Chen Chen & Yanyi In Conversation at AAWW

The Asian American Writers' Workshop hosts a conversation between Chen Chen and Yanyi about family, queer identity, and Chinese culture. Yanyi, a 2017-2018 Asian American Writers' Workshop Margins Fellow, heard Chen Chen's poetry for the first time at a reading hosted by Split This Rock and immediately related. "He read 'Race to the Tree,' a poem that surprised me because I was not used to hearing stories like my own," Yanyi explains in the introduction. From there: 

I was 13 when I came out too, was also met with violence and ran away from home for a time. It was surreal—comforting—hearing “Race to the Tree,” and then also to read “Self-Portrait With & Without” and know exactly what Chen’s speaker meant about that 1980s edition of Monkey King.

Chen Chen’s poems have a sense of exaltation and vulnerability to them: poems, with an air of Frank O’Hara, that move in and around mental illness and loneliness; poems that stand together brothers and mangos as much as queerness and Chinese-ness, poems that quiz us on knowing more than one book by Maxine Hong Kingston. Chen’s speaker writes gently but steadily towards relating, towards making families, and towards making further possibilities of families. Over the phone, we thanked our families at Kundiman and the Asian American Writers Workshop, and each other.

Read their conversation at AAWW.