#Genny Lim

[serious2020]

(via HAITI SOLIDARITY: A CONCERT & FUNDRAISER)

[rebeldyke]

[poeticanthologies]

Wonder Woman by Genny Lim (1981)

from This Bridge Called my Back edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, 2015 [first edition 1981].

[inthemarginalized]

My priority has never been to fit in a particular box. 

 - Genny Lim (b. 1946)

 She is a Chinese-American poet, playwright, and performer.

[ethelcainsboobs]

Wonder Woman, Genny Lim

[rose-teeth]

[18mr]

Unbound Feet was a Chinese American feminist writing and performance collective based in the Bay Area. Their pioneering work created new pathways for Asian American feminists and performance artists today.

Nellie Wong, Genny Lim, Kitty Tsui, Canyon Sam, Nancy Hom, and Merle Woo were collective members. Their work explored sexist and racist oppression in society, immigration, family issues, and challenged stereotypes of Chinese women as passive and servile. 

By being out lesbian performers, Tsui, Sam, and Woo helped bring visibility to lesbians within the Asian American community and developed a large Asian lesbian following. 

The flyer below advertised Unbound Feet's last reading before the collective disbanded in 1981. Three members - Wong, Tsui, and Woo - tried to continue performing as Unbound Feet Three. But, a dispute ensued over the name and their efforts ended.

[hernamewasluna]

Celebrating Asian American resisters Nellie Wong, Genny Lim, Kitty Tsui, Canyon Sam, Nancy Hom and Merle Woo, they explored sexist and racist oppression in the Bay Area, challenged stereotypes of Chinese women as passive and servile. Their pioneering work created new pathways for Asian American feminists and performance artists today. Out lesbians Tsui, Sam, and Woo helped bring visibility to lesbians within the Asian American community and developed a large Asian lesbian following. It's sad and maddening that lesbian erasure is happening, when gender ID > sex, cannibalisation of women only spaces, female linguistics, lesbian stories and lesbian history has occured. Photo courtesy of @18millionrising

[senzalinea-blog]

Venerdì 5 aprile 2019 - Start ore 21.00 - La Locanda del Mare, Via Linora - Paestum Salerno INGRESSO GRATUITO GENNY LIM, icona della Jazz Poetry Al contrabbasso il jazzista ALDO VIGORITO

Venerdì 5 aprile 2019 – Start ore 21.00 – La Locanda del Mare, Via Linora – Paestum Salerno INGRESSO GRATUITO GENNY LIM, icona della Jazz Poetry Al contrabbasso il jazzista ALDO VIGORITO

Una persona che sogna farfalle, sotto i ponti della sua città, è una persona che riconosce le sue origini e, soprattutto riconosce la funzione della bellezza e della poesia, al di sopra del fuoco e della distruzione, come una forma di insegnamento che il linguaggio è come un veliero, che può far viaggiare la memoria attraverso l’oceano e il tempo. Come nelle poesie di Genny Lim, la storia sempre…

[heaven-handmade]

Week #1 Reading Reflections

“Hashtag Feminism, #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, and the Other #FemFuture.” by Susana Loza

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“Wonder Woman” by Genny Lim from This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, pp. 23-26

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“La Guera” by Cherrie Moraga from This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, pp. 27-34

I share the same sentiments Moraga does about oppression in this reading on how it affects people based on trivial, yet detrimental, details such as skin color. I’m light skinned and people don’t usually guess my Mexican ethnicity right, and that mixed in with the fact I live in Williamsburg gives me a certain privilege. It is one where people automatically assume I have money and am some artsy hipster, when the truth is my parents have lived in Williamsburg since they were 16 years old, our building is rent controlled, both of my parents work tirelessly, and I don’t spend any of my money in my own neighborhood because of how expensive it is. Similar to Moraga, I used to not see or pay that privilege much attention before but now I know just how much it separates me from other Mexican women so I agree with her when she says “[...] to remember may mean giving up whatever privileges we have managed to squeeze out of this society by virtue of our gender, race, class, or sexuality” (30). I think many white Latinx women fail black Latinx women when they do not acknowledge where their skin color puts them on the oppression versus privilege scale. I understand that being a woman of color is hard in itself and even if society sees us as white passing or straight or female, our own people and families are often heterosexist and misogynist so the benefits that work outside in the world don’t always transfer inside our homes. However, choosing not to do anything about our privilege is, to me, a contribution to oppression.

“One Is Not Born a Woman” from The Straight Mind by Monique Wittig

I’m not a big fan of this reading, it seems outdated to me and is a general understanding on gender oppression at its best. My main problem with this reading is that it does not recognize non-binary and transgender people enough if at all. However, I will say that I agree with Wittig when she says “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” I think the concept of there only being two sexes is a dangerous one, one that not only prevents people from identifying and being themselves fully and unapologetically but inprisions us into following a model of “ideal” oppressive living. Additionally, I found that her writing was angry and almost like if she was pointing a finger at my chest as she got her words out. I’m not particularly put off by this, I like that the pages bleed with her passionate emotions and thoughts on feminism and gender oppression. Anyway as it is right now I am not impressed by her work, but that may just be because I’ve read more inclusive work before her’s or because I haven’t looked into her profile, perhaps I’ll give Wittig another read and do some research before making up my mind on her.

[serious2020]

HAITI SOLIDARITY: A CONCERT & FUNDRAISER

OCTOBER 6, 2024 !!!!! Don’t miss this fantastic cultural evening, a fundraiser for the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund [HERF]. All funds to HERF go directly to support the grassroots struggle in Haiti. Also a book launch for Brassroots Democracy by Ben Barson. “Barson reveals a new revolutionary genealogy of jazz based in the popular struggles of Haiti, Mexico and the plantation regions of the…

[rantingsofadamnstudent-blog]

Response to Wonder Woman

As humans, we need to feel belonged, we need to find something to identify with. Being LGBTQ, being Hispanic, being disabled. No one gets to choose how they are born, but we all need to belong. The poem by Genny Lim talks about this and I feel like Goes in to speak about the complexity of our lives. How we live, how others live/ What we see going on in our lives and in others. The quote i posted before speaks to a theory in the flesh. We need justifications for complicated things. where we don’t fit in and where we don’t want to. Everything we feel is our identity and if it doesn’t fit into what society deems correct, we are rebellious, we are wrong and it is our fault that they don’t understand us. For that, we must choose how we feel the world wants to see us and go on with that. Speak predominately English outside, talk Spanish at home and say nothing to a “Man”. Being a woman is already 1 strike against you and you did nothing at all. In the poem, it also doesn’t talk about a woman working, it is the wife of a professor or a woman in poverty cleaning. never a woman doctor. Why? Because Society.

[michaelwarr-creativework]

A POETIC CELEBRATION OF THE LIFE & LEGACY OF JANICE MIRIKITANI

We celebrate the life of Janice Mirikitani with poetry this Saturday (8.14.21)...

Poets include Tongo Eisen-Martin, Kim Shuck, Alejandro Murguía, Jack Hirschman, devorah major, Aileen Cassinetto, Susan Kitazawa, Genny Lim, Lauren Ito, Sandy Mori, Kimi Sugioka, Dr Mary Wardell Ghirarduzzi, Nelly Wong, Michael Warr, and others not yet announced.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 2 PM PDT Event by San Francisco Public Library https://sfpl-org.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcode6hpzwpGdfzhYU1h7qPPqXY213GBtx1?fbclid=IwAR2c3gVAuSS-xkbagG_wa_1On95kl5ZAd5wkil919f77fjR7pSs8CN7ToIc

[inthemarginalized]

I am what I am. Chinese, American, woman--not in that particular order, mind you. I could have said it the other way around as well. Labeling is a preoccupation of mass media, marketers, and politicians who need to classify their products or politics for consumers and constituents. Culture changes all the time because circumstances and people change. - Genny Lim (b. 1946)

She is a Chinese-American poet, playwright, and performer.

[slffashion]

Fashion Trend for SS20: Bohemian style Knitted Crochet.

- Summer Beach Crochet Bralette Top.

STAUD, Altuzarra, Genny, 3.1 Phillip Lim Spring Summer 2020.

More.

[oilsteven80-blog]

The Walls Speak: Excavating the Chinese Immigration Experience at Angel Island

JANUARY 13, 2019

MORE THAN A CENTURY before Donald Trump issued a flurry of executive orders restricting the entry of foreign nationals from certain Muslim-majority nations, demonized Central American refugees seeking asylum, and voiced his desire to end birthright citizenship, the United States was in the grip of its first potent anti-immigrant fever. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was aimed at keeping Chinese laborers out of America. The law restricted entry only to those Chinese who were diplomats, merchants, teachers, students, and US citizens, plus their immediate families, and denied all Chinese people the right to become US citizens.

The law was initially set to expire in 10 years, but Congress renewed it in 1892 and extended it indefinitely in 1902. The 1917 Immigration Act expanded those exclusion laws to the Asiatic Barred Zone, which included Japan, India, and most of Southeast Asia. The Immigration Act of 1924 then denied admission to all “aliens ineligible to citizenship,” which, given the naturalization clause in the original exclusion laws, was effectively a ban on Asians. The offending laws were not repealed until China became an ally during World War II in 1943, 61 years after the Chinese Exclusion Act first passed.

During that time, many incoming Chinese were detained at the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay as they waited for the outcome of their cases. Before Angel Island opened in 1910, Chinese who arrived in San Francisco were held in an old warehouse on the Embarcadero where conditions were overcrowded and unsanitary, and from which escaping detainees could flee into the anonymity of the city. The Angel Island facility was larger, and like Alcatraz its seabound location prevented jailbreaks. Until 1940, when a fire destroyed its administration building and the station was closed, Angel Island was the main port of entry for immigrants on the West Coast.

Because of the exclusion laws, all Chinese at the border were treated as suspicious until they could prove that they were eligible to land. In practice, this meant that upon arrival most were ferried to Angel Island, where they waited weeks, months, and in a few cases years before they received a determination of admission or deportation. Most were young men from Canton province, which had been impoverished by the Opium War. They had saved or borrowed money to make the passage across the Pacific, and their relatives had invested their hopes and futures in them. To return without having set foot in San Francisco was to bring shame and disappointment on the family.

In recent years writers and academics, many of them children or grandchildren of Angel Island detainees, have been exploring the Chinese immigrant experience at Angel Island in historical scholarship, in anthologies and translations of the poems detainees wrote on the barrack walls, and, as in my book Islanders (Conundrum Press, 2016), in verses that imagine voices and experiences outside the official record. All of the preserved Angel Island poems were found in the men’s barracks — the women’s barracks on the second floor of the administration building were destroyed in the 1940 fire. Initially, historians thought the women did not write poetry because they were illiterate, but in interviews conducted by the authors of more recent studies and anthologies, former female detainees claimed that they wrote and saw poems on their walls, too.

Chinese women were subjected to higher levels of scrutiny at Angel Island. The groundbreaking Page Act of 1875 forbade the entry of “immoral Chinese women” — that is, prostitutes — so every Chinese woman at the border had to prove her virtue to inspectors, which meant that she was questioned about her sex life. The Immigration Act of 1882 also excluded immigrants of any race or gender likely to become a public charge, a statute still on the books today. With maddening circular logic, these two laws denied admission to Chinese women not accompanied by husbands or fathers on the grounds that because of racism and sexism they were unlikely to find work and would either become a public charge or resort to prostitution.

My contribution to the corpus of Angel Island literature outlined below is a volume of original, English-language poems that imagine what these women might have said. I used the stories gathered in these books as well as the labyrinth of exclusion laws to develop my work. In writing fiction that is rooted in historical and cultural facts, I aimed for larger truths about the effects of unjust policies on the lives of real people.

In this era of rising xenophobia, this history reminds us of the harsh realities immigrants and refugees around the world have always faced. There is, of course, still much work to do in excavating the stories and poems of these early Chinese immigrants. Even so, the five works below provide a strong beginning.

Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940, Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung (1980, reprint University of Washington Press, 1991)

The first major book on the Chinese experience at Angel Island, Island is an anthology of the surviving poems that includes translations and interviews with former detainees. Some brushed their words onto the barrack walls in ink, some carved them into wood. The guards painted over them, but they continued to write, covering the walls with heartbreaking poetry. On two separate occasions in the 1930s, detainees Jann Mon Fong and Tet Yee copied down many poems and snuck the manuscripts into San Francisco when they were finally released.

After the immigration station closed, it was used to house prisoners of war during World War II and then abandoned. By 1970, the state was ready to demolish the Angel Island ruins and turn the land into a recreational site until California State Parks ranger Alexander Weiss stumbled upon the wall writings in a derelict building. He disobeyed his bosses, who had dismissed the writings as graffiti, and told San Francisco State College professor George Araki about his find. Araki, whose Japanese mother had been detained on the island, brought photographer Mak Takahashi to document the inscriptions.

Island preserves 135 poems taken from the Jann and Yee manuscripts as well as the Takahashi photographs. The translations and interviews describe life on Angel Island, from humiliating interrogations and medical exams to lonely nights spent waiting and wondering if they would ever enter the land they called Golden Mountain.

Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America, Erika Lee and Judy Yung (2010, reprint Oxford University Press, 2012) 

In the first comprehensive study of the Angel Island Immigration Station, historians Lee and Yung tell the stories of the immigrants who tried to come to the United States via the “Ellis Island of the West.” There is a strong focus on the Chinese, the first group to be excluded from the country, but the book also delves into the experiences of the Japanese, Indian, Korean, Russian, Mexican, and Filipino immigrants detained there. (Asked by an Angel Island interrogator in 1918 if he had ever been in jail, Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev, who was fleeing the tumult of the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War, replied, “In yours.”)

Lee and Yung describe the system of “paper sons” the Chinese in San Francisco developed. Because of inadequate records, many Chinese men in the United States could claim unrelated men in China as their sons. Inspectors on Angel Island wised up to the scheme and tried to determine family ties by separately asking each man about the minutiae of his home life, from the location of the rice bin to the number of steps to the front door. If the details matched, they were considered blood relations and the newcomer was allowed to land. The Chinese continued to game the system, though: brokers drew up “coaching papers” full of such details for prospective immigrants to memorize on their journeys to San Francisco.

Drawing on archival records, interviews, newspaper articles, and more, Lee and Yung weave a wealth of historical detail into Angel Island’s engaging narratives. 

Wild Geese Sorrow: The Chinese Wall Inscriptions at Angel Island, Jeffrey Thomas Leong (Calypso Editions, 2018)

English and Chinese are vastly different languages, and it is difficult to translate from one to the other. In Island, translators Him Mark Lai and Genny Lim write that they made the choice to stay as close to the original meaning as possible: “The form [of the poems] is oftentimes compromised in order to retain the content, which we for historic reasons feel is our first priority.”

In Wild Geese Sorrow, Leong translates 70 of the Angel Island poems with an eye toward the original poetic forms.

Most of the poems were written in the classical Tang tradition, which many of the detainees would have studied in school even if their education had been cut short. Each line has five or seven syllables — the line length is consistent throughout the poem — and each poem usually has four or eight lines. As Chinese has very few non-lexical or multisyllabic words when compared to English, the seven-syllable line would have far more content in Chinese than in English.

Leong employs longer lines — they could be interpreted as accentual lines of five to seven beats — and creates a lyric quality that approximates the original. He does not follow the original rhyme schemes. Here is one of his translations:

In the still of night, small sounds are a howling wind. Shadows, an ache of old wounds, so I recite verse:

Fog and mist drift, a gloomy sky, Insects rub crick-crack beneath the moon’s faint light. My sad and bitter face matches these heavens. A worried man sits alone, leans at the windowsill.

Translation is always interpretation, and an exact reproduction of Chinese forms in English is impossible. But in paying attention to form, Leong captures something of the compression, tone, and elusive beauty of these poems. Leong’s translations remind us that the Angel Island poems were not merely graffiti or a way to pass time. They were works of art made by a people with a rich poetic and cultural heritage.

Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown, Marlon K. Hom (University of California Press, 1992)

At the turn of the 20th century, Chinese people in San Francisco formed poetry clubs. At these meetings, members would write poems on chosen subjects and present them to the group leader, often a high-ranking diplomatic official, for evaluation. A literary society emerged in Chinatown complete with contests, journal and newspaper publications, and anthologies. Many of these poems were written in classical forms such as parallel couplets, but there also emerged an oral tradition of Cantonese folk songs and popular rhymes.

A Chinatown bookseller published two anthologies of such folk rhymes: Jinshan ge ji (1911), which contained 808 poems, and Jinshan ge erji (1915), which added 832 pieces. Hom collects and translates 210 of these poems in Songs of Gold Mountain. His introduction outlines the history of the Chinese community in San Francisco and its early literary culture, and offers a critical analysis of the forms, themes, and cultural context of the rhymes.

Hom organizes the poems by subject, beginning with Angel Island. These pieces were written in San Francisco, but the trauma of detention clearly stayed with the poets long after the fact. While the wall poems were written in classical forms, these folk songs were written in a vernacular form of lines of varying syllables (5-5-7-7-3-5-7-7), with all lines rhyming. The themes and subjects are similar, however, and in many of the folk rhymes the speaker is situated on Angel Island rather than looking back from San Francisco; psychologically, many of these poets were still trapped there.

The other poems in the book deal with everyday life in San Francisco’s Chinatown: workingmen alone in a hostile country, married couples separated by the vast Pacific, children and family struggles, and the inevitable vices of addiction and prostitution. Taken together, these poems depict the intimate world of a community living in the shadows of Angel Island and Chinese exclusion.

The Tribute Horse, Brandon Som (Nightboat Books, 2014)

Winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Som’s The Tribute Horse opens with an elegy for his grandfather:

A Chinese immigrant, on his Pacific-crossing, carried coaching papers for the memorizing. Approaching the island station, these pages were tossed to sea. A moon’s light in a ship’s wake might make a similar papertrail. My grandfather, aboard at twelve, practiced a paper-name. What ensued was a debt of sound.

That paper-name is the poet’s own: “Som – aspirate, vowel, liquid. / There is a sea on the coaching pages.” This origin story — it is, after all, where the family name began — becomes a touchstone in this series of lyrical experiments that span ekphrastic poems about Japanese landscapes and Chinese scrolls; recollections of his father and grandfather, and the Spanish of his mother’s family; homophonic translations of Chinese poet Li Po’s “Quiet Night Thoughts,” which had been carved into the Angel Island barrack walls; and a collage of found text that keeps circling back to the Angel Island poems translated in Island.

Som eschews narrative and historical evidence in favor of sound and image. His collection is not so much about Angel Island and Chinese exclusion per se. Rather, he weaves images of the sea and birds with fragments of history and family lore to make gorgeous sonic tapestries that resonate far beyond the cold waters of San Francisco Bay.

¤

Teow Lim Goh is the author of the Islanders(Conundrum Press, 2016). Her work has been featured in Tin House, Catapult, PBS NewsHour, Colorado Public Radio, and The New Yorker.

Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-walls-speak-excavating-the-chinese-immigration-experience-at-angel-island/