Food is celebratory, but its flip side is hunger and deprivation. Spiritual deprivation and hunger in the new country are important motifs of ethnic … - Marilyn Chin

I was raised by my grandmother who spoke Toisan, a very ancient language. I see myself as part of the minority tribe. I align myself more with people like Kafka, with his weird dialect. I see myself as an outsider on many levels even if we are Han.

I retired from my tenured job early partly because I would like to devote more time to writing poetry. The ancients did that too, they retreated to the countryside and “cleanse from the mud” of the academy and “palace art”. They retreated into the woods to hear their own voice again. Of course, these were rich privileged aristocratic poets. Some were forced exiles like Du Fu, who wrote some of his best works in his later years. In angst, of course. He felt abandoned. However, as we all know, he became the greatest poet of China.

America is no longer a monolithic, European-derived culture. It is no longer a mono-lingual or mono-cultural country, and the margins are moving toward the center. That's to say that those of us who have an urgent message or who have polyphonic voices or who have colorful backgrounds and interesting lives and pasts have a lot to say, and it's now our turn to say it. Indeed, there's more urgency in what we have to say, and the contemporary poetry world can't keep us out. That's the thing. We're breaking new ground, and this is the voice of America. My voice is one of the many voices of America.