Cathy Song
Cathy Song, born on August 20, 1955, in Honolulu, Hawaii, is a celebrated poet and writer known for her rich reflections on family, cultural heritage, and the immigrant experience. Drawing from her Korean and Chinese ancestry, her poetry is deeply personal and focuses on nurturing family connections rather than political or social issues. Her debut collection, *Picture Bride* (1983), pays homage to her grandmother's immigration story and showcases Song's vivid imagery and fascination with visual art, often inspired by various artists.
Throughout her career, she has published several collections, including *School Figures* (1994) and *The Land of Bliss* (2001), which explore themes of wisdom, compassion, and the delicate balance of life and death, often viewed through a Buddhist lens in her later works like *Cloud Moving Hands* (2007). Song's writing celebrates a nuanced multiculturalism and reflects her experiences as a mother, incorporating her children into her poetry. She has received numerous accolades, including the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, solidifying her standing in contemporary literature. Her ongoing literary contributions include the 2020 release of *All the Love in the World*, a collection of short stories, showcasing her versatility as a writer.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Cathy Song
- Born: August 20, 1955
- Birthplace: Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii (now Hawaii)
Author Profile
Having grown up in the culturally and ethnically diverse society of Hawaii in a family that had been there for at least two generations, Cathy Song does not write about racial or ethnic anxieties or the pains of being an outsider in an Anglo world. Her poems reflect a family that has been close and nurturing. The title of her first book of poetry, Picture Bride (1983), refers to her Korean grandmother who immigrated to Hawaii to marry a man who knew her only from a photograph. Song’s paternal grandfather was also Korean; her mother is Chinese. Song’s original title for the book, “From the White Place,” refers to the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, which she encountered while at Wellesley College where she graduated in 1977. Song received her master’s degree in creative writing from Boston University in 1981. Her vivid imagery and interest in the subject of perspective indicate her fascination with visual art. The dominant strain in Picture Bride is the connection between the first-person speaker and her relatives. Song’s poems show little interest in political or social issues. Song’s appreciation of her Asian heritage, however, appears powerfully in poems such as “Girl Powdering Her Neck,” which concerns a painting by the eighteenth-century Japanese artist, Kitagawa Utamaro, and ends with a haiku: “Two chrysanthemums / touch in the middle of the lake / and drift apart.”
Song appears as a somewhat distant narrator in poems such as “Chinatown” and “Magic Island,” which are found in Frameless Windows, Squares of Light (1988). These poems concern the immigrant experience, which she knows only secondhand. The deft beauty of a poem such as “Magic Island” does not compare with the personally felt experience of the poem “Living Near the Water,” in which the poet watches her father give his dying father a drink of water. These poems also reflect changes in her own life, with her children appearing in the lines. In “Heaven,” for example, her blonde son thinks, “when we die we’ll go to China.”
The blended worlds of Cathy Song are celebrated in her third book, School Figures (1994), which opens with a poem on Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline series of children’s books. “Mother on River Street” depicts the poet’s mother and aunts eating at a Vietnamese restaurant and recalling Sei Mui, who, as a girl, fell out of Mrs. Chow’s car. In the title poem, Western painters such as Piet Mondrian and Pieter Bruegel merge with Katsushika Hokusai. Song’s poems portray not a simple multiculturalism but rather—as in “Square Mile,” in which she sees her son sitting in the same classroom she once sat in and herself on the same hill her father once was on—a profound and affectionate personal unity.
Song has also published the collection titled The Land of Bliss (2001), her fourth poetry collection. Diving into the emotions of life, the collection explores the powers of wisdom and compassion during the everyday events of life and the personal ability to create one's own joy or misery. Her fifth collection, Cloud Moving Hands (2007), examines the delicacy of life and death through a Buddhist lens.
Song has been recognized for her work several times during her prolific career. She won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 1983 for Picture Bride, and in 1993 she won the Hawaii Award for Literature and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 1997, she received a Literature Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Song continued to write in the twenty-first century, publishing All the Love in the World in 2020, a compilation of short stories.
Bibliography
Bloyd, Rebekah. “Cultural Convergences in Cathy Song’s Poetry.” Peace Review, vol 10, Sept. 1998, pp. 393–400, doi.org/10.1080/10402659808426175. Accessed 5 Oct. 2024.
Chu, Leilani. "Cathy Song Tells the Story of Three Generations of an Asian American Family with Roots That Begin in Hawaii." International Examiner, 21 Nov. 2020, iexaminer.org/cathy-hong-tells-the-story-of-three-generations-of-an-asian-american-family-with-roots-that-begin-in-hawaii. Accessed 5 Oct. 2024.
Fujita-Sato, Gayle K. “‘Third World’ as Place and Paradigm in Cathy Song’s Picture Bride.” MELUS, vol. 15, no. 1, Spring, 1988, pp. 49–72, doi.org/10.2307/467040. Accessed 5 Oct. 2024.
Kyhan, Lee. “Korean-American Literature: The Next Generation.” Korean Journal, vol. 34, no. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 20–35.
The Quarantine Tapes. “Cathy Song on the Slowness and Ritual-Making of Lockdown.” Literary Hub, 18 Dec. 2020, lithub.com/cathy-song-on-the-slowness-and-ritual-making-of-lockdown/. Accessed 5 Oct. 2024.
Song, Cathy. “Cathy Song: Secret Spaces of Childhood Part 2: A Symposium on Secret Spaces.” Michigan Quarterly Review. vol. 39, no. 3, 2000, pp. 506–08.
Sumida, Stephen H. “Hawaii’s Local Literary Tradition.” And the View from the Shore: Literary Traditions of Hawai’i. U of Washington P, 1991.
Wallace, Patricia. “Divided Loyalties: Literal and Literary in the Poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes, Cathy Song, and Rita Dove.” MELUS, vol. 18, no. 3, fall 1993, pp. 3–20, doi.org/10.2307/468062. Accessed 5 Oct. 2024.