Review of Molly Zhu's Asian American Translations by Kristy Snedden

Book Review of Asian American Translations    

In Asian American Translations, Molly Zhu envelops us in Chinese and American culture, her family, the people she loves and how they fare in America. She explores how these forces have formed her and how they live in her body. Her first chapbook is an invitation into her world and if you enter you will be rewarded with beautiful imagery, literary skill, and a vulnerability that leaves you hungry for more.

The first poem, “As American As” introduces us to Zhu’s unique ability to invite and include every reader into her experience in her family, saying, “Under our roof, certain terms did not translate from generation to generation and/we lived with this the way you live/with never being fully understood.” In the same poem, she doesn’t minimize the challenge of being Chinese in American culture when she confides, “once, a rental car associate responded with a wink, green for money!/ I told him, green for rebirth,/ for the dream of something new,/for the first moment of spring.”

Zhu clearly places a high value on family and traditions. She doesn’t just tell us about her grandmother. she shares her essence, “These days, knowing her is like practicing voodoo/ in the information age-magic drips from her veins/into the pores of my skin…” and “she feeds me these yarns and I braid them into my hair.”

One of the great enjoyments in reading this collection is Zhu’s obvious love of food and related imagery, such as when she wishes she could “wear my memories like a steamed egg” and describes a family meal as “the five of us huddled around the Formica counter/ heads down in chopstick-dotted silence// when breakfast was a kind of worship.”  Zhe repeatedly invites us into this world that is a deeply moving expression of Chinese and American experiences. 

Zhu doesn’t shy away from racial tension in her work and confesses, “Amir, I too, am a pawn in a poisoned America. I drink from the groundwater where the hatred/runs off,/it swells under our homes and our gardens,/in our capillaries, in our swallowing throats…” and later calls out “I’m not like that now,//I’m not like that now.” 

Throughout her poetry, Zhu invites us to visit with her ancestors through her images and memories, saying “I want to ask her…if she’ll always carry a murmuring ache/ for my parents and the rest of their evenings,/ spent in different hemispheres of the same globe.” In another beautiful poem she muses on a “Chinese belief that hair can be legend…your hair is in disarray, it is ferocious,/that you are somehow just as untamed.” 

There are poems here for mothers and fathers, friends, and lovers, all in a beautiful mixture of Chinese and English. I can’t stop resonating when she writes of her father, “Then the years of hunger/and, later, disbelief when you first stepped foot into an/American grocery store, thinking/you’d been ushered into heaven.” Later in the same poem she shows us how things move and change, when she says of her father, “You are every bit an American” and in the last stanza speaks of how her paternal grandmother “could only answer with salt water beading at her eyes,/those same rivers running through you,/passed on to me.” Zhu uses well-placed poems translated by John Zhu into Chinese and effectively draws the reader more deeply into her lived experience.

I began this review saying that Zhu explores how multiple forces have formed her and live in her body. The real treat, if you choose to immerse yourself in her poetry, is the moment when the lines between your lived experience and Zhu’s lived experience begin to blur and unite. She has the gift of writing words that find the human in every experience and lead us to a compassionate understanding of ourselves and our “otherness.” 

Molly Zhu’s first chapbook, Asian American Translations, is available now from Cordella Press. 

​


Kristy Snedden has been a trauma psychotherapist for forty-plus years. She began writing poetry in June 2020. Her poem “Dementia,” was awarded an Honorable Mention in the 90 th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition and she is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work appears or is forthcoming in various journals and anthologies, including Snapdragon, The Examined Life Journal, Open Minds Quarterly, Pensive, and Anti-Heroin Chic.  She is a student at Phillip Schultz’s Writers Studio. In her free time, she can be found hiking in the Appalachian Mountains near her home or hanging out with her husband listening to their dogs tell tall tales.

Molly Zhu is a Chinese American poet and attorney. Her work is about Chinese culture, her family and the things that make her cry. She has been published in Hobart Pulp, the Ghost City Press, and Bodega Magazine, among others.  In 2021 and 2022, she was nominated for Pushcart prizes.  She is the winner of the inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize hosted by the Cordella Press and her first chapbook will be published and available for purchase early next year. You can visit MollyZhu.com for more information.
​