Leaving Biddle City

Leaving Biddle City, Marianne Chan‘s second poetry collection, is focused on the role of place in shaping a person’s identity and sense of self. The speaker, a Filipina from Lansing, Michigan, refers to her hometown as Biddle City, a name that relates to the city’s beginnings—

This is the origin story of our town:
In 1835, two brothers from Lansing, New York, 
sold the land where Lansing, Michigan, currently is. 
They called the land “Biddle City.”

The speaker’s relationship with Biddle City is complex; having immigrated as a teenager along with her family, she feels torn between the desire to obey her parents––particularly her mother––and the urge to try out new, unfamiliar, things. “Mom wouldn’t let us go anywhere, afraid of civilian / kidnappers, kids with guns,” says the speaker, and yet, “sometimes // we snuck off anyway to J.J. Video for a thrill, bought licorice, / gazed up at the New Releases. We too felt newly released.”

The tension between different cultural norms is central to this book. One poem recalls how, at the request of the speaker’s brother, the whole family starts seeing a therapist because, as the brother says, “[w]e're screaming too much.” After listening to the therapist, the speaker concludes,

I understand now. Screaming was too
loud. It drowned out all complexity. While screaming, we would,
momentarily, not hear ourselves love one another.

The speaker recalls how her mother used to scream into the “karaoke microphone” and how, “[e]ven as a child […] I never interpreted this as anger. I / knew that this screaming was joy, despite it all.” 

Chan’s unique sense of humor and lyricism beautifully captures the experiences of an immigrant family in a Midwestern town. Each poem serves to anchor the self through memory, since the speaker is “[a]lways moving. Always starting over.”