Yellow Light by Garrett Kaoru Hongo

First published: 1980; collected in Yellow Light, 1982

Type of poem: Narrative

The Poem

Garrett Kaoru Hongo’s “Yellow Light” is unrhymed free verse of five unequal stanzas, the longest one opening the poem and the shortest one closing it. The tone of the poem is conversational; its syntax, diction, rhythms, and lilt are those of contemporary conventional speech.

On its surface, “Yellow Light” is at once a poem about a community that is specifically identified and about an individual, who is not specifically identified. Its setting is inner-city Los Angeles, a “J-Town” barrio a few blocks from the intersection of Olympic Boulevard and Figueroa Street. This is a struggling, racially mixed, working-class neighborhood whose social and economic anxieties, it is evident, erupt regularly in domestic abuse and street brawls. The poem, both wistfully and indignantly, describes the tawdry setting in sensory detail. This is a busy, crowded, and volatile environment where Japanese, Koreans, Hawaiians, and Chicanos exist in close proximity and not always harmoniously.

The poem’s bare narrative focuses on a female adult’s homeward trek at the end of a tiring day’s work. The reader is given no personal information about the woman, but one determines in the course of the poem that she is either poor or frugal (perhaps both), that her job is probably office work or sales (she wears high heels), and that she lives on the second floor of an apartment building. It is dusk; she gets off the bus and walks uphill three blocks to her home. She is carrying ingredients for the evening’s supper: spinach, fish, bread. She passes “gangs of schoolboys playing war” and angry “young couples…yelling at kids.” Reaching her home, she walks up two flights of steps and fishes her keys out of her messy purse, poised to unlock her door. The narrative leaves her at this point, turning attention toward the moon for the poem’s final few lines.

A fourth-generation Japanese American, Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawaii, which his family left when he was six months old, settling in a small city south of Los Angeles called Gardena. At that time, Gardena boasted the largest community of Japanese Americans on mainland United States, though it was bordered on the north by the predominantly African American towns of Watts and Compton and on the southwest by Torrance and Redondo Beach, white towns.

Growing up in a working-class neighborhood with a variety of ethnic groups sensitized Hongo early to issues of race relations, cultural alienation, and urban street life, themes that figure prominently in many of his poems, including “Yellow Light.” He knows intimately the environment through which his female heroine makes her way: its disputes, its loneliness, and its frustrations. There seems little comfort here to be gleaned from community or family; the only note of guarded optimism is the image of the full moon that ends the poem.

Forms and Devices

The name Hongo means “homeland,” and in ways either subtle or overt, Hongo’s poetry is intimately tied up with his ethnicity. At the same time that his poetry is written in honor and in memory of his Japanese ancestors, it exhibits full awareness of the assimilation necessary for Asian Americans to live in the United States. Assimilation is taken to a higher level in “Yellow Light” as Japanese must not only acclimatize to American culture but also live side by side with Hawaiians, Koreans, and Chicanos in a true melting pot. The idea of the melting pot is emphasized by Hongo’s decision to set the poem at suppertime, when apartments are “just starting to steam with cooking.”

The apartments may be steaming with cooking, but the neighborhood is steaming with racial unrest. The fights broadcast from loud televisions and the adults yelling at their children signal the conflict, both domestically and socially, that plagues this working-class community. Hongo’s concrete imagery gives the anger and the hostility a sharp edge. The bus from which the woman departs is “hissing,” the schoolboys she passes are “playing war,” the televisions are not being turned on but “flick[ed]” on.

After the initial paragraph, which sets the volatile mood, Hongo pauses for wistful reflection of a past season, presumably a more peaceful time. “If it were May.…,” stanza 2 begins, then late spring flowers would be blooming, despite the smog; the monkey flowers obscuring the trash would be “tangled in chain-link fences” and buzzing with butterflies, mosquitoes, and moths. It was a more idyllic, even carefree time.

The poem, however, is set in October, at the tail end of a hot summer, the end of a long day, when the city is not blooming with fresh possibility but is “seeth[ing] like a billboard” and patience wears thin. Hongo’s sharp, concrete images sharply delineate the tensions between ethnic cultures despite their forced proximity. The sharpness extends to the woman in the poem, whose spike heels click “like kitchen knives” as she ascends the stairs.

Hongo’s sharp imagery is reinforced by his clear and conventional grammar. There is no evocative, elusive poetic language or diction here, but rather clear-headed declarative sentences, some long and complex, others shorter. There are no sentence fragments. The first, fourth, and fifth stanzas are composed of a single sentence; the second and third stanzas have three sentences each. The well-crafted, complete sentences glide along seamlessly and rhythmically, some with initial modifying clauses, others beginning right off with the subject.

Bibliography

Gunew, Sneja. “Gendered Reading Tactics: Public Intellectuals and Community in Diaspora.” Resources for Feminist Research 29, nos. 3/4 (Fall/Winter, 2001): 57-73.

Hongo, Garrett. “A Vicious Kind of Tenderness: An Interview with Garrett Hongo.” Interview by Alice Evans. Poets and Writers 20, no. 5 (September/October, 1992): 36-46.

Ikeda, Stewart David. “The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America.” Ploughshares 20, no. 1 (Spring, 1994): 202-205.

Jarman, Mark. Review of Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai’i, by Garrett Hongo. The Southern Review 32, no. 2 (Spring, 1996): 337-344.

Monaghan, Peter. “How a Small, Nondescript Writing Program Achieved Distinction.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 44, no. 33 (April 24, 1998): A13-A15.

Muratori, Fred. Review of The River of Heaven, by Garrett Hongo. Library Journal 113 (May 1, 1988): 81-82.

Pettingell, Phoebe. “The River of Heaven.” The New Leader 71, no. 10 (June 13, 1988): 16.

Schultz, Robert. “Passionate Virtuosity.” Hudson Review 42 (Spring, 1992): 149-157.

Slowik, Mary. “Beyond Lot’s Wife: The Immigration Poems of Marilyn Chin, Garrett Hongo, Li-Young Lee, and David Mura.” MELUS 25, nos. 3/4 (Fall/Winter, 2000): 221-242.

Yu, Larry. “Under Western Eyes: Personal Essays from Asian America.” Amerasia Journal 22, no. 3 (Winter, 1996): 169-172.