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Russell Leong
Russell Charles Leong was born and raised in San Francisco's
Chinatown. After studying at the Kearny Street Workshop for writers and
National Taiwan University, he earned an M.F.A in film at the University
of California, Los Angeles. He is currently the editor of the Amerasia
Journal and the head of the Asian American Studies Center Press at
UCLA, where he also teaches Asian American studies. His rich cultural background,
along with a strong visual sensibility, informs Leong's complex poetry.
Leong's work often focuses on cultural exile, or "diaspora." His poems describe
the bifurcated consciousness of the individual who exists between two worlds.
In "Threads," for example, Leong imagines himself as an unformed, yet somehow
indivisible, entity: "It is with me / And yet / There is nothing I can say
... That will make it work." Leong does not specifically say what this vestigial
"it" is, or why "it" sticks to him so irritatingly. But he does go on to
metaphorically describe this "it" as undigested but necessary food: "It
is with me ... A fruit ripening on a tree ... a fat insect caught on threads."
In this way, Leong's poetry both bemoans and celebrates the half-split consciousness
of diasporic identity; it is uncomfortable to experience oneself as a dual
entity, he seems to suggest, but it is also exciting and filled with potential.
Leong's work speaks in general about diaspora, but it also speaks specifically
to the Chinese American and larger Asian experience. As he demonstrates
to Bobbi Ciriza Houtchens' class, studying Chinese American culture often
brings students into contact with various Asian cultures: Filipino, Japanese,
Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian -- or "Chino," as Leong refers to them collectively.
In this way, Leong investigates the relationship between different types
of Asian American identity.
Leong has published both scholarship and poetry, including Asian American
Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay and Lesbian Experience. His work
has been anthologized in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Charlie
Chan is Dead, The Open Boat, Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian
American Writers, ZYZZYVA, The New England Review, and
The United States of Poetry. Phoenix Eyes and Other Stories,
Leong's collection of short fiction, was honored with the 2001 American
Book Award. The Country of Dreams and Dust was awarded the PEN
Josephine Miles Literature Award in 1993.
Works by the Author
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Work:
"Aerogrammes"