Prescribee
by Chia-Lun Chang
Nightboat Books, 2022
Review by Nicole Miyashiro
“Please bear with me,” Chia-Lun Chang writes in “The Accent Floats,” an early poem in her first full-length collection, Prescribee. Born and raised in Taiwan and living in New York City, Chang travels the immigrant experience in these poems via a nuanced study of interpersonal communication. “I’m sorry that you’re / forced to be surrounded by my voice,” the narrator continues.
The you I envision winces at hearing this narrator’s voice and solicits a preemptive kindness that feels familiar and heavy with the responsibility of deflecting biases and ensuring one’s ease and safety when moving through spaces— in this case, the proximity of a shared apartment building. The use of dialogue throughout this work reveals visceral, day-to-day perspectives on embodying a multicultural identity.
“Parents” and “Winter Has Never Arrived” contextualize the familial duty to both thrive outside of and remain loyal to one’s homeland by sampling conversations with parents who still live in Taiwan. Despite light and inquisitive chats about finding love and the day’s weather, I feel a sense of distance, pressure, and grief in these exchanges. The effect of quoted dialogue interspersed between prose reads as symbolic of internalized messaging—messaging that implores the narrator to quash personal autonomy in favour of an ideal.
Various forms of silencing strike me within these portrayals of predefined duties and ‘scripts’ throughout this collection. When reading “The Photographer Took My Photo and Claimed I’m The Immigrant Dwelling,” I recognize the backhanded slip of erasure. The erasure experienced when being exoticized. I find myself asking, how does one combat erasure inherent in admiration that is fueled by grossly assumed submissiveness?
Likewise, when is self-diminishment wise for self-preservation and safety vs. a hinderance to healthy connection?— This is the question that arises for me when I consider the nonnative speaker in “Engli-shhh Isn’t Yours,” who explains: “I cover my face / beam a tale, weave a silence. / English doesn’t belong to everybody and / my language is never mine.”
Chang’s writing prompts me to revisit Lauren Rebecca Thacker’s 2020 “Lost and Found” article in the Arts & Science magazine, OMNIA. In it, Huda Fakhreddine, Arabic translator and Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, describes transitioning from one language into another as being put “face-to-face with the feeling that what you really set out to say is not going to be said,” suggesting one must “inhabit the loss.” Yet the alternative to risking loss in meaning by communicating is to remain silent. This dilemma is acknowledged in Chang’s work with precision. “You really / love my face / only why / won’t I be / quieter,” the poem “Why Can’t We Simply Love Each Other’s Face” interrogates.
While silence can offer healthy space for breath, reflection, and active listening, its destructive implications are alluded to throughout the pages of Prescribee, beginning with its front matter:
“prescribe
\pri-‘skrī¬b \
verb
to officially tell someone to use (a medicine, therapy, diet, etc.)
as a remedy or treatment
prescribe
\pri-‘skrī¬b \
verb
to make an authoritative ruling
be subject to legal prescription
to write before
prescribee
\pri-‘skrī¬bē \
noun
to witness unbearable negligence and make no sound
to stay sane steadily
to place music next to a pulse before a rookie serves in the military
to suppress prediction when a citizen receives the order”
“In 1987,” Chang references in back matter notes, “Taiwan ended a 38-year-long period of martial law, the second-longest in human history.” These front and back pages bookend the undercurrent of intergenerational political repression that runs through the conversations of this collection. “Why didn’t you inform me before / you stand up to leave the conversation?” the speaker confronts a listener in “My Teeth Keep Grinding at Night.”
In commiseration with its political subtext, this evokes a personal point of view: a perplexed state I (and many have) experienced when someone I felt close to stopped responding in what had felt like a trusted and lively connection. At the time, I was so distressed that I sought guidance from friends, family, experts, and texts, including a 2019 Psychology Today article by Andrea F. Polard, PsyD, subtitled “Learn to distinguish between golden silence and harmful silence.” Within this piece, Polard states: “When someone aggressively turns away without good intent, gesturing that [they] will not engage even when the silence causes suffering in the other, silence becomes a punishment.” When I perceived receiving the silent treatment, I became frustrated and furious. “[Silent] punishment is especially lacking in instruction,” Polard explains, “leaving the other confused […] instead of working [on] mutual empowerment and happiness. Not much can be learned when the other refuses to explain, train, or instruct.”
Prescribee rallies commentary on such silence as a vehicle of oppression and subsequent repression. The poem “How To Stay Mad” suggests channeling the resulting fury: “Constructively. / Being angry constantly takes energy. / How do I come up with a long-term plan? / It can’t occur in the living room. Too displayable, too public.”
In Thacker’s article, Nili Gold, University of Pennsylvania Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, considers how multilingual speakers and writers grapple with a sense of separateness and insecurity: “When you have more than one language, you know that the signified [e.g. ‘a table’] is disconnected from the signifier [e.g. multiple, or in some cases no, words for the signified ‘table.’] And that it’s all arbitrary. Meaning is arbitrary. But at the same time,” Gold counters, “knowing multiple languages gives you some sense of empathy, because you know that there are other ways of saying things and of looking at things.”
As these poems imply, the immigrant experience of disconnection and oppression may have more to do with being unacknowledged than the challenge of differing languages. Dismissive silence attempts to deny another’s existence altogether and is often experienced as violent. “I’ve been questioning / the difference between / disappearing and death,” the applicant in the poem “My Green Card Was Denied” confides: “Books are innocent. / They encourage me to resist.”
Theater Director, Jenny Lamb warns in her description of Emilia, a play that uplifts historically ignored, non-male voices, that: “An ignored voice becomes a raging fire”—and, in the case of these poems, a thunderous flood. “I allow my anger to deluge,” Chang’s “Let Me Lay Down Like A Song” insists.
Despite being punished with silence—by an individual, a system, or oneself—we inevitably persist. We can each thrive empowered, as Chang demonstrates by putting her words into the hands of readers who open her book. “[T]he only way to escape from pain,” the applicant in “My Green Card Was Denied” decides, “is to see my body as a / vessel that fills nullity…”
Prescribee subverts its conciliatory tone with mastery, realizing its own quiet power and encouraging that power in all who others attempt to marginalize. Its gentle poetry—flowing with water imagery and the intimate cadence of private conversations—ultimately holds those who prescribe harmful silences accountable. As within “Upon Disrespectful Advice” triumphs: “Still, I exist without consent.”
________________________________________________________________
Nicole Miyashiro writes short forms and collaborates in community and interdisciplinary art projects. She is grateful for support from the PA Center for the Book – Penn State University Libraries, the Can Serrat International Art Residency, Tempest Studios, and Vermont Studio Center. Her work appears in Milk Press, Bi Women Quarterly, CALYX, The Hudson Review, the Nasty Women Poets anthology (Lost Horse Press), and elsewhere. Nicole lives in the United States.