♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Major support for Poetry in America provided by the Dalio Foundation.

Additional support provided by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine and an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture.

And by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

And from Deborah Hayes Stone and Max Stone.

♪ ♪ MARILYN CHIN: Urban Love Poem.

Condominium, stiff bamboo, refuses to bend in the wind, squats in the sinking earth like a thin-hipped dowager.

You arrange the amenities, and we pay the rent.

So please, don't fall as civilizations fall in the comfort of night.

PETE LEE: It's structured like a Western poem, but it sneaks in all these little Eastern imageries and ties them into stories of our displacement.

CHIN: Gingko, vomit-eater of the metropolis, city's oxygen, small men's shadow, your gentle bark can't protect you now.

One pellicle, another, falls on the land of your displacement.

Where is the Yellow Emperor who nurtured you?

Where is your birthplace, the Yangtze, the Pearl?

MAXINE HONG KINGSTON: It's very much a poem of an immigrant.

She's come to this new place where she sees images of the old country.

So there's the constant reminders of nostalgia as she walks around San Francisco.

♪ ♪ CHIN: Hong Kong, San Francisco, San Jose, the path through the "Golden Mountains" is a three-tiered freeway.

Look up; it suspends where no prophet can touch.

A quick fix in your veins; a white rush in my mind.

You cry, "Mei Ling, Mei Ling, once we could've had everything; the talent, the courage, the wherewithal."

RANDY KOMISAR: This poem's tone is important to instruct us, "How do we deal with change?"

CHIN: Oh, the small delectables of day: persimmons from Chinatown, a stroll through the Tenderloin with the man I love.

My darling, please, don't be sad.

I've parked my horse in this gray, gray sunrise to gather sweet crocuses and jonquils for you.

KINGSTON: Marilyn's young enough, she's really hip.

She knows, like, a punk kind of talk, and she knows the old language.

It's just incredible.

We don't have any other poet like this.

NEW: Marilyn Chin's "Urban Love Poem," first published in the 1990s, looks backward to San Francisco as gold rush boomtown and destination for immigrants from Asia.

And it looks forward, to the city's present as global tech hub.

"Urban Love Poem" has depth, but also edge, like the city it represents.

To explore this poem, I met with confirmed lovers of the city, including America's most distinguished novelist of Chinese-American experience, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Randy Komisar, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who came to the city, as Marilyn Shin did, in the 1970s.

KOMISAR: "Condominium, stiff bamboo, refuses to bend in the wind."

- The first word of this poem is condominium.

To begin a poem with the word condominium takes real guts.

(Komisar laughs) It's not a very poetic word.

It's, you know, multi-stories and multi-floors and many different rabbet-warren condominiums in those floors.

BETTE LOUIE: You picture these big steel buildings with concrete facades that have no personalities.

CHIN: When I was two in Hong Kong, the first thing I saw was bamboo scaffolding, made of strong green bamboo.

And that scaffolding is, you know, deep in my mind when I wrote this.

KINGSTON: She compares these buildings to bamboo, but they're stiff bamboo.

KOMISAR: This concrete structure, this stiff bamboo, not the bending bamboo that will endure changes in the wind, but a stiff bamboo.

NEW: A building that doesn't have a little bit of flex in San Francisco is in trouble.

(radios squawking) CHIN: In 1989, a big earthquake happened.

My apartment crumbled and I lost my beloved fish collection, and my books and everything, and it was, it was-- it was heartbreaking.

KINGSTON: The condominiums, those buildings are sinking into the ground.

KOMISAR: "Squats in the sinking earth like a thin-hipped dowager."

KINGSTON: And the other image she uses is there, "like a thin-hipped dowager."

It's so... - So funny.

- Yeah.

LOUIE: You know, I can imagine these ladies or these people in the rice paddies, as you're squatting in the rice paddies.

And of course she's a, a thin-hipped dowager.

She squats, but she's not stable.

KINGSTON: Marilyn is bringing these ancient images right into modern-day San Francisco.

CHIN: You arrange the amenities and we pay the rent.

So please, don't fall, as civilizations fall, in the comfort of night.

- "You arrange the amenities and we pay the rent."

That's, that's the punchline in this stanza.

This is the trade-off we've made.

There's a transactional quality.

Do you own it?

Do you not own it?

CHIN: Are you illegally subletting?

I remember my mom telling me that the Chinese here in San Francisco had been moved many, many, many times.

♪ ♪ CHIN: We never quite own this real estate.

We're all squatters on this earth.

KINGSTON: This is a deeply felt Chinese feeling, that kingdoms rise and fall, civilizations fall.

♪ ♪ PEREZ-WONG: Gingko, vomit-eater of the metropolis, city's oxygen, small men's shadow... LOUIE: Your gentle bark can't protect you now.

KOMISAR: Gingko's a Chinese immigrant.

And it's an ancient immigrant.

It's one of the oldest species of trees anywhere.

I think it's hundreds of millions of years old.

ELAINE CHU: A very big part of growing up in San Francisco, you smell and you see the gingko leaves and the fruit.

CHIN: The fruit's very smelly, but it can survive terrible pollution.

KINGSTON: Then you just get shocked when you're reading this poem, and then you see "vomit," and not just vomit, but "vomit-eater."

It eats vomit?

Does that mean it's cleaning up the city?

I mean, this thing definitely has a sense of humor.

NEW: And yet this tree is able to process all of that garbage.

CHIN: We're a very resilient people, and we all are very resilient-- we're, we're migrants.

It is really a a self-portrait-- I am the gingko tree.

I came from this long lineage of peasants that survive drought, communism, Japanese takeover.

It survived this horrific history of suffering.

NEW: So we're beginning to think about San Francisco as a city of immigrants and of Chinese immigrants, especially.

KOMISAR: And, by the way, doing the dirty work.

And, and so this gingko is very representative of wave after wave of immigrants that established themselves by doing the hard, dirty work of the city.

CHIN: One pellicle, another, falls on the land of your displacement.

Where is the Yellow Emperor who nurtured you?

Where is your birthplace, the Yangtze, the Pearl?

KINGSTON: There came all these men, these lonely men, and they were coming from the Yangtze.

Uh, they were coming from the Yellow River, but mostly they were coming from the Pearl River Delta.

And this is where most of us came from.

NEW: The tone has a sort of faux-sentimental... CHIN: Oh, yeah, it's, like, "Oh, the..." You seem to be making fun of a sort of stylized, nostalgic longing.

CHIN: Of course, I was born in Hong Kong.

I know nothing about the Yellow... You know, do I know the Yangtze and the Pearl?

Do we know, you know, about our dynastic past?

♪ ♪ NEW: The voice of this poet has a real vernacular American sound, as well as something that sounds Chinese... KINGSTON: Marilyn can read classical Chinese poetry, and she can speak the dialect that's in the streets, and, and she puts it all into her poetry.

It's not a fusion and it's not a synthesis.

It's an interesting kind of mash-up.

CHIN: It's interesting about mixing dictions.

Perhaps "Yellow Emperor," it's a little exotic, and yet that's juxtaposed against a gingko and a vomit-eater.

So, it's just really about conflicting feelings.

My undergraduate degree was in classical Chinese poetry.

I mean, it's just really a nerdy... (laughs): Thing to do, but, but I love Tang Dynasty poetry.

And this poem, this, really, octaves and, and that's fashioned after Tu Fu's octaves.

I'm trying to mix East and West.

And high and low.

High and low, street and, and sublime.

real and surreal.

KINGSTON: Hong Kong, San Francisco, San Jose, The path through the "Golden Mountains" is a three-tiered freeway.

Look up; it suspends where no prophet can touch.

PEREZ-WONG: My great-grandmother, when she came over in 1906, she was under the impression that all the streets in San Francisco were paved in gold.

From the beginning, everybody has always said, they've referred to San Francisco specifically as the Gold Mountain, the Gum San.

KINGSTON: In all human imagination, there are the seven cities of gold, and there's the Gold Mountain.

And this is what Columbus was looking for, and then 1849 came, and there was, they actually found gold here.

♪ ♪ CHIN: The Chinese prospectors, 20,000 of them, came to San Francisco to work in the gold mines, and they called it Gao Gum San, the Golden Mountains.

These are my people, the Cantonese, the Toisanese that came from the southern provinces.

They were the peasants.

KINGSTON: So they were coming with the gold rush, and then the next rush would be the building of the railroads.

(explosion echoes) The path through the Gold Mountains was the tunneling through the Sierras for the railroad.

Right after railroads were built and we didn't need those men anymore, there were pogroms and burnings of Chinatowns, and lynchings.

LEE: We've been here for generations, and we kind of got exploited and exported out of China, uh, you know, with this promise of Gold Mountains.

KINGSTON: And remember, the gingko looks like small men's shadow.

She's talking about small men?

Why're the men small?

Chinatowns were just filled with men.

There were Chinese men here, but no women.

So they took women's jobs.

They did the laundry and they did the cooking.

Restaurants and laundry, so they were emasculated.

So maybe that's why she's saying that there are small men here.

But by Marilyn's time, her pathways through these Golden Mountains is on these freeways.

NEW: And so there's two histories layered one on another.

CHIN: That's the new railroad, right?

And someone has to build those.

NEW: "Hong Kong, San Francisco, San Jose."

There's a sort of necklace of connected cities.

CHIN: That's right, it's globalization.

You have the freeway from Hong Kong to San Francisco by air, and then you have... NEW: And by sea.

KOMISAR: And by sea, that's right.

And then you have the freeway, of course, from San Francisco to San Jose, which is now in rush hour, terminal rush hour, eight hours a day.

LOUIE: The three-tiered freeway, I feel a lot of hustle and bustle and activity, and that's more from the tech world.

Silicon Valley, encroaching.

LOUIE: In the 1990s and later, San Jose became a destination point for people from, from Asia.

CHIN: Perhaps the new Golden Mountains maybe is Google.

♪ ♪ I love this, "Quick fix in your veins, a white rush in my mind."

I love, that is so poignant to me, because it, that's what the city feels like.

It's a white rush.

LEE: The satellite image makes the highways look like veins, and, I don't know, maybe progress is a drug.

LOUIE: You see these words, and you immediately think, way back when, you know, people would come down here for the opium dens.

CHIN: I had a friend who was hooked on cocaine.

NEW: This poem does seem to take us back to the speaker's youth.

I love San Francisco, but I can't go back.

There's just something about that place.

It's just the memories of the '70s... ♪ ♪ Where Santana used to play for free in the Mission District.

Where the flower children ran amok.

♪ ♪ NEW: The poem takes us to the moment in your 20s when you drink too much, and you work too much, and you grab too much.

You know, when you're in your 20s, you're just driven by, like, hormones and ego.

CHIN: That quick fix of junk, that quick fix of money, of, of ambition, it's all there.

♪ ♪ NEW: We get this speaker, "Mei Ling, Mei Ling, once we could have had everything."

I love the rhyme there.

"The talent, the courage," and then that amazingly anti-climactic, "the wherewithal."

(laughs) To end that verse on "wherewithal," oh, such a funny word.

She refers to herself as Mei Ling, her Chinese name.

This is her poet's name.

So I see this as her deep Chinese self.

And looking back at it from older age and seeing that in those days, we lived fast and hard.

It's not just about youthful carelessness or...

I think it's about greed, about Gold Mountain as a place where you might get rich.

KOMISAR: We could have had everything.

The talent, the courage, the wherewithal.

Each generation that comes into the city does think they can have everything.

And in the light of day, you know, it's a little shabby.

PEREZ-WONG: Oh, the small delectables of day: persimmons from Chinatown, a stroll through the Tenderloin with the man I love.

KINGSTON: My darling, please, don't be sad.

I've parked my horse in this gray, gray sunrise to gather sweet crocuses and jonquils for you.

NEW: This poem is called "Urban Love Poem."

What kind of love or loves are we talking about?

KOMISAR: I first thought that the love she was talking about was a romantic love.

And the more I read the poem, the more I felt like that romantic love was a romantic love for the city.

She doesn't much talk about her lover.

It just seems like she's strolling through San Francisco and thinking about how it is a romantic place.

CHIN: There was a poetry reading on every corner.

There were bookstores.

There was a way to be a bohemian poet.

They had a reputation of being the place where you get to experiment a little bit.

Is this a poem to the city?

Is this a poem about urban lovers?

It's all the above-- it's about the self representing something larger.

The love that stands out for me in this poem is the kind of love that might have happened in the Tenderloin, in San Francisco, at a certain time.

Giddy, a little bit dangerous.

Maybe young.

- Yeah, young in that, maybe it's not gonna last forever.

What does she call it?

She calls it, "the small delectables," which is gonna, this isn't, "We're not gonna have a long-term marriage here.

We're gonna have a small delectable."

KOMISAR: Oh, the small delectables of day: persimmons from Chinatown.

CHIN: That's another ancient Chinese fruit, but on the local level, you do get those beautiful persimmons in Chinatown.

I love persimmons-- they're sweet, they're a beautiful color, they're small enough, you know, to just take a bite and get the juices in your mouth.

KOMISAR: I can picture that wrinkled Chinese woman sitting on that street in Chinatown with her basket of persimmons.

Three for a dollar.

I can imagine walking past and buying three, with no intention of having bought anything.

LEE: "A stroll through the Tenderloin with the man I love."

The Tenderloin is gritty.

There's a dark side to the Tenderloin, it's always been seen as kind of dangerous, a little bit seedy.

It was a place of vices, but on the other hand, it also had this sort of organic feel to it.

LEE: It's a pretty common thing among San Franciscans to really take pride in enjoying... (laughs): the dustier sides of our city.

PEREZ-WONG: The Tenderloin is a place that is rough on the exterior, but that has a lot of soul.

CHIN: One could taste that persimmon and walk around with your boyfriend and, or girlfriend, and you, and you're in love and it's fine.

NEW: You're just invulnerable, that love gives you these, these beautiful, ripe, discreet days where... CHIN: Yes!

NEW: Nothing can touch you.

♪ ♪ KINGSTON: A few days ago, I read this poem to my poetry circle.

When I got to this last verse, people wept.

And I think that last verse has a very different tone and atmosphere from the other verses.

I think it is coming from very far away.

It sounds much, much like the classical poems.

There are so many stories about lovers being parted.

I think she's calling upon these ancient stories.

♪ ♪ CHIN: And also we go back to horses, to the days of the Gold Rush, to... NEW: Cowboys.

CHIN: To, to 1848.

NEW: And we're also reminded that San Francisco was a destination of pioneers.

It's almost as though a cowboy rides in on horseback, so that these two rivers of migration and immigration meet here in San Francisco.

KOMISAR: I juxtapose the horse to the reference to the three-tiered freeway.

Because here we've stepped back from the hustle and bustle and frenzy and anxiety of the city.

♪ ♪ CHIN: My darling, please, don't be sad.

I've parked my horse in this gray, gray sunrise to gather sweet crocuses and jonquils for you.

It's okay to have a little cheesiness in a poem, right?

A cheesy love.

♪ ♪ LEE: If you want to be here for longer than three months, you have to have a sense of humor about, uh, the city and what you love about it.

As much as you fell head over heels in love the day you got here, months, years later, it's more mature-- a mature love for the city, an understanding that it's not everything, um, and still it's worth loving.

♪ ♪ KINGSTON: In this gray, gray sunrise...

In San Francisco, we get gray, gray sunrises, and so it keeps it sad and nostalgic and foggy.

♪ ♪ And all through the city, there's the myths, or the fog, that is the dreams and nostalgia and knowledge of the old country.

And it permeates this new modern place that we're in.

♪ ♪ Major support for Poetry in America provided by the Dalio Foundation.

Additional support provided by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine and an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture.

And by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and from Deborah Hayes Stone and Max Stone.

For additional information and streaming content, please visit us at poetryinamerica.org.