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Asia Girl Biography

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Poet Cathy Song was born and raised in Hawaii and is of Korean and Chinese descent. Her work draws on her rich Korean-Chinese ancestry as well as her experiences as an American and a woman. In poems that have been compared by critics to the muted tints of watercolor paintings, Song has consistently created a world rich with narrative and imagery that transcends her own ethnic and regional background. Song herself resists classification as an “Asian American” or “Hawaiian” writer, calling herself “a poet who happens to be Asian American.” Her first volume of poems, Picture Bride, won the 1982 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and was also nominated for that year’s National Book Critics Circle Award. The volume’s success carried the young poet to national recognition, and other awards followed.

Song’s father was a pilot and the family traveled extensively during her youth. In interviews, Song has credited her early interest in writing to her family’s travels: “Our family travels started my writing. I guess I was around nine years old when I decided I wanted to be the family chronicler.” Her interest and talent were encouraged by her high school teacher, the Hart Crane biographer John Unterecker. Song attended Wellesley College and earned an MFA from Boston University. She met her husband, a medical student at Tufts University, while in Boston. The couple moved to Denver, Colorado, in 1984 while he completed his residency at Denver General Hospital, and there Song wrote Frameless Windows, Squares of Light (1988) and began a family. In 1987 they returned to Honolulu, where she now lives, combining her writing with teaching creative writing to students at several universities.

Song’s poetic oeuvre is united by her abiding focus on family. The moral ties that bind women to children and parents, to their community, to tradition, and to the land are continuously interwoven throughout her verse. In the title poem from Picture Bride, for example, Song recalls the story of her grandparents. At age twenty-three, Song’s grandmother was sent to the United States from Korea in an arranged marriage through the exchange of photographs; her husband, a Chinese immigrant who worked on a Hawaiian plantation, was much older. Much of the book addresses such family relationships. Shirley Lim, in a review of the book in Asian American Literature, commented: “Song’s greatest strength lies in this marvelous organic nature of her imagery and in the complete fusion of form, image, occasion, and emotion. Every poem is marked by this naturalness of form, based unpretentiously on phrasal pauses or the breadth of a line, by an unforced storyline or ease of observation; almost every poem has a sudden eruption of metaphor, which startles, teases, illuminates.”

Frameless Windows, Squares of Light continues to explore family history and relationships; as Booklist reviewer Pat Monaghan noted, “Song explores the nuances of intimacy with admirable clarity and passion.” Song treats the theme of womanhood in “A Mehinaku Girl in Seclusion,” which describes a girl’s coming of age and subsequent removal from her tribe for three years in order to be “married to the earth.” In this poem, Song’s approach is unique. “Song is at her best when she wrenches free of her responsibility to family history,” reviewer Jessica Greenbaum opined in Women’s Review of Books, adding that “A Mehinaku Girl” draws the reader into the inner life of its main character far more vividly than do Song’s second-person recitations of family history.

In School Figures (1994) Song again casts the stories of her family in verse. Both “A Conservative View” and “Journey” explore the challenges that faced her parents. The thoughts, feelings, and impressions couched within each of Song’s poems—whether quietly coming to terms with the death of a father or sitting amid the clatter of serving dishes and the buoyant chatter of family during dinner—are transformed by the poet into universal images, transcending labels of race, gender or culture. Song’s next collection, The Land of Bliss (2001) is shot through with familial and autobiographical themes. Rochelle Ratner, reviewing the collection for Library Journal, commented that here, Song “magnificently intertwines the harsh reality of her aging parents (including a mother frequently hospitalized for depression) with memories of her grandparents.” Ratner considered the longer autobiographical poems to be “some of the finest this reviewer has read in recent memory.”

Cloud Moving Hands (2007), Song’s fifth book, takes its name from a T’ai Chi movement, and is informed by Buddhism. As Eric McHenry noted in the New York Times Book Review, the work is “preoccupied with suffering—as itself and as an opportunity for change.” McHenry praised Song’s shorter poems in the belief that “Song is at her best when her poems are most—pun unavoidable—songlike, or when she’s imagining other lives.” The poet Li Young-Lee added, “Cloud Moving Hands is Song’s best work. More of the heart and mind and soul are integrated than ever. More finely seen differentiations arise. Deeper chords are struck. She moves more and more into the unknown. This book is a gift to her readers.”

Song is a noted teacher and leader of creative writing workshops through Hawaii’s “Poets in the Schools” program. Of her work with the program Song has said: “I’m not there to give them [the students] false praise. It’s not going to do them any good...Sometimes I tell them to rewrite something over and over, and they do, creating a really good poem. You’ve got to be willing to dismantle...to realize that poetry is something made outside of yourself.”

[Updated 2010]

CAREER

Poet and educator. Instructor of creative writing at various universities.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

POETRY

Picture Bride, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1983.

Frameless Windows, Squares of Light, Norton (New York, NY), 1988.

School Figures, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 1994.

The Land of Bliss, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 2001.

Cloud Moving Hands, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 2007.

Also editor, with Juliet Kono, of Sister Stew: Fiction and Poetry by Women, Bamboo Ridge Press (Honolulu, HI), 1991. Work anthologized in publications including Boomer Girls, Poems by Women from the Baby Boom Generation, Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, Norton Anthology of American Literature, and Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Also published in Best American Poetry 2000. Contributor to periodicals, including Asian-Pacific Literature, Hawaii Review, Poetry, and Seneca Review.

FURTHER READING

BOOKS

Asian American Literature, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Benbow-Pfalzgraf, Taryn, editor, American Women Writers, 2nd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2000.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 169, American Poets since World War II, 5th series, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Kester-Shelton, Pamela, Feminist Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, October 1, 1994, p. 231.

International Examiner (Seattle, WA), May 2, 1984, Debbie Murakami Nomaguchi, "Cathy Song: I'm a Poet Who Happens to Be Asian American" (interview), p. 9.

Library Journal, May 1, 1983, p. 909; June 15, 1988, p. 61; December, 2001, Rochelle Ratner, review of The Land of Bliss, p. 130.

MELUS, Volume 15, number 1, 1988; Volume 18, number 3, 1993.

Poetry, April, 1984; August, 1989.

Publishers Weekly, April 1, 1983, p. 59.

Women's Review of Books, October, 1988, p 19.

Angry Little Girls was developed from Kim, the Angry Little Asian Girl, a character she developed in 1994 when she was a sophomore at UC Berkeley. Four years after initially creating the first episode of the Angry Little Asian Girl, she created four more, and sent the five episodes titled Angry Little Asian Girl, Five Angry Episodes to festivals. Later she submitted her comic strips to syndicates in hopes of getting syndicated in newspapers. But after numerous rejection letters and realizing her work would never fit in the mainstream, she decided to buck the system and draw whatever she was inspired to. With the newly created characters, including Deborah the disenchanted princess, Maria the crazy little Latina, Wanda the fresh little soul sistah, and Xyla the gloomy girl, Lee turned it into a weekly comic strip self-published on her website www.angrylittlegirls.com. After finding her true voice, a publishing deal came quickly thereafter. In 2005, the first book of collected Angry Little Girls strips was published by Harry N. Abrams.

Acting career[edit source | editbeta]

She is also a film and television actress, with roles in the 1998 film Yellow and the 2002 film Better Luck Tomorrow. She was a series regular in the short-lived Sci Fi Channel series Tremors, and had a recurring guest role on NBC's Scrubs. Lee made a guest appearance in the first episode of Season Four of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm, ironically playing an angry Asian woman, who launches a physical and verbal attack on star Larry David after he suggests 'Tang' is a common Chinese name. Lee was also in the episode "Animal Pragmatism" of Charmed as Tessa, a college student.

Personal life[edit source | editbeta]

Lee, the youngest of four children, spent her earliest years being raised on a chicken farm by her grandparents in Korea. A few years later, she joined her family in Van Nuys before they moved to San Dimas, and cites her traditional Korean upbringing while growing up in an area with few other Asian Americans as a central influence in her work.

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