The Magic Whip
Novelist, short-story writer and scholar Wang here checks in with her second collection of poetry and prose, collaging the two to reflect the forms taken by immigration and exile, motherhood, family and national histories. With a terse voice that does not allow for dissembling, her speaker delves into the physical horror of footbinding (a subject on which Wang wrote a scholarly work, Aching for Beauty), revealing anguished ties to beauty, love, and what parents have to give to their children; as a mother shatters and binds her daughter's foot, so does an infant latch onto his mother's cracked nipples: "How could they ever crack, so brown and tough?" In Wang's anatomically dense verse, actualities of the body (sweaty, hairy, large, smelly) are contrasted with fantasies of ideals of it: fragrant, delicate, aphrodisiac, tiny. In the title poem, the daughter is lured, through promises and flattery ("you'll have everything husband home children see the tiny shoes pointed like a new moon more fragrant than a lily"), into a permanently excruciating bondage that is yet "our secret weapon." The particular achievement of this book is to make such descriptions ring uncomfortably close to contemporary, Western beauty practices. "Stones and Metals," a prose account of the life of Song Dynasty poet Li Qingzhao, distills the sense of ever-present past. Qinqzhao's ancient dilemmas in creating a collaboratively creative marriage are often expressed in the idioms of today, forging a past that broken and reformed (like the phoenix Qingzhao invokes in memory of her husband) into present verse.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.