Andrew Chi Keong Yim has a fixation with place. Whether it’s in wandering the fluorescent halls of a mall or by interrogating the role that Asian Americans have in settling on native soil in the so-called United States, Yim is preoccupied with what it means to have, build, lose, and create homes for ourselves. Born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, Yim is the current Martha Meier Renk Distinguished Graduate Fellow in Poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and will be graduating in May.
Over the course of his two-year MFA program, Yim has not only found a home in the collective of his cohort, but in writing itself. “I don’t think at any point prior to coming here [was] I certain that I was a writer,” he told Madison365. “But I think this is a life now.” With poetry that is at times devastating in its belated realization, and at other times buoyed with the playfulness of childish desire, Yim and his work take into account the complexities of what it means to find your place in the world — across time, space, and in relation to others.
Madison365’s Rodlyn-mae Banting spoke with Yim ahead of his April 5th event at Art + Lit Laboratory as part of their monthly Watershed Series. Find more details about the event here.
The below conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Rodlyn-mae Banting: How did you come to writing, and poetry specifically?
Andrew Chi Keong Yim: I went to a weird high school. It was a public high school but they didn’t really have an English curriculum. It was just creative writing for four years. So we would just read books and write stories. It made it really hard to write papers when I got to college. I don’t think I ever thought anything of it then, I was just like, “This is a school assignment.” But that made me feel very comfortable with it. I used to teach middle school and high school and within the set curriculum, there’s not otherwise a lot of time for creative writing. So I grew up with only time for creative writing, even if it wasn’t the thing that I thought I would do. It felt really natural when I actually started taking it seriously. It was the middle of college when I started actually being like, “Oh, maybe I could be a writer.” I started doing slam poetry and it was a really important time to get involved in that community. I was 6,000 miles away from home. My family was going through a lot of [stuff] at that time. And I felt like it was hard to be away from them and not be able to do much concretely for them. To have a community through slam was really helpful for me and a lot of people who were involved in slam were also other students of color, and students who were on scholarship, and students who didn’t necessarily feel like they had space otherwise in the institution. I really needed that, so it became my home for the rest of my time in college.
RB: Do you have a slam persona? I’m trying to imagine you on stage.
AY: So it’s weird, because I don’t think I give off the impression that I would be particularly good at slam. But the thing I did was sort of like, a thousand-yard stare and quiet, devastating, really sad poems, like a glassy look in my eyes — sort of in shock but really quiet.
RB: What made you apply to the MFA program? Where were you at that point in your life?
AY: I was six years out of college at that point. I’m 30 and I hadn’t written most of those six years. My friends were scattered to different places after college. Not having that community made it pretty hard to actually keep writing. Especially with slam, the way you do it is you just write it immediately and you share it immediately. It was weird to not have anyone to do that with.
I moved to Boston initially after college and there was a really cool slam scene there but the venue that it was housed in went under years-long renovation. So it sort of disappeared. It was called The House Slam, and it was really wonderful. It just sort of went away over time. So I was sad to lose that because I had gotten involved a little bit with that. Work just sort of took over. I was teaching middle school through the pandemic and I wasn’t budgeting time to write, to be honest. Applying to MFAs or fellowships was sort of my last ditch effort to stay a writer and be like, “Oh man, maybe I can still give this one last shot. I’m glad I took that last shot because I would be really sad now if I wasn’t writing poems.
RB: And look where we are now! You talked about how important it was to have that community in college with your slam friends. Being part of the program, you’re part of a cohort, and from what I gather, you’re all very close. Can you talk a little bit about the idea of writing as part of a collective?
AY: I love my cohort so much and I really hope we write together for a long time. I think I’m motivated to write through the collective. I wouldn’t want to be writing in a vacuum and just sending things out via Submittable and never talking to anyone about it, right? One thing that [Hanif Abdurraqib] brought up [during a recent visit to Madison] was that he would read with Franny Choi and other friends from the Dark Noise Collective during that burgeoning scene from 2019 or so. The motivation that they had was writing to delight their friends. He was talking about how he would write a poem so he could bring it to his friends and they could feel the awe or joy or just be moved by it. I think of that all the time now. It’s been nice that the cohort is close and that we’re each other’s sounding boards. I write shitty poems on my phone all the time and text them to Johnny and Juj, that kind of thing.
And they do the same. Johny will just send me a document and I’ll leave 20 comments, and he just wrote it ten minutes ago. It just sort of keeps you going. One of the points to poetry is to bring people together, to connect people, especially when it has spoken mediums and the space where you’re reading it aloud.
RB: Do you feel like you’ve developed a writing practice [over the past two years]? Are you worried about what that practice looks like going forward?
AY: I’m totally worried. I can’t help but be worried. It’s weird because I get it back, and then I lose it. My trajectory with writing has not always been super consistent. I’m probably gonna go back to teaching after this, in all likelihood. It’s what I like to do for work, but I never really had a good balance, honestly. I put a lot of myself into my teaching. I didn’t make a lot of time, necessarily, to write. I do think I’m better prepared to keep going and I believe fully now that I’m a writer. I don’t think at any point prior to coming here [was] I certain that I was a writer. I was like “I’ve got some stuff, I don’t know, maybe it’s a hobby.” But I think this is a life now. So even if stuff gets harder and I’m teaching, and I have 150 8th-grade papers to grade, there’s something guiding me a little bit more. I know I’m a lot better writer after these two years than at the start of it.
RB: You mentioned that you’ll probably go back to teaching. I’d love to hear about that experience, since you’ve taught middle and high school, and now also at the college level.
AY: I loved teaching middle school because they’re just ridiculous. I was just constantly surprised. There’s a lot of joy in it. It is exhausting and especially post-COVID, you’re kind of teaching really tiny people how to be people, in addition to ELA and history. It’s like, “How do you interact in the world?” I don’t think that has to happen as much for college students. I think there’s definitely an element of always having to be a person. Part of your work as a teacher is not just content knowledge, but improving your students’ lives. [Teaching college students] is a lot more chill, it’s easier. I was worried that I didn’t have the content knowledge to teach college when I came here. But the undergrads have been super generous. I’ve only had good classes here.
RB: Let’s pivot a bit to your work. I feel like as writers of any kind of diaspora, we’re always gravitating towards writing about our families and writing about our cultures. I noticed that your work attempts to maybe bridge some of those gaps between geography and between the past and the present. Do you feel like that’s something you’re striving towards? Is it something you’re achieving?
AY: It’s definitely something I’m striving towards. I hope I achieve it sometimes. My family’s history with diaspora is something I’m still untangling and trying to work through. We’re Chinese American and my dad’s side is six generations in Hawaii. And I’m first generation on my mom’s side. There’s that mix of a long relationship with the place and the land — my dad’s side [was] indentured workers on sugarcane plantations. And then to have another side of my family that doesn’t necessarily have the same experience, at least in Hawaii, is interesting. I’ve been trying to think about my engagement with the land and with place in a deeper way and with more responsibility.
I was talking to Felix, one of the fiction [MFA members] about this the other day. There’s a lot of Asian American writing where the only races essentially conceived of are Asian people and white people, and that frustrates me. A lot of it is about the experience of having immigrated and being the child of immigrants, which is definitely important and means a lot to me. But there’s not always an engagement with the place that they find themselves in. What does it mean that I am here? What sort of role in settler-ness do I have in this place? I just don’t want to write that book again.
I’m trying to spend more time — if not geographically, then in my mind and in my reading — in Hawaii and engaging with the Kanaka, the native people there, and thinking about what my responsibilities are as a writer who generationally has history there but is also not of the land. I’m trying to read up on old plantation histories and labor movements where there was solidarity between native Hawaiians and Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino plantation workers.
RB: You find yourself on the mainland because of college, right? Is that a lens that you’ve been grappling with, and how does that influence your work going forward?
AY: I don’t know if I really wanted to leave. Half of my mind was like, “I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go.” And half of my mind was like, “This would be really cool.” Ultimately, it was just a lot of financial aid and it was the cheapest option to go versus staying. I have a weird relationship with going back home now because a lot of my family has been displaced to other places. My friends who I grew up with… there’s just a lot of displacement happening from Hawaii right now because it’s extremely expensive and the kinds of work that you’re offered, largely, are in the form of military and tourism, like hotels and doing housekeeping. Work like that can’t actually sustain the cost of living there.
I felt a lot of guilt when I left. Especially [being that] as I left, my family was also struggling with housing, it was weird to be housed by this college, and to have this college be paying for my food and not being able to send that back in some way, especially when that was precarious for them. Now my family lives in Las Vegas. I still go back [to Hawaii] because I still have grandparents there but in some ways, Las Vegas feels like it’s becoming home.
RB: It’s interesting how notions of home shift in our lives as our family dynamics shift too. I was tickled by your poem, “Love Song from the Back of a Gamestop,” I think in part because it’s a love poem, but also because I found it playful. Could you talk a little bit about factoring pop culture into your poems?
AY: I think my brain has sort of been eaten by mall culture. It’s just there. I don’t know if I could write a straight-up pastoral [poem]. Like if I tried to write a poem and just look at the woods, I would probably see the sign for a 7-Eleven in the background of that. That’s just sort of the geography that I know, it’s marked by these shitty corporate glimmering lights that’s just sort of there. As far as “Love Song from the Back of a Gamestop,” that was one of the first poems I [wrote] after that six years. The prompt I gave myself for that was like, “Let me just try to write a poem I would have written in middle school.” I was just [messing] around. It felt loose and free and I didn’t feel like I was judging it because I was like, “I’m just writing a poem I would have written in middle school. It’s probably not gonna be good.”
Then as far as continuing to incorporate pop culture, I write maybe too much about malls and maybe give malls too much shine. I was talking to [my thesis advisor] Erika Meitner, and we were talking about how sometimes when home is lost, or when you don’t have a solid sense of home… Literally, I would spend whole days in the mall growing up because I wasn’t sure where else I would go. It’s not really public space because obviously it’s all privatized and they’re trying to sell you things. But it feels like, when you don’t have a lot of parks, my public is my town square. This is my public space to make a temporary home.
RB: To close things off, in your poem, “Poet Laureate of this Costco” you write, “I have history / It’s so nice to have a place.” What do you feel is your place or role writing poetry in this particular moment?
AY: I’m never just going to be a writer of poetry. I always think of the writing and the teaching going hand in hand. I conceived of that poem as like, “What if I went to a really weird interview where they were trying to make me Poet Laureate of Costco and I had to prove to them that I could do the job?” That poem sort of pulls from the personal, but also zooms out to look at different points in history in terms of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during internment. There’s a line in there where it’s like, “Where there is need / there is devotion.” I was trying to capture the dependence that people in Hawaii have on [Costco because it’s] one of the few places that gives them food at cheap, reasonable prices. So there’s this fixation on Costco. But it’s not really about Costco. How do we scrape something together or fulfill our needs and find what we need and give that to each other? And sometimes that’s through having to sit at a mall for 72 hours. Sometimes it’s through writing a poem.
