Kyle Liang’s debut poetry collection Good Son (Sundress Publications) begins with the title poem “Good Son.” In it, the speaker looks at the “pile of bones in front of [him] hopelessly small–/ flesh still clinging to the carcass, unwilling to be gnawed off / by [his] American mouth.” Good Son moves through what the phrase “good son” evokes, the brother of the prodigal son, the son of an immigrant mother who “agreed” to have her uterus removed by the doctor, and the speaker himself who lays there as the state dictates “which parts [he] can keep and which are illegal.” Liang imbues Daniel Burotzky’s dark surrealism as he makes real the shadow cast by an omnipresent state that forces the speaker to always feel that he is insufficient. It ends with optimism and hope. Even when the speaker barks like the dog he sees, the speaker pray[s] for parts that make [him] human / enough.” In the rainbow cast after the rain, we smile to see that the speaker is left “with a taste we can almost name,” that he too has found belonging through his beloved
Kyle Liang is the son of Taiwanese and Malaysian immigrants. He is the author of the full-length collection Good Son (Sundress Publications, 2024) and the chapbook How to Build a House (Swan Scythe Press, 2018). His work has appeared in Best of the Net, Tupelo Quarterly, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, wildness, Diode, and elsewhere. In addition to working as a physician assistant at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell, Kyle teaches at Quinnipiac University and Brooklyn Poets. He is an avid vegan, climber, and Knicks fan. Kyle lives in New York City with his wife Morgan.
Tiffany Troy: How does the eponymous opening poem, “Good Son,” set up the poems that are to follow? To me, it explores the relationship between the mom and son through the homemade fish soup, as their backgrounds, histories, and desires are revealed. Through eating, the speaker thinks through what it means to be an American (mouth), and by extension, a good son who slurps without questioning.
Kyle Liang: When I started writing in high school, not only did it help me reevaluate my muddled relationship with my parents and contextualize our starkly different upbringings, which made me more forgiving, but it also gave shape to the space between us, filled the cracks in our languages, and allowed me to define the silence in our home. What follows “Good Son” is a somewhat chronological series of poems; and the scene in this first poem reminds me of when I started writing in high school, which led me to poetry a few years later. Eating dinner at the dinner table, especially with someone else, is something that has not been a routine of mine since I was very young because both of my parents would work into and through the night—all three of us eating when and where we could; therefore this poem felt like a starting place in more than one way. As for the title, while “good” carries a positive connotation, the word also suggests, to me, inferiority because “good” isn’t “great,” and it certainly isn’t “amazing” or “the best” or any of the countless other adjectives that describe things favorably. It’s vague. Nonspecific. It’s barely better than “fine” or “okay.” In an outcome-oriented, achievement-based meritocracy, which is what we often see in immigrant, Asian American households, “good” might as well just be “okay.” But what interested me about the coupling of the words “good son” was the suggestion of struggle, tension, and obedience. I like to think the poem speaks to this internalized conflict that lives in the quiet—oftentimes silent—yearning to be good. Or good enough. Or simply enough.
TT: Your conception of “good” is fascinating, in large part because I saw the “Good Son” as a foil or counterpart to the “Prodigal Son.” There is a real sense of misfit between the son’s all-American mouth and the fish soup that he was asked to imbibe, and the son nevertheless chooses to comply out of filial piety. The idea of “good” can be a moral imperative, as in when you channel and extend Daniel Borzutzky in Good Son’s second section, in thinking about the rabidity through which the medical system seeks to consume immigrant women (many women of color) through unauthorized tubal ligation. In this sense, I always felt that the speaker yearns to reverse the systematic inequities, which is opposite to being just good enough. I felt societal force beyond the Tiger parent trope at work, if that makes sense. Because there is a sense that the speaker has already achieved academic and professional success and what the speaker desires is less a promotion or to climb up the ladder but a sense of true empathy with himself, his family, and his community.
You mentioned that the poems are in rough chronological order. Can you walk us through the making of Good Son? How has high school English made its way (or not) into your work as a poet who also works the important day job as a physician assistant at a major hospital in New York City?
KL: I like what you said about moral imperative and societal force. I spent a lot of my teenage years and early adulthood overcome by guilt. I felt undeserving of the opportunities available to me as the beneficiary of my family’s sacrifices and misfortune. As a “good son,” or American child of Asian immigrants, this led to the question of what I can do with this privilege and responsibility. How I can be a “good son” to not only my family, but also my community and the people around me. For most of my childhood, the only future I imagined for myself was one in which I worked in a hospital because I was raised in a working-class area by immigrant parents with little education, and they let me believe that there was no future outside of working in healthcare. Classic.
Cue my high school English teacher, Dr. Bierman. In his class, he would beg us to “say something” with our writing. He would actually demand it. Practically yell and scream, cry and plea. And he encouraged us to “play” with our words, mimic other writers, take risks. His brash and unapologetically brazen style of teaching wasn’t well received by all my peers, but for me, it wasn’t too different than my home environment haha, so I really admired him and took to his teaching. He pushed me to re-imagine my childhood experiences and reconsider my values while making bold choices with my writing. I thought more about the sense of responsibility that I inherited from my family and wrote into that silent yearning. And I was reading. I read in search of answers and found more questions.
Although the outcome of going into medicine didn’t change, the passage did. With Good Son, I kind of mirrored this passage. The evolution of what it means to be born from someone or something and the responsibility it entails. In many ways, I feel like I was re-born when I started writing, and now I feel a responsibility to it. It’s also why I write about medicine. The intersection of poetry and medicine is such a fertile place for writing, and it’s rich with opportunity for me to engage with a wide audience of readers. I have the unique opportunity to illuminate what the public doesn’t see about our medical system and its blind spots as well as the underbelly of living and dying. But writing about these topics, unfortunately, also means processing and swallowing the razor-sharp truths about our system and the health of its individuals. Writing in this interiority forces me to absorb these griefs and take ownership of these tragedies as someone on both sides of the system as you may notice in poems like “Poem in Which Nothing Bad Happens At All” or “Nonmaleficence,” where I dramatize a true experience of finding out about my mother’s former gynecologist scheduling her for a hysterectomy without her complete understanding of the surgery. I like to think the second and third sections of Good Son invite readers to hearken in these happenings alongside me. Sometimes, I think of poetry as a confession, so this is my confession.
At first, I thought the book might only be three sections, but given the chronological order, having the book end after the first three sections felt abrupt and hopeless, which seemed disingenuous as someone who emerged from these past few years (mostly) intact. So I thought about where my hope and optimism and motivation to get up each day comes from, and I thought of my wife. We got engaged and married in 2022. I thought about what our love represents to me and how our relationship has always been a driving force for this book as well. How love harbors a sense of belonging and how belonging inspires responsibility to others and how these ideas work in concert, compelling me to continue my work. Whatever that work looks like and however it best helps folks. Thank you for this question and the opportunity to speak on this.
TT: You utilize different forms throughout your collection, in line lengths, spacing, end-stopped lines, lower case, and footnotes, etc. How does form influence your writing of poetry, and vice versa? For instance, I found that very capacious form to be suited for the questions asked, as in “A Tracing of Our Shoeless Feet.”
KL: It’s not uncommon for someone in the hospital to present with some vague, unexplainable illness or abnormal finding like weakness or confusion or an elevated white blood cell count, and despite our best efforts to send tests and obtain imaging to identify a cause, the reason still isn’t obvious, therefore we’re left waiting for the underlying problem or infection to declare itself. When it comes to writing poems, I try to let the form declare itself. I try to find the voice inside the poem and see how I can house it and parent it to stand on its own without me having to speak for it after it’s finished. With that being said, I guess you could say that I deploy different forms throughout the book and its various sections. You can definitely trace some of the influences in my writing as you’ve already pointed out: Daniel Borzutsky being one of them and “A Tracing of Our Shoeless Feet” being one example. The Performance of Becoming Human is one of my favorite collections to read and re-read. In writing about humanity and the denial of humanity for people living in a shapeless world between places in the second section of my book, I found myself drawn to prose poetry, world building, surrealism; and to me, this lends itself to poems that greedily consume white space, forced to fit on the page—long lines nearly crashing into the margins like waves, sending the reader’s attention back to the left-hand side to continue reading, the way Borzutsky’s poems do for me. I enjoy the thought of the reader’s eyes oscillating across the page.
Circling back to the first section, when writing “An ABC at a Birthday Party” and “An ABC in a Dim Sum Restaurant,” I opted for everything to be lower case because, to me, it signifies how small the speaker feels in the context of the poem. How i rather than I or the lack of capitalization at the start of a sentence might represent a weaker declaration. Similarly, some of the poems that speak of childhood—or some frightful time like in “A Lesson on Immunology”—use shorter, more fragmented lines and frequent enjambments, whereas the last section of the book demonstrates more end-stopped lines, which I think comes from a place of confidence and maturity and older age, compared to the more timid, precocious voice earlier on.
On a side note, I’m sure the range of forms may come across as a bit searching, which I’m aware of and not trying to hide. This collection is, after all, a timestamp. My debut album. My Adele 19 for you fellow Adele fans. I’m young, and I hope to continue writing poetry for many more years, so I think that for this first book, I’m allowed to be honest and showcase that sense of searching—the exploration of poetic identity in also searching for self.
TT: Speaking of your engagement with the I or the i, in “Self-Portrait as Fish,” you write, “I speak of being Chinese because here,/ they’ll call a dog a fish / if it doesn’t bark.” Can you speak of calling yourself an American-born Chinese and writing about how “my mom is from Malaysia,/ dad is from Taiwan,” both in terms of your grappling with identity but also from the perspective of a poet? What is the audience that you are writing for or towards?
KL: There’s an enclave of predominantly Chinese, Asian immigrants where I’m from in Connecticut. Many left NYC once there were job shortages as laborers in the garment and restaurant industries following 9/11 and came to work at Mohegan Sun casino in Montville, Connecticut. It’s actually really interesting. There was an exhibition in Museum of Chinese in America a few years ago detailing how these immigrants urbanized a Connecticut suburb by converting single-family homes into multi-family homes, turning their yards into community gardens/farms to grow Asian vegetables (many of them were farmers before moving to America), and creating trails and walking paths through the woods to more easily commute to Mohegan Sun by foot. Anyways, when I was little, my mother would tell other people that my brother and I were ABCs (American-born Chinese) to explain why we were shy any time she brought us to the one Chinese hair salon in town or to a coworker’s house to pick up zong zi. I became used to hearing that phrase and attached myself to it in primarily Asian spaces or primarily white spaces—times I felt shy or quiet. But it wasn’t until 2016—when I spent a combined 6 weeks in Taiwan, Malaysia, and China (specifically the Dachen Islands off the coast of Taizhou, which feels a bit removed from Mainland), seeing the villages where my parents and grandparents were born, raised, worked, fished, and farmed—I learned that these three places could not be more different despite there being ethnically Chinese people in all of them. I realized the significance of national identity and the influence it likely played in my upbringing and development as a “Chinese” person. The term “ABC”—which had a stronghold over my sense of self—began to feel more loose. I’m glad that the phrase was in my vocabulary while I was growing up because it gave me a framework to view the world. But as I got older, I shed that framework because it felt reductive to my family’s ties to Taiwan—ties that date back to an evacuation from the Dachen Islands to Taiwan following bombings by the People’s Liberation Army’s—as well as the generations of Chinese-Malaysian men and women on my mother’s side. As a poet, I specifically chose to name this distinction in “Self-Portrait as a Fish” because Chinese identity has taken a stronghold over many of us in America out of convenience, submission, or both, even though we may not be from China, our parents may not be from China, our grandparents may not even be from China, and we may have conflicting feelings about being identified as Chinese given China’s severe history and our families’ reasons for leaving—or in my Nai Nai and Ye Ye’s case, reasons for not being able to stay. This is an evolving idea that I’ve navigated in my writing and poem titling for years, hence why this framework appears in some places throughout the book but not others.
TT: I appreciate learning about Montville, Connecticut and the resonances of being perceived as identifying at times as Chinese or non-Chinese are shown throughout the collection. As a teacher, do you have any tips for writers who are writing about family, genealogies, and myth?
KL: If you can, ask your family as many questions as you can. Treat their responses like primary sources, historical texts. First-hand experiences are valuable information and anecdotes are easily or sometimes intentionally left out of history. Be a journalist, documentarian, and know that any detail may present an opportunity for a poem or story or neither and just become a pearl of knowledge that would have otherwise been lost.
If the answers you receive aren’t specific, then ask follow up questions and try to draw out details so long as you’re not forcibly wringing out trauma. Take advantage of the chance to have these conversations while you still can, but do so sensitively. If they excitedly mention a dish they used to eat, then ask about how the dish was prepared, ask them to show you with their hands, ask what ingredients they used. If you don’t have family to ask, then go to places where you might meet people with overlapping genealogy. If you don’t have the means to travel far, then find a restaurant that cooks food specific to where your family is from and eat the food, chat with the servers, ask them their favorite dishes and why. Food is a common theme in my poems, hence this example.
Listen to old rumors and try to trace their origins. Google Image search whatever you find for visual inspiration. Find videos on Youtube. Watch the crappy 54-second Android clip from 2009 that only has 120 views. Listen to the words they use. Find articles and textbooks by random academics who publish a lot about a specific region and time period relevant to your ancestry and buy their work. Send them an email and see if they’d be willing to chat and answer your questions—they’ll be thrilled to know that someone takes as much interest in their work as they do. I have no problem admitting that there are mad old white college professors who know way more about the Taiwan Strait Crisis than me, and I’m grateful for their knowledge (shout out to Bruce A. Elleman). If I can use a play on words, this is all, in essence, “home work.”
While it may not seem it, we, as poets, work with a very liquid medium. Like water, the language of poetry is a universal solvent. This is to say that within our poem we can dissolve an enormous range of other mediums and allow it to take on those properties and transform the work entirely, whether it’s art in the form of an ekphrastic poem or pitch and melody in the form of a song. Why limit ourselves? Why not extend our work to absorb history, conversations, rumors, mythology, film, lighting, etc.? Although reading poems is a wonderful, everlasting source of inspiration to write, so is everything else.
TT: In closing, do you have any closing thoughts you’d like to share with your readers of the world?
KL: Writing this book was both a dream and a struggle that I was only able to finish with the love and support of my family, friends, and readers. So thank you. I hope you enjoy.
Tiffany, these questions were wonderful. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and co-translator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert /El próximo desierto (forthcoming, Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the 4W International Women Collective Translation Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, and Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote. She co-edits Matter with Darius Phelps.