Friday, July 20, 2018

Cha review: Su-Li Zhen Descends on Earth in her Flowered Qipao -By Artemis Lin 

The first thing you notice about this poem is its layout, beginning with a traditional three line left-aligned stanza. Lin then breaks free from the norm with a roughly right-aligned stanza. The layout controls the rhythm, as it moves from slower paced to faster and rambling where the lines drift away from stanza structure, to slower again with a final five line stanza which concludes in a single word. It also provides visual interest and draws the reader's eye across the page, making it easier to read. With varying levels of enthusiasm for poetry, we both felt that the layout was really interesting and added a lot to our experience of the poem.

A lot of the understanding of the poem relies on cultural knowledge such as Qipao (a traditional Chinese dress with many Asian variations), xi-fan (a rice dish) and names of the movie characters. As Western readers we initially could not draw much concrete meaning from the poem, however after some research we gained greater understanding of the underlying cultural references and the social setting of the poem.

Deeper meaning can be found in the poem through investigating the specifics of the movie to which it repeatedly refers. In The Mood For Love (2000) is a Honk Kong film set over the course of four years in 1960's, it’s a part of a trilogy, Days of Being Wild (1990), and 2046 (2004), with Su-Li Zhen (played by Maggie Cheung in all three films, who is also the poem’s title). Chao Mo-Wan, mentioned in the poem, is the man whose wife has an affair with Su-Li Zhen's husband in the film.  The film investigates sexual tension, romance and forbidden love, all of which are mirrored in the poem.

Lin quickly drew us in with heady and sensual summer motifs and atmosphere. These images and feelings of heat and mugginess were certainly the element that stayed with us the most after we had finished reading the poem. The repeated motif of cicadas evokes both an image and sound, representative of the hot, suffocative summer. Whether or not you have experienced the Asian tropics, Lin takes you there and accurately captures many of the sensations.

On a more thematic level, Lin explores family, complex relationships and reality vs dreams. Its themes of family is throughout, “...my mother tongued her petaled baby teeth… where Chow Mo-Wan is my father … This is the best any father will do for me, … and your brother still rides a bicycle to the market … You look so much like my own mother that I think of you as her ghost.” (Lin, 2018). The narrative is deeply rooted in place and nature, focusing on growth and regeneration. We really felt entranced by the foggy and dream-like state of the poem, emphasised by the repetition of "tell me the dream where..."  (Lin, 2018)

Overall, we were really intrigued by the film and its significance the more we looked into it, however without knowledge of the movie the poem is far less accessible. A lot of the ideas presented are deeply enriched by knowledge of the film and there are probably a lot more references we would only be able to understand by watching it. The language is dreamy and soft, much like the subject matter being discussed. Despite this, we really felt a sense of tension throughout.

(By Melissa and Sidney)

1 comment:

  1. Nicely done, and good to see the 'we', first person plural, come out as a part of the collaborative process. Wonder if the ending could've been a little more rounded out, maybe?

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