Past Lives, Future Bodies by K Ming Chang (formerly Kristin Chang) explores migration as a person in diaspora. In line with this exploration, there is plenty of movement in Chang’s work. And in the poem, “Yilan,” Chang uses tercets to propel the narrative of the poem forward. Each tercet is a brick on the road toward different realizations, and the reader joins this journey alongside the reader. With each tercet linking with each other, like a chain, Chang reveals that everything is connected, loss, her family’s stories, and all of it leads back to the grief of losing her ancestral home.
The reader is placed in Yilan, Taiwan in the first stanza. Visually, the tercets jut and jag, akin to a well-traveled path. It is as if the tercets could be pushed upward into each other to make a straight path. In addition to the physical aspect of the stanzas, the content of the stanzas itself link to the next. For example, papaya being eaten on the road in stanza one becomes the papaya meaning wood melon, which becomes wood that is always wet, which becomes drowning and so on.
The words that Chang chooses to enjamb on is important as well, forcing the reader to stay a moment longer on that particular word. The word cultivates more importance this way and lands more of an impact, such as in the second stanza where the last line ends on the word “absence”.
This journey through Taiwan also becomes a journey towards Chang’s family, particularly Chang’s mother and grandmother figures. The papaya that the speaker eats in the first stanza is in stark contrast to the “open sore fruit” in the sixth stanza.”
Chang also compares the alternate lives possible. In the eighth and ninth stanza, the speaker’s “first world face” is likened to a blonde woman. The difference in her upbringing is also described in material wealth in access, where the speaker watches a typhoon from a hotel. There is a longing for home and a longing to belong to this home. The way that these imaginings flow into each other by way of the tercet make them as real as this reality, or rather, the difference between these universes is marked by a single small, yet enormous decision.
K Ming Chang’s Past Lives, Future Bodies is a journey toward the self. Along the way, she addresses the movement of her life and the impact had on her family from leaving Taiwan. “Yilan” is the map back home. It is Chang’s vulnerability in showing . Leaving is a type of losing, and it will remain a grief across all of Chang’s past and future lives.