Are the Leaves of an Onion”). A seemingly ran-
dom set of images from nature, Asian writing, and
quantum physics (as in “The String Diamond, 3”:
Deltoid spurge, / red wolf, / ocelot, / green-blos-
som pearlymussel, / razorback sucker,.. .”) come
together in the reader’s mind to build tableaus and
pose open-ended questions such as “In the mind,
what never repeats? Or repeats endlessly?” Even
“redshift” in the title of Sze’s most successful col-
lection, The Redshifting Web, ties the natural and
poetic to the scientific in a conjectural fashion:
Redshift is an astronomical phenomenon that oc-
curs when galaxies move apart and their light shifts
from the higher (blue) to the lower (red) end of the
spectrum. To Sze, all things in the universe, includ-
ing humans, are intricately connected in patterns
of constant motion and change.
In the early 1990s, Sze settled in Pojoaque, New
Mexico, with his wife, poet Carol Moldaw (The
Lighting Field, Chalkmarks on Stone). He now di-
rects the creative writing program at the Institute
for American Indian Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
gives lectures and poetry readings worldwide, and
publishes his poetry and that of others from the
Santa Fe Public Library Workshops and the Insti-
tute of American Indian Arts.
Bibliography
Sze, Arthur. The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998.
Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press,
1998.
———. The Willow Wind: Translations From the Chi-
nese and Poems. Santa Fe, N.M.: Tooth of Time,
- Rev. ed., Santa Fe, N.M.: Tooth of Time,
Xiaojing, Zhou. “The Redshifting Web: Arthur Sze’s
Ecopoetics.” In Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction,
edited by J. Scott Bryson, 179–187. Salt Lake City:
University of Utah Press, 2002.
LynnDianne Beene
Sze, Mai-mai (1905–1987)
As an artist, Sze published a comprehensive study
of Chinese painting called The Tao of Painting in
- An important writer in Chinese-American
communities during the Sino-Japanese War, Sze
wrote about the war and immigrant experiences.
Crossing cultural boundaries, as the daughter of
a Chinese ambassador, she also attempts to de-
construct the binary opposition between East and
West.
Writing in the 1940s, when Western readers
often expected exotic descriptions of the Orient,
Sze described herself as a homeless cosmopolitan
rather than a tour guide of Eastern exoticism. In
her autobiography, Echo of a Cry: A Story Which
Began in China (1945), she records her life as a
rootless Chinese-American woman. Born in
China, she was taken to England, cared for by an
Irish nanny, sent to a private school in France, and
then lived in New York. During a return visit to
China for a birthday celebration, she felt discon-
nected from her Chinese heritage. Noticing an old
baby photograph of herself on the wall, she real-
ized how distant this part of her life had become.
In the Western world, however, her feelings of
displacement and exile were even worse. For in-
stance, in the United States she was subjected to
racial slurs. On a painting trip to France, she was
viewed as a curiosity. Sze’s diasporic experiences
show how difficult it is to determine one’s identity
after so many relocations. She captures the pro-
found loneliness and loss at the heart of the im-
migration experience.
During the Sino-Japanese War, Sze organized
the first Chinese war relief campaign in the United
States and lectured on China’s war efforts across
North America. Her antiwar sentiment is revealed
in her novel, Silent Children (1948). Unlike early
Chinese immigrant writers who wrote patriotic
stories of the Sino-Japanese War to gain support
for their mother nation, Sze does not show an ur-
gent patriotism in this novel. Instead, in a surreal-
ist setting, her narrative centers on a band of war
orphans who struggle to survive near the outskirts
of a nameless city and who work together for their
future. Sze uses the homeless and miserable condi-
tion of the orphans not only to criticize the dehu-
manizing effects of war but also to reflect on the
psychological conditions of diasporic subjects.
Sze, Mai-mai 277