Quick Thoughts on Russell Leong: Country of Dreams and Dust

Russell Leong’s The Country of Dreams and Dust is one of those books of poetry I wonder why I am only reading now, and then in many ways I am glad I am only reading it now. I’d recently picked it up used at Half Price Books in Downtown Berkeley for $4.98, and really was drawn to it because of the publisher, West End Press, who’s published Arlene Biala, Paula Gunn Allen, Nellie Wong, among other writers I admire much.

I think I have many (perhaps justified) preconceived notions of what I expect to find in a collection of Asian American poetry, what so-called conventional immigration and immigrant narratives, what clean delineation between “there” (homeland) and “here” (host country), and how this translates into a neatly packaged conflict the speaker experiences and articulates. Perhaps this is my derisive way of saying I was thinking I’d be reading conventional “identity politics” poetry, and I mean “identity politics” in the simplest, most commonly understood way, that the poet’s (ethnic) identity is the thing driving forth the narrative, the reason for the conflict, and the primary if not sole lens through which he views his “there” and “here” world.

All this to say Leong’s book is not at all what I expected; it isn’t at all “clean” in terms of the breach between “there” and “here,” home and host. So I am checking myself at my own prejudices on “conventional” Asian American narrative, and thinking more on Leong’s many (time and place) loci: Los Angeles in the present day, San Francisco and California post-Gold Rush, Southeast Asia circa 1960’s-1970’s American wars, Tiananmen Square and its aftermath, a modern day free enterprise China.

He is not editorializing; he’s digging into something much more spiritual than the stuff we read in history books and watch on the evening news. Leong’s very neat wording and short lines, clever enjambments, and sectioned multi-part poems well-contain this historic and geographical pinballing between loci. He frames each section of his long poem, from which the book takes its title, with text from English language Christian missionary texts used for the conversion of Chinese communities, and connects these with prostituted Asian girls and women post-Gold Rush and the do-gooder white women who “save” these girls and women only to wrest them away from their ethnic communities, families, and their Buddha. Leong then connects these to foreign invasions in Southeast Asia and the American GI’s bringing home brides. He then presents us with urban multiculturalism gone violently awry, and here I think a little bit of Sesshu Foster’s City Terrace Field Manual for their Southern Californian locales intersect, and the collisions between different folk resonate. And I think institutional violence is an apt term to describe the formation of impoverished ethnic ghettos, disenfranchised community members’ alcoholism and social alienation.

The elements are what binds human experience. Elements’ destructive or “negative” properties, as well as its healing, restorative, or “positive” qualities. Water, for example, as the River Ganges floods and obliterates entire Bangladeshi communities, “Houses extracted from their roots / Like rotten teeth,” his speaker thinks of his reality of “Mojave desert dust,” Southern Californian water rationing. Remember the Ganges is a sacred deity.

I think a lot of Western poets do this badly, link themselves to universal human experience and hence get a piece of Third World suffering. I believe Leong pulls it off, for framing or overarching this entire collection are the teachings and practices of Guatama the Buddha, and Leong’s strong Buddhist faith and practices, and the faiths and practices of the historical and contemporary speakers in his poems, in resistance against Christian conversion and subsequent subservience to the agents of conversion, as well as his strong Buddhist belief in peaceful action in the face of such acts of violence, institutional and the resulting violences the disenfranchised inflict upon one another. Amid the violence of immolation (and I think of the L.A. “riots”), we come to understand fire’s cleansing properties.

Tags: Russell Leong, The COuntry of Dreams and Dust, West End Press