eileen chengyin chow

@chowleen.bsky.social

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@chowleen most elsewhere; my old tweets reappear here at odd times. Duke prof, APSI Dir+DGS, Duke Story Lab founder. DUP Sinotheory, LAReviewOfBooks board. Shewo Institute 舍我紀念館 Director, Biographical Lit 傳記文學 publisher 周成蔭 #everynightapoem

Little soul, little perpetually undressed one, do now as I bid you, climb the shelf-like branches of the spruce tree; wait at the top, attentive, like a sentry or look-out. He will be home soon; it behooves you to be generous. You have not been completely perfect either; with your troublesome body you have done things you shouldn't discuss in poems. Therefore call out to him over the open water, over the bright water with your dark song, with your grasping, unnatural song-passionate, like Maria Callas. Who wouldn't want you? Whose most demonic appetite could you possibly fail to answer? Soon he will return from wherever he goes in the meantime, suntanned from his time away, wanting his grilled chicken. Ah, you must greet him, you must shake the boughs of the tree to get his attention, but carefully, carefully, lest his beautiful face be marred by too many falling needles.
black and white photograph by Greg Williams. Matt Damon reading The Odyssey in 1998 on the set of The Talented Mr Ripley
Screen still from Chris Nolan’s The Odyssey - sacking of Troy
Black and white studio wedding portrait of my grandparents Cheng Shewo and Hsiao Tsung-jang - they are in western formal clothes
Nightscape Taipei, dimly lit streets and building
[Robert Mapplethorpe, 1977] Black and white photograph of a weather-beaten flag
Street scene Shanghai, blurry bike rider and blue framed doorway
Messi cutout hawking Lays in Shanghai
HUMMINGBIRD For Tess Suppose I say summer, write the word hummingbird," put it in an envelope, take it down the hill to the box. When you open my letter you will recall those days and how much, just how much, I love you.
A sunbathing turtle in a lotus pond
black and white photograph of back bench of a bus
photo portrait of Meryl Streep, medium close-up, black and white, her hands outstretched
photo portrait of the artist Rene Magritte with a upside down bowler hat perched on his head, and another larger one superimposed
THIS PHOTOGRAPH IS MY PROOF This photograph is my proof There was that afternoon when things were still good between us, and she embraced me, and we were so happy. It did happen. She did love me. Look see for yourself!
Book Cover of the Book of Birds
the artist Chen Yi Fei posing with her 'tear gun' - contraption to collect tears from one's tear ducts to shoot back via a connected, customized pistol
Green sadness is sadness dressed for graduation, it is the sadness of June, of shiny toasters as they come out of their boxes, the table laid before a party, the smell of new strawberries and dripping roasts about to be devoured; it is the sadness of the unperceived and therefore never felt and seldom expressed, except on occasion by polka dancers and little girls who, in imitation of their grandmothers, decide who shall have their bunny when they die. Green sadness weighs no more than an unused handkerchief, it is the funereal silence of bones beneath the green carpet of evenly cut grass upon which the bride and groom walk in joy.
Still life of summer bounty of greens and root vegetables from Duke Canpus Farm
Federico Garcia Lorca, Romancerto Gitano (book cover)
tombstone engraved in red ink with the key set of lines which could also be read vertically Eight calla lilies Nine yellow chrysanthemums Six white tulips Four red roses
Marjane Satrapi’s instagram grid, announcing her husband Mattias Rios’s death and black boxes spelling out For I have lost the love of my life
Perhaps most challengingly, in my first year as an assistant professor, I interpreted for and moderated a live conversation between Nobel Laureates Saul Bellow and Gao Xingjian for public television. Gao had just won the Nobel and was at Harvard for part of his victory tour, and he wished to meet his literary hero, then emeritus at BU, I believe. Bellow, cantankerous, made no effort at pretending to having read anything by Gao, or of considering him a literary peer. Thrown together for nearly an hour on live camera, Bellow decided that the way through this conversation was to crack lewd jokes about bouncy breasts and such, while Gao’s bewildered response was to make repeated reference to Bellow’s seniority and sagacity. Every respectful mention of Bellow’s age by Gao, however, would provoke Bellow into more off-color comments about virility and the women he had bedded. And then there was me - young, feminist, and pissed off. Awkward, to say the least. I think towards the end of that conversation I was just making stuff up instead of interpreting their words.
APSI Summer Book Club: join us to discuss THE SYMPATHIZER with Professor Marguerite Nguyen - Duke Asian/Pacific Studies Institute https://asianpacific.duke.edu/event/apsi-summer-book-club-2026-sympathizer-07-14-2026/
THE NEED FOR DREAMING As a scar commemorates what happened, so is memory itself but a scar. As in: Given hunger, which is endless only until it isn't, he destroyed what he could. And then? - So the lover enters the beloved - enters, and withdraws; so a yellow-crested night heron wades into view, then out: useless? It gets harder to say. Like signs of struggle in a field where nothing stirs, the past can seem everywhere. I think to be useless doesn't have to mean not somehow mattering. Years now, and still I can't stop collecting the strewn shells of spent ammunition where I come across them; carefully, I hold each up toward what's left of the light.
The Trees The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
EXAMPLE A gale stripped all the leaves from the trees last night except for one leaf left to sway solo on a naked branch. With this example Violence demonstrates that yes of course — it likes its little joke from time to time.
Image of Dr Nathan Thadeo Yoashi of Tanzania delivering the 2026 commencement address representing international students. He has his fist raised in jubilance.
Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.
cold noodles topped with meat sauce in bean paste, cucumbers, scallions - in red bowl
Adolescence in the Male: The Two Paths - What Will the Boy Become? Left column: "At 15 Study and Cleanliness" "At 25 Purity and Economy" "At 30 Honorable Success" "at 60 Venerable Old age" Right Column: "At 15 Cigarettes and Self Asbuse" "At 25 Impurity and Dissipation" "At 36 Vice and Degeneracy" "at 48 Moral-Physical Wreck"
The Two Paths - What Will The Girl Become? left column, with illustrations: "At 13 Bad Literature" "At 20 Flirting and Coquettery" "At 26 Fast Life and Dissipation" "At 40 An Outcast" right column, with illustrations: "At 13 Study and Obedience" "At 20 Virtue and Devotion" "At 26 A Loving Mother" "At 60 An Honored Grandmother"
Photo montage of the Duke EAS MA graduation
Some men say an army of horse and some men say an army on foot and some men say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing on the black earth. But I say it is what you love. Easy to make this understood by all. For she who overcame everyone in beauty (Helen) left her fine husband behind and went sailing to Troy. Not for her children nor her dear parents had she a thought, no- ]led her astray ]for lightly reminded me now of Anaktoria who is gone.
Two fabulous artists - one with orange fanta cans as curlers in her hair, one with sunflowers
Things In Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li. Book cover in green, with title, on red trunk, and in leafy shadow
Hong Kong poster for original Star Wars theatrical release
Stephen Owen in a red cardigan, his last public lecture at 2 Div.
Collage of 9 screen grabs from Chungking Express, young man in convenience store looking for canned pineapple.
rainy day steps, strewn with fallen blossoms
black and white portrait of writer Delmore Schwartz, young man in a suit jacket and tie
framed poster of Buenos Aires Zero Degree, the making-of doc of Wang Kar Wai's Happy Together. Tony Leung's face is visible in dusk light.
Apples strewn on table for packing
Posters for May Day rally in Raleigh and Durham
[“Earthset” by Artemis II crew as they flew around the moon 4/6/2026, and “Earthrise” from lunar orbit by astronaut William Anders 12/24/1968]
Fresh picked peonies in yellow, pink, and magenta
film still from LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE (Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, dir., 2003). An exhausted man and a woman, played by Tadanobu Asano and Sinitta Boonyasak, sprawled out on a leather couch
Catalina Muñoz holds a photograph during a press conference held in Durham, N.C. by Siembra NC on Thursday, April 9, 2026, of Denis, 6, a Burton Elementary School student who was detained by ICE and deported. Kaitlin McKeown kmckeown@newsobserver.com Read more at: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/counties/durham-county/article315358386.html#storylink=cpy
Screenshot of sophiafornc from Threads: This is eleven year-old Genesis and six year-old Denis, two Durham elementary school students whose families came here to seek asylum. On Monday, they were detained by ICE and immediately sent back to Honduras without due process. Don't you dare tell me that this is making our country safer.
It is the wound in Time. The century’s tides, chanting their bitter psalms, cannot heal it. Not the war to end all wars; death’s birthing place; the earth nursing its ticking metal eggs, hatching new carnage. But how could you know, brave as belief as you boarded the boats, singing? The end of God in the poisonous, shrapnelled air. Poetry gargling its own blood. We sense it was love you gave your world for; the town squares silent, awaiting their cenotaphs. What happened next? War. And after that? War. And now? War. War. History might as well be water, chastising this shore; for we learn nothing from your endless sacrifice. Your faces drowning in the pages of the sea. Carol Ann Duffy, ‘The Wound in Time’ (2018)
a deep blue dyed easter egg
Norman Wong, Asian American man in blue-grey shirt, standing in front of mural in SF that includes a portrait of Wong Kim Ark
two frames from Chungking Express (Wong Kar Wai dir, 1994) - showing the interior of a quick mart, and the back of a young man. Captions read: "As we split up on April Fool's Day / I decided to let the joke run for a month." Image via mubi
Bouquet of tulips in orange vase on my window sill
Edmund de Waal, an Archive - small yellow book in a bowl of lemons and oranges
WONG KIM ARK IS A CITIZEN. 一- Supreme Court Deciaion la Case of Chinese Born in America. The case of the United States agalnst Wong Kim Ark was decided in the United States Supreme Court yesterday, Justice Gray handing down the opinion of the court. The case was appealed by the Unlted States from the District Court for the Northern District of Callfornia, and it Involved the citizenship of a person born In this country of Chinese parents, which had never hitherto been decided by the Supreme Court. Yesterday's decision will have the effect of confirming the citizenship of such persons.
Immigrant (and) here to stay - my sign
Peking Opera Blues (Tsui Hark, 1986) Friday, April 3, 2026 7:00pm Location: Rubenstein Arts Center Film Theater Peking Opera Blues (Tsui Hark, 1986, 106 min, Hong Kong, Cantonese with English subtitles, DCP) --Introduced by Prof. Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (Asian & Middle Eastern Studies) In the aftermath of China’s first democratic revolution, three high-spirited young women (Brigitte Lin, Cherie Chung, Sally Yeh) from very different backgrounds cross paths on a quest for liberation. Fate finds the trio joining forces to discover their respective warriors within. Elegantly blending action, comedy, and social satire into a sparkling, fast-paced whirlwind as bright and colorful as Peking opera itself, this classic of Hong Kong cinema showcases the charms of its three leads as well as the energetic filmmaking style of legendary director Tsui Hark at his height.
Still from the Pixar animated short Bao, woman in visor sniffing chinese cabbage in a street market
Misty Copeland in the Firebrand costume from the Dance Theater of Harlem, dancing en pointe in Sinners ensemble at the 2026 Oscars