Letters Home E-Book

Jennifer Wong

• Herausgeber: Nine Arches Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 55

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Letters Home, Jennifer Wong's remarkable and vivid third collection of poems, unravels the complexities of being between nations, languages and cultures. Travelling across multiple borders of history and place, these poems examine what it means to be returning home, and whether it is a return to a location, a country or to a shared dream or language. "There are poems of homesickness, nostalgia, but also humour, hope and optimism - all depicted in Wong's distinctive, intelligent style... This is a remarkable collection, which makes a new and bold contribution to the genre of diaspora literature." – Hannah Lowe "Jennifer Wong's voice is captivating, compassionate, her poems full of insight, as she questions the complex relationship between culture and identity and what it means to leave a place to become defined by another." - Rebecca Goss

Leseprobe

回家

LETTERS HOME

Letters Home 回家

Jennifer Wong

ISBN: 978-1-911027-87-4

eISBN: 978-1-911027-88-1

Copyright © Jennifer Wong

Cover artwork: © Lam Tung Pang – ‘Before the night’ Acrylic and charcoal on plywood, 100x100cm, 2018.

Website: www.lamtungpang.com

All rights reserved. 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.

Jennifer Wong has asserted her right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published February 2020 by:

Nine Arches Press

Unit 14, Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre,

Great Central Way, Rugby.

CV21 3XH

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Contents

i. the ground beneath our feet

of butterflies

Glow

Diocesan Girls School, 1990-1997

Chung Kiu Department Store: a love story

King of Kowloon

Su Li Zhen

Lotus

Daughter

Small School

Dreamers

Girls from my class

ii. speak, silence, speak

Chinese Classifiers

Ba Jin (1904-2005)

Bloodline

To the little girl in a village hut I never met

Comrade

Catch-22 in Simplified Language

The language of exile

Naming the sheep year babies

Lost in translation

Letter to AS(T)7

iii. Mountain City

Mountain City

iv. just an immigrant

Arrival

Trace

London, 2008

Diary of a Miu Miu Salesgirl

Dimsum at Joy King Lau

Maria

Confessions of a minority student

The metallic bit in your tongue

The Colour of Race

From Beckenham to Tsim Sha Tsui

Sushi bar amnesiac

Postpartum vinegar

The limitation of maps

v. remember to forget

At the wet market

My father, who taught me how to fold serviette penguins

Unbearably light words on San Huan Lu

Metamorphosis

Calling the dead

Sending Chinese students to America, 1872

Anser anser

Up the mountain, down the village

Truths 2.0

Yangtze

An engraved Chinese teapot

Real life thesis

A personal history of soups

Notes

Acknowledgements

Thanks

About the author and this book

i. the ground beneath our feet

In the east and west,

above and below the equator –

quiet like pins dropping,

and in every black pinprick

people keep on living.

– from ‘Map’ by Wislawa Szymborska,

Map: Collected and Last Poems

(trans. Clare Cavanagh)

of butterflies

Zhuang Zi said

the man does not know

if he dreams of a butterfly

or if the butterfly dreams

of a man. It is unclear

who awakens first      or from where.

Neither do I

know          after all these years

if I am a Chinese girl who

wanted to go home

or a woman from Hong Kong

who will stay in England.

It’s British summer time

in my living room

but my watch in the drawer

moves seven hours ahead.

The past: is the door still open?

The future: am I a filial daughter,

living so far away from my parents?

Wearing her marmalade camouflage,

the butterfly of unknowing

pollinates in one world                  and another.

Glow

In the old days everyone there knew

how to make ice lanterns, filling

the barrels with water from Songhua

and leaving the blocks to freeze.

They lit and hung the lanterns outside houses.

But as time passed they grew

more ambitious with their craft:

to carve a dragon’s whiskers and scales,

a lotus pavilion, the goddess kwanyin,

and the Great Wall of China.

Look at the children laughing

and skating away.

The crystal palace beckons to you.

You remember how far

this water has travelled.

The amusement won’t last.

Diocesan Girls School, 1990-1997

We sing English hymns from the blue book,

as if those songs were our own:

allthingsbrightandbeautiful…

We read Jane Eyre and Hard Times,

and how the pigs oppress

Boxer and Clover in AnimalFarm.

In Chinese history lessons, we follow the roots

of a gingko tree to Spring & Autumn

when Confucius taught his disciples ren, yi.

‘Western history’: the rise and fall of empires,

a cartoon from Punch, 1840: China, a cake

gobbled up by foreign powers.

In poetry, we fall in love with Plath,

her fantasies and her fury against men.

We want to let out our anguish.

Some of us stammer in our own tongue –

it’s inferior, we know it.

Secretly, we all love to sing Cantopop.

We dream of going away

to England or America,

and never, never coming back.

Chung Kiu Department Store: a love story

There she is: dusting again the antiques called

‘Chinese goods’ with a gai mou sou: blue porcelain,

milky snuff bottles, small ivory animals.

When she speaks she fills the room

with her thick northern accent,

charms the tourists with that lilt.

Everything comes from the newsagents:

Green Spot Juice, Ding Ding candies and worship goods.

No metro yet, so we go to work by bus.

From my counter of calligraphy scrolls,

I ask her out. You look just like the singer夏韶聲

Danny Summer. I’m flattered.

Roasting chicken wings in Tai Tam,

we hum Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘America’

the year she turns eighteen

and when John Lennon comes to town,

we wear ombre sunglasses

and trumpet-shaped jeans.

I have nothing to offer: not a car or a flat

but I’ve made her cassette tapes of all our favourite

Beatles and Garfunkel tracks.

Her mother hates          everything

the communists          (my father worships Mao).

We are young. Who can stop us?

So we marry the following year in spring.

A simple wedding: 敬茶, 交杯酒and kowtow

to our parents in a teahouse, without a gown.

King of Kowloon

In your white vest and blue flip-flops,

you wandered about in the fierce sun,

a can of black paint in your hand.

We read your family history on lamp-posts:

your escape from Liantang, your ancestral home,

settling for Pink Shek in Kowloon.

You hailed Wen Tianxiang and Sun Yat-sen,

charged the Queen for usurping your land.

新中國皇 曾榮華 曾福彩

中英 香港 政府

A self-declared king for fifty years, painting

all over the colony – a city where the British

lived on mid-levels like paradise birds

and the Chinese sweated, selling meats

in wet markets but Oh! the freedom

to march and shout, to do what you did!

Defiance on the lamp-posts,

defiance at the ferry pier.

撐住五十年不變

叉燒 飯碗 撐住!

Your furious characters on the red pillar box

kindle in us an identity we have always known.

Su Li Zhen

– After Wong Kar-wai’s IntheMoodforLove (2000)

The cure for homesickness is to resist falling in love

with the city: in my dream you hold

a green thermos filled with pu’er, descend