Southeast Asian, Take 3

This morning I thought of Sarith Peou’s chapbook, Corpse Watching. I remembered what made this publication possible was first Ed Bok Lee’s poet-outreach work into the Minnesota prison system, where Peou, a survivor of Khmer Rouge genocide, has been serving time, and then Tinfish’s openness to consider such stark, graphic, relevant work. Like Linh Dinh, Sarith Peou’s work is not nostalgic and it is not beautiful. Something like Linh Dinh, there is something like a “Poetics of Disgust,” at work here, with unrestrained descriptions of corpses in the river, diseases and bodily maggot infestations in the labor camps, which I think counters popular American expectation of any Southeast Asian experience to be voiced as sentimental, and grateful to the American savior. Too many misguided American war movies, it’s also disaster porn, watching all those poor refugees bombed and razed, loaded into boats.

This morning I also thought of Bryan Thao Worra’s On the Other Side of the Eye, in which he voices critically the expectation and desire of his writing workshop colleagues to really deliver that pain of war and exile from the motherland. This too is disaster porn. All this, when post-relocating, and very matter-of-factly, Bryan, a Laotian adoptee transplanted into the Midwest, simply wants to tell us that the USA changes people.

So this is anti-nostalgia then, as I am also thinking of Katie Vang, who is a Hmong performance artist, who performed at Bryan’s book release party at The Loft back in August. The piece she did then, was spoken in a mother’s bilingual voice, and it was an angry voice, telling us a story of her family’s day in the life, dad and the kids scavenging through alleyway dumpsters for useful things which Americans have thrown out.

These are the things I am thinking are relevant to being here, and growing up here.