Born in Alicante, Valencia, poet, researcher, and journalist Paloma Chen dedicates herself to advancing migrant justice in Spain. Her first collection of poetry, Invocación a las mayorías silenciosas (Calling On All Silent Majorities, Letraversal, 2022), explores the depths and diversity of the Chinese diasporic experience in Spain through a kaleidoscope of voices, encompassing mothers, daughters, sisters, and lovers, while at the same time always challenging the suppositions of language. “Shanshui Pixel Scenes 山水像素场景,” published as an app in 2023 and translated by Paloma and her colleagues into Catalan, Mandarin, and English, renews the form of 山水诗, or “poetry of mountains and waters,” by pairing pixel art depicting scenes from China and the Chinese diaspora with poems that deepen the speaker’s relationships with their multiple and ceaselessly transforming selves. In the following interview, I spoke with Paloma about the importance of orality and quotidian language in her poetry, writing in community, and the multiplicity of the self.
Julia Conner (JC): In your essay “No tengo más que una literatura y no es la mía.” you mention how you envision Invocación embodying a Chinese diaspora collection of poetry, much like Sally Wen Mao’s Oculus being an Asian American poetry collection. When writing Invocación, how did you imagine your work in conversation with previously published literary works, both from Spain and abroad?
Paloma Chen (PC): I really like Asian-American poets like Sally Wen Mao, Marilyn Chin, Franny Choi, and Li-Young Lee, so their poetry was a great inspiration for me, as I wanted to write in Spanish, for readers in Spain, but taking into account my Chinese roots. Most of their works were truly enlightening and helped me build my own poetic language. I was trying to carve out a little space, one in which I can also find poets like Berna Wang, Minke Wang, Ale Oseguera, or Gio Collazos, that I could find liberating, one in which I could express the complexities regarding identity that I was all these years reflecting about. There is no me without all those before me, and all those walking with me right now. There is no Invocación without all the amazing books and artwork I had the privilege to encounter, without hundreds of fruitful conversations and lived experiences. I was writing for my friends, the amazing community of artists and activists, not only from the Chinese community, but from the anti-racist, feminist, Queer movements present in many places. I did not know if my book, which I thought was a very specific work by a Spanish-Chinese girl talking about her reality growing up in a little restaurant in rural Spain, could have the potential to connect with readers abroad, but I am happy to know that maybe it has.
JC: Many of your poems from Invocación center on speech and communication, fluency, disfluency, and the function of language. “Pero habla,” for example, repeats the visually interrupted line “pala/bras part/idas que hi/eren.” Your work also has powerful oral and rhythmic qualities to it. How do you see the relationship between the themes of your work and your poetry’s orality and visual form on the page?
PC: I guess that for a writer and a poet, reflecting about language itself is quite common. In my specific case, reflecting about identity inevitably leads me to reflect about language, as identities, languages, and cultures are so closely interrelated. Also, I do not think poetic language is that different from the quotidian tool we use to communicate daily. Our every-day interactions are full of poetry. The fact that in my normal life I am used to thinking about communication, fluency, and disfluency doubtless permeates my writing. I have always struggled to communicate, to express myself in the way that society demands me to. I studied journalism at university because I was truly worried about it back then. Some people think of me as being quite shy sometimes but, in a huge contrast, quite expressive in my poetry. For me, writing poetry is establishing a conversation with another true self, a self empowered by voice, body, presence, rhythm, a self that is connected with the environment and less in its own head. Because I value orality, I like to experiment also with the visual form of the verses in the page, so the reader can also have some visual clues of tones, silences, vibrations, etc.
JC: Your comment about the everyday interactions being full of poetry feels especially pertinent. Likewise, everyday interactions can also be rife with linguistic harm. I appreciate the places in your work that address the racism contained within quotidian language, such as in “Toda la vida” in reference to the RAE’s definition of “negro” and the ubiquity of the phrase “trabajo de chinos.” Do you see poetry as a means to transform everyday language?
PC: Definitely! Just as our every-day language permeates my poetry, poetry permeates my every-day language. So if with poetry we can invent new ways to name our silenced realities, then they will be silenced no more, and that is so powerful! The fact that our quotidian language is full of racist expressions means that our society is full of racist expressions. Poetry can help us to re-think and re-invent it.
JC: In “Para las chiñolas,” you speak distinctly as part of a “we,” and in “Invocación a las mayorías silenciosas,” you speak to a collective “you,” “a vosotras.” These two poems follow a sequence of deeply intimate poems spoken by an “I.” How do you view the relationship between the individual and the collective throughout the collection?
PC: “I am large, I contain multitudes,” right? I had a friend that used to joke that I had seven different personalities. The thing is, that is not only me, but everybody. We never come to know 100% of anybody, not even ourselves. I am constantly surprised by the “me” that wakes up, the “me” that goes to sleep, the “me” that struggles to speak Chinese, the “me” that goes to the supermarket, the “me” crazily in love, the “me” in the Mediterranean, the “me” in the Yellow Mountains . . . And all of them are “me.” So it is the same with “you,” and sometimes “you” are “me,” and there is no distinction, and we are a “we,” but other times I am not even “me,” I am just void, 空. That is, in general, how I feel about the relationship between the individual and the collective. Specifically regarding the collection, in some poems the poetic voice finds itself belonging to a clear group or collective (the “chiñolas”) and sometimes is calling and invoking others that may belong to the same collective (or not) to welcome them: my own past selves, our future daughters, the readers. . .
JC: Your second collection of poetry and smartphone application, “Shanshui Pixel Scenes 山水像素场景,” thrives on multidisciplinary creation and collaboration, including pixel art, audio recordings, and translations. In the foreword, Julio Hu Chen describes your work as “closer to scenes than simple poems because of their roots and rhizomes” and also as revolving around corporeality, or an “Asian and Chinese diasporic womxn body” as a “living memory in motion that has to be understood from its place on earth, not from an identity and algebraic conceptualization.” Can you talk about how you came to the idea of publishing a poetry collection in the form of an app and how you view your poems as corporeal scenes in this sense?
PC: The software developer and video-games musician Raúl Sangonzalo wanted to create a pixel art wallpapers app representing scenes of China, and he invited me to write some texts that could enter into dialogue with them. As I became more and more involved in the process, I started to write poems that could be grouped together as a collection, and I started to work alongside the pixel artists thinking about scenes that were not only about China, but also about the Chinese diasporic community in Spain, and other issues in which I am interested, like technology and hopeful futures. I was also quite interested in the fact that an app can be accessed by more people than a somewhat pricey book; not everyone can buy books, so this was also a way of making poems and artworks more available. For me, it was a must to include my voice reciting the poems; as I have explained in a previous question, orality is something that I really value. The pixel art aesthetic made me think about the realm of video-games and about how art is developing in new forms and it can help us towards empathy and social equity.
JC: “Shanshui Pixel Scenes 山水像素场景” includes translations into Catalan, English, and Mandarin, which are all credited to yourself. What is the significance of presenting the collection of poetry in these four languages, and how did you experience the process of self translation?
PC: Spanish, Catalan, English, and Mandarin are the four languages in which I consciously live, so even if I normally just write in Spanish, I wanted to experience the process of self-translation and to know more about the poems of those Catalan, English, and Chinese “my-selves,” that all as “my-selves” are somewhat foreign and local at the same time. Fortunately, I had the help of the translators Layla Benítez-James and Ian Farnes for English, of my high school teacher Néstor Torres for Catalan, and of my friends, actress and writer Yan Huang and researcher Yuying Song for Chinese. They have been my other “my-selves” for my other dear languages in which I am not proficient or fluent enough. The process was painful, joyful, and enriching.
JC: The overall effect of the translations is quite striking. Is there any example in the translation that left a particularly memorable impression on you?
PC: Layla Benítez-James and Ian Farnes had many smart questions for my English translations about what I meant in specific verses or with specific words. I was surprised myself that even if I did not know the answer at first, I always came up with some explanation. After all, all translations are interpretations. The variety of meanings I intend to transmit in Spanish sometimes is lost in the translations because keeping them is difficult or sometimes impossible. But I do think you can also gain a lot with the translations, and in the opportunities I had to recite in other languages I always enjoy the feeling. In the case of Catalan, with the help of Néstor Torres, I did a translation that kept close to the Catalan variant that we speak in the Valencian Community, different from the one spoken in Catalonia. As I used to study classic Catalan poetry as a teenager, reading my poems in Catalan was, again, a wonderful experience. And lastly, with the case of Mandarin, the process was so beautiful because I have been also helping my friend, actress and poet Yan Huang, with her poetry in Spanish, and having her in this project taught me so many things.
JC: In the final poem of “Shanshui Pixel Scenes 山水像素场景,” “Dear Daughter of Immigrants,” you write, “There is nothing more useless than the discourse of integration / We have not spent our lives dodging missiles to now target prey.” You are also involved in or collaborate with cultural organizations such as Liwai and Tusanaje. How do you view your role as a poet in connection with your involvement in Chinese diasporic cultural community spaces such as these?
PC: All my work and life areas are deeply connected. My poetry relates to my journalism, teaching, research, activism, because all areas inspire, feed, and sustain each other. I am deeply indebted to Tusanaje, Liwai, Catàrsia, and many many others. Just to mention some names: Rodrigo Campos, Susana Ye, Cris Zhang Yu, Quan Zhou, Chenta Tsai, Jiajie Yu Yan . . . My collaboration with Tusanaje started in 2017 in Shanghai and helped me discover how various Chinese diasporic communities from Latin America worked. They gave me the strength to start writing about these topics. My collaboration with Liwai started about one year later when I wanted to bring all those learnings to my activity in Spain, and I could meet the wonderful artists, educators, and activists that are now part of Red de Diáspora China en España. The spaces that we built gave me the courage to start reciting poetry and show my works.
JC: In the past year, multiple poetry collections from Chinese diaspora writers in Spain have been published, including Crecer como hierbas salvajes by Yan Huang and Trashumante en arenas movedizas by Susana Ye. Have you sensed any material or discursive changes for writers of Chinese descent in Spain since you first started?
PC: Yan Huang migrated to Spain when she was almost thirty years old. Her mother tongue is Mandarin and the dialect of her region (Jiangsu), but she writes mainly in Spanish, as well as Chinese and English. She is an actress and performer, so her gigs are truly engaging. Susana Ye has a profile more similar to mine (born and raised in Spain in a Chinese family), and she has been so far quite successful in her journalism career. I really like that she wrote about her Spanish family too, so she could show how complex identities, families, and in general, the lives of the second-generation are in reality. What I sense is that more and more writers from a wide range of origins in Spain are addressing urgent issues, and all of them have a very unique voice, so it is very worthwhile to follow them closely.
JC: How have the questions you address in your writing evolved over time? What are you working on next?
PC: My interests, in general, have broadened in two directions, again, closely related: on one hand, how we build collective spaces for all migrants and their descendants that are inclusive and safe in a Spain and Europe that are, day by day, less and less secure for us (with the rise of the far-right and right-wing extremism); on the other, how we can find alternative epistemologies that help us in our individual and collective struggle for liberation, for example, exploring traditional philosophies. Right now I am working on research that puts into conversation relational feminism and ethics of care with traditional Chinese philosophies and a collection of essays that, I hope, as Walter Benjamin said about Bertolt Brecht, “don’t start from the good old things but the bad new ones.”
Paloma Chen is a Spanish-Chinese journalist, poet, writer and researcher. She is part of the Transnational Migrant Platform-Europe and Red de Diáspora China en España. She is pursuing a Master’s Degree in Philosophy at Fudan University in Shanghai. She has published the poetry collection Invocación a las mayorías silenciosas (Letraversal) and the multilingual poetry app Shanshui Pixel Scenes 山水像素场景. Her poems have been included in anthologies like Matria poética: una antología de poetas migrantes (La Imprenta, 2023) and Última poesía crítica. Jóvenes poetas en tiempos de colapso (Lastura, 2023).
Julia Conner is a Chinese American teacher and translator from the United States South. She received her BA in Modern Languages and Literatures from Kenyon College and is a 2024-2025 Fulbright Student to Taiwan. Her work has appeared in Poetry in Action (Action Books).
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