Being last to the party is an awkward role to take on, distinct yet tinged with the discomfort of invisibility. That questionable status is what centres Chuqiao Yang’s debut full-length poetry collection. The Last to the Party places “The Party” as its prelude, not its climax, and Yang’s speaker imagines meeting their future children at this party. She wants to tell a girl, also at this party, “that better days / are coming. Because they’ve come, / and keep on coming, as eager to please / as that one dinner guest / who overshares, who means well, / but whom no one seems to be enjoying.” With this promise and its dubious comparison, Yang opens up her world of cultural memory, her geographic and emotional landmarks, and uncertain-yet-loving family relations.

Born in Beijing and raised in Saskatoon, Yang integrates space and place into many of her poems; they are irremovable from her experience as an immigrant and the different places she has found herself in. Place names, including streets, stations, cities, and bodies of water, can be found everywhere in this collection and are tied into the Chinese-Canadian identity.  Poems in the third of the book’s five sections, labelled by number, are titled, among others, “Taiyuan,” “Nanjing,” and “Wuxi.” In “Nanjing,” Yang wryly notes “How Canadian of me,” momentarily believing her passport would do anything to stop Chinese police at Sun Yat-Sen’s Mausoleum. There are postcards, zodiac years, tourists, and a distinct sense of being partway there and partway gone. 

The first section revolves around wanting to leave not only the place in which the speaker finds herself (Saskatchewan), but the grief of stifling family ties. It starts off with a poem in which Yang’s speaker tries to run away because her parents will not allow her to drive to a show in Moose Jaw with her friends. The speaker’s heady teenage wildness (“belting / Bon Jovi, feeding / the blank prairies / burger wrappers, / summer dreams, / playing at last / the debut part / of properly unsafe, / sixteen”) is tempered by her parents literally following behind in their car, calling out to her that they want to be there in case she needs anything (“my mother frantic / with the upside-down map, / and my father, cursing”). 

The show that the speaker is going to, like the collection’s titular party, is not the memory that remains with the speaker. Instead, it is her parents standing outside like “sentries.” Years later, when the speaker’s father reminds her of that night by offering her a pair of crushed lilies, like the ones flattened by the car she was in with her friends, she looks away in shame. Yang is brilliant in her expression of filial guilt, and her interrogation of family is extremely moving, especially in her relationship with her father. “Twenty Years Later” is fraught with emotion that father and daughter cannot communicate to each other directly, and lands exquisitely and painfully on “Did I say too much? I know that sometimes you are ashamed. / But I’ll spend the rest of my life making it up to you.” 

Family and the Chinese-Canadian immigrant identity are achingly present in the later sections of the book. Yang writes of visiting her grandmother in China, listening to her grandmother say that she will live to meet Yang’s daughters, and knowing that she will not see her again. Elsewhere, Yang’s mother pays for a street blessing that would have the grandparents outlive the rest of the family. The anticipatory grief is quiet but inescapably heavy, beautifully capturing the tenderness that is present and the loss that is yet to come. There is no doubt that Yang is well-acquainted with the struggles of being situated on the other side of the planet from grandparents or coming to terms with the burdens and sacrifices of immigrant parents. 

Often, despite how often it would be the main event, the literal “party” is not what is important about the poems of The Last to the Party, nor is it even present at all in many poems. But the discomfort of being the last one to arrive, and of feeling out of place, echoes everywhere Yang takes her readers. She excels in the time and space around the party, showing up last, taking memories in and then brings them back out to places that are far removed. In the titular poem she writes, “I’ve returned from the future and brought back / who I intend to be,” and a reader would believe it to be true. 

Acta Victoriana would like to extend thanks to the publisher, Goose Lane Editions, for the review copy.