By Emily Velasquez
For years, Asian and Asian American women have been objectified as obedient, dutiful, and submissive—roles in which they’re expected to feel fulfilled in a culture that distorts the intergenerational silencing and trauma these women may face. Vietnamese American poet Cathy Linh Che uses the subject of silence in her three-part poetry collection, Split, to examine how Asian and Asian American women have been conditioned by society to respond to injustices committed against them with silence. For instance, Che’s speaker throughout the book echoes the disturbing reality of being raped by a cousin and how it connects to her mother’s silence on memories of the Vietnam War, thus revealing how trauma’s stain persists from mother to daughter. In Che’s poems “The German word for dream is traume,” “Split,” and “Home Video,” she constructs a narrative on silence, particularly the silence that causes splits, or a dismemberment of the body from the self.
Che introduces part one of this collection with the poem “The German word for dream is traume.” Here the speaker directs our attention to the way her body instantly becomes a desirable toy for pleasure in a space she remembered as safe, noting, “Between the couch / and wall, the ceiling was white / with popcorn bits. The boys stood / and watched. I lay there, / my eyes open like a doll’s. / Someone said, Let me try. / He pulled down his pants / and rode on top, / then abruptly stopped.” The image of her eyes opening like a doll’s connotes how the speaker was unable to distinguish whether this was a dream or a trauma because her body had become immobile, plastic, touched like an on and off button. The poem continues and closes with, “The boys laughed, / said Shhh / and stood me up.” The use of the “Shhh” emphasized with italics speaks closely on the language of whispers and secrecy that exists in the docile demeanor forced on Asian and Asian American women while “Let me try” continues the pattern of power over their body.
Later in the book, we find a piece titled “Split” where Che examines a particular memory when the speaker’s mother first encountered American soldiers in Vietnam. The speaker retells this memory as, “They come to watch her; / Americans, Marines, just boys, / eighteen or nineteen. / With scissor-fingers, / they snip the air, / point at their helmets/ and then at her hair. / All they want is a small lock– / something for a bit of good luck.” The idea of the soldiers using “scissor-fingers” communicates an act of mockery; the snipping motion is a symbol of their possession over her and how her hair would then become their reward or souvenir. The soldiers watching her mother reveal how her body was exploited as a spectacle for exoticism and this trails back to the boys that watched the speaker’s body laid on the ground. Che is expressing how today the alarming silence that has become socially acceptable and expected leads to how often Asian and Asian American women become victims of hypersexualization and ridicule to a point where these “scissor fingers” result in assaults, rape, and violence.
Che’s poem “Home Video” visually reads as raw as an unfiltered and unedited home video. In addition, it is written in prose and the speaker carries a tone of voice unlike the rest of the poems in which she questions and reflects on what these splits mean to her. Che notes, “If I say, I have been touched. If I say, by my cousin, then a neighbor boy and then another. If I say no, I didn’t want it from my boyfriend first…If my body can be a box. If I can close it up. If it has to be open. Who will touch me again?” The speaker’s repetition of “If” sounds as if she is circling around these thoughts but is finding it difficult to verbalize trauma in actual words. The question she addresses in the end “Who will touch me again?” is the profound question that gives this collection its title because the speaker is trying to figure out how she could regain or if possible, reinvent herself again, since the question is not only seeking an answer for who will physically harm her again, but also who will love her again. The way Che uses the image of a box opening and closing to connect it to trauma and how the body after trauma will be split is significant because it changes, it is not one or the other, it is involved in both.
Split makes it evident that the trauma to which Asian and Asian American women have been subjugated to is the trauma that displaces, dysfunctions, and demeans one’s voice.
Split is available from Book Cellar, Book Soup, Garden District Book Shop, Kinokuniya, Skylight Books, and Strand Book Store.
Emily Velasquez is a poet who loves anything about food and cooking. Born and raised in Santa Ana, she received her B.A. in English from California State University Fullerton. She is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in creative writing from Chapman University.