Winner of 2014 American Book Award
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The final collection in this group, Water Chasing Water (2013) by Koon Woon, with ink-drawings by Sean Chao, is the only non-debut in this review, although selections from his award-winning first book, The Truth in Rented Rooms, appear therein. At a robust 140 pages, Koon Woon’s offering is no shy volume. It encompasses an impressive range of socio-historical moments from turn-of-the-century Chinese bachelors to a drought in Guangzhou, a road trip on Highway 101 along the west coast to the Pacifica, and his personal journey through schizophrenia. As long-time friend Sesshu Foster notes in the “Foreword,” we are fortunate that “Koon Woon hid out in the Aberdeen, Washington walk-in freezer of the family restaurant to read Joyce and Kafka. It takes a cross-cultural rebel and sometime outside like Koon Woon to move between worlds, showing us the doors between them.”
In a wittily ironized turn on identity politics, “Please Sir, Tell Me Who I Am” draws attention to the diversity of ethnicities within an imaginary pan-Asian body politic: “Please sir, before you release a bullet against me, / tell me who I am, or if I am who I think I am.” In other words, the poem resists how the dominant culture “reads” Asian faces. The speaker introduces himself by wearing a “waiter’s yellow jacket,” one who brings “teapot and tea.” These multi-faceted “readings” accrue in parodic sequences of hyperbolic Orientalist stereotypes, yielding hilariously incongruous paradoxes or chimeric aphorisms: “one tree going into a forest to / hear false poets in my deaf ear!”
Wide-ranging and deeply emotive, Water Chasing Water is a seasoned volume, eloquent in its plain-spoken political subject matter, supremely moving in lyric, and daring in its explorations of individual psychological trauma and socio-historical events. Koon Woon portrays various Chinese masculinities and turn-of-century bachelor immigrant experiences from a rich personal core – of tender, restrained desire, at other times highly charged with male-centered awareness, balanced with a sense of gender equity issues. Consider, for instance, this snippet from “Uncle Harry:” “A man needs his son to write down his legacy, which is transitory / like the summer span of an insect that lands and then takes off again,” and this excerpt from “Bronze Statue in Rain:”
The Chinese say “woman” under “roof” is “peace.”
If you are indeed woman,
The sculptor has misrepresented you.
In this anniversary celebration of two decades of creative lava pouring out of Kaya Press – in the spirit of its tagline with verve, “Smoking Hot Books” — and of redness as an auspicious color across Asian culture — I conclude with these red-hued lines from Koon Woon’s “Two Persimmons Side by Side”:
Somewhere in the world, two
persimmons sit side by side on a shelf,
ripening quietly through quiet days.
On some day of some month, all guitars will weep,
and the persimmons’ red hues will deepen and deepen.
For every brother there is a brother,
and for every persimmon there’s another persimmon,
but for every boy is there a girl?
And for ever girl is there a promised world?
No one knows except the crimson sky
and the red, moist persimmons…”
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