Transcripts

MARIANNE COMBS: You're listening to MPR News. I'm Marianne Combs. Finally this hour, Bao Phi is an accomplished Minnesota poet. His first book of poems Song I Sing was praised by The New York Times. Now, Phi is back with a new collection called Thousand Star Hotel. It delves into his youth from his family fleeing the Vietnam War when he was just a baby to growing up in the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis as a poor Asian kid.

Here he is reading the poem for which the book is named, inspired by his first trip back to Vietnam in college.

BAO PHI: "Vietnamese people joke that they don't need a four-star hotel. Even the homeless sleeping in the wide open are treated to thousand star hotel every night. 1996, in the countryside of Vietnam, I front like I'm better than a tourist simply because I was born here. Hot spring water is piped into a spartan concrete pool so gray you can tell its color in the pitch dark.

Overhead are the most stars I've ever seen in my life. They take what little breath I have away. The night is so deep and gorgeous without the light. I can't swim, not even to save myself. But still, I soak and look overhead. I'm self-conscious because my body is rail thin and pale. I'm frustrated because the hot water fogs up my glasses constantly. I curse my bad luck, my bad eyesight.

What I should have done is kept wiping. And kept gazing, if only for a second at a time. Because luck is returning to a homeland you are too young to embody. Because you never know if you'll get a second chance to be a witness to beauty. Because stars don't care about inconvenience, their gorgeousness took an eternity to reach us and they have done the work and they are worth it. So wipe away.

See what your parents had to tear from themselves. And the even less fortunate count the drowned till they can't. Only scientists could measure the journey of starlight. A thousand perfect songs you hear by yourself. A thousand belly laughs meant for someone else. A thousand lines between a thousand points of light until our ancestors stopped counting and named it all sky. A thousand butterflies that never land on you. A thousand windows rolled down to the wind, eyes always on the road.

A thousand gnats, their bodies so light they blow back from your breath only to seek you again. A thousand breaths during a thousand dreams folded and folded and folded again. A thousand unfolding, crease things to let go."

MARIANNE COMBS: Thank you.

BAO PHI: Thank you. Thank you. And ultimately, that poem is about disappointment. And we're all disappointed and rejected, and we feel we're missing out, or we're looked over, or ignored, or invisible. And so I think that poem was to both acknowledge that, and to also see the beauty in life anyway.

MARIANNE COMBS: Bao Phi grew up immersed in hip hop culture and spoken word, at which he excelled. He was a two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion and a National Poetry Slam finalist. Now, he's the program director at The Loft Literary Center, where the spoken word series he created Equilibrium has been successfully running for 15 years. In a recent conversation in his Powderhorn Park apartment, Phi told me about what inspired his latest poetry collection, Thousand Star Hotel.

BAO PHI: I didn't write a lot about my upbringing and my past. I would touch upon it here and there, but I didn't really start writing about this until after I became a father. And I think part of it is when my partner and I at the time decided to have a child, we went and I can't remember if it was a midwife clinic or the hospital. They sat us down and they ask us all these questions.

Like, is there a history of cancer in your family, high blood pressure? All of these questions because they want to anticipate what you might pass down to your children. And I remember one of the questions was, have you or anyone in your family been traumatized by war? And I remember hearing that in the moment and just feeling dazed.

Of course, we had been traumatized by war, of course. But I don't think it really hit me until that moment where I'm sitting there, and the idea of passing this trauma down to my child became very, very real. And I think part of the reason why this new book is so personal is because I had to come face to face with that as a father.

And part of it is also I just want my daughter to have-- it's almost like for those of us who are marginalized people, it's like the creative writing, storytelling, prose, poetry. It's like these are our history books because we're left out of history. I just wanted her to have this history of what it was-- anything could happen to me, right?

I could get hit by a car. A police officer could be having a bad day and decide he doesn't like me, or he sees me as an enemy, or he's like you killed my uncle in a war or whatever. Anything could take me from this life. Like, violence has been a part of my life since forever. If that happens for whatever reason, what is my daughter going to have to know that I existed? What is she going to know about this trauma that I passed on? And I wanted her to have something.

MARIANNE COMBS: It's interesting to me to think about trauma as something that-- as something that's being passed on and to give somebody like, here's the context for you in trying to deal with this trauma. I mean, it's just the strangest of gifts to give to a child, to say, here's what I can give to you. Is that at all a reflection of your relationship with your father?

BAO PHI: Yeah, absolutely. Definitely. I was too young to remember much of that, but fortunately, I came from a family that was very free about these details to me. So my mother, my father, my older siblings, our extended family, I've heard bits and pieces of what we went through, through them.

I remember having dinner with my extended family, and there's a poem about this in the new book. And it's dinner, and the conversation is fine and it's lighthearted. Everyone's kind of ribbing each other. But then suddenly it turned to those days of us escaping. And the tone shifted, and people started relating their stories. And this is my extended family.

And I'm looking around and I'm listening. And my Vietnamese is lousy in terms of speaking, but in terms of comprehension, it's very good. So I understood everything. And I'm listening to these stories and they're bringing me back to the stories that my family would tell.

And I'm thinking to myself, here are these people who have these amazing stories of survival, like amazing stories of survival, and yet they walk out of this restaurant, is that amazing story of survival the first thing that people are going to think when people lay eyes on them? No. It's going to be like, look at this Gook, look at this Chink, you know, go back to where you come from, whatever. Or you guys, you don't belong here, or any number of the racist lenses that are leveled at us day in and day out, the violences that we experience.

Already most people do not see Asian and Asian American people as human. And I think it's like this trauma just suddenly comes from somewhere. I think if she doesn't have this, I mean, I would hope that someone else would provide it to her. But, I mean, if she doesn't have these stories, no one else is going to provide it for her. I mean, what else is she going to have, Miss Saigon? That's not her story. That's not her story. That's not our story. That's useless.

MARIANNE COMBS: It feels like there's a definite tone shift between the first book and the second book. The first book is sort of a wonderfully wise and critical eye looking at society and social justice and race. This one, you crack open your chest and just dive in and bury your soul. You're very open about visiting your therapist. You're talking through issues. You're talking about a fear of failure or a lack of self-esteem.

Has going through-- has the writing process been at all cathartic or helpful in how you view your own place in the world and wrestling with these issues?

BAO PHI: I think that the way that I see it, I don't know if it's been helpful, but I think one thing that drives me is that if anyone else can be helped by this vulnerability, then I'm going to do it. I think this world is already just kind full of men who are absolutely sure of themselves, or at least they project that and they feel they need to be that way in order to be loved or successful, and what have you. And they feel like they need to take up space, and that's how men are taught that they are important.

And I feel like everything I am is against that. And I'm not trying to position myself as some type of hero or anything, I'm saying that my gut is telling me that men need to be less of that. If I have a place, then I hope that being vulnerable and exposing my flaws and my anxieties is what's helpful to other people.

So this poem, I think a lot about racial hierarchies in the United States, regardless of what political spectrum it is in, and how Asian Americans are often wrongly positioned as the most privileged of people of color. And therefore the onus is on us to always be an ally and to de-center our communities. And I often think of how the Asian Americans who are willing to accept that and position themselves that way actually get a lot of props.

It's almost like-- it's almost like allyship and social justice is or has been commodified where it's like if you are willing to have certain opinions, it's almost like you receive social status, which I find really strange. And I say that as a person who when he was very young, bought into that without having a clear understanding of what he was doing.

And so this poem is about that, being the exceptional Asian person, like being the only Asian person in a social justice movement. And do we play the role or not, and what does it mean? So this poem is called Token Exceptional Asian and Liberal Multiculturalism, "Sliver of gold, Chink narrow. Swimming in a rainbow stream. Are you the shiniest of the school, or are you bait?"

MARIANNE COMBS: I love it.

BAO PHI: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Some of these poems are going to get me in trouble, and I've been honest. And that's fine. I mean, poets were supposed to be troublemakers.

MARIANNE COMBS: You're listening to poet Bao Phi, talking about his new book of poetry Thousand Star Hotel. It's a deeply personal collection that reflects on his youth in the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis and on the legacy of inherited trauma.

BAO PHI: So this is an excerpt from a poem about my father, something that happened when we were young called Lead. "I want my dad to be normal, not yell in his foreign tongue that everyone is out to get him. I'm sure they're just mosquitoes. But I am too scared of him to tell him. I'm sure they are just mosquitoes, even when I see dull lead fragments sticking into his brown skin. I didn't want to believe him, even as I helped him wash his wounds.

You need someone to care for your life, or at least your dignity. My dad had a son who believed in invisible mosquitoes more than the evil of men. Darth Vader had a son who could not understand his father had been corrupted into killing the best version of himself. My dad had a son who thought he was just another Gook who didn't know what caused him pain. They say we're all equal, but we are the ones standing here with the history of our father's blood on our hands."

What was important to me in writing a lot of these poems is that I acknowledge my own complicitness in a lot of these things that happened. And so that poem was about when someone had vandalized our garage. We were vandalized all the time because we were one of the few Asians in Phillips. And my mom and dad had to fix this up because we didn't have any money. We did this ourselves. And I would often help them.

And I remember my dad squatting in the alley trying to fix up something with some cement and a trowel, and he was complaining of these sharp pains on his back. And at first we thought they were mosquitoes. And then we realized someone was probably shooting a BB gun at him. And I remember that I was ashamed of him because I wanted to not be victimized.

I didn't want to be different. I didn't want us to be-- I didn't want us to be the targets that we obviously were. And now looking back on it, how ashamed that makes me feel. And so I wanted to write about these things and honor my parents' pain and what they went through, but also kind of acknowledge my complicitness in it. And so that poem is almost an apology, I think.

MARIANNE COMBS: That was poet Bao Phi, reading from his new collection, Thousand Star Hotel, published by Coffee House Press. The Loft Literary Center will host a release party July 12. Phi's first children's book, A Different Pond, inspired by memories of fishing with his father, comes out in August.