Baby Book Review: reconnecting and reconciling with ancestral roots

Prisca Tang 

Born in Hong Kong and raised in Toronto, author Amy Ching-Yan Lam explores the divergence of her duality — Eastern roots with a Western upbringing — in her poetry collection Baby Book. She skilfully plays around with extended metaphor, allusions to Chinese fables and poetries, and anecdotes in her works to depict the struggle of being detached from one’s ancestral roots, and having her identity colonized by Western culture. 

Sharing a similar background with Lam, I can resonate with many of the pieces in the collection. One which has been  imprinted in my brain ever since is, “THE POET LI BAI.” It recalls an experience that many Chinese Canadians share, her routine in Chinese school memorizing fables and poetry from a culture she was born into, but unfamiliar with. She starts the poem with an allusion to the Chinese fable about a naughty boy witnessing a granny grinding down a pole into a needle. The language she uses in her translation of the fable is simple. By not embellishing the story, or even using highbrow syntax to reiterate the tale, the author travels back in time instead, retelling it in a childish way — which is exactly what she heard when she was young. She even recorded her naïve thoughts of the fable: “Why would anyone be impressed by a pole?” A rhetorical question that not only students who have heard and learnt about the poem can relate to, but even for readers who are reading the poem for the first time in this book. However, this simple retelling of a famous Chinese story allows readers to have a glimpse into how people disconnected from their roots feel about their ancestral culture — the pain of not being able to comprehend and appreciate the art of the language. 

Lam’s poem continues with another Li Bai composition that every Chinese remembers by heart. It is a poem about how the poet looks outside the window and reminisces about his home. Once again, Lam uses colloquial language to reiterate the poem and mirror how the art of language is lost in translation. As I was reading her version of one of the nation’s most renowned poems, I wrote it out in Chinese directly above her four-line translation — 

The poet is in his bedroom.

床前明月光

He sees moonlight, like snow, on the floor.

凝視地上霜

He looks up at the moon.

舉頭望明月

He looks down and thinks of his home. 

低頭思故鄉

Even though the English version is accurate, almost verbatim to the original, the beauty of Li Bai’s work is nowhere to be found here. I wish Lam had added a footnote or elaborated upon her memory of the poem, or even the authentic beauty of it. This way, she could have seized the opportunity to promote the intricacy of the Chinese language. For example, in Chinese culture, the moon symbolizes the reunion of family, while moon-watching is an activity that usually takes place with loved ones. When Li Bai says ‘the moonlight looks like snow,’ he is portraying a setting of how lonely he feels in the winter. Combining the two lines, the poet illustrates a pitiful picture which gains sympathy from the audience. The simple poem becomes a masterpiece due to how concise and precise the language is, yet the English translation convinced me to agree with Lam that it is “idiotic.” However still, this silly rephrasing of the poem powerfully reveals her disengagement with her ancestral culture and language. 

Out of all the literary techniques used in the poem, I always find the use of extended metaphor articulates her struggles the best. In the same poem, when she recalls her grandmother teaching her how to stitch, Lam learns about her culture through the motion of it. She uses the movement of the needle as a pathetic fallacy of her making amends with her cultural background, connecting her inner identity with her outer appearance — “a switching/ between the inner and outer.” The vivid imagery really allows her reader to understand the urge to converge and reconcile with her Chinese lineage. 

Another poem which eloquently demonstrates Lam’s cultural identity crisis is “ENGLISH ACCENT.” The poem jumps from anecdotes to stories she retells to spiritual experiences. There are no obvious links between the fragments of these  stories she is retelling. The poem first talks about a feeling of shame Lam experienced after winning an award for a letter she had written in appreciation for a veteran’s effort in World War II because she doesn’t truly feel that way. Then, it jumps to a story about her extracurriculars — learning Bach’s sonatas and Shakespeare's monologues about romance and revenge.  She then moves onto a medieval story about a man who sells forgiveness. The work concludes with the stanza , “The English church says salvation cannot be impeded by the/ people it passes through. Not by a colonizer, not by a liar.” The last anecdote she uses is from a book she read about how a diplomat’s son kills all the cows in a local farmer’s field and receives no consequences. 

Only on the last page of the poem does she use one powerful stanza to connect all the stories:

Decades of no apologies or fake ones. 

Decades of art about war. 

Art that is fluent, rhetorically successful. 

A beautifully carved wooden box. 

That which blocks the truth is physical. 

In these few lines, readers can feel how her education, her upbringing, and her knowledge about the Western culture irk her. She is ashamed of being so fluent in a language and culture that assimilates her identity.

I have only chosen two of her works  here that echo with me the most, but her other pieces continue to use a combination of vulgar language and humour to express the dilemma of growing up as Chinese-Canadian and her journey in searching for cultural identity. Her language is intimate, personal, and truthful, and her images are vivid, honest, and direct. Overall, it is a pleasure to see an author effectively express the communal struggle of growing up as a Chinese Canadian, and how the discrepancy between your ancestral roots and environment can be reconverged through words and poetry.