screenplay for the film Fresh Kill (1994) directed
by Shu Lea Cheang.
Bibliography
Bloom, Harold, ed. Asian-American Women Writers
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Miles, Chris, Jessica Heerwald, and Tina Avent.
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Marta Vizcaya Echano
Hahn, Kimiko (1955– )
Poet Kimiko Hahn was born in Mt. Kisco, New
York, the daughter of two visual artists: the Japa-
nese American, Maude Miyako Hamai, from Ha-
waii, and the German American, Walter Hahn,
from Wisconsin. Her dual Eurasian parentage in-
forms much of her poetry, grounded in the ques-
tions of racial identity she has faced throughout
her life. As a child growing up in Pleasantville, New
York, Hahn was never fully accepted by either the
Asian-American or European-American commu-
nities. In school, her peers considered her an Asian.
Similarly, while she was living with her father in
Japan for a time, her schoolmates referred to her
as a gaijin, an outsider or foreigner. Such experi-
ences galvanized her interest in her split identity
and led to her involvement, as a teenager, in New
York City’s growing Asian-American movement.
As an undergraduate, Hahn double-majored in
English and East Asian Studies at the University of
Iowa, where she later received an M.F.A. in creative
writing. She also earned an M.A. in Japanese lit-
erature from Columbia University. Her extensive
knowledge of cross-cultural literary traditions
infuses her poetry with complex intertextual al-
lusions and bilingual ruptures. Her first book of
poetry, Air Pocket, published by Hanging Loose
Press in 1989, established her characteristic use of
varied cultural and linguistic material. In “Dance
Instructions for a Young Girl,” Hahn employs a
double-voiced discourse to depict the strict Kabuki
training geisha girls undergo, while also portray-
ing the mental processes they employ to subli-
mate the acts they undertake with male clients. A
longer, more complex poem that weaves together
Hahn’s diverse thematic strands is “Resistance: A
Poem on Ikat Cloth,” which acts as an appropriate
capstone to her first volume. Here, Hahn emulates
the highly allusive, fragmented structure of T. S.
Eliot’s Waste Land by combining Japanese ideo-
grams with cross-cultural quotes from Murasaki
Shikibu, Virginia Woolf, and Joseph Stalin. Hahn
uses these to parallel the different images woven
into a Japanese cloth made from resistance-dying
yarn that emulates, poetically through images, the
struggles of a woman living within a disorienting
bicultural reality.
In 1992 Hahn began receiving critical recog-
nition with her second book, Earshot, which was
awarded both the Theodore Roethke Memorial
Poetry Award and an Association of Asian Ameri-
can Studies Literature Award. Her third book,
The Unbearable Heart (1995), won a prestigious
American Book Award for Hahn’s heart-wrench-
ing confessional portrayal of how she dealt with
her mother’s unexpected death. The dark lyri-
cal poems collected here often employ a childlike
tone to explore the intimate yet complex relation-
ships that existed between different generations
of women within her family. In Mosquito and Ant
(2000), Hahn resurrects the nearly extinct, millen-
nia-old nu shu script—in which Chinese women
held secret correspondences with one another—to
present the most intimate thoughts women hold
about their bodies, interpersonal relationships,
and families.
Currently, Hahn lives in Manhattan with her
husband and two daughters and teaches English
at Queens College, City University of New York.
Her most recent book, The Artist’s Daughter, was
published by Norton in 2004. True to her roots as
a New Yorker, Hahn’s poem “Mortal Remains” is
included in Poetry after 9/11: An Anthology of New
York Poets.Hahn, Kimiko 99