On Not Reading Diana Chang

A forgotten poet and "A Wall of Their Own"

Diana Chang (1924-2009) is best known for her fiction; The Frontiers of Love (1956) is generally considered the first novel by an American-born Chinese writer. She also wrote poetry, though. I discovered her in L. Ling-chi Wang and Henry Yiheng Zhao’s 1991 Chinese American Poetry: An Anthology, which included the verse below.

A Wall of Their Own

Weeping, a woman is watching
            her friend’s back in a mirror
                        say nothing at all

“Get lost,” a man says.
            His child smiles still harder,
                        closing another door

Near windows, birds, seeking more flight,
            crash into sky,
                        struck dead by images

Dreaming they are well, the dying
            through walls lifting like wings
                        slip away

A lady espaliered
            on love
                        loves walls

The poem is a series of five vignettes on the theme. That theme is walls—and also I think the absence of walls. Chang carefully avoids periods at the end of each stair-step stanza; there isn’t a hard break between the thoughts here. Instead, the poem moves from image to image without barrier, a bit like a dream, where the usual divisions between idea and idea, room and room, are unexpectedly violable.

Similarly, the “walls” in the poem are more or less abstract, and their power to cordon off is mutable. In the first stanza, the “wall” between two (female?) friends is displaced into a mirror behind one of them. One friend looks over the other friend’s shoulder and sees the friend’s back, which is turned towards her in metaphor, if not in actuality.

Or at least that’s one reading. It’s also possible that the friend has turned her back and the back is doubled by a mirror positioned off to the side. Or the friend may not even be in the room; perhaps the woman sees her own back and thinks of her friend? The exact mechanics of the scene seem clear (like a mirror) but are actually (like a mirror) opaque. Communication between person and person, reader and poet, is blocked or rerouted, and you have to fill in the frame yourself with your own, unspeaking, image.

The second stanza is more straightforward and (at least to me) less compelling. Though I do like the way the child’s disturbing smile, usually a sign of welcome, is here a refusal or barrier.

 Near windows, birds, seeking more flight,
            crash into sky,
                        struck dead by images

In the third stanza, as in the first, transparency closes down, and what appears open is in fact locked. The dramatic indented line-breaks here keep the reader suspended—like the birds. You seek flight, and then Chang thumps you into the plate glass. “Struck dead by images” refers to the poor birds, but it’s also an abrupt reminder to readers that you’re a reader. The poem seems to look onto sky, but in fact the page is a surface that brings you up short. You can’t see through it.

Dreaming they are well, the dying
            through walls lifting like wings
                        slip away

The fourth stanza is an inversion of the third. Death here isn’t a barrier, but “walls lifting.” Or maybe the “walls lifting” are an illusion, and death is the walls coming down? The dying don’t see the truth or a truth; they are “Dreaming they are well”—as deluded as the birds who think they’re headed towards heaven. But the delusion for the birds is thinking the wall is a door, while the dying think a door is a wall. They “slip away” without knowing they’ve escaped.

A lady espaliered
            on love
                        loves walls

The last stanza is the shortest and the most gnomic. “Espaliered” means “to grow flat against a wall”—it’s used to describe climbing vines. So the poem is saying that a lady is flattened against love like a vine, which could mean she’s run into or smashed against love, or could mean she’s clinging to love. Either way, love is usually seen as a breaking down of barriers; it’s an experience of going over or around or through Pyramis and Thisbe’s gap to be together as one.

Here though, the lady, “loves walls”—and love is described as a wall itself. That could mean love is protection. But it also, given the rest of the poem, could mean love is opacity, separation—an inability to see inside. Chang seems to be suggesting that what we love about love is the way it is closed off to us, allowing us to lean against our own ignorance or limitations. The best part of love is the part where you are alone with love, before you have to deal with the person out there—a view which Chang may be mocking, or light-heartedly endorsing, or both.

“A Wall of Their Own” is probably a reference to Woolf’s “A Room of Their Own.” That book length essay argues that woman have been prevented from writing in part by the fact that they are denied privacy, space, income, and time to think. Chang’s poem is an ambivalent response, drifting through and bumping against different ideas about the uses and abuses of isolation. Walls can trap or protect, function as mirrors, windows, or doors. Chang  (probably) wrote the poem inside, with walls around her. You’re probably reading the poem inside with walls around you as well. Does the poem open a from walled room to walled room? Or does it just distract you from the box you’re in?

I also can’t read Chang’s poem without thinking about the way that a poem about walls and disconnection has itself been so thoroughly disconnected from popular consciousness, and readership. Chang’s novels are occasionally read and studied, but her poetry is mostly forgotten, and as far as I know this one in particular isn’t anywhere online. The poem is fun because you get to see Chang’s mind flutter and swoop across ideas, ignoring walls. But for the most part, no one has seen that; indifference, time, the exigencies of fame and publishing have put in place barriers Chang can’t open or walk through.

“A Wall of Their Own” is a short ode to freedom and claustrophobia, to getting out of your head and settling into your own mind. If you’ve, like me, found Chang for the first time, you’ve found a porthole into a room that’s mostly been walled off. And if you never read her, you’re still maybe in the poem, which is about being outside the poem, spread against it like wisteria climbing a mirror, espaliered on love.