📁 RETURN TO FIRST IMPRESSIONS
📁 RETURN TO CHA REVIEW OF BOOKS AND FILMS

Click HERE to read all entries in Cha on Making Space.
Click HERE to read all entries in Cha on Where Else.

❀ Nicolette Wong (editor), Making Space: A Collection of Writing and Art, Cart Noodles Press, 2023. 163 pgs.
❀ Jennifer Wong, Jason Eng Hun Lee, and Tim Tim Cheng (editors), Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology, Verve Poetry Press, 2023. 219 pgs.

It is great to see two collections of Hong Kong-related poetry and auspicious artwork—and in the case of Making Space several short stories also—published in 2023. There are some similarities between the two anthologies, yet there are also several discernible differences, other than the fact that one is published in Hong Kong and the other in UK, and that one is shorter even though it contains the original Chinese language versions of several of the stories. Interestingly also, there are only three poets who are represented with their poems in both collections. Both books are written primarily in English.

Making Space is a formidable endeavour. Seventeen writers are represented, all bar the British poet Neil Douglas with close connections to Hong Kong, with some of them having now left the city. The writers are passionate, all in some manner expressing the vicissitudes of creating and maintaining space, be it to enable personal identity or to retain political agency. Accordingly, the writers create some great imagery, some fine lines throughout both poems and stories, which embody sui generis Hong Kong scenes, sights and sounds, while the inclusion of five of Boon Lee’s vivacious artworks serve to further amplify these.

Some examples:

Electronics have tampered with their brains (from “A Painless Body”, by Lee Chi Leung, 37).

It’s as though you have drilled a hole through my heart and threaded anchor rope through it (from “Ways to Love in a Crowded City”, by Wong Yi, 114).

While in “New Year’s Day on Shek O Beach” (138), Sahilla Shariff literally makes space by constructing a concrete poem of words and lacunae, both of which amplify the vista. Thus the poem commences with:

a broken bucket                          sandy wrapper                                plastic lunchbox.

More than this, this anthology of contemporary writing is not afraid to depict the recent seismic events that have shaken Hong Kong into a whole different epoch, a divergent Dasein. Given the panoptical timidity which has become almost a norm for creative writers in the city, several short stories and a couple of poems (such as the verse of Paola Caronni and Jennifer Eagleton) portray the pain, the confusion, the upheaval, the schisms that—in the forms of Covid-19 and political insurgency—have riven Hong Kong of late. The book is a brave attempt at their depiction.

The non-fiction piece, “What We Leave Behind”, by Karen Cheung, typifies this approach, the narrative being replete with angst in the face of both the initial earthquakes and the multitude of aftershocks still reverberating here. Thus,

The people who are still here have stopped talking about the future (61).

What space is there left to write, to read. Before we enter the elevator, we skim the headlines of the free-of-charge state-controlled newspaper…to figure out who the authorities will target next (62-63).

The purportedly fictive following piece, “The Glasshouse and the Footbridge” by Yeung Chak Yan, similarly centres on the powerful political conscience currently prevalent in Hong Kong, which in many cases has divided families. The tale builds to a crescendo and at one key moment states:

This city had no room for the weak, and no space for conscience (85).

Yet, as denouement, the reader encounters,

She had caught a glimpse of a better place—of what this city could be, if it was allowed to shape its own destiny—and she was not ready to give up yet (94).

A sentiment which is also espoused at the conclusion of Mary King Bradley’s “A Tree Grows in Hong Kong”.

Well done, I say, to Making Space. Because for me, as a critic, as a writer, as a Hongkonger, there is one key task we must all undertake, albeit always being carefully strategic. Most especially nowadays when Hong Kong has altered inexorably. And that is to comment, to reflect, to convey what we newly experience around us.

❀

Where Else is somewhat of a different beast. While there is some manner of contemporary reflection and allusive reference to what modern day Hong Kong is still in the process of becoming, there is also a tremendous amount of poetry depicting a city from a vastly different era, or eras, poems with a different punchline, if you will. In a sense this ambitious analect is a history textbook. There are a sizeable number of poets represented here who no longer live in the city, or who were not born or grew up here, though they might continue to return to it to visit. There are a number of poems published quite some time ago, as in 1997, 2004, 2005, 2010, given that some of these pieces are classics.

As a result, this comprehensive compilation is somewhat of a curate’s egg, paralleling, of course what Hong Kong itself is and always has been. Therefore while there is a mighty quotient of terrific verse throughout, there are some pieces I would arguably assess as rather less so.

The youngish editors, of course, must have had a very difficult, perhaps impossible, task of deciding what to include, given their professed gambit of, “focussing on the ever-present nature of Hong Kong and its myriad imaginaries across the world”. (Jason Eng Hun Lee, Introduction, 11) A massive undertaking, particularly as Lee goes on to profess, “the ‘real’ Hong Kong is always hybrid, liminal, expressing a place in-between, an ‘elsewhere’ that is always hard to pin down or conceptualise”. (11) As Tim Tim Cheng echoes, “Hong Kong writing is a slippery thing… Try as we might, our anthology is not exhaustive”. (Introduction, 17)

Fair enough. A real potpourri of poetry then. There are seven avowedly thematically divided sections, although I confess to not always working out the territorial similarities between pieces in any given partition. And as with any such salmagundi, some portions taste better than others. At best, any reviewer can only present a sample of poetic highlights, of which—as noted—there are a myriad, given that not all such manifestly pinpoint the city of Hong Kong.

Among the highlights from the first section are the veteran Dave McKirdy’s incisive work “Citizen Ship” (2014), Nashua Gallagher’s clever “Siu Ap Fan with a Visitor” (2018) and Felix Chow Yue Ching’s英年早逝 (2022) with its brilliant lines such as “Ulcer our minds”.

To continue delineating must-read poems would make for an extremely lengthy review, so I will quickly name poets whose work is markedly excellent. Primarily resident young Hong Poets stand out, by the way, which augurs well for poetry per se in the SAR.

Xiao Yue Shan, River Dandelion and Sophie Lau graphically evoke the pre-1997 PR China/Hong Kong physical and psychic divides, while Chris Tse, Dorothy Chan and Roland Tsoi evoke the inter-generational ones. Chioma Onuoha’s outstanding “How to Make a Mixed Baby” (2020) deserves a book of its own, such is its class. Another veteran Hong Kong poetry maven, Konstandinos (Dino) Mahoney gifts us the magical “Hon Kwong Mansion” in which we are immersed in the pervasive underbelly of this city’s street life, while Belle Ling evokes some of its distinctive diurnal routines—at least for some of its inhabitants—via her “63 Temple Street, Mongkok” (2019). Certainly, these are but some of the treasures spilling from these pages.

In the sixth section, the poems become strong statements about language and identity, a symbiotic relationship, whereby each one shapes the other. English has never been and never will be the first language of most of the city’s population, though this anthology leans heavily in an Anglophone direction, not least due to the fact that more than a few of the poets included are resident in the UK.

Therefore, in this section, the linguistic confusion and ipseity of some Hong Kong poets explodes away from the earlier preponderance of image-saturated everyday encounters. Thus Huiwen Shi, Lian-Hee Wee, Tom KE Chan, Louise Leung Fong Lee, Sannya Li, Wai Julia Cheung all slam-dunk the complexities that a colonial language engenders, so well encapsulated by this line from Eric Yip’s fine “Translate” (2022):

I dissolve my tongue in another language (147-148).

Thematically, what then of any consideration of the vast political ruptures that Hong Kong has been undergoing for some time now? Where Else wisely avoids any direct confrontation with such turbulence and—other than some reference to it in Michael Tsang’s earlier poem “Reading Louise Ho on the MTR”, which pays homage to that author’s wonderful 1997 volume, rather than to contemporary Hong Kong—there is little such reflection until later in the collection. By the time we get to section seven, compunction is cast aside and some more candid statements feature. Never, however, with the forthrightness of the slimmer and closer-to-home Making Space.

Mind you, James Shea prophetically announced that “there is very little crime here, but there could be a war”, in his succinct “Soft Tank” (2014) and each of Henry Wei Leung, Collier Nogues and the admirable pair of Shirley Geok-Lin Lim and Agnes Lam made more tangential reference to the years 2014, 2019 and presumably later.

The final few poems, then, are—for me, at least—meritorious. From Cass Donnelly—who incidentally does not have a bio posted in the addendum of poet biographies—through to Chris Song’s wistfulness at looking on to his homeland from Europe in “At an East Prussian Restaurant in Berlin” (2023), such lines as,

Even as my city falls apart. (Cass Donnelly, “Demi-Noblesse”)

and

What we can do is to
love what’s still there. (Jennifer Wong, “Sitting in the car with my brother”)

Paola Caronni’s masterpiece “Tarrying Home—Unfolding”, inside which the poet/persona is a rift between remaining and departing Hong Kong, culminates with,

looking for the exit in the dark hall
ready to leave you forever.

All of these poems intimate a Hong Kong that is manifestly unlike the one I first accosted over 25 years ago (“the city that no longer exists”, as Judy Brown puts it in “Greenery” [2022]). Even though, it must be said, for many citizens here nothing much has in fact altered—for these people, working, striving, surviving, and partaking in the city’s culinary delights remain the priority for them. Though maybe they might read and write poetry on occasion.

Finally, a poem towards the end of this impressive, necessary, yet necessarily incompletable collection, is titled “Again”, penned by the wondrous Felix Chow Yue Ching, which perhaps epitomises where Hong Kong is at right now and which is an apical way to end the review,

there is no cure for a rotting city
seeping through inaction and redaction
torn apart by the times (184-185)

This is a sonic boom away from David McKirdy’s percipient statement from a decade earlier: “a city divided by race, ideology, and fortune” (from “Star Struck”, 2014, 126-127).

And yet, and yet. The very fact that there are so many dexterous poets with an affiliation to Hong Kong, across both of these vital anthologies, gives me some hope for the city. I will always return. Where Else, indeed.

How to cite: Rapatahana, Vaughan. “I Will Always Return: Making Space and Else Where.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 18 Jul. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/07/18/making-space-else-where/.

Vaughan Rapatahana (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Te Whiti), the author and editor/co-editor of well over 40 books, commutes between homes in Hong Kong, Philippines, and Aotearoa New Zealand. He is widely published across several genres in both te reo Māori and English and his work has been translated into Bahasa Malaysia, Italian, French, Mandarin, Romanian, Spanish. He earned a PhD from the University of Auckland with a thesis about Colin Wilson. He is also a critic of the agencies of English language proliferation and the consequent decimation of indigenous tongues, inaugurating and co-editing English language as Hydra and Why English? Confronting the Hydra (Multilingual Matters, Bristol, UK, 2012 and 2016) and several academic papers accordingly. As a poet, Vaughan has published nine collections in Hong Kong SAR; Macau; Philippines; USA; England; France, India, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand. Atonement (UST Press, Manila) was nominated for a National Book Award in Philippines (2016) and he won the inaugural Proverse Poetry Prize the same year, and was included in Best New Zealand Poems (2017). He also writes short fiction and has had two novels published. Vaughan is one of the few authors in the world who consistently writes in and is published in te reo Māori (the Māori language). It is his mission to continue to do so and to push for a far wider recognition of the need to write and to be published in this tongue. His latest poetry collection written exclusively in te reo Māori (with English language “translations”) is te pāhikahikatanga/incommensurability, published by Flying Islands Books in Australia, 2023. See Vaughan’s New Zealand Book Council Writers File for more information.

---