By Theophilus Kwek

Letters Home 回家
Jennifer Wong
Nine Arches Press (2020) / 72 pages / GBP 9.99

To a bilingual reader, the disconnect is obvious between the English and Chinese titles of Jennifer Wong's third full-length collection, Letters Home 回家, with the latter more appropriately rendered as 'returning home'. Far from mistranslation, we might parse this as a gesture towards a truth: how even the most earnest missives in one language can only truly arrive – and thus 'return' to a place seen as 'home' – in another. Though Wong's poems are (largely) in English, we find this effect reproduced throughout the book, with fragments of Chinese scattered across its pages, much the way anyone caught between two languages might reach for a choice expression in one or the other. Between these twin tongues and titles, we find the distance between Wong's three cities (Hong Kong, Oxford, and London), their overlapping histories, and a hint of the currents that seem to be tugging them further apart.

The book is divided into five segments, with a poignant sequence, 'Mountain City', at its heart. This longer poem serves to bridge the book's two halves, and stands out for its autobiographical rhythm, even among a collection of largely narrative poems. It recounts in sensuous detail Wong's own journey from a childhood in Hong Kong ('In the corridors of my sleep / I hear a metal gate creak […] Next door a muttering game / of mahjong, a baby crying') to her arrival in the UK, via an undergraduate career at Oxford. Her student years, spent negotiating the sharp edges of a foreign country, seem to bridge the two halves of her personal story too, as she suggests towards the poem's close: 'What do they mean, a few years / of feeling foreign, having eaten / takeaway chips from Ahmed's kebab van / on High Street that stays open till 2am?' Prior to 'Mountain City', the collection's first two segments focus on scenes from Wong's upbringing and family history; beyond this halfway mark, the poems pan visually and geographically over to Bloomsbury, Beckenham, and the present.

Such a deliberate progression may have felt forced in the hands of a less experienced writer, but Wong's handling is nimble and understated. Flashes of recollection (under such matter-of-fact titles as 'Diocesan Girls School, 1990-1997') are interspersed with more layered reflections on the politics of heritage, such as in the sonnet 'Chinese Classifiers', where Wong compares the historical accident of Hong Kong's political situation to the traditions written into the Chinese language: 'How much freedom have you got there? […] Someone handed us the rules'. The poems in her second segment, 'speak, silence, speak', which tackle the intricacies of language head-on, show an exceptionally deft range: from a meditative tribute to the popular Chinese novelist Ba Jin, to the offbeat cadences of the Chinese internet, rendered awkwardly in English: 'What can't / be sold on Taobao – a husband, a baby? / No YouTube, just Tudou: a hearty northern staple' ('Lost in Translation'). If somewhat distant in tone, these poems are certainly polished, with the gleam of long-kept memories rubbed bright.

The collection's latter half feels more urgent and wistful: these poems contain fewer Chinese interjections, but even with their English expressions tug readers into unfamiliar territory. Whether in the placenames of imagined stops on the Tube ('my train also calls at / Prince Edward, Mongkok, Yaumatei […] even if some places are gone by now / and the ferry-dotted harbour / smaller than it was'), or moments of identification with fellow immigrants ('Lives measured in shifts and toilet breaks, / happiness in the annual leave they take'), Wong's lines are restless, as if searching for a way to settle into their own linguistic landscape. In one particularly evocative poem, 'Dimsum at Joy King Lau', Wong introduces a childhood cuisine to her sceptical companion in a London Chinatown restaurant where, tellingly, her (presumably British) dinner guest is referred to as a 'foreigner'. The awkwardness of the meal – which both enjoy, but enjoy differently – becomes a proxy for the in-betweenness of her diasporic experience: 'Nothing is authentic', she muses, 'except what we are missing'.

As the poems in this half of the book range over new geographies in Wong's adopted home, they also take more formal risks. Some are better pitched than others: while the numbered aphorisms of 'Truth 2.0' present a refreshing take on what it means to watch the Hong Kong protests from a distance, the light-grey echo of the word 'success' printed in a column across the page in 'Confessions of a minority student' strikes this reader as somewhat on-the-nose. Most rewarding, perhaps, are the prose poems, where so many of the perspectives Wong has gleaned over a lifetime of movement between her three cities are revealed through the plainsong of daily routine. One such gem is 'Maria', which takes the voice of a Filipino domestic helper, and addresses itself to the unnamed employer who – like Wong – may well also be an immigrant. From its first lines ('In your home I only perspire […] I am a mindful ghost you don't notice'), we are reminded of the inequalities of migration: how even a shared sense of leaving and arriving cannot bridge wide differences of class and status.

Another remarkable prose poem is the penultimate number, 'Real Life Thesis', an almost stream-of-consciousness narration of a day in the life of a doctoral student (closely modelled, one imagines, on Wong's own student years). Rebelling against the notions of restraint and formal elegance that frame some of the poems in the book's first half, this one is positively anxious in its delivery, putting paid to the false promise of 'work-life balance' in junior academia: 'I sat next to her, typed up two paragraphs of my thesis, ordered groceries, read tweets […] Mummy scooter! […] More than anything or any poem, we wanted to buy a house'. Having journeyed with Wong across these pages, this poem returns us to the heart of the moment, pointing us to why even 'returning home' – this side of history, this side of the world – remains fraught with restlessness and dreaming. 'Some days or nights I thought of it, all of this,' she muses. 'But here and now your warm hand is the only thing I'll miss'.

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