Seeking Vivian Chang - a poetic tale of spam email

But sometimes you get a strange email that is not offering to sell anything, and you can tell by the grammar and syntax that it came from a foreign country. Sometimes it's quite poetic, as in the case of an intriguing email I received in 2007 from "Vivian Chang," with a subject line "Autocad." It wasn't even addressed to me, but somehow, I got it. And the text was a paragraph of sentences run together with gobbledygook programming. Nevertheless, I was breathless with delight, for here was sheer poetry, so I took it upon myself to rearrange the sentences in poetic form, with a title in bold:

Snow is the Link, the Causative Factor, the Key

Floating on the sky.

(Our fortitude grows dim in the woods, close by,
Wheel tracks entrench themselves in snow, yet painted
Only a whiter absence to my mind,
Glimmering of light: undreaming even of fields
And beyond, the same sound of bees
A rabbit carcass in its stiffened fur.
Away, my songs, must we go
Empty streets I come upon by chance,
Snaps of ice cracking in the hidden air.
Of observation lying on the ground
Stunned in their voiceless way to be alive
And all at once it is the meadow I walked in at ten,
My only thought is for what has been
and the numbed yards will go back undercover

Marvelous, wonderful, and I found, as a poet myself, that I simply had to know who this Vivian Chang was who could write with such power. So I did a search online for Vivian Chang. A search for Vivian Chang online showed her everywhere and with many faces and careers.

In Asia, she is the executive director of an environmental network.

In Seattle, she is a high school student who won a prize for writing a short story with the theme of snow, just like the theme of the poem above (maybe she is the real author of the poem?).

She is a lawyer in San Francisco and in Phoenix.

She is also an engineer in San Francisco, who designed the Jamestown Bridge in Narragansett Bay and interchange viaducts in Atlanta.

She is a filmmaker who won three awards in 2001 for her film Xiao bai wu jin ji (Hidden Whisper).

She married Andrew Hua in New York.

She is also a concert pianist in New York.

She's a financial partner in Australia.

She is an interpreter for the State Department in Shanghai.

Perhaps I will follow up on these links, especially the Seattle one, but Vivian Chang's poem stayed with me and finally, last month, I wrote a response poem. For those of you in literary circles (or not) this kind of response poem is called "ekphrastic" and there is or was a journal devoted to ekphrastic work. An ekphrastic work is any artistic work responding to, based on or inspired by another artistic work. So it could be a poem based on a painting, a painting based on a piece of music, a piece of music based on a play, etc. Here is my ekphrastic poem based on Vivian Chang's "Snow is the Link...":

Vivian Chang,
Snow fields could not be whiter
than the silent space of death
in China.
White for death,
but where it means purity
in Puritanical America,
there a thin fenceline
snakes a dark line
across the landscape,
a boundary between
our two countries.

We both know snow
and cherry blossoms,
and that is enough.

Snow is the link, Vivian Chang,
as in Chinese brush paintings,
what is not trailed on rice paper,
is what the mind must see
and make meaning of.

You are so right, Vivian Chang,
It is only a whiter absence,

but where for you the bees still hum,
here they are silenced
amid, yes, the "snaps of ice
cracking in the hidden air."

I would go back with you, Vivian Chang,
back before you became
a writer in Seattle,
a lawyer in San Francisco,
a concert pianist,
an environmentalist.
or an engineer whose Jamestown Bridge is
sturdier than that thin fence line
in the meadow of your memory at ten,
and a filmmaker making meaning in Hidden Whisper
(echoes of the silent bees?
"stunned in their voiceless way to be alive"?)

I would go back with you
to that snowy field at ten
where "wheel tracks entrench themselves in snow,"
where the rabbit carcass in its stiffened fur lies still.

Where our only thoughts now
are for what has been
and for hope
that the numbed yards will recover.