The Last to the Party

Emily Cann talks to Ottawa poet Chuqiao Yang about her debut collection The Last to the Party, (Gooselane Editions/Icehouse Poetry, 2024)

Emily Cann: The title of this collection is The Last to the Party, yet readers actually arrive at “The Party”—the poem that opens this collection—right away. The rest of the collection is divided into five sections, with the titular poem appearing in the middle of section three. Can you say a little about the structure of this collection? How did you determine the organization/placement of the poems? Did the structure and order evolve significantly as you wrote, or did you always have this configuration in mind?

Chuqiao Yang: I struggled with the book’s structure because the poems were written over a long period of time and the style and voice of the speaker changed along the way, all of which caused a lack of cohesiveness. I really didn’t have a clear idea of the configuration, but I thought it would be linear and likely a fictionalized origin story of sorts, as a lot of debut collections tend to be. It was a struggle to come up with the opening poem, and I actually left that blank for a while. Originally, I had at least two other poems in mind for the opening poem, but I think both were omitted from this collection through the editing process because they didn’t quite fit.  “The Party” was actually tucked away elsewhere in the collection, and it was also a newer poem.

The two most intensive attempts to sequence the collection involved another writer guiding me through the process—in the first instance, my friend Puneet Dutt (read her poetry, people!) and in the second, my editor Michael Prior (again, read all his books!). Both involved printing the poems out and placing them on the floor to see what the collection could look like, and then doing it a few more times to see what made sense. At my editor’s suggestion, I printed a tiny version of the poems and played around with them like they were a deck of cards. I also read them out loud and recorded myself reading the poems in certain sequences (which also helped with editing). My best friend who has known me through so many phases of my life, read it with me a few times in its earlier form and in its later final shape. It’s really nice to have people support you like this, especially because there was a lot of self-imposed pressure. Interestingly, it was through my editor’s suggestions and through playing around with the sequencing that it became apparent that “The Party” could set the tone for the collection. Depending on where I read the poem, I’ve heard audiences react to the ending with laughter, or with some affirming nods, or even sympathy. “The Party” getting those kinds of varied responses sets the tone for the book – it isn’t about one thing or emotion, and it is meant to be funny and serious, sad and joyous.      

Emily Cann: In “Departures,” the poem that ends the penultimate section of the book, you write: “We talked about dying, departures, arriving.” These different transitions—coming and going, death and life—appear throughout the collection. What about these moments of transition speak to you? What does it mean to you to “depart” and to “arrive”?

Chuqiao Yang: This is such a great question, thank you! Arrivals and departures are often on my mind; it’s hard to tell them apart sometimes and they represent some kind of a change. And I don’t like change, especially in the form of relationships.

I get very attached to people—ever since I was a kid, I have been terrified of people passing away or relationships of any sort coming to an ambiguous or defined end.  People who know me well will laugh and say that’s an understatement. As someone who tends to have a strong emotional response to partings of any form—whether it’s a death, a fading relationship or friendship, or a physical arrival/departure to a new city, new home, or new job, I am extremely sentimental and get easily attached, and that leads to my deep fascination with the connections we make, remake and move through.

Life is full of a lot of beautiful encounters and moments, as well as painful ones, whether it’s with friends or family, or total strangers, and sometimes things come to an intentional or unexpected end. Focusing on arrivals and departures is a way for me to enjoy just being here, alive, where I want to be, with who I want to be there with me. There’s a quote by Rainer Maria Rilke I think about a lot: “And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” That sentiment, and life going on, as in transitioning from one moment to the next is a thread that is woven through the poems, and I hope to showcase the turning points that mark the growth of the speaker.

Emily Cann: In the Acknowledgements section, you note that these poems were once something to “run from,” but that you have now learned to “celebrate and embrace” them. Can you elaborate some on what about them you were running from, and what your process was like for turning back towards them?

Chuqiao Yang: The book is intentionally written in a confessional, intimate way. I wanted to create difficult, messy, nuanced moments where it was ambiguous as to who was the hero, who was wronged, and why it even matters. I was exploring questions like, what if a significant experience I’ve had or sacrifice I’ve made doesn’t hold a life lesson or a redemption arc? What if this poem doesn’t end on a hopeful, feel-good note? And does every hard lesson I’ve learned have to be imbued with meaning, or do I just have to own up to my own part in mucking things up? In considering those questions, I was also worried about how I’d be perceived as a writer and a person, not to mention having to face my emotional limits and my limits as a poet.

As I mentioned earlier, it has been a long time since I began working on the manuscript: I was juggling my professional career with my creative interests. And it was hard to be accountable to myself and to face or return to the memories that inspired these poems. There’s also a degree of accountability I feel towards my loved ones and even when I publish things that are fictionalized, they seem personal and that could result in others perceiving who I am and what my community is about in a particular way. I’m mindful of unhelpful stereotypes or tropes about my lived experience, and worse, inadvertently contributing to them.

But my editor, especially given his background in teaching, has such a talent for encouraging you to see past your personal ambivalence and hone in on what you, as the writer should be doing, which for me was focusing on the work, challenging myself, and feeling good about it. It was truly empowering and rewarding to reclaim experiences that shaped me as a young person. By transforming them into something else through artistic expression and fictionalization, I was engaging in an act of self-compassion. An editor who can guide help you find yourself and show you how to enjoy the process is rare and I am lucky to have gotten that experience in my first book.

Emily Cann: What do you intend for the readers to be left with after the final page?

Chuqiao Yang: A sense of hopefulness, even if it’s faint. I also hope that someone reading the book can laugh and see themselves in it a bit, or be reminded of someone or something else, and see it all with new perspective and even some compassion.

But with that said, I think that as soon as you’ve written something, it’s not really yours anymore and you don’t have much of a say in the impression you want to leave behind, even for someone like me who struggles with letting go of control. Because once something is out there, it really is up to the reader to decide what they want to do with it, how much of themselves they’d like to see in it (or not), what they think the author’s intentions were, and what it means to them, or if it’s to mean anything at all. Already, I’ve had many different reactions to the book—some have told me it’s a real emotional bummer (in a bad way like they had to put the book down and pick up something jollier and never returned to mine haha), others have told me it’s funny and they read it in one sitting. Even people’s favourite poems are wildly different. I like that a lot.

Emily Cann: Was there a specific incident or experience or series of events that inspired this work? What was the development process for the inspiration to become this newest collection?

Chuqiao Yang: When I was a kid, I was so excited to leave home and do my own thing. I was a very ambitious young person and focused a lot on my academics to get me there. And I was idealistic, hopeful and cocky. I was humbled by how challenging the experience of leaving turned out to be. And that sense of humbling repeated itself over and over again: when I did poorly in exams when I was rejected from jobs, when I was applying to do more school (and facing rejections) when I rejected or lost out on artistic opportunities when I was dealing with people who were more talented, sophisticated or just plain cooler, and when I was trying to establish my life in bigger and bigger cities and failing (even with simple things that were effortless to others, like reading directions on a map or taking the subway in the right direction). I was fascinated with meeting new people while keeping my old friends close to me too. And I was reluctant to let go of anything or anyone in my life, even if it felt awful sticking around. I wanted to explore my tendency to lean into what I knew and found familiar, even if it was no longer a source of comfort, why I do that, and how to shed that kind of behaviour because it just isn’t sustainable long-term.

Emily Cann: How do you intend for the value of the work to be assessed – as a piece of work that shares a compelling message or makes a social, political, or practical point or is it to be seen as a cultural event/phenomenon – an object of taste or a statement of your aesthetic?

Chuqiao Yang: I think about this a lot and I’m still not sure exactly. But I do feel very mindful of the tropes and stereotypes associated with being a person of Asian descent.

Sometimes I feel as if my value as a writer is tied to whether I have something powerful to say about my being here, if it’s to be said at all. And if it’s to be powerful, it must be grounded in some kind of traumatic experience: from a space of feeling marginalized as a woman, as a visible minority, as an immigrant, or all three. And implicit in any of those identities is, at the very least, a political statement. And to be here, writing at all, must automatically mean that I am overcoming barriers and breaking some glass ceiling. It boxes me in and it’s reductive. There is always this looming sense of having to be a model figure, of being expected to overcome, and of needing to do and say more when sometimes I just want to say what I want, even if it’s less, disappointing, or boring.

I have unique experiences that may have marked me in some way, and that I carry forward in the way I exist in the world, and that may come out in my poems. But I feel like there’s a pressure to write about my experiences in an aggrieved, offended way (which kind of feels like I am being stereotyped as a writer), and when I do, it’s a commentary on the diasporic experience, and that I must be speaking up for, or against something.

I feel like I am whining but I’ll end it here: I find there is a lot of joy and satisfaction to be had in just being alive. I am enjoying finding ways to move beyond what I think I have to do or should say, to doing what I want to do and want to say. I know it is a huge privilege to be able to do that. I am still in the process of realizing that and experiencing the privilege that comes with being able to feel this way and the responsibility that comes with it. Some of this is in the book with poems like “The View,” “Eve,” “Friday,” or “Roads Home,” and it’s a direction I want to continue to explore further.

Emily Cann: What books were you reading when you wrote this? Are there any books that you had to keep visiting for inspiration when writing this book?

For poetry, I was reading Ada Limón, Phoebe Wang, Sonia Sanchez, Li-Young Lee, Richard Wagamese, Jenny Xie, Sylvia Legris, Joy Harjo, Octavia Paz, Anne Carson, Oliver de la Paz, Liz Howard, Frank O’Hara, and Yusef Komunyakaa. For fiction, I was reading books that fixated on relationships and how time changes things, like James Salter, Elena Ferrante, Min Jin Lee, Natalia Ginzburg, Alice Munro, Kazugo Ishiguro, and Miriam Toews.

Emily Cann: What memorable or formative experience around learning to write springs to mind?

When I was in high school, I attended a poetry course through Sage Hill at St. Peter’s Abbey (it’s through the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild, and it’s awesome!). The course was held in Muenster, Saskatchewan, at a Benedictine monastery. It’s in this beautiful, rural part of Saskatchewan where you get a proper, unobstructed view of the prairie sky that actually does it justice. I went there for I believe four or five days during the summer and our instructor was Sean Virgo, who is such a talented facilitator, not to mention poet. Everyone there was older than me and they had published books. I was so intimidated but since we spent so many hours of the day together writing and giving each other feedback, and watching the evolution of our work take place before us because of the energy of the group, I think we started feeling really comfortable sharing vulnerabilities despite our age gap. The more willing I was to be open and the more I gave, the more I received. I was greedy for more of that energy and the dynamic of the group was really nurturing. It set the bar for all the future workshops I attended and it was a very high bar.

I left feeling so fortunate and inspired to keep writing. We also had our own rooms in I believe the abbey’s guest quarters and access to printing and computers at all times which was such a luxury. I also remember having conversations with several of the monks there.

I have the notes somewhere, but they must be on another laptop—but I remember one of the monks was a refugee and had such an incredible story about how he got to, of all places, Muenster. He was so polite, modest and approachable. I was really moved to learn of his experience, and grateful he shared it.  

Emily Cann: What emotions do you associate with writing? Or, differently put, how does writing impact your emotional state?

I think it’s evolved over time, fortunately. Writing used to feel like a really solitary activity. It is a cathartic experience but I didn’t have anyone to share the exercise of writing with, like I do in a team sport so it can feel lonely. I find talking about a draft before a draft is ready, unhelpful—especially if I get too many forceful and divergent opinions. And I take a lot of time to write something so it used to feel like I was carrying something heavy around me all the time. I was also grumpier and more introverted and had pretty inconsistent hours. I’d be at my desk all day, and sleep at very odd hours. I would forget to eat or eating would feel like a nuisance which threw a wrench in my routine because I love cooking and eating. And all of that of course made me grumpier and sleepier.

I think something switched this year though. I practice a lot of mindfulness. I set timers for writing and just go with the flow, and I walk away when something isn’t working. I also started playing sports—which forces me to get out of my head (I am constantly in my head).

Emily Cann: Can you name a source of inspiration before the age of 12 that impacted your writing in some way?

I can name several! I watched Billy Elliot with my mom. I was in love with that movie. I was so inspired by Billy Elliot—of course, I barely understood the political upheaval the movie is about, but that said, I understood and appreciated wanting to pursue something unconventional and it felt like both a gift and a curse.

My parents also supported me a lot by encouraging me to read, write and draw. They are big readers so I was exposed to a lot of literature. I read East of Eden by John Steinbeck and I was moved by the book, especially the character of Lee (he was one of the first Asian characters in a book I had ever read, I couldn’t believe it) and the question of what it means to be good.

I also moved to a different right before I turned 12, and my sixth and seventh-grade teachers truly changed my life—both were such funny, wonderful and supportive people who believed in my artistic and literary interests. It was at that point in my life that I started to excel academically and gained more confidence. I also loved music and really admired strong lyricists.

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