Here is another interview I did recently with a great writers’ website…

Writing like an Asian Blog, thoughts on writing, composition, and issues of identity
June 17, 2016

Feature: Five Qs with Jeffrey Thomas Leong

Jeffrey Thomas Leong is a poet and writer, born in Southern California and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. For over two decades, he worked as a public health administrator and attorney for the City of San Francisco. He recently earned his MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and while there, began a project to translate the Chinese wall poems at the Angel Island Immigration Station. He is currently seeking a publisher for his manuscript, “Wild Geese Sorrow.” His own writing focuses on the Asian American experience including adoption, multiracial families, and student activism during the 1960s. His poetry and prose have appeared in many publications including Crab Orchard, Cimarron Review, Bamboo Ridge, Hyphen, Cha, Spillway and Poetry Flash. In past lives he has been a singer-songwriter, disc jockey, high school teacher, and open mic host. He lives with his wife and daughter in the East Bay.

(Q1)  How did you select the poems for your reading at “Why There Are Words”? Are these favorite pieces of yours? Did you choose them with the particular audience in mind?

I feel that every reading must have its own particular selection of poems in order to connect with its unique audience. The “Why There Are Words” reading series is a well-established San Francisco Bay Area literary venue, primarily for prose writers who are reading from recently published books. I met the series founder, Peg Alford Pursell, through my wife, and Peg invited me, a poet, to read at their June, 2015 event.

At the time, I was a recent graduate of the MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, where I’d begun a translation project on the Chinese wall poetry at the Angel Island Immigration Station (AIIS) near San Francisco, CA. The reading was located in Sausalito in Marin County, one of the wealthiest suburbs per capita in the entire United States, and mostly white. The site is, according to Google Maps, approximately 3.4 miles as the crow flies from the Immigration Station, directly across Richardson Bay and Raccoon Straits, which is about as close as you can get and still be standing upon dry land.

I chose to read a selection of original poems on my own experience of the Angel Island wall poems, and also selected translations. My first poem was about searching for my father’s Cantonese dialect on the barrack walls; although not a poet, he was a detainee at the AIIS. Next, I read a series of short translations which emphasized the lyricism and longing, anger and resentment of the detainees. I ended my reading with a poem that imagines the connection across space and time between an Angel Island detainee poet and his present day translator, that “white space,” dedicating the work to a dear friend of mine who had died just two weeks earlier.

The reading seemed to connect with the audience, both in its local connection and in empathy for the Chinese immigrant experience. I had only wished that I had my book of translations already available for them to bring home.

(Q2)  In a past interview (2011), you spoke about your adoption experiences. In what ways has your understanding of adoption affected the themes of your poetry? Has it changed since 2011?

As I’d said in that interview, adoption continues to be an important thread in my writing, particularly around the issue of “attachment,” how human beings personally and/or socially connect or not connect to others, and how relationships evolve as one matures. My adopted daughter is now a multi-talented teenager, who continues to explore her own personal history which includes adoption from China. We intend to visit her home town and orphanage in the coming years. My own understanding of adoption has deepened and become more nuanced as she becomes an adult, and I feel poetry has been a part of this process by investigating the emotional underpinnings of family situations.

(Q3)  Do you see any connection between your adoption experiences and your work on translating the Chinese wall poems at the Angel Island Immigration Station?

To me, adoption and immigration are both very deep and often traumatic life experiences that involve dislocation and identity reformation. Who am I in the context of a new family or new country? What happens to the old “I” I was before? Do I feel safer here? Will I survive in the new environment? In the context of change, human emotions can run the gamut from survival fear, resentment and anger, to hope and/or hopelessness, and perhaps then into wonder and belonging. At any one point for an adopted person or immigrant, attachment may mean something totally different than what it does to the native-born or non-adopted person. I have seen glimpses of these mysteries in both my father’s and my daughter’s lives, which I write towards to understand better. For my daughter, I also encourage her own exploration, in her questioning and also in her creative endeavors.

Poem 4

I, young son of the Wong clan from Hèung Sèhng,
straightened up, tossed my writing brush,
to quest for America’s capitol.
I bought an oar, came to the place of Gold Mountain.
Who knew I would be sent to this Island?
If my country were strong, it would not be like this.
When the ship docks, up a gangway straight to shore.

Written at dawn, 24th day in the 13th Year of the Republic,
the idle pen of a lazy boy from the City of Iron.

(Q4)  Is the translation of Chinese poems, which you began with the wall poems, an ongoing project? Are there particular works of translated Chinese poetry that you wish were more familiar to readers?

My initial impulse to translate the Angel Island poems was to connect with family history, my immigrant parents and my own adopted “immigrant” daughter. However, in doing the work, I’ve discovered the complex and wonderful world of literary translation, where one must take creative expression from another language and try to find equivalents in your own.

Through literary translation, I’ve learned to be a better close reader, to occupy that space and time of another, their mind and soul no less, in order to find English words to express another’s sentiments. It is both selfless and selfish, because although one tries to get out of the way of what’s being expressed, one knows all the while that ultimately, you can articulate only within your own sensibilities, lexicon and personal experience.

As a deepening practice for all poets and writers, I highly recommend translation. There are many contemporary and classic Chinese poets being translated today, by Arthur Sze, Fiona Sze-Lorrain and others, in aesthetics that are both ethereal and vernacular. In reading translated poetry, one can approach the heartfelt concerns of a country’s citizens, e.g. the joys and fears of China’s working people, just as the detainee poems of Angel Island revealed another emotional truth from a different time period.

(Q5)  What new works do you have forthcoming?

I am currently in the process of trying to find a publisher for the Angel Island translations and of course, like every other MFA graduate, sending out my own work to journals. This is a new experience for me, of having a manuscript ready for publication. I feel sort of in transition, not quite ready to take on a new project, but starting to explore possibilities. I have thought of writing of my experiences as an Asian American student activist at UC Berkeley in the 1960s, and also of my family’s history as longtime Californians. Whether this writing takes the form of poetry, personal essay, stories, creative non-fiction or something else, is unclear at this time. For a writer, this is perhaps the most challenging but also most exciting of moments, when the pen is poised above the expanse of blank white page.

Posted 17th June 2016 by teacherlee