The Margins Presents an Interview With Wawa

AAWW's The Margins has posted an interview with Hong Kong poet Wawa, conducted by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho. "My work is my self, and my self is my city," says Wawa, now based in the U.S. and the author of the collection Pei Pei the Monkey King; her poems "comment on the Umbrella Movement—a movement that aroused many Hongkongers’ longing for democracy and freedom of expression—in surprising and captivating language." An excerpt from this conversation:

Have any recent events (social or political events, changing demographics, economic downturns) been a catalyst to your writings about the city?

When the Fishball Riot happened in 2016, we were in Honolulu. More recently, my husband and I visited Hong Kong. The only thing we could do to make up for our absence during the riot was to go to the High Court and sit in on the trial hearings for the rioters. It’s different for my lawyer-to-be husband whose decision in the Umbrella protests to change his career and pursue social justice took flight. But for me as a poet, I was sinking in helplessness, burning from my entrails to my limbs, staring at the floor and sobbing quietly. I think it is this helplessness, which has been growing since I left Hong Kong, that forces me to confront the tension between the political and the religious. I’m physically so far that my body can’t do anything for Hong Kong, not even cough out tear gas again. I could only look at the blank faces of those young rioters who bet their future for Hong Kong and have already been forgotten by Hong Kong people outside the court. When I was in the Czech Republic, I heard the story of how the Golem was invented by Jews during WWII. When you are in utter helplessness, you start imagining something mythical to save you and to soothe your sorrow. I started muttering something like a prayer, something like a poem, as I stared at the courtroom floor.

What is your perception of your home city’s history?

I am very aware of the colonialness of our people—especially after I moved away from Hong Kong—that weird mix of Chineseness and colonialness since the rule of Britain. I myself resist those traits of being a colonial Chinese. My husband says we are always seen as the worst of both East and West, and never seen for something in ourselves; and I added: that’s why we are infinite. Many don’t see this, and always try to be someone else. The most neutral remnant of our colonial history, to me, in me, is the coexistence of two languages, of the English personality and the Cantonese personality. Now there’s even a complicated Mandarin personality. When I’m trying to process, understand, and accept change, I am also looking for the quintessence of a Hong Kong that doesn’t and won’t change. I’m trying to capture it through the ecstatic state of my poems.

Which particular aspects of Western and colonial representation do you challenge or engage with in your poetry?

My challenge is to challenge nothing because I don’t know and don’t care what others write and think about Hong Kong... 

Read on at The Margins.