The Survivor (Analysis #3)

The Survivor

By Marilyn Chin

Don’t tap your chopsticks against your bowl.

Don’t throw your teacup against the wall in anger.

Don’t suck on your long black braid and weep.

Don’t tarry around the big red sign that says “danger!”

That you have bloomed this way and not that,

that your skin is yellow, not white, not black,

that you were born not a boy-child but a girl,

that this world will be forever puce-pink are just as well.

Remember, the survivor is not the strongest or most clever;

merely, the survivor is almost always the youngest.

And you shall have to relinquish that title before long.

The first thing that caught my eye in this poem was the title: The Survivor. I was immediately intrigued. Surviving what? At first, the poem seems to be a parent gently reprimanding a child about bad habit (Don’t tap your chopsticks against your bowl…), but as it progresses it reveals more and more of the author’s self and it almost seems like illeism, like she’s talking to herself about herself and her identity as an Asian in America (I believe that “puce-pink” is representing the tainted perfection of the American culture). As I read into the last stanza, it seems like she’s learning to let that go and become her own person without being defined by “girl-child” and “yellow” and “youngest”. As the poem ends, she breaks free of the bonds and relinquishes her old identity and the words that once defined her.

(Stock photo)