Things We Carry on the Sea

Wang Ping is an American writer, translator, professor, and cultural critic originally from Shanghai, China. Ping’s novels and short stories are better known than her poetry and have been translated from English into Dutch, German, and Japanese. Her memoir, Life of Miracles Along the Yangtze and Mississippi, won the AWP Creative Nonfiction Award in 2017. Ping has authored over 12 books of poetry, prose, and creative nonfiction since 1994. “Things We Carry on the Sea” was originally published in a 2018 journal and later revised for Ping’s 2020 collection My Name is Immigrant. This guide engages with the original 2018 edition of the poem published in New American Poetry.

Much of Ping’s work finds roots in Chinese ancestry and the literature of contemporary China. Her translations focus on rendering contemporary Chinese verse into English. Her works often incorporate both English and Chinese characters, and they play on tensions between Western and Eastern culture. “Things We Carry” expands beyond her Chinese ancestry to explore immigrant experiences more broadly. The poem troubles American political narratives about climate change and Western globalization by highlighting what immigrants leave behind in search of a better life.

Poet Biography

Wang Ping was born in Shanghai, China, on August 14, 1957. Ping’s family moved to a small island in the East China Sea shortly after she was born. During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Ping spent three years as a farmer in a remote mountain village. Though Ping had little formal education, she earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Beijing University in 1985. Ping lectured both in English and in Chinese at several Chinese universities during her studies in Beijing.

Ping left China after graduation to attend Long Island University in Brookville, New York. There, she earned her master’s degree in English literature. On one of her first days in the United States, Ping accidentally walked in on a creative writing workshop. She later decided to enroll in the workshop, where she wrote her first poem. Ping then attended New York University in New York City, where she earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature. Ping taught Chinese literature at The City University of New York while pursuing her Ph.D.

Ping published her first volume of short stories, American Visa, in 1994 and her first novel, Foreign Devil, in 1997. During this time, she also worked as a writing instructor and translator. She was the first to translate the works of Xue Di, a contemporary Chinese poet, into English. Ping focused on translating modern Chinese poetry for a Western audience. New Generation: Poems from China Today (1999), which Ping edited and co-translated, was one of the first anthologies of contemporary Chinese poetry in English.

In 1999, Ping obtained a professorship at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. At Macalester, she taught creative writing and founded the Kinship of Rivers Project, which aims to bring communities and lands together through art. Ping published widely during her professorship. Between 1999 and 2020, she authored books of poetry, translation, prose, and cultural analysis. Her memoir, Life of Miracles Along the Yangtze and Mississippi, won the 2017 AWP Creative Nonfiction Award.

Ping retired in 2020 after teaching for 21 years and was bestowed the title of professor emerita. She has received numerous honors during her career, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the title of Minnesota Poet Laureate. Her 2020 collection, My Name is Immigrant, recaptures her early experience of the United States.

Poem Text

Ping, Wang. “Things We Carry on the Sea.” 2018. Poets.org.

Summary

The speaker of “Things We Carry on the Sea” is a collection of immigrants and refugees, drifting “in [their] rubber boats” (Line 19). The poem operates partly as a list of things the collective speaker carries. The first line states that they “carry tears in [their] eyes” (Line 1) as the speaker says goodbye to their parents. Lines 2-12 repeat this same grammatical construction. The speaker mentions concrete items like “soil in small bags” (Line 2) and “diplomas” (Line 4) in addition to abstract concepts like “old homes along the spine” (Line 11) and “yesterday” (Line 12).

The speaker later identifies themselves as “orphans of the wars forced upon us” (Line 13), and “refugees of the sea rising from industrial wastes” (Line 14). They return the previous motif and state “we carry our mother tongues” (Line 15). In the next three lines, the speaker articulates the ideas of love, peace, and hope in Chinese, Arabic, Yiddish, Spanish, and English. The speaker ends on the repeated word “hope” (Line 18), an emotion they hold on to while “in [their] rubber boats” (Line 19).