East West - The Asian American Lifestyle Magazine

By Eliza Gano 

Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai speaks in a rapid-fire, energetic voice, pausing briefly before moving on to her next thought. Her passion for words and social activism brought her to where she is today – a spoken-word artist, essayist, playwright and choreographer who travels throughout the country on various tours.

“My art and work is a way of understanding the value each person brings to the table,” Tsai says. “Being an artist is like a chemistry experiment, trying to see what I can put out into the world.” 

Born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, she is the youngest daughter of Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants. And her fierceness and relentlessness may be genetic. While visiting relatives in Taiwan, she learned that when one of her aunties was 18, she performed in anti-communist plays, and her grandfather was a politician in Shanghai — one of the reasons her family fled to Taiwan, eventually settling in the United States.

“I have a sense of my family’s diaspora; it’s a natural part of who I am,” she says.

Tsai has appeared on many stages including the Nuyorican Poets Café, the House of Blues, the Apollo Theater and two seasons on “Russell Simmons Presents HBO Def Poetry.”

“People think of spoken word as a young art form, but the oral form is part of the oldest stuff on earth. In Asian, African, Latin American cultures, there’s always the storyteller,” Tsai says. “Different poets are now thinking, ‘Where do we go with spoken word?’ It’s exciting to see how things shift and change and as a community to see what other people are doing.”

Her third national “Move This Earth” spoken-word tour begins in October with appearances in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, the Bay Area, Denver and Minneapolis. Tsai’s spoken-word solo CD “Infinity Breaks” will also be released this fall, and in 2008, after many rewrites, her spoken-word/hip-hop theater ensemble show “Murder the Machine” will premiere preceding the 2008 election. The play was most recently excerpted at Chicago’s first Hip Hop Theater Festival in spring 2006.

“Murder the Machine” (a reference to the Windy City’s political scene) is a piece Tsai has been fine-tuning for the past three years. Her point of reference is Chicago, between 2003-2005, in a post-Sept. 11 world. She recalls a very profound incident in a march of about 20,000 individuals. “We proceeded north and everyone sat down. There were so many cops in riot gear ready for something to happen. It was an apocalyptic scene,” Tsai says. “It made me question, ‘What is our legacy in terms of working toward peace, what are we prepared to do, at what cost and how does that match with all the things we go through in our lives?’”    

Before becoming a full-time artist and activist, Tsai, 28, worked in the nonprofit, focusing on youth organizations, domestic violence and community and urban development. But she also had much exposure to the spoken-word scene. In high school, her English teacher would sneak her class into poetry slams. While attending the University of Illinois-Champagne, Tsai organized open mic slam nights. Tsai says she realizes that any creative work is not made in a void, but rather it is effected by several factors, most notably, history.  

“I was on the subway when I heard Sam Cook’s song ‘A Change is Gonna Come’ and it made me think that art is so important, not as an extra thing or a luxury. It renews us to the sense of love and what we do love,” Tsai says. “It can bring a person back to their history. History is so important to understand because through art you can bring to and add to that legacy of history.”

She also muses about her existence as an Asian American woman in the world today. In “Memoirs of an Ass Kicker,” a piece she wrote as a retrospective on Arthur Golden’s book-turned-movie “Memoirs of a Geisha,” she writes, “I’m so over this recycled wet dream of subservient Asian women waiting for white male liberators, whether they be G.I.s, “samurais” or American authors. Believe me, fools, we don’t need you to save us or to write our stories. Every river has its source, and what we see manifest today flows from the past.”

But aside from using her writing as a forum to question, observe and call to action, writing is simply an outlet for Tsai. When asked how many journals she owns, she laughs. “Girl, my life is surrounded by paper! I can go through at least one or two spiral-bound notebooks in a month. Writing is like a conversation with yourself. My friends would send blank notebooks to me and I used to write with a pencil because I didn’t want to mess up. I didn’t think I had the right to take up space on paper,” Tsai says. “A journal reflects my interior life. Writing can offer a really personal, private space; it helps to carve out a space for ourselves.”

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