Monkey Puzzle

Chris Knight is copy editor of the National Post.

Rita Wong grew up in Calgary and lives in Vancouver, but her poetry is
infused with ancestral memories of China past and present. She writes of
the otherness that a Canadian of Asian decent feels, and of a different
sort of otherness that she experiences when visiting China: “the
adventure, for me, is not to gawk at the people, whose skin & hair call
me home, but to navigate these streets an independent woman, a woman
uneasily negotiating the currency of foreign birth,” she writes in
“chinese & not chinese,” one of several poems that take place in her
ancestors’ homeland. Or she and a friend “try to pass, to quietly
sneak by as possibly chinese from some other part of china, modernized
shenzhen or guangzhou—just one generation removed from truth.”

Wong lets her personal history drizzle through the book without
drowning the reader in the symbols or syntax of China. There is a clear,
well-rounded voice behind these poems. In the background there always
lurks a ghost of the Far East, but the works in this collection are also
very much in the here and now. Put crudely, you don’t have to be
Chinese to get it.