Sally Wen Mao’s The Kingdom of Surfaces was published yesterday by Graywolf Press. The book interrogates the Western gaze, the eroticizing/exoticizing of Chinese people, women in particular.
Each poem is a knockout that builds and complicates the theme. The poems often center on objects—jade, poppies, silk and silkworms, pearls and porcelain. In fact, three of the poems are shaped like vases. But hidden in those beautiful shapes are difficult realities of Chinese-Americans, then and now:
“In Atlanta,// a white man shoots/ Kills eight people//Most were Asian women/ He regards//not as ‘people’ but “temptations’”
and
“My century of humiliation began with my body”
The poet brings the historical up to our very moment, engaging with the crude, discriminatory remarks by the former president during the pandemic and the violence and fear his rhetoric caused. Sally Wen Mao was born in Wuhan.
At the center of the book is the ambitious title poem based on the 2015 MoMA exhibit “China: through the Looking Glass” and the Met Gala where the theme was China. The speaker situates herself in the exhibit—“When someone’s fantasy comes true, my nightmare begins.” She roams through the exhibit, where surreal, sometimes frightening, encounters ensue. At the “real” Met Gala, celebrities confused cultures—some wearing (Japanese) kimonos. Rihanna was the only celebrity to wear a gown by a Chinese designer.
There is so much to admire in this book—the glorious poetic forms, the precise diction and image-making, and the social/political chutzpah, just to start. Sally Wen Mao’s subject may sometimes be objects, but she refuses objectification as she becomes the subject in these poems.
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Author: Denise Duhamel
