Queer Creators Collection: Introducing Suri Chan
Suri Chan is a poet and the author of ‘But I Don’t Feel Empowered.’ She spoke with GO about her identity as a queer Asian writer.
Poet and author of But I Don’t Feel Empowered, Suri Chan, is harnessing the dynamic, empowering, and sometimes lonely intersections of the queer Asian identity within the pulls and tugs of a Westernized way of life. Chan gives GO an inside look to the inspirations, struggles, and rewards that come with being a queer Asian writer.
After college, Chan started a corporate job despite wanting to make a career in art. The push to begin putting her work out there was driven by the fear that if she didn’t start now, she would never start—the thought of never publishing scared her more than actually sitting down to write. Chan tells GO, “When I first started sharing my work on Instagram, I got a lot of positive feedback from strangers. They said, ‘Oh, you managed to articulate my deepest emotions.’ And, I just felt really good about that.”
Chan describes herself as a “late bloomer” in the context of her queerness—a label that largely shapes the content and rhetoric of her writing. “The journey was rough at the start, especially as a femme. A lot of my queer friends said that coming out felt like coming home. But to me, it felt like turning up to the dyke bar in inappropriate footwear. With my work and my book, But I Don’t Feel Empowered, I really just wanted to be honest about all aspects of my queer journey.”
Coming into your queerness later in life is something that many folks can resonate with. For writers, artists, and creators, perhaps there were telltale signs in the early stages of work. For Chan, a funny but incredibly powerful experience in her early processes of writing gave it away. “I used to write lots of sapphic fiction. But I didn’t publish it, and I thought I was a straight girl. It was probably my queerness leaking out of my subconscious. Then, once I wrote my book, I was able to fully unpack my late-bloomer journey.”
The intersection of queerness and her Asian identity permeates her work, and is both charming and provocative. The queer Asian identity is distinct, and often unable to escape the grasp of familial and traditional values. Chan tells GO that being queer and Asian comes with challenges that particularly find one with the inability to be out, loud, and proud. There is a unique pressure to water down one’s queer self to appease family and not rock the boat. The contention between her queerness and Asian identity is explored and unraveled in the poems in her book.
“I’m Chinese and Indian, but I grew up in a multicultural environment, and now live in a Western country. My Asian and Western cultural identities constantly fight for space within me, and that’s a real conflict,” Chan tells GO. “A bull, a mantis, and a gay girl walk into an Asian restaurant” is a poem in her book that draws on the different identities that live within her, and their fight for a seat at the table. As she recounts the poem to GO, she delves deeper into the symbolic representations of the characters that she holds space for.
The bull represents the Western side of Chan—a brash and harsh character that wants to draw blood. He is aggressive and demands those around him take him for who he is. The mantis in the poem is described to tiptoe and keep peace in the story, emulating how the queer Asian identity often requires skirting around cultural expectations. The mantis is slow, gentle, soft, and cautious, representing the often-felt necessity to hide the louder and more colorful parts of oneself. The bull provides a harsh comparison, embodying the identity of unapologetically seeking unconditional acceptance. As Chan puts it, “The bull is a typical Western notion of ‘Take me as I am! This is who I am, and if you don’t like it, f*ck off!’ Which isn’t always necessarily compatible with a traditional Asian family.”
Chan also notes generational trauma as a central theme in her work. A poem she wrote called “The well of generational trauma” describes a well that her parents and their parents drank from. She tells GO, “It’s a whole line of people drinking from the same well without thinking. They don’t stop to consider whether or not something is wrong. They’re just too busy pouring water for the next generation. That poem is about me trying to break the cycle.”
“I feel like our generation—we’re kind of the first, in a way, to really start questioning things. It’s really scary, but at the same time, really empowering. It’s also confusing because why us? But at the same time, I also shouldn’t forget that there are cycles that my mom and grandmother broke,” Chan told GO. Chan’s grandfather is Chinese, and her grandmother is Bengali. This was the first interracial marriage in her grandmother’s line, and her great-grandparents didn’t approve, subsequently not showing face at the wedding. “My grandparents named my dad ‘Oshim,’ meaning no barriers. They called him ‘no barriers’ because of the concept of not having racial barriers, and he was the first to break that in a way.”
As Chan draws upon her lineage, she discovers an unraveling theme of resistance across generations of her family. She holds the story of her grandparents close to her heart, and often contemplates how her dad was the first to break racial barriers, and she is now the first to break sexuality barriers. “For my grandmother, it was the biggest taboo to marry a Chinese man. So now, to marry a woman, that’s as big of a taboo, if not bigger. It’s interesting how what is defined as taboo is different across generations. And, it’s all kind of make-believe anyway, because it’s constructed, you know?”
The queer Asian experience finds a common struggle and empowerment in those who share the identity, and Chan takes the wheel of putting time-worn-tales and cultural conceptions into words that can be appreciated by many. She tells GO, “As individuals, we feel like our stories are really specific and personal. We sometimes feel a little lonely. But when we share them, even if our experiences are niche, there’s always someone who’s going to relate. And that’s so powerful, because it feels like you’re not standing alone, even though you’re not physically in the same place.”
You can get your copy of ‘But I Don’t Feel Empowered’ by Suri Chan here. Learn more about Chan on her website and on Instagram.
