
She was neither Black nor White, neither cherished nor
vanquished, just another squatter in her own bamboo
grove minding her poetry when one day heaven was unmerciful
and a chasm opened where she stood.
Like the jaws of a mighty white whale,
or the maw of a metaphysical Godzilla,
it swallowed her whole.
She not flinch nor writhe, nor fret about the afterlife,
but stayed.
Solid as wood, happily, a little gnawed, tattered,
mesmerized by all that was lavished upon her
and all that was taken away.
[APPLAUSE]
So that's a dramatic monologue and--
[LAUGHTER]
No.
No?
[LAUGHTER]
Not slam, I was told.
[LAUGHTER]
But--