Poetry

Marianne Chan, Leaving Biddle City (Sarabande), 100 pp. Paperback, $17.95.

In A New Home—Who’ll Follow? (1839), her lightly fictionalized account of Midwest frontier life in the 1830s, Caroline Kirkland described the beginnings of a new city in Michigan. Speculators went out to inspect a parcel of land for potential development. At first, they see only a fetid marsh cast in an “impenetrable shade.” But then their imagination gets to work: “They saw at a glance how easily the marshes could be drained, the channel of the [river] deepened, and the whole converted into one broad area, on which to found a second New York.” Before long they have prepared a beautifully illustrated prospectus with “choicely worded” advertisements. Soon strips of land—currently a foot under water—are being auctioned off to gullible easterners for a wonderful Michigan city called “New-New-York.”

According to a local legend, the city of Lansing, Michigan, had origins more or less the same as Kirkland’s fictional “New-New-York.” In the myth, Lansing, which was more-or-less created in 1847 to be the young state’s new capital, was actually begun in 1836 as “Biddle City,” a swampy land scam marketed to New Yorkers hoping to make a buck on frontier speculation. (It’s true that there was a failed plan for a community named Biddle City in that area in the 1830s, but it probably wasn’t a trick for swindling Easterners.)

The myth of Biddle City has great appeal. It’s a version of the rude awakening from the American Dream. At Ellis Island, a quote from an unnamed Italian immigrant reads, “I came to America because I heard the streets were paved with gold. When I got here, I found out three things: first, the streets weren’t paved with gold; second, they weren’t paved at all; and third, I was expected to pave them.”

The poems in Marianne Chan’s new collection, Leaving Biddle City, focus on life in Lansing, where Chan grew up with her parents and her brother in the late 1990s. Chan, who received her MFA in poetry from UNLV in 2015, is now a professor at Old Dominion University. Her brother, Rammel Chan, to whom the book is dedicated, is a professional actor. The Chans grew up in the Lansing suburbs in a community of Filipino Americans. As her title suggests, Chan finds a resonance between this actual community and the “Biddle City” of the nineteenth century:

Some who found they’d been scammed
decided to build their houses there anyway.
They found themselves underwater.
But they created a home in Biddle City.

Sure, it’s a scam, but it’s also home.

The title poem, “Leaving Biddle City,” is a standout. A short prose-poem, it succinctly captures that small-town Midwestern feeling of being nowhere. Everything seems colorless; when a barn catches on fire, it fills “the gray sky with more gray, smoke and ash, but also orange—the blaze and heat stinging my cheeks and lungs.” That orange fire is a welcome diversion, the only thing “that made me feel like I was somewhere, someone.” Chan knows that Lansing is only a “brief and little home”—okay for now, but destined to be left behind when she moves on, just as “the crab apples soured on my lover’s lawn.”

Most of the poems here are short, and Chan is especially drawn to the form of the pantoum, which features the repetition of alternating lines—a form Chan sometimes adapts into her prose-poems. “Falling in Love in Biddle City,” for example, begins thus: “My first kiss was with a snowman. It made my lips numb and tingly. Then, finally, I kissed a real-life person in 9th grade; we rolled around in pinecones. It made my lips numb and tingly.”

Chan is self-mocking about this style, noting of a friend that reads her poems, “She’s mad at all the pantoums. So repetitive, / she says with tired eyes. She’s right.” But maybe repetition is right. It’s that feeling of being stuck—and maybe wanting to be stuck.

Chan captures the city within a city—the both/and rather than the either/or quality of American immigration.

The most memorable poems here are the four with a version of the title “Biddle City Filipina.” For these, Chan conducted interviews with three Filipina women living in Michigan. The strongest, “Biddle City Filipina, No. 2,” features a middle-aged speaker who reflects back upon the fact that, at twenty years old, when she was living in the Philippines, she accepted a marriage proposal from a man she just met so she could move to the United States: “Back then, you just don’t care. You just want to go to America. Desperately for me.”

Her friends warn her that many American men will take out insurance policies on their Filipina wives and then kill them. (“Yes. Yes. Serious. This is reality.”) She goes into the marriage assuming there’s a strong possibility it will end in murder. “I don’t know my husband is a killer or not. He’s probably one of the killer, you know?” Her solution to the problem:

When I got here, I’m wearing jeans on bed for a month.

Because if he tries to kill me, I can get out of my house with my pants. Hahahahaha.

She clearly has a sense of humor. Now in her fifties, she can look back upon her newlywed life and laugh. But the terror is no less real. It turns out that her husband is a nice guy, and his kindness to her helps her to love him. But she took a risk. She needed to leave her own rut in Cebu. “I just want to go because, like I said, to grow up in the poverty it’s hard, really hard.”

The accent of Chan’s interviewee, and the terse understatement she uses to deliver her eyebrow-raising account, gels nicely with the “crisp Midwestern English” and the “flat, nonnarrative, Midwestern conversation” that Chan finds in Michigan. Biddle City isn’t just Lansing; it refers to a diasporic Filipino community there. Chan’s parents speak Bisaya, they eat lansones and lumpia, the kids perform a Cinderella play in Tagalog. Chan captures the city within a city—the both/and rather than the either/or quality of American immigration.

In “Autobiography via Screaming,” the family needs to see a therapist. They’re too sad, too mad, screaming too often. But it’s not that simple. Chan writes that “sometimes at home my mother would scream, not sing, into the karaoke microphone, I want to dance with somebody! I want to feel the heat with somebody!” But this isn’t the plaintive cry of a lovelorn woman. “I knew,” writes Chan, “that this screaming was joy, despite it all.” It harks back to “In Defense of Karaoke,” a terrific poem from Chan’s last collection, All Heathens. The great joy of a home karaoke machine is that it can connect you, aurally, back to your family, as you “unravel into the microphone and listen to yourself double / miss your mother father // brother / kiss their photographs / kiss America / learn to love it / until you learn the lyrics by heart.”