Stephanie Niu’s debut collection, I Would Define the Sun, brims with salt, sea-creature, and island desire. Niu, a Fulbright scholar who conducted research on the remote Christmas Island just south of Indonesia, constructs a speaker who is island-like herself, isolated by her desire and yet simultaneously surrounded by a depth and plenitude of oceanic life. In “Sonnet of Tropical Excess,” she writes:
Can our selves across time warn? I know mine can
lure—younger, I desired this island so strongly
I carved a path that stayed clear for years.
Even earlier, islandless, I was in love.
I still don’t know what I wanted more of.
Niu’s speaker is stranded in her longing, reminiscent of Bishop’s “Crusoe in England.” Even when the speaker is on Christmas Island and her desire for the island is fulfilled, the desire for her faraway lover is made even sharper.
Niu captures the everyday negotiations of island life: the limited food resources, the intimacy of shared living, and the encroachment of the wild in human spaces. Her poems, in their form and content, adopt an island economy. She is careful with her words, delivering lines with gorgeous precision that rely on their conciseness. The reality of island dynamics is also emphasized by her interest in waste. Garbage features more than once in the collection, not just as a symbol of lost resources, but as a source of new potential. Niu’s garbage clangs with “music” and possibility. In “The Magic of Eating Garbage,” the speaker describes how she will transform her rotting leftovers into “gumbo, stir fry soup—I want to feed my guests the magic of reuse.” This “alchemy” makes what was destined for the trash into something that tastes “abundant,” a skill that erupts not just from necessity and an environmentalist’s perspective, but also one that requires the same reinvention as poetry itself.
Making use of what others do not value—eels, jellyfish, secondhand clothes—therefore becomes the speaker’s way to move away from desire, and the lack that it implies, into a measure of abundance. Hunger is reframed through sustenance and sustainability. Or, at least, the speaker aims to do so. But even in moments of the purest reciprocity and sharing, the speaker finds herself greedy, unsatisfied by what she is given, ever wanting more. In the poem “Christmas Island,” she describes in detail the fresh wahoo her host has fished for them to eat, their bodies cut into “firm chunks almost translucent.” These are the same species of fish she swam alongside that very morning, “their long bodies glinting like blades”:
I slice into the meat. I will eat this seared,
with soy sauce and juice from the neighbor’s
calamansi tree. I imagine the chase,
the long body twisting in evening light.
The clear fins trembling in a truck bed.
I taste the fish. I wish for more.
The speaker consumes this animal, made delicious from the resources that immediately surround her. But it is not enough. The speaker desires something more, something else. The syntax of the poem makes us unsure whether there is any amount of fish that would satisfy this craving. Perhaps the speaker is really referencing her distant lover, or a different kind of fullness that only mainland capitalist culture can provide. Perhaps the island’s geography offers a kind of detox from this overconsumption, a contrast that makes these indeterminate longings more acute in the absence of excess to disguise them. The speaker’s honesty in these moments of desire are what power the collection’s voice, and this is what allows readers to trust her as she leads us deeper into the poems’ oceanic landscape.
The speaker’s relationship to Christmas Island is made more complicated by her inherent foreignness, a fact that, while it isn’t an explicit topic of Niu’s work, nuances how the collection navigates its sense of place. Christmas Island is the closest to a physical “home” the speaker renders, but it also a place in which she experiences a profound isolation and longing. Christmas Island is notably the location of Niu’s research, which positions her as a Stanford-educated academic who lives alongside local life, a perpetual observer. The speaker therefore cannot take root in Christmas Island itself. In her search for self-definition, she turns outward to the ocean that surrounds it.
The ocean in Niu’s collection serves as a source of the self, a kind of mother which is related to the mothering of language as well as the speaker’s own biological mother. In “The Ocean in Miniature,” the speaker describes how the underwater world pressurizes words into new forms. The world of literary meaning gives way to the realities of environment:
iiiiiiiiiiiiHere, the vastness
of a word like depth or death or knowing
becomes bowl sponge. Comb jelly.
Things that fit in my palm.
Underwater, where light wavers and gathers in uncertain pools, the world is somehow made more legible. The speaker longs to be submerged in the ocean’s mystery, its capacity to hold so much in its murk. The ocean is as deep and clarifying as the self. This interest in non-land-based truth is seen elsewhere in other poetry collections, including Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Oceanic (Copper Canyon Press, 2018). I Would Define The Sun can even be situated within a larger exploding genre of Pacifica poetry which imagines the ocean as a source of decolonial knowledge. But Niu makes a further leap from the ocean as a mother of language to the ocean as a physical mother.
Niu’s musings on her maternal lineage are all expressed through a connection to water. In the beginning of the collection, in “My Mother Says Water Dreams Are Auspicious,” the speaker describes her mother’s horrifying dream of a miscarriage and how this dream came true. Water dreams are an inverse of this, a symbol of luck, of birth. Information and meaning is transferred through this water, much like the act of mothering.
Later in the collection, “兰” (lán), tracks this maternal lineage through the speaker’s grandmother. The poem is an ode to a particular shade of almost-blue, a not-quite blue, inspired by the sonic similarity the character shares to the actual word for “blue” in Chinese. The rough ocean of language between the speaker and her grandmother is difficult to traverse:
The years my grandmother
begged us to speak
in her language. The color
of a sky full of tropical storm.
…
It rhymes but isn’t right.
Not blue, but the sound
blue makes. The last sound
in my grandmother’s name.
This blue is a sea-blue within the collection’s oceanic image system, another moment in which language collapses into its environmental, genetic origins. The poem’s conclusion hints at an imprecision of language that results from a loss of mother tongue, but that offers new possibilities for meaning-making. In the context of diaspora, Asian American life is often island-like itself. It can be a geographically isolated form of cultural meaning through which one is constantly negotiating one’s relationship to the whole, to one’s ancestors’ country of origin.
Niu does not offer a clear path out of the loss she feels—of lover, of home, of language—but she points to the generative nature of the desire these losses elicit, as in “兰.” The poem “My Mother Says Water Dreams Are Auspicious” hypothesizes that images only “approximate meaning.” If so, the images of this debut collection form vibrant, complex approximations of island life, just as the poems contain a budding, pearlescent approximation of their speaker.