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| Bao Phi |
Thousand Star Hotel
by Bao Phi
Coffee House Press 2017
Minneapolis, Minnesota
ISBN9781566894708
Thousand Star Hotel
is an unusual memoir of some 62 poems in 105 pages with a one page lyrical
introduction. It tells of a life of escapes, from Saigon, as a three month old,
in a C-5 transport while his father looked “over his shoulder once/to see
shells dropping where we once stood,” and, as a teenager and adult, from the
fate of many in his neighborhood who “At a prison reading … [have] come to
listen to the art that kept me out of this place.”
It is a memoir that chronicles a bigotry he can't escape:
It's not a majority white school.
In seventh grade, the tall blonde tomboy asks you to dance. You have no idea
all the boys have a crush on her; you've been busy with comic books, and the
only romance you know are tragedies from Greek mythology and Arthurian legends.
She's your best friend and you've laughed together every day, so of course you
say yes. … Suddenly you notice three white boys looking at you, two snickering.
They come right up to both of you, and whisper in her ear. Loud enough for you
to hear. Everyone can see you dancing
with that gook, they laugh. She responds by flicking them off, pulling you
closer. Years later you'll wonder how she created her armor.
And it is a memoir of a single parent wondering what do I do
“When My Daughter Asks Me to Check and Make Sure Racists Can't Come In and Kill
Us.”
It has powerful prose written in the short lines of verse:
The worst powerlessness
is when wicked men and boys
come for your family
and you can do nothing.
And lyrical language in prose, “That a raindrop can weep
inside of itself so hard it drowns and, looking at it, you would never
know."
The reality described in the poetry of Thousand Star Hotel, is discomforting; most of the time we avoid
looking at it, but, as Bao Phi presents it, you can’t. Flip to any page and you
will find lines like these from “Shell”:
Brown people getting bombed –
how can you
even think
about
love?
But you do.
That accusatory “you” implies, if they were white people
getting bombed, our response might be different and, reluctantly, you have to
admit, “He’s right.” However, that “But you do” is also a colloquial equivalent
for the formal “But one does” so that Bao Phi is asking of himself the same
question he asks of us. The fact that, in the face of the daily bombing of
brown people, both he and we “even think//about//love,” creates the possibility,
if we are willing to tolerate our discomfort, for a shared humanity.
But this poem and these poems are not going to let us off
easily with the question, “What else is more important to think about in the
face of horror than ‘Love?’” Later in “Shell” Bao makes the impersonality of
contemporary war, the consequence of bombing, and our passive witness more
explicit:
The news crackles
drones drop
blossoms
empty
the heads of children
no science fiction
to save them.
To the extent that, as we watch the news we are passive witnesses
to bombings, we are complicit in them and our agency becomes remote; children
get their brains blown out by explosions that look like blossoms from our distant
vantage; and we are helpless.
Many of the raw images of these poems are the traumas of his
life and the lives of his family; traumas such as the one he would have witnessed
at three months old, and to which he alludes in the poem, “To Combust”:
When his oldest son comes home from
the corner gas station
beaten for no reason
we can venture to guess Dad sees
blood and thinks
how he risked his life to get us
all on that plane,
jumping in, last minute,
prayer and opportunity,
looking over his shoulder once
to see shells dropping where we
once stood
before becoming an alien to his
homeland for ever.
Later, during the narration of a trauma in the poem, “Cookies,”
he introduces another thematic question of his memoir: how should he share this
history with his daughter?
For the holidays, our Lutheran
sponsors used to give us a blue cookie tin. … For Christmas my sister gave my
daughter a box of shortbread cookies. … She wanted to share them with me, and
they tasted so much like those cookies from our childhood I had to close my
eyes and look away. Her five-year-old eyes track some commercial in which white
men are playing at battle and she asks me about war. I want to tell her that
her grandpa once told me how one of his friends in the front lines got hit in
the side with the rocket while crawling out of a foxhole, and he had to pick up
the smoking pieces of him and put them in a cookie tin to send the remains home
to his family.
Because of the eloquence of its expression, the pain of
these poems is tolerable. In “Say What?” a short poem that introduces the
collection, Boa Phi reveals one source of that eloquence by parsing the
variations in Vietnamese for “ma,” where it has six different meanings depending
upon the tone of expression [Ma–ghost, Mà–but, Må–tomb or grave, Mã –horse,
Má–momma and Mā–to plate].” The poem concludes:
Vietnamese people have always been
spoken word poets.
How you say it
is as important to the life of the
word
as the word itself.
In the Minneapolis of their exile English replaced the music
of Boa Phi’s parental Vietnamese, yet he has managed, with this adopted
English, to create a music, which, though it must often be a dissonant music,
is worthy of our attention.
These poems are difficult, but not in an academic way,
nothing to puzzle out, no obscurities to excuse by calling them
“experimentation”, just a clarity of vision that is hard to take but impossible
to ignore. Thousand Star Hotel is
evidence that our War in Vietnam won't be over until all of its wounds have
healed. We encounter some of those wounds in the faces of homeless veterans on
our corners holding out cups for alms. These poems are evidence of other wounds,
which have an importance we have yet to acknowledge. What are these injuries, caused
by being torn from home, if not “wounds”?
The value of these poems is that they erode the denials that
interfere with our healing and in doing so encourage us, give us the heart we
will need to persist in our own repair. These 14 lines at the beginning of “It
Was Flame” describe as succinctly as anything I have ever read the history,
which we must cease denying if we are to heal:
Slavery
indentured servitude
migrant labor
genocide to clear land for theft
minimum wage so low
we can see the ceiling:
America has been in business.
Shackled to sow.
Smallpox to blanket.
Guns bristled the border.
Lighter kisses hooch,
and how many times would you burn
down Chinatown,
or what ever enclave we have been
forced into,
to manifest your destiny.
This collection is worth owning if only to have those 14
lines close at hand as a reminder of the history, which we must acknowledge, if
we would heal.
–Wendell Smith
