Double Happiness

open, the gilded facade of restaurant “Double Happiness.” These lines come from the title poem of Marilyn Chin’s second collection of poetry, The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty (1994) (48). However, ‘“Double Happiness”’ is the double-edged name of the Chinese family restaurant that recurs throughout Chin’s works. Beyond serving as a setting and subject of several poems and her novel, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen: A Manifesto in 41 Tales (2009), “Double Happiness” invokes the duality of Chin’s self-identification as a “hyphenated” Chinese American (Chin, “Q&A”) who immigrated to the United States from Hong Kong as a young girl. It further suggests her hybrid poetic approach, which is informed by both Western and Eastern literary traditions. Of her personal history and poetry Chin has suggested: “How exciting to have this great opportunity to make a ‘political’ statement about my bicultural identity by exacting my ideas with hybridized forms. How wonderful to have the riches from east and west, from two vastly different histories” (“An Interview,” Indiana Review). While the poet describes her dual cultural inheritances as “riches,” there is decided Daoist irony to the name “Double Happiness,” a bitter sweetness that is also reflected in her poetry. Chin has observed, “There’s a doubleness to nearly all my work. To how I feel about things, and perhaps especially about assimilation” (“Marilyn Chin” 73). Therefore, though “Double Happiness” might evoke the tidy hyphenate Chinese American, Chin’s poetry is layered with cross-cultural references and allusions that concurrently have both Eastern and Western implications. Together with her hybridized poetic forms, which are intimately bound with the poems’ meaning, these doubled allusions result in emotionally and thematically complex works that explore the varied facets—political, personal, historic, and social—of cultural hybridity

Aesthetics · Art · Chin · Happiness · Literature · Poetry · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Medicine · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Psychology · Gender Studies · History · Social Psychology

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