Ten Thousand Waves: Poems

The voices in Ten Thousand Waves will haunt you! They are the voices of the exploited, oppressed, and, unfortunately, too often unheard. These poems tell the untold stories that are painful and disturbing but must be told. Ten Thousand Waves tells of immigrants and people who can not, did not, and will not be allowed to succeed.I spent twenty-five years as a US immigration officer, in the enforcement branch. The works in “Crossing the Line” are so accurate. I can’t remember how many times I encountered people who destroyed their documents prior to landing and later cried for asylum. The majority of Chinese I encountered were still paying off their debts to the snakeheads—they were able to gain access to the US, received immigration status, but became indentured servants (they will probably die before their debts are paid) instead. Ten Thousand Waves brings back the voices and images of the numerous times when I would encounter thirty or more Chinese living in a dilapidated house, the fifteen or more bunk beds in the front room; most had tattered bed sheets hanging as partitions. They would stand in their underwear staring at my colleagues and I, their basic human instinct to analyze the situation drained. My colleagues and I knew that despair and hopelessness were beaten into them. These are the voices in Ms. Ping’s collection.The voices in Ten Thousand Waves are ones we never hear. Wings Press should be commended for publishing Ten Thousand Waves. They could have easily published the more profitable common Asian theme of “An Asian immigrant who came to the US with $50.00 and against all odds, made it” or the “An Asian American who goes back to the land of his ancestors and finds his roots.” Wings Press, instead, published what really matters.

Since childhood, the poet Wang Ping has been aware of her own restless spirit. “I want to play,” she writes in her recent poetry collection, Ten Thousand Waves, “See the world before I become too old.”Wang Ping’s wayward-seeking energy has transported her from the China of Mao’s Cultural Revolution across a myriad of geographies, cultures, and fantasies. Like a shaman, Ping dances, seamlessly assembling a layered collage of portraits, stories and dreams. She blends personal experience with conjured people, places, events, and reflections so honestly that we trust her flight from storytelling to poetic reportage, from fiction to fact.Advancing on Ping’s often-guileful but compassionate voice, Ten Thousand Waves embraces the contradictions of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the enigma of Tibet. She gives voice to the microcosms of life in a new China. She celebrates the simple contentment of a snail merchant and mourns the hope, hardship, and cruelty of immigrant lives in New York, the Metal City of Yongkang and on the murderous tidal flats of Wales.Content drives her diverse stylistic choices. “I consider reading poetry to be a social obligation,” Ping says in one interview. “The small people are speaking,” she writes. “...and no dam of bullets or machine guns or pepper spray tanks media smears can stop this tsunami of justice and peace…this is not violence.”Ten Thousand Waves plants images and impressions in the reader’s memory where they gestate, waiting to surface in unpredictable forms. Wang Ping’s poetry is the work of a mirthful, gentle trickster with an urgent and intricate agenda. In Ten Thousand Waves, her restless spirit follows the poet’s heart while her pen delivers the world to us.

Wang Ping stands by and speaks for the powerless with her startling story telling fueled with first-hand, precise and detailed images manifesting the fate of Chinese migrant workers impacted by urbanization and globalization. Wang Ping, herself as a Chinese immigrant arriving at NYC with $26 in her pocket in 1986, now a creative writing professor at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, has transformed her role as a journalist, humanitarian, friend and listener when she travels about different landscapes to investigate Chinese migration issues, researching, interviewing, observing, digging, and writing, giving birth to each story with a unique form, rhythm, tone, voice and spirit coming alive through her truthful and creative narration."The Price of a Finger" is about my hometown Yongkang. I was so amazed by Wang Ping's courage, compassion and precision, revealing things that are so familiar to me as I lived in Yongkang during my first 17 years, having witnessing one of the workers in my mother's factory got his fingers cut off and mended. For so long I haven't found a right way to write about my hometown, a city so small but so controversial that its story wouldn't be heard if not because of Wang Ping. I found a deep connection with her because of that article.

This book is just great. I love the style -- it's like a poetry of journalism.You read this kind of poetry, and you realize: This is the way to learn about the world, and this is the only way these stories can really be told. The poetry's so beautiful because it so well tells these stories of working to death in Chinese factories, doubting one's ability to support his family suffering misfortune after misfortune, trying to survive in a wildly changing country, hoping not to be left behind, having to flee, not being able to flee...These are people so often characterized by their suffering, it's easy to forget they're real people. This is where poetry, like Wang Ping's can triumph where news journalism cannot. Wang Ping tells these stories so we can meet these people through her poems and understand they're real people and the suffering is real. The focus, like all of Wang's work, is on the people themselves.I love the collage style she uses, mixing first-person narratives with statistics with images. It's a really beautiful book, and you should read it.