wei xin tee

Chantale: Wei Xin, thank you so much for being with us here today. It's such a treat. Can you share a little bit about what you have submitted to Dialogue, to introduce yourself?

 

Wei Xin: I had a poem called “The Secret Life of Pygmy Elephants,” and the most recent one was “Americans Sing Work Songs,” that's a prose piece that sort of toes the line with poetry. I’d written the first piece a few months before I moved to America to study here and I'd never been to the U.S. before. And it was really a piece about environmental destruction in my country. It came to me in a documentary about the Kinabatangan River, which is a very famous river on the Borneo side of Malaysia. And they were talking about how the biodiversity has become this illusion, because when you float down the river, you think there's a lot of forest, but if you actually step beyond it, it becomes monoculture palm oil, like factories. And it's thinning, you know? And I thought that was the exact same thing that sort of happens with the racial-religious lines in Malaysia. And at the time I was experiencing a lot of grief of seeing it all and sort of coming to terms with being very opposed to the sort of Chinese, Malaysian, Christian, middle-class bubble I grew up in, and I was very troubled by it. And I think that was one of the poems where I really learned that poetry was not so much an art for me but more like processing, and I just don't know any other way how to experience things that are so difficult without poetry.

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​​​​​C: Poetry seems to be a way of how you document your life, a sort of outlet. How long has that been a part of your life?

 

WX: It's honestly still kind of strange now that people know me for my poetry, because I'd never really shown anybody before publishing in Dialogue. It was sort of just a random thing I did, in solitude, just for nobody at all. A way I would sit down and process. I would say more recently it's become far more of a craft, in the sense that I have much more of an enjoyment of the beauty of it. But I think most of the time poetry remains a place of reckoning. And then I'm always learning new things about poetry, so it's always very experimental and I feel like every single poem I write has such a distinct character and diction. And because of that, I always feel very rogue with my poetry, like I'm just scavenging and like putting these parts together.More often than not, when I write, it's for someone, a very specific someone in my life. I put together my first poetry portfolio, and I titled it “Dedicated and Indebted,” because I think that, for me, The words don't belong to me. Even now, I was thinking about what pieces I want to submit, and I was realizing that basically every piece I submit, I need to ask the person first and be like, hey, I wrote this thing about you. Can I let other people read it? Because I realized that it's as much my privacy as theirs. It's so shared, and the poems don't belong to me. They belong to us.

 

C: I want to come back to your second poem, “Americans Sing Work Songs.” Which, when compared with “Pygmy Elephants,” they're both very rooted in place.

 

WX: Yes.

 

C: So what is sense of place doing for you in your writing process?

 

WX: I think being so far away from home makes you notice place in such a visceral way, and I think being homesick makes sense of place far more vivid. I never thought about how contrasting the imagery of those two pieces I put out were. Because “Pygmy Elephants” is so tropical, so lush, so green. But also, the dying tropics is so different from the sort of natural death that happens here over the course of the seasons. Death in the tropics is very unnatural. It's always alive. It's always moving, the bugs, the monkeys. It's just a racket in there. And at any time where it's quiet or you hear machines, it's so wrong. Whereas in the winter, there's this blanket of muted silence. And it's so jarring. It's like, wow, this is so foreign. A lot of “Americans Sing Work Songs” was a reckoning not just with American culture, but a reckoning with the weather. I just could not deal with the lack of sunlight, with how cold it was, and how lonely the winter was in so many ways.

 

C: So, poetry is almost a way for you to fully inhabit a space. When you talk about these different locations, you feel both of them very deeply at a very personal level. So what is your writing process actually like? The technical aspect paired with the way you feel things so deeply?

 

WX: Yeah. I've really not thought about it, and this is part of why I feel so rogue because I do it differently every time. I'm very much a planner. I like to anticipate, I like to predict. But poetry is the one area of my life where it's complete spontaneity, just free and honest. And because it's on paper, I never have to see it again if I don't want to and that's why it's so easy. I think a lot of the time it's like something will happen and or I'll hear someone say a word, I'll have a bunch of conversations and they'll sort of line up in my brain and click. And then I'll just spew out whatever it is, my first draft. That’s how “Americans sing work songs” happened. I had three separate conversations with people and they sort of just meshed into one in my mind. I was like, whoa, these people have been talking to me about the exact same thing.

 

C: It's like a collage.

 

WX: It is like a collage, yeah. Whereas something like “Pygmy Elephants” was very much a slow burn throughout my entire life. A lot of times in my writing process, it very much begins without much technicality. It just is on the page. And then maybe a day or two, I'll open the notebook and be like, oh, this is actually poetically interesting and not just personally interesting. And then I'll edit it, I'll move things around. I think if I truly like what I see on the page, what I'll do is I'll pretend I'm a reader, and I'll try and annotate it. Like, if I move this line here, what's the intention? If I use this word instead of something else. And then like, Emily Dickinson, trying alternate words. Have you seen her manuscripts where she, like, underlines something?

 

C: Constant revision, yeah.

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WX: Yes. And I think it's so sad that poetry has become this polished act. Like Emily Dickinson, I think the reason why like so many versions of her poetry exist is because every poem she wrote had every word had like alternative words and like it's just so strange to me that we've tried to polish it when it's messy.

 

C: Right. You want the mess, you would say. So for you, it's very much welcoming the process and like, I want to see the scribbles and the doodles and what I've crossed out, what I've chosen to put in. That's really interesting because I think, again, that translates into the way you're so generous with your writing. You pour your heart out and you allow those different versions to exist. I think other people sometimes take an opposite take and see the polished version as a way to hide and keep things private, potentially.

 

WX: Like hiding behind the metaphor and the symbolism.

 

C: Yeah, like there's sort of choices in privacy almost, in how much you choose to show.

 

WX: I would say yes to that side too though. Because sometimes there have been poems I've written where it was incredibly abstract, which is rare for me. My poems are very down the ladder of abstraction. A lot of objective correlative, you know. But there have been occasions where I wrote very abstract poems. And I think it's because I was not ready to look what was true in the eye. And a lot of times it's less about hiding from other people and more about, I think, hiding from myself or even hiding from God sometimes. I think there's a lot of meaning that can be very scary when you can really hold it tangibly in your hands which is why I think sometimes poetry is a little bit of a way to skirt around the intensity of prose. I would say I love the mess of poetry because growing up going to Chinese school in Malaysia, I’m so used to being demanded of this rigidity or certain standard of perfection as defined by some authority. I'm so used to that that when I discovered my love for poetry, it was the place and it is always the place where I feel that I can blend anything I've experienced, I can love anyone I love, I can appreciate anything I appreciate and there's no sense of arriving at a conclusion. Whereas I think in any other mode of writing or thinking, there's sort of this demand for resolution and I think that I was reading the book of Job recently, Answers from the Whirlwind, and I think it's interesting that sometimes when I'm reading God's Word, sometimes I have to take the posture of reading poetry in order to fully experience God's presence through His Word. I think that's always shifting in some ways. Some of my poems bring me to these profound conclusions, and some of the poems I write are more like Jonah and the whale, just a place of pure doubt, but also safety.

 

C: And I liked that you used the word “reckoning” earlier, it’s very accurate for all of that. What's one last thought you’d like to share that's on your mind?

 

WX: I've been thinking about how it's often a lot more comfortable to write and never show anybody, but since experiencing showing people, and not just the parts that I think they'll understand, but the parts that they might not, I’m becoming willing to take that risk.Not everyone who reads it gets it, and that's totally fine, but then there are a few people who have. Right now I'm trying to decide if I want to submit a bunch of multilingual poetry. And there's Chinese in it, and I don't know how to map on the translations. And then I put a section in the end, and then I got feedback that's like, I don't even know how to recognize the characters back. And I'm like, that's fine. What if I just didn't translate anything? And I think there's sort of more of a risk that I'm willing to take there.

 

C: That's awesome. Thank you so much for your time.

 

WX: Thank you.