How Pantoums Can Tell Intergenerational Stories

I grew up in a household where our stories were not seen as worth documenting, both in dominant US culture and within my own family. Each time I asked my grandparents, parents, aunts, and uncles about their stories, they would say, what is there to tell? The past was seen as past. Yet, over herbal soup and chopsticks clinking to porcelain bowls, they would talk with each other about Toisan, the land of fresh eel clay pot rice and volleyball. I would slurp the last grains of rice and listen intently, watching memory unravel across the kitchen table.

My grandparents were children during the Japanese colonial occupation of China in the second Sino-Japanese wars of the thirties and forties. They raised my parents during the Cultural Revolution of the sixties and seventies. Much of their lives were shaped by survival and enduring farm labor before they migrated to New York City. There, my parents met in the eighties. I grew up in Staten Island, as one of the few Asian students in my entire school. When my teacher asked us to interview our parents to learn of their childhoods, my peers told stories about their parents growing up in the suburbs, about grandparents who owned ranches. My mother would slip me stories of her mother during wartime. I would write down what was asked of us: birthplace, birth year, favorite childhood memory. The rest, I took to poetry.

I read my first Asian American poets in high school. My English teacher introduced me to the poetry of Kimiko Hahn and Ishle Yi Park. Another encouraged me to share my poetry at the open mic after school. I remember standing at the library podium, voice trembling, and reading a poem straight from my notebook. Afterward, friends and peers shared how my words resonated with them. My writing reminded them of their own family stories. For the first time, I saw how vulnerably sharing my own work could reach and move others. Emboldened, I became hooked on the power of poetry and began to use poems to tell stories of my family and my diasporic community in Chinatown. In college, I joined a research team led by the late scholar Jean Lau Chin to document stories of Chinese Americans who grew up in Manhattan’s Chinatown in the thirties, forties, and fifties. After graduation, I was awarded a fellowship to travel to Chinatowns around the world to trace stories of migration, displacement, and resilience across the diaspora. In a year, I traveled to eight countries from Peru to Australia. My early career and research was devoted to learning the historical and sociopolitical stories of my people, a community still marginalized and derided in the America I knew. Yet, in my decade of oral history work, the most difficult stories to record and tell were the ones within my own family.

My grandfather, my 爺爺, swam from southern China to Hong Kong in the seventies to escape what he saw as dead-end devastation during the Cultural Revolution. Growing up, I had heard stories of this escape from family members, yet my grandfather rarely spoke about it. There was a layer of shame to 偷渡, “illegally” crossing. Yet, his feat is the reason my dad’s side of the family was able to come to America. From 1974 to 1980, Hong Kong, under British colonial occupation at the time, allowed Chinese refugees who “touched base” on their soil to remain. Knowing this, my grandfather secretly trained in the bay to swim across the manmade border. Once he made it, he was then able to seek asylum in the United States. This is how I was born in New York City.

when searchlights flooded our vision
i pretended the sun was rising
liberation army cuffed us home soon.
record that in this pantoum.

i pretended the sun was rising
when rocks scraped scalps & wood splintered knees
record that in this pantoum
i waited for the scars, & returned.

rock-scraped scalp & wood-splintered knees
bandaged in 嬤嬤’s scolds, congee, & lotus root
i waited for the scars, & returned
new hing dai came searching for a guide.
—From “how we survived: 爺爺’s pantoum (i)”
 

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I first learned about the pantoum in a mentorship intensive with Kundiman, a national literary organization dedicated to Asian American writers. As a fellow, I worked with my first genderqueer Asian American mentor, Ching-In Chen, across five months. It was in the early days of the pandemic when we were still adjusting to remaining in place. We would gather weekly on Zoom to workshop poems. For the first time, I felt I didn’t need to explain all the parts of myself in order to be seen. Upon reading an earlier version of my poem about my grandfather’s crossing, they asked me, have you heard of the pantoum? I hadn’t. Today, five years later, it is one of my favorite forms to write and teach in college classrooms.

The pantoum has roots in Malaysian oral storytelling. First recorded in the fifteenth century, the pantun is a form of rhyming couplets regarded as part of classical Malay literature. For hundreds of years, it spread through trade routes and migration. The pantun berkait, a series of interwoven quatrains—stanzas with four lines—was later adapted by French and English writers. The form was popularized among Western writers in the nineteenth century when Victor Hugo included a French translation of a Malay pantun in his book Les Orientales, a text often cited for its Orientalist portrayal of Turkish people. Around the same time, the British government took colonial control of Malaysia. The form’s history is inseparable from its country’s. Yet even though its proliferation is one dipped in colonialism, becoming widely “known” only when published by Western writers, I get to decide how I wield its lineage.

In the pantoum, the second and fourth lines of each quatrain repeat to become the first and third lines of the next. In the final stanza, the second and fourth lines are the third and first lines, respectively, of the very first stanza. Traditionally the form uses an ABAB rhyme scheme. Some contemporary pantoums keep the rhyme, while others diverge. The repetition of the lines creates an echoing effect. Because of this, I find pantoums lend themselves well to documenting oral history, memory, elders’ stories, and emotions that cycle, like grief and loss. The form can be one that gives way to writing about what haunts us. I chose the form for my poems on harrowing family histories for these reasons.

As I studied contemporary pantoums, I turned to Kiandra Jimenez’s “Halcyon Kitchen”—which keeps the ABAB rhyme scheme—for the ways she writes intergenerational remembrances of a grandmother through cooking and food. I also dove into Aurielle Marie’s “pantoum for aiyana & not a single hashtag,” which honors the life of seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones and conjures a reality in which Aiyana is still alive. In their piece, the repeated lines shift and propel the poem forward. These writers’ devotion to preserving life and memory across generations, against forgetting, made room for my own.

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One afternoon, as I visited my grandparents in Brooklyn, my 爺爺 decided to share his story of crossing. I sat in his living room, mesmerized, as the words I had waited so long to hear directly from him came spilling out. As he spoke, images seared: the fishermen who helped him and his brothers onto a boat, the sharks in the water, the bowls of rice he ate once he finally made it to Hong Kong. There were certain phrases he repeated that became ingrained in me: you had to know the currents, you had to not be afraid to die. As he spoke, we time traveled; the memories and images fused.

Like many of my elders, 爺爺 spoke in repetition. He was conveying to me what he wanted me to know, to remember. That day I learned he attempted his swim twice. The first time he was caught. Yet even after he faced the unforgiving consequences of escape, he tried again. I knew I needed to write this story in two parts to honor the second attempt.

we were promised work in the restaurants
i clawed brown earth before collapsing.
fishermen took pity & reeled us on gasoline tanks
five bowls of rice in hong kong, my sweetest meal.

i clawed brown earth before collapsing
villagers found us gasping, fish out of water
five bowls of rice in hong kong, my sweetest meal.
memories escape me now.

villagers found us gasping, fish out of water.
my thoughts enter one ear & leave the other.
memories escape me now.
you being here helps me remember.

my thoughts enter one ear & leave the other.
water lilies & crickets, our last witness.
you being here helps me remember
we wore watermelon husks to hide.
—From “how we survived: 爺爺’s pantoum (ii)”
 

As 爺爺 shared, I saw the watermelon husks—my eyes widened—when he explained how they hollowed them to appear like floating fruit, lost cargo in the waters. This, he told me, was how they would evade the snipers, soldiers who stood guard to shoot any dissenter who dared try to leave. He had determined the chance of survival as 80%, a number he heard from across the waters. The surety. This is what it took. To have that faith to tread for miles in the dark.

I never sat down with 爺爺 to record his story. The times I tried to, my Zoom H5 propped on the tray table between us, he didn’t want to share. His rightful hesitance is why I turn to poetry: writing is an act that can capture a lived moment, when there is trust that exists between the storyteller and the writer. With my own elders and community members, I have found there is a lot more trust in seeing written documentation as opposed to recording equipment. There is less performance and unease that way, less threat. For a people who have been impacted by decades of state surveillance and persecution, that is an especially important consideration.

There is a certain shame that lives inside my 爺爺’s story. 冇講啦, he would say, mo gong la. There’s nothing more to say. What I saw as an act of immense courage and bravery, he saw as one to tiptoe over, perhaps for fear of judgment, or due to the lingering weight of persecution. There was little pride. That is why I chose to tell his story. This act of telling also makes our intergenerational survival more part of me than the silence. In his telling, he granted me the story. In the tacit permission, I wrote our history.

My grandfather became an ancestor in 2021. When he was hospitalized during the pandemic, I got to show him the pantoums I wrote. By then, one of them was slated to be published in Best New Poets. He was strapped to breathing tubes and couldn’t speak at the time. I don’t know if he was proud. He transitioned a few months later, alone, in a nursing home we weren’t allowed to enter for fear of contagion.

There is a third pantoum I have not completed. It is a draft that lives in the archives of my marble notebooks. The third pantoum speaks of memory—how later, as 爺爺’s Parkinson’s worsened, he recanted some facts he had shared. The weight of his deteriorating memory, losing him, and knowing his last moments were alone, is a deep grief I am still processing.

Not all poems are meant to be completed. Not all poems are meant to be shared. But through writing, we can break generational inheritances of shame and silence around how we survived. We are not the shame we inherit. May we be the clear channels for the stories of our living, our dead, and our dying. May our writing be the means through which we also know truth in the lives we live and get to live. For life itself is precious.