"Third World" as Place and Paradigm in Cathy Song's Picture Bride

Abstract

Cathy Song's Bride won the Yale Series of Younger Poets award in 1982. Her second book, Frameless Windows, Squares of Light, appeared in 1988. Song is Korean and Chinese-American. Born in Honolulu in 1955, she attended the University of Hawaii and Wellesley College, where she received a B.A. in 1977. In 1981, she received an M.A. in creative writing from Boston University. In the summer of 1987, she returned to live in Hawaii with her husband, son, and daughter. Bride furnishes a rich text for the study of relationships among ethnicity, culture, and writing. Through an analysis of the book's organization and image patterns, followed by close readings of several key poems, I attempt to show how Bride describes both a personal history and a paradigm for analysing multicultural writing. In its portrayal of specific places and histories that is at the same time a portrayal of cultural synthesis and pluralism, Bride defines a kind of third world writing. Through the title poem Picture Bride, Song begins her book with an attempt to learn more about her paternal Korean grandmother.1 Of the scant information she already has her grandmother's age when she left Korea for Hawaii, the port she sailed from, the name of the sugar plantation where her husband worked, and his age only the first item is presented as fact in the poem's single declarative sentence. The remaining lines being questions, the poem is thus mostly speculation. Yet the process of searching is inevitably a process of constructing, for even the few details Song uses to pose questions create complex impressions of her grandmother's new surroundings and of the woman herself: