potential wife. In the end, the speaker experiences
disillusionment: “I wrote off filial piety / as useless,
/ a fallen branch.” But at the same time, familial
and ancestral connections play a complex and un-
shakable role in his feelings about his own identity,
and he recognizes the pull his family will always
have on him. He finds himself with “split vision,”
equally tied to the life his family has envisioned
for him and the life he’s created for himself in Los
Angeles. The poem ends with the following lines:
“Yet / as keenly / as the blade / of the letter opener
/ that falls upon my hand, / I await the arrival / of
the next / immutable / aerogramme.”
Because diasporic subjectivity is complicated,
open, split, nomadic and hybrid, to represent it
in words can be difficult. Leong aptly expresses in
his poem “Threads” the complex relationship one
might have with his/her identity by emphasizing
that which cannot be expressed: “There is no way
to show it. / No way to even break it or / Burn it
or throw it away. / It is with me. / And yet / There
is nothing I can say / And nothing I can do / That
will make it work.” The “it” in the poem is never
defined, as if it were impossible to do so. And yet,
Leong also goes on to describe “it” metaphorically,
as a “fruit ripening on a tree.” The poem illustrates
diasporic consciousness as unsettling and uncom-
fortable, but also as having much richness and po-
tential. Leong treats identity with ambivalence and
celebration.
In Leong’s work, the feeling of exile or displace-
ment is not represented as exclusively a migrant
or immigrant experience, and certainly not as an
exclusively Chinese or Chinese-American experi-
ence. His characters come from a variety of ethnic
and class backgrounds, genders and sexual orien-
tations, to emphasize that feelings of loss and long-
ing are universal. In the title story of his collection
of short fiction, Phoenix Eyes and Other Stories, the
reader catches glimpses of an international com-
munity as different people pass through Taiwan:
wealthy Asian businessmen, American sinologists,
and a French-Algerian student. The Chinese-
American narrator, estranged from his family,
comes into brief contact with several of these pass-
ers-by in erotic and passionate, but also detached
and impersonal, interactions. Life seems to be only
a series of moments as the narrator blithely floats
from one experience to another. However, when an
old friend and lover dies of AIDS at the story’s end,
the weight of losing the one love in his life renders
him unable to escape, unable to continue floating.
And yet, coming to grips with his lover’s disease
has bred a different kind of isolation and exile:Today I won’t open the door and walk across
the street, not even for a sixpack of beer or
aspirin. I don’t trust cars, pedestrians, clerks,
janitors, nurses, bank tellers, not even children
anymore.The narrator, as do other characters in Leong’s
poems and stories, struggles to find a new way of
confronting life’s trials and explores Buddhism as
a way of finding serenity and centeredness. The
search is not always successful; Leong emphasizes
that life is constantly in flux, and that human ex-
perience cannot be reduced to simple precepts and
summarizations.
Appropriate to the diversity of themes and
motifs in Leong’s work are the sources of inspira-
tion he has attributed to his work. Leong not only
cites figures from Chinese cultural tradition, such
as Lu Hsun and Mao Tun, but also Asian-Ameri-
can writers such as FRANK CHIN, as well as writers
from various traditions, including Amiri Baraka,
N. V. M. Gonzalez, Frederic Jameson, and Pablo
Neruda.
Leong’s work has been featured in several an-
thologies, including Charlie Chan Is Dead and
Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers.
For Phoenix Eyes and Other Stories, Leong received
the American Book Award in 2001. Leong was
given the PEN Josephine Miles Literature Award in
1993 for The Country of Dreams and Dust.Bibliography
Chang, Edward T., and Russell C. Leong, eds. Los An-
geles—Struggle toward Multiethnic Community:
Asian American, African American, and Latino
Perspectives. Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1995.
Nomura, Gail, Russell C. Leong, Russell Endo, Ste-
phen H. Sumida, eds. Frontiers of Asian AmericanLeong, Russell 169