By Audrey Fong
In her poetry collection, Cold Thief Place, Esther Lin grapples with her family’s history and their experience living undocumented in the U.S. I was initially drawn to Lin’s collection because much like her family, my family fled Communist China as well and made a temporary stop in Brazil before arriving in the U.S. (although mine was in Taiwan for a few decades before my grandfather moved to Brazil in the 1960s). Her collection covers not only this migration but also the complicated relationship between child and parents and the unknowability of one’s parents. Below, we discuss the writing process, form, family, and so much more.
Audrey Fong: Cold Thief Place covers so much ground from your parents’ immigration journeys to the U.S. to your experience being undocumented in the U.S. What drew you to write about such a large swath of your family history? What was the writing process like, choosing which stories to tell and which ones to leave out?
Esther Lin: I wrote this book for simple reasons: I wanted to better understand my parents, which meant I had to retell their stories to myself.
My parents were sophisticated, urbane, and squarely middle class in their lives in Brazil, where I was born. How did they turn into undocumented laundromat workers in America? They had experienced war and revolution firsthand, but like many survivors, they didn’t carry these wounds openly. Rather, the troubles of survival arose within the household, in a kind of domestic terrorism over me and my siblings. And trouble arose anytime they sensed new danger, which was often.
There are many distinct chapters to our family story, so I foregrounded the big ones: my mother in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, her death, her marriages, my greencard marriage. Little things crept in too, like how evangelical Christianity gripped her imagination.
Writing these poems was both an exorcism of the past and a quest for control over the forms that held these subjects. Gregory Orr’s Poetry As Survival illuminated my approach.
Fong: Your collection references many other texts and genres, from the Bible to Madame Bovary to fantasy staples such as dragons. How does intertextuality impact your poems and your writing process?
Lin: Now I wonder if Madame Bovary, the cave paintings in Lascaux, and other texts served as a distraction before my speaker could approach the crisis that is the subject matter. When I was a child, books and art were pathways to a benevolent imagination. I entered and exited of my own volition. Metaphor makes the truth more bearable, which is why at times I want to step away from them. But describing one’s parents is difficult. Parents are fundamentally unknowable, especially if they die young. So I’d say that some of these texts are footholds on that mountain of not knowing.
Other times, the fantasy staples are the stars of the poem, more like characters rather than metaphors. “Fantasy Novel” and “A Book About Dragons” refer to two phenomena that I felt best to merely narrate. My ex-husband once told me that I didn’t have a childhood; I had a library of books instead. Well, that’s it. Untoward as the remark is, a poet must use what tools she has.
Fong: The poems in Cold Thief Place greatly vary in form, from poems like “Chu Ying” written in two distinct columns to mimic a conversation to “Up the Mountains Down the Fields” in which each line is fairly brief, ranging from one to five words. How do you decide on the form of a poem? Are there forms you abide by or ones you wish to break? And how does form impact the story or message of each poem?
Lin: The heft of my sentence determines the length of the line. The short, terse sentences of “Up the Mountains” dictates its very short line. I usually like a poem that reads as an unbroken column—no stanza breaks—because it seems the most spontaneous, most naturalistic. I find it the most suitable container for poems that are cries of pain or outright observations or straightforward storytelling. It’s a single voice in the darkness, speaking without preamble.
When I want to crowd an image with context, that is, the interrupting voice of a sports commentator, I tend to play with the white space more. Couplets, which are static but dramatic. Movement east and west of the page, which feels urgent, leaping, impatient. For me, these kinds of poems more overtly announce themselves as acts of artifice.
To return to your earlier question, form controls what stories I tell and don’t. All my short lyric poems tend to be informed by the sonnet (truncated sonnets or lazily longish ones), and since the release of Cold Thief Place, I’ve been writing stricter Petrarchan sonnets. What a form! Lots of poets are writing crowns lately, and I encourage everyone who hasn’t to try, just to see how their voice evolves as the sonnets progress.
Fong: In “Diagnosis,” written in the aftermath of your mother’s death, you wrote about how your mother “nourished us by nourishing us,” describing many foods before writing that “I hardly ate. It was too rich, too much / of everything. Which annoyed her. / Why won’t you accept what I offer? / I work so hard. Why? Why? / When my husband tells me / he loves me I hear her instead.” I was struck by the use of rich food as a symbol for her love being “too much” and how you hear your mom when your husband says he loves you. Why was food the best metaphor for your mother’s love? And what inspired the twist at the end where the reader is left reflecting on how your husband’s love feels intertwined with your mom’s love?
Lin: Thank you for dispensing with the idea that the poem’s speaker is distinct from the poet! I guess I’ve been pretty clear that there isn’t a distinction. But I should say that sometimes I do fudge the truth to suit the poem. In “Diagnosis,” food isn’t a metaphor; it was the primary way my mother presented love without complication. There was a complication. Of the comparatively ordinary kind: she cooked beautifully and would fall frustrated when I, unappreciative child, refused to eat. I was picky.
But anyone may be afraid of bounty if the environment doesn’t feel safe. An unsafe environment informs one’s later decisions too: love becomes something to be suspicious of, rather than wholeheartedly accepted. This is what therapy taught me. In the moment of writing, however, I tumbled into this ending intuitively. As far as I knew, I was writing about how uncomfortable I felt when my mother’s love surfaced.
Audrey Fong is your stereotypical Southern Californian. She loves the beach, drinks more boba than the doctor recommends, and has an Insta-famous dog. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.