Yearn Hong Choi’s poetry book, Moon of New York

Yearn Hong Choi’s poetry book, Moon of New York(Baltimore, PublishAmerica, 2008)

 

I am honored to introduce Dr. Yearn Hong Choi’s latest volume of poetry, MOON OF NEW YORK.  As a professor of multi-ethnic American literature searching over the past decade for important writers to introduce my students to, I found Dr. Choi’s work. As the coordinator of the Writing Program at Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland, I wanted my students to meet and be inspired by such a hard-working lifelong writer. His contributions to American literature via his groundbreaking anthologies of Korean-American writing and his own accomplishments as a Korean writer in America—of essays, memoirs, and poems—are unparalleled.  And he is not even a writer by vocation!  I am in awe of someone who possesses such surplus dedication and talent to be able to write—and so prolifically!—in addition to excelling as a career lifelong government consultant and social science professor!  Or, to modify some lines from his poem, “To Koh Choong-suk,” his “poetry-loving heart” has accompanied him “beyond [his] professional fields.”  With the breadth and depth of his knowledge, his eclectic interests, and his wide-ranging life experiences, he can engage an audience—in publication and in person—diverse in age, race, ethnicity, nationality, and language.

 

Last year, when I relocated to the metro DC area, I tried to locate Dr. Choi.  His biography indicated he lived in Virginia.  His publisher forwarded me his e-mail.  And that is how I came to meet him.  Dr. Choi visited Montgomery College in Rockville last month and regaled close to 200 professors and students with stories about his life and his writing and the history and conventions of Korean and Korean-American literature; he read and discussed some of his poems; and he fielded wide-ranging questions about art, history, and politics over three hours!  I should note that Dr. Choi’s visit occurred the morning after the presidential elections.  Most of the crowd was tired from election night and basking in the afterglow of this historic moment.  Yet, he took them to new topics and moods with each poem he read and discussed.

 

One of the students asked Dr. Choi why he wrote; another asked why he wrote poetry.  Dr. Choi responded: “The question is the same as ‘Why do you climb the mountain?’

The best answer I know…is: because the mountain is there. Yes, the mountain invites the hiker. The poetry invites the poet. Does this statement make sense?...I am not satisfied with the answer…I just wish and hope my writings positively affect many readers. But I know poetry has little utility to this society and is not comparable to Bill Gates’ Microsoft’s mighty power…I do not know the utility of poetry in this modern world, but I can compare my poetry as wild flowers in the field. I appreciate wild flowers whenever I walk into the field. I wish and hope you appreciate my poetry as I appreciate wild flowers.” Everything seems to command Dr. Choi’s attention, and thus, everything must be made into poetry.

 

As Dr.Choi notes in his introduction to this volume of poetry, the poems in MOON OF NEW YORK “are confessions of a Korean-American life from 1968 when I came to Indiana University as a foreign student to today.” Early in the book there is a poem called “Resume”: despite its title, it is a poem, and it glosses in ten-year increments changes of epic proportions in the personal and political spheres. “Born in the last days of the Japanese rule/In Korea./When I was ten years old,/I was a refugee in the Korean War./When I was twenty years old,/I was a college student/with poetry and arts./When I was thirty years old,/I was a college teacher in Wisconsin./When I was forty years old,/I was a bureaucrat in Washington./When I reach fifty,/I will soothe my two children’s growing pains./When I reach sixty,/I will be ready to depart from this world./But no one knows tomorrow,/No one knows one inch’s future.”  Keep in mind that this poem appears early in the volume.  Dr. Choi eclipsed the decades he imagines in this poem, and later poems in the volume pick up where this one left off. At the end of the book, we are not at the end of a life.  Even in the poem “Retiree’s Last Words” near the end of the collection, Dr. Choi writes, “He did not know where to go next.”  Yet, before the end of the poem, he is embarking on another adventure.  It’s not the last poem; so these are not his last words, either.  His closing of this book necessitates and, thereby opens, another book in the future.

 

In the poem, “To Koh Choong-suk,” Dr. Choi describes how writing poetry “helped me to renew and refashion the dreams of my heart.”  His poems testify to those dreams coming to fruition.  This book charts the course of his life to date.  It begins with a poem called “My Sail,” wherein Dr. Choi wonders, in leaving Korea for America, what he is leaving behind and what he will find. The poem is literal and figurative, and it is apt as the prefatory piece. Dr. Choi is physically making a crossing, a pilgrimage; the poems describe his travels across the US and the world and the journey of his life-course, from schooldays to retirement, marking the milestones of marriage and parenthood along the way, as well as reunions with and losses of parents; and he explores on a cultural and an emotional level who he is and charts how he changes as he moves over that space and time.  In his last poem, “Vienna Waltz,” he’s traded the waters of the Pacific for a stream in his Virginia backyard.  He doesn’t feel split or adrift, as in the first poem, between Korea and America, but whole, engaging selectively with the European heritage of America. Yet, he is still discovering America, for he refers to it as “a new world.”  In the first poem, a boat transports him to what? He is searching for happiness, a.k.a. opportunity, “the vast expanse” between the sky and the ocean, yes?  In the last poem, he transports himself through music and dance to freedom.  He is blissed out.  He is not “alone” in a “distant land.”  He is at home, one with nature, a “citizen” of the world.  This is a different rendering of the American Dream.   Accomplishment and prosperity are in the background; personal satisfaction through exploration and self-expression are celebrated.  Shades of Walt Whitman?  Definitely.  On a sidenote, Dr. Choi alludes to this classic modernist American poet in the title of his memoir in progress, Song of Myself: A Korean-American Life.  While steeped in the traditions of Korean poetry, Dr. Choi demonstrates an awareness of and facility with the anti-traditions of American poetry. Or, as he states at the end of the poem, “America,” “Sleeping in rugged individualism/Is the most attractive in the USA.”  Yet, in many of his poems, in “Journey to Korea,” for example, when he aches for family, he refers to himself as “a son living abroad/So long in a foreign land.”  Yet, coming full circle, many of the poems in the second half of the volume describe some of his sojourns in Korea, referred to not as a homecoming, but as a “visit,” in, for example, the poem “An Empty House.”

 

While these poems were composed in Korean and translated into English, so that, according to Dr. Choi, “there may be some loss in translation,” these poems are far from derivative; more than merely “the same values” remain—these poems reveal some exquisite crafting of the English language and are their own unique pieces of art.  Dr. Choi relishes in alliteration.  His poems flow, too, because they are rhythmic.  Were time to allow for it, I would like to showcase this aspect of his artistry.  First, however, I should provide a thematic overview of the collection.

 

There are 86 poems in MOON OF NEW YORK.  Dr. Choi has a lot to say about a lot of subjects!  Reminiscences predominate. There are poems about the seasons and nature, the desert, flowers, the woods, and water, especially the ocean.  The ocean serves both a symbolic and stylistic function in these poems.  It ebbs and flows, just as these poems pulse and fade with alternately disturbing and then ephemeral thoughts. In the poem “Reminiscence,” Dr. Choi equates his life with the ocean through the phrase “By time and tide.” Like Dr. Choi’s poetry, it is both beautiful and functional. Symbolically, it represents the repository of the ancient history of the Earth and humankind; source of nourishment and rebirth; symbol of constancy or recurrence in waves and tides and of change in storms and streams.

 

There is writing about writing.  Because family serves as the impetus for writing, poems about family address issues about writing, too.  In an essay Dr. Choi shared with me, he wrote: “I read children’s poems and stories before I went to school. My parents taught me Korean and Chinese letters when I was a pre-school child. They told me later that I was an avid reader, and later a writer. I seemingly enjoyed metaphor in my early age…When I look back my life, I was born to my parents who loved poetry and literature. They were compassionate human beings who cared for disadvantaged people and things, and tearful about the sad things around their lives. Tears and sad things are the sources of my poetry and literature. I left my mother and my family, and my country…I remained in the United States very long time. I became an immigrant to the States. Writing hundreds of letters every year over 40 years was the source of my poetry and literature…Life is a process of departing and separating myself from the dearest persons in the world…Life is essentially a tragedy. This tragedy makes me write.”  

 

There are poems about and including classical music.  Jesus gets a long and lovely treatment.  The poems, in totality, could be seen as a travelogue, too, for many document his encounters with people and places around the world.  And there are love poems.  Romantic enthrallment with women, primarily, his wife, and the wonders of the world.  Love—in the broadest sense—for family, friends, even strangers.  The most affecting poems address his mother, father, grandmother, daughter, and son.  The title poem, “Moon of New York,” in fact, contrasts the magnificence of the New York skyline from atop the Empire State Building and from across the Hudson River with the puny scene of his daughter “sleeping in an apartment/In midtown Manhattan alone.” Dr. Choi’s eyes and heart are brought low because his daughter is alone and “It is Thanksgiving Night.”

 

In this place and at this time, Dr. Choi’s poetry seems more relevant than ever.  We are in Virginia, site of some of the most virulent anti-immigrant backlash in recent memory.  The politicians and protesters in nearby Manassas have repeatedly made national headlines in the past two years.  There are poems in MOON OF NEW YORK which attest to ways that America can be every bit as hostile as it is welcoming, particularly to Asian immigrants and evenAsian-Americans who seem to always be seen as foreigners.  Here are 3 lines from the poem “In Autumn”: “The Oriental is inscrutable/At our untouching selves./I am always a stranger to him.” Violence against Asian Americans takes many forms.  Any act or attitude which makes it so that “Those who cannot enjoy freedom, equality and democracy/In the land of freedom, equality and democracy/Feel pain,” taken from a poem titled“Ulcer,” is violence.

 

We are one month away from the end of George Bush’s eight-year reign.  Poems in MOON OF NEW YORK look critically and quizzically at the actions and long-term impact of this president.  In “America,” Bush is a young Caesar, America an empire. One poem, “War Against Terror,” describes the war as an “Occupation,” and hinges on the statement: “I don’t see the difference between the terrorist and the imperialist.”  Yet in another “America” poem, this “Rome of the twentieth century,/…shall not collapse/Like the other.”  But not because of Bush!  Because “The country’s nature is beautiful,”—albeit, as the poem explores, contradictory—according to the translation of the Chinese characters for USA, which mean “Beautiful Country.”  There is “equality and democracy”—rich and poor “enjoy the same hamburger and coca-cola,” and workers believe in the American Dream, even if capitalism ensures their perpetual inequality and exploitation.  Or, as in the poems “Blues” or “Hate Crime” or “Ulcer” or “Virginia Rhapsody,” violence results in the sometimes discriminant, sometimes random killing of innocent people, in these poems, youth and elders, Americans and immigrants, equally.  With the economic crisis we are now facing, as we read daily about senseless acts of violence on the streets, in the schools, and in homes in every neighborhood in our area, and, with the country’s war inIraq and Afghanistan continuing unabated, even escalating, these poems couldn’t be more prescient.

 

Dr. Choi doesn’t shy away from explicitly political subjects.  In the poem “Russia,” he privileges humanity and art over economic theory and political principles.  In the poem “At Mt. Kumkang Village, North Korea,” he describes the melancholy he feels looking at a fellow Korean through barbed wire.  One of my favorite poems is called “Will of a Comfort Woman,” wherein Dr. Choi adopts the persona of a survivor who struggles with living while longing for death and rebirth, who bears disgrace quietly and yet names for herself the real crime: “Disgrace was that I was a woman born to a helpless kingdom./Why should I feel shame?/The kingdom should be ashamed.”  

 

He addresses the delicate matter of Black-Korean relations in this country in several poems.  These poems sparked the strongest reaction from my students, for they are raw with rage and grief—and rightly so. In these poems, the color black signifies humanity and unity, for all the colors mixed make black, and it is associated with birth and death, the great equalizers, “the darkness/Of our mother’s womb, and/We all return to the darkness/Of our tombs.” (from “Hate Crime”) “Blues” and “Hate Crime” are heart-wrenching poems.  In “Blues,” two dreams—the dream of an immigrant, “a middle-aged mother/From a distant land” who came with “a ‘Great Gatsby’ dream” and the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to eradicate racial prejudice through recognizing shared humanity and sharing opportunity—are shattered simultaneously by a robbery and shooting, wherein “Little Black kids” aim at a “Korean mother.”  The legacy of racism and violence is passed down to these children, turned not on the oppressor—“Where did you get the guns?/From the whites who have killed your ancestors?/Then, you should have aimed at the white killers,” but deflected onto another of the oppressed.  In the poem “Ulcer,” “One discriminated man killed another discriminated person!/If he was rather murdered by the KKK,/My stomach pain would be less sharp.”

 

Dr. Choi faced his severest racist attacks not on a street, but in academia.  But his struggle to earn tenure at a university in Virginia in the 1960s, in other words, in a South in the throes of a backlash against the Civil Rights Movement, granted him a nuanced understanding of American racism, as he reveals in the poem called “Accent.” When he challenged the university’s decision against him, his branding as an enemy was couched racially: “Somebody called me after midnight/In a low voice,/’You are not even a nigger. How can you complain/in this country?/It happened after I registered my complaint against/A white university in Virginia.”  What I like most about this harsh poem is Dr. Choi’s use of irony: “I received the highest students’ evaluations, but/The university said, ‘You are no good, because you have/A Korean accent.’/I let the university know that Henry Kissinger has his accent./The university paid a merit-based salary increase/In the first five years,/Then they must have loved my accent.”  His coming to this country during the 1960s and living and working on the West Coast, in the Midwest, and in the South gave him a panoramic, accurate, and generous view of America.   Participating in the political movements of the time gave him a sense of solidarity with other people of color in this country, which is clearly why the conflicts between Blacks and Koreans pain him so.  Knowing the story of the Korean diaspora, likewise, breaks down, for him, the barriers between Koreans and other people.  The poem “Black Korean,” for instance, delineates the migration of a Korean man from Hawai’i to Mexico to Cuba to work on one plantation after another, begetting in his “odyssey” multiracial progeny whom Dr. Choi meets in Washington, DC, one day.

 

Let me conclude by attending to the most difficult and topical poem in MOON OF NEW YORK.  It comes near the back of the book because it details a local tragedy that captured national attention only a year ago.  The poem is “Virginia Rhapsody.”  After Dr. Choi read it, my students were stunned by the immediacy of the incident and of the sentiment.  He brought them in and took them out of what was a painful episode for him personally and for Korean immigrants across America: the Virginia Tech Massacre.  That pain caused Dr. Choi severe depression, according to the opening and closing of this poem.  But in this poem, he also shuttles between his pain and the unrelenting and inconsolable pain Sung-Hui Cho, who came from this very county in Virginia, clearly must have borne that neither music, family love, literature, or faith could relieve it.  Full of allusions to classical music and classic American literature, it is an all-American scene with an Asian face, unfortunately: “Your death is not the final solution: spirit of the dead, sorrow of the family, guilt/of three million Korean immigrants to this country, and shame of the country/you left when you were only eight.”  One of mystudents, who identified himself as Korean-American, asked Dr. Choi hesitantly why it mattered that the gunman was Korean-American.  That question, I thought, sets in relief the generational differences and cultural shifts that the poems in this collection so thoughtfully define.  

 

Asked by one of the students what he hoped to accomplish with his poetry, Dr. Choi replied: “I hope my poetry is a prayer for wisdom, courage, and justice…I hope my poetry is comforting men and women in sorrow and sadness…I hope my poetry is a comfort to many Korean immigrants to the United States and other minority people. I hope my poetry is a comfort to some white American people, too. Anyone in sorrow, I hope, can find time and strength to read my poems.” I hope that my introduction to MOON OF NEW YORK persuades you to read this collection—immediately.  Thank you for your consideration.

 

 

Professor Ellen Olmstead

Montgomery College

 

December 13, 2008