Return Flight

Jennifer Huang’s debut collection Return Flight contemplates what it means to be an American-born child of 外省人, literally, “people from outside the province,” the Chinese mainlanders who made Taiwan their home after the revolution. In “Layover,” a stranger tells the speaker, “Taiwan is written all over your face.” But it turns out that identity isn’t so easily legible. “I want to live / in Taiwan,” says the speaker in “Tongue-Tied” to their father, who now considers himself American and merely “laughs: ‘Why?’” 

The collection’s “return flights” are journeys of knowledge and self-understanding to places found on maps, like Taiwan, but also to less tangible spaces in which the speaker feels an outsider, like the Chinese patriarchal realm of the father, whose silences grew “louder until / his hand spoke our name,” or the oblivious terrain of an American lover who, after an intimate moment, asks to “watch hentai / together.” As the speaker says in “Pleasure Practice,” 

Truth is I didn’t want a man. Really, 
I want to feel all of me 
realize what is, what is; 
my body, in existence; enough. 

Seeking this existential wholeness, Huang employs some of the syntactic elasticity—adjectives as nouns—of Chinese languages (“his soft,” “my foul,” “her smooth”), while poems like “Manifest” aim to change interior provinces of fate (“a life filled with cursed / love”) and dissociation (“I could see but couldn’t stop. Living / as if I had no choice”) into something triumphant (“For only / I was left and then I left”). Return Flight finds its most memorable destinations in Taiwanese identity—“getting lost / in green brush / then seeing / the sea”—and in familial reconciliation and coming of age:

If forgiveness is an absence, I make a tent with my 
fingers and bow to his sweet-sour spritzing over me 
like a bloom, I bloom.