How to Not Be Afraid of Everything

Jane Wong’s aptly titled second book offers a vivid portrait of Chinese immigrant life in the United States through an array of poetic forms, surprising metaphors, and images that hit with startling resonance. Many of the images in How Not to Be Afraid of Everything are deft—“with a cleaver as wide / as a flooded river”—while others evoke an almost surrealist tableau: “my grandfather breathes through a silk jacket, // a dandelion mane resting between his lips.” 

Food, and the preparation thereof, is a running motif in this collection: we observe beans being cut, fruit drying on window sills, soup congealing with fat, a “fish spinepicked clean,” and the speaker relates, “my teeth keep sharpening / for something to come. / I eat and eat and eat again.” Such consumption is overtly contrasted with the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward, which the poet investigates as part of her exploration of family history. She approaches the ghosts of the past in moving sequences like this one: “At my grandmother’s grave in Jersey, the ground. / Was as soft as a perfectly poached egg. / And I almost plunged my arms into the soil. / To touch her―her purple jade bracelet shining.” Here, Wong showcases many of the qualities that characterize the book as a whole: a simple but effective experimentation with sentences, believably precise similes, vivid contrasts such as the image of the shining bracelet against the dark soil, and, finally, her own position as the American looking back.

Wong has fight and she readies her “curled fists” against both U.S. racism and Chinese patriarchy―her father’s neglect in particular. But as it progresses, this collection turns out to be, overwhelmingly, a dedication to the labors and love of the women in her life, especially her mother. In the closing poems we witness the poet grappling with what it has meant for her family to persist, as the ghostly voices of her ancestors inquire: “Tell us, little girl, are you / hungry, awake,   astonished enough?”