combines narratives from personal and collective
history as the speaker moves through the land-
scapes of home neighborhoods to Japan to explore
the Asian-American experience. “Stepchild” is a
long poem that searches for an American identity
in the void created by the silence of first-genera-
tion immigrants and second-generation Japanese
Americans. The speaker asks, “Where are the his-
tories / our tragedies, our books / of fact and fic-
tion?” The bitterness of the poem reflects Hongo’s
growing need to erase the shame of the Japanese
relocation and to recover the lost history of Japa-
nese Americans. Hongo has been praised for the
lushness of his imagery in Yellow Light. Poems
such as “Who Among You Knows the Essence of
Garlic?” engage all the senses with beautiful evoca-
tion of details: “Flukes of giant black mushrooms /
leap from their murky tubs / and strangle the toes
of young carrots.”
Hongo’s second volume of poetry, The River
of Heaven (1988), won the Lamont Poetry Prize
and a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize in po-
etry. While still concerned with reconstructing the
past to illuminate a culturally enforced darkness,
Hongo creates specific characters to highlight the
Japanese-American experience in less bitter tones.
In “The Legend,” a poem narrating the events
surrounding the senseless death of an Asian im-
migrant, Hongo approaches the subject with a
beautiful calm: “Let the night sky cover him as he
dies. / Let the weaver girl cross the bridge of heaven
/ and take up his cold hands.” The journey of Asian
immigrants to America is continued in this dead
immigrant’s journey to the next world.
The journey motif is frequent in Hongo’s writ-
ings, and connects his early “Cruising 99” with his
later VOLCANO: A MEMOIR OF HAWA I’I (1995). Vo l -
cano traces Hongo’s journey to his birthplace on
Hawaii, near the Kilauea volcano. Hongo’s family
moved to Los Angeles, where he grew up in a mul-
ticultural environment that did little to encourage
the poet’s quest for his family history and his own
identity. Hongo recounts feeling alienated from the
American experience as it was taught in the Cali-
fornia schools. Particularly frustrating to him was
the exclusion of Asian-American history from the
textbooks and the absence of information on the
Japanese internment camps during World War II. In
a 1989 interview with Bill Moyers during the mak-
ing of the PBS series The Power of the Word, Hongo
comments that traveling to Volcano, Hawai’i, pro-
vided him with an opportunity to reconnect with
family and to come into his own as a writer.
Hongo is also a respected editor and has pro-
duced several collections and anthologies of Asian-
American writings. Songs My Mother Taught Me
(1994), by WAKAKO YAMAUCHI, is a collection of
stories that document the lives of rural immigrants
and factory workers. In 1993 he edited the influen-
tial The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America. In
the collection’s introduction, Hongo says, “It is per-
haps difficult to make poetry from that emotional
catch in the throat, that which compels us to speak
when so much passion swells that, out of pride, the
act of speaking is what we might fear the most. But
our poets speak anyway” (xl). Hongo’s comment
highlights the primary theme of his poetry and
autobiographical writings—the need to break the
silence. An anthology of personal essays by Asian
Americans, Under Western Eyes, followed in 1995.
The essays use autobiography to confront the prob-
lems of racism, assimilation, and loss of identity
that affect the Asian-American community.Bibliography
Evans, Alice. “A Vicious Kind of Tenderness: An In-
terview with Garrett Hongo.” Poets & Writers
Magazine (September–October 1992): 37–46.
Hongo, Garrett, ed. The Open Boat: Poems from Asian
America. New York: Anchor Books, 1993.
Hongo, Garrett, Alan Chong Lau and Lawson Fusao
Inada. The Buddha Bandits down Highway 99.
Mountain View, Calif.: Buddahead, 1978.
Slowik, Mary. “Beyond Lot’s Wife: The Immigra-
tion Poems of Marilyn Chin, Garrett Hongo, Li-
Young Lee, and David Mura.” MELUS 25, nos. 3/4
(Autum–Winter 2000): 221–242.
Uba, George. Review of Yellow Light. The Journal of
Ethnic Studies 12, no. 4 (Winter 1985): 123–125.
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