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Poem 1 · Self

Kentang

Daren Shiau. A speaker called a potato for not speaking his own dialect — and what he does with the insult.

📄 Open your package at page 2 and keep it beside you. Only short extracts are quoted here, for analysis — the full poem is in your booklet, and you should be reading from that.

What is happening

Friends call the speaker kentang — Malay for potato — meaning he is Westernised: an English speaker who cannot manage his own mother tongue. His grandmother says, in dialect, that he cannot speak Khek properly. The whole poem is his answer to that label.

Two footnotes you must use in an answer: kentang is potato in Malay, and Khek is a Southern Chinese dialect, also known as Hakka. Mentioning them shows you understood the cultural situation, not just the words.

Step 1 · The sustained comparison

The comparison is announced in the first line and never let go: the speaker is food. Once you see that, almost every image in the poem belongs to one family.

perhaps mashed, quashed by expectations, maybe even a whipped potato,

Daren Shiau, ‘Kentang’ — extract quoted for analysis

Look at what those verbs have in common. Mashed, quashed, whipped, whisked — every one is something done to a potato by someone else holding the utensil. They are violent, and they are passive. The speaker is never the cook.

The detail most students miss Notice the hedging words: “perhaps”, “maybe”. He is not even certain what he has been turned into. That uncertainty is the point — being labelled by others has left him unsure of his own identity, and the tentative language performs that doubt rather than just describing it.

Step 2 · The grandmother's words

her words are like pebbles of uncooked rice raw and earthy, not softened by heat or tact — i swallow but cannot digest

Daren Shiau, ‘Kentang’ — extract quoted for analysis

This is a simile (“like pebbles”), and it stays inside the food idea. Rice that is uncooked is hard, inedible, painful to swallow. “Not softened by heat or tact” is doing double work: literally rice needs heat, and figuratively her criticism needed tact and did not get any.

Then “i swallow but cannot digest” — he accepts the criticism but cannot absorb or come to terms with it. Swallowing without digesting is exactly what it feels like to be told something hurtful by family: you take it, and it sits there.

Step 3 · The turn

Everything above is done to him. The final stanza is the first time he acts.

Before

Mashed, quashed, whipped, whisked — processed by other people. Broken down, uncertain, passive.

→
After

“i imagine being a root, dug from the ground… soaking, whole, in a bowl of curry.” He chooses the image himself, and he is whole rather than mashed.

Three things change at the turn, and a strong answer names all three:

Form is doing work too The whole poem is in lower case, including “i”. That does two things at once: it makes the voice quiet and informal, like a confession to a friend — and it makes the speaker's “i” visually small, which fits a poem about someone whose sense of self keeps being diminished by other people.

Check yourself