SOURCE: Uba, George. “Versions of Identity in Post-Activist Asian American Poetry.” In Reading the Literatures of Asian America, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling, pp. 33-48. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Uba includes Chin in a discussion of Asian-American poets writing after the 1960s and 1970s, noting that Chin, in her poetry, is skeptical of the very source of personal and ethnic identity to which she is drawn.

The raw energy of Asian-Pacific American “activist” poets of the late 1960s and early 1970s gave impetus to a literature in the process of self-discovery. By refereeing unexplored spaces of Asian American existence, these poets helped preside over an emerging ethnic consciousness and helped plot the sociopolitical vectors of the age. Seeking to “unmask” poetry by removing it from the elitist academy (which had sealed meanings in the esoteric and the arcane, renounced plainness of...