Asian American Literature Festival 2024 Keynote Address

Nellie Wong

The literature, poetry, art, songs of Asian America sail and float throughout the cosmos, indeed on earth through workers’ hands, their compassion, survivors’ instincts, their respect for the living and the dead, for permanent revolution, our communal search for bread and roses, for beauty.

Our voices may tremble or shout, murmur, somersault, lift.  Indeed, they sing.  And through this gathering of the Asian American Literature Festival Book Fair, our voices multiracial, multicultural, multigender, rumble, dance humanity’s joys and sorrows.  We won’t shut up. We open up, we fight for what’s possible. To be seen.  To be heard.  To live.  To work together.  To truly share, to thrive.

Little did I understand, when I was growing up on the streets of Oakland Chinatown, that literature and poetry surrounded me.  There’s seven of us kids.  Mom and Pop fighting over money, the lack of it.  Both working day and night to feed and clothe us.  One day I told my mom:  I want to ice skate. I want to swim.  Pushing it.  Why? My mom boomed.  Want to be Sonja Henie?  Want to be Esther Williams?  Ice-skater and swimmer movie stars of the 40s and 50s whom I idolized.  I dared not talk back.

In a class at Laney College, we were supposed to fit wooden blocks and balls and tubes into a slab of holes.  Test our eye-hand coordination, manual dexterity, that kind of thing.  Though hesitant, I wanted to try.

The instructor boomed: not for girls!  I shrunk, upset in silence.

Sitting on my duff, lost in the world of watching TV hours on end, my sister Flo boomed why don’t you take a writing class?  You’re funny she said.  Who? Me? I listened. And I began.  At Oakland High’s Adult Evening School, my first short story wasn’t a short story.  It was a parable, my instructor said.  At San Francisco State, my first poems, handwritten on a spiral-bound shorthand notebook, were skinny, short.   When you write angry poems, throw ‘em away the professor boomed.  I told my feminist sisters.  Don’t have to listen to him, they said.  I took an acting workshop.  What do you do?  the instructor asked.  I’m learning about poetry.  So you’re a poet, he insisted. 

As a teen, I typed for Frank Chin.  He and my brother were friends.  I was known for my speedy, accurate typing skills.  Don’t remember what I typed exactly.  Years later, Frank, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Inada, and Shawn Wong gifted us Aiiieeeee!, a treasure of early Asian American writings.  From Carlos Bulosan’s “America is in the Heart” to Wakako Yamauchi’s “And the Soul Shall Dance,” among other gems.  There we were! Asian Americans. Heart, soul, real.

As a working woman, I typed for the bosses.  At Bethlehem Steel, one of four jobs I’d held during a 40+year career, I asked the sales manager to include me in a sales meeting.  Why? He asked.  So I could learn more about steel, I said.  No! You just want to know too much!   (Read:  you’re only a secretary).

Now, I type for myself, in search of liberation.  Indeed, of the cosmic kinship between you and me, us.  The material, the physical, the historical, the cultural, the spiritual.  Learning what Clara Fraser, socialist feminist intoned: The only thing constant is struggle.

Buoyed by the stories and folklore, chants and memoirs, labor of our bodies and minds, howls and jitterbugs, the terrible wars against our earth, our workers’ lives, our bodies, our dreams, our rights to decide.  Indeed, with my own search for selfhood.  For human hood.  My own path to writing leads to yours, ours.  The paths of Asian American literature entwined, sensual, tough, humorous, maddening, enriching.  Voices old and new.  Voices out and about.  Present, wherever’s home.

On this very land, poet Fady Joudah, tells a story of Palestine.  I found Joudah’s poem, untitled, shown with a pictogram […], in The Guardian’s Poem of the Week by Carol Rumens.  And I quote (without permission): 

“The Palestinian-American poet takes us straight to the aftermath of a blast, and a little girl’s joy at being rescued from the rubble before devastating loss hits.”  This.  In Gaza.

Here’s the poem:

And from out of nowhere a girl receives an ovation

From her rescuers

All men,

On their knees and bellies

clearing the man-made rubble

with their bare hands,

disfigured by dust

Into ghosts.

All disasters are natural

including this one,

because humans are natural.

The rescuers tell her

she’s incredible, powerful,

and for a split second, before the weight

of her family’s disappearance

sinks her, she smiles,

Iike a child

who lived for seven years above ground

receiving praise.

On this very land, poet-educator Merle Woo writes in Yellow Woman Speaks:

Whenever You’re Cornered, the Only Way Out is to Fight

Karen, comrade and sister poet, sends me this news article

about a woman warrior,

She includes a note that says:  

    “We’ve got her philosophy and her strength, too.

    We’ll get them by the ears and let them have it.”

The article is one I’ve been wanting

To slip into speeches, talks, poems, conversations.

The images we get from reality —

Those fighting-back images in the face of great adversity.

I saw another news article of the Voting Rights marchers.

Their banners, red, black and green — for Black liberation,

carried by Carrie Graves of Richmond, VA— mother of

five teenagers.

Carrie says:

     “My arms are tired, my feet have blisters,

      But I’m fired up!”

So what is this article?

The reporter must have loved writing it, the way it came out:

Beijing

     A crippled grandmother caught a leopard by the ears,

Dragged it to the ground and then helped kill it with her

bare hands, official reports said Tuesday.

    Qi Deying, who can barely walk because her feet were

bound from birth, was gathering with herbs with her niece and

grandchildren on a mountain in North China’s Shaanxi

Province when the six-foot leopard attacked her and sank

his teeth into her arm.

    But the animal soon realized he had bitten off more

than he could chew.

    The 77-year-old Qi grabbed the leopard by the ears,

wedged its jaw shut with her right shoulder and forced it to

the ground, the Shaanxi Daily said.

   Their bodies locked in combat, the grandmother and

the leopard rolled more than 120 feet down the

mountainside, bounding off rocks before coming to rest in a

wheatfield.

    Qi called out to her grandchildren, who were hiding

behind a boulder, to come to her aid.  They tore branches

off a tree and helped her beat the animal to death.

    Qi, only bruised, told the paper: “Whenever you’re

cornered, the only way out is to fight.”

Now, from my newest book, Nothing Like Freedom, celebrating 90 years on this planet, I share with you “Angels of Earth,” ancestor writers and fighters that deeply affected my life work in struggle, art, and activism.

Angels on Earth

Angels of earth and agate, silver splinters

Battling death and swooping, skimming the seas when

Chinese warriors Qui Jin and Ding Ling, their wings, their wings

Dive and wish, dine with Owen Dodson and Tillie Olsen, American.

Effervescence of words dotting breastplates, dotting their bodies in

Finery of hungry ghosts of concubines and blacksmiths who

Galvanize streams and rivers, haw flakes red and glistening

In their mouths, teeth for

Justice against random, against planned

Killings of children, women, and men,

Lovers and enemies

Moving horsehair and boar brushes, pen, ink, twigs, fingertips

No nos but yes to human power and will

Over plains and mountains with Audre Lorde and Mahmoud Darwish

Pueblos and zocalos, hamlets and forests, groves of olive trees

Questions and answers, solutions for migrations of

Radical change, what say the dead Yannis Ritsos, Kim Chi Ha never

Surrendering Nawaal El Saadawi and Pat Parker and Karen Brodine

Together and apart, atoms and multiverse, fireworks

Underwater dragons, pterodactyls, our human realm. What say the

Vindicated, the erased the silenced champions, buskers, cartographers

When Margaret Walker wrote Jubilee, when Gloria Anzaldúa, Al Robles

Xylophoned language and deed, when Clara Fraser met Marx, Akhmatova

Yes to angels, when Siu Sin Far, Bulosan, Baldwin, Okada, Yamamoto awaken

Zzzzzz and sing.