An Interview With Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai by Bryan Thao Worra
for Asian American Press, Sept. 16, 2005

Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai is a Chinese/Taiwanese American spoken word artist who strengthens cultural pride and survival through “how she lives and how she spits.” She has been featured at over 100 performances across the country including venues like the Nuyorican Poets Café, the House of Blues, the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and two seasons of “Russell Simmons Presents HBO Def Poetry.” Splitting her homes between Chicago and New York, Kelly also tours nationally with Mango Tribe and “We Got Issues!” She is the author of two chapbooks Inside Outside Outside Inside and Thought Crimes. Her first full-length play, “ Murder the Machine.” will be excerpted at Chicago’s first Hip Hop Theater Festival this Spring.

AAP: I see you’ve got a new website up at _www.yellowgurl.com_ (www.yellowgurl.com/) . That’s exciting. Do you feel the internet has changed the exposure and accessibility to Asian American poets?

Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai: Well I think that the internet has changed exposure and accessibility for everything! I swear I know folks whose lives revolve around Friendster, IM, Live Journal, My Space, Hifive. particularly in the APIA community, there’s a lot of folks on the web.

But I feel really geeked that I can share my work with so many more people through the internet. I’m kinda web-phobic, I mean, I’m an e-mail queen, but I really like human-to-human interaction, so the whole phenomena of the web kinda trips me out, but where else can people have access to anything they want 24-7?

AAP: What’s the best way for people to jump into your work?

KZT: Hmm…the best way to jump into my work, well, to come to one of my shows if they can. I really like sharing and vibing with an audience. It’s like I think of spoken word as a chance to get at some of the heavy difficult stuff that goes on every day in our lives but to make it energetic, powerful, totally nuts. A place where we can enjoy our chaos and realize that we can escape into our problems and find a way out together instead of just pussy-footing around them.

It’s interesting, because I’m really into live performance - but I realized with putting out my first chapbook, that there is something so special and unique in a reading experience. It’s very intimate. You get to take someone’s life, stories, thoughts, and ideas into your home. It’s totally nuts to me how much that can mean and how very different it is from the energy at a show.

But if going to a show or getting a chapbook isn’t possible, I’m going to try to keep my live tracks and poems on the website as updated as possible, because evolution, growth, and change is a big part of my philosophy as an artist and a human being and the website will continue to be helpful to have folks ride along with me as I do what I do.

AAP: Has your family been supportive of you as a writer?

KZT: Ha! Isn’t this a juicy question? Actually, my family and I have gone through a lot in my relentless pursuit to become a writer. It was a very difficult thing for them to let go of their sense of the American dream (being one of the holy trinity: lawyer, doctor, engineer) for mine, which was to follow this call inside of me, to tell about the crazy mixed up world that I see every day, to push the boundaries of how I understand myself, my community, and my world. Yeah, I’m sure that wasn’t exactly what they had in mind during English language classes in Taiwan. But at this point, they are very supportive.

AAP: What’s been the most difficult thing for you as a writer and a performer?

KZT: Recognizing that whether anyone else thinks what I’m doing is important or valuable that 1) I’m gonna do it anyway 2) I need to recognize it as valuable and important myself. It’s a shame, y’know, sometimes people are lucky enough to be surrounded by a whole community of people who believe in them and their work - but if they don’t believe in it themselves…it don’t really mean a thing. Also, my compulsion to write is kinda nuts, so to come to terms with the fact that it is a fairly permanent fixture in my life for a lot of different reasons and to let myself enjoy that fact has taken some time and soul-searching. I basically had to re-organize my life when I accepted that.

AAP: What’s next for you?

KZT: A lot of things. I’m finishing up my second chapbook, which will be available on my website. I’m touring my solo stuff plus touring with Mango
Tribe and We Got Issues! I’m working on a full-length play called, “Murder the Machine,” which will be excerpted at the first Chicago Hip Hop Theater Festival. I’ve also got a couple other ideas cookin’ up right now, but I’ll leave it at that for now.

I’m happy with what I’ve accomplished so far, but I’m really trying to see how I can freak what I’m doing. how can I push spoken word? theater? music? dance? how do I tell stories with the quirky multitude of complexities that I notice everyday? how do I be a better writer, a better performer, a better person? I’m starting to write a lot more fiction, so who knows where that will go!

Chekhov said if you want to improve your art, improve your life. so yeah, I’m going to try that, ha! I’m also really committed to just learning more about the world, so a lot of travel. I’ll be in Mexico this winter and then Asia again next winter.

AAP: Who have some of your favorite writers been?

KZT: Hmmm, there’s a lot. But some folks who’ve really affected me with their work? well, there are the biggies like Toni Morrison, Jessica Hagedorn, Alice Walker, Sonia Sanchez, Etheridge Knight, Ama Ata Aidoo, Zadie Smith, Jhumpa Lahiri, Mahasweta Devi. and since I come out of a spoken word tradition first and foremost, there’s a whole bunch of folks from there like Patricia Smith and the vast amount of poets that I’ve heard read at open mic’s from Seattle to San Francisco, Chicago to New Orleans, New York to Boston. Our oral literature is what’s so ephemeral, powerful, and sometimes right on. And sometimes you only hear it once and can never find it again, and sometimes it still changes your life.

As a writer and performer, my influences are really diverse. I get as much from listening to Kanye West as I do from reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez, from talking to a random hairstylist on the street to watching old school bomba dancers in the park, from talking with my best friends on the phone in Chicago to sitting next to kids on the subway. I’m a firm believer that the world can teach us everything we need, in every area, in every way.

AAP: How has response from the Asian Pacific American community been to your work?

KZT: Terrible. But what do they know anyway? Just kidding. The folks at the APIA spoken word summit, my girls in Mango Tribe, a lot of the people in the APIA community across the country are my heart. They encourage. They explore. They challenge. It means a lot. I spread my work through performance mainly, so I see the faces. I get to talk to people after the show, and you can’t beat that opportunity to impact people: face to face, person to person. You can’t beat the opportunity to engage in dialogue or just to know that you were in that same place at that unique moment in time. Just to share space with audience and ignite feeling within which impacts the world throughout — that’s where it’s at, for me.

AAP: Do you have a particular poem you’d recommend for people who are just starting to become familiar with your work?

KZT: The poem that a lot of folks tend to gravitate towards is “Little Red Books,” which was featured on the fourth season of “HBO Def Poetry.” And I do think that’s a good place to start. That piece is still really close to my heart, because every time I perform – I still discover something new within it. The poem to me is not so much about communism or not communism – because capitalism clearly has a lot of its own issues. For me, the poem is much more about reconciling lived experience with intellectualized experience, lived struggle with romanticized struggle.

I believe fully in the spirit of idealism and possibility, but the harshness, the reality of change is something we need to confront and consider if we are really down for it. If we’re talking about movement towards a new society, we might have to chuck the things we like as well as the things we don’t like! But what I also like about that piece – which is what I try to do in nearly all of my work – is that it’s about trying to reconciling these quirky mixed experiences in one person’s life and drawing out the significance and relevance of that mixture. Having spent time recently with my relatives in Taiwan, I realize that “Little Red Books” is my contribution to the history of my family which has had to grapple with these issues of Chinese and not Chinese, communist and capitalist, East and West for a very long time. It’s my spin on what my grandpa had to experience every day — plus my little funky self inserted into the mix, ha!

AAP: When do you think a poem you’re trying to write is finished?

KZT: Coming from spoken word, I write a lot for the ear. So I read it aloud a bunch of times until it flows out the mouth, out the body, and out the spirit right. Performance helps me a lot. I try to read a least couple new pieces at every show I do – I kind of think of it as an audition for the poems. Some poems don’t make the cut, after an initial performance either because I’m not that interested anymore in its content, rhythm, or form or it just didn’t speak in the room the way that I thought it would. But something about performance really juices up my voice and body to explore all the tunnels and pathways within the poem.

I discover things that I hadn’t realized working with it on the page or even alone. There’s something about the electricity of a room and the fact of actually sharing your work as a gift with others that tests how waterproof it is. You can feel in a room whether or not people are feelin’ it energetically – so that feeling is just as much a part of my testing process as looking at line breaks and thinking about narrative structure. Usually, I just go back and cut out the clunky parts that cloud the message and the music of the poem.

AAP: Is there anything that’s drawn you to poetry and spoken word over, say, short stories, novels or other forms?

KZT: Hmm…good question. I never had a real interest in fiction or novel until this year. It’s almost totally inexplicable. I was going through certain things this winter that just spoke to me in short stories. So I’ve written a whole bunch of totally bizarre short stories over the last year, which has been a fun and exciting process. Poetry has always spoken to me, and ironically, I don’t exactly know how to explain it. There’s something about a line that captures so completely the complexity of a human emotion which is really captivating and magical. You know, it’s in the chest. I can feel it right there. Maybe it’s the idea that you can possess the universe in a metaphor. In one moment, you’re shot with this tremendous sensory experience that defies and surpasses an analytical comprehension.

AAP: How do you balance the demands of your daily life with the writing life?

KZT: Every day starts with writing and that’s generally non-negotiable. Luckily, my writing life is my daily life, and I’m trying to keep it that way, ha! I always carry my notebooks with me with prompts I want to work on or just blank pages. That way, if I’m on the train or waiting at a diner, I can just rip it to wherever my heart wants to go that day. I try to block out times during the week in 2-4 hour chunks that are just focused on writing – so that means no e-mail, no phone, no talking. I usually find that I’m really mentally tapped out after two hours of writing at the most. So I can get spoken word/theater admin stuff done during my breaks.

I also try not to get overzealous with it. It’s important for me to recognize that my body has a limited capacity. So if I need to take a few days off, I do. Presence is important – so being physical really helps me to balance the stress of daily life and the stress of the writing life. Also, good food and music helps me. Seriously, I think that having the fridge stocked with a few things you like to eat helps to keep you more focused and more in tuned with your senses.

AAP: What do you think will be necessary for Asian American poets to take their work to the next level? Along that line, what do you see as the next level for yourself?

KZT: Well, I can’t speak on all Asian American poets, because I don’t know what every single APIA poet is up to. But I will say that the trick of white supremacy is that it encourages you to feel illegitimate, irrelevant, illogical, and insane – even to yourself! At different times, I’ve felt the need to write from a place of trying to establish legitimacy, to prove something.

At this point in my life, I’m like, “Hey, this is me.” It’s not an argument or declaration, but a reality as simple as the sun. I accept the reality of me and that reality will always be misconstrued by certain people, especially if they are bad listeners, don’t want to learn anything, or if I’m not being honest with myself.

So I think some of that internal work can help whether you’re writing for an APIA, Latino, Black, or White audience. For me, the next level is writing more hard-hitting stuff that makes people’s brains and hearts explode in multiple happy confused jumbles. Whatever form that takes is wherever I’m gonna go.

AAP: Do you have any advice for younger writers? I.E. Looking back, is there anything you know now that you wish you’d known back then?

KZT: Keep writing, and you will grow into your ambitions. There’s never one way to do anything. Learn as much as you can from peers, mentors, and life, but you’re basically gonna have to figure out the answers for yourself. Don’t get caught up in other people’s postitivity or negativity. Everything in service of the work. There’s something only you can do on this earth – so you better start getting good at it, ha! I don’t think there’s anything I wish that I’d known. When I look back on my life, it’s been this funny, terrible, resistant, and relentless path towards the work that I love.