Zheng Wang: Trips Stories of a Businessman Who Writes Poetry on Work Trips is a sequence of narrative poems in a pseudo-chronological order, a kind of spiritual diary. Its predominant theme is the imaginary persona of this Singapore-based businessman who searches for the meaning of travelling and life by playing various parts in unexpected stories. These poems depict a variety of episodes of this persona’s diasporic life against a capitalist-globalised backdrop that mandates a work routine and a teleology for things like eating, meeting, sleeping, and even love. But they also endeavour to engage the parallel inner life of the author and contemplate the Heideggerian question of how man can dwell on the earth, poetically within a shifting context of nature, technology, and humanities.

Throughout this spiritual diary, these poems document the struggle of the persona varying from being unemployed in New York City to being a bus driver in Singapore, achieving reconciliation with the world where the author and his audience also play a part. The dilemma arises when life straddles tragedy and comedy, the emotions of which both move as the frame shifts from location to location or from one story to another.

However, these poems are not necessarily based on real narratives, acting like documentaries or epics of certain historical moments. Instead, they serve as a heterotopic lens to examine the possibilities of life, starting from the author’s family ethnic Iu Mien village, then his odysseys through the US and Europe as an international student, then an artist, and finally the tensions embodied by the conflict between being an artist scholar in Singapore and being a prodigal son of hybrid identities in a Chinese-majority city-state. These poems also exhibit a curious contrast with the author’s writing in Chinese, highlighting the complexity and contingency of human experiences. In addition, there is also musical rhythmicity to correlate the seemingly disparate episodes and personas into a flâneur-ish journey.

I believe that the purpose of art and poetry is to expand the experiential possibilities through examining and formulating personal experiences and transcending the boundaries that make them singular, administrative, stolid, distinct, and conflicting entities, only to be transformed into something else and larger. This principle guides me to write the Stories of a Businessman Who Writes Poems on Work Trips not as a businessman in imagination, but as a member of humanity in critical actuality.

An Iu-Mien Funeral

They mourned him in whispers
as if they had done that eternally
or in life,
chanting and waiting to crumble from the knees,
only to steal some rest and gossip.
Many of them were old.
The bodies lowered to his level of slumber,
the skeleton of a deflated balloon.
I could see his nose out of joint,
for one person was wearing black, not white.
As an atheist by document, he asked for an ethnic burial,
and grandma nodded in agreement
to each progressing mourner.
The casket with one screw left half-hammered—
glossy, smoothened, and manufactured like his radio to be buried.
Anachronistic shrouds only and for all to open the casket
for the final examination–is it final?
Envelopes, radio, and toothbrushes
and then came the hearse.
Only straight men were allowed to flank
the parade, and the chickens were sacrificed.
Blood spilled accurately, according to a lost cosmology,
around the coffin lid, unfit like his abdomen.
An old man’s stomach, wrinkled, punctured,
and now covered in other layers, fresh or dead.
The ritual was short enough to catch some chill in a temple.
At the end of the parade was the boy in black,
I reminisce, who looked like me in my twenties.
He sobbed and later sniffled a lot, almost negligible,
not as much a disturbance to the resting crowd,
but he remained outside the temple roof,
like a priest arriving late but never entering out of hesitation.
His fine hair and lips chapped beyond
the pallor, untanned by the summer here,
leaving films of tears crossing the bridge
and my vision blurry as the season straddled.
Summer was here—
grandpa was not dead yet, not until I saw the boy.
I couldn’t but felt obliged to justify before grandma spoke more.
He wasn’t there to keep me sober but judged.
In the old days, I would make tea for grandpa
around this time. I invited the boy to join my routine.
They both would have to wake up
from that indulgent game of glares.

The Not-So-Great Gatsby

Gatsby never reads Fitzgerald
and would think of this name as a made-up cartoon.
“It’s just an easy name,” he would complain.
The youngest son of the Gatsby family, he survived
with his mom’s pension and his phone like his penise.
His virginity is a myth after he came back drunk
on a discounted plane from Vegas. “Too hot is Vegas,”
and Gatsby would not regret the second time.
After an argument with his mom, he tried to win with Marxist quotes;
he moved out. A rite of passage.
He moved to Roosevelt Island, looking down to a Korean shopfront.
Every morning, I mean at noon,
Gatsby makes Kimchi sandwiches he would not finish without a decaf
at the only Starbucks on the turtle’s neck.
The island is a stranded carapace.
A turtleneck is Gatsby’s entire closet.
He enjoyed peeing into the grim ocean after a drink at the cabaret
almost engulfed by the mini-tsunami of wintry New York.
It is snowing soon, and Gatsby has adopted a kitten
with the advance to pay for the rent. That grumpy lady always smells like cigarettes.
Not for her, he quit smoking
because one of his favorite characters did so in his novel
unpublished. He even eavesdropped on the affairs of his intellectual neighbor.
Is his student Sophia? Gatsby takes the last ramble
around the stony embankment dedicated to a man in the 19th century named Fitzgerald.
No one around but some poets trying to impress a tourist lady.
Gatsby is stranded
because he is a Chinese cowboy with a Southern accent.
The south of New York
is not
Texas.

A Night in Singapore

“No history stays,” says Jan Morris.
It is a place where the diaspora became a re-diaspora-tion.
A harbor that slows the pace of no one
No ships or princes.
Merlion looks into the distance for which it looks ready to leave but without return.
Its half-body still submerged as fiction.
A slow boat to China? Such wasteful grace as the steamship horns resonate.
No matter whether slow or fast, the ship has sailed,
into oblivion.
The homeless would have to take the East-West
to claim an expired ticket at the Changi Airport.
It reminds one of the Miami City in the 19th century
a place of banality and possibility coexisting like Vegas and Jerusalem.
After Garden City has shed its last petal of the orchid,
the silenced voices reemerge under the white horses.
Street artists start singing Bob Dylan
in an accent smelling like dried seaweed.
The cigarette buds often a rare scene relit the melancholy of Gen Z.
Care for one more? Our last smoke.
In a vacuum where only mystery thrives,
the city is enshrouded in a grimness as thick as the tropical sea fret.
Les tristes tropiques—
Singapore has long outgrown the postmodern exhibit.
For some, the twinge stays impulsive.
The touting hawkers,
the Punjabis, the English-speaking pupils from Chinese families,
and the Malay motorcyclist with dragon tattoos on his arms.
They all look towards the sea at certain points.
The horizon on the ocean glints with ambiguous signals, a phantasmagoria.
Shifting time zones, the LED lighthouse leaps from island to island.
There are always people awake.
History leaks through the interstice
of Labrador Park and the Santosa corallites
picked up by a toddler, placed in a delicate vitrine,
and on it, a four-digit year is etched.
In Singapore and on a night in the harbor,
I toast with strangers from every world
to the last fisherman and their catch of the trip:
Saba fish, and still, Saba.
Only the pint stays fresh, and Singapore,
bubbling throughout the dark.
O, captain, my captain, tonight,
we are both losing sleep.

January

I played the cliches all night, sorry.
A playlist is a secret that I would keep
from your ears, if you were to tiptoe across the hallway.
You choose to knit your web at the corner of the stranger’s shower.
The web you abandoned at the sink now shivers with the dull breeze
from the aircon they inspect weekly
due to a pathological fetish with the mechanical click
when the plastic skin fits the skeleton underneath.
Where’s the switch of your body?
Nothing is as visceral as the hair after a shower.
After my shower at four,
the window invites the foul of the humus,
smelling the room emptied of elephants.
Just footprints and rustles of the broom scratching a sultry dream,
about you. Who are you?
A spider that left my memory dangling in a night of dengue.
How does the soil smell by your window?
I am still counting the rhythms,
then a lonely howl from the distance.

December

From the sixth day of sleeplesssness,
I recognize your voice in the crevice.
You speak through the eyes not lips.
A rabbit with razor-like teeth and the bloodshot gaze of innocence.
Only after I feed you to satisfaction will I be spared from the night,
a night of stares. You judged me
like judging an opened pomegranate, a cornered chameleon.
The sun is yet to rise from the routines of beehives.
Through the rain dwindling, the moist from the snorting humus,
I recognize your voice, neither Apollonian nor Dionysian,
but what about the Clydesdale at large and the dream that
we travelled far together on her saddle to Ushuaia?
It should be auspicious or our doom sharing a buffet of thorns and roses.
Should I keep you in cavity or as company?
Should I join the trap that injured my feet?
A hesitant knock on the door and a mewling from the bassinet of death.
The troubled sleep in a strange morning between storms indistinct.
It was an air-conditioned night of where we exchange hypnotic tricks.
I am going to meet the claws of your voice
by referencing the somniloquy.

A Secret Sojourn

A secret only to himself and his lover waiting at the confession room.
A benevolent austere. Will I be spared, pater? from the furnace of jealousy.
A baroque intoxication with another’s caress turned astringent immediately.
The soma and spirit, the bitter pair, like us, only ache to be intimate again.
We both reached for a left-over Pinot.
I heard the voice drowning as a splash before an otter plunges back into the depth
of a fishery, or the baffoonery of existence without return.
As a dessert, I am feeding you my cuspid and cavity
a bloodshed bite on the stony silence. I hum the wake of an exiled gondolier.
A hesitant cut by a rusty A minor through the frozen canals of hormones.
An excess, spumes, and audience circumbulating your tattoo-birthmark.
You have pride. A secret to be remembered like no one
would remember the last expression of a corpse unless she wakes up.
The saccharine of dueling bones is a little death we fail to consense.
It is never a full “Bon Nuit” but a semicolon.
I dreamed of the suffocation that will seclude us in a pond of cerberas
to feed the lizard lovers.

River and Lake

Anonymous river and orphaned lake
kneels at the coffin of his late mother.
His bride from the south strained as the willow trees
began to stretch the thin arms into the gelid air.
Exhausted of the authentic medication or pain inauthentic
he writes his name into the list of mourners.
The mere comfort arrived from the Chinese New Year
when the boy named after the ancient awe for the grand waters
finally quit his job in a factory of Canton, the ever-spring
that mythologized both the place where he was orphaned,
and her retirement home, a home now in the coffin,
patiently covered by snow. River has no name, nor does the lake.
The swans swoop over the crevasse like a birthmark
the only secret he shares with her.

Sanctuary

The tropical sun strips me bare
as an amphibian waking up at the wrong morning.
History is ChatGPT sans chitchat.
To escape from the heat, I deviate from the map
to seek a sanctuary in between,
in the breeze smelling like a deluge.
Sanctuary is the shadow between the lips
when closed to drink behind the altar.

An April Afternoon

The door shuts before one’s exit. Running late.
He limps on with strangers through the Kempas.
An enclave that moves along the threshold
a twilight seeming to decay from the gristle.
One last toast to my wallet then,
board the slowest boat to catch the regret.
A feline, Singapore’s only intellectual,
expects you, the grumpy driver to brake and grin.

How to cite: Wang, Zheng. “Stories of a Businessman Who Writes Poetry on Work Trips.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 24 Mar. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/03/24/businessman.

Zheng (Moham) Wang is a multilingual artist, poet, novelist, and art historian/critic based in Singapore. He graduated from Rice University in Houston, Texas in 2020 with a B.A., double-majoring in Art History and Studio Art, and from California Institute of the Arts with an M.A. in Aesthetics and Politics (Art Criticism) from the School of Critical Studies in 2022. He is currently a Ph.D. student of Art History and Theory at the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, with an NTU Research Scholarship. His poetry and novels have been published in Chinese and Bilingual magazines such as Voice and Verse Poetry (Hong Kong), Vineyard Poetry Quarterly (Taiwan), China Daily (Taiwan), Tsingtao Literature (China), Youth (China), and Rice Magazine (Houston, TX). His poetry has won awards internationally, and he is recently writing in English, Chinese, French, and his ethnic mother tongue, In Mien, a Hmongic language native to the Iu Mien people living in Southwestern China and Southeast Asia. More at mohamstudio.com.

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