Ahead of the release of his debut full-length poetry collection Good Son, Kyle Liang spoke with Sundress intern Saturn Browne on translation, memory, and family.
Saturn Browne: What was your primary thought process as you put Good Son together? Is there a larger narrative which you hoped to achieve?
Kyle Liang: I just wanted for both the reader and speaker(s) of these poems to experience a feeling of arrival at the end of the collection. So I turned to my poems and asked them what they were trying to say, what they were collectively chanting, and began working on how to arrange the poems and create sections that would sharpen their voice(s) such that there wouldn’t be too much noise or a sense of overcrowding. What resulted was a kind of chronologic series of poems—almost autobiographical, which, to me, feels similar to full-length collections that are titled something like “Selected Poems, 1969 – 1974.” This isn’t to say that my collection will be as generational as others works with these titles, but I think it’s honest and unromantic, and that’s what I appreciate about those types of collections.
Saturn Browne: How do the different languages of Chinese pinyin and English play into each other (e.g. “Self Portrait as a Fish” and “No | Bùyào”)?
Kyle Liang: At work and at home I’m used to hearing and speaking a number of different languages, whether it’s English, what’s left of my Mandarin after learning English at age four and using it as my primary language from that point forward, bits and pieces of Spanish, or even medical language. In this book, I was particularly interested in exploring what gets lost in translation. “Self Portrait as a Fish” is very anecdotal and offers a brief, but explicit, history of how things might get lost in translation, whereas “No | Bùyào” presents a visual experience of how things get lost in translation. We already know that much is lost in the process of translating from one language to another despite our best efforts, but I’m more curious about the intention laced into the translation process by the translator. How there might be hidden intentions. Limitations. How the translator might be driven by unconscious bias or emotion or fear or vulnerability or love or an attempt to protect their listener. How a Mandarin interpreter in the hospital once told me that she learned to avoid the phrase “hospice” with Chinese patients because she finds that they react with an irrecoverable sense of hopelessness, whereas I see it as a path to comfort and opportunity for dignity in certain patients. But perhaps this example is not specific to just Chinese people. Anyway, Mandarin sounds like home to me because it’s the language that I grew up hearing, and I think that pinyin allows non-Chinese readers to experience hearing the words that I sometimes have no translation for.
Saturn Browne: What led you to the decision to include epigraphs of Danez Smith, Audre Lorde, and other poets? How were the epigraphs picked and how do you believe they contextualize the sections?
Kyle Liang: I developed a course at Quinnipiac University called Health, Aging, and Intersectionality and am always searching for new resources and materials to support my students and my teaching. One day, Morgan and I were returning books at the library during Pride Month when I saw Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals featured on one of their shelves near the circulation desk. I borrowed the copy on the shelf, not knowing that I was ill-prepared for the richness of Lorde’s words. Reading it for the first time was kind of like hearing a new song on the radio while you’re driving and then suddenly noticing tears streaming down your cheeks. It really affected me as a poet, POC, healthcare provider, patient (as we all, in different ways and at different times, are patients), lover, son. Each page of this short book was striking and spoke to my work as a practitioner, teacher, and poet. With that being said, I felt it also aligned with Good Son.
Futhermore, in using a quote from her book, I wanted to celebrate and honor the work Lorde did during this frightening, vulnerable passage of her life. Writers and artists create profound work when they confront death, but I fear that the public’s aversion to real, legitimate, unapologetic and unromanticized death and dying outside of a fictional world, serial killer podcast, or murder mystery-style narrative, makes these works susceptible to being lost and overlooked. This isn’t to say that any of Lorde’s work is or will ever be lost or overlooked—although more people would certainly benefit from reading it; I just fear that we disproportionately value the words of folks when they are flourishing (e.g. interviews and book deals with celebrities and entrepreneurs at the peak of their careers), whereas the words of folks who are dying or near death risk being akin to silence. I’m interested in reading the latter. I want to know what they have to say and what they can teach me.
Saturn Browne: What was some of the reasoning behind different structures of pieces—for example, moving enjambments vs. footnotes vs. prose-blocks?
Kyle Liang: Like every poet, I try to push the boundaries of language and form. But most importantly, I try my best to listen to my poems and let them tell me what structure they need to support their words, worlds, and ideas. When I fail to house my lines with the right form then I feel like I didn’t parent my poem to find its own voice—a voice that can be in conversation with readers for years to come without me having to speak for them. In some cases, the poem needed to be pushed to move in order to be heard, and in other cases, I didn’t want to over parent, so the poems were given permission to run the width of the page.
Saturn Browne: How do you believe the act of translation barricade or advance the poems?
Kyle Liang: Great question. I think the act of translation itself—poetry aside—can be a barricade or an advancement. It limits and it enables. Sometimes it can be used for protection and sometimes as a weapon. Something I was never told as a child but believe to be true is that all we can do is our best. Hence, the idea behind Good Son.
In an outcome-oriented environment, good isn’t good enough. There’s a conflict buried in “good”—a hidden, internal conflict, an inherent struggle, a sense of effort-based action. As for my poems that deal with translation, all I can say is that the poems are doing their best to mirror conflict, and in doing so, present their own conflicts.
Saturn Browne: Where did you draw inspiration? Who did you read and reference the most as you put the collection together?
Kyle Liang: Mother. Father. Nái nái. Yé yé (RIP). Pó pó. Gōng gong (RIP). Gē ge. My wife, Morgan. My coworkers. My elementary school best friend, Ahmond. My best friend, Kashif. Chiang Kai-shek. Old family photos. Manhattan Chinatown. The City of Norwich. Dachen Islands. The Taiwan Strait. New York Public Library. Taiwan Straits Standoff: 70 Years of PRC-Taiwan Cross-Strait Tensions. Earthling Ed’s Instagram reels. Anatomy lab. My kitchen. Silence. My students at Brooklyn Poets. José Olivares. Daniel Borzutsky. Li-Young Lee. Jason Koo. K-Ming Chang. Leila Chatti. Ada Limón. Solmaz Sharif. Danez Smith. Victoria Chang. Jennifer Huang. Laura Kolbe. Joshua Bennett. Aracelis Girmay. Ocean Vuong. Ed Hirsch. Atul Gawande. UpToDate.com. Audre Lorde. CDC.gov. Health.gov. The New York Times.
Saturn Browne: Can you speak about the collection’s relationship with family and the language used to articulate it?
Kyle Liang: When my father was in high school, he lived in Taiwan while his parents and younger siblings were in the United States. They left without him because all Taiwanese men were required to serve in the military after reaching a certain age, and my father had already reached that age by the time they decided to leave. He spent roughly a decade in Taiwan without them, starting in his early teen years. He tells me that the break between school semesters were the loneliest because he had no family or classmates to keep him company, and the weeks that the country celebrated Lunar New Year were some of the most difficult because he didn’t know how to cook and every business would close for the holiday so he would grow hungry. He still doesn’t like to eat noodles because he ate them frequently as a kid.
When I was in high school, my mother worked the second shift at Foxwoods Resort Casino, and my father worked the graveyard shift at Mohegan Sun, so they rarely saw each other, and I would only see them for maybe a few hours throughout the week when they weren’t working or sleeping. My older brother, who helped raise me when I was a child, was in college at the time. None of us really spoke much at home so the time we were in the house together was almost always spent in silence. Sometimes the silence was filled with the quiet sound of a pot boiling yu choy or my mother descaling fish or the more violent sound of a cleaver cutting through pork bones on a thick, wood cutting board.
This is all to say that my relationship—and therefore the collection’s relationship—with family could be described by its silences. I think I inherited the silences that defined my father’s upbringing, and this book, as a result, has as well. Outsiders might describe my relationship with my parents as an absence, but I think that describing our relationship as an absence does a disservice to many immigrant and working-class families, especially those who have been affected by war and/or displacement at some point in their family history. This book is an attempt to write into the silence. Define it. Articulate it. In whatever language lives in it and serves it. To find the words and language I didn’t have when I was younger.
Something that my father doesn’t really talk about is that he and his parents also do not speak the same primary language because his parents were born and raised on a small island off the coast of Taizhou, called the Dachen Islands, before they were evacuated and relocated to Taiwan as part of an effort called Operation King Kong; therefore their primary language remained a dialect of Chinese native to Dachen people, whereas my father spoke Mandarin as someone who was born and raised in Taiwan, so I’m sure there were many silences in his relationship with his parents as well.
While we’re on the topic, it would be arrogant of me to pretend I didn’t have help writing into these silences. Interestingly enough, growing up in the United States with rather quiet parents who didn’t understand the intricacies of American childhood or speak the same primary language as me, made me a vessel for guidance and mentorship by teachers, who were often white men. I distinctly remember my middle school science teacher, Jason Deeble, insisting I borrow his copy of the graphic novel American-Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang, but not understanding why he thought I should read it. I owe much of this book to my high school English teacher, Bruce Bierman, who fiercely and almost violently steered me into that silence. Working with him as an impressionable teenager was an awakening. My former undergraduate professor and now good friend, Keith Kerr, played a large part in this process as well—I didn’t consider myself a writer until he began calling me one. Big shout out to these white men in my life.
Saturn Browne: Which poems proved to be the most difficult to write? Why?
Kyle Liang: “No | Bùyào” was certainly a challenge. When it was accepted for publication in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, one of their readers at the time, Koh Xin Tian, spent a lot of time helping make sure the pinyin read naturally. Prior to writing that poem, I had never written in pinyin.
“A Lesson on Immunology” was an extremely difficult poem to write. I wrote it in March 2020—a time when I was afraid to leave my apartment or ride public transportation (keep in mind I live in New York City) for fear of being attacked. It was during a time when I scared that my family members, many of whom are immigrants, would be targeted for hate crimes. I was also in weird position because no one in America seemed to care about protecting themselves or each other from COVID early in the pandemic and scoffed at the thought of wearing masks or social distancing, meanwhile I was working in the hospital, taking care of the very people who challenged the severity of the disease as well as the people of color who were disproportionately affected by it. That was a soul-crushing period of my life. I have many memories of hyperventilating in the hospital bathroom.
Saturn Browne: Did Good Son change and morph through other perspectives (for example, sharing the poems, beta readers, editing), and, if so, how did it change?
Kyle Liang: The majority of the poems in this book were unpublished and unread by anyone before it was selected for publication, so I knew that the poems and the manuscript would probably undergo significant changes. We removed a few poems, added a couple in. I actually asked a very good friend of mine who is not a poet to read the manuscript after it was accepted because I knew that two of the poems spoke closely to our friendship, and I didn’t want to include anything that could potentially hurt him. I ended up removing one of those poems after he read the manuscript, which is a decision I have no regrets about, but undoubtedly changed the book. I was happy to do it because a big reason why I write is to create something that can help people, not hurt them, so the last thing I wanted to do was publish work that would cause needless harm. One thing that did surprise me about the process of having readers and editors was that I found out which themes I really cared about preserving and which themes I didn’t even notice were there. That was cool.
Saturn Browne: What are some of the biggest tips you have for future writers when it comes to crafting a collection?
Kyle Liang: Feel good about every piece you include. A strong manuscript should feel like stone masonry, and you are the stone mason. By the end of the process, your manuscript should feel solid, able to withstand wind and storms and time because every poem has a very specific place and reason for being there. Like carefully orienting various curiously-shaped rocks around each other, the poems should fit together in a way that highlight their unique features. Some poems are bigger than others, but every single one is necessary to support each other. If it feels like you’re forcing one in—no matter where you put it, then maybe it just doesn’t belong in this manuscript. Save it for another project.
Saturn Browne: What is next for you and your writing/teaching?
Kyle Liang: As a sort of continuation of the last section of Good Son, I wrote a chapbook-length collection of romantic love poems that began the year Morgan and I got engaged. I’ve already started submitting the manuscript to contests and presses, and while it hasn’t been accepted anywhere yet, I’ve had some reassuring responses. I also plan to continue teaching students to write at the intersection of poetry and medicine, illness and intersectionality, identity and romantic love, and I hope to lead by example, which means I have more work to do. But I’m excited. I have a lot of other hopes and ideas for writing projects floating in my head but these are the ones that feel the most promising and comforting right now.
Good Son is available to order now
Kyle Liang is the son of Taiwanese and Malaysian immigrants. He’s author of the chapbook How to Build a House (winner of the 2017 Swan Scythe Press Chapbook Contest), and his work has appeared in Best of the Net, Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, wildness, Diode, and elsewhere.He is an adjunct professor at Quinnipiac University, a teacher for Brooklyn Poets, and a physician assistant in internal medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell. Kyle lives in New York City with his wife Morgan.
Saturn Browne (she/they) is a Chinese-Vietnamese immigrant and the Connecticut Youth Poet Laureate, East Coast Asian American Student Union (ECAASU) Artist in Residence, and the author of BLOODPATHS. Her work has been recognized by Gone Lawn, GASHER, Beaver Mag, Pulitzer Center, Foyle Young Poets, and others. She is an incoming undergraduate student at Yale University.
