Alien Miss

by Carlina Duan

In her stunning second collection, Carlina Duan illuminates unabashed odes to lineage, small and sacred moments of survival, and the demand to be fully seen “spangling with light.” Tracing familial lore and love, Duan reflects on the experience of growing up as a diasporic, bilingual daughter of immigrants, exploring the fraught complexities of identity, belonging, and linguistic reclamation. Alien Miss brings forth beautifully powerful immigrants facing the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first Chinese American woman to vote, and matriarchal ancestors. The poems in this ambitious collection are immersed in the knotted blood of sisterhood, both celebrating and challenging conceptions of inheritance and homeland.
 
I browse through

archives full of men and women with long black hair,

throwing themselves into the land. thread of grass. thread

of immaculate touch.              paper son, or paper

daughter. my own papers marked with wings, the pointed

tip of an eagle’s beak. here, I’m made prey.

I pledge allegiance.

—Excerpt from “Alien Miss Confronts the Author”

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

Published March 9, 2021

About the author

CARLINA DUAN is a writer from Michigan. She is the author of the poetry collection I WORE MY BLACKEST HAIR (Little A, 2017), and the chapbook Here I Go, Torching (National Federation Poetry Societies, 2015).

Reviews

[Sigrid A · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautifully crafted collection that traces Chinese-American identity, family, belonging, and language. Duan's poems are full of insights and memorable images. I highly recommend this collection, even if you don't think of yourself as a poetry person.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an extraordinary achievement for a comparatively young poet. For ANY poet. Carlina Duan is not only writing very moving poems about immigration, language (Chinese and English) and the woman's body, she is clearing the ground for all the work that will come after. The first poem is about language and learning the language of the new country, this new country, and the very last line of the book reads, "I speak, & it is delicious." I admit that I got goose bumps when I read that after a good reading of everything that came before.

All that said, I think the opening sequence, the title sequence, "Alien Miss," is the most extraordinary accomplishment in this very good book. In the sequence, Duan is able to combine historical texts, recreated moments, encounters with language, personal and familial experience on a big canvas. I think everything works together to make a profound yet personal picture of the Chinese-American experience/history. And still through it all, she has created deeply engaging poetry.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

If bicultural identity is processed similarly to grief, which is to say, conceptualized often as a five-stage cycle which is a misconception in that the cycle is actually nonlinear, can jump to any point at any time, can appear to lose "progress" while progressing in its own untraceable ways—this book is on a level of processing that I remember being at but have since moved past.

Before I continue: speaking of grief, the most moving passages I found were those about grief. Duan's language is luminous, with motifs of pearls and persimmons that strike to core memories. She interrogates family history in a way that my sister and I are doing now, grasping at red strings that lead to our past, trying to bridge language and historical divides with our elders that are in some ways too big to cross in the little time we were given. Our elders, who experienced the greatest possible extremes of change in their lifetimes. She speaks of her family tenderly, not only her parents and sister, but her aunties and her 外公外婆.

Anyways: This book recalls me in eighth grade, writing too many words about a book I had chosen and learning for the first time that many people in this country before me had experienced what I thought was my singular Chinese-American experience. What did I know then, if not wishing to read characters so freely, if not wishing for “golden retrievers and hamburgers”?

I am of course not relegating the emotions related in this book to the eighth grade; any bicultural person could relate to these emotions at some point in their life. My sister showed me this book; our experiences, which had been exactly the same as children, are now different as adults. It took me until I moved to the West Coast and stayed in the company of people who had grown up in our community (we have a community?) to learn the full range of our experiences and to leave my shame behind. Certainly I once would have written bitter poetry about the pledge of allegiance. Certainly this stage is common and perhaps necessary for all bicultural people. But I think to stay bitter as a Chinese-American ignores the beauty of everything immigrants have learned from each other and fought for. This book, in contrast, is pre-occupied with itself, inward-looking in a way that only a middle-class, Chinese-American bildungsroman can be. (I may be wrong in this assumption of socio-economic standing, but that is the impression I got from the father's occupation.)

You know, I find myself preoccupied with a different kind of thought now now. No longer are my thoughts about schoolrooms; they are now about the tight and strong communities that some of my friends' ethnicities and religions have successfully built and retained. You might begin asking why that is: why Chinese Americans do not have dances or folk music, why we don’t grow up attending the weddings of our community members. (Search up why Denver doesn’t have a Chinatown, or the history of mutual aid in Chinatowns, and you will begin to see.) Maybe a class analysis is in hand, but lately I wonder if I’ve been applying the race, class, gender lens too heavily on all aspects of my life. Anyways, my question is: knowing and respecting the beauty around us, how can Chinese Americans rebuild a community to be proud of? (Again, the historical Chinatowns…)

I can’t help feeling rather than navel-gazing, it is time for me, at least, to look up at the examples set by our neighbors as well as at the needs waiting to be met in our own community. Duan speaks often of hating how she cannot read Chinese, but is this a shame she places on herself or shame that others have put on her? There was a time in my life when I realized that the shame I thought was from others was in some part from myself. This book is important for cataloguing a (Midwestern) Chinese-American history: our adolescences spent wondering if we were enough, if we would ever be enough. Yet while the circumstances we found ourselves in were disorienting, we have the power to reorient (re-Orient ?) ourselves in whatsoever way we choose. We don't need to let others write our narrative for us. The last third of the book hints toward this possible future.

Finally, I have been putting this book in conversation with two others. First, a work from the rapidly coming-of-age "Chinese"-American demographic: Stay True by Hua Hsu. I had found Hsu's narrative fascinating as a chronicle of a Taiwanese American family who had come overseas one generation before mine. How did he navigate his world? Is Duan's and my experience more different from his in terms of chronology (Internet access, burgeoning media representation other than Bruce Lee), or in terms of sociology (growing up in the Midwest rather than California, female versus male)? These are somewhat open questions I am still mulling over.

Second, probably the seminal work in bilingual poetry, Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera. Duan's poetry follows in Anzaldúa's footsteps, weaving Chinese and English as a political declaration of identity, while adapting the form to her own cultural understanding. Characters are omitted from the pinyin to emphasize the oral nature of second-generation language. Still, Duan's words sound as if they are self-consciously (unconsciously?) yielding to an American audience. Every word is explained—do they have to be? Do we owe the audience that? Who is the audience of these works? Are we, even now grown, forever explaining ourselves to our colleagues and friends? It is sometimes wonderful because we can be understood, sometimes exhausting because it is necessary. I just think there's more than this.

(Side note: why ????? is there this other ABC who has a closer-than-blood sisterhood with a Karen, who was born in Michigan and raised in the Midwest, who writes poetry and prose? is she me? is she me?)

[Minjeong Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I spoke Mandarin Chinese I would have understood better.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I stutter in English, a wingless weight.” Alien Miss, the second poetry collection by Carlina Duan, serves up a varied, vivid and vital look at race, culture and displacement, the feeling of being displaced within and by the country you call home, while also struggling to keep a sense of connection with one’s roots. The first part follows the titular Alien Miss through a brief history of anti-Chinese American racism, its past and its future, from Section 14 (and its present resonances) to history’s sublimation into the body (“for my body to become some body // it had to understand) and the voice (“for my mouth to carry English / it needs to understand I am / beholden to other hands / I don’t belong to”). Duan skilfully spins an array of bold images: “I descend from / a lineage of flat lines. we compose / a horizon. red pearl as in red sun”, lyrical and stark. Later, there’s poems like the provocative + undaunted ‘Do You Have a Grammatically Correct Response to the Question?’, which begins with a verbal hate crime, stripped of its actual terms and so most of its power, allowing Duan to strip back the wallpaper of language: to reject its abuse and embrace its possibility, how the writer is freer than most to use the word to “defy and defy and / talk back”. Poems of family + unity close the collection — also the relatable ‘Dear Tinder Screen’, proclaiming: “I am / tender if I want to be. I am hopeful when I have / a joke to tell”, a declaration we can all revel in.

[Wednesday · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely incredible

[k.a.yya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Appreciated it even more after meeting the author, she’s brilliant.

[Tutankhamun18 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really enjoyed a few of these!

Alien Miss #1
Alien Miss Consults her Future
None on the Rooftops
Love Potion
Do you have a gramaticall correct response to the question?

[Danielle Depa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you Klara for making our class read this I am IN AWE 💖❤️‍🩹🩷

[Ryleigh Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful collection, so many unique tools employed and a wonderful examination of language and life.

[Nikita Ladd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Day 10 of Sealey Challenge: Of the poem "Feast," I remember most the folding in of people into one room, one mixed and matched holiday, and the ache between the speaker's desires as a child and the puzzling together of what her parents were doing as an adult - "holding the knife against the meat, / carving out what they could." There were many other beautiful poems like "Love Potion," "Rein," and "Say a Little Prayer."

[Emily Yesowitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely adore this book!! The author is so so talented. I found that this book is great for medium/low level poetry readers. It is written well with interesting and pretty ideas, vocab, imagery, and social/political concepts. But still, is comprehensible. Easy to read deeply into or just read on the surface level.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I saw Duan read (mostly) from this collection at a reading with Farnaz Fatemi. Unfortunately, this collection was on back-order from the publisher at the time, so the venue didn't have any copies for sale. But her words stayed with me such that when I got home I added myself to the back-order list the very next day.

At the reading she read a powerful poem on language and hate and identity, but my favorite, the one that drove me to the publisher's website to click Buy, was "Possible" — about finding the inspiration to be possible — to be your self and have a voice and claim your space — a bit that stuck in my head (my soul) was about the "purpling" of the lilacs in the backyard. It brought me to tears, but with JOY and POSSIBILITY.

Once I had the collection in my hot little hands, I added more poems to my list of favorites, especially "Love Potion" and "Dear Tinder Screen," but "Possible" remains at the top of the list.

— & oh, I am possible again. I am
a fragrant, silly self today. I thank
the worms who eat the dirt who
break down the soil who make
the lilacs possible and young, forever
purpling...