The Kingdom of Surfaces
Chances are you know the titular wonderland of Sally Wen Mao’s third collection, The Kingdom of Surfaces—you maybe even live there. It’s a country pledged to shallowness, unquestioned exteriors, the appearance of justice for all. It’s a place where East Asians are dehumanized on sight, miniaturized into sexual trinkets (regarded “not as ‘people’ but ‘temptations’”) or blown up into faceless fears: “Carrier / pigeon, germ-carrier, carrion breath, China virus.” It is—in Roland Barthes’s phrase—an “empire of signs,” where Eastern meanings are decontextualized and manipulated according to Western whims. Barthes pays that empire a visit; the New York City–based Mao has to live there: “I am trapped in someone else’s imagination. My borders lose shape. I become a woman without boundaries, permeable as water.”
The Kingdom of Surfaces deepens the fascinations of Mao’s previous collection, Oculus (2019): multiperspectival sequences, self-camouflaging personae, fan-fictional recastings of the pioneering Hollywood star Anna May Wong. Oculus’s conceptual tug-of-war was between the verbal and the visual; the new book pits fantasy (a universal impulse, equally crucial to Orientalizing gazes and daydreams of “kingdom-destroying” revenge) against materiality, the subject of meditations “On Silk” and “On Porcelain.” In Mao’s hands, even the sturdiest stuff can be remolded into unexpected metaphors. Within one vase-shaped stanza, porcelain stands for immigrant resilience—“the Chinese / have survived centuries / in America, exploited, / excluded, beaten black / and blue”—and one family’s resistance to cross-racial solidarity: “They’ve grown brittle as earthenware / So I am bereft & blue.”
Carrying historical hurt is a responsibility Mao accepts without hesitation—and without relish: “I’m sick of speaking for women who’ve died.” In the book’s last, strongest poems, Mao concentrates on herself, and on the “American loneliness” of a Chinese American poet, born in Wuhan, surrounded by anti-Asian racism and entrapped by Silicon Valley’s con games—Mao’s mother worked for Elizabeth Holmes’s defunct corporation Theranos, “spiraled with it and lost everything.” This kingdom of surfaces is one big joke, and Mao takes herself seriously enough to take it all personally: “Perhaps the American dream is an American gag order / American gag reflex / American gag.”