Chang’s persona seems intimately comfortable with Taiwan, despite her alienation from it.
As with any myth, though, her construction of Taiwan is off-color, not quite reaching the truth. In Yilan, Chang describes herself as watching a typhoon from the 65th floor of a Marriott; “smaller buildings lean / like thirst to water” in her invented narrative. But in the real Taipei, there are no 60-floor hotels.
Chang knows that her experience of Taiwan is distanced through a filter of Asian-American identity and diaspora.
“I try not to write from a purely autobiographical place,” she says, pointing to her descriptions of her parents and grandparents peppered throughout her narrative.
As Chang embraced her mother’s reincarnation myths, her poetry similarly serves as a reclamation of identity. Using secondhand stories of a country she has never known herself, she carves out a new Asian-American mythology of her past lives and future bodies.
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