Beyond Lot's Wife: The Immigration Poems of Marilyn Chin, Garrett Hongo, Li-Young Lee, and David Mura

Abstract

When God tells Lot to flee Soddam and Gomorrah, he cautions him not to look back. Lot's wife cannot resist the temptation and, as they rush from the great fire storm erupting behind them, she does look back and is immediately turned into a pillar of salt. The fear of looking back and yet the compulsion to look back at the country that one has left behind infuses much cross-cultural writing in the United States today. The experience of immigration is a central fact in the lives of Asian, Hispanic, Mid-Eastern, Slavic, Irish, and Italian families in America. Even when the immigration is several generations removed, cross-cultural writers searching for their roots must in one way or another grapple with the event itself. For many families, immigration is a traumatic experience. Expelled out of their homelands, immigrants must suffer the treacherous journey to America and then survive in a different and frequently hostile host culture. Families do not easily talk about these experiences. Migrations are frequently shrouded in silence and an unspoken prohibition not to look back. For Asian immigrants in America, the subject of this paper, silence about origins in Japan or China has been a necessary course as they have attempted to assimilate into a dangerous, frequently racist environment. During the era of the Exclusion Acts and the internment camps of World War II, having Asian origins and cultural identity incurred enormous penalties: job and home loss, deportation, even imprisonment and death. The writers whom I am discussing in this paper, however, suggest that there are even more painful and damaging silences than those required by survival in a hostile environment. There are the