Hong Kong echoes across English ghost lands: A decolonizing of English-language poetry

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on three women poets who deploy a Hong Kong Chinese imaginary, an imaginarium filled with memories, popular cultural references, fragments of Cantonese, and isolated Chinese characters. Jennifer Lee Tsai was born in the UK of Hong Kong immigrant parents, while Jennifer Wong migrated from Hong Kong to the UK first to study and then to write poetry. Tim Tim Cheng similarly migrated to the UK to study, having grown up in Hong Kong. Their English-language poems are peppered with Cantonese images and linguistic elements that challenge the reader to address the postcolonial condition of the poetry. Written in English in the UK, their poetry represents a poïesis of the local and the personal. While articulating a local everydayness, their work seeks out from afar and from the past, in the migrant in-betweenness of Chinese–British borderlands, poetic resolutions to the binds of their postcolonial subjecthood.

KEYWORDS:

• Hong Kong
• Chinese British
• Cantonese
• Tim Tim Cheng
• Jennifer Lee Tsai
• Jennifer Wong

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The work of these poets was part of a workshop project, which was a community initiative; it is available in Michelle Lacy, Lili Man, and Jessie Lim (1992).

2. After graduating from St Martins College of Art, London, Lab Ky Mo had a career writing and directing in the film, TV, advertising, and theatre industries, He now teaches film and TV at the University of Greenwich.

3. For a docufictional account of the post-war tribulations of the Chinese merchant seamen who kept open the Atlantic sea lanes for the UK and the USA during the Second World War, see Lee (2022).

4. Princes Avenue, one side of a magnificent Victorian boulevard, that leads to the imposing gates of Prince’s Park, named for Prince Edward (1841–1910), later Edward VII (1901–10), embodies the heyday of British imperialism. At the start of Princes Boulevard stands a now empty plinth which once hosted the statue commemorating William Huskisson, a pro-slave trade Member of Parliament, for whom the Georgian street in Tsai’s poem is named.

5. The poet’s note – “The line: “非礼勿视, 非礼勿听, 非礼勿言, 非礼勿动” – is a teaching from The Analects. Yan Yuan, Confucius’s disciple, asked about perfect virtue. Confucius said: “Look at nothing contrary to ritual, listen to nothing contrary to ritual, say nothing contrary to ritual, do nothing contrary to ritual” (J. Wong 2020, 87).

6. Cheung Po Tsai’s Cave on Hong Kong’s Cheung Chau Island is, according to legend, where Cheung Po Tsai張保仔 (1783–1822), a Manchu naval officer and former pirate, is said to have stashed his treasure.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gregory B. Lee

Gregory B. Lee has been writing about modern Chinese poetry for over 40 years, and has conducted research into the representation of Chineseness and the Chinese diaspora for some 30 years. He is founding professor of Chinese studies at the University of St Andrews. His latest book, published in both English and Cantonese, narrates the experience of being Chinese in the UK in the first half of the 20th century: 第八位中國商人同嘅海員/The Eighth Chinese Merchant and the Disappeared Seamen (2022).