Mixed Race Studies

Essayist and Poet Paisley Rekdal to Read From Works at Ithaca College

Ithaca College
Clark Lounge, Egbert Hall
2010-10-05, 19:30 (Local Time)

ITHACA, NY — Essayist and poet Paisley Rekdal will give a free public reading from her works on Tuesday, Oct. 5, at Ithaca College. Her presentation, part of the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series, will be held at 7:30 p.m. in Clark Lounge, Egbert Hall.

The daughter of a Chinese-American mother and an American father of Norwegian heritage, Rekdal is the author of “The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee,” a collection of personal essays in which she confronts the difficulty of negotiating her biracial identity. She has also published three collections of poetry and will have a hybrid photo-text memoir that combines poems, nonfiction and fiction with photography, coming out from Tupelo Press in 2011.

Rekdal currently teaches at the University of Utah. She has been honored for her writing with a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, a Pushcart Prize, National Endowment for the Arts and Fulbright fellowships, the University of Georgia Press’s Contemporary Poetry Series Award and the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review.

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The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In

Vintage an Imprint of Penguin Random House
2000
224 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-375-70855-8 (0-375-70855-3)
E-Book ISBN: 978-0-307-42908-7 (0-307-42908-3)

Paisley Rekdal, Distinguished Professor of English and Asian Studies
University of Utah

When you come from a mixed race background as Paisley Rekdal does — her mother is Chinese American and her father is Norwegian– thorny issues of identity politics, and interracial desire are never far from the surface. Here in this hypnotic blend of personal essay and travelogue, Rekdal journeys throughout Asia to explore her place in a world where one’s “appearance is the deciding factor of one’s ethnicity.”

In her soul-searching voyage, she teaches English in South Korea where her native colleagues call her a “hermaphrodite,” and is dismissed by her host family in Japan as an American despite her assertion of being half-Chinese. A visit to Taipei with her mother, who doesn’t know the dialect, leads to the bitter realization that they are only tourists, which makes her further question her identity. Written with remarkable insight and clarity, Rekdal a poet whose fierce lyricism is apparent on every page, demonstrates that the shifting frames of identity can be as tricky as they are exhilarating.