In Li-Young Lee’s poem “The Cleaving,” he writes about the slippery connection between reading and eating: “my reading a kind of eating, my eating/a kind of reading.” And later: “What is it in me would/devour the world to utter it?”
When my family greets each other, we ask: have you eaten yet? Meaning, are you well? Are you nourished? Do you need anything? I grew up in a household full of sacred recipes, of healing watercress soup, of fish spines picked clean. And I also grew up in a Chinese American restaurant, surrounded by the clatter of bowls and customers sharing their lives with my mother, who always clipped their receipt on top of a brown take-out bag. As a child, I became a poet amongst all this sensory storytelling. To be in a restaurant is to be in a vast field of language. I loved trying to describe the smell of the fryer. Or imagining frozen shrimp in the meat freezer spooning each other. I’m forever curious about what our foodways teach us about ourselves, our lineages, our complex relationship with nourishment--- thinking through the intersections of race, class, gendered expectations, and more. How can we tap into our sensory food memories to bring intimate stories to the surface? How can poetry linger on the tongue? Perhaps to “devour the world” is also akin to being devoted to the word.
Being surrounded by food as a child, I am keenly aware of absence in fullness – my family, as I write about in my recent two books How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) and Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023), has experienced both hunger and starvation as a result of the Great Leap Forward, a Maoist campaign from 1958-1962 that led to vast catastrophe – an estimated 36 million people starved to death. In writing about my familial relationship with food or the lack thereof, I am moved across time into a space where I can offer the eggs from my fridge now to them in the past. I’m obsessed with this speculative desire – to feed all of us. From my poem “After Preparing the Altar the Ghosts Feast Feverishly”: “We wake in the middle of a life, hungry./We smear durian along our mouths, sing soft/death a lullaby.” I wanted to reckon with this painful history with tenderness, with visceral connection. And, as a poet and educator, I want to do so with care. Sometimes, it’s not about what we ask our family members, but how we listen. And in my deep listening – through metaphor, through meter – I’m able to bring forth a silenced history.
As a poet and educator, I’m so grateful to have the opportunity to facilitate this sharing of our food stories, down to the rhythm of the knife cutting. One of my former students, who is a Korean American adoptee, shared a poem with me about the taste and fragrance of sesame oil, a flavor she described as something felt in her body – despite not growing up with it. What kind of embodied knowledge do we carry within us, in these ways, unbeknownst us? Smell and taste are amongst the strongest senses for conjuring memories. When I smell Chinese black vinegar, my entire body salivates, returns to my grandmother boiling a pot of it for medicinal purposes. Food as healing. Poetry as healing. Eating, reading. Reading, eating. It’s all intertwined, woven together like thick noodles I can’t wait to share.
There’s still time to register for this workshop. Learn more about WRITING DELICIOUSLY: FOOD & MEMORY.
May 18 · 2PM PT / 5PM ET
Please share this with your friends. See you in class May 18th!
ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR
Jane Wong is the author of the memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023). She also wrote two poetry collections: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016). A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room, Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, Ucross, Loghaven, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and others. She grew up in a take-out restaurant on the Jersey shore and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.
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