"El sexto and the grotesque body: The Japanese character at the boundaries of national belonging."

- Spanish version: "El cuerpo grotesco en El sexto de José María Arguedas y el personaje japonés en las fronteras del proyecto nacional" Desde el sur (2013, Forthcoming)

Publicado en Chasqui (2013): 137-46  

Para ver la versión publicada pulsar aquí

                                                  Ignacio López-Calvo

                                       University of California-Merced 

 

No, no hay país más diverso, más múltiple en variedad terrena y humana; todos los grados de calor y color, de amor y odio, de urdimbres y sutilezas, de símbolos utilizados e inspirado­res (Argue­das, “No soy un aculturado¼” 258)

 

      As is common in José María Arguedas's (1911-1969) opus, in his third novel, El Sexto (1961), everything that is evil and vile is associated with the urban, coast­al, and Criollo (or Misti, to use the Quechua term for Caucasians) life, while the provincial, Andean, and Quechua popula­tion and motifs enjoy a much more positive image.[1] Even though it is not set in the highlands, the novel has often been interpreted as a confrontation between these two seemingly incompatible cultures and worldviews. In fact, several dialogs support this assessment. Thus, when an inmate named Pedro claims that there is no differ­ence between him and the miner Alejandro Cámac, the pro­tagonist’s communist and fatally ill cellmate, an indigenous aprista from Arequipa known as Mok’ontullo reacts by telling him that it is impossible because Cámac is an Indian. Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the critics who have abided by this perspective:

                        En realidad, la prisión es el decorado que usa Arguedas para representar, igual que en Los ríos profundos, un drama que lo hostigó toda su vida, el de la margina­lidad, y para soñar desde allí con una sociedad alternativa, mítica, de filiación andina y antiquísima historia, incontamina­da de los vicios y crueldades que afean la realidad en que vive. (La utopía 212)

In fact, Vargas Llosa consid­ers this novel Arguedas’s best articulation of what the former calls “the archaic utopia,” that is, an expression of Andeanism and social immobilism; in other words, a rejection of moder­nity and the industrial society. Ciro A. Sandoval and Sandra M. Boschetto-Sandoval have also analyzed the countercolonizing scheme and the “Andean paradigm of cultural reivindi­cation” present in El Sexto.

      Yet little attention has been paid to other players in this power exchange. In a power inver­sion of what happens outside the prison in Peru, several Afro-Peruvian inmates (blacks and “sam­bos”)[2] are among the most powerful in the prison. By the same token, there is a fourth culture that is prominently represented in the novel, adding fuel to an already “un­comfortable” heteroge­neity: we have an added element in an unnamed character of Japanese origin who was apparently imprisoned for vagrancy (like another victimized vagrant in the prison, the Pianist) and whom an Afro-Peruvian inmate known as Puñalada derogatively calls Hirohito.[3] In this way, even if it is, as several critics have argued, one of Arguedas’s minor works, El Sexto has the merit of being one of the first Peruvian novels to incorporate a Japanese (or perhaps Nippo-Peruvian) character.[4]

      While Cámac condemns the widespread moral degeneracy in the capital city (“—La corrup­ción hierve en Lima—dijo [Cámac]—porque es caliente; es pueblo grande” [33]), it pales in compari­son with the unrestrained vice and depravity that pervade the prison of El Sexto. Indeed, Arguedas chooses a specific chronotope to explore the paradoxes and dilem­mas of Peruvian nationhood: the peniten­tiary. Most narrative events in the novel are subordinated to its suffocating atmosphere and enclosed spatial relation­ships. By the same token, the intrinsic con­nectedness between spatial and temporal catego­ries recontextualizes the worldviews and ideolo­gies of each of the groups in El Sexto. Through a national allegory, this overcrowded space merges with the time of the action to become the organizing center of the plot, a laboratory in which characters unsuccessfully try to resolve Peru’s cultural relations and sociopolitical contradictions. The carceral setting in El Sexto forces numerous social interac­tions, cultural exchanges, and power struggles that mimic those taking place at a larger scale in the nation. Issues of political affilia­tion, class, educational level, ethnicity, nationality, and sexual preference are negotiated and sometimes become blended into a teleological discourse of belonging or not to the Peruvian nation. The Andean and Criollo worldviews are not the only ones that collide and have to come to terms with their respective claims to Peruvian­ness; men of African descent are also forced to coexist with other inmates of indigenous descent (Indians and Cholos) and Criollos, as are communists and apristas, educated idealists and illiterate masses, military and civilian, or gay and straight inmates. Whereas outside the prison communists and apristas, for example, would normal­ly have avoided one another, and Hirohito perhaps would have been separated from non-Japanese Peruvians by the counter of a barber shop or grocery store, in the prison, another heterotopia of deviation, the latter has no­where to hide; there is no other member of his ethnic community that can offer him protection. Whether he likes it or not, the Japanese character, like everyone else, has to share a common space, perform his theatrical role, and suffer its fatal consequences.

      This uncommon commingling of disparate elements of society provokes grotesque situa­tions. In this context, looking for the foundations of the grotesque, Galt Harpham affirms: “In all the examples I have been considering, the sense of grotesque arises with the perception that some­thing is illegitimately in something else. The most mundane of figures, this metaphor of co-presence, also harbors the essence of the grotesque in the sense that things that should be kept apart are fused together” (13). From this perspective, Hirohito’s grotesque behavior, as well as the comments that other inmates make about him portray him as a foreign alien who has eerily infiltrated the boundaries of the Peruvian nation. Even though one could easily argue that Gabriel, the protagonist of El Sexto, is also unable to integrate himself into a violent reality that he cannot quite grasp, at least he still considers it his reality, his society, and, for this reason, he strives to find sociopolitical solutions. In contrast, in the case of Hirohito his irredeemable rootlessness prevents him from belonging in the narratives of the Peruvian nation synecdochically performed in the prison. This Japanese man should not be there; his inability to blend in in the prison makes him even more grotesque than the rest of the inmates. Furthermore, the complete dislocation that has alienated Hirohito also happens to antagonize other characters, who have come to mistrust everything about him: the military outfit he was wearing when he arrived to the prison, his mysterious and seemingly fake smile, the feigned way he walks, and even the reasons why he will not find a hidden place to defecate. In other words, in a hellish underworld of injustice and barbarism, this shadowy character who walks clumsily by the prison walls and barely understands Spanish represents the most obvious Other, a site of ambiguity that some of his fellow inmates find almost offensive. His level of abjection is remarkable even among the most wretched and degraded members of society, precisely because he does not belong in the prison and, by exten­sion, in the national imaginary of Peru. However, it is never clear whether this is partly the reason Puñalada, one of the prison gang leaders along with Rosita and Maraví, feels the need to torture and martyr him until he loses his mind.

      Castro-Klarén and Madrid argue that Arguedas’s oeuvre “is anchored on the need and the search for self-definition” (141). For this reason, he incorporates episodes from his own life, including his childhood. Indeed, between November 1937 and October 1938, during Óscar Raymundo Benavides’s dictatorship, Arguedas was incarcerated in a federal prison called El Sexto, located in Lima’s central Avenida Alfonso Ugarte, for participating in an assault of college students against the fascist Italian general Camarotta, who was visiting the University of San Marcos. This experience would mark his life. As Vargas Llosa explains in La utopía arcaica, the outrageous acts of violence witnessed in El Sexto, contributed “a agravar, con una pesada carga, la maltratada vida emocional de Arguedas, aguzando sus sentimientos de inseguridad y su patética identificación con los humildes y los indefensos” (110). Later, Arguedas used this painful experience as inspi­ra­tion for his novel El Sexto, a fiction­alized testimonial (or a “narrativa metatestimonial urgente” (699), as Ciro Sandoval calls it[5]), where we find in Hirohito one of the most memo­rable second­ary characters of Asian origin in Latin Ameri­can literature. The story is told, in a straight forward prose devoid of formal experi­mentation, by Arguedas’s alter-ego, a twenty-one-year-old serrano (or Andean) student named Gabriel Osborno, who claims not to be affiliated with any political party. This autobiographical protagonist de­scribes the worst types in Peruvian society, who are responsi­ble for numerous atrocities commit­ted with impunity in the prison. After so much hunger, suffering, and torture, several inmates, including Hirohito, progres­sively become demented.

      Arguedas himself explains, in a letter he wrote to doctor Murra in 1960, the main topics in the novel:

                        ¿Puede Ud. imaginarse lo que significaría para mí ver cómo los asesinos violaban a los hombres hasta volverlos locos? Esa es la parte medular de mi novela. Pero también el Sexto era un prisión política y juzgo con la libertad que he sabido conservar a los líderes de los partidos aprista y comunista que conocí en el Sexto. (Las cartas 50)

Likewise, in a 1961 letter to his friend John, Argue­das denounces:

                        Odio desde la infancia el poder fundado en la riqueza material. Y casi todos los que me rodean no persiguen otro fin más alto para sus vidas que ese miserable objetivo. Te parecerán ingenuas mis palabras, pero a ti se te puede hablar con ingenuidad. El Sexto y todos mis pocos relatos están plenos de odio a esta parte oscura del ser humano y de una fe absoluta en que podrá vencer el mal. (Las cartas 65)

Indeed, although the autobiographical first-person narrator and other idealist characters in the novel never lose their faith in the possibility of building a better Peru for the most marginalized and oppressed in society, the denouement of the story, with the death of Hirohito and the protago­nist’s cellmate, is quite pessimistic. Even the precious freedom to speak openly about politics that the political prisoners have found in El Sexto is offset by their inability to disseminate their ideas to the outside world or to the inmates who are either insane or too dehumanized to care about social issues.

      Hirohito, a thin Japanese inmate with a sparse beard and a permanent, humble smile on his face, is one of the victims of the brutality that reigns unstrained in El Sexto. He wears dirty rags, which get progressively deteriorated as the plot evolves, and lives in the courtyard on the first floor, which is the equivalent of Dante’s ninth circle of hell. He shares this ominous space with murderers and vagrants (vagos), who are considered the dregs of society. Two of the most powerful inmates, Puñalada and Maraví, constantly humiliate the vagrants by using them as carriers (paqueteros) of their excrements. These two gang leaders and their thugs, Colao and Pate’Cabra, also rape some of them, strike them whenever they want, and deprive them from any sort of human dignity. In fact, these abuses seem to work as their escape valve and as a way to show their power to the rest of the inmates. In particu­lar, the sadistic Puñalada vents his frustra­tion for not being corresponded by Rosita, a gay and transvestite inmate, by constantly humiliat­ing Hirohito. Besides kicking the Japanese man in the stomach and chest until leaving him unconscious for laughing at Maraví, in some of the numerous scatological scenes in the novel Puñalada makes his victim defecate in motion or dancing, or kicks him to make him fall all over his own excrements. The latter is so scared that he does not even dare to bend down his knees when he is using the latrine. These circumstances inevitably accelerate the Japanese man’s physical and mental decay. He spends the rest of the time picking fleas from his armpits to eat them or to throw them on the floor.

      Cámac expresses his empathy for the most exploited inmates: “Aquí, en mi pecho, está brillando el amor a los obreros y a los pobrecitos oprimidos” (27). Likewise, Gabriel bemoans the pathetic situation of three inmates: the submissive Hirohito, the helpless prisoner known as The Pianist, who lost his mind after being repeatedly raped, and an indigenous boy known as Clavel, who also lost his sanity after being turned into a sex slave. To describe his own sorrow, he zeroes in on Hirohito’s face, which, in his view, “trascendía una tristeza que parecía venir de los confines del mundo, cuando ‘Puñalada’, a puntapiés, no le permitía defecar” (23). In neo-naturalist fashion, the narrator provides a detailed descrip­tion, in the first scene in which the Japanese man appears, of how he takes off his rags to defecate as fast as he can, before Puñalada or Maraví can see him. These grotesque situa­tions, along with his fear, also awaken the curiosity of other inmates, who laugh and ap­plaud after Hirohito has finished. The latter’s only defensive reaction is to smile back, showing relief and, according to the narrator, almost happi­ness. It is never clear, however, whether this passive reaction is a calculated defensive perfor­mance or yet another sign of his insanity. From this scene we can conclude that, whereas other inmates simply exclude Hirohito from the narrative of the nation, Puñalada, by forbidding his primary needs, seems to go further with this prohibition: he virtually denies the Japanese man his right to exist. Interest­ingly, Mikhail Bakhtin, in the chapter “The Grotesque Image of the Body and Its Sources” of his Rabelais and His World, associates this bodily function with both birth and death:

All these convexities and orifices have a common characteristic; it is within them that the con­fines between bodies and between the body and the world are over­come: there is an interchange and an interiorization. This is why the main events in the life of the grotesque body, the acts of the bodily drama, take place in this sphere. Eating, drinking, defecation and other elimination (sweating, blowing the nose, sneezing), as well as copulation, pregnancy, dismemberment, swal­lowing up by another body—all these acts are per­formed on the con­fines of the body and the outer world, or on the confines of the old and new body. In all these events the beginning and end of life are closely linked and interwoven. (93)

In the end, the Japanese man’s agony turns him into a sort of martyr, as the narrator’s words suggest a few pages later: “En el japonés y el ‘Pianista’ había algo de la santidad del cielo y de la madre tierra” (106).

      Like the protagonist of Augusto Higa’s La iluminación de Katzuo Nakamatsu, Arguedas’s Japanese character is always walking. He moves by the shadow of the walls from the latrines to the corners, as if he were trying to return to Japan. But more so than his constant walking and picking fleas from his body, one of his most notable traits is his resilience, as Gabriel points out: “No los machucaron, sin embargo, hasta formar una masa sin nombre, como a los otros. En el cuerpo del japonés se arrastraba el mundo, allí abajo; conservaba su forma, aun su energía. De los wáteres a los rincones, caminando, o apoyado en la estaca, llevaba un semblante que no muere” (106). Unlike the Pianist and other vagrants, who resign themselves to licking leftovers from the floor or blood from the fights, or simply die of hunger, Hirohito does not hesitate to fight tena­ciously in order to have access to the man who delivers the food every day. In contrast with his docile compliance with the humiliating performances ordered by Puñalada and others in the latrines, whenever Hirohito is trying to find food, he withstands the shoving, kicking, and elbowing of stronger inmates and, when he is pushed back, he returns even if he has to crawl between their legs. These scenes of resistance separate him from stereotypi­cal images of Asian docility in the Americas. The black man who delivers the food admires Hirohito’s bravery so much that he defends him from others and even drops extra food on his bare hands. After the Japanese man devours his ration, the inmates who were unable to receive any food relieve their jealousy by punching and kicking him until they make him vomit. Once again, Hirohito’s only reaction is to protect his stomach and to smile. The political prisoners feel compassion for him and try to give him cans of food, but the other inmates steal them from him on the same day. Eventually, on the day they noticed that Hirohito had not gone to get his food, everyone realized that his end had come.

      Although we are never told whether Hirohito was born in Peru or not, in some scenes he seems to not understand Spanish well. In addition, an inmate named Prieto points out that “para maldita su suerte atravesó el Pacífico en busca del Perú ¡que era de oro hace 500 años!” (25). Besides pointing to his foreign origin, the mere act of crossing the Pacific five hundred years too late, when Peru is no longer “made of gold,” seems to be seen by a character named Prieto as an insane act that constitutes the first step toward his eventual madness. At any rate, if he is indeed Peruvian, other characters seem to con­ceive of him as if he represented the human bound­aries of the Peruvian nation. For example, at one point the narrator states: “Los vagos se fueron acercando a esa celda, aun el japonés vino corriendo, encorvado, rascán­dose los sobacos” (89). Likewise, when the inmates dance in the prison, Hiro­hito stays, indiffer­ent and seemingly alienat­ed, in his own world: “El japonés se quedaba solo, rascándose, apoyado en la estaca, sin comprender ni intere­sarse por el tumulto ni el baile” (180). Adding to his awk­wardness, perhaps because of his insanity, while other charac­ters fear the intimidat­ing Maraví, Hirohito is the first one to laugh when he sees the gang leader walking inebriat­ed through one of the corridors. As a result, Puñalada beats him so hard that he will die soon after.

      As stated, Hirohito eats fleas and defecates while he dances. He is undoubtedly a grotesque character and, as such, he is not only a source of both affinity and antagonism, but also a site of ambivalence and ambiguity. As Geoffrey Galt Harpham explains, “the grotesque is always a civil war of attraction/repulsion” (11). Tellingly, while Gabriel feels sorry for this Japanese man whom he describes as “desperdicio humano” (24), he also mistrusts him. In his grave dialogs and speeches about Hirohito and the Japanese people, he negotiates his own feelings of attraction and repulsion for the unknown. Thus, he compares Hirohito’s permanent smile and his dirty face to the red, im­mense, and sad sunset he sees from the prison, which, he claims, “despertaba sospe­chas irracionales” (23) when one faced it directly. Gabriel also speculates about the motivations behind Hirohito’s constant smiling and suspects that he may be faking his clumsy walking: “empezó a caminar con la torpeza, como fingida, con que solía andar. Avanzó sonriendo hacia quienes aplaudieron. Con esa sonrisa fija, humildísi­ma, aplacaba a sus camaradas de prisión; aun, a veces, a ‘Puñalada’” (23). At times, the Japanese inmate is, indeed, successful at elicit­ing his fellow inmates’ commiseration. For exam­ple, in a different scene later in the plot, Puñalada “son­rió tristemente” (64), as if he suddenly felt empa­thy for the Japanese man, after giv­ing him some sugar to make the fleas he was chewing taste better. In any case, the symbolic gesture of giving him a sugar cube, something one would associate with a reward for an animal, indirectly degrades and animalizes the Japanese character even more than his eating fleas. Other inmates seem to be equally mystified by Hirohito’s behavior. They debate, for instance, about the reasons he does not try to find a different place to defecate. While Gabriel argues that he goes to the latrine in self-defense, as a way to please Puñalada and his gang, an inmate named Prieto follows the stereotype arguing that Hirohito’s “Japa­nese discipline” prevents him from doing otherwise. The indigenous aprista Juan ‘Mok’ontu­llo’ provides a third theory when he blames Peru for this bizarre situation.

      The prison of El Sexto is also a site of voluntary and forced performances, in both the metaphoric and the literal sense. Thus, whereas Hirohito is forced to dance or move around while he defecates, Clavel is coerced into wearing women’s dresses and lipstick, and, after Puñalada dies, some inmates imitate his peculiar way of calling people’s names. The political prisoners also recall the humiliating and grotesque scene that took place when Puñalada forced the Pianist to “play the piano” on the Japanese man’s ribs while the latter was forced to lie on the floor and defecate. These compelled and degrading performances are also complemented by voluntary performances of “manhood,” such as the demonstra­tions of power by the gang leaders; or “wom­anhood,” such as Rosita’s way of walking, dressing, and cooking for her “husband,” the Sergeant; or affiliation, such as the political anthems sung by the communists and the apristas.

      Hirohito is also an unaware performer. In this experiment in nation building that takes place within the walls of the prison, he represents the absolute Other against whom the nation must be conceived. In the midst of all the unstable sites of nationhood construct­ed by the different power struggles taking place, he comes to embody that which is certainly not Peruvian. Apristas, for example, try to expel communists from the national body by accusing them of being vendepatrias or sell-outs to the Soviets, of having betrayed Peru. Likewise, indigenous inmates (Indians and Cholos) tell communists that they will never be able to feel the world with the same depth (and, implicitly, to be as Peruvian) as a man who has grown up seeing the spectacular landscapes of the Andes and has experienced an older, ancient Peru. By contrast, Hirohito, with his linguistic shortcomings and the insurmountable barrier that is his foreign (almost “un-Peruvian”) phenotype, never has the luxury of being seen, at any point in the plot, as part of the national body. No one can exclude an individual that was never included in the national discourse or the political agendas in the first place. He is simply an uncomfortable obstacle that has to be eliminated or at least ignored, an outsider who does not belong anywhere and who should not be there, in the middle of the nation-building conundrum. Adding to his mysterious aura and demeanor, according to Cámac, he had arrived to the prison in a military outfit. Incidentally, this detail is reminis­cent of the Japanese fashion that, as Seiichi Higashide explains in his testimonial Adiós to Tears, was turned into the “people’s uniform incident” by the FBI. Because of this “uni­form,” Cámac sees in his death the end of Japanese militarism, even though he was a harmless victim. Gabriel, however, refutes these hostile accusations: “—Her­mano Cámac—le dije—. El militarismo japonés tiene su agregado en la Embaja­da. Este ‘Hirohi­to’ llevaba una representación más alta. Se levan­tará sin duda; no es mortal” (107). When Cámac also dies soon afterward and they are dragged together to a truck, a major specu­lates sarcastically: “—El japonés va’fregar al cholo en el camino. Esto’ japonese’ ni muerto son tranquilo’” (138). In this instance, therefore, Hirohito is no longer presented as a danger to national security, but as an inconvenient nuisance, as a stereo­type. By contrast, Gabriel does take Hirohito seriously. He dedicates solemn words to him and his people, while addressing the spirit of his dead cellmate:

                        El japonés, ahora que no es ya sino espíritu, recordará los cantos amados de su pueblo, que es tan martirizado como el nuestro. Cantaréis juntos siempre porque a ti y a él, los echa­rán a la fosa común; lanzarán tierra y piedra sobre ustedes, con desprecio. El Japón es un pueblo más grande que el nuestro; pero no lo dejes ir allá, lo volverían miserable otra vez. (138-39)

Arguedas, through his narrator, expresses his deep compassion for the Japanese man, one of the innocent victims of the brutality in the prison and, by extension, in Peru. There is, in Gabriel’s speech, an internationalist feeling of fraternity toward Japanese people, another nation that has suffered injustice at the hands of their rulers. Instead of seeing Hirohito as an accident in the road to nation building, he chooses to establish parallelisms between the oppression of the underprivi­leged masses in both countries. In any case, it is worth noting that, although Hirohito’s madness is presumably a consequence of all the abuse he suffered in the prison, it is not clear whether his race or ethnicity was a major factor in the way he was treated, particularly if we take into ac­count that the Pianist, a Criollo, or Clavel, an indigenous Peruvian, were raped numerous times and treated even worse.[6]

      Certain passages in El Sexto evidence Arguedas’s self-exploration, particularly when he is trying to understand his country through parallelisms between the prison and Peruvian society. Thus, Cámac asks: “¿Dónde está la diferencia entre el negocio de ésos, de afuera, y de éstos, aquí dentro?” (26). Along the same lines, when asked by Alfonso Calderón about the experiences that inspired El sexto, Arguedas not only describes the prison as a microcosm of the country, but he also voices his idea that urban life perverts citizens:

                        Encontré allí lo que los sociólogos llaman una "muestra completa" del Perú. Entre los qui­nientos presos que estaban, desde los sujetos más pervertidos por la ciudad hasta los diri­gentes y militan­tes políticos más puros, los más esclarecidos y serenos y los fanáticos, distri­buidos en pisos libremente comunicados por escaleras. Vi allí también lo que aún seguiría llamando inferna­les escenas y conflictos sexuales. (El zorro 405)

In Arguedas’s literary efforts to understand Peruvianness and to reconcile the Andean and Criollo worlds, he finds a question mark in the Japanese character, who further complicates a situation that was already quite convoluted. What is the role of Hirohito in the conflict between the two Perus, the indigenous and the Criollo? If the prison of El Sexto can be considered a microcosm of all the injustice and outrage in the country at the time when Arguedas wrote the novel, one could reasonably argue that this nameless and hapless Japa­nese man can also be seen as a synec­doche of his community’s dilemma. Moreover, the Andean or serrano characters, who, like Arguedas and his alter-ego protagonist, conceive of the city as the source of all perversions and impurities, find in the Japanese man the most extreme strangeness; as stated, they consider his face, his smile, his outfit, and even the way he walks suspicious. In this context, Anne-Marie Lee-Loy, referring to the Chinese in West Indian literature and to the narratives used in the articula­tion of national identity as belong­ing, argues: “There is more than one way to imagine the boundaries of national belonging, and the fictional images of the Chinese capture this inherent instability” (4). I argue that the same can be said about the fictional image of the Japanese man in El sexto. In this “sample” of the nation that Arguedas find in the prison, Hirohito represents the liminality between the Peruvian and the non-Peruvian, the human borderland of the nation. Furthermore, his mysterious behavior and appearance epitomize the deceitful nature of everything urban. Like the sexual aberrations witnessed in the prison, Hirohito’s pitiful behavior contributes to the justification of the serranos’ anti-urban ethos.

      In this novel, Arguedas shows a neo-naturalist fascination for that which is filthy and oppres­sive in society. He depicts numerous grotesque scenes that emphasize primary bodily needs dealing with evacuation, eating, and sex. Regarding excretion, early in the plot, for example, we learn that the civil governor had ordered the informers to cover the political prisoners’ mouths with the vagrants’ excrements. In addition, gang leaders order their “paqueteros” or carriers to take their feces, wrapped in newspapers, to the latrines. With respect to eating, the prison food is rotten, Hirohito eats fleas, and vagrants lick the floor looking for leftovers and blood, or eat trash and spit from those who have already had some food. In turn, sexual scenes are dominated by exhibitionism, rape, and gang rape. Within this wide display of grotesque scenes in the novel, Arguedas has found the epitome of the unsightly and bizarre in Hirohito. While the most gro­tesque aspects dealing with sex are embodied by other characters (the transvestite Rosita, the gang raped Clavel and the Pianist, or the black vagrant who shows his immense penis for a few cents), Hirohito is the center piece of the scenes dealing with grotesque eating and evacuation. It is, in fact, his determi­nation with getting to the front line in the food delivery scenes and with eating as fast as he can, as well as his obsession with defecating without being discovered by his neme­sis, Puñalada, that make this secondary character remarkable. In the end, all these degrading scenes inextricably link human physiology to sociopolitical and cultural conflicts. Corporeal and social exchanges become, in fact, inseparable: the progressive decay and eventual death of the grotesque body augur a similar degeneration of the social realm.

      In El Sexto, Arguedas exhibits an ostensibly progressive stance in defense of indige­nous people and of an innocent member of a minority group, the Nikkei community. Yet these passag­es are offset by the subconsciously homophobic and somewhat racist overtones that characterize the rest of the novel. As Vargas Llosa indicates in La utopía arcaica, Cámac seems to have convinced Gabriel that homosexuality could never exist in the Andean world, as it is simply a result of urban vice: “Lo hubiéramos matado en su tiempo debido, si hubiera sido. Allá no nacen” (34), argues Cámac in El sexto. Likewise, Vargas Llosa continues, black and mulato characters are portrayed in a very negative light and miscegenation is seen with suspicion:

                        El andinismo y el afán de conservar la tradición quechua en su mayor pureza generan el incons­ciente racismo que informa la novela: la distribución de cualida­des morales y espiri­tuales según la condición étnica de las personas. Ya hemos visto que los serranos en la novela tienden a ser buenos, generosos y virtuosos, en tanto que los costeños, sobre todo si son ne­gros o mula­tos, se los diría condenados a la crueldad, codicia y corrupción. Lo que dicta esos sentimientos, más todavía que el prejuicio contra el hombre de color, es el sueño de la pureza étnica—otra pieza clave de la doctrina indigenista—, el oscuro temor de que la hibridación racial, el mestizaje, la confusión de razas, puedan destruir la integridad del pueblo quechua. (La utopía 220)

Vargas Llosa’s comments are reminiscent of the notorious polemic between Arguedas and another Boom author, the cosmopolitan Argentine Julio Cortázar. In his famous “Carta a Roberto Fernán­dez Retamar,”  sent from Paris in 1968, the latter had condemned the excessive nationalism or provincial “tellurism” of some Latin American writers. In his view, any literature conceived as exaltation of the local or influenced by an ethnological or folkloric perspective was a type of nationalism or even racism. Arguedas felt insulted by his comments and responded, also in a public letter pub­lished in the magazine Amaru, defending his engaged literature in defense of indigenous people and mocking the Argentine’s argument that a writer could discover the authentic roots of Latin America better from Europe than from the provincial position of one who never leaves his own country. The polemic continued later in letters sent to Life magazine, the journal El Comercio, and even in Arguedas’s posthumous and unfinished novel El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (1969).

      In all, even though El Sexto has the merit of being one of the first Peruvian novels to include a character of Japanese origin, this element of Peruvian nationality and culture is incorporated through the prism of the grotesque. Avowedly inspired by real-life events, Arguedas’s character situates the ethnic group he represents at the outskirts of Peruvianness. He is a sort of human border, the Other against which all the contradictions of Peruvian nationhood are performed and constructed. Hirohito’s insanity and alienation as well as the disgusting acts he is forced to perform make him the source of laughter and sorrow for other inmates. His anamorphous appear­ance, which elicits both empathy and disgust from others, ultimately becomes a bizarre distortion of the Japanese element in Peruvian culture.

 

Works Cited

Arguedas, José María. Las cartas de Arguedas. Ed. John V. Murra and Mercedes López-Baralt. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1998.

—. “No soy un aculturado¼” El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo. Ed. Eve-Marie Fell. Ma­drid: ALLCA XX/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996. 256-58.

—. El Sexto. Lima: Horizonte, 1969.

Bakhtin, Mikhail M.. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.

Castro-Klarén, Sara and Arturo Madrid. “Travels (‘Los viajes,’ from ‘Los ríos profundos’ of José María Arguedas).” Latin American Literary Review 4.8 (Spring 1976): 141-49.

Galt Harpham, Geoffrey. On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and

      Literature. Aurora, Colorado: The Davies Group Publishers, 2006.

Higa, Augusto. La iluminación de Katzuo Nakamatsu. Lima: San Marcos, 2008.

Higashide, Seiichi. Adiós to Tears: The Memoirs of a Japanese-Peruvian Internee in U.S. Con­centration Camps. Foreword C. Harvey Gardiner. Preface Elsa H. Kudo. Epi­logue Julie Small. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2000.

Lee-Loy, Anne-Marie. Searching for Mr. Chin. Constructions of Nation and the Chi­nese in West Indian Literature. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2010.

Sandoval, Ciro A. “‘El Sexto’ de José María Arguedas: espacio entrópico de hervores metatesti­moniales.” Revista iberoamericana 181 (1997): 697-709.

Sandoval, Ciro A. and Sandra M. Boschetto-Sandoval. “José María Arguedas’s El Sexto: The Gestation of an Andean Paradigm of Cultural Reivindication.” José María Arguedas. Recon­siderations for Latin American Cultural Studies. Ed. Ciro A. Sando­val and Sandra M. Bos­chetto-Sandoval. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1998. 138-66.

Vargas Llosa, Mario. La utopía arcaica: José María Arguedas y las ficciones del indigenismo. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica de México, 1996. 

Notes

---

     [1]José María Arguedas Altamirano was born in the province of Andahuaylas in the southern Peruvian Andes. Although he was a Mestizo, he grew up in a humble Quechua community. He learned the Quechua language before Spanish, but only some of his poetry was published in Quechua. He was known to write his poetry in Quechua before translating it into Spanish. The rest of his poetry, his novels and his anthropological texts were all written in Spanish. Along with Ciro Alegría and Manuel Scorza, Arguedas is considered one of the three great indigenista writers in Peru. He wrote numerous anthropological studies, the collections of short stories Agua. Los escoleros. Warma Suyay (1935), Amor mundo y todos los cuentos (1967), and Cuentos olvidados (1973); the novels Yawar fiesta (1941), Diamantes y pedernales (1954), Los ríos profundos (Deep Rivers, 1958), Todas las sangres (1964), El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (1971); and the collections of poetry Túpac Amaru Kamaq taytanchisman. Haylli-taki. A nuestro padre creador Túpac Amaru (1962), Oda al jet (1966), Qollana Vietnam Llaqtaman / Al pueblo excelso de Vietnam (1969), and Katatay y otros poemas. Huc jayllikunapas (1972). With El sexto, Arguedas won in 1962, for the second time, the Ricardo Palma National Award for the Promotion of Culture (Premio Nacional de Fomento a la Cultura Ricardo Palma).

     [2]In Latin America, “sambos” (zambos in Spanish) are people of mixed African and Amerin­dian origin. Although the English term is considered derogative, I use it because I consider it the closest translation.

     [3]Besides the Japanese man, there seems to be a Chinese inmate, one of Maraví’s thugs, in the prison. Although, in Latin America, the nickname El Chino does not necessarily guarantee Chinese origin (after all, the Japanese Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was known as El Chino), the fact that the words el chino are not capitalized in the novel suggests that we are indeed dealing with a Chinese or Sino-Peruvian man. However, in other scenes this same charac­ter is described as “a man with slanted eyes” (“un hombre achinado” [31]). He is in charge of guarding Clavel, the sexually abused indigenous boy, and following him the few times he is allowed to leave his cell. He also strikes the Pianist in a different scene.

     [4]Along with Sara Castro-Klarén and Alberto Moreiras, Phyllis Rodríguez-Peralta has also pointed out the aesthetic limitations of the novel: “In El Sexto Arguedas tried to paint a humanity capable of triumphing over surrounding brutality. Unfortunately, faceless prisoners, the constant cacophony of political dissension, and the obvious division of art and politics lessen his success” (227).

     [5]Ciro A. Sandoval explains his term: “Con el distintivo ‘metatestimonial’ queremos resaltar la intertextualidad del texto con el discurso institucional académico que surge de la praxis de Arguedas como escritor y traductor de visiones etnoculturales e ideológicas” (699).

     [6]In Arguedas’s posthumous novel, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo, there is a brief example of xenophobia against the Japanese:

                        La procesión se detuvo un instante frente al mausoleo de un antiguo comercian­te japonés que había sido princi­pal en el puerto cuando fue puerto algodonero. El mausoleo era tan nuevo como el arco y estaba frente a él, reluciendo. Mon­cada alcanzó allí a la multitud, pero cara el médano; dio media vuelta, militar­mente, bajó su cruz, como si fuera una escopeta, la apuntó hacia el mausoleo:

                                                —Japonés solito—dijo—. Forastero. ¡Te mato a ti, mato a todos!” (64)


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Latin America and the Caribbean in a Sinophone Studies Reader?

  Published in Sinophone Studies. A Critical Reader. Ed. Shu-mei Shih, Chien-hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards. 

Irvington, New  York: Columbia University Press, 2013. 409-24.

 

To read published version click here

 

Ignacio López-Calvo

University of California, Merced

 

         This essay is largely about writers who write in Spanish, not in the Sinitic script.[1] Only one of the texts mentioned here was originally written in Mandarin: The Cuba Commission Report. Sinophone writing from Latin America and the Caribbean (including texts written or published in China by Chinese nationals who migrated to Latin America for some time) still needs to be discovered, researched, and translated. By looking at Chinese Latin American literature written in Spanish, however, we get a glimpse of the kinds of issues Sino-Latin American writers deal with in general. This essay is a short introduction to these topics. Of course, many other writers of Asian descent could have been included in this study, but I will only consider some of the most representative names.
 

         The ancient cultural heritage brought by the Chinese diaspora has contributed greatly not only to the region’s literature, cuisine, art, language, and music, but also to its aspirations of independence (in the case of Cuba). Yet, in contrast with the relatively recent efforts by literary and cultural critics to incorporate the cultural production by people of pre-Colombian and African descent into Latin American and Caribbean studies, that of people of Asian descent continues to be, for the most part, neglected. Only in recent years have a few critics begun to acknowledge its importance, thus disrupting the official black-and-white or indigenous-and-white discourse of the nation. In any case, if, as Honoré de Balzac stated, the novel is the private history of nations, the fiction by Latin American writers of Chinese descent offers alternative ways to narrate the nation and to construct or imagine national identities.

 

      Cuba

        As is the case with the other Latin American and Caribbean countries, the Chinese experience in Cuba has been narrated, for the most part, by non-Chinese authors. Although several of them, including Severo Sarduy, Cabrera Infante and Zoé Valdés, share the presence of Chinese ancestors in their ethnic background, the fact that they do not identify themselves as Chinese Cubans but as Cuban or Cuban American is a reason for caution or even skepticism when dealing with their representation of the Chinese. At any rate, by the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Chinese presence is reflected in the Cuban cultural production, often with Sinophobic overtones. One the most important texts written in Mandarin in Latin America and the Caribbean is the testimonial The Cuba Commission Report: A Hidden History of the Chinese in Cuba (1877). Although translated into English in 1876, it was not widely available until the last edition of 1993. Considering that, to this day, there is no translation of this document into Spanish, the complicity with the Cuban reader that might be expected from a testimonio never took place. Yet its primary objective was achieved since it did elicit empathy and a reaction from the Chinese government. As Denise Helly has explained, in May 1873, after the imperial viceroy in Canton (Kwangtung) had been hampering the recruitment of Chinese workers in this region for years, two agents of Cuban companies decided to complain to the Emperor (14). Subsequently, representatives of the Russian, British, French and German embassies, who had been called to assist in the litigation, proposed to launch an investigation of the treatment received by Chinese emigrants in Cuba. After an inquiry that lasted six weeks, the findings of the Imperial Commissioner Ch’en Lan Pin (aided by A. MacPherson, commissioner of customs of Hankow, and A. Huber, commissioner of customs of Tientsin) not only provided Chinese laborers in Cuba with a voice, but also officially ended the coolie trade with the signing of a treaty between China and Spain in November 1877. In addition, four Chinese consuls were named to different towns in Cuba to grant protection to Chinese citizens.
 

         Anyone reading the hundreds of testimonies recorded in this document would have little doubt that most coolies became de facto slaves from the moment they were deceived or kidnapped. Despite the efforts of Cuban officials and planters to conceal the truth, the replies supplied in 1873 by the Chinese laborers draw an appalling picture of their ordeals. From these testimonies of suffering collected in Cuban depots, prisons, plantations, jails and sugar warehouses, we learn about numerous demoralizing and dehumanizing patterns of abuse. According to The Cuba Commission Report, eight out of ten coolies claimed to have been deceived or abducted. In sugar plantations, they rested about four hours a day and the insufficient and inappropriate food they received was denounced by some as yet another form of humiliation. Once their contracts expired, Chinese workers in Cuba were often coerced into renewing them; if they refused, they were sent to the depots to do unpaid hard labor. Overall, the 1,176 depositions and eighty-five petitions recorded by the commission, supported by 1,665 signatures, indicate that the coolies worked in conditions of slavery. Marginalized, dispossessed and sometimes vilified, Chinese subjects find in testimonials such as the The Cuba Commission Report a vehicle for the reconstruction of their collective history. Simultaneously, these counter-narratives—albeit often mediated by the interviewer(s)’ political agenda—become sites for resistance and identity construction.

 

         As happened with The Report, behind purportedly autobiographical accounts such as Chuffat Latour’s Apunte histórico de los chinos en Cuba (Historical Notes about the Chinese in Cuba; 1927), lies a political struggle for representation and empowerment that responds to a collective project. At times marked by vacillation and contradiction, particularly when referring to political and ethnic affiliations, these texts ultimately represent an alternative way to narrate the nation. Chinese Cubans like Antonio Chuffat Latour and Regino Pedroso devote their efforts to a representation of difference based on the premise that the Chinese community “belongs” within the realm of the Cuban nation (something that is common in Chinese Latin American writing). In their zealous attempt to assimilate themselves and their community to mainstream society, however, they depict Cuba as the land of Western progress and freedom, while relegating China to the usual images of backwardness, oppression, and passivity; that is, the same images created by Western powers to justify their intervention and resulting colonization.

In Apunte histórico de los chinos en 

Cuba, Chuffat Latour challenges Creoledominance and demands the acceptance of Chinese culture in Cuba by using all the available rhetorical devices to lead his ethnic group far from the image of the strange Other. His text constitutes a sort of symbolic victory over oblivion: a Chinese mulatto subject, refusing to become a passive object of a non-Chinese anthropological study, writes in the language of the former oppressors (he admits to have studied Spanish to formulate a manifesto of Chinese diasporic thought). Apunte histórico is, therefore, an invaluable document of self-representation and self-empowerment by a Cuban of Afro-Chinese descent. Oddly, Chuffat Latour positions himself both as a representative of the Chinese community in Cuba (a native informant), and as someone who distances himself from them and speaks about them from “the outside.” He refers to the Chinese in the third person plural and often compares them with “us,” the Cubans. While Chuffat Latour speaks for the disenfranchised Chinese “colony” and is proud of his Chinese descent, he considers himself fully integrated into Cuban society and allies himself with the Creoles to whom he targets his study. In a sense, he represents the colonial “mimic man” who reinforces colonial authority while he “talks back” (or writes back) to it. His conciliatory tone responds to a strategic positioning with a twofold goal: to “charm the oppressor,” as Fanon puts it, and to express his disappointment in Cuba’s failure to recognize the key role of the Chinese in the building of the nation.
 

Chuffat Latour displays a wide range of attributes commonly associated with the colonized mind and the sub-oppressor (to use Paulo Freire’s term). Although he was also of African extraction, he often contrasts the assimilation of the Chinese to “the refinement of the white race” and their efforts to “civilize themselves” (16; all the translations in this essay are mine) with what he sees as the failures of black Africans in Cuba.[2] Yet he still tries to balance his stance by lamenting the marginalization of blacks and even quoting a poem written in Chinese by Kan Shin Kon, the first editor of the Chinese newspaper La voz del pueblo, in which the enslavement of Africans is condemned:
 

Black face, silver tooth/ They mistreat him as if he were not a

person / Awake from lethargy / I long for your liberty / Break your

chains / I long for your happiness / Fly like a bird / Death to the

tyrant / Long live democracy / Freedom, freedom / I desire it.[3]

Ultimately, his main rationale to have the Chinese community accepted as an inextricable part of the Cuban nation and, therefore, to validate its essential Cubanness is the disinterested patriotism of the Chinese combatants and the “peaceful Chinese” who helped mambí troops free the island from Spanish occupation. For this reason, in the fourth paragraph of his prologue, immediately after affirming the veracity of everything that follows, he declares his intention to record the testimonies of Chinese men who fought for Cuba’s freedom.
 

Regarding Sino-Cuban self-representation through poetry, Regino Pedroso (1898-1983) asserts his ethnic pride through a process of Sinicization of his own poetry. Writing during the heyday of the Negrista poetic movement in Cuba, Pedroso follows the ethnic trend and chooses to rediscover his Chinese heritage through his poems and essays. In the prologue to Nosotros (We; 1933), Pedroso states that he belongs to “the human race” and that his pigmentation is “black-yellow. (With no other mixture).” He also explains that his race, “Ethiopic-Asian,” is conceived as inferior by “bourgeois ideology.” As part of his avowed goal of writing socially committed poetry, Pedroso mentions both his personal Chinese heritage and the injustice of the coolie trade in several poems in Nosotros. Lacking a first-hand experience in Chinese culture, he finds a basis for the re-creation of the Chinese world in the hackneyed and idealized, Western stereotypes of Chinese exoticism. Intertwined within these lines that overflow with social commitment, is the view that the Chinese past is a negative set of oppressive and passive traditions. At the same time that he embraces his ethnic roots, he has obviously internalized the colonial discourse to the point where he tries by all means to distance himself from China and from the “embarrassing” past of his ancestors. On the other hand, the present becomes the threshold to a bright future of freedom and hope offered, from the poet’s perspective, by Cuba.
 

In contrast with the socially committed direction of previous works, in his collection of “Chinese poems” El ciruelo de Yuan Pei Fu (Yuan Pei Fu’s Plum Tree; 1955), Pedroso concentrates on the re-creation of the exotic world of his ancestors from a philosophical and nostalgic perspective. In it, the poet decides to Sinicize his identity by “inventing” a Chinese ancestor: the multifaceted Yuan Pei Fu lived as a wandering apostle, preaching to his disciples, and performing miracles; however, he ended up becoming a rich mandarin in the court and leading a life of “Asian luxury.” In all, Pedroso, like so many of his contemporaries, resorts to the Orientalist envisioning of China as a place where the subjects starve while the Emperors squander riches and time on jewels, feasts, and orgies.

Peru
The first important Tusán (second-generation Sino-Peruvian) author is the librarian, social activist, poet, and idealist philosopher Pedro Salvino Zulen  (Zun Leng; 1889-1925). Zulen was born to a humble family in Lima: his father was a shopkeeper from Guangdong and his mother, a mestiza from Lima. He studied at the University of San Marcos in Lima (he also studied for a few months in 1916 at Harvard), and published two philosophical studies: La filosofía de lo inexpresable (The Philosophy of the Ineffable; 1920) and his doctoral dissertation, Del neohegelianismo al neorealismo (From Neo-hegelianism to Neo-realism; 1924). A collection of his poems from the 1920s was published posthumously, El olmo incierto de la nevada (The Uncertain Elm of the Snowfall; 1930).[4] Some of his poems were collected by Dora Mayer de Zulen in La poesía de Zulen. In Memoriam (Zulen’s Poetry. In Memoriam; 1927). Although Zulen did not consider himself a poet, it is interesting to note that some of his poems, including “Pampsiquismo” (Panpsichicism) and “Ocaso de ensueño” (Dreamy Twilight), run parallel to his philosophy. He also reflected some of his experiences with spiritualism in poems such as “Vahído” (Blackout). By the same token, while his search for and love of wisdom is reflected in “Mis libros” (My Books) and “En el vallezuelo…” (In the Little Valley), he echoes his ethical concerns in “El carácter y la moralidad” (Character and Morality). Finally, he also wrote love poems, such as “Romántica,” “Soñaba” (I Dreamt), and “Gladys.”

A contemporary of Pedro Zulen, the Sino-Peruvian A. Kuan Veng published several short stories in the newspaper El Correo as well as the collection of stories Mey Shut, poemas en prosa (1924). Although the subtitle of the book is “Poems in Prose,” the texts are not poems but parables, moralizing short stories, and impressions. Several of Kuan Veng’s texts, such as “Idealidad” (Idealism), “El mar” (The Sea) and “Nocturno” (Nocturnal), also have philosophical overtones. The narrator shows his Confucian filial piety or xiao in “Plegaria” (Prayer), “Madre mía” (Dear Mother), and “Voces maternales. Sé sencillo” (Maternal Voices: Be Unassuming). In this last story, his ethical advice echoes his mother’s words: one must be unassuming, modest, and pure like a lotus; one must not arrogant (one of the precepts in the Tao Te Ching)or obsessed with money. The author continues with his moralizing, again in Taoist terms, in “Amor ideal” (Ideal Love) and “Simbólico,” where he exhorts his readers to avoid loving someone only for his or her money or beauty, as these are mutable and instable. A few of these texts are set in an idealized China and describe old traditions like the moon festival. Finally, in “El primer beso” (The First Kiss), Kuan Veng exhibits a certain degree of double consciousness, as his characters are described from a Western point of view: “Her artistically slanted eyes looked tenderly at me.”[5]

Moving on to contemporary authors, perhaps the most international Sino-Peruvian author is Julio Villanueva Chang (1967-). He was born in Lima, where he still lives, and he studied Education at the University of San Marcos. Villanueva Chang has published the anthologies Mariposas y murciélagos: crónicas y perfiles (Butterflies and Bats: Chronicles and Profiles, 1999) and Elogios Criminales (Criminal Praise, 2008). Villanueva Chang is widely considered one of the best cronistas (chroniclers) in the Hispanic world. In Mariposas y murciélagos, he provides intriguing chronicles of daily life in Peru and profiles of interesting people, including a man who is probably the oldest professional model in the world; an Afro-Peruvian traffic police; Gabriel García Márquez’s dentist; a fisherman who became a millionaire; a man who walked the entire coast of Peru in ninety days; or the story of a German woman, expert in butterflies and bats (hence the title of the collection), who was the only survivor of an airplane accident in the Peruvian jungle in 1971. In one of his most engaging crónicas, “Viaje al centro de la noche” (Travel to the Center of the Night), Villanueva Chang describes the underworld of alcoholics and prostitutes that one can discover at night in downtown Lima. With his typical sarcasm, Villanueva Chang concludes: “If, as in the olden times, Lima’s streets were baptized according to the predominant trades in them—Shopkeepers, Sword Makers, Merchants—, today Cailloma Avenue would be Prostitutes, and Quilca, the popular Drunks Street.”[6] Revised versions of two of these texts were published again, along with five more profiles and chronicles, in the collection Elogios criminales.

Another important Sino-Peruvian author is Siu Kam-Wen (his given name was Xiao Jin-Rong). He was born in 1951 in Zhongshan, in the Chinese province of Guangdong, migrated to Peru at the age of nine, and now lives in Hawaii.[7] Although as a young, aspiring writer, Siu Kam-Wen began writing in Mandarin (Spanish in only his third language, after the Lungtu dialect of Southern China and Cantonese), he later chose to write in Spanish in order to reach a larger audience. He has published the collections of short stories El tramo final and La primera espada del imperio (1988), which were later re-printed, along with the collection Ilusionismo, in the volume Cuentos completos (Complete Short Stories, 2004). In the same year, he published the novels La estatua en el jardín (The Statue in the Garden) and Viaje a Ítaca (which the author himself translated in 1993 from an earlier English version titled “A Journey to Ithaca”). La vida no es una tómbola (2007; also translated by Siu Kam-Wen as This Sort of Life in 2008) and El furor de mis ardores (2008) are his last novels. Siu Kam Wen only focuses on the tragic odyssey of the “coolies” in one of his short stories, “En alta mar” (On the High Seas), included in El tramo final; the rest of his works that deal with the Sino-Peruvian experience take place in the 1960s or later, and focus on the second wave of entrepreneurs from Hong Kong and their descendents. As we see in his works, the impressive economic success of the Chinese community in Peru has not come without side effects: self-exploitation and the harsh life of storekeepers mark the life of many youngsters. Although some of his publications do not deal with Chinese issues, in several of his short stories and novels he explores conflicts of personal and national identity, particularly regarding the relationships (including racism and reverse racism) among the Wa Kiu (huaqiao in Mandarin; overseas Chinese nationals or first-generation Chinese immigrants, both Hakka and Cantonese), the Tusáns (Chinese born in Peru), the Sén-háks (recent arrivals or new immigrants), and the Kuei (literally “devil;” foreigner, non-Chinese). Many of his texts reflect, with autobiographical overtones, the claustrophobic world of child exploitation, generational gaps, and the life of Chinese store owners. Siu Kam-Wen’s works are one of the few testimonies of life in Lima’s Chinatown from a Sino-Peruvian perspective. Ultimately, although some of his writings are marked by the nostalgia perhaps expected from an expatriate writer, one can also perceive a certain tone of reproach and resentment against a country that forced him into a third migration.

In Peru,there are also several Sino-Peruvian poets. One of them is Julia Wong Kcomt, who was born in 1965 in Chepén (La Libertad) and currently lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina.[8] She has published five collections of poems: Historia de una gorda (1994), Los últimos blues de Buddha (2002), Iguazú (2004), Ladrón de codornices (2005), and Un salmón ciego (2008). The exploration of her Sino-Peruvian identity appears in some of the lines in different poems in Historia de una gorda: “my surname;” “I don’t need to be called Julia / I can show a stamp;” “I have dreamt about an enormous ship cruising the Pacific / (My grandfather died without his coolie queue and in a violet habit);” “Sleep, little Chinese girl;” “Because of my very black skin / And a spare hole in my ribs / That does not match Western aesthetics.”[9] Wong Kcomt’s second collection, Los últimos blues de Buddha (Buddha’s Last Blues), continues to express sexual desire and to evoke maternity (frustrated or not) as well as different cities and countries. Pride in her Chinese identity is again suggested in poems like “Ritual del té” (Tea Ritual), “Hijos de sabandija” (Children of a Bug), and “Mentiras” (Lies). Likewise, in “Quiero (poema de colores)” (I Want [Poem of Colors] she describes herself as yellow. Yet her main sources of inspiration are still her need for company and love, the absence of a loved man, and transitory love affairs with tourists or men she has met in her travels and who will soon forget about her.

In other poems, her prosaic verses mention China directly, as we see in “Cuando atardece en China” (When the Sun Sets in China), where the poetic voice talks to a loved person who made her strong, just like this country made her strong as well. On occasion, she makes generalizations about Chinese women: “Are you calling me / Me? / Are you talking to me? / A Chinese woman is always plagued with doubt” (10-13),[10] she argues in “Un milagro en Chérrepe” (A Miracle in Chérrepe).[11] Some lines in “Harnero” (Sieve) even denote essentialist overtones: “Because one has to understand Chinese, / To understand why the tiger’s stripes / Are painted by rich men” (23-24).[12] Yet the sieve mentioned in the title makes reference to cultural differences; she may look like the other people in Chengdu, China, but she certainly feels different. The poetic voice even admits feeling guilty for not identifying with China. Later, she confesses that, in fact, she does not want to be the same. Likewise, in “Llueve en Shanghai” (It Rains in Shanghai) she rejects this city, which she considers dirty. Yet in “Inmemorial China” (Immemorial China) the poetic voice seems to feel nostalgia for an ancestral China that she never knew, perhaps for invented memories about Chinese ancestors. Wong Kcomt has also published a short novel entitled Bocetos para un cuadro de familia (Sketches for a Family Portrait; 2008), which is divided into short, interrelated accounts. With this book, she joins Siu Kam-Wen in the narrative representation of Peru from a Sino-Peruvian perspective. The novel deals with the life of a family of Chinese immigrants in Chepén, Peru, who stop farming to become shopkeepers. Eventually, the children migrate to the city or abroad.

Another Sino-Peruvian poet is Sui-Yun (a pseudonym for Katie Wong Loo), who was born in the Amazonian city of Iquitos in 1955 to Chinese parents who migrated before the Chinese Revolution.[13] She devotes her first collection of poems, Cresciente (Waxing Moon), to the moon. In this collection, which includes poems in both English and Spanish, and was published in California in 1977, all elements in nature, and particularly the moon and the sun, work in unison to express the poet’s feelings of love and harmony through an extended pathetic fallacy. The nostalgic memory of the Amazonian landscapes and animals of her native land also provide inspiration for metaphysical thoughts. In other poems, they inspire philosophical thoughts close to Chinese philosophy, such as the yin and yang, the Confucian concept of the balance of opposites in the world: “The primitive from the civilized / The humble from the aristocrat / The positive from the negative // All these coordinate in the making of One whole” (8-11). Therefore, the ultimate answers are to be found in the magical powers of nature and in its unity.

In 1983, Sui-Yun published a second collection of poems in Lima (this time all the poems are only in Spanish, albeit with sporadic lines in French and English), whose title Rosa fálica (Phallic Rose), seems to suggest that she has continued to search the yin-yang equilibrium between opposites (woman and man in this case) that we saw in the previous book. Now, the prevalent topics are eroticism and love, which become the fundamental path to harmony. In contrast with Wong Kcomt’s poetry, the only reference to her Chinese ethnic background to be found is in the line “And the memory of Chinese lanterns”[14] (3) of an untitled poem in this last collection. Sui-Yun has also published the collection Soy un animal con el misterio de un ángel (1999) in Lima, and Cantos para el mendigo y el rey (2000), in Wiesbaden, Germany, as a bilingual edition.

The last author from Peru that I will mention is Mario Wong (Lima, 1967-). Wong has published the collection of poems La estación putrefacta (1985), the novel El testamento de la tormenta (1997), and the collection of short stories Moi, je vis à San Miguel, mais je meurs pour Amalia (2002).[15] With thirty characters roaming the streets of Lima and Piura in Peru, Paris, and an unspecified American city, many of the scenes in El testamento de la tormenta take place in the Wony, a Sino-Peruvian chifa restaurant and bar where the “poètes maudits” of the Kloaka movement meet to drink and discuss literature and politics. The nightmarish urban atmosphere—somewhat reminiscent of Julio Villanueva Chang’s crónica “Viaje al centro de la noche”—is sometimes described through a frenzied, poetic cascade of existential thoughts and metaphors, while others through the coarse language of the protagonists, who navigate a world of alcohol, drugs, and nihilism. Wong portrays the violent 1980s in Peru as a hellish hallucination. Eight years of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path)’s terrorism, combined with the official violence of the government, end up flooding Peruvian society with fear, torture, and senseless massacres. Self-reflective and surrealist writing becomes a way to look for answers and to exorcize inner evils. And when this tactic fails, his romantic passion for a woman called Amalia Morales, who has moved elsewhere, fills his thoughts. These two leitmotifs are at the core of the novel, around which several other episodes of fear, torture, violence, destruction, and self-destruction through alcohol and drug abuse take place. It is, as the title indicates, a testimony of a stormy time in Peru as well as in the life of the protagonist. 

Panama
Another Latin American country with a long tradition of Chinese immigration is Panama. One of the most prolific and well-known Sino-Panamanian authors is Eustorgio A. Chong Ruiz.[16] In Techumbres, guijarros y pueblo, short stories such as “El rapto” (The Kidnapping), “El machete,” “Longoroneros” and “Kyrie Eleison” describe a small town atmosphere of violent machismo in which boyfriends and parents feel compelled to defend their honor once someone else takes their women. In this last short story, the unnamed protagonist reminisces, while considering suicide, about his childhood, his father’s death, and his bravery on January 9, 1964, when Panamanians marched into the Panama Canal Zone after U.S. students only raised the American flag. Although he mentions several times the socialist concept of the new man, the narrator has lost his faith in all ideologies. This same concept of the new man reappears in the socially conscious play Después del manglar (After the Mangrove Swamp), where Chong Ruiz condemns the abuses committed against the lower classes in the countryside. He tells the story of a hamlet in a mangrove swamp close to the ocean, whose inhabitants end up being displaced by the “owner,” Efigenio, even though they had legal papers bought from him. The play ends with the protagonist and his girlfriend Gisela, who happens to be the landowner’s daughter, leading the exodus in hopes of creating the new man some day and somewhere else.

Even more prolific is Carlos Francisco Changmarín (he blends his two surnames, Chang and Marín, to express his mixed Chinese and Criollo heritage; 1922-), who was born in Los Leones, Santiago. His works often deal with nature, revolution, social justice, land ownership in the countryside, class struggle (his Chinese-Panamanian father’s wealthy family always resented the latter’s marriage to a peasant Criolla), or the recent history of Panama (including the U.S. invasion and the construction of the Panama Canal, in which he worked in his youth).[17] Punto ´e llanto is, for the most part, a collection of intimate love poems with a popular tone and atmosphere. However, some of them deviate from the norm. We find, for example, “Por las lomas negras” (On the Black Hills), which describes an inebriated black man who rapes and kills a young girl, and then flees when he hears her father’s voice and dogs. In a poem reminiscent of César Vallejo’s solidarity with human suffering, “Llanto del interiorano acabangado” (Weeping of the Melancholic Provincial Man), he feels empathy for the underprivileged. In turn, in “El hijo que quiero tener” (The Son I Want to Have), the poetic voice defends mestizos by explaining that although he had always wanted to have a white boy, he now has changed his mind. As we see in the last stanza, the poetic voice professes a sort of reverse racism nuanced by a questionable identification of mestizaje with gratuitous violence. The poem never clarifies what has made him so ashamed of his white son as to reject nothing else than his ethnicity.[18]

Nicaragua
Moving on to another Central American country, perhaps the most well-known Sino-Nicaraguan poet is Juan Chow. He was born in Managua in 1956.[19] Chow’s first book, Oficio del caos, includes surrealist poems with long, often prosaic, verses and lists of oneiric and hallucinatory images. Poems such as “En defensa de Georgette Vallejo,” imagine Latin American poets such as Rubén Darío, Vicente Huidobro, or César Vallejo in the bars and cafés of Paris. In other poems, these literary references give way to the reflection on the tragic civil war in his native Nicaragua, as we see in “Epigrama de un asesinado a su novia también asesinada” (Epigram of an assassinated man to his girlfriend, also assassinated) and “Reflexiones de un dios acabado” (Reflections of a finished God).

Mexico

         Óscar Wong is a Sino-Mexican poet, fiction writer, essayist, literary critic, and journalist. He was born in Tonalá, Chiapas, in 1948, and now lives in Mexico City. He serves as sub-secretary of culture and recreation of the government of the State of Chiapas. In a speech he read during an event in Mexico City that commemorated his thirty years as a poet, Wong expressed his pride of being of Chinese descent: “It is true that I feel grateful to life for my lineage, for my dynastic origins, especially because I had a father that saw the world, not with the coarse and even rude optic of Westerners, but with the millenary wisdom of Chinese ancestors, with the diligence and discipline that forge universes and discover the infinite multiplicity of the ten thousand things that integrate the Cosmos.”[20] He praises his father hi poem: “My father was an incredulous wise man.”[21] In Poética de lo sagrado. El lenguaje de Adán (Poetics of the Sacred. The language of Adam, 2006), Wong describes the poet a sort of priest who interprets the secret of existence. The “sacred” in the title of the book reveals—against the grain of current literary theory, we must say—poetic inspiration as a divine puff and the poet as an mystic or enlightened person.

This peculiar way to understand poetry is reflected in his collections of poems. For example, in Enardecida luz (Flushed Light), which is divided in seven different sections, we find poems, such as the one that open that opens the collection, or “En las fauces de lo oscuro” (In the Jaws of Darkness), “Sobre la ira estoy” (I am over the wrath), “Encabritado corazón” (Reared up heart), and “Ahora muerdo la lengua” (Now I bite my tongue), where a self-deprecating poetic voice turned into a sort of deity, threatens all those who deride him expresses his wrath and angry despair. Toward the last sections of the poem, however, the poetic voice has found harmony in the beauty of women and love, as we see in “Como una gota” (Like a drop), “Rumor del sol” (Rumor of the sun), “Tras la piel titubeante del otoño” (After the hesitating skin of Autumn), and other poems. In another collection, Razones de la voz (Reasons of the Voice), Wong includes erotic poems such as “Espuma melacólica,” “Piedra que germina” and “Ceremonial para Leticia,” combining them with pantheistic chants to nature like “Resaca devorando el arrecife” (Undertow Devouring the Reef). Other poems establish an intertextual dialogue with Jaime Sabines, Octavio Paz, Remedios Varo, and other Mexican writers and artists. But perhaps the most intriguing and successful poems are those in which Wong explores metaphysical realities, such as “La noche yace aquí” (The Night Lies Here) or “Herida brutal de los sentidos” (Brutal Wound of the Senses). 

 

          Conclusion

          Finding themes and topics that are common to the writings of all these Sino-Latin American authors is not an easy task since the sociopolitical circumstances that surround them are obviously extremely variegated. Therefore, any generalization runs the risk of falling into essentialism, reductionism, or homogenization of a clearly diverse corpus of works. At any rate, it is clear that, in many cases, texts dealing with Chinese characters and topics tend to explore the migrants’ reasons for leaving China and the different degrees of suffering, assimilation, or social agency enjoyed in the adopted country. They also reflect their uninterrupted contact with the sending communities. As previously mentioned, despite the large number of authors listed here, the story of the Chinese diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean basin has been narrated, for the most part, by non-Chinese authors. But regardless of their ethnicity, many of these writers focus on the cultural differences as well as on the hybridity, liminality, and transculturation that characterize daily life in the Chinese and Sino-Latin American communities (or “colonies” as they are called in the region.) These works also reveal the inevitable mixture of Sinic and Latin American cultures, despite the Chinese immigrants’ reputation, throughout Latin America, for preferring isolation from mainstream society. In other cases, however, the same authors that contest the stereotype highlight this very insularity in their works. For example, Siu Kam-Wen seems to feel a sort of claustrophobia in the demanding world of Chinese shopkeepers and in the traditionalism of strict kinship norms, while at the same time representing numerous cases of hybridity, particularly in autobiographical passages. These feelings, along with sociopolitical adversities, have made re-migration another important literary topic. With each of these migrations, and with the passing of time, feelings of nostalgia may also find their way into the writing. Besides migrations and re-migrations, some of these books reflect the tradition of returning to mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Macao to look for a young wife.
 

          Perhaps one of the most important overarching leitmotifs in Sino-Latin American cultural production is the presentation of the Chinese communities as an integral part of the nation. In fact, a narrative of “belonging” is often the latent or overt theme of the work. The justification may vary: from the participation of the Chinese in the wars of independence (as is the case the chinos mambises in Cuba) to the partial or complete unfamiliarity with Chinese cultures and languages, many other reasons are cited. As previously stated, the Chinese presence in national literatures as both characters and authors challenges the constructed dualism of the black/white or Indigenous/Criollo discourse. By contrast, in other cases, texts offer a diasporic version of national identity, which shields itself from Eurocentric hegemony or “Criollo-centric” narratives of the nation. Another crucial overarching leitmotif is the realization that, with the freedom and social agency sometimes provided by flexible transnationalism, mobility and deterritorialization, often comes a great deal of marginalization, uprootedness, suffering and victimhood (including imprisonment): indentured servitude, slavery, xenophobia, and Sinophobia are also recurrent topics in these works. While multiple displacements may allow Chinese subjects to flee repressive regimes and social customs, they can also make them fall into equally oppressive and dictatorial regimes.

 

Works Cited

Changmarín, Carlos Francisco. Punto´e llanto y Arcoiris en doce colores o

        Poema de un pueblo. Panamá: Imprenta nacional, 1948.

Chong Ruiz, Eustorgio A. Después del manglar. Panama City: Incude,

       1973.

---. Techumbres, guijarros y pueblo… Panama: Ediciones del Ministerio    
       de Educación. Dirección Nacional de Cultura, 1964.

Chow, Juan. Oficio del caos. Managua: Unión de Escritores de Nicaragua, 
       Asociación Sandinista de Trabajadores de la Cultura, 1986.

Chuffat Latour, Antonio. Apunte histórico de los chinos en Cuba. Havana: 
        Molina, 1927.

The Cuba Commission Report: a Hidden History of the Chinese in Cuba. 
        Ed. Denise Helly. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

Helly, Denise. “Introduction.” The Cuba Commission Report: a Hidden
        History of the Chinese in Cuba. Ed. Denise Helly. Baltimore: Johns
        Hopkins University Press, 1993. 3-30.

Kuan Veng, A. Mey Shut, poemas en prosa. Lima: Lux, 1924.

Mayer de Zulen, Dora. La poesía de Zulen. In Memoriam. Lima: n.p., 1927.

Pedroso, Regino. El ciruelo de Yuan Pei Fu. Poemas Chinos. Havana: P.
         Fernández compañía, 1955.

---. Nosotros. Havana: Letras Cubanas, 1984.

Villanueva Chang, Julio. Elogios Criminales Mexico: Random House
         Mondadori, 2008.

---. Mariposas y murciélagos: crónicas y perfiles. Lima: Universidad
        Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC), 1999.

Wong Kcomt, Julia. Historia de una gorda. Trujillo, Peru: Libertad, 1994.

---. Los últimos blues de Buddha. Lima: Noevas Editoras, 2002.

Wong, Mario. El testamento de la tormenta. Madrid: Huerga Fierro
        Editores, 1997.

Wong, Óscar. Enardecida luz. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
        México, 1992.

---. Poética de lo sagrado. El lenguaje de Adán. Mexico: Coyoacán, 2006.

---. Razones de la voz. Mexico: Práctica Mortal, 2002.

Yun, Sui (Katie Wong Loo). Cresciente. California: n. p., 1977.

---. Rosa fálica. Lima: Loto, 1983.

Zulen, Pedro. El olmo incierto de la nevada. Lima: n.p. 1930.

 

Notes          

[1] Part of the information included in this essay was published in my book Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
2008) and in the article “Sino-Peruvian identity and community as prison: Siu
Kam Wen’s rendering of self-exploitation and other survival strategies” (Eds.
Evelyn Hu-deHart and Kathy López. Afro-Hispanic Review 27.1 [Spring 2008]: 73-90).




[2] “El refinamiento de la raza blanca” (15-16). “Civilizarse”
(16).




[3] “Hat Min Gan Ga / Toy pok ton un hay yan / Sen mai mon / Go sion ni chi yau / Tun lin /
Go sion ni fac tak / Chiok Fi / Shi Chung Chay / Chan sen pen tan / Chi yau-Chi
yau / Go shion.” (89).



[4] This collection included poems from previous books such as CLAT Whitman en las 
bacanales, El poema sin nombre, El poema de una lágrima, Así habló una azucena, 
and El errante. Zulen is also known as a pro-indigenous activist.




[5] “Sus ojos artísticamente rasgados me miraban tiernamente” (n.p.).




[6] “Si como antaño las calles de Lima se bautizaran según los oficios que predominara en ellas—Bodegueros,
Espaderos, Mercaderes—, el jirón Cailloma sería hoy Prostitutas, y Quilca, la popular calle Borrachos” (122).




[7] Siu Kam-Wen had to migrate to the United States when he realized that, without a Peruvian passport, he would never find a job
in Lima. The problem was that, as he explains, they would not give him a passport if he did
not have a job.




[8] The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Julia Wong Kcomt studied Law and Political
Sciences at the University of Lima and Humanities
and Social Sciences at the Catholic University of Peru. She has also studied at
different universities in Germany and Macau, China. Since 2006, she organizes a
festival of Peruvian-Argentine poetry in Buenos Aires.




[9]  “mi apellido;” “no preciso llamarme Julia / puedo enseñar un sello;” “he soñado un barco enorme cruzando
el Pacífico / (mi abuelo murió sin su trenza de culí y con hábito morado);”
“duerme chinita;” “por mi piel negrísima / y un agujero sobrante en las
costillas / que no concuerdan con la estética occidental.”




[10] “Me llamas / (¿a mí, / Te refieres a mí? / Una mujer china siempre está
plagada de dudas.”




[11] “Como gruesa de lápices / amarrada con cintas brillantes / así somos las mujeres / así somos
las mujeres chinas.” Likewise, in “Harnero” (Sieve) she states, “Like a bundle of pencils / Tied with shiny tape
/ That’s how we, women, are / That’s how we, Chinese women, are” (6-9).




[12] “Porque hay que entender chino, / para saber por qué las rayas del tigre / están pintadas por hombres
ricos.”




[13] Sui-Yun was recently invited to represent both China and Peru during the Giornata Mondiale della Poesia (World Day of Poetry), which took
place in Frascati, Italy. She lives between Peru and Europe and, in consonance with one of the main themes in her poetry, she devotes part
of her time to ecological preservation. 




[14] “y el recuerdo de faroles chinos.”




[15] Mario Wong was born in Lima to a Chinese father and a Criolla mother, studied Economics at the
University of San Marcos, and lives in Paris since 1989. He collaborates with the Mexican magazine Archipiélago and with the Peruvian journals such as Maestra Vida and Ciberayllu. He also participated in the anthology Cuentos
Migratorios, 14 escritores latinoamericanos en París (2000).




[16] Born in Los Santos in 1934, Chong Ruiz received a B.A. in Philosophy and
History from the University of Panama, a Diploma in Social Sciences from the
Universidad Nacional de Honduras, and another Diploma in Cinematography from
the Cinematographic Institute in California. He has published several collections
of short stories, often dealing with life in the countryside: Con los pies en la tierra  (1958), Del mar y de la selva (1962), A
la luz del fogón (1963), Techumbres, guijarros y pueblo (1964), Otra vez, pueblo (1966), Canción del hombre en la ventana (1980),
Diario de una noche de camino (1987), Y entonces, tú (1991), and El cazador de alforja (2001). He has also published a collection of poems
entitled Poemas, the plays Detrás de la noche (1966), Después del manglar (1973), and Yaya (1981),study Los chinos en la sociedad panameña (1993).




[17] He has published the following collections of short stories: Faragual
y otros cuentos (1960), La mansión de la bruma, Cuentos de la cárcel (1965), Nochebuena mala (1995), Las
mentiras encantadas (1997), and Cuentos para matar el estrés (2002). He has also published two
historical novels: En este pueblo no mataban a nadie (1992) and El guerrillero transparente (1982). He has also published the followoing
collections of poems: Romance de la niña perdida (n.d), Punto ‘e llanto (1942), Poemas corporales (1956), Socabón. Décimas para cantar (1959), Dos poemas (1963), Versos del pueblo. Décimas (1972), Versos para entrar al canal (1979), Crónica
de siete nombres memorables (1980), Las tonadas y los cuentos de la cigarra (1987), El gallo de las horas (1993), Cantadera. 130 décimas para
cantar (1995). Changmarín has also tried to deliver his social message through children’s literature, publishing the novels El cholito que llegó a general
(1978) and the semiautobiographical Las gracias y las desgracias de Chico Perico (2005),
and the collections of poems Versos de muchachita (1974), Las tonadas y los cuentos de la cigarra (1975),
and La muñeca de Tusa (2001). He has also published five essays about poetry and international politics: Base social de la décima en Panamá
(1965), Algunas áreas folclóricas de Veraguas (1975), Panamá 1903-1970 (1979), Victoriano Lorenzo, primera víctima del canal
norteamericano (1980), Vigencia de la décima en Panamá, en itinerario de una nación 1903-2003 (2003).




[18] Among other Sino-Panamanian writers worth mentioning are the following: César Young Núñez,
Carlos Fong, Elida Wong Miranda, Gloria Youmg, Luis Wong Vega, José Chen Barria, Berta Alicia Chen P., Lucía Kusial Singh, Arnoldo Díaz Wong, Carlos
Wong, José Young, Camilo Siu, Lucy Cristina Chau, Moisés Chong, and Dagoberto Chung.




[19] Juan Chow has worked as a journalist for the journal Barricada. His first collection of poems, Oficios del caos (1986; reedited
as Oficios del caos y otras versiones, 2005), was influenced by surrealism and daily rationalism. His other collections of poems are La
inteligencia del alacrán y otros boleros (2001), Retórica del seductor (2001), and El amor razonado (2004). Chow has also published the book of
criticism La paja en el ojo 1995-2002 (2003). His playful and ironic poetry has been compared to that of the
Salvadoran poet and revolutionary Roque Dalton (1935-1975).




[20] “En verdad que me siento agradecido con la vida por mi linaje, por mis orígenes dinásticos, sobre todo
porque tuve un padre que veía al mundo no con la óptica burda y hasta grosera del occidental, sino con la milenaria sabiduría de los ancestros chinos, con la
constancia y disciplina que forjan universos y descubren la infinita multiplicidad de las diez mil cosas que integran al Cosmos” (n.p.).




[21] He has published the collection of short stories La edad de las mariposas (1990) and the collections of
poems: Si te das al viento (1978), Fragmentaciones (1979), En
un lugar del mundo (1981), Cántiga para la hermana Esther (1982), He brotado raíces (1982), Vuelta
al camino (collective book) (1983), No creo que las rosas cambien (1986),
El conjuro del druida (1992), Enardecida luz (1992), Vocación
de espuma (1993), A pesar de los escombros (1994), Ritual de
ausencias (1994), Espejo a la deriva (1996), Cantares del escriba
(1999), Espuma negra (2000), Razones de la voz (2000), Piedra
que germina (2001), Fulgor de la desdicha (2002), and Rubor de la
ceniza (2002). Wong has also edited several anthologies and
has published the following essays and collections of essays: Eso que
llamamos poesía (1974), Una indagación sobre el hombre. Muerte sin fin, de José Gorostiza (1982),
La salvación y la ira (1986), Entre las musas y Apolo. Presencia y
realidad de la poesía mexicana (1992), Hacia lo eterno mínimo. Otra
lectura de Muerte sin fin (1995), La pugna sagrada. Comunicación y
poesía (1997), El secreto del verso (2001), Jaime Sabines. Entre lo tierno y lo trágico
(2005), and Poética de lo sagrado. El lenguaje de Adán (2006).

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