“Thoughts on a Still Night” by Li Bai (744-756)

Li Bai is an essential figure in Tang Dynasty poetry and is likely the best-known traditional Chinese poet in the West. His works are widely learned and memorized by children in the Chinese school system. The poem translated here as “Thoughts on a Still Night” is his most famous work. Li Bai’s poem evokes feelings of displacement and homesickness similar to those in Ping’s “Things We Carry on the Sea.”

“Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman (1892)

Walt Whitman’s original 1855 publication of Leaves of Grass was a turning point in American poetry. An innovator in the lyric voice and free-verse forms, Whitman’s work carves the way for an American poetic identity. Whitman’s use of repetition and anaphora (See: Literary Devices) helps establish a bold, declarative voice that foreshadows many later American poets. Ping’s use of repeated, declarative sentences owes a debt to Whitman and “Song of Myself.”

“We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks (1960)

Gwendolyn Brooks is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet and former Poet Laureate of the United States. Brooks’s poem, like “Things We Carry,” has a collective speaker identified with the first-person plural. Brooks uses this speaker to inhabit the “pool players,” or a group of Black teenagers who “Left school” (Line 2). Brooks’s “We Real Cool” captures a minority perspective in the United States using similar techniques Ping uses to show the immigrant perspective. While Ping attempts to capture a large swath of immigrant cultures, Brooks’s use of contemporary slang and narrative frames focuses her poem on a particular group.

“Immigrant Blues” by Li-Young Lee (2008)

Li-Young Lee, born only five days after Ping, is a contemporary Chinese American poet. Like Ping, Lee writes extensively about the immigrant experience and draws on his own experience moving to the United States in 1964. Lee’s 1986 collection Rose is a groundbreaking work of Asian American literature. “Immigrant Blues,” from Lee’s Behind My Eyes, explores issues of identity and language through the immigrant experience. Lee’s poem provides a complimentary perspective to Lee’s “Things we Carry.”

“Lao Jia” by Wang Ping (2017)

Published one year before “Things we Carry,” Ping’s “Lao Jia” provides a larger view of Ping’s poetry. “Lao Jia” engages with many of the same problems of language, mother tongues, and translation present in “Things we Carry.” This earlier poem, however, shows how English and Chinese become integrated in immigrant families.