Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Co-organized by COMPASS, the graduate student association of the Comparative Lit Dept at the University of Georgia, Athens, and the Wilson Center for Humanities and Arts, my lecture-and-reading "Translation as a Literary Trope" was held online on March 25, 2020. I spoke about my relationship to Singapore's (neo)colonial linguistic policies, my encounter with American poets and poetry, and the development of my hybrid work, Snow at 5 PM: Translations of an insignificant Japanese poet. Thanks, Aruni Kashyap, for suggesting that I visit and, Subrahleena Deka, for organizing the event.

  This week, we mourn yet another hate crime, this time against Atlanta’s Asian women massage workers. We are reminded of the prevalence of anti-Asian hate, especially at the intersections of immigration status and class; the hypersexualization and fetishization of Asian women; and the anti-sex-work ideology both within and outside of the US. We recognize that we still live in a society built on white supremacy and patriarchy. And we also remember why we continue to do this work—our love for  us . In the face of violence and erasure, we are more committed than ever to telling our stories. Gaudy Boy will be donating all sales proceeds from March through May to Minkwon Center for Community Action. You can find all our titles on our  website . Based in Flushing, Queens, Minkwon Center for Community Action meets the needs of low-income Asian immigrant communities through advocacy and community organizing, increasing civic ...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Last week a student took me to task for not warning the class that we would be talking about suicide, Lady Macbeth's self-harm. The same student had objected to my drawing a parallel between the civil war at the start of Shakespeare's play to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol the day after the event. It was too soon, too emotional for too many people, the student wrote. On both occasions, I bristled in self-defense, ego bruised, competence questioned. I had so many good pedagogical reasons for doing what I did. But not having done something for the past 15 years is not a good reason for not doing it now. One could be making the same mistake year after year, unintentionally, until one is told. That the causes of harm are various, multiple, and nebulous is no reason for not warning of the ones that we know of: suicide and rape, for two clear instances. And if trigger warnings soften our ch...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . In the recent Committee of Supply Debate, Workers' Party MP Jamus Lim called for smaller class sizes in Singapore's schools . Class sizes now average 33 pupils. MP Lim proposed a cap of 23 pupils. As he argued in his Facebook post, "It all depends on what we think the purpose of the classroom is. Is it to simply deliver the material in the prescribed syllabus, leaving the onus of understanding to the student? Or is it to foster genuine learning, ensuring no child is left in the dark? There’s nothing inherently wrong with the first position. In fact, that’s what often happens at the tertiary level; the student is expected to take ownership of their education. But if it is the latter, especially the lower levels, then I think our system falls short." It is a mistake to view education as "delivering the material in the prescribed syllabus" at any level of the system. As the o...

I'm an admirer of Rigoberto González's previous book Unpeopled Eden . In this new book, he continues his excavations into history in the poem "The Ghosts of Ludlow, 1914-2014," but also extends his range by writing a number of poems that read like parables. "A Brief History of Fathers Searching for Their Sons" returns to a major theme in Unpeopled Eden , but is both more general in its implications and more personal in its details. The effect is perhaps less urgency in the tone, but it is also more melancholic. The strongest achievement of this parable mode is, I think, "Hagiography of Brother Fire and Sister Smoke," which raises its elements up on an imaginative exploration of the qualities of both. It is because we think we know what fire and smoke are, and so we are constantly surprised by what the poet make of them in his vision.

My favorite essays in this book are the ones that examine the death of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and female artistic friendships. The first is a feat of snooping, the second a feat of honesty. I also enjoyed the meditation on Richard Pryor and what he taught the author about impersonations while remaining one's own racial identity. The more personal materials are well written, but exhibit a big gap in them—the absence of the mother—which Park Hong admits is matter for another time. Without the tussle with that obviously out-sized person in her life, the reckoning feels incomplete.

  Last year I visited Rachel Hadas's lit class at Rutgers and read them some of my poems. At the end of their semester the students wrote about a poem that made an impression on them. I'm so pleased that two people wrote about "A Whole History," a gay breakup poem, and one wrote about "Attribution," about the time at Oxford when I was caught for plagiarism. The piece on "Attribution" was particularly perceptive, eloquent, and moving about the aftermath of colonialism. The student wrote, "The concept of this poem was one which I personally could relate to, having lived in South Africa for 4 years and also being from Zimbabwe which was a country that was colonized by the British between 1888 through 1980, I found out Jee and I have similar backgrounds in that aspect. I think when you've experienced living in the aftermath of colonialism even when in modern times you cannot forget about its existence because the residue still lingers to this ...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Singapore has every reason to be proud of Asymptote , the outstanding journal of literary translation with a monthly global readership of 55,000 for the 1,603 translations published and archived in its ten years of existence. In 2015, Asymptote became the first magazine to receive the London Book Fair Award for International Literary Translation Initiative. The Guardian hosted its high-profile weekly showcases between the period of 2015-2017, winning it and the newspaper even more readers for literary translations. Yet Singapore's National Arts Council has never provided any long-term funding for Asymptote, which is founded and headed by LEE Yew Leong, a Singaporean, and incorporated in Singapore. It is not for the lack of trying on the part of Asymptote. The journal made two major attempts, in 2016, after the London Book Fair Award, and in 2020, to ask for the kind of funding that would susta...

Alternately sidesplitting and heartbreaking, and sometimes both at the same, this is a wonderfully alive depiction of a Native American teenager torn between the reservation and school in a small white farming town. It does not shy away from looking at alcoholism and death, but makes the first so humanly understandable and the second so movingly bewildering that it transcends the boundaries of YA literature.