The Future’s Not Ours to Keep

“When I die, my epitaph should be: I died a thousand deaths.”
— Anna May Wong

 

In 2014, a heartbroken young woman in Shanghai piled her belongings on a bed and set them on fire. She took a picture with her cellphone and posted it on Instagram. Then she posted another picture: the faint outline of her legs and feet as she sat on a ledge, suspended high over a parking lot, apparently poised to jump. Then another image of the burning bed, the sheets and frame already blackening into ash. Then the feed ends.

Though underreported in China, the story made international news. At the Daily Mail, a headline asked, “Did hundreds of people ignore this girl’s cry for help? Chinese woman appears to post her suicide on Instagram.” The story is sensational, but it encapsulates the increasingly visual way people relate to each other and to the world. Hyperconnected through social media, many of us now have the instinct to livestream our suffering. Despair, especially feminine despair, finds a rapt audience. Nothing is spared for the camera.

Sally Wen Mao retells this story in one of the titular poems from Oculus (2019), her second full-length collection. In direct, unrhymed couplets, Mao evokes both the young woman’s suicide and the increasingly worrying messages she posted before her death:

Before I wake, I peruse the dead girl’s live
photo feed. Days ago, she uploaded
 
her confessions: I can’t bear the sorrow
captions her black eyes, gaps across a face
 
luminescent as snow.

“Oculus” is a surprisingly quiet poem. It’d be easy to wring the young woman’s suicide for melodrama, to zoom in on her sexy selfies or tie her tragedy to a larger indictment of millennial narcissism. But Oculus isn’t that kind of text; Mao isn’t that kind of poet. Instead, she focuses on small details: the wet eyelashes in a self-portrait, the girl’s tapered legs “bright as thorns,” the Huangpu River “frozen this year into a dry, bloodless / stalk.”

In an interview with the Creative Independent published last year, Mao explains, “I saw that burning bed and that ledge, and up until those posts is just this beautiful girl with this enviable life. I thought about all the ways that we try to create this spectacle. It’s so much harder to document how we feel.” Mao’s aim isn’t to further objectify the young woman, which the news media has already done, but to render her circumstances comprehensible and real. Mao does this in a single, touching gesture:

Why does the light in the night
 
promise so much? She wiped her lens
before she died. The smudge still lives.
 
I saw it singe the edge of her bed.

I’m reminded of the flattening effect of social media and of narrative in general. A story can totally obscure its subject, a theme Mao takes up throughout the collection. Behind all the headlines and speculation, there was a woman, and she lives on in text, if only briefly. Mao preserves her final act, whose mark is still present in the posthumous Instagram account. In the last line of “Oculus,” Mao turns her gaze away from the singular young woman and toward the world that young woman knew: the misogyny of her deceptive boyfriend, the alienating loneliness of the 21st-century city in which she lived, the online bystanders who responded to her final posts only with likes, and even then only too late. The girl’s last gesture—her fingerprint on the lens—becomes enormous, powerful, accusatory: “Soon it swallowed the whole burning city,” Mao writes.

Mao was born in Wuhan, China, and moved to the United States at age five. She draws upon her experience of Chinese and Asian American visual culture, which saturates the book with allusions so dense the text requires endnotes. Her landscape is the detritus of television and cinema and internet webcams, the jetstream of the image in an era when most everything has become visual matter. In the aforementioned interview with the Creative Independent, Mao describes the themes at the heart of Oculus: “It’s obsessed with spectacle and being looked at, but it also is aware of all the violence that comes with being looked at.”

“Occidentalism,” a poem early in the book, is a useful guide for how to read the collection. Its subject is the world of text: “A man celebrates erstwhile conquests, / his book locked in a silo, still in print. // I scribble, make Sharpie lines, deface / its text like it defaces me.” The “marble lions” outside, “silent / yet silver-tongued, with excellent teeth” in the following lines place readers in Manhattan, at the New York Public Library, where Patience and Fortitude flank the entrance. Finding herself both subject and author within the institution, Mao grapples with the problem of having one’s story already told—and already colonized.

“In this life I have worshipped so many lies,” Mao continues. “Then I workshop them, make them better.” Mao engages with the narratives allowed women of color, Asian women in particular. In two short lines, she condenses the Asian woman’s dilemma: faced with a scarcity of models for her own life, why wouldn’t she end up “worshipping” a lie at some point? And why wouldn’t she come to resent the confines of that lie? The word workshop—which plays off worship with the consonance that characterizes many of Mao’s poems—alludes to the poet’s duty or perhaps to the political duty that poets assume: to refigure these historical narratives and rewrite them to suit a self-made future.

“Occidentalism” continues:

[...] I love
the fragility of a porcelain bowl. How easy
it is, to shatter chinoiserie, like the Han
 
dynasty urn Ai Weiwei dropped in 1995.
If only recovering the silenced history
 
is as simple as smashing its container: book,
bowl, celadon spoon. Such objects cross
 
borders the way our bodies never could.

These lines set the stage for Mao’s later discussion of movement and migration and of the provenance of objects, bodies, and their ultimate fates. Western museums are full of stolen art: precious, often culturally significant objects expropriated across borders and markets to end up far from their origins. There’s been a wave of museum heists across Europe in the last eight years—high-tech vigilante repatriations of Chinese artifacts, whisked out of Drottningholm Palace, Cambridge University, and the Château de Fontainebleau, all under cover of smoke bombs. In Oculus, Mao performs a similar kind of heist; she seizes back the narrative allowed to Asian women, though she acknowledges the task, ever ongoing, won’t be easy. “Occidentalism” ends:

The tome of hegemony lives on, circulates
in our libraries, in our bloodstreams. One day,
 
a girl like me may come across it on a shelf,
pick it up, read about all the ways her body
 
is a thing. And I won’t be there to protect
her, to cross the text out and say: go ahead—
 
rewrite this.

When I first read the poem, I was struck by how Mao’s generosity is coupled with rage. She situates herself as both poet and protector, giving a hypothetical future reader, perhaps also a woman of color, permission to rework the texts that oppress her. Like Mao, I’m a girl who has been told all the ways my body “is a thing.” The casual exotification of my body—catcalls on the street, unsolicited emails, anonymous messages online—is so frequent and so banal that I’m surprised when it doesn’t occur. In less confident or less generous hands, voicing such a fear could come across as overly abject, dramatic, or cynical. But Mao is aware of the power of text. She speaks about the objectification of Asian women plainly, knowing that to write something is to preserve evidence. And though she positions herself as a kind of guardian, the security of that role is ambivalent. She worries, “I won’t be there to protect / her.” In Mao’s absence—she cannot haunt the stacks of all the libraries in the world—she offers this poem, whose end swings out toward the world like a flung-open window. “[Go] ahead—rewrite this.”

***

An oculus is an opening, eyelike by both definition and etymological root. In architecture, it denotes the circular opening in the center of a dome, as in the ceiling of the Guggenheim Museum. (Oculus is also the name of the futuristic transit hub in the World Trade Center complex.) An oculus represents not the temptation of the screen but the violence of the lens, the eye staring out. It’s the gaze, but also, crucially, an opening, a point of entry, a moment of weakness, a window, a wound. Think Margaret Atwood: “A fish hook / an open eye.” In Mao’s work, the oculus doubles in the same way: in her poetry, she moves through the oculus, that place of looking, like thread through the eye of a needle—or a rock thrown through a window—in search of the gaze’s effects.

As befits such a visual text, Mao’s language is highly cinematic. In “Mutant Odalisque,” for example, there’s mention of a “cicatrix soaped, cilia and pus / rubbed raw.” A cicatrix is the scar of a healed wound; in botany, it’s the mark on a branch after a leaf has been removed. In the same poem, “February’s ice razor scalps / the gingko trees, their hair pulled skyward like the ombre roots // of young women.” Mao’s poems are vivid and dense and reference science, the natural world, and an internet lexicon that invokes a sensory-rich world where everything is interconnected. Li Po’s eighth-century poems are given new life as “baroque lasers”; elsewhere in the book, a Nam June Paik-esque television screen “turns / dark, then bright with waves.”

Key images recur, particularly images from the Western Orientalist fantasy of Asian women. In “Occidentalism,” for example, there’s “a man parting the veil covering a woman’s / face, his nails prying her lips open.” Many of these images allude to the films of Anna May Wong, a Chinese American actress who also inspires several persona poems in which Mao resurrects the star’s voice. In “Anna May Wong on Silent Films,” Mao writes

[I]f I bared the grooves
in my spine, made my lust known,
 
the reel would remind me
that someone with my face
could never be loved.
 
How did you expect my characters
to react? In so many shoots,
I was brandishing a dagger.

Born in Los Angeles in 1905, Wong was the first Chinese American movie star, and her career spanned the transition from silent to sound film. Yet the racism she faced in the industry ensured that her characters—often orientalist clichés such as the self-sacrificial, innocent Butterfly or the sly, manipulative Dragon Lady—were often treated poorly onscreen. “That was the story of my film career,” Wong said. “Most of the time I played in mystery and intrigue stories. They didn’t know what to do with me at the end, so they killed me off.”

Wong is a liminal figure. As a third-generation Chinese American, she was too Chinese for the American film industry and too American for her Chinese critics, who saw her vampy sensuality and conniving roles as damaging to China’s reputation. Caught between two worlds, Wong was forced to blaze her own trail. Though she achieved fame in American films—reviewers praised her subtle performances, and she became a fashion icon—Hollywood convention forbade representation of interracial relationships, which meant Wong could never act as a leading lady opposite a white love interest. Because many Asian male roles were played by white actors in yellowface, Wong was barred from appearing as a romantic lead in those movies too.

Frustrated by racism in America and by the limited roles available to her, Wong left for Europe in 1928. There she appeared in a wider variety of roles and achieved the superstardom she dreamed of; she also fostered close relationships with fellow actresses, such as Marlene Dietrich. However, when she returned to the United States two years later, she resumed acting in many of the same stereotypical parts, hoping she’d eventually break out in Hollywood. In 1935, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer refused to consider her for O-lan, the lead character in the studio’s adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s novel The Good Earth. The studio cast Luise Rainer, a white woman in yellowface, instead. Mao references this moment in “Anna May Wong Fans Her Time Machine”:

Ursa Minor, you never
warned me: all my life I’ve been minor,
played the strumpet, the starved one.
 
I was taproot and crook. How I’ve hunched
down low, wicked girl, until this good earth
swallowed me raw.

In her series of 11 persona poems, Mao offers Wong a new freedom, both creatively and emotionally, through the device of time travel. In Mao’s imagined filmography, Wong makes cameos in Sixteen Candles (1984), Kill Bill (2003), and The Last Samurai (2003)—although Wong still dies in these versions, and her footage is still cut. In “Anna May Wong Goes Home with Bruce Lee,” Mao grants the actress something she never got to experience on film: a passionate love affair.

We were born in the same golden state, surrounded
by cameras, chimeras for our other selves. He admits
some applause can be cruel, then steals a kiss.
 
Only he knows this terror—of casting so huge
a shadow over a million invisible faces.

The poem brings together two stars, lonely at the top, and allows them to commiserate in a way Wong was denied in her lifetime. Mao acutely captures the longing for community:

He asks me to take him
with me, to the future. It’s the only place we can live
together, he ventures. I want to say yes. I want to let
 
the flush flood us and take him there, our own
happy ending. But instead I say, It’s not ours to keep.

Mao’s poem asks, When, exactly, is that future? Have we already arrived, in 2019, or do we have even farther to travel? If life were fair, Wong’s time machine would work, even in the poems. But in Mao’s depiction, Wong becomes a liminal figure twice over—this time, instead of being between cultures and countries, she’s between the past and the future that Mao envisions for her.

Mao’s poems are a vessel for the actress’s voice, but more important, they’re a call to arms for the present moment and to the generation reading now. Mao gestures toward the splendidness of imagining one’s own future, jettisoning the indignities of history and the harms to which our bodies have been subject. Seeking futurity is a balm for the ills of the present; it’s also a potent inspiration. “Darlings, let’s rewrite / the script,” Mao’s Wong proclaims. “Let’s hijack the narrative, steer / the story ourselves.” This is a call to readers who wish to reclaim their stories, rewriting and workshopping them, as in “Occidentalism,” to make them better.

***

Though some of Mao’s poems invoke a Utopian techno-futurism, as in “Teledildonics,” an imagined post-body virtual reality paradise “where all touch gives pleasure / all touch is welcome // and nothing will hurt / and nothing will bruise,” Mao also depicts the ugly histories that society—especially people of color—still reckon with.

In “Provenance: A Vivisection,” a sweeping, six-part poem, Mao’s subject is Bodies: The Exhibition, a touring scientific carnival of plastinated human specimens. She begins with a history of human exhibitions: Sara Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus,” whose large buttocks made her an attraction throughout 19th-century Europe; conjoined twins Chang and Eng, who became famous touring the US both before and after the Civil War; Afong Moy, a Chinese woman with bound feet and the first female Chinese immigrant to the United States, who was exhibited as part of a human zoo in the 1830s. (Moy is also the subject of another long poem in Mao’s collection, “The Diary Of Afong Moy.”)

Mao juxtaposes these seemingly retrograde “curiosities” with the plastinated bodies on display today. Whose bodies are these? she asks. Did they donate their remains willingly, or were they seized? Investigations by the US Congress and then–New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo in 2008 suggested that the bodies are those of Chinese dissidents. Addressing one plastinated corpse, Mao writes

Sir, I look at you through your vitreous blue
eyes, and your shorn life passes through me
in one thrush. […]
 
Have you traveled
as far in your life as you’ve toured
 
posthumously, torqued in a prison
of cryogenic light? Amsterdam. Paris.
New York: what does it mean, anyway—
 
the provenance of a corpse?

In focusing on stories of individuals juxtaposed against the histories of empire, Mao invites readers to consider the ways in which everyday environments are connected to ongoing injustices. If you are one of the millions of people who saw the Bodies exhibition, Mao suggests, consider the truth of what you saw.

Another poem, “Electronic Motherland,” refers to the 2012 Foxconn Riots, during which 2,000 workers in Taiyuan rioted against poor treatment in the factories where they manufactured electronic components for companies such as Apple and Dell. Anyone who owns an iPhone is complicit, however distantly. After a spate of employee suicides at the Foxconn factories in 2010, the company installed netting to dissuade jumpers. “Midnight in the dormitories: pigeons / drop shit on the suicide netting,” Mao writes. For American readers, these issues can feel removed, both culturally and geographically, but their insidious effects are pervasive. Mao doesn’t presume to offer a solution to capitalism, exploitative labor, racism, or patriarchy—who could?—but she asks readers to hold the knowledge of what transpired and carry it with them into the rest of their lives.

In the same way that Mao’s focus on lives in the history of empire reminds readers of the ongoing effects of imperialism, her poems also reclaim lives eclipsed by a monolithic narrative. “No Resolution,” like “Oculus,” is a quietly devastating poem about an event that also made headlines: a Korean father from Queens who was pushed off a subway platform and killed by an oncoming train in December 2012.

“Blood broadcasts the story. Noise rakes / the story and pummels it to the ground / until there’s nothing left. No story. No man,” Mao writes, succinctly conveying how the reverberating din of social media and the news cycle can soon wipe out the details of an event. Here, the story of an immigrant’s tragic death becomes a stand-in for his life: his and his family’s history reduced to a blip in the news, a tabloid cover, gone within a day. Mao identifies the same mechanism in “Occidentalism,” a story subsuming its subject. Yet she moves past the headlines to remind readers of what was lost. She writes of meeting the man’s daughter, Ashley Han:

She will talk about her father—the story
of all our lives—how she didn’t have the chance
to connect with him fully, and then suddenly—
it was the story of none of our lives.

The poem is part elegy, part memorial, and part reckoning. There is no easy conclusion, no easy way to render justice posthumously.

Though expansive and forward-gazing, Mao’s vision is also critical. Her futurity is paired with realism, as in the Wong cycle. Her portrayals of real-world tragedies are unsentimental. There are no resolutions in Oculus, no fantastic restructurings of history, just sites where the dominant narrative is pulled away, and the oppressed subjects are allowed to speak.

In the last poem, “Resurrection,” Mao writes of seeing Wong’s face everywhere one autumn, plastered on subway ads promoting a show at the New-York Historical Society. “I’m so hungry I gnaw at light. [...] I know this hunger tormented her too,” Mao writes. What Mao asks of readers is not to feel comfortable but to be aware—to see what she has made visible. In this, perhaps some of us will see ourselves too. “But dear universe,” Mao writes, the last lines in Oculus, “if I can recognize / her face under this tunnel of endless shadows / against the luminance of all that is extinct / and oncoming, then I am not a stranger here.”