Cathy Song was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. She is half Korean (Father) and half Chinese (Mother) and she got her B.A. at Wellesley College and her M.A. at Boston university. She won the Yale younger Poets Award in 1982 for her first collection of poems, Picture Bride (1983). She has since published 3 more collections of poems and is currently a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Song's poetry is characterized by the colorful paintings she makes in people's minds through her imagery. She also receives inspiration from her Korean-Chinese background and from being an Asian American woman.
Picture Bride
She was a year younger
than I,
twenty-three when she left Korea.
Did she simply close
the door of her father's house
and walk away. And
was it a long way
through the tailor shops of Pusan
to the wharf where the boat
waited to take her to an island
whose name she had
only recently learned,
on whose shore
a man waited,
turning her photograph
to the light when the lanterns
in the camp outside
Waialua Sugar Mill were lit
and the inside of his room
grew luminous
from the wings of moths
migrating out of the cane stalks?
What things did my grandmother
take with her? and when
she arrived to look
into the face of the stranger
who was her husband,
thirteen years older than she,
did she politely untie
the silk bow of her jacket,
her tent-shaped dress
filling with the dry wind
that blew from the surrounding fields
where the men were burning the cane?
From PICTURE BRIDE (Yale University Press, 1983)
First of all, this poem catches the essence of Cathy Song because this short little story has so much poetic detail in all of the environment, emotion and history. I can relate to this story in many ways. My parents migrated here from the Philippines in the late 70s, early 80s and although they have never talked about their feelings toward moving to the United States to me, I could imagine that this poem reflects the emotions they had. There is a an over all feeling of uncertainty to the poem because there are so many questions laid out and the speaker's grandmother was traveling to unknown territory and was probably at least a little scared. I do not know if this is actually Song speaking but we can obviously see that her Korean heritage is portrayed in this poem. When the poem mentioned Pusan, it jumped at me because I was there just this previous Summer and Pusan is an East Coast big city in Korea where there are many beautiful beaches and ports for the Pacific Ocean. So I can literally picture what the grandmother was going through because I saw the beautiful sunrise and I saw the many different boating ports that she could have left on. It's not often that I read poems that I have such a connection to so when Cathy Song, an Asian American popped up with a poem that I could relate to, it was very exciting for me and I love the poem.
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