Wang Ping’s poem Who Killed Soek-Fang Sim? is a beautifully written piece about the internalized racism that many women of color deal with in academia. The theme of guilt for being silent when her colleague Soek-Fang Sim faced racism and sexism for her Asian identity and womanhood is central to the tone of her writing. In one part, Ping says, “We die from inside, a lone alien,” in which “alien” signifies a double meaning of a person feeling estranged and out of place in a general sense, while one can also be an “alien” in another country as a non-citizen. Her use of multiple definitions in her writing is genius and so clever.
Not only is Ping mechanically and grammarily intelligent with her writing, her poetic conscience is clearly sophisticated and powerful. She touches on the influence of the unconscious by documenting the images of Soek-Fang in her dreams, which seems very Freudian and psychoanalytic. It’s obvious that her writing is informed through an interdisciplinary lens, which makes it very relatable and applicable to other academic disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, like History, Psychology, and the arts. Overall, this poem seemed like a tragic ode to Soek-Fang where Ping tries to reconcile herself for her silence and internalized racism.
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