The School of Try Again: In Praise Of Chen Chen’s Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency (Bloodaxe, 2022)
by Helen Bowell
When I read Chen Chen’s first book, When I Grow Up I Want To Be A List Of Further Possibilities, I thought I was straight. I loved the book then and admired Chen’s ability to bring off comedy and tragedy in the same breath. Reading it also connected me (Chinese mum, white British dad) with another poet from the Chinese diaspora, something which a few years ago felt rare. But it didn’t have the effect on me that his latest book, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency, has had.
***
Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency is a book of love poems. These poems are dedicated to Chen’s partner Jeff and to himself, to his parents, to queer people, to students, to teachers, to Asian people and all immigrants. A seasonal transformation takes place through the course of the collection. Like a clenched hand opening up, the book moves from a position of anxiety and fear towards a more generous, joyous and silly outlook.
The book begins with the difficult news that the speaker’s partner’s mother is dying. Over the phone, they are both dazed, unsure what to say or do: ‘& I say I know but nothing is clear’. Then, on the opposite page, Chen conjures the reverse scene in his own family, a ‘Doctor’s Note’ in which the speaker imagines himself to be ‘currently dead’. He suggests his parents’ ‘“utter devastation” (already in scare quotes) would be ‘bupkis’. In fact, his parents (who ‘are not his emergency contacts’) have ‘exhibited clear signs of wishing he were dead, such as saying in a clear voice, You’d be better off dead. Better than whatever you are with other men.’ This indictment of his existence, so early in the book, is devastating; it’s made harder to swallow by the stark contrast with his partner’s mother, who (at least in the book) appears to love her son unconditionally. The speaker is alone in his parental rejection, and his partner is alone in his grief.
The contrast in the two different parent-son relationships also sets up the speaker’s yearning for a different kind of relationship with his mother. Throughout the collection, he battles with how much contact to have with his parents. He feels so guilty for ignoring their messages, for not calling, that in the first poem titled ‘Winter’ he imagines birds, grackles, who begin to talk, only to ‘ask about my mother & father, whether I’ve spoken to them lately’. He adds that this is ‘just like my boyfriend’, who’s not helping that guilt. A part of him wants to call – but, really, he wants to call a different set of parents, ones who would have listened sympathetically about being bullied at school, who would have said ‘Come here. At home / you don’t have to worry about that’, who would spontaneously say now ‘Happy Anniversary! Six years, wow!’ instead of ignoring the date (‘The School of Keyboards & Our Whole Entire History Up to the Present’).
This tension is familiar to many queer people of diverse backgrounds whose parents don’t fully accept them. But it is also particularly a trope for Asian and immigrant parents: it is a stereotype that ‘their culture [… is] Just so behind / the times’, as one white teacher tells the speaker (‘The School of Song, Uno, & Dinnertime’). Western imagination ascribes Asian parents with so-called ‘traditional’ values: being strict, wanting particular, respected professions for their children, and pressuring them to marry straight and have children. It forgets that many Asian and African cultures were fine with queerness before white missionaries and colonialists arrived. But Chen sees his parents with that same otherness and fear.
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When I told my parents I thought I was bisexual over WhatsApp video call in autumn 2020, having barely seen them since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, and having had many an identity crisis in that more solitary and self-reflective time, my dad said, “I’m betting that you’re not. If you were, you’d know.”
My mum said, “Where did you get that idea from?”
***
Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency is so much more complicated than a racialised story told about immigrant parents who reject their gay son, who in turn finds a home in the queer sanctuary of the USA. That static idea of ‘their culture’ pins the speaker’s parents in a past the West has apparently moved beyond, and does not make space for how they can change.
Through the course of the collection, Chen realises he, too, may have taken the flat view that ‘their culture [… is] Just so behind / the times’. At times, he has subconsciously moved away from his parents and his own Chineseness, and towards whiteness, believing it would bring him safety. He has a ‘long list’ of white boyfriends, perhaps because ‘I’ve thought that being with a white man would whiten me, lighten my lonely. & actually, factually, being with some white men has blanketed me while covering me in lonelier’ (‘Winter’). A fear of his own Chineseness may have even shaped his identity: in middle school, he quits piano, begins to dislike Maths, and rejects his mother’s lu dou tang, even though she says ‘I thought it was / your favorite’. ‘I’m not like the other / Asian kids, I’m not like / what they love,’ he writes, the line-break on ‘other’ pin-pointing the very real fear, even from a young age, of being othered.
Chen shows us plenty of moments that could cause such a fear. He is particularly interested in the phenomenon of depersonifying Asian people, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic but from long before too. He feels America sees him as ‘an antonym for person’ (‘Winter’), commenting:
some people are not yet personified
while trees often are & the birds
in poems & the pets
of white people most often.
(‘four short essays personifying a future in which white supremacy has ended’)
He’s internalised this fear so much that even he has personified ‘the birds’ in this book. This depersonification is psychologically harmful but also physically dangerous. An early poem (‘The School of Fury’) remembers a friend’s neighbour deciding to call the police when seeing a Chinese stranger – the speaker’s father – knocking on their door by mistake. But the father and son blame each other, not white supremacy, for this near-run-in with the police: ‘Don’t ever give me the wrong address again,’ says the father; the son retorts, ‘Why don’t you try not going to the wrong house next time?’ Rather than pinning the blame on the racist neighbours – would they have called the police on a white man? – they blame each other. This moment recalls many in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, echoed even in the poem’s prose form. Rankine’s book illuminated (micro)aggressions and violence towards Black Americans and following in that tradition, Chen’s collection offers Asian readers a lens through which to see their trauma as valid, too.
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Chen has to unlearn these unfair stereotypes and see the complex truth of his parents – in fact, he has to unlearn much of what he has been taught in institutions like school. Many of the poems are titled ‘The School of [X]’, indicating the lessons in experience: fury, Uno, dinnertime. In particular, Chen has to deconstruct his understanding of poetry, as taught by white teachers:
In college, a poetry professor asked, Are you from Whitman or from Dickinson? which sounded like he was asking, Are you American? – –
(‘Origin Story’)
Chen is from both, and from many non-white-American writers too, from Arthur Rimbaud to Justin Chin, and contemporaries like Michelle Lin, Bhanu Kapil and Sarah Gambito, all of whom are named in poems. In the writing, too, he disrupts ‘traditional’ notions of poetry, using colloquial language like ‘poop’ (which a teacher once forbade, apparently). Chen parallels the (white) establishment’s teaching of poetry with a wider subconscious pressure to distance himself from Chineseness:
I thought what my parents did,
that wasn’t poetry. I believed
what white people said about my parents.
I had to say, Stop.
Stop believing them.
(‘Spring Summer Autumn Winter’)
Held right, these realisations may allow the speaker to imagine his parents more generously. In ‘a small book of questions: chapter vii’ (after the questions in Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers), Chen writes of the mother: ‘She asks about the dog before she asks about the boyfriend. / She doesn’t ask about him. She does this for a year.’ But the poem breaks off (‘Then I remember –’), recalling suddenly an instance of his mother’s kindness, placing ‘two magnificently crispy scallion pancakes […] on the boyfriend’s plate. She looks at me. Says, For him.’
For those not fluent in Chinese food, this may be translated as: I care about your partner, and I careabout you, and I want you to know I want him to feel welcome in this family. Making a special effort to remember the food someone likes and making sure they have it is one of the most tender things you can do.
In the light of this, Chen re-reads events more generously: ‘Maybe she is asking about us by asking about the dog.’ Or even, he acknowledges, maybe his mother just really likes the dog – it is, he admits, ‘cuter than the boyfriend, cuter than the son’. He then reflects: ‘what am I looking for, exactly? Do I look at her, the way she would like? Have I said I love you recently […] Couldn’t we ask each other for more?’
This moment of kindness doesn’t invalidate or undo the speaker’s feelings of rejection, and grief for what could have been. In parentheses, he reflects, ‘(I want to remember better. / But I want more, more of the / better to remember.)’ But now he can begin to hold both complicated truths at once: in spite of the past, right now, this mother loves her son and, in her way, cares about his boyfriend. It’s not quite the expansive, love that he wants deep-down, that Western media shows us. She might not be able to give him that, and he might just have to accept it.
***
Although my mother has never used the word ‘girlfriend’, she does remember her favourite dim sum.
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In ‘Lunar New Year’, near the book’s end, the speaker and his partner join his parents to celebrate. It feels like he is taking a small step towards away from fear and towards generosity – he is calling them more now, perhaps, he is there at the meal. And he is rewarded with a small gesture of acceptance, in the form of red packet, from his parents to Jeff. ‘Never did I imagine you / gifting him a 红包’, the poem begins, that line-break revealing the truth of it: we can’t imagine another person fully, and sometimes our greatest fears about how others perceive us can cloud that even further.
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How, then, can we imagine people generously and not fearfully? How can we have better relationships, in spite of a racist system? How can we act not out of hurt but out of love? One of the answers offered by Chen is queer joy. There is so much joy and silliness bursting defiantly out of this book, even in moments of grief. Even the word ‘bupkis’ in that devastating ‘Doctor’s Note’ at the beginning is arguably lessened by its childish sounds. I haven’t seen Chen perform this poem, but I can imagine it stirring laughs – after all, it opens:
He came in last Thursday, exhibiting clear signs of dying, such as saying in a clear voice, I am
nothing except the wish to listen to Coldplay, & after one too many plays of their 2002 hit
“The Scientist,” he is dead.
Chen uses humour to lessen the weight of the queer trauma – not to diminish it, but to survive it. Laughter also offers a present-ness which reduces some of the anxiety his speaker is feeling: you can’t be worrying about how often to call your parents if you’re laughing at Coldplay. The queer joy radiating from this book does not negate trauma, but offers hope in spite of it, a way forward.
In a world that hates you, you have to find a way to love yourself. So, in ‘Summer’, he beatifies himself:
You are the ice cream sandwich connoisseur of your generation.
Blessed are your floral shorteralls, your deeply pink fanny pack with travel size lint roller just
in case.
Level of splendiferous in your outfit: 200.
[…] Instead, queer means, splendiferously, you.
Queer people have always needed to find a way to be ‘splendiferous’, to be their authentic selves, in spite of oppressive structures. Choosing to open that clenched fist with silliness, joy and present-ness is not (just) frivolous: it’s an act of bravery, and is how queer people can continue to exist. In ‘Summer’, during the pandemic Chen writes, ‘Many of the things I miss are pretty silly. Pretty & silly. & I miss them deeply.’ Pretty, silly things are (if you believe in capitalism) useless, but they bring joy, and for Chen and many queer people (doubly for queer people of colour), joy is a means of survival.
The speaker’s love for his partner is also expressed through tender silliness: in another ‘Winter’ poem, we learn their code for ‘I love you’ is ‘I’d eat a bag of your hair’. Remembered moments of tenderness include ‘remember when your name / was Fluttersaurus Vex’ in ‘The School of Eternities’. These moments mark an overcoming of a homophobic, racist system – but they are silly, joyous, and bring the reader joy too.
After everything, Chen suggests, what else is there to do but try and love one another? In ‘a small book of questions: chapter iii’, Chen writes in response to the question ‘How will you / have you prepare(d) for your death?’ ‘I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. […]’ ninety-one times.
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The final poem in the book, ‘The School of Joy / Letter to Michelle Lin’ is written in memory of Tanya Jones, a former student of Chen’s who was killed in a car accident. The accident recalls Chen’s own near-death experience with a red truck, recounted earlier in the book, and is a final reminder that our time on earth is short and random. The poem celebrates Jones’ life and writing, and as the next academic year begins without her, Chen has to find a way to continue: ‘my hand tried again: / picked up / the best marker, // the purple one.’ The unconventional colour of board marker is a small moment of splendiferousness, of resistance against darkness, an attempt to bring joy in spite of grief again.
The poem is addressed to poet Michelle Lin and acts as both a kind of ars poetica and a manifesto for life. Chen says:
You wrote
that I write with joy.
When really it’s toward,
walking to
the school of
try again.
Choosing joy is a choice, and it is an effort – it doesn’t come naturally. But to choose joy is to choose life. And so here we are, calling our parents back, wearing our most splendiferous shorteralls, ‘walking to the school of / try again’.
Helen Bowell is poet and co-director of Dead [Women] Poets Society. She is a Ledbury Poetry Critic and an alumna of The Writing Squad and the Roundhouse Poetry Collective. Her debut pamphlet The Barman (Bad Betty Press, 2022) was a PBS Pamphlet Choice. She works at The Poetry Society.