The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Brief Article

Marilyn Chin has a voice all her own--witty, epigraphic, idiomatic, elegiac, earthy. In The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty, she covers the canvas of cultural assimilation with an intensely personal brush. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Oregon, she pours herself into her poetry.

"How I Got That Name: An Essay on Assimilation" begins with the declaration, "I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin," and recounts how her father "obsessed with a bombshell blonde/transliterated |Mei Ling' to |Marilyn,'" honoring her with the name of "some tragic white woman/swollen with gin and Nembutal." She goes on to warn that the stereotypes of Asian Americans are wrong: "We've managed to fool the experts," she writes, "... . they can use us./But the |Model Minority' is a tease."

Worse than that, it can be fatal. Her "Elegy for Chloe Nguyen" tells of her precocious childhood friend, "Bipedal in five months, trilingual in a year;/at eleven she had her first lover." At thirty-three, she was dead. The last line reads: "Chloe, we are finally Americans now. Chloe, we are here!"

Similarly affecting are the ten little poems that make up "Homage to Diana Toy," a patient Chin tutored in a psychiatric hospital. When Toy, denied citizenship in the United States and sexually taken advantage of by an administrator, commits suicide, Chin blames herself, an "unworthy tutor," who "failed to tell her about the fifty paltry stars."

Chin concerns herself not only with the United States, but also, poignantly, with China. She dedicates a section of her book to the Chinese Democratic Movement. In "Beijing Spring," she embraces the protesters. "Lover, on Tienanmen Square, near the Avenue of Eternal Peace/I believe in the...