By Arin Alycia Fong

Cathy Song's poetry possesses a quality of lightness, of quiet conviction, of keen observation. For those of us fortunate to be present at the 'Being Human' panel at last year's Singapore Writers Festival, we witnessed Song read one of her most enduring poems, 'The Pineapple Fields', a piece which captures the complexities of place, language, belonging, and showcases the depth of her empathy for humanity.

Song was born and raised in Hawai'i, and is of Korean and Chinese descent. She has published five collections of poetry, including her debut Picture Bride, which won the 1982 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Her oeuvre centres around generational memory, familial relationships, and experiences that transcend place, identity and culture. She is currently working on a collection of 12 inter-connected stories based on the life of her late father, a second-generation Korean American in Hawai'i and one of the first Asian-American commercial airline pilots in the United States. Writing All the Love in the World (Bamboo Ridge Press, forthcoming 2020) is Song's way of dealing with the grief of losing her father, while also revealing the discrimination he had faced in his early years of commercial aviation. "With so much of the world news being taken up by men behaving badly," she says, "it was time to share stories of men who did not shirk their responsibilities but remained constant, decent, and kind."

A selection of Cathy Song's poems will also be collected in a new anthology of Asian diaspora poetry launching at this year's Singapore Writers Festival. To Gather Your Leaving (Ethos Books, 2019), edited by Boey Kim Cheng, Justin Chia, and myself will, for the first time, bring together poetry by poets of Asian ancestry in America, Australia, United Kingdom and Europe.

1) What are you reading right now?
Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees, a gift from a dear friend with whom I climbed one late afternoon last March the Torre Guinigi in Lucca, Italy, which offers spectacular views of the walled city and is crowned with Holm oaks. We spent the last hour before closing among those ancient trees. The fable's premise of a lifetime spent living in the trees frees Calvino to take flights that are pure poetry. Also, Boey Kim Cheng's Gull Between Heaven and Earth which I regrettably just finished. The immense capacity of Boey's skill and imagination to bring Du Fu out of the distant past so vividly took my breath away.  

2) If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play or poem, who would you be and why?
The six-year-old (soon to be seven-year-old) speaker in Elizabeth Bishop's poem 'In the Waiting Room', because after I first encountered her decades ago, she still manages to astound me with her intuition and intelligence. She describes in the most prosaic of terms that existential moment of crisis when the veil is lifted and what we hold to be true or real slides "beneath a big black wave, / another, and another." She describes what can be experienced in a flash or over longer, crushing periods of groundlessness.

The precocious speaker, her Aunt Consuelo, and the other "grown-up people" waiting to see the dentist, are such ordinary characters, as are the setting (a winter waiting room in Worcester, Massachusetts) and the date (February 5, 1918) repeated like bookends, as if the speaker needs to anchor herself to a certain reality. The seemingly ordinary action of passing the time by flipping the pages of the National Geographic emphasises the seemingly inconsequential scene we have all experienced. Yet all the conditions are ripe for something extraordinary to happen.

The young girl experiences "the sensation of falling off / the round, turning world/into cold, blue-black space" and questions the concept of the self – "…you are an I ,/you are an Elizabeth,/you are one of them. Why should you be one, too?" – her I-ness in the world of volcanoes and "black, naked women with necks/wound round and round with wire" are no less exotic than the people "in the dentist's waiting room" in their "arctics and overcoats." As is so often the case, the child is wiser than all the adults in the room.  

3) What is the greatest misconception about you?
That because I once said I was a writer who happens to be Asian American I somehow shirked my duties to fully embrace being foremost an "Asian American writer." Just as I wouldn't want to have to qualify my being a writer with other signifiers like "female," I feel there is so much in our human experience to write about that doesn't depend on such restrictive lenses. Being Asian American and female certainly inform the way I see things, but the way I see things is primarily as a human being.  

4)  Name one living author and one dead author you most identify with, and tell us why.
Murasaki Shikibu because she was able to live a seemingly double life – composing without clear precedent a world masterpiece while fulfilling the many obligations, formalities and functions of her time and place and social status. Maxine Hong Kingston because when I first read The Woman Warrior in college, she made me realise that I could write about things I had taken for granted.  

5) Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
The act of writing begins with the clear intention of giving myself uninterrupted time (a few hours, an entire day, a week), tending to tasks beforehand as if I am about to go on a trip. Writer's block is those seemingly excruciating moments (hours) of stilling the restless mind, waiting to let what's hidden float to surface. It requires a whole lot of patience. If I can sit through the noise, debris, the temptation to flee, and do something else less difficult – the resistance – something I can work with usually comes through. And if not, I am no longer so hard on myself.  

6) What qualities do you most admire in a writer?
Generosity and kindness. A sense of humour, not taking yourself too seriously.  

7) What is one trait you most deplore in writing or writers?
The opposite of the above.

8) Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
     for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
 You only have to let the soft animal of your body
          love what it loves.
 Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

                                         —Mary Oliver ('Wild Geese')  

9) Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I…
…am a very slow reader. I read with my ears.    

10) At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy, or an action thriller to watch, which will you go for, and why?
A comedy because laughter is the best medicine.    

11) What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
Uji: A word taken from the Japanese word "etchi," which means lecherous person and is often used to describe the men that rub up against you in a crowded bus or train, the  pronunciation and meaning we made fluid, our own to describe the myriad situations (so many unsavoury ones!) we were confronted with as kids growing up in Hawai'i. Small Kid Time is fraught with danger! I think today's terms would be inappropriate, gross, or weird. Somehow those words lack the punch and secret hilarity of "uji." As kids, it was so useful, like a code, a signal we sent out to warn each other about possible pitfalls and danger. Even my own kids have adopted it. I have yet to use "uji" in a poem, although it appears in a short story. Apologies to the city of Uji. 

Like: When it is used simply as a filler, hindering speech, rather than as a verb to show preference or in the construction of a comparison.  

12) Compose a rhyming couplet that includes the following three words: light, buoy, earth.

Rust-linked light corrupts the buoy.
Heaven's claim on earth untethers Puyi.  

13) What object is indispensable to you when you write?
Present mind, unfettered chunks of time.  

14) What is the best time of the day for writing?  
It doesn't matter (See No. 5).  

15) If you have a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree?
Ursula K. Le Guin, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston.  

16) Perhaps a more serious question now. In light of global migrations, heightened nationalism and the obsession with borders in America (and other nations), what are the stakes of writing poetry today? To quote Myung Mi Kim from her 2002 collection Commons, "what are the implications of writing at this moment, in precisely this 'America'?"
Poetry, because it uses the same medium as relentless advertisements, propaganda, rhetoric, party lines, social media messaging platforms – words – has perhaps a harder time than the other art forms to keep from getting lost in the noise.

I used to teach in the Poets-in-the-Schools programme in Hawai'i's public schools. When I would read poetry to kids who lived in households where the TV was always on and the people around them were constantly bickering and swearing, it was like offering them a cool splash of spring water to drink. They were so thirsty! Their faces softened with relief as though they were hearing a kind of music they had never heard before. Poets and writers in the best way they know how must keep replenishing that spring, keep offering that music.  

17) What would you write on your tombstone?
Kindness, above all else.

_____