The Complexities of Love and Belonging: Review of Chuqiao Yang's The Last to the Party

Chuqiao Yang, *The Last to the Party*
Gooselane Editions, icehouse, 2024. $19.95 CAD
Order a copy from Goose Lane Editions.

The Last to the Party (Gooselane Editions, icehouse, 2024) is an honest and moving debut trade poetry collection by bpNichol Chapbook Award recipient, Chuqiao Yang. Yang navigates the complicated terrains of family, heritage, ancestry, identity, racism, belonging, friendship, grief, love, tenderness, heart, and ferocity, as the book moves from childhood to adulthood.

The speaker’s relationship with parents is fraught with the tensions created through wanting love and approval but also being suffocated by it. This portrayal of family is complex: neither idyllic, nor completely negative. Writers of the diaspora in particular may identify with the heartache of trying to remember and honour traditions while adhering to expectations while needing to figure out one’s own identity.

In “Pub Crawl,” Yang writes, “I wanted someone to find me,//peer into me and confirm I was full of surprise,/ promise. […] I imagined how it must feel/to be unafraid” (41).

Throughout the book, there is a constant ache to belong. In “The View” Yang writes

What is this gift of finally belonging,
if not returning the tender smile back
to those with faded faces
who were quietly waiting for you
to see them as they always were
for the very first time? (75).

The speaker’s Asian identity is mocked throughout the book by classmates, friends, and dates. She is made to feel othered and inferior, something carried from childhood into adulthood in these coming-of-age poems. For example, in “Art Therapy with A Squirrel,” the speaker tries to change her nose after she recognizes herself in a “childhood chant” that describes those like her as egg faced”(78).

I pinched my nose to a
clothesline,
prayed for cartilage and remained much the same:
pancake flat, crooked, seething (78).

In “Pygmalion the Colonialist,” the speaker is on a date with a man with a white saviour complex. The speaker puts him in his place and shows strength and defiance.

She left him, silent, and he stood, waiting until he froze
into a statue, a relic, a nameless, mouthless palladium, eyes
filled with the recollection of a girl alive with breath, striding
through a world that flooded her with welcomes; her life a
series of inspired follies and his, a life that inspired none (58).

In “The Tourist,” we are shown more examples of racism directed at the speaker, how this racism is so personal and casual that it is shown as a form of lighthearted humour:

I am flinching
and laughing/in Saskatoon
each time a Brad/Heather or Allie
jokes about whether
my slanted eyes
see only in
widescreen (62).

In “Icarus,” Yang writes “I tried to be as complicated/ as my country’s history” (65). This complex attempt to work through issues of identity, family and heritage continues in “Raspberries,”: “I have questions I am too afraid to face./And many times, I could have lied to myself/that I held the answers, but I’d still be here, all the same” ((77).

And while the ”I” of these poems is full of self-deprecation and anger, the speaker offers a mix of tenderness toward herself , both hope for the future, and surrender to her negative sense of self. In the opening and eponymous poem, Yang writes: “I tell her that better days/ are coming. Because they’ve come,/ and keep on coming, as eager to please/as that one dinner guest/who overshares, who means well,/but whom no one seems to be enjoying” (12).

And in “The Tourist,”:

Chuqiao,
Let me in, let me in,
I’ve got endless
plans for you and me (63).

This is the only poem in the book where Yang names herself and it is a brave naming. There is no distance between author and speaker; we are meant to identify Yang as the speaker of these poems. The speaker still wishes she could do more to deal with these racists, but instead she shuts windows and locks the doors:

I forget, I forgive,
as you watch me
dig us both
a tidy grave (63).

These oppositions between tenderness toward the self and negative self-image spring in part from the speaker’s relationship with her parents. The tension between parental love and its smothering effect is apparent in “The Geologist”: “When I am nine, I return home with a failing grade;/My mother shows my father. He cries, he has failed me.” (20), and in “The Night I Left Home”: “My family smiling, lifting me.//My family chasing, breaking me” (19).

In one of the collections most stunning poems, “The Bridge She Named Her Body,” Yang writes

Yet I thread myself through their wounds;
whether in rock, in sea or in winter’s
thick cold sheets, always I will ring the bell
I’ve sewn into the ripe wound of their love.
and like two birds, struck and stunned
by the same storm
they will remember to rise into the sky
where I will remain,
taut and sturdy and ever near,
to bear the lodestar’s weight (30-31).

There is often a mix of the beautiful and the ugly, the tender and the tragic in these portraits of home, ancestry, friendship, and family. Yang’s portrayal of the area where the speaker lives as a child is complex, grotesque, full of cigarette butts, unclean surfaces, and the goo encountered while eating “aged couch-cushion chocolates” (37). In “The Road Home,” a kid is “pooping on the street” (93). In ”Trisha and the Wonder Years,” a dying mother of a friend barfs up AAA steaks. The sandbox is “pee-curdled” (37).

In “The Night I Left Home,” gold leaves are “beating in the air” but their midribs are “shaped like the scars/on my dog-bit lips, two thin silver lines still healing” (19). As Yang writes in “The Road Home,”: “Everything is a rough/ugly diamond” (91).

In “When I Knew You Well” the speaker’s fortune is told:

She told me
I was a menace, lingering on each of my fingers.
That my ghosts would guide me, upstream, then down
That there’d be no stillness for me yet,
no quiet solitude, no home to rest (49).

I could write essays on the homage to friendship and the despair of grief in this book, as well as the haunting, resonant imagery. In particularly, the bird imagery in reference to the speaker such as kite bones and a crow’s beak gives a feeling throughout of a bird wanting to fly. The Last to the Party is a work of extraordinary beauty, pain, and honesty. Yang achieves flight in this poetry collection. It soars.

Note: Chuqiao Yang was a member of the Board of Directors at Canthius for many years, but ended direct involvement in 2022.

Amanda Earl (she/her) is a cis-gender, white settler, polyamorous, pansexual feminist writer, editor, publisher, and visual poet who lives on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples. Her recent book is Beast Body Epic, a long-poem collection provoked by a near-death health experience. Earl is managing editor of Bywords.ca.

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