SOURCE: Rothschild, Matthew. “A Feast of Poetry.” Progressive 58 (May 1994): 48-50.

In the following excerpt, Rothschild praises Chin's intensely personal depiction of cultural assimilation.

Marilyn Chin has a voice all her own—witty, epigraphic, idiomatic, elegiac, earthy. In The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty, she covers the canvas of cultural assimilation with an intensely personal brush. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Oregon, she pours herself into her poetry.

“How I Got That Name: An Essay on Assimilation” begins with the declaration, “I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin,” and recounts how her father “obsessed with a bombshell blonde / transliterated ‘Mei Ling’ to ‘Marilyn,’” honoring her with the name of “some tragic white woman / swollen with gin and Nembutal.” She goes on to warn that the stereotypes of Asian Americans are wrong: “We've managed to fool the experts,” she writes, “… they can use us. / But the ‘Model Minority’ is...