Excerpted from “Sinister Wisdom”, Issue #70 (Spring 2007)
Sherry Quan Lee’s book, Chinese Blackbird, is a fascinating narration of how race is lived in the United States today. Born to a Black mother and a Chinese father, much of Sherry Quan Lee’s life was spent understanding race as she lived it in the United States. In the opening poem of the collection, she writes, “I am pregnant with myself / gestation: fifty years.” She comes to poetry later in life, but with the emotional power and languages of a convert.
Quan Lee describes her lfe, “Like a magnolia / –whose sepals never fuse00 / my life is disparate / here a Black / community, //there an Asian / community, // everywhere, white.” Chinese Blackbird is the narrative of Quan Lee’s life and her exploration of race, gender, love, and marriage. It is fierce and tender, angry and understanding, hurt and honest.
Some might call the book, not a poetry collection, but a textual gathering of one woman’s life. Indeed, the poems are accented by photographs of Quan Lee and her family and her birth certificate. They are important visual moves in the collection, adding connection for the reader to these poems. Many of the poems are written in the style of prose poems, such as “Magnolia Cafe,” “Mother’s and Mine,” and “I Ask My Husband if He Thought I was a Lesbian and He Said Yes.” This density of language and narrative builds throughout the book to Quan Lee’s final assertion of herself as an autonomous Chinese/Black/Woman in “I Am the Snake I feared,” she writes,
Sometimes I think I’m whispering
when you complain I’m hissing.
I’m sorry if my word are noisy, but
I haven’t left. I’m not leaving.
Only my thoughts wander
I am home, for the first time
in fifty-four years, venomless.
Quan Lee’s poems and this book, Chinese Blackbird, are the examples of the space and legacy that Jorddan and Lorde dreamed when they wrote their truth on the page.
