WHERE ELSE E-Book

• Herausgeber: Verve Poetry Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 173

Beschreibung

Featuring both established and emerging Hong Kong poets across generations and continents, this unique anthology offers a glimpse into an exciting, diverse range of voices that make up the diasporic imagination of the contemporary Hong Kong poetry community. Adopting a diasporic approach, the anthology encompasses both native Hong Kong writers as well as expatriate and mixed-race voices who were born or have lived in the city. With a preface from the Hong Kong-born, California-based poet Marilyn Chin and a joint introduction from the co-editors, the anthology sheds light on some poignant, wide-ranging themes such as migration, identity, gender, language, belonging, environment that underpin the city of Hong Kong, a place situated uniquely between the East and the West, in the 21st century. The book also features a selection of artworks from some of Hong Kong's most talented artists, inviting the reader to make connections between the visual images and the text.

Leseprobe

MEET THE EDITORS:

Tim Tim Cheng is a poet and teacher from Hong Kong, currently based between Edinburgh and London. Her pamphlet Tapping at Glass is out with VERVE Poetry Press in 2023. Her poems are published or anthologised in POETRY, The Rialto, Ambit, Cicada, Our Time is a Garden, and elsewhere. She has spoken in transnational literary panels across Asia-Pacific regions, the US, and the UK. Her latest appearances include the StAnza Poetry Festival, Hidden Door Festival, and Loop, BBC Scotland. Named ‘one of the seven female poets to know in Hong Kong’ by Tatler Asia, she is also a William Hunter Sharpe Memorial Scholarship awardee, WRiCE fellow, Roddy Lumsden Memorial Mentorship mentee, and a member of the Southbank Centre New Poets Collective.

Jason Eng Hun Lee is a poet and academic of mixed British and Malaysian Chinese ancestry whose research and practice fields encompass global anglophone literatures, postcolonial and diasporic Asian writing and global Shakespeares. His debut poetry collection Beds in the East was a finalist for the HKU Poetry Prize in 2010 and Melita Hume Poetry Prize in 2012. His poetry, reviews and articles have been published in Wasafiri, Stand, Under the Radar, Acumen, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Oxford Poetry. He is a Literary Editor for Postcolonial Text and chief curator for OutLoud HK [隨言香港], Hong Kong’s longest running poetry collective. He is a Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at Hong Kong Baptist University.

Jennifer Wong was born and grew up in Kong Kong, is a poet, writer, researcher and translator who has published poetry, reviews and translations for many journals. Her poems have been included in books of essays and anthologies, including Why I Write Poetry (Nine Arches Press) and 100 Poems to Save the Planet (Seren Books). She was a visiting fellow at Oxford TORCH for 2022 and the writer-in-residence for Wasafiri international literature magazine in 2021. Her collection, 回家Letters Home, published by Nine Arches Press in 2020, has been named a Wild Card choice by Poetry Book Society. Other works include Goldfish (Chameleon Press), which won the Hong Kong Arts Development Council Young Artist Award (Literary Arts), and her monograph, Identity, Home and Writing Elsewhere in Contemporary Chinese Diaspora Poetry, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2023. She has taught creative writing at Poetry School, City Lit and Oxford Brookes University.

PUBLISHED BY VERVE POETRY PRESS

https://vervepoetrypress.com

[email protected]

All rights reserved

© 2023 all individual authors

The right of all individuals to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

FIRST PUBLISHED APR 2023

Printed and bound in the UK

by Imprint Digital, Exeter

ISBN: 978-1-913917-36-4

ePub ISBN: 978-1-913917-79-1

Cover photo by Carmen Lau Ka Man

CONTENTS

Introductions by Jason Eng Hun Lee, Jennifer Wong and Tim Tim Cheng

- ONE -

Sestina for Hong Kong – May Huang

Eye – Claire Cox

Build and Dismantle – Emerald Liu

Calendar – Sarah Howe

Citizen Ship – David McKirdy

Two Candles (婉) – Robert Black

Yung Shue Wan Pier – Helen Bowell

New Territories – Sean Wai Keung

With Wings You Gave Me – Nadee

How Did I Forget? – Ethan Yu

Repulse Bay Hotel, Hong Kong (1981) – Harry Ricketts

Bauhinia x Blakeana – Antony Huen

Siu Ap Fan with a Visitor – Nashua Gallagher

Island – Louise Ho

英年早逝 – Felix Chow Yue Ching

- TWO -

The Dotted Line – Mani Rao

If You Don’t Hit It, It Won’t Fall – Sarah Howe

Special Economic Zone Love Song – Jane Wong

Border Town – Viki Holmes

exodus hong kong – Xiao Yue Shan

How We Survived：爺爺’s Pantoum (II) – River瑩瑩Dandelion

(a)bridge(d) – Sophie Lau

Self-portrait of My Granny in the Voice of Anti-Japanese Drama’s Protagonists – Tim Tim Cheng

My Mother’s Love – Tegan Smyth

Ping Shan Heritage Trail – Akin Jeje

Kuk Po – Jennifer Lee Tsai

Ngee Sik Ng Sik – Roland Tsoi

Cantonese – Chris Tse

Lotus Flower Kingdom – Stephanie Chang

Triple Sonnet for Veronica Lodge’s Tigers – Dorothy Chan

Madame X – Jessica Chan

- THREE -

Reading Louise Ho on the MTR – Michael Tsang

請勿靠近車門 – Kika Man

Essay on Stochasticity – Marco Yan

The Slice, the Bus and the Astronaut – Atom Cheung

Texaco Road – Cass Donnelly

Witness – Nicolette Wong

Dough – Ethan Luk

Dealing in Numbers – Kavita A. Jindal

After-school Snack – Silvia Tse

A Father and Son in Rags, Downtown Hong Kong – John Wall Barger

Checherella – Cecil C. Elleran

Your Room – Janet Bi Li Chan

Reflection – Nicholas Wong

Rare on the Market – Peter Kennedy

Soft Tank — James Shea

- FOUR -

There Is a Season Waiting Behind This One – Collier Nogues

Admiralty – Shirley Geok-lin Lim

The Tomorrowless People – Wendelin Law

What the Mother Cannot Say – Andrew Barker

Magpie Robin – Agnes Lam

Term of Art – Henry Wei Leung

Scared – Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

The Last Words of a Dying Girl – Swann Adara Lee

Butterflies of Hong Kong – Neil Martin

Moving Out at Night – Polly Ho

The Disease – Victoria Walvis

Twelve Ways of Looking at Blue – Florence Ng

A Simple Destruction – WaWa

Ghost Tigers – Portia Yu

Calling Home – Mary Jean Chan

- FIVE -

Hoi Ha – Martin Alexander

Change with Constancy – Gillian Bickley

Rock – Laura Jane Lee

The Shopping Cart – Henrik Hoeg

Fetch – Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

Star Struck – David McKirdy

At the Market Butcher in Tai Po – John Wall Barger

Cycling to Tai Mei Tuk – Jason Eng Hun Lee

How to Make a Mixed Baby – Chioma Onuoha

Babysitting in Ho Man Tin – Ian Humphreys

||：碰：|| – Josephine Yip

Different Skin – Mags Webster

Office – Eddie Tay

Greenery – Judy Brown

Laundry – Tara Lee

- SIX -

Introduction to Literature – Huiwen Shi

A Pigeon to Deliver a Creole – Lian-Hee Wee

After Ma Zhiyuan – James Shea

譯 / Translate – Eric Yip

Tempo is not a rhythm you sway to – Victoria Fong

Like That – Tom KE Chan

The Young Biologists – Kate Rogers

Brew Sky – Louise Leung Fung Yee

Gong Nui – Sannya Li

小心 – Elizabeth Chung Yi Lei

Bak Lan – Madeleine Slavick

鬼 – Wai Julia Cheung

Fricatives – Eric Yip

Permission – Jerrold Yam

New Glasses – D.J. Hamilton

- SEVEN -

Home to Hong Kong – Louise Ho

Congee in Sham Shui Po – Art Hur

Hon Kwong Mansion – Konstandinos Mahoney

Demi-Noblesse – Cass Donnelly

63 Temple Street, Mong Kok – Belle Ling

Hoi Polloi – Sam Cheuk

At an East Prussian Restaurant in Berlin – Chris Song

Twin Cinema for the Dying Cinema – Hei Yee Hayley Wu

It’s Late – Janet Charman

Mother’s Ink – Kit Fan

Sitting in the car with my brother – Jennifer Wong

Tarrying Home – Unfolding – Paola Caronni

Again – Felix Chow Yue Ching

Gratitude on Ch’in’s Edge – Marilyn Chin

想(家) – Hilary Tam

Acknowledgements & Poet/Artist Biographies

‘Mei Wah Building’ by Stella So

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTIONS

1 - Jason Eng Hun Lee

The late, great, Yasi [也斯], known to fellow Anglophone poets as Leung Ping-kwan, wrote in ‘Images of Hong Kong’ that

We need a fresh angle,

nothing added, nothing taken away,

always at the edge of things and between places.

Write with a different colour for each voice;

OK, but how trivial can you get?

Could a whole history have been concocted like this?

For regular cultural observers of Hong Kong, the issue of representation has long been at the heart of much contemporary angst about the city. The challenge to provide ‘a fresh angle, / nothing added, nothing taken away’, to create our own individual and collective myths and resist drowning in perceptions not of our own making, has led many before us to labour to produce a more diverse, inclusive vision of what the city is and could be.

Given its history as a port of embarkation and disembarkation, Hong Kong is often said to have a diasporic mentality, spewing forth people that are comfortable inhabiting two or more cultures and locations. As Nashua Gallagher writes triumphantly, Hong Kong is ‘a third-culture kid who writes her own story’ (‘Siu Ap Fan With a Visitor’). That ephemeral window onto the world has sometimes given Hong Kong an exotic lustre that complicates its reception as a place beyond more than just a melting pot of East and West. However, it also gives us the opportunity to reimagine what it truly means to be a community, to be more than just neighbours enclosed by borders, nationalities, identity or language.

In focusing on the ever-present nature of Hong Kong and its myriad imaginaries across the world, Jenny, Tim Tim and I humbly present to you this anthology entitled Where Else, which can be a statement, a question, an imperative, a declaration, or a combination of all the above. Where else but Hong Kong indeed! Yet the phrase can also be inverted to articulate that fixation on ‘elsewhere’, as Sam Cheuk states in ‘Hoi Polloi’: ‘“Where else / should you be?” There. Elsewhere.’ If the ‘real’ Hong Kong is always hybrid, liminal, expressing a place in-between, an ‘elsewhere’ that is hard to pin down or conceptualise, it nevertheless allows us to rework these conditions into a space for meaningful exchange, where poets from all over the world can converge and take part in Leung’s call to ‘write with a different colour for each voice’.

While highlighting Hong Kong’s connection to the wider world, the anthology celebrates the best of what can be produced or nurtured locally. Instead of producing a compendium of the ‘Best of the Best’ or a collection featuring the most famous, representative poets to have emerged from Hong Kong, we wanted to showcase both emerging work from our predominantly unpublished poets, whilst giving many of our veteran poets living overseas the chance to call home and reconnect with their roots. We wanted to give equal credit and weighting to all, placing grassroots voices side-by-side equally with their international counterparts and to allow the reader to dwell in their shared preoccupations.

Organised into seven sections, and with a loose thematic structure threading together the different genres and styles of our poets, we hope to produce a vibrant, contemporary vision of Hong Kong that caters to all tastes and schools. There are poems on the tangled legacies of colonialism in the city; poems on the pain of exile and the wonders of migration to and from a motherland; poems celebrating the many landmarks and geographies of Hong Kong; poems on conflict; poems on love. So too is there a veneration for the literary flag-bearers who have come before, like the aforementioned Leung Ping-kwan, Xi Xi, Louise Ho, who rightly appear as giants when mentioned by other writers in this anthology. There is also a desire to break new poetic ground, to delight in the interplay of linguistic signs and fuse together new language sensibilities as Louise Leung does in ‘Brew Sky’: ‘Standard English meets 老一輩 when / inflexible tongues pronounce 雞腸 in 錯 geh 讀音 […] leaving fundamental structures / with tints of Chinese saliva’. Ultimately, what the anthology hopes to achieve is to look at the city doubly from the outside as well as from the inside, to reconcile the strange with the familiar, yoke the exotic with the mundane, and to show that, despite the ever-present exotica of Hong Kong images on posters and billboards, there will always be more to say about this wonderful city and its people than can possibly be contained in a single volume.

With all our hearts, Jenny, Tim Tim and I would like to thank Stuart and his team at VERVE Poetry Press, the many poets and artists who have contributed their work, feedback and support, and the many financial (and emotional) patrons and sponsors without whom this work would not have seen the light of day. As a fellow sojourner and transnational emigre who can claim multiple heritages, Hong Kong has never felt more like home. Yet home is, as many of the poems have shown, as much an imaginative concept as a physical one. If the anthology opens with a sense of one’s memories trapped in the past, it ends with the realisation, in Hilary Tam’s poem, that ‘home’ will never leave us. It is with this in mind that we dedicate this anthology to our wider Hong Kong family stretched out across the oceans, but also to those who write in conditions that do not always make art-making easy, to the various groups and collectives that labour week-in, week-out, to put up a space for writers of all stripes and colours to read, listen, or share their work and to break bread with their fellow poets in communion, and to help nurture and publish the next generation. This book is for you all.

2 - Jennifer Wong

In co-editing this anthology with Jason and Tim Tim, I was reminded of the days when I started out as a poet writing in and from Hong Kong. My friends used to tease me: you want to write about Hong Kong? What’s there to write about, pollution? Now, in 2023, as we launch this anthology, I can’t help but feel proud about this book because if I were a young writer coming from Hong Kong, I would love to read it. It’s an anthology that can give a Hong Kong writer the courage and permission to write from the heart (even if English is not one’s mother tongue). This book is affirming in the sense that I know I’m not alone.

In the process of our editing and soliciting submissions from the open call, I am exhilarated to discover the sheer range of voices emerging from this place, some of whom I have not encountered before. Best of all, I fall in love with poems that offer bold and refreshing ways to read Hong Kong, such as ‘Demi-Noblesse’ where we see a customer’s quiet moment in a local cha chaan teng (Hong Kong-style cafe), her orders ‘clipped and exact’, who hopes to lead a life that is ‘a little elegant, a little kind / even as my city falls apart’. From MTR train rides (such as in Kika Man’s ‘請勿靠近車門’ and Michael Tsang’s ‘Reading Louise Ho on the MTR’), mahjong games (‘||: 碰 :||’ by Josephine Yip), pandemic abnormalities (Polly Ho’s ‘Leaving at Night’); a lunar calendar (Sarah Howe’s ‘Calendar’) to the natural landscape in Hong Kong (e.g. Kate Rogers’s ‘The Young Biologists’), these poems revel in the power of poetry to transform the everyday into something extraordinary.

In our compilation process, we were impressed to see the poets’ courage and originality in addressing conflicts, whether they are class barriers, inequality, struggles with racial, gender, queer identities or relationships, challenges living under strict Covid restrictions, and surviving the city’s ineradicable memories and traumatic changes. In ‘Madame X’ and ‘The Last Words of a Dying Girl’, for example, it is impossible not to be moved by the speaker’s longing for social acceptance, for an end to unfair biases against queer love.

As a school student in Hong Kong, I remember reading poems by Louise Ho and Agnes Lam, and loving the way they brought the city to life through writing about the multicultural, the local rituals or working class spaces. I have also been encouraged by how they claimed their subjectivities as Asian woman writers. Later, reading Agnes Lam’s research Becoming Poets1—in which she traces the writing practice, cultural and linguistic backgrounds of generations of Asian poets including poets from Hong Kong—has brought new understanding and hopes that Hong Kong poetry must be heard and to claim its unparalleled space in world literature. As scholars, critics and poets, Jason Lee and Tammy Ho have interviewed Asian diasporic poets in Singapore and Hong Kong to capture the Anglophone city poetics and Asian experience, pose new questions on the multiplicities of Asian writing and the cultural identity of these writers.

Having relocated from Hong Kong to live in England a decade ago, I realised that my writing community and landscape do not fall neatly in a single place, even though I have always seen myself as a writer from Hong Kong. At the same time, I am fortunate enough to be connected with a diverse diasporic writing community, including some very talented Hong Kong poets in the UK and the US. In his prize-winning essay ‘The “Old Hong Kong” and “a Gold-sifting Bird”: Hong Kong and Chinese Ekphrasis in Contemporary British Poetry’ published in Wasafiri, poet-critic Antony Huen expands on the concept of ‘Hong Kong poetry’, its ekphrastic roots as well as geopolitical nature that encompasses ‘cultural memory, and diaspora, and the complex geopolitical relations between Hong Kong, mainland China, and the UK’.

To me, it seems that there isn’t a clear-cut, stable definition of what a ‘Hong Kong poet’ is. What we would like to bring about is the space and willingness for people to appreciate these writings, and I can’t wait to see how readers will respond to the thematic and geographical range of voices that we have captured, and to discover the dialogues between their works.

I am indebted to fellow poets and co-editors Jason and Tim Tim, for their insights, dedication and friendship in the process, and I am deeply touched by their willingness to embrace all kinds of poets or poems that deserve to be in the book. We are tremendously grateful to those who have supported us throughout the creative process, especially Stuart Bartholomew at VERVE, who has believed in the project since the beginning. Thanks to our patrons and friends who care about this anthology, and readers—you who are reading this right now—and we hope that you will enjoy discovering such a diverse range of original and essential voices from Hong Kong.

3 - Tim Tim Cheng

It was a humbling experience editing Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology. I came across so many well-written poems that I wish I had written myself. Reading more than 400 entries—some by poets I admire, some by poets I have never met—I am both moved and proud of being able to contribute to one of Hong Kong’s many writing communities. The book you are holding is a labour of love, in which poets who are faithful to their crafts come together to acknowledge their connections with this small dot of a place we call Hong Kong.

Without reading Hong Kong poets, I would not know our stories deserved a place in English verse. Our curricula have always been farsighted. We learn to care about what is far away in time and space more than the here and now. I am grateful for Hong Kong anthologies published by Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine and VERVE Poetry Press, Cart Noodle Press, Chameleon Press, OutLoud HK, and Canto Cutie, among others, for showing an aspiring poet like me what is possible in the making of Hong Kong literature. We are not the first who do this, and we will surely not be the last.

It is good to know that you are not alone, and things you care about share common values with people beyond your wildest imagination. This, to me, is the purpose of our anthology. I want readers who identify as Hongkongers to feel understood and empowered. I want readers who are not familiar with Hong Kong to be surprised by the city’s multitudes. I want readers who are somewhere between the two groups to keep being curious about the city. I do wonder, though, if our anthology will be valuable not just among academics and writers. I am speaking as a secondary school teacher who believes that words are vessels of power. Being attentive to them could make a difference in the ways we relate ourselves to the world.

In Wong Yi’s interview with Dung Kai-cheung titled ‘The Hong Kong Type’, Dung contends that: ‘[t]here is no such thing as ‘Hong Kong history’—everyone has their own Hong Kong history. I think it’s more important for everyone to have their own history of Hong Kong than one official, unified history of Hong Kong.’ Our stories are proliferating and gaining more attention in times of crisis. It is both bottom-up and top-down. This anthology attempts to gather diverse representations while ensuring that honesty, safety, and marketability are in balance. The suffix ‘-ty’ seems to reflect that one has to think of Hong Kong as a state that complicates, and a condition that requires care.