If you pick The Kingdom of Surfaces off the shelf, I imagine you’ll be struck by the beauty of the cover image and that you would expect the poems housed within to be similarly ornate. Imagine my surprise, then, when I began to read Sally Wen Mao’s book and found that every poem serves as a reflection of Walter Benjamin’s quote that “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” The Kingdom of Surfaces offers poems both long and short that call into question the West’s engagement with China throughout history well into the present day.
In fact, an early work in the collection, “Batshit,” addresses the way China was and is portrayed in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Having been born in Wuhan, Mao confronts head-on the racist tropes that emerged following the outbreak. She references the fact that “some love foreign / dogs more than foreign people” (9) and that “they call eating dog barbaric, / but not police brutality” (9). The poem immediately following, “Wet Market,” further explores the shifting meaning of barbarism with reference to cultural practice.
Throughout the collection, Mao includes concrete poems (poems in the shape of things), which seems to have fallen out of vogue with “serious” poets. Here, though, it’s a refreshing take on the genre. Rather than having a poem about cats in the shape of a cat (how cutesy!), Mao replicates the shape of Ming vases to address a history of conflict, of exploitation, and of appropriation. It’s rare to see a concrete poem that addresses such meaningful issues, elevating the form to unabashedly honour the traditions from which the poet has emerged.
This work is important precisely because Western culture aims to decontextualize artistry from its origin. The titular piece of The Kingdom of Surfaces is a sustained, surrealistic piece that draws from Alice in Wonderland and the MET Gallery. The poems in that section, spanning twenty pages, each use an epigraph pulled from the exhibit at the MET China Through the Looking Glass: Fashion, Film, Art. The quotations often make claims about the work being disconnected from its context in a kind of postmodern revelation. Specifically, part of the exhibit reads as follows, provided as the epigraph for Mao’s poem “Humpty Dumpty”:
The China that unfolds before our eyes is a China “through the looking glass,” one that is culturally and historically decontextualized. Freed from settings, past and present, the objects in this catalogue and in the exhibition galleries begin to speak for and between themselves. A narrative space opens up that is constantly being reorganized by free association. Meanings are endlessly negotiated and renegotiated.
Each poem in the section “The Kingdom of Surfaces” offers a challenge to the MET’s perspective that art can be removed from its context. The poems offer a metacommentary on museums’ accumulation processes and the appropriation inherent in exhibit art from Chinese dynasties. The culture-jamming and satirical bent of offering these quotations as a guidepost for a poem that cleverly appropriates from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (a nice little inversion of Orientalism) is a great statement on the state of curation today.
What makes the collection really powerful, though, is that this is not simply a tirade against the forces of Western culture engaged in yet another colonial exploitation. The foundations of Mao’s culture are also troubled. Take the poem “On Silk,” for example. It’s an eight page poem about the history of the silk trade, and a number of poems in the collection reference the cultivation process of silk and boiling living creatures alive in order to harvest the culturally-coded material. “Romance of the Castle Toppler” similarly tries to grapple with the treatment of women in Chinese culture, another interrogation of a heritage which has ultimately produced beauty, as well.
The poem “Paris Syndrome” really helps to reinforce that challenging disconnect. Paris Syndrome is itself an experience of failed expectations, a medical affliction recognized among Japanese and Chinese tourists to Paris, whose experience of culture shock is so intense that it creates a sense of dis-ease, sweating, anxiety, and panic. The final stanza of the poem addresses the idea of home and what expectations the speaker’s mother had for a house. The final lines of the poem read as follows: “Before we arrived in the beautiful / country, I imagined a house / with walls made of silk. // I imagined a stranger could come up to our door / and whisper a secret through its seams” (35). It’s an evocative image, both familiar and strange. The idea of the house being made of silk is not entirely comfortable, particularly when it is troubled by the other cultural and “barbaric” layers of the silk trade. The idea of a stranger whispering a secret through the seams of the house presents as intimate a scene as it is coded with danger, an alluring danger perhaps, but a danger nonetheless.
The poem immediately after is “On Silk,” which is structured around a series of vignettes that provide glimpses of history in the silk trade and its current incarnations. Mao offers some rich imagery where the speaker narrates, “When I found the water, I debated / drinking its mirage. In the desert, / everything grew wild. I expected / an expanse of death, but everything / sprouted before me, more alive / than I could ever hope to be” (43). It’s a rich and lush kind of image that is immediately undercut by the section of the poem which follows. She notes that “Every evening in the Bund, orange light / bathed the municipal buildings as I strolled. / The cameras captured every transgression— / jaywalking or loitering. On this side of the river, / memories of blood spilled. A luxury watch brand / sells time to the rivers of people walking down / East Nanjing Road” (43). There’s a coldness to the scene. The orange light takes on an ominous quality where “every transgression” is documented. In the passage that follows, there is a dystopic depiction of the skyline “sequined / with fishscale lights, projections on buildings — / cherry blossoms, ads for skin cream, and the / words I love my home in Chinese and English” (43). The passage ends with the line “Even the sky / was a bolt of silk torn in half by God” (43). The short quatrain that concludes the poem discusses “the splendour and squalor” of their collective past. It’s an appropriate phrase for characterizing the depiction of aesthetics in across the collection: splendour and squalor interlinked, and “A worm spitting / and spinning itself into a new luxury, a sensation, / finally, yes, a thing of value” (43).
While the poems often take on a political bent, they are thoroughly infused with the personal and some of those poems really standout. There’s a viscerality to the pieces, notably in the excellent piece “American Loneliness,” where personal memories are recounted and placed within the broader framework of American and Chinese culture. There are some narratives that weave in, out, and around each other for a finely crafted experience.
As you may have noticed, Mao has a knack for striking images and some poetic phrasing. The first piece in the collection is a highlight that offered a beautiful closing line; in fact, it is what compelled me to read the rest of the collection. In describing “Loquats” (after which the poem is named), the poem concludes on a compelling paradox: “A tree so pretty and snakelike / it renders you breathless, then worthless, all at once” (4). Grappling with contradictions like awe and worthlessness before the beauty of the world is compelling, but Mao twists the knife just a little bit more. The small word “then” is in conflict with “all at once.” The experience is both sequential and simultaneous, which gives that irresolvability voice and helps to nourish the pieces which follow.
The Kingdom of Surfaces is an engaging collection. If you’re interested in history, colonialism, aesthetics, and the monuments to barbarism regularly erected in the West and beyond, it has a wealth of narratives to engage with. It’s an informative collection as much as an imagistic one, and there is enough of a personal touch to breathe life into the poems (without simply being a history textbook with line breaks). It was a surprising read, far more confrontational than I would have expected, but also sincere and appreciatory and conflicted. Sally Wen Mao offers a rich collection here worthy of deep consideration.
Happy reading!
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