EVENT DETAILS

A reading by poet Wing Tek Lum

The Departments of Asian American Studies and English present

A reading by poet
WING TEK LUM
from The Nanjing Massacre: Poems

From a review by Craig Howes:
The subject is the notorious Japanese occupation of Nanjing, China, in 1937.
The poems capture all perspectives of the tragedy—from the weary, casually cruel
Japanese soldiers to the uncomprehending child victims, and from the desperate helpless
parents and the brutalized comfort women to the bloodless yet vicious bureaucrats of
death.
“Too often history is written by those who survive, those who won,” Lum writes.
Drawing on published histories, memoirs, photographic collections, and oral histories, he
composes testimony after testimony for the silenced—poetic memorials that also provide
some measure of revenge against the victors. At key moments, he also broadens the
frame of reference, linking the crimes in China to the atrocities committed since then at
different times, on different continents. Massacres, Lum suggests, bear a family
resemblance—the human family.
But The Nanjing Massacre is much more than a chamber of horrors. Lum’s
spare and meticulous verse offers up vivid, memorable, and even beautiful images, and
many of the poems are mini-narratives, suspenseful and compelling. The result is a
gallery of disturbing portraits that nevertheless move us through their artistry and truth.

Wing Tek Lum is a Honolulu businessman and poet. His first collection
of poetry, Expounding the Doubtful Points, was published by Bamboo
Ridge Press in 1987. With Makoto Ooka, Joseph Stanton, and Jean
Yamasaki Toyama, he participated in a collaborative work of linked
verse, which was published as What the Kite Thinks by Summer Session,
University of Hawai‘i at Manoa in 1994.