Steffi Sin Reviews Dorothy Chan's Revenge of the Asian Woman

Dorothy Chan was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship in 2014, and her work has been published in Academy of American Poets, The Cincinnati Review, Diode Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She is the Editor of The Southeast Review and Poetry Editor of Hobart.

In her poetry collection Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, 2019), Dorothy Chan breaks tradition and makes her own rules using sonnets and odes to break down the sexualization of Asian women in the entertainment industry. Forcing popularized stereotypes into poetic forms subvert the idea that Asian women are expected to fit themselves into labels because “the movies don’t give the showgirl justice” (77). Movies don’t depict the showgirl in a storyline where “women could be the heroes instead”, so Chan gives women the spotlight they deserve in poems such as “Ode to the Las Vegas Showgirl”, “Ode to All You Beautiful Hong Kong Girls”, and “Triple Sonnet for Sad Asian Girls”. Chan is also the author of Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018) and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017).

Chan’s poems cut with a brazen wit and glow with earnestness while speaking to women who don’t fit in. As the narrator in the poems remarks, “I’m the wrong girl” (27), “I’m a nightmare as a woman,” “a Chinese girl nicknamed Yellow Fever” (25), and “I want to cry, because sometimes, / I too, am a sad Asian girl with demanding / parents who want to go back to Hong Kong / every year” (21), girls who are daughters of immigrant parents, girls who feel torn between two cultures, girls who know what it is to feel “wrong” or like a “nightmare of a woman” because someone derogatively nicknamed them “Yellow Fever”, feel seen and represented in literature through Chan’s words. Chan takes that wrongness, that “Yellow Fever” label Asian girls are given, and she turns it around on those who make her narrator feel like a nightmare. Wielding her razor-sharp wit, Chan uses these pejorative labels as a source of power for her heroines instead. In “Where Are All the Hot Pilots: Thank You, Mrs. Guan”, Chan explains her fear of swans in association with a former swan-like teacher, and when the narrator receives news she is moving to America, Chan writes, “the way I’d stand up / in the middle of class and stretch and eat crackers, / or write my name in Chinese too large… maybe I was the creature Mrs. Guan feared the most in life, / the little girl who wreaked havoc / in the Hong Kong classroom” (85). Chan’s narrator takes ownership over and pride in standing out and being different than Hong Kong girls. She causes chaos in the classroom and defies traditional Chinese values her teacher tries and fails to instill in her, and her sonnets personify these traits too. They often do not rhyme, they are longer than fourteen lines sometimes, and each line does not always contain ten syllables, but Chan deviates from tradition with clear intention. For the careful reader, she titles these as sonnets as a signal about how she is breaking traditional form to prove her own point.

Luxurious details of buffets and unlimited cocktails, pop culture references, glitz, and glamour, burst from Chan’s poems so that when Chan makes us “feel it” (8-9), the reader’s emotions cannot be contained by a ten-syllable line and it defies the space of a single printed page. A syllable count of “Triple Sonnet for Asian Girls Eating Gelato” reveals how excess can still leave the narrator hungry and craving for more. Chan packs the reader’s plate with “lobster wellington and rosemary potatoes,” “biscotti / thrown into marzipan Italian ice cream,” and “strawberry / drizzled on strawberry cream,” presenting us with “the stuff / of dreams,” big dinners and dessert buffets, using an excess of syllables in those lines to literally pack the mouths of an audience reading her work aloud. But as the sonnet transitions into an “arrangement” to marry “a nice / Chinese boy,” the lines are less packed with sumptuous sensory detail. The narrator wonders if her parents are hiding a “guy for me somewhere in Hong Kong” (57) in a relatively short, eight-syllable line, and using the number of syllables, Chan depicts a narrator who is left craving more than what her parents dream for her. Chan continues to play with syllables in “Triple Sonnet for Being Your Own Sugar Daddy” (59). Chan asks, “why did I even think I needed men / for anything,” declaring that she likes “my men a little beautiful / and I like my women a little powerful.” The excess syllables (“and I like my women a little powerful” is twelve syllables after a strong of ten-syllable lines) shows a narrator who is asking for more than “a nice Chinese boy” in her future. In juxtaposition, the lines about “dating and dining,” rolling around “with someone else on a bed of bills”— things women are expected to need men for— are less than ten syllables to convey the message that men do not satiate. Most of the third stanza of this triple sonnet narrates the designing of a dream house and most of the lines fall under ten syllables with the exception of “and what about a topiary with my name” (60). Seeing her name on something is the only thing that makes the narrator feel like she isn’t lacking. There is a notable fifteenth line in this sonnet which is, perhaps, Chan putting her own mark, her own name, on the sonnet. In doing so, she is not only defying traditional rules, but fearlessly making her own, bringing the sonnet into this century.  

“Dream Meal Sonnets,” on the other hand, feels like a sonnet crown at first, but Chan quickly diverges from the traditional form, mirroring how the poem points out that the narrator does not fit in or live up to her parents’ ideal of “the perfect Chinese daughter” working to “attract the perfect Cantonese husband” (47). Chan writes, “Give me everything I want” (51), and then, in the next sonnet, repeats, “Give me everything I want, is probably what my mother / was thinking at age twenty” (52) to show, through poetic form, that when she subverts expectations, she is also adding her own twist to traditional forms because old traditions no longer give her the space to write what she wants. Her narrator asks for more than what her mother received in life, and she also asks for things her mother hadn’t thought to ask for. A close reading of “Triple Sonnet for Goldilocks and the Three Boys” (81) reveals that Chan further uses the traditional sonnet to lean into a deeper meaning of the poem. In the second stanza, lines 1, 2, 10, 11, 13, and 14 all contain exactly ten syllables. These lines describe “our protagonist in a blue gingham / cutout dress, ribbons in her hair, naughty” and depict the “Three Boys” using Starbucks cup sizing to show, through syllables, that this is her idealized fantasy by putting “Goldilocks and the Three Boys” perfectly on display for readers. In the third stanza, it is lines 3, 5, 6, 9, and 13, which contain exactly ten syllables. These lines describe a more unconventional relationship with “pink wigs, heart-shaped paddles, whips” (82), and “a younger man wrapping me in his arms.” Chan’s tidy ten-syllable lines show us that these are the kinds of relationships and kinks that fit the narrator perfectly even if the content is unconventional. It begs readers to consider that what was once taboo should be normalized with no judgement or kink-shaming. There are 10 lines in the first stanza that weren’t ten syllables, 8 in the second stanza, and 9 in the last, “too big, too small, and just right” (81). By creating her own form with different rules, ones that suit her Asian-American voice more advantageously, Chan’s poems support the idea that “the best thing in the world is you… ready to turn some men down” (87), ready to do away with traditions and rules male European poets set centuries ago and move forward by making our own formal choices.

Steffi Sin is a Chinese-American writer from San Francisco, and her work can be found in The Kenyon Review and elsewhere. She is Nonfiction Editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review.