Marilyn Chin’s “Get Rid of the X” is a poem about losing, or failing to lose identities. Part of its meaning is the way that it keeps shuffling off, or stumbling away from, stable meanings. What the poem says is the way it cannot quite find what it says.
Get Rid of the X
My shadow followed me to San Diego
silently, she never complained.
No green card, no identity pass,
she is wedded to my fate.The moon is a drunk and anorectic,
constantly reeling, changing weight.
My shadow dances grotesquely,
resentful she can’t leave me.The moon mourns his unwritten novels,
cries naked into the trees and fades.
Tomorrow, he’ll return to beat me
blue—again, again and again.Goodbye Moon, goodbye Shadow.
My husband, my lover, I’m late.
The sun will plunge through the window.
I must make my leap of faith.
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Chin does provide a clue or two to those trying to pin down the elusive X here. In her collection A Portrait of the Self As Nation, she notes that the poem is a “reinvention” of a the very famous “Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon” by Li Bai (701-762). The translation below is by Frank Hudson.
Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon
I’m out in the wildflowers with my cup of wine—
But I’m not drinking alone. Oh no.
I’ll ask the moon to join me and toast my shadow
Aha! That’ll make three of us!Out in the wildflowers with wine.
But the moon can’t drink,
And my shadow’s only an eager disciple.
For a moment though, three friends—
Probably last about as long as spring does.
For a moment though, three friends.I look to my wind and sing.
In the wine the moon dances.
And my shadow? It shakes its cup.
Us three friends, out here drinking!Us three friends, out here drinking
Will get drunk, and then disperse.
We will travel everywhere else,
Our only reunion out in the currents of stars.
Out in the currents of stars.
Li Bai’s poem is an ode to transcendence through inebriation. The poet starts off in the wildflowers alone, a drunken tramp. But as he imbibes, he escapes his mundane (and disreputable) circumstances and self. In his cups, the moon and the shadow seem to speak to him; he is no longer one, but three—and then the three multiplies and expands further, as "they travel “everywhere else” and out into the stars.
This (drunken) dream of transcendence is, though (as you’d expect of a doubled and tripled poet) ambivalent. Li Bai wavers back and forth, wondering if the moon can really drink, uncertain about whether it’s himself or the shadow that’s shaking the cup, and at least vaguely aware that his buddies will only be with him a short while—no longer than the next hangover certainly. Shedding his self allows the poet to escape his own loneliness for the heavens, but if he’s no longer himself, how can he know what he’s escaping or where he’s going? Is the holy fool just a fool? When you become the moon and the shadow, what happens to the “you”? Losing identity can be a kind of spiritual transformation, but it can also be a self-betrayal, or a death.
Chin’s poem riffs on this ambiguity—and on the fact that Li Bai’s play with identity and self was enabled in part by his own identity as an older man. It is unlikely that a woman of his time and place would have been allowed to wander drunk through the wildflowers, or to cheekily present embarrassing besottedness as the radiance of moon or the mystery of shadow.
“Get Rid of the X” then imagines or examines the ways in which loss of female self is both more exhilarating and more gutting than Li Bai’s selflessness allows for. It’s in that context that Chin’s verse is less stable and determinate than Li Bai’s wavery wander through the moonlit flowerbed.
My shadow followed me to San Diego
silently, she never complained.
No green card, no identity pass,
she is wedded to my fate.The moon is a drunk and anorectic,
constantly reeling, changing weight.
My shadow dances grotesquely,
resentful she can’t leave me.
The speaker in “Get Rid of the X” sets out on a journey whose details stagger and blur. She’s going to San Diego without green card or identity pass—perhaps escaping from a (abusive?) relationship (with a drunkard?), perhaps entering the US from China (illegally?) She is accompanied by a “shadow,” and by the moon “drunk and anorectic,/constantly reeling, changing weight.” The rhyme scheme is also hard to pin down; is “complained” supposed to rhyme with “fate”? Is “grotesquely” supposed to rhyme with “leave me”? (And I love the way that particular couplets 8/7 syllables and staggered sort of rhyme leaves the shadow hanging—somewhere.) The one full clear rhyme is “fate…weight”, which crosses stanzas, knocking the rhythms off kilter as that moon.
Li Bai playfully multiplies selves, but the poem is always clear on which self is being multiplied. For Chin, though, we’re never sure who is speaking, or who is the shadow. Is the speaker trying to cast off a past (the old lover, the old country), or is the shadow (“resentful she can’t leave me”) the new life, and the speaker the old? They are intertwined in their indeterminacy and, perhaps, in their trauma; to change (like the moon) is not to go from one self to another, but is instead to lose track of which self is which—Chinese, American, immigrant, couple, single, victim, survivor.
The second half of the poem doesn’t resolve these confusions, but instead adds to them.
The moon mourns his unwritten novels,
cries naked into the trees and fades.
Tomorrow, he’ll return to beat me
blue—again, again and again.Goodbye Moon, goodbye Shadow.
My husband, my lover, I’m late.
The sun will plunge through the window.
I must make my leap of faith.
The moon, as a writer, fuses, perhaps more fully, with Li Bai, who is now a novelist as well as a poet, and whose drunkenness phases from playfulness to vulnerability, self-pity, and violence; the three selves leading, not to transcendence, but to more fists, which beat her “again, again and again.”
The final stanza bids farewell to Moon and Shadow both—though they don’t really vanish. Instead, the propulsive line “My husband, my lover, I’m late” (with an end rhyme that points back to the first part of the poem) suggests another kind of doubled self. If the speaker’s period is late (as measured by that moon), she may be pregnant.
Pregnancy can provoke domestic violence; it can also be a spur to immigration or to leave an abusive relationship. And pregnancy is also a multiplication of the self that is significantly more literal, and more powerfully affecting, than a man’s drunken double vision. Giving birth, like immigration, or fleeing an abusive ex, can be a leap of faith—a search for a new self that isn’t easily analogized to moon or shadow, but which takes place in, or looks forward to, a dawn that isn’t, and can’t be, especially dreamy.
Li Bai’s poem (at least in translation) gets its humor from its whimsical drunken wavering around a simple series of events; you know the moon and shadow aren’t really drinking, but it’s fun to drift along with the conceit (“I’ll ask the moon to join me and toast my shadow.”) Chin’s response, in contrast, uses plain, even stark language which seems like it has the clarity and specificity of sobriety (“My shadow followed me to San Diego/silently, she never complained.”) even though you are never sure who is speaking, where they are, or what is happening to them.
One takeaway, perhaps, is that while men with at least some purchase on social standing can find play with identity fun and liberating, marginalized women—immigrants, racial minorities, survivors of abuse, single mothers—often experience split selves as disorientation, erasure, or violence.
And yet, human beings still refuse to be any one thing—neither self, nor shadow, nor moon, but all of them. They go to San Diego, they dance grotesquely, they take a leap of faith—if not into the stars, then in the small bedroom where they find themselves, with whatever illumination is at hand.