Rhapsody in Plain Yellow: Poems

by Marilyn Chin

A fusion of east and west, high culture, popular culture, and ancient Chinese history mark this distinguished collection. Marilyn Chin, with her multilayered, multidimensional, intercultural singing, elegizes the loss of her mother and maternal grandmother and tries to unravel the complexities of her family's past. She tells of the trials of immigration, of exile, of thwarted interracial love, and of social injustice. Some poems recall the Confucian "Book of Songs," while others echo the African American blues tradition and Western railroad ballads. The title poem references the Han Dynasty rhapsody but is also a wild, associative tour de force. Political allegories sing out with personal revelations. Personal revelations open up to a universal cry for compassion and healing. These songs emerge as a powerful and elegant collection: sophisticated yet moving, hard-hitting yet refined.

Genres: Poetry, Asian American, Read For School, Literary Fiction

110 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Marilyn Chin is an award-winning poet and the author of Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty and Dwarf Bamboo. Her writing has appeared in The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry.

She was born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. Her books have become Asian American classics and are taught in classrooms internationally. Marilyn Chin has read her poetry at the Library of Congress. She was interviewed by Bill Moyers’ and featured in his PBS series The Language of Life and in PBS Poetry Everywhere.

Reviews

[Nadine in NY Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of these poems, I really liked, and some of these (really, most of these) I didn't understand.

Variations on an Ancient Theme: The Drunken Husband
The dog is barking at the door
"Daddy crashed the car"
"Hush, kids, go to your room
Don't come out until it's over"
He stumbles up the dim-lit stairs
Drops his Levis to his ankles
"Touch me and I'll kill you," she says
Pointing a revolver at his head

The dog is barking at the door
She doesn't recognize the master
She sniffs his guilty crotch
Positioned to bite it off
"Jesus, control your dog
A man can't come back to his castle"
"Kill him, Ling, Ling," she sobs
Curlers bobbing on her shoulders

The dog is barking at the door
"Quiet, Spot, let's not wake her"
The bourbon is sour on his breath
Lipstick on his proverbial collar
He turns on the computer in the den
He calms the dog with a bone
Upstairs she sleeps, facing the wall
Dreaming about the Perfume River

The Dog is barking at the door
He stumbles in swinging
"Where is my gook-of-a-wife
Where are my half-breed monsters"
There is silence up the cold stairs
No movement, no answer
The drawers are open Uke graves
The closets agape to the rafters

The dog is barking at the door
He stumbles in singing
"How is my teenage bride?
How is my mail-order darling?
Perhaps she's pretending to be asleep
Waiting for her man's hard cock"
He enters her from behind
Her sobbing does not deter him

The dog is barking at the door
What does the proud beast know?
Who is both Master and intruder?
Whose bloody handprint on the wall?
Whose revolver in the dishwater?
The neighbors won't heed her alarm
She keeps barking, barking
Bent on saving their kind

[Amelie Florence · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chin's Rhapsody in Plain Yellow is musical (as alluded to in the title), wild and unspooled at times, and formal and subdued at others. The book is a romp through culture, family, interracial love, politics and identity, and she is not afraid to be explicit and naked and lurid in her portrayal of these things. Her imagery is vivid and fresh and odd and, at times, uncanny.

My favorite part of this book is her Broken Chord Sequence, a series of poems within the collection that come together as an elegy to her mother and grandmother. It is a beautiful, sorrowful exploration of love and grief and guilt and the frailty of life.

I love these words so much on the page, and listening to her read her poems is another experience in itself—a completely different, almost manic, experience of the words—definitely worth checking out if you enjoy seeing poets perform their work.

[andré crombie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Man is good said Meng-Tzu
We must cultivate their natures
Man is evil said Hsun-Tzu
There’s a worm in the human heart

He gleaned a beaded purse from Hong Kong
He procured an oval fan from Taiwan
She married him for a green card
He abandoned her for a blonde

My grandmother is calling her goslings
My mother is summoning her hens
The sun has vanished into the ocean
The moon has drowned in the fen

Discs of jade for her eyelids
A lozenge of pearl for her throat
Lapis and kudzu in her nostrils
They will rob her again and again

[Matt Sautman · Rating 5 out of 5]

While the bulk of this is republished in Portrait of the Self as a Nation, Chin’s Rhapsody in Yellow presents as a coherent volume in isolation as well. These are excellent poems about Asian American identity that show off Chin’s prowess for wordplay.

[VA · Rating 4 out of 5]

Expressed mixed feelings of the author

[Teena Chumber · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gets boring towards the end of the book. Some of the poems are really really good.

[Chin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poems that she expresses in her writing is unique, it is how she felt for the event that occur. She makes the reader connect with the speaker of these poems. For example, “That Half Is Almost Gone” the speaker of this poem, as I concluded she is missing something that she used to have. These poems are precious to her because they are part of her life.
As readers con read, “That half is almost gone, / the Chinese half, “seems to be voices that creates one voice a poem in which anyone can make personal connection with.

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marilyn Chin was the visiting poet on our campus this year. She's really an interesting and talented woman -- the reading she gave was wonderful. I love what she does with her poetry, and I think I enjoy the poems even more because I got to see the brilliant woman who wrote them.

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marilyn Chin is one of the most proficient contemporary poets, and her Rhapsody in Plain Yellow is truly one of her landmark poetry books!

My favorites:
"Hospital Interlude"
"Rhapsody in Plain Yellow"
"Blues on Yellow (#3)"

[SmarterLilac · Rating 5 out of 5]

This genius book, brutal, elegant, romantic and strange, made me cry. Filled with an appreciation of a speaker's Chinese heritage and of loss for its decreasing hold on her mind, it is at once a book of praise and mourning. More of mourning. Astounding quality in these poems overall. Excellent.

[Victoria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favourites:
"That Half Is Almost Gone"
"Hong Kong Fathersong"
"Bold Beauty"
"The True Story of Mr. and Mrs. Wong"
"Empathy"

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

So lovely and so rhetorically important in the American canon (& really in the canon of any place where the overlap of cultures plays a prominent role in shaping human experience).

[ben adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of the poems in this book were pretty good, but the long poems were grueling, rambling, and unfocused, especially the title poem.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 C5392r 2002