Picture Bride Cathy Song (1983)
Winner of the 1982 Yale Series of Younger Poets
Award and the best-known collection of CATHY
SONG’s poetry, Picture Bride was published by Yale
University in 1983 and was also nominated for
that year’s National Book Critics Circle Award. A
poet who highly stresses visual body imagery in
her works, Cathy Song deals with the mapping
of identity by exploring the relationship of body
to body and presents such imagery explicitly and
symbolically. Picture Bride reveals the poet’s cor-
poreal interaction with animals and such people as
her grandmother, mother, sister, son, father, hus-
band, and neighbors. The book explicitly visualizes
the body and its parts, such as hair, hands, eyes,
and lips, and also presents the body symbolically
through images of such spaces as Chinatown, Ha-
waii, home, the sugarcane field, and even weather.
A collection of 31 poems, divided into five
sections with the subtitles named after Georgia
O’Keeffe’s floral paintings, Picture Bride begins by
depicting her grandmother in its title poem, “Pic-
ture Bride.” The poem dramatizes Song’s grand-
mother at the age of 23, when she was leaving
Korea to marry a man she had never seen before—a
sugar-mill laborer in Waialua, Hawaii, who was 13
years her senior. Imaginatively picturing the scene
of their first meeting in Hawaii, “Picture Bride”
begins with the poet speaker’s identification with
her grandmother because of their shared appear-
ance. Song recalls that when she wrote this poem,
she was about the same age as her grandmother in
the poem: “I find that incomprehensible, that she
could leave willingly, forfeit all that was familiar
for a place she had never seen, to marry a man she
had never met” (qtd. in Solberg 544).
The collection shifts to the mother-daugh-
ter relationship in the next poem, “The Young-
est Daughter,” in which Song portrays moments
of physical intimacy between the poet speaker
and her mother: The mother massages the poet’s
face, and the poet in turn bathes her mother. “The
Youngest Daughter,” at first glance, displays a state
of harmony as well as nostalgia for a physical union
between mother and child. In many of the subse-
quent poems, Song depicts her early childhood
in the voice of a child or an adult speaker with a
child’s consciousness. Through the sensory organs,
the child perceives the world around her as some-
times threatening and sometimes protective; the
surroundings are even perceived as an extension
of the body, reflecting the wholesomeness or frag-
mentation of the bodily identity. Heard through
the voice of an adult viewer of Kitagawa Utamaro’s
prints and the persona of Georgia O’Keeffe, the
middle part of the book reveals the oppression of
a patriarchal society by meticulously depicting fe-
male body images in various paintings. The book
ends with an assertion of the body as having al-
ways been ethnicized and gendered.Bibliography
Chen, Fu-jen. “Body and Female Subjectivity in Cathy
Song’s Picture Bride.” Women’s Studies: An Inter-
disciplinary Journal 33, no. 5 (2004): 577–612.
Solberg, S. E. “Cathy Song and the Korean Ameri-
can Experience in Poetry.” In The Asian Pacific
American Heritage, edited by George J. Leonard,
541–546. New York: Garland, 1999.
Fu-jen ChenPicture Bride Yoshiko Uchida (1988)
The title Picture Bride refers to the Japanese
women who traveled to the United States in the
early 20th century to join husbands whom they
had never met before. Because marriage between
Japanese immigrants and white Americans was
strictly forbidden during this time, many Japanese
men resorted to matchmakers through whom they
sought to find marriage partners in Japan. Men
and women would exchange photos and some-
times letters. Women who agreed to these mar-
riages, referred to as “picture brides,” then traveled
to the United States to meet these men for the first
time. Women like Hana Omiya, in YOSHIKO UCHI-
DA’s Picture Bride, saw this as an opportunity that
might not have been readily available to them in
their native Japan.
Hana Omiya, a daughter of a samurai, has big
dreams. She has been corresponding with a manPicture Bride 243