Introducing:
Simon Shieh

Posted January 14, 2016

Simon Shieh (1991) was born in Taiwan and raised in Hyde Park, New York until he turned 15, at which time he moved, with his family, to Beijing, China. Simon began writing poetry in middle school, but did not consider himself a serious writer until college, where he studied literature and creative writing at SUNY New Paltz and San Diego State University. Simon now works in Beijing as an Instructor at China Foreign Affairs University on a Princeton in Asia fellowship.

See Simon's work in Aztec Literary Review.

Fighting Words

These poems are part of a larger set that are inspired by my time living and training with the Sanda team at a sports academy in Yizhuang, China. When I was there in 2007, Yizhuang was a budding industrial suburb of Beijing — a city in the awkward throes of development, smelling all the time of coal. Sanda is a form of full-contact Chinese kickboxing that includes kicks, punches, take-downs and “sweeps.” Another boy and I were the youngest in the program at 16 years old. I was the only foreigner for miles, and much more privileged than my teammates, most of whom lived and trained there long-term. I have attributed to my teammates, in these poems, the names of Greek gods. In my young eyes, they very well could have been.

A Myth for Waking

Cellphones sing the sun

up — Apollo swats at his phone

and misses.

I hear darkness shatter

from my bed and feel sweat

tracing the narratives of my body.

What word do these drowsy beasts have

for daybreak? Say, a fingernail of sunlight

on a god’s sleeping face. Say

the wrong word and a stiff right-

cross will correct you. It’s 5:30 and I

forget how to be badly broken

forget to trade tired

for angry, a dream for the light

that fractures it. I dreamt fear

was a lick of palm salt and opened

to a fist under my cheek. It shakes

at the mention of lightning.

Coil nose, mustache bristle-whipped,

Zeus is at a loss for words this morning.

He rouses us like blood rouses the fur

coats in a crowd.

Six men wail

into flat pillows, bone

dry and dusty as the ginkgoes

guiding coal trucks through town.

Apollo curses the fiery mother

of daybreak and I see where the hoe

used to totter on his shoulder, hoping Zeus

wouldn’t lay hands on him for dreaming.

Ares cocks the phlegm

to his mouth and watches

it slap the floor.

We wait till we are as soft

as our black-blue thighs

before we struggle into our shorts.

I try to grunt but it comes out a whimper.

Nobody looks up from their shoe laces.

Morning Ritual

Every morning, I read my fate

in a milky way of salt clinging

to my shirt. I read rose

bushes by the door,

frayed bodies wilting

into sunlight, willing

the blood to our fingertips — I — first in fear

pluck thorns from the stalk and run

them under my fingernails.

There is nothing quite

like returning dirt to itself.

As my eye finds itself in a rusty

mirror, I see them almost

clothed, blurry as a backward

question: that is what?

Contact lenses, I reply, without them

you’re all color and no shape.

When we start running, even the track

needs waking up.

First footfalls on concrete echo

through my legs, the rosebushes looking

more like thorns with each lap.

Tell a rosebush its name

and it will weep over lost petals.

Ask why I’m here and I’ll show you

how I box my shadow out of a doubt.

We fool ourselves breathless — gasp

our heads out of water. Does breath

sound like a promise to you?

Origin says and unsays us blind:

six fighting men, thinking

with our bodies, howling

down the line until dawn is shaking

with surrender.

Zeus leads us in circles. A petal

for every breath that doesn’t ask

for blood.

Breakfast in the Hunchback’s Basement

Fire and oil make the white walls

heavy with morning light. Spice

stings the shadows out of a darkness

as daydreams catch sleep in their feathers.

Before long, I will be panting, slick

with spotlight. My fist, blood-beaten

as the evening cleaver, will be raised

to heaven or hanging from it.

The hunchback answers his angry

flame by flipping the onions

just beyond its reach.

Prometheus shakes

the empty table from his stool.

There is barely color

in his cheeks.

Yes, we have ducks in America and yes,

their love life is a mystery to us as well, I say.

Eggs were as rare as lovemaking

must have been for ducks

that July. Money can't buy

hunger, until you're huddled

in a hunchback's basement.

Fighters make money look like rain

in a drought. That summer, ducks snapped

a gold feather on their wings.

Does it outshine my busted right eye?

You’ll bite your tongue when

you see what kind

of woman will come running

to feed me.

II.

Steamed buns come in large

plastic bags from the boy who sells cigarettes

at the middle school. He’s quiet

until he’s swinging his fists at you — eyes

stale as a summer moon. Prometheus

says some shit about time and hunger then

burns the boy with five fingers.

Zeus rises from his seat.

His thighs tell me how easily

they woo a rib from its cage.

Imagine truth in a mouthful

of cold, hard teeth.

I shrink when Zeus returns

with his eyes on me, holding the first

fried duck egg this week. You

need it, he says, growing boy

like you, he says, home-

sick and always swinging

to please us, he says.

You kicked Prometheus so

hard the power went

out, and that’s why we like you.

You keep your words

to yourself.

A Dance with Weapons

All this toughening and

nobody’s taught me how to love

the fight. When Ares beckons me

to the ring I could vanish

into my name. Could be

a wisp of smoke sighing

from a frail pair of gloves. Can you

hear the doubt in my fists? Hook

to unhinge his whole fury. A snap

in the shoulder roll. Fugue

in dripping body light.

I drove my knee a cool centimeter into

the man’s skull before I touched

my wet cheek to his and

whispered thank you, man

in his ear.

We are thankful

for the damnedest things:

when the man facing me

can finish my

sentence about the way we hurt.

When he can strike me

tenderly because of the look

in my eye.

I’ve held a man’s courage

with two hands — it bled

through my fingers.

That is to say, I’ve loved something

untouchable.

1. What is the most memorable thing from your first year in China?

I'm from upstate New York, and moved to Beijing when I was 14 because my mom's a diplomat. That first summer in Beijing I enrolled in a sports academy in a dusty suburb of Beijing, called Yizhuang. You see it come up in my poetry. It was a kickboxing school, and it was thoroughly Chinese. No foreigners, no frills. It was a shocking introduction to China.

2. Moment you realized China was an important part of your life?

I guess I didn't realize that until after I left China. I left to go to college in the US. In the US, it's not so much that I didn't feel at home, it's more that there was a lot I suddenly couldn't do. Like go out to eat and drink, or use public transportation. My college was in a small town. It felt quite foreign. I realized then that China is where I wanted to be. So I applied for Princeton-in-Asia teaching program, and I got it. I was surprised when I came back to realize right away, that despite the pollution and the hard things about here, that I feel just right here. I feel at home in Beijing.

3. Moment you realized writing was an important part of your life?

Like many people do, I spent my teenage years writing angsty poems. After taking a course in college, I felt encouraged to take my poetry seriously. I had a shift in mindset from poetry being a therapeutic thing to an actual skill; something I could become good at.

4. Tell us more about your writing history and projects.

I'm mostly submitting to poetry and literature journals, and also applying for a workshop for Asian-Americans. Whether or not I get any of these, I'm still going to be writing. I wouldn't call it a hobby ... I also don't see myself getting an MFA right now. Poetry is something you can always do, and you don't need a higher education for that.

5. Do you have a favorite word to use in your writing?

You know, I do, and that's the bad thing. I like to keep using certain words. One accomplished poet said to me that he recognizes the words he uses a lot and then writes it down. It's not a bad thing to use the same words in a set of poems, but I try to stop myself from letting to words bleed over into other poems.

6. How would you describe the process of writing?

Something I have to set aside time for. For me there's a time for poetry and a time for essay-writing and research. I can't do both at once; I need to have a month in which I can focus on poetry, only read it, only write it. I need to be somewhere quiet, where I can read other people's poetry out loud and read my own out loud. It's solitary and vocal at the same time.

7. Could you give us some background to the poems?

Yeah, like I mentioned, I spent a month of my teenage years in this industrial city called Yizhuang, doing a kickboxing academy. And the routine was really weird to get used to. There were no TVs or computers or anything, so we'd get up, run, and then nap. We took three naps a day. I mean, they did -- I couldn't sleep. I didn't know what to do with myself. So the worst part of it was the boredom. I read four different books that month. It's hard to talk about the experience in a narrative way, because there's so much happening and it's so hard to put words to it. So I use poetry to talk about it.

I wasn't writing during that time though. I wrote one poem. A poem about the wind going through the window and freeing itself. Needless to say, it wasn't a good poem. I don't tend to write poetry when I'm unhappy. I was mostly just trying to survive.

8. Do you feel like the training itself influenced you in terms of being diligent with writing?

Yeah, I mean I've always been a serious, determined person. That discipline and routine that you need to be a professional athlete carried over into writing. It's helped me be a better writer.

9. In your poems you say you assign names of Greek Gods to your classmates at the kickboxing academy. How did you assign those names?

There was kind of a hierarchy to the group, and there were different personalities. Zeus was the head honcho, the one everyone looked up to, unofficially. Apollo was kind of this very lively and not-so-serious guy. Aires was this huge, hulking man, I'm pretty sure he was gay. I found that out in a strange way. I've got to figure out how to work that into the poems.

10. You talk a lot about emotional pain, in the poems. But not physical pain.

The thing about physical pain is it's only possible to write about it in retrospect. For a long time, I didn't know how to write poetry about fighting. For a while, those were my two passions: poetry and fighting. But I didn't know how to write about it.

There's a stress and trauma involved in fighting that's hard to conceptualize and put it into words. I had to distance myself and reflect on it to put it into the poems. I think the physical and emotional pain are working off one another. They're not mutually exclusive by any means. It opened up another way of writing about pain itself.

11. You wrote in 'Morning Ritual' about being the only foreigner in the school. 

When I first got there, we were both foreign to each other. I was weird. But that being said, I think that was integral to the camaraderie. They were so hospitable. They were very, very kind to me. They took care of me, and if I were not an outsider, I wouldn't have been received in the same way. So yes, I was a foreigner, but because of that foreign-ness, I was treated a certain way, and our camaraderie was built around that dynamic.

12. In the poem, you talk about food. And there's a sense that food is almost idolized as this rare and precious gift. 

Before I had this experience...I'll put it this way. The experience made me think of hunger and desire in a certain way. I had never been so conscious of wanting something. I was reading Angela's Ashes when I was there, about this family in terrible poverty. I read about them eating strawberry jam, and that really got to me. It sounds so trivial and stupid, but this experience made me aware of these visceral needs we have. And it really amplified my desire, and in a real sense, my hunger.

13. I get a sense that there is a competitiveness that extends beyond the ring. Was this the atmosphere for you?

Fighting is different from other sports wherein in other sports, there's this distance between the abstract concepts of winning and losing. But in fighting, you really feel the win or the loss in a very close way. You feel literally beat up. So because there was so little distance between the sport and what was happening in the sport, and what you were feeling, everything was very literal. Even outside of training, there was always this understanding that although it brought us together, there was always some competitive tension. We knew that the next day we would have to hurt each other in a very real sense. On a whole though, it really brings combat sports athletes together.

14. It sounds like you and your teammates really respected each other. What granted that respect?

This goes back to the last question. For fighters, the respect is always very mutual. Because I know best how he feels, and he knows best how I feel, and there needs to be some element of respect to keep the sport from becoming something much uglier, which it never really is. Respect is necessary in a sport like fighting, because if it's not, neither of the fighters can do their job. They would devolve into an animal's show of aggression and force.

15. Does this physical exertion and expression still inspire you to write?

I haven't figured out how, but it does. I've since "retired" from professional fighting, as a career. I teach English now, and focus on writing. Like I said, I didn't know how to write about fighting until recently. I'm still figuring it out.

16. So what are your inspirations now?

Hm, hard question. Other poets inspire me ... I don't know why this is so hard to answer. OK, this is going to sound cliche, but the ability to share my experience in a meaningful way is what really inspires me to write. I think there are a lot of experiences that I can only share through poetry.

17. What advice would you give to other young writers?

When I was a young writer, the few poets I know would always tell me to keep writing. I never knew what that meant, so I don't want to say that now. But it is important to not give up. They'd also tell me that, and I didn't know what it meant. Writing is not this magical thing that you're born with. No one is more pre-disposed to it. Just keep reading and writing. That's the only way to improve. To be conscious of the fact that you're always improving. There was one point when I was struggling with the idea that maybe I'm a poet, maybe I'm not. But that's bullshit.  No one is a poet or isn't a poet, you just make the decision to improve, or you don't.

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