The Magic Whip - Softcover

Ping, Wang

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566891477 ISBN 13: 9781566891479

Publisher: Coffee House Press, 2003

Synopsis

This melodic, visceral collection -juxtaposes the author’s unbridled joy in motherhood with the complex and brutal practice of footbinding in China, the plight of Tibet, and the remarkable endurance of survivors everywhere. The Magic Whip pays particular attention to women and children whose ordeals have been -imprinted on their very bodies and whose memories resonate in these -exceptionally clear poems.

Wang Ping, born in Shanghai, came to New York City in 1985 after graduating from Beijing University. She is the acclaimed author of the novel Foreign Devil, the story collection American Visa, the poetry collection Of Flesh & Spirit, and the academic study Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota and teaches at Macalester College.

About this title

About the Author

Wang Ping was born in Shanghai and grew up on a small island in the East China Sea. After three years spent farming in a mountain village commune, she attended Beijing University. In 1985 she left China to study in the United States, earning her PhD from New York University. She is the acclaimed author of the short story collection American Visa, the novel Foreign Devil, two poetry collections: Of Flesh & Spirit and The Magic Whip, and the cultural study Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China.

Reviews

Novelist, short-story writer and scholar Wang here checks in with her second collection of poetry and prose, collaging the two to reflect the forms taken by immigration and exile, motherhood, family and national histories. With a terse voice that does not allow for dissembling, her speaker delves into the physical horror of footbinding (a subject on which Wang wrote a scholarly work, Aching for Beauty), revealing anguished ties to beauty, love, and what parents have to give to their children; as a mother shatters and binds her daughter's foot, so does an infant latch onto his mother's cracked nipples: "How could they ever crack, so brown and tough?" In Wang's anatomically dense verse, actualities of the body (sweaty, hairy, large, smelly) are contrasted with fantasies of ideals of it: fragrant, delicate, aphrodisiac, tiny. In the title poem, the daughter is lured, through promises and flattery ("you'll have everything husband home children see the tiny shoes pointed like a new moon more fragrant than a lily"), into a permanently excruciating bondage that is yet "our secret weapon." The particular achievement of this book is to make such descriptions ring uncomfortably close to contemporary, Western beauty practices. "Stones and Metals," a prose account of the life of Song Dynasty poet Li Qingzhao, distills the sense of ever-present past. Qinqzhao's ancient dilemmas in creating a collaboratively creative marriage are often expressed in the idioms of today, forging a past that broken and reformed (like the phoenix Qingzhao invokes in memory of her husband) into present verse.
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The whip of the title was the waist-length pigtail of a young girl, the symbol of her nubility and untried sexuality and, as such, analogous to the bound "lotus foot" that kept Chinese women virtually immobile and, perhaps for that reason, held erotic power for men. Shanghai-born Wang Ping braids the two emblems of sexual status together in this book's disturbing title poem, chiming their images with men's traditional queues, shaven pubic hair, hair bleach, permanent waves, and other tokens of power and sex. Her other poems similarly work at the margins of culture, power, and gender, though never in an ideologically simplistic way. Although a few poems are conventional free-verse lyrics, most are strange, proselike lists of startling facts and tiny peculiar narratives, like the one about a radio dial rambling over odd, unsettling talk shows. Similarly to the hovering and settling dial, Wang Ping moves between ancient and modern China, between domesticity and wild freedom, between eroticism and politics, and her compelling juxtapositions jar the reader into experiencing insight. Patricia Monaghan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1566891477
• ISBN 13: 9781566891479
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 90