Electric Synapses, Bureaucratic Power, and Performance: A Conversation With Wo Chan

By Neha Mulay

Wo Chan is the winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and the author of Togetherness (2022). Chan has received fellowships from MacDowell, the New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, The Asian American Writers Workshop, Poets House, and Lambda Literary. 

Their poems appear in POETRY, No Tokens, The Margins, and elsewhere. Chan is also a drag artist who performs as The Illustrious Pearl. They’re a member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N’ Play. Chan has performed at venues including The Whitney Museum of American Art, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and the Architectural Digest Expo. 

Wo Chan’s Togetherness relishes in its chaotic excess, tinged with a breathless physicality and the slow violence of anguish. Chan’s poems are remarkable for their seamlessness, a sheer fluidity that inundates the reader with movement and mania. These poems are submersed in drag, the queer community, and family. They grapple with the brutal scope of the forces beyond us: nature, bureaucracy, and alienation. 

They’re lush with the “tender buffet” of the familial and the urban, bursting with “the asymmetric armor of pineapples,” “gummed out discounted / clompers,” “television,” fishbowls, antimother and “samefold pavement” shining “crystal patience.” They’re both glorious with being and shattered by the despair that can accompany the immigrant experience. 

Chan and their family underwent deportation proceedings, and the book is interspersed with real documents that were submitted to the courts in an effort to keep the Chan family in the United States. The effect of these letters in the book is a kind of cosmic, tender, laborious devastation laced with innocence and pain. 

“Art and violence” are at the center of this collection—from tempestuous party poems to the fragmented @nature poems, Chan’s poems clamor with the iridescent, stout ache of survival.  The poems consciously unmake performance the onus of performance and objectification: “her own miscommunicated beauty. Brittle as nonfat chocolate.” while noting, with immense divinity, that “the singing has always been faultless.” 

I met Chan first in an online workshop in 2021, then again at a reading upon the release of Togetherness in 2022. Chan’s drag name, “The Illustrious Pearl,” feels entirely apt—there’s something luminous about Chan’s presence, and yet, I can sense the itinerant nature of their grief and their joy—the frustration of being marked as other, that physical ejection, along with an acute awareness of wonder; the “late patter of heaven” laboring “on plain earth.”

Neha Mulay: Describe the process of writing Togetherness. Do you have any writing rituals?

Wo Chan: I think every book has a different writing process, especially in terms of poetry. So many books of poetry are project-based or experientially gathered. A first book is often about everything that has happened in your life till that point, especially if you’re writing from your identity as a queer poet of color.  

Togetherness is very much about my childhood growing up in my family's restaurant and my battles with deportation in my twenties. It’s about me finding my place amongst my chosen family in New York, performing drag, and finding queer people who kind of reflect my way of moving through the world. 

The earliest poem from this book is from 2014. This book captures the time when I had initially moved to New York. So much of the ritual of writing this book was voraciously attending workshops, finding a community, and getting that feedback, that mutual kindhearted scrutiny.

One of my favorite writing rituals is to write a poem a day. I was writing sonnets every evening that recounted the happenings of the day. Some of the sonnets I wrote one summer really crystallized, and they’re precious to me in that way. 

NM: I’m so intrigued by the form of these poems. The chaotic fluidity that you utilize is so affecting and poignant. How did you arrive at this form?

WC: Thank you for saying that. It’s very hard to be confident in chaos. Sometimes, I look at the book, and I think, this is so messy. But when I think back to it, there is a real experiential kind of thought process to the book. 

In MFA school, you get a thousand chances to write a new poem, and by the end of it, you know how to order the lines in a poem and make a poem feel like..…a poem! But you only get one shot at deciding the order of a book. 

I wish we got to make dummy books in school because I really struggled with the challenge of ordering this book—I had this grand idea in my mind but no experience in terms of ordering it. I sought feedback from people, but everyone has their own ideas on how to organize a book. But you want your first book to really reflect what you’ve always dreamed of. 

I felt very bridezilla-esque. I had to get away from whatever theory I had in my mind and think, okay, if I were to read this book from front to cover, how would I order it? And I found, ultimately, it was about the tonal energy and the posture. 

If this were a poem where the character was on stage delivering a piece of the story, what would be the silhouette? How dramatic is the voice? How playful is the outfit or the facial expression? How far are they leaning into you or backing up?

I thought about each of these postures or gestures delivering a part of a story in their own affected voice. Sometimes it just got to the point where I thought, okay, this person or this poem just crossed the stage so lyrically, daintily, we need something energetic that picks up the thread in this way. So, it’s about recognizing that we need a different character or its complete opposite at a certain point in the book. 

I was thinking a lot about the kinetic or the electric synapse between poems. I was also thinking about the charge and the flavors, the gaps in between poems. I'm the type of person that finds stillness much more difficult than motion. I could describe myself as being trapped in motion—as you mentioned, that chaotic fluidity. It’s easier for me to work with that chaos than to sit down and write a structured world. 

When I look at fiction writers who have created an entire novel, a stable plot, and a world that builds on itself, I’m always in awe. That form of creation is so much more difficult for me than jumping around and moving through the gaps and utilizing the energy between gaps to create a poem.

NM: How do drag and poetry intertwine in your creative practice?

WC: I started doing drag in 2012. It’s this twin craft that I've been working on next to my poetry. It wasn't until my family and I underwent these deportation proceedings that I began to see how language and the body really, and quite strangely, dovetail together—you know, these papers and documents that the State was sending me, telling me that I hadn't fulfilled the requirements to make myself a valid body and citizen this country. 

I saw how clean and bureaucratic violence can be. What mark can you see on my body? Maybe sadness, ha. It all arrives in the form of an unassuming, devastating letter. And I feel like that is such a trauma for me, a trauma that happened within language and affected my sense of bodily security.

So from 2014 to 2015, I wrote poetry and performed drag, but they weren’t really integrated into each other. Eventually, I began using drag to express the emotional experience of deportation—it was this immediate expression of pain leaving my body—feelings flooding from me—as I performed in a crowd of 20 to 40 people.

I was glad that I had drag to help me with the physical feeling of alienation and deportation. I started projecting words and thoughts, essentially poetry, through live performances. Part of my multimedia practice is combining drag with poetry because they help each other in a way that is important to me. My body standing in front of my words—I call that my PowerPoint drag, haha.

With drag shows, it’s very to look at a performer and flatten them in this hyper-stylized way to expect some sort of visual spectacle from them, rather than engaging in the live moment as living people in a room. Similarly, it’s really easy to peruse a poem, remove the body, and not understand or keep in mind that the being has political struggles and a life outside the page. 

There’s a body within drag, one that’s sweaty, gross, and oily, one that’s moving through time and aging. For me, they’re both very important practices that help me and help each other. 

NM: The letters that are interspersed throughout the book have such a profound impact. What led you to include these letters within the collection? 

WC: I’m so thankful you picked up on the language performance aspect. I really wanted to highlight the performance of the letters as well as the kernel of real love apparent in them. There’s a real core of love and dedication to those letters as they were written by people trying to keep us here. 

So many of the poems are about living as a person under deportation proceedings. The book includes the language of bureaucracy and adapts these poems into forms. When I read these books, I read the language of the state. I wanted to include the experience of bureaucracy in the book, but I didn’t want to give any room to government forms. 

I had to ask a handful of people who knew my family to write those letters for us. As bureaucratic and performative as those letters were, I was moved by many of the observations and reflections. My childhood friend wrote a letter, as did a delivery driver we hired who has now trained to become an immigration lawyer—that’s the longest letter in there.

They had their wedding reception at my family's restaurant. So I wanted to include that world of language, and I did so by including these letters that are peripherally radioactive in their own way. I don't include the full letters;  including sections of the letters creates an interesting tension. I  put them in there almost as section breaks.

In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee there’s a found letter that’s written by the Korean government. It's a complete language performance. They're asking for aid, but they’re actually asking them to go away. It’s a total reversal, and I was very inspired by that epistolary writing or that letter format. 

The letters are important as glimpses into the love in my community but also as immovable real-world objects that help give the book structure. They’re found documents, and they’re immovable aspects of the book. 

NM: Eduardo C. Corral notes that your poems are “acutely aware of the cruelty of the nation state.” How have these ideas impacted your work?

WC: It’s like putting on sunglasses—once you see that kind of violence, it’s very hard to unsee it. When you and your family go through the experience of deportation proceedings, it feels like you’re dealing with this super-supreme, non-negotiable power. Missing a deadline could have serious consequences—at best, I’m out a few thousand dollars in this kind of high-stakes engagement. 

If the state wanted to change my hearing date by a year-and-a-half the day before the hearing, they could just do it. That actually happened to me. I was packed up and ready to head to Washington, D.C., and I got this email telling me that my hearing date had been moved to three months later. What do you do with all that anxiety, that fear? You’re at their whim.

NM: Could you speak to the process of writing the “@nature” poems?

WC: It’s completely lopsided: For many years, I saw everything through this lens of anger toward the state. Things became much more pessimistic, and everything looked a little cruel.

I think actually that's when I began to access the voice for the nature poems, which feature the most intense character in the book that comes through and speaks in a way that is outside of the rules. I was worried when I was workshopping this manuscript: the nature poems are very different; they’re unhinged and not really tied to the real world. 

But my teachers said you don’t have to explain them, they’re the most energetic poems and electric in this book. They’re about nature and growth, the side of myself that disgusts me when I look in the mirror.

I arrived at that voice after months of stewing in what essentially felt like the hatred of the nation-state. I was suddenly so much more antagonistic because this humongous structure felt like it was trying to get rid of my family and me. So this voice came through—I wrote those poems when I was at Millay Colony for the Arts. 

It was my first time ever being awarded an art residency where I could live in nature for a month and have food cooked for me and not have to worry about anything. It’s an incredible privilege that there are those who would treat artists with such kindness, poets no less, ha!

At that point, I should have been enjoying the most luxurious moment of my life, but I felt like I was going out of my mind because I didn’t know if I was going to be deported back to China—my hearing was in a month. I haven’t lived there since I was four so I have no idea what I could do there. 

And looking back, I now understand that I was just seeking conversation with the largest non-negotiable power structure that I could see, whether it was nature or god. I was plugged into fighting everything, and on some level, it felt like a losing battle.  I was throwing everything I had against it—all the vital parts of my body, all the offal of my mind! What did I have left?

The nature poems are a confrontation with power. It's interesting to see all the places where the mind danced in order to reason with something that is unreasonable.

NM: I was struck by the notion of having a “healthy relationship with television.” What is the significance of this idea for you?

WC: Thanks for picking up on that line. I didn't realize what it meant when I wrote it. But now, having thought about it and after talking with my friends, I’ve realized that while growing up, so many of us were essentially raised by television. 

And that is a very immigrant thing because I understood that my parents could be parents in some capacities, meaning they could work and pay the bills—provide food on the table, a roof over my head, and pay for clothing and such. 

But they couldn’t help me understand American values or how to act in social situations. They couldn’t help me understand what to pack for a sleepover or how a cool kid might behave around other cool kids, or what was gay and what was not gay. 

I felt like an alien. Like, for example, we had a bar of soap at home in the shower. And I remember seeing body wash at the store and thinking, what’s body wash? I remember asking my friend how they showered. Which, looking back… was gay! Hahaha!

I used to wear basketball shorts to sleep, but then I would go to Walmart and see these plaid sets of pajamas and think, Am I supposed to wear those? I remember freaking out before my first high school field trip and thinking, oh shit, I have to pack pajamas, I can’t let people know that I wear basketball shorts to sleep. It does feel like you’re doing this pantomime of being a “normal American kid”. And now I know there are simultaneously many American norms, and yet globally, no American kid lives normally.

NM: What is the significance of food, family, and memory in this book?

WC: I feel that food is a gateway to memory: this was quite literal for me since I grew up in a restaurant. I remember being four feet tall and standing next to an obelisk of frozen chicken. I remember pressing cabbage with my body weight. My toys were dumpling dough and dinner plates. I would see oil and batter around me all the time and smell it on me at nights.

I would walk through the kitchen, and we would be making the batch of filling, stuffing egg rolls with cabbage. I remember squeezing the water out of the cabbage—we would take all the cabbage, stuff it into the barrel, and put a big wooden block on top. And then three of us would climb onto that block and just stand on the cabbage. I would climb up and jump up and down on the block, and in that moment, it felt like a trampoline. 

So food was quite literally something that surrounded us. For me, it’s not just a metaphor. It was a material thing that made my life possible. Food, family, and memory are the building blocks of my experience, and I wanted to communicate that they’re quite literally related to labor and to running a restaurant, in other words, to our survival.

I have three very clear sources and inspirations for this book. The first one is Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. I was very inspired by the punctuated-punching style of her prose poems. There’s a rhythm, a set-up and release of her observations and conclusions. The second-person style in which she wrote her poems gave me a lot of permission in my writing. It also felt like the TV screen was watching me back—the surveillance aspect of it. 

The second book that influenced me is Diamond Grill by Fred Wah. He grew up in a Chinese diner in Canada. Much of the book depicts a series of memories about family history and growing up in a restaurant, and I guess some of them are fictionalized or stylized. All of his father’s wives had a history of deportation from China to Canada and back and forth. 

The third influence is Marilyn Hacker. She’s an iconic white lesbian poet who wrote Love, death and the Changing of the Seasons, which is essentially 200 pages of sonnets about her loves and loving.  But it's also about hanging out in the park with her friends, and I like the quietness of normal-time she holds in a poem.

That book gave me open permission to write. Reading Hacker, I realized that I could write a poem about sitting in the park after therapy—lying there, taking a selfie, and just being amazed by the experience of beauty passing through time.

Because you don’t get that back. That’s the thing that sticks out to me now.  

NM: What are you working on at the moment? 

WC: I am dreaming of an ensemble piece in which the characters are avatars or aspects / of my mind. Either personas or literal characters that I’ve been cast as for in drag shows. 

I'm in psychoanalysis right now, and I’ve been unpacking and untangling a lot. I can feel these characters emerging, and each holds a different part of my thinking or worldview or simply represents a vocabulary of movements. It’s part of returning to the tonal gestures.

I’m unsure about the form of the—I’m not sure if it’s a poetry collection, a strange novel, or a staged piece of theater with different roles. But right now, it mostly exists as fantasy in my mind–ha!