Vertical Reality: Wawa Interviewed at Apogee

Muriel Leung talks to Wawa (aka Lo Mei Wa) about her poem “維多利亞港天台建國/Rooftop Nation of Victoria Harbour,” which was published in Apogee Issue 09. The conversation begins by setting the scene during the Umbrella Movement protests that took place in Hong Kong from September to December of 2014. Wawa describes her role as a protester during the movement: "That first night, I had arrived with fruits, eggs, juice-boxes of soymilk in my backpack, which I threw at the riot police as my sister ran at them, and they launched the second round of tear gas. That was probably (and secretly) the last instance of violence from protesters throughout the entire Occupy period. The movement was peaceful. No looting. No one beat up a police officer. Tents were set up. We slept in the streets. Study corners, where I wrote most of my poems, were set up for students." After moving to the U.S., Wawa watched the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at the Standing Rock Reservation and felt a kinship with the movement. With this background in mind, Wawa began writing “維多利亞港天台建國/Rooftop Nation of Victoria Harbour.” We'll pick up where Wawa discusses the writing and translation of the poem, and merges into her interest in reviving Cantonese as a poetic medium:

[Muriel Leung]: I was struck by the refrain and list-like quality of the poem, of rooftop after rooftop, of buildings of varying staggering heights. It seems to establish the quotidian way of life in Hong Kong, where one can smoke and listen to someone talk of revolution, but this pattern, which seems benign at first, accrues in tension through repetition. In the midst of describing the everyday, Jane Lam jumps off one of the buildings and the speaker declares, “Hell, let’s build a goddamn nation on the rooftop.” The way this poem moves gradually and through refrain, the loud smack in its middle, and its continuity, seems very much like a social movement, how actions build and gain political significance through quotidian moments amassing into something greater.

Was this something you considered in the writing of this poem? How does this movement communicate in English and in Chinese, each on their own terms? What gets communicated in one language that is perhaps missing in another?

[Wawa]: My publisher at Tinfish asked me what “vertical reality” in Hong Kong is, and I said to her, “I’ll write a poem to answer your question.” This is how this poem came about in the first place. My poems, including this one, synthesize everything that’s screaming in my mind and heart. I think, first, this poem isn’t meant to be purely political. It’s much more than that. The failures of the Umbrella Movement and the Fishball Riot are there. The disappointment with the city’s values is there. The loneliness and helplessness of existence, of failing to conform to the “horizontal reality” given by school, family, work, and the government, are there. The rooftops are a form of abandonment, synonymously meaning freedom. The people up there are abandoned. The streets are killing them. Some stay on the rooftop long enough to start living off their ideals, their beliefs and values. Some cannot find peace in this lonely “freedom,” and surrender by jumping off the building. Jumping off a building is the most common way to die, to quit, in Hong Kong. We don’t have other states. We can’t move except to China, a fact that many people are still adjusting to since the city used to operate like a country when it was a British colony. People in the streets get killed by people jumping off buildings. When I was a kid, I always imagined holding a steel umbrella that could shield me from people jumping off buildings. Then when I grew up, I became a rooftopper imagining what to do there, and whether to jump or not. Building a nation on rooftops is my image of utopia. The rooftop is freedom. I heard that when people are in a desperate hopelessness, imagination becomes salvation.

When the poem gets translated, the context shifts from the particular to the universal. A Hongkonger would immediately assume the difference between vertical and horizontal realities, which is particular to that level of density. But for another reader, linguistic markers like the number of stories up each rooftop are necessary, and can only suggest the setting. So the existential implications are weakened. Also, the swearwords are weakened a lot. Recently, I started to include Cantonese in my poems. There are different kinds of Chinese’s in the world. I want to start a small revolution to restore the dignity and integrity of my mother tongue, which might even be belittled by our own people. “Cantonese is vulgar. It doesn’t sound serious enough in poetry.” I want to crack down on these superstitions even among Hong Kong poets. Cantonese swearwords are the most glamorous part of our language. In one Cantonese swearword competition in 1969, the winner came up with a combination of 36-character swearwords without repetition. There are many combinations of swearwords to express different strengths of emotions like disgust, anger, etc.—a very precise dissection of the emotions. The tone and the swearwords in the Chinese are diluted in the English translation of the poem.

Read on and in-full at Apogee.