Interview Excerpt:

From “A Companion to Where Else, Hong Kong Literature’s newest addition; interviews with contributors,” by Elizabeth E. Chung, Writing Chinese: A Journal of Contemporary Sinophone Literature, 2(1), p.123-143, 2023.

Elizabeth E. Chung: I really loved ‘How We Survived: 爺爺’s Pantoum (II)’. Every time I re-read it, I'm entranced by how it is constructed of repeated lines in new contexts that give each line a new meaning. Can you please speak a bit about the pantoum form and why you chose it?

River 瑩瑩 Dandelion: The pantoum is a form that's rooted in Malaysian oral history. It dates back several centuries and for me, as someone who is an oral historian and gravitates towards documenting everyday stories as history, I gravitated towards the form itself. The poem is inspired by oral histories and conversations that I had with my grandfather 爺爺 about his migration journey from southern China to Hong Kong, and then to the US. That's one reason [for the form], because of the oral history.

And then two, my grandfather had Alzheimer's before he passed, so that would lend his memory to be repetitive, or to wind around the same memory, situation, or scenario; that is an added layer to why the repetition in the pantoum also works in that way.

EEC: That's fascinating. The repeating and recycling, especially with the content of this poem – it sounds like the repetition and reliving of trauma.

RD: Yeah, that's like the third layer, or reason, too. It's moments that are so significant in one's life in the retelling– this would be a story that I heard retold over and over again in different parts of my life from early teenhood to adulthood.

EEC: Can you talk a little bit more about the process of creating the pantoum and highlighting intergenerational stories?

RD: I’m a poet and creative writer, I’m also working on a memoir. A big reason why I write is because my grandparents, who raised me, and then my family in general – especially the women – just don't see or didn't see their stories as worthy of being told. And so, they would live through major historical events, like this mass migration to Hong Kong, like the Cultural Revolution, like migration to the US, and they would not think it significant. My job as a writer or what draws me to it is saying, ‘No, these are significant stories and you can downplay it all you want, but it is part of history, and it will be recorded.’

This poem didn't start as a pantoum. This poem started because one day I was going to visit my grandparents in their house in Brooklyn in New York and for some reason my grandpa started talking about his experience swimming across the waters, and that is a question I had asked him several times in recent years – but for whatever reason, the times that I asked, he'd be like, ‘Oh, there's nothing to talk about’ or ‘Oh, I don't want to talk about that right now.’ But that day he just remembered really clearly, and he wanted to share it. He would share details, like how there were sharks in the water, and ‘fishermen took pity & reeled us on gasoline tanks’ – those are all actual facts. And eating ‘five bowls of rice in Hong Kong’ – when they landed, they were on the outskirts of the islands of Hong Kong, at the villages, it was villagers who found and fed them.

It was those really momentous moments I wrote down as lines, and I think when I started writing the poem they were just in traditional stanzas, but I realized that some of the moments in the images – like with the fishermen – stood out to me so clearly, I wanted to write them again. In an early draft of the poem some of those lines repeated, and at the time I was doing a mentorship fellowship with Kundiman, which is one of few national Asian-American literary arts organizations in the US, on Turtle Island, and Ching-In Chen, my mentor was another genderqueer, trans, Chinese-American mentor who saw my poem and asked me, ‘Have you heard of the pantoum?’ And at the time I hadn't – I didn't have an MFA and the forms that I studied were just learned in community – but when I heard about the pantoum I realized that the form of the poem was actually asking to be that.

The way the repetition works in a pantoum is the second and fourth lines of stanza one become one and three of the next, and that just keeps going. And, when I put that into the poem, I realized that that's the form it needed, and the form worked so well for me that I wrote two pantoums. After I wrote that, I began going back in and working on the craft and the details of the poem.

EEC: To go back to some of the things you mentioned in terms of being an oral historian, documenting your family's experience and the broader Asian-American experience, your poem relates a lot to my interest and critical work about Hong Kong Literature being used as an archive. What does this add to the archives of Hong Kong’s history? Especially because it's creative writing as archive, not just documenting facts and writing it down as prose, there's something a lot more artistic about it.

RD: Yeah, I think that the power of creative writing is to bring history to life, it can help people feel history. Oftentimes the way history is documented, objectivity and a lack of feeling is seen as standard and what we aspire towards. But poetry and creative writing is the opposite of that.

I draw a lot from Audre Lorde who said, ‘I feel therefore I can be free.’ I've read this poem out loud to different audiences here [in the US], and at the end of the night there have been other Chinese-American people who tell me, ‘Oh, this is my father's story,’ or ‘Oh, this is also my grandfather's story, but it hasn't been talked about as much,’ or ‘I didn't know the full details,’ or ‘I've been trying for so long to figure it out.’ This is just someone I don't know, who was sitting in the crowd, and so I think poetry also brings people together.

It feels like the poem can be a historical archive itself, but then when the people who have lived a part of that life come together, it becomes an extension of the archive. People's memories continue to write archive. Even in research for this poem, there would be a specific time period when thousands of people swam, and there might be a photograph in an article – but you don't actually feel the full humanity of those people's stories. I think poetry helps do that, creative writing helps do that.

EEC: You include an equation in the poem, and you also use the statistic ‘an 80% chance of making it’. I read this as a way to rationalize the painful experiences of the poem. What inspired you to write with mathematics, a somewhat logical/rational form within the somewhat illogical/irrational, creative form?

RD: So the equation piece came from talking to my grandpa, he said, ‘Oh, they said we had an 80% chance of making it.’ When I shared that with someone else, they were like, ‘That's so improbable, how can you come up with that?’ But the thing is, that's what was needed in order to think that it was rational or a good idea to swim for several miles at night, across these waters. There had to be some logic to it, or there had to be some promise to it.

And the ‘breath + breath x wanting [over] death’ – from my understanding, of how to make it across, it was very calculated. So, the opening of part one says, ‘you had to know the currents, & the sun | stay shallow to keep warm in the waters. | you had to believe you could do it | & not be afraid to die.’ Those are direct quotes, also. It was really calculated, he was like, ‘Oh yeah, you would go to shallow waters which would be warmer, and the deeper ones would be colder. You could know the temperature that way.’ He told my grandma, ‘In order to make it, you had to believe you could do it. And you could not be afraid of dying.’ I don't know if you would call that logical or illogical, but death is such an accepted part of the human experience, and so to think that you could make it and you would not die? That's its own logic. And so, math as a subject that is so considered and calculated, a lot of it has answers.

EEC: I find myself wondering if these lines are in translation. When you were speaking to your grandfather, what language were you speaking in?

RD: Our family is from Toisan, and so everything's in Toishanese. This is my translation to English.

Interviews & Features

“A Companion to Where Else, Hong Kong Literature’s newest addition; interviews with contributors,” by Elizabeth E. Chung, Writing Chinese: A Journal of Contemporary Sinophone Literature, 2(1), p.123-143, 2023.

Given the growing interest in Hong Kong and the region’s literature which provides insight into the experiences of one of Britain’s last colonies, Elizabeth E. Chung interviewed River 瑩瑩 Dandelion, as well as editors and contributors to the new Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology. The ensuing interviews are included here and result in a companion to the anthology: a revelatory insight into the transnational attention to Hong Kong, its history, and its future.

“That Which You are Afraid to Write, Write It,” The Margins, 2022.

Former Open City fellow River 瑩瑩 Dandelion answers ten questions, plus one open-ended one, about his writing life.

Global Chinatowns: Histories of Resistance & Community, Podcast Feature, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 2020.

Writer and organizer River 瑩瑩 Dandelion traveled to Chinatowns in eight different countries, as well as his ancestral villages, documenting global stories of migration and resilience across the diaspora. That same year, artists and scholars Diane Wong and Mei Lum, went on a West Coast Solidarity tour to connect with tenants, organizers, workers, and artists in Chinatowns in San Francisco, LA, Vancouver, and Seattle. In this podcast interview, they talk about the formation of Chinatowns across the world, how the pandemic is affecting Chinatowns, and make important connections between gentrification in immigrant communities across the U.S.

Story Corps: On Home, Family History, and Remembering for Future Generations, Interview, 2020.

In this interview conducted by Tara Mei Smith, River 瑩瑩 Dandelion reflects on home, Chinatown, family history, and how racism in the U.S. impacts one’s sense of belonging. River discusses his ancestral lineage, as well as how present-day anti-Asian racism is connected to racism across centuries.

Wellesley College Alum Spotlight, Interview 2020.

In light of an increase of reported anti-Asian hate crimes, Wellesley’s Advisor for Students of Asian Descent hosted a panel called “Building Resilience: Addressing Anti-Asian Racism During COVID-19.” The goals of the event were to empower people of Asian descent with strategies for navigating racism, violence, harassment, and discrimination in the midst of COVID-19; offer advice to allies who want to better support Asians and Asian Americans; and share historical context & raise awareness about the dynamics of anti-Asian racism. River 瑩瑩 Dandelion, was one of the panelists, and was gracious enough to spend an afternoon with us to discuss what that event meant to him.

Press for Homeward Bound: Global Intimacies in Converging Chinatowns Exhibitions

How ‘Homeward Bound’ Came to Be: A Discussion with Curators, Artist Spotlight Interview, Pearl River Mart, 2019.

Around Towns, World of Chinese Magazine, 2019.

Exhibit Explores Asian Identity in Global Chinatowns, The Ink.NYC, 2019.