Tag Archives: Collier Nogues

Nogues on Hong Kong poet Liu Waitong

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In a piece titled “‘The protests became a poem‘: Liu Waitong’s ‘Wandering Hong Kong with Spirits,'” new on Jacket2, Collier Nogues reviews Wandering Hong Kong with Spirits 和幽靈一起的香港漫遊, by Liu Waitong 廖偉棠, with translations by Enoch Yee-lok Tam, Desmond Sham, Audrey Heijns, Chan Lai-kuen, and Cao Shuying 曹疏影 (Zephyr Press & MCCM Creations). To my knowledge, this is the first time Jacket2 has paid any attention to poetry translated from Chinese.

Nogues asks, “What is it to be a Hong Kong poet writing now?” She answers:

For Liu Waitong, it means to be accompanied always by ghosts. But it means also to seek them out and keep them company in turn — to haunt with them. Working through questions of displacement, citizenship, and competing visions of Hong Kong’s and China’s future, Liu’s poems insist that a careful attention and receptivity can be revolutionary. For Liu, that attention is what we owe our pasts and each other.

She continues:

Christopher Mattison, the director of the Atlas series of translations of Hong Kong Chinese literature into English, points out in his introduction that it would be a mistake to brand Liu primarily as a political poet. Rather, Mattison says, Liu is a careful observer of Hong Kong, and many things in Hong Kong are inherently political. Perhaps it’s just a matter of emphasis, but I’m not certain that I agree with Mattison here; while it’s true that Liu is indeed a “poet of longing,” as Mattison suggests, “of past eras, former loves, lost neighborhoods, and poetic mentors” (xvi), nothing on that list is separable from politics in the poems or in Hong Kong more generally. When Liu elegizes the demolished Central Star Ferry Pier, for example, he is not only lamenting the loss of a familiar landmark, but also pointedly indicting Hong Kong’s real estate market, which incentivizes the replacement of historic sites with new, more profitable development. In Liu’s poem, the pier shakes its head and sings into the cold rain: “It all will finally disappear to become a postcard sold / for ten dollars. This Hong Kong will disappear and become real property / with an unspecified mortgage” (93).

Click on the image above for the full review.

Dispatches from Hongkong in the AALR

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AALR_v5i2-FallWinter2014-COVER-front+spineThe current Asian American Literary Review includes a feature titled Dispatches from Hong Kong, featuring entries on the Occupy Central Umbrella Uprising protests by Nicholas Wong, Collier Nogues, Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, and Henry W. Leung & Adriel Luis, as well as a piece by me. Here’s a taste of mine:

Two days after attending the Occupy Central demonstrations in Hong Kong I was in a crowd in Tiananmen Square … I took my son to Tiananmen Square with my wife and parents-in-law on National Day, celebrating the 65th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Thinking back to the much more densely packed Admiralty district from only days prior, I thought of Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power. In Tiananmen I stood in a crowd whose interest in celebrating something—anything—the continuation of their country, the blue skies, the military flag-lowering, the stories-tall arrangement of silk flowers—motivated a forgetting—inequality, pollution, the systematic dismantling of all but the structure of power the revolution whose victory they were celebrating had fought for, the fact that Tiananmen was both the site of the declaration of the People’s Republic of China sixty-five years ago and of the military murder of political protestors twenty-five years ago. In Occupy Central, I had stood as part of a more empowering crowd—larger and denser, colored by more black and less red—motivated by equality and respect and an inability and unwillingness to forget. The memory and motivation of the Hong Kong crowd gave a palpable discomfort in Tiananmen’s ethereal and disconnected mass.

Click the image above for the full feature.