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- I gave up reviewing poetry books several years ago, but this week I received in the
- mail Carol Lem's Shadow of the Plum, (Cedar Hill Publications) and began to admonish
- myself for my failure to display more affection for reviewing. I beheld a wonderfully
- designed book and fanned the 83 pages so they created a breeze that smelled of ink
- and glue --- it was hot off the press, as they say. I read these poems in their rightful
- order, from first to last, and over again. I make no bones about it; I know Carol Lem,
- a much-loved instructor at East Los Angeles College. She has invited me numerous times
- to campus, and together she and I have put our heads together to try to make her students
- --- my students, indirectly --- readers and, thus, wiser and more fulfilled people.
Before I review her book -- actually, only a single poem will be addressed, a poem
titled "Didn't They Tell You Stories?" -- let me give you a picture of Carol. She
is Chinese-American, born in the 1950s and raised in Los Angeles, and has been for
many years an instructor of English at ELAC in the heart of Aztlan. Most of her students
are Latino, many of them recent immigrants. Her favorite language is Spanish.
Orale pues! Her favorite food? Mexican, of course, with a penchant towards enchiladas.
She plays the shakuhachi, a Japanese flute, and likes wine. In the photo on the back
cover, she's holding a glass of red wine that has circulated to her cheeks -- she's on her
way to a stately bliss.
Now the poem "Didn't They Tell You Stories?," which operates as a preface to the
collection and which sneakily negates her inability to tell a story while telling a
story. The poem begins with Carol and a student walking across the college campus lawn
littered with "broken blossoms of East L.A." --- a lovely image that suggests the
students are broken yet still flowers in their own right. This student at Carol's
side naively asks if her parents told her stories (presumably Chinese, thus exotic
and mysterious) when she was a girl growing up in the 1950s. The question startles
Carol. She doesn't know how to answer. Did my parents tell me stories? she wonders.
Then she realizes that she can only provide facts about her family, not luxurious
details about growing up in a Chinese household where there were plenty of cultural
references at her fingertips --- language, food, customs, music, religious, tea, incense,
superstitions, etc. Her family was more prone to tense silence. The reason becomes
evident as the reader delves into the book --- her father, for instance, liked betting
on losing horses. He was also not careful at Las Vegas roulette tables.
For Carol, then, there were few stories, only occasionally remembered moments through
the lens of memory --- the sweetness of her early life was rock candy after an evening
bath and the babble of the television that kept her parents from arguing. This is what
startles her. The question (Didn't They Tell You Stories?") from the student is perhaps
idle chatter on the way to class, but for Carol a profound shocker. Did her parents pass
on a story for her to tell? Does she have something to say? This reviewer believes so,
and it's a familiar story for those who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s and shared
names like Deborah or Gary or Carol --- god, how ethnic families wanted their young
to assimilate.
It's easy to ask a simple question, but often difficult to answer it --- or so
Carol discovers. And it's the simple question that often provokes us, and, as a
result here, gets us going if we're introspective, if we're soul-searching, if we
are poets and writers. I will even argue that "Didn't They Tell you Stories?" is
about "art." Consider the line "[I] tell a boy there's a life in the sky . . ." In
some regard this phrase has a religious connotation --- i.e., heaven and the
afterlife --- but I believe Carol is saying that the life of writing is, well, up
there, in that sky a poet sometimes touches and pulls down onto the page. She is
telling this student, her other students, her future students who will walk at her side,
that the art of writing is life and ---
- Originally published on Gary Soto's website: www.garysoto.com
October, 2002
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