Lin Pang is a queer and trans Asian American poet and youth worker based in Boston. Born in the year of the dog like their grandmother, Lin's writing explores queerness, family histories, gender, and the ghosts of trauma. Lin is a Pink Door Fellow, 2017 FEM Slam finalist, and founding member of Disrupt Slam at Tufts University. Their work is published or forthcoming in Winter Tangerine and Crab Fat Magazine: Best of Year Three print anthology. Lin teaches poetry workshops with teens at GrubStreet, and coordinates leadership development programs at BAGLY, one of the longest running LGBTQ+ youth organizations in the country. You can find Lin online at linypang.com or on Instagram @lin.pang_. You can find Lin irl reading queer fiction, hiking, eating noodles, or at the barn with the horses.
"Having the opportunity to write my own story down and have my narrative be affirmed by people when others hadn’t believed me or gaslighted me, was one of the most powerful experiences of my life."
kait/lin
by: Lin Pang
And I've been a forest fire
I am a forest fire
And I am the fire and I am the forest
And I am a witness watching it
I stand in a valley watching it
And you are not there at all
[Lyrics from “A Burning Hill” by Mitski]
I take a match to my given name,
birth a hundred glowing possibilities-
Kaitlin: Irish, pure, derived from Catherine
a moniker my mother and the government own
Lin: Chinese, forest, carved from Kaitlin
or how I pulled the girl out by the roots
I singe a line through my given name,
devour binders and peaches all summer
spark a fearful joy full of gender
a new email address and stuttered introductions
before English I spoke my name in Cantonese first
paang jan jan, same sound twice
a Confucian heirloom I learned to tongue
our mouths with so many words for the same grief
I name myself and tell my mother I am still her child
I am sorry for craving a different kind of life
I want to tell her I love her like any good daughter would
I wish self-actualization did not have a cost
to want a body tall and strong
to be shade and refuge for others
when fire turns a forest to ash,
nature says it is a vital part of the ecosystem
in order to thrive, some things must burn
so I clear the thick growth- debris and dead matter
sunlight stretches to reach all the stuck places
maybe I am resilient enough to survive my own arson
a forest burns down and a wildflower starts to bloom
a match ignites and my mother no longer recognizes me
I am both the decay and the bloom
a rebirth illegible to my own blood and kin
Ma, ngo oi nei
ngo gui paang jan jan
nei ho ji giu ngo Lin
ngo sing paang
speak my name and wrap around the vowel
let your mouth get used to my song
call me anything but what you anointed me at American labor & birth
sing my name in all our tongues
TS: Tell me about your first exposure to poetry.
LP: Other than going to high school where I read poetry by dead White men in English class, my exposure to more political poetry and spoken word poetry was probably my first year of school at Tufts. Around that time, a collective called Spoken Word at Tufts was starting up and there were a lot of different open mics in campus. I started to attend those as I developed more of a political conscience. I had done theater all throughout middle school and high school, and I really like performing but I never felt like there were roles for me as an Asian person. I played White women characters and other really problematic roles, so I felt like coming into the open mic and poetry scene at Tufts was a way for me to make sense of everything I was learning about myself and which communities I belonged to, while also finally getting the chance to perform but on my own terms.
TS: Tell me about your journey through poetry, what content did you deal with, what forms have you explored?
LP: I believe my writing speaks to the contradictions and liminal spaces- particularly experiences of queerness and transness, Asian American diasporas, healing from sexual violence/loving through hauntings, and belonging. What interests me most about these tensions and contradictions is how we survive through them and with them. I think most of my poetry in the beginning was very generic Asian American diaspora poetry. At the time, I identified as a cis straight person, and I hadn’t come out yet so I didn’t really deal with the themes that I do now. I started my writing with the topic of immigration history and while it was obviously relevant to me as an Asian American, it was very much not specific to my own family or personal history. It was very general racialized history of Asians in America such as the Chinese Exclusion Act and the history of hypersexualization with Asian women. Then moving into my second year of school, I relied on poetry a lot in a completely different way as I was recovering from an abusive relationship. I leaned on my poetry and poetry communities to get support and start my healing. I wrote a lot about that experience and the trauma involved in that. Then I came out as queer and trans, and now most of my poetry deals with navigating those identities in an immigrant family and more specific to my family history. Now, I aim to write poetry that could only comes from me and my voice, and is specific to my experience. I was very much into writing only freeform spoken word when I started but now I’m experimenting more with forms such as the pantune (which is a Malaysian poetic form) and the contrapuntal. Topics wise, I hope to expand and write more about joy, love, and the people and things that make me happy!
TS: What have been your influences, whether it be other writers, social issues or your experience as a queer person?
LP: A lot of my poetry comes from situations where I feel like I didn’t have agency or power. So often, I’ll revisit that situation and put myself in a position where I was able to speak back or stand up for myself. Things like street harassment or conversations that went wrong with my family, for example. I get inspiration from other queer and trans poets of color. There are so many brilliant poets doing amazing work with their craft and form! Some of my favorite poets are Danez Smith, Franny Choi, Fatimah Asghar, and Ocean Vuong. They’ve inspired me and pushed me to be a more honest writer. I read a lot of poetry to help me break out of certain forms I’m writing in, or try different techniques and voices. It has all been very connected to my own experiences. I’ve used poetry to navigate and understand what I’m going through. I think a lot about what it means to be a poet in these current times- what responsibilities do we have? What does it mean to be a queer and trans person of color, specifically Asian American, right now? How can we do the necessary work of documenting survival and resistance?
TS: How has your poetry changed from before to after coming out?
LP: I always knew I was queer in a way, or at least different. efore coming out, I would focus more on feeling racially othered, and now I try to look at the intersections between being queer, trans, and Asian. There is so much to explore and learn about my peoples and my identity, and I feel that poetry is a healing and challenging tool to do that work. Queer and trans Asian identity is not an experience I see written about in a mainstream way or on TV or movies. So it’s important for me to create that representation and do that exploration for myself. Coming out has connected me to poetry communities of queer/trans poets of color.They make me better and push me always think about the responsibilities I hold as an artist and writer in this time in . But coming out completely changed not only the way that I view myself and the world, but also the way that I wrote about myself and what I could write about. It changed the way I grappled with my identity and the way I navigated the world.
TS: What challenges have you faced as a queer POC writer?
LP: As a queer and trans Chinese Malaysian American, I have felt very lost and unseen in the majority of the arts and writing spaces I move through. I’ve been told that who I am, how I write, and the topics I explore are both too much and not enough. I feel like in a lot of queer and trans spaces, especially trans poetry spaces, the dominant narrative is always a White transmasculine perspective and while a good amount of us queer Asian poets exist,specifically in performance poetry, there just aren’t as many as I would like to see. It can feel a bit lonely at times.
In my experiences with my family and navigating my queerness and gender identity, I felt like people didn’t really respect or understand why I made the choices I made. It’s hard because when I write about my family, I sometimes feel a lot of responsibility to not portray them in a negative way because I worry that people will say “all immigrants or Asians or POC are homophobic and transphobic.” Because I know that’s a stereotype and misconception that a lot of white queers will put upon us.
I’ve also been asked to perform at queer and trans readings with the explicit request of “we need diversity so can you perform at my event” this one instance, there was a white trans woman who told me that they were doing an all trans reading line-up but it was all white. so they asked if I could perform for them for no compensation. Things like that happen a lot where they’ll be like “we need one, can that be you?” I feel tokenized and weird even in some of these progressive arts spaces.
As a non Black poet, I also want to be aware of my positionality because so much of the poetry spaces I am lucky to be apart of and so much of performance poetry comes from Black art forms and from Black artists and poets. When folks reach out to me to me as a token QTPOC poet for their event, I also feel wary because this often means they find me more palatable as a lighter skinned Asian poet for their non-White representation which is really racist and anti-Black. I try my best to be mindful of the space I take up as a non Black and lighter skinned non-White person. I think that nuance is important to name because so much can be flattened under the QTPOC label.
And in general, I grew up in a rural White area and the only queer people I saw were white cis men so I essentially thought that I couldn’t be queer or trans because I had no role models, and nobody in my life to look up to or to see myself reflected in. It’s something that I think about a lot when I write and it’s weird because I don’t want to always feel like “I need to create this representation” because I can also just be a person who simply exists and writes poetry for a purpose that doesn’t always have to be greater than myself and have that be enough.
TS: Can you talk about the power of reclaiming space, and how you do that with your writing?
LP: The literary world is so white, with all the dead white men in poetry classes and books. And I think it’s important to write our narratives and create that history for ourselves. When I was in college on the Tufts slam team, we had a series of negative experiences where we would perform at regional slams and there would be all White teams who would perform poetry that was really problematic and disrespectful. They didn’t think about the space they took up or how their presence and poetry made others feel. We talked about how we wanted our team to disrupt those spaces and reclaim those spaces. I’m not at Tufts anymore but the team has since been called Disrupt Slam, and that’s something I carry with me and is one of the reasons I think it’s important to write. And personally, it really saved my life coming out of an abusive relationship and having poetry as a healing tool. Poetry doesn’t replace therapy for me but it has definitely helped me in my journey to heal and love myself. I also feel that if I don’t write my own narrative, it’s going to be distorted or something’s going to be assumed about it so when I write poetry, I try to think about that message as well.
TS: Do you consider yourself an activist, how does this shine through in your writing?
LP: I use words like youth worker or organizer to describe myself. I work at an LGBTQ+ youth organization and am passionate about supporting youth leadership through programming and advocacy work. I think the word “activist” has some negative connotation to it unfortunately though I don’t think it should. When I write I don’t necessarily think about my poems as activism before anything else, but it is obviously connected to structures, history, and speaking back to systems of power, etc. So it does come through since I try to challenge binaries of gender, sexuality, and other social constructions. Nothing is apolitical. I feel like a lot of my writing talks about the in-between and liminal spaces.
TS: How have you healed through writing?
LP: I always say that writing has saved my life and people think I’m corny when I say that. But I truly believe that it did. Not just the act of writing but being able to be part of a community and network of people who believed me. In being a survivor and leaving that abusive place, having the opportunity to write my own story down and have my narrative be affirmed by people when others hadn’t believed me or gaslighted me, was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. Sometimes hurt and violence happens and I will try to write poetry about it and it doesn’t always fix everything, or it’s not sufficient, or I need more time, then I can write about it. But if I can’t write about it right away or I’m not ready to, then I can go to people that I’ve met through poetry and through those communities that can help me. Poetry for me is also being part of those communities and healing with people who go through similar and different experiences.
TS: Name the poet that impacts you the most, or a poem that has impacted you.
LP: There is this poem that I talk about a lot, it’s by Cam Awkward-Rich, he’s an incredible Black trans poet. It’s called “I Think Door and There Is” and it’s very short, like a stanza. But it’s a poem that imagines a door and this person opens it. It imagines a different world where there is no hurt or violence or harassment. I like thinking of poetry as a way to imagine new ways of living and being, of better worlds and conditions than the ones we’re living in now. That can also be a way of healing: dreaming. I read that poem and it was so short but it really spoke to me and I think about it almost everyday. I know I have poems that deal with trauma and aren’t positive and happy which is fine, but it’s important for me to have writing that is imagining something better for us and that poem was a good model for me.
TS: Tell me a little about the poem you sent me: when you wrote it, why you wrote it?
LP: I struggled with writing that poem for a long time. It’s about choosing a name and then still having the history and legacy of a birth name as a trans person. A lot of what I’m trying to celebrate is growth and resilience and I really like metaphors about nature though I know it can get corny so I try not to make it too corny. I have always gravitated toward that kind of imagery especially when I was going through difficult times, with the idea of a spring and regrowth after destruction. Taking a lot of those messages as I was choosing a name for myself and figure out how to do that with my family, who saw it as a betrayal and “they don’t know who I am anymore”.
TS: What’s the significance of the lyrics at the top of the poem?
LP: I really like the artist Mitski, she is Asian American. I remember when I heard that song for the first time I felt like it punched me in the gut, and I’m dramatic like that. I was trying to think of names to choose for myself so I ended up just chopping a part of my name. I was thinking about the imagery of chopping and if you type out Lin in any Chinese dictionary, it’ll come up with the word for forest so I felt like the imagery of chopping and forest in that song just came to my mind. I used that song as an inspiration for the forest fire metaphor, and as a tool for understanding how I navigate this time in my life.
Review + Analysis of "kait/lin"
by: Tanairi Sorrentini
This poem was so moving and powerful, as it featured their narrative of navigating the transition between their given name to their chosen name. Lin moves through this poem in a beautiful way where they “pulled the girl out by the roots” and burn the name “Kaitlin” in order to reemerge as Lin, a cycle reminiscent of the mythological phoenix. The rebirth of Lin throughout the poem is supported by an incorporation of Cantonese and the overarching presence of their mother, who they seem to seek some reconciliation or common ground with. The poem seamlessly balances images of burning, forests and language, creating a statement of reclaiming identity.