at Long Island University. In 1999 she received her
Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York
University. After teaching in various writing work-
shops, she is now an associate professor at Macal-
ester College, Minnesota. Besides writing fiction
and poetry, Wang also introduced and translated
contemporary Chinese poetry into English. She
edited and cotranslated New Generation: Poems
from China Today (1999), a collection of poems by
24 Chinese poets.
American Visa (1994), Wang’s first book, is
a collection of 11 related short stories featuring
Seaweed’s journey from a small island to a farm-
ing village in China and to New York. The eldest
and seemingly least cherished daughter of four
children, Seaweed is made to do all the housework
by her harsh and abusive mother, whose talent for
music and desire for beauty have to be buried dur-
ing the Cultural Revolution. When Seaweed is sent
to the countryside to be re-educated by farmers,
she is relieved. Yet life there is no less torturous
for Seaweed; in fact, it is even tragic for most of
the women in the village. Ju, one of the women,
drowns herself in defiance of an arranged marriage
to a blind old man. Ju’s mother, after the deaths of
her first two husbands, abuse at the hands of the
third, and the suicide of her daughter, also dies
soon after. In the 1980s, Seaweed manages to come
to America. However, the American dream, touted
by an old woman at a book stand in New York
subway station, turns out to be an illusion, as evi-
denced by Seaweed’s encounters with the diseased,
the deserted, and the lost in the city.
The title story, “American Visa,” depicts the
desperation and despair of Seaweed’s two sisters in
finding their way out of China. In the end, however,
an American visa, as Seaweed’s experience proves,
does not guarantee a brighter future. In “Lotus,”
Seaweed links the obsolete foot-binding practice
in China with modern high-heeled shoes and
finds the latter, in effect, a contemporary equiva-
lent. The binding of women, physically, emotion-
ally, and spiritually, is a theme that is shared by
all the stories in American Visa. Wang is at her
best when detailing the life of ordinary people in
China and reflecting on her protagonists’ Chinese
and American experiences with a balanced view.
Wang explores a similar theme in her novel, For-
eign Devil (1996). Ni Bing, the protagonist, largely
resembles Seaweed in character and experience.
However, some elements of the plot, such as the
secret of Ni Bing’s birth and her love affair with
a married man, make the novel a sensational and
gripping read.
“Language, like woman / Look best when free,
undressed,” exclaims Wang in “Syntax,” a poem
in her first poetry collection, Of Flesh and Spirit
(1998). The language in Wang’s poems is direct
and incisive. In a passionate and powerful way,
Wang deals with her usual themes such as Chinese
women’s identity and experience and the journey
of the Chinese to and within America. As is best
exemplified by the title poem of her second col-
lection, The Magic Whip (2003), Wang also experi-
ments with the poetic form, making it a pastiche of
verse, prose, and other nonconventional elements
to produce an intense and disquieting effect.
In Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China
(2000), Wang adopts cross-cultural and interdisci-
plinary perspectives to examine the old practice of
footbinding. She introduces various literary texts
and oral accounts on footbinding from the Ming
and Qing dynasties to the present, as well as lin-
guistic, literary, and psychoanalytic theories from
the West.
Wang’s works have earned her a number of
awards and fellowships including the Eugene M.
Kayden Book Award in 2001 for the Best Book in
the Humanities (for Aching for Beauty) and the
Bush Artist Fellowship for Poetry in 2003.
Yan YingWar Trash Ha Jin (2004)
Set largely in South Korean and U.S. POW camps
during the Korean War of the early 1950s, Wa r
Trash is the first of HA JIN’s works to take place
outside mainland China. War Trash opens, and
ends, in Atlanta, Georgia. While visiting his son
and his family in the United Sates, 73-year-old
Yu Yuan decides to write a memoir about his war
experiences as a gift to his American grandchil-
dren. As he relates his story, Yu is a junior officerWar Trash 309