In Painting the Borrowed House, Kate Rogers celebrates place without standing still. We move with her poems from becoming lao wei (foreigner) to being at home in “thinking about where / I’ve been and where I’m going next” (60) –even at those moments when we can’t wait to “be automatic.” One of the most striking aspects of the collection is the clarity with which it documents parallel processes of becoming lao wei and settling into a place where being automatic is a real possibility.
The book is divided into three sections, each associated with a particular place (though the third combines two) — “Becoming Lao Wei” (China), “Being Pale” (Hong Kong), and “Painting the Borrowed House” (Taiwan and Hong Kong). That three of the places are distinguished from China though all are China speaks volumes about the new China and about each of the places distinguished.
It is the mainland where the poet becomes a foreigner, an experience vividly captured in the first poem of the collection: “A child again, I am / alone with my myth of this country” (18). Like a child, the poet keeps pace with a Shanghai that is reinventing itself 24 hours a day. Like the child of “a lean mother, with no lap to sink into,” she learns practicality. Like a snake, she sheds her skin. All are images of beginning and beginning again, and those are as apt for China as for a stranger making the transition from passing through a place to living there. Images in the first section of the book are more vivid for being images of a child reinventing herself: “matching slippers slap / the pavement in a show of applause. And all these casual / loungers and strollers make nonsense of my old dream: kids / laughing at me because I’d worn a nightgown to school, / and passed no mirrors on the way” (21). This is a second naivete, making nonsense of one childhood while drawing on another to hear China as well as to taste it and see it.
The second section, too, makes space by drawing places together. While we learn Hong Kong with Rogers, she recalls Canada and dreams “of snow / muffling Hong Kong. Of flakes sifting down to glint in my hair, melt / their cold kisses on my cheeks. Of a darkening sky / shedding its stars, turning the universe inside out….” (29). This is more than nostalgia, more than an image of homesickness. It is an illustration of the way eyes formed in a place form other places, making old and new equally strange. The transition from “becoming” to “being” is not complete — and we have good reason to suspect it never will be. Recalling the image of being a child alone with the myth of a country, “Chung Yeung: Lamma Island 2006″ brilliantly evokes the settling into new myths that is part of making oneself at home, the other side of eyes formed forming: settling into new myths (new, at least, to the settler) transforms old eyes, here in the process of climbing a mountain: “we seek the highest point / to save ourselves and the family / friends have become, from historic danger” (34). Reenacting a myth is part of the ritual process by which friends become family and strangers become friends who are at home. The third verse of the poem transposes this to a cosmic level in the form of a question: “In twenty years, after the poles have melted, / the white bears of my northern / home become myth, / and the sea has reclaimed Hong Kong, / who will tell // the story of Chung Yeung? Who will offer / the children rainbows / as the flood waters rise?” (35) “A Book of Birds” (36-37), too, makes space between Canada and Hong Kong. The poet remembers her mother and writes “Gravity, momentum and other forces of nature brought me here. / Still, I often face north, feeling the pull of my country / and its raw bones full of iron. Think of my mother living / in opposite time, on the other side of the world” (36). That forces of nature brought her here (Hong Kong) as surely as they’d brought her as a child into Canada is another remarkable insight into the becoming that makes it possible to be at home.
The final section shares the title of the whole collection, and that title is a metaphor for the moment at which a borrowed house becomes home. Typically, one doesn’t begin painting until one is settled — though the house is still borrowed. That image is applied particularly to Taiwan and Hong Kong, and it highlights the extent to which Hong Kong has become the borrowed house in which Ryan is settled enough to paint. This in spite of the vivid evocation of earthquakes that “live on / in my body” (49) and (in the title poem) the observation that “a stairwell is simply a place to pause / before opening another door” (52). That pause flavors these poems: “These days my shadow is practicing / to be my ghost. It might prefer / to wander through cloisters with / submerged hands and invisible feet…. // …Become a tapestry / of myself in the Middle Ages. / But a stone cell loses / heat quickly as the light fades. / The single bed is too narrow / for my restless heart” (56, 57). The “Nunnery at Diamond Hill” gives the poet pause, but, being a traveler, she needs a different sort of hermitage.
In the second to last poem there is an image that casts considerable light on the whole” “I want to raise my camera, / capture the colours of their flight, / but will not startle with the flash. // Sitting on a low concrete wall, / I begin this poem” (58). One might think this is about birds, though it is about a group of “little nuns” receiving new robes. Rogers has published a collection of essays on birdwatching, conservation, and culture, so it is no surprise that her knowledge and experience in those areas would inform her poems. But it is particularly interesting that the poem takes the place of the camera here, precisely because the flash of the camera would spoil the scene — but the poem doesn’t. And that, I think, is startling enough to keep our eyes open even when we become sufficiently settled to become automatic in whatever strange places we inhabit.
reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
Kate Rogers. Painting the Borrowed House. Hong Kong: Proverse, 2008. ISBN 978-988-99668-4-3