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ENGE3320 - Lecture 9

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60 views25 pages

ENGE3320 - Lecture 9

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sheungchitcheung
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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ENGE 3320

Hong Kong
Literature in
English
T1 2022
Week 10
16th November 2022
Overview
1.Part 3: The New Literary Consciousness of Hong Kong
English Voices
2.Introduction of four poets: Kit Fan/ Tammy Ho/
Nicholas Wong/ Jennifer Wong
3.Close reading of selected poems
4.Defining their new-ness
5.Class business
Optimistic prophecy proves true
“It will also be one of life’s great and somehow satisfying
ironies if post-Handover Hong Kong proves more prolific in
producing new writing in English than prior to the
‘Change of Flag’. Nobody would have anticipated such an
outcome, but then truth is often stranger than fiction.”
(Ingham 15)
Part 3: The New Literary Consciousness of Hong Kong
English Voices
The Post-1997 millennium: 2000s-
2020s
• Under the actual practice of “One Country Two Systems”
• Financial Crisis: (1997; 2007-2008)
• Social movements: Umbrella Movement (2014)/ Anti-ELAB
Movement (2019)
• Introduction of National Security Law (2020)
• Public health crisis: SARS (2003); COVID-19 (2020-Now)
• The English literary scene in Hong Kong
• The size of readership steadily grows
• The writer circle expands, diversifies and matures in a faster rate
• More institutional resources and international rapport, e.g.
International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong (2009-Now)
• International accolades
Local creative writing outlets
• University student writings
CU Writing in English (English, CUHK)
Figment (ELTU, CUHK)
Yuanyang (English, HKU)
• Imprint (Women in Publishing Society Hong Kong) (
on s
i ss i
https://www.hkwips.com/imprint/)
m m e
• Hong Kong Writers Circle Annual Anthology
Sub l c o
w e
(http://www.hkwriterscircle.com/publications.html)
• Cha: An Asian Literary Journal are
(https://www.asiancha.com/wp/)
• Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine (bilingual)
(https://vvpoetry.com/)
Tammy Ho Lai Ming Nicholas Wong Jennifer Wong Kit Fan
• Born in Hong Kong
• Associate professor of English at
• Senior lecturer in • Born in Hong Kong, • Born in Hong Kong,
the Education now resides in the UK
Hong Kong Baptist University
University of Hong now resides in the
• Co-founded Asian Cha in 2007
UK • First poetry collection
• First poetry collection Hula Kong Paper Scissors Stone
Hooping (2015)
• Crevasse (2015), • First poem (2011) won the
• Co-founded the academic Inaugural International
journal Hong Kong Studies in received the Lambda collection Summer
Literary Award HKU Poetry Prize
2017 cicadas (2006)
• Chairperson of PEN Hong Kong • Novel: Diamond Hill
• Letters Home (2021)
Common topics in Hong Kong Literature of
English
SELF & LANGUAGE CITY LIFE &
IDENTITY & SPEECH SOCIO-ECONOMIC
STATUS

MANHOOD & LITERARY MEDIUM & COLONIAL &


WOMANHOOD CREATIVITY POSTCOLONIAL
SUBJECTIVITY

LOVE & SEXUALITY MULTICULTURAL SOCIO-POLITICAL


EXPOSURE & EVENTS
CONNECTIONS
Kit Fan’s “Paper Scissors Stones”
SELF & LANGUAGE CITY LIFE &
IDENTITY & SPEECH SOCIO-ECONOMIC
STATUS

MANHOOD & LITERARY MEDIUM & COLONIAL &


WOMANHOOD CREATIVITY POSTCOLONIAL
SUBJECTIVITY

LOVE & SEXUALITY MULTICULTURAL SOCIO-POLITICAL


EXPOSURE & EVENTS
CONNECTIONS
Title poem of the poetry collection
a. The title
• Children’s game (a closed cycle of competition)
• Re-appears as symbols in the grave ending
Paper (and books): fact, fiction, knowledge and truth
Scissors: a tendency to cut papers up; political oppression
and censorship
Stone: fossil; inert and illiterate entity; turning into waste
and dogma
• Game  General pattern of socio-political history
• 2 against 1: The vulnerable status of paper?

> What is specifically destroyed in the poem?


b. The act of narrating, telling, and explaining
• “It is not only the guilty secrets/ are hard to tell in the end.”
a. His childhood in the community library
b. His literary lineage
c. The formation of his mental landscape
d. The hardship of working class (~“The Yellow Line”)
• Counter-intuitive desire: Orphanhood (“I dreamed of an
orphanage”)
The common theme of Victorian novels
Intellectual/ mental detachment from one’s biological
parents
• The difficulty of articulation/ narration

> Does the persona succeed in telling what he wants to tell?


c. The transformative significance of literary education
• How does paper counter stone?
a. The institution: The library
A lost space with multiple dimensions: Home/
orphanage/ prison
b. The tattoo-armour:
“I prayed that my book-lined
womb would not be scissored apart
as pages and covers braced the skin
against the emperor’s new clothes.”
• Proof: The persona in the present (Part II)
• Perceptiveness: Prediction comes true
• Perplexed by injustice abound in the world
(~“Diocesan Girls School, 1990-1997”)
Tammy Ho’s “Languages”

SELF & LANGUAGE CITY LIFE &


IDENTITY & SPEECH SOCIO-ECONOMIC
STATUS

MANHOOD & LITERARY MEDIUM & COLONIAL &


WOMANHOOD CREATIVITY POSTCOLONIAL
SUBJECTIVITY

LOVE & SEXUALITY MULTICULTURAL SOCIO-POLITICAL


EXPOSURE & EVENTS
CONNECTIONS
a. The title
• Languages (English and Chinese) &
dialect (Cantonese)
• Subscription to “South China Morning
Post, an English newspaper” and its
visibility to others
• Correct pronunciation > strong HK
accent (-)
• As cultural capital
b. Class consciousness
• A sense of cultural superiority
• Dress code (beauty)
• Conversation topics of the Western
world (intelligence; well-educated)

> Which group of people do the personas


belong to in Louise Ho’s “Jamming”?
c. The repeated acts of self-
differentiation
• “We” are different from “they”
• “They live less ambiguously”
• Characterized by ignorance and
insensitivity
• We are also different from “two real
English speakers”
• Recurring mental behaviours: the
right thing to do
• “our humble origin”: the ambivalence
of colonial elites

> Is this poem ironic?


Nicholas Wong’s “Nono (Uncorrected
Proof)”
SELF & LANGUAGE CITY LIFE &
IDENTITY & SPEECH SOCIO-ECONOMIC
STATUS

MANHOOD & LITERARY MEDIUM & COLONIAL &


WOMANHOOD CREATIVITY POSTCOLONIAL
SUBJECTIVITY

LOVE & SEXUALITY MULTICULTURAL SOCIO-POLITICAL


EXPOSURE & EVENTS
CONNECTIONS
a.The title

• The semantic translation of the Chinese label “ 雙非



• Double negative in Chinese still means negative
• Rich interplay of Cantonese, English, and
editorial language
• Controversial social issue: Residential rights V.S.
the exploitation of public resources (e.g. formula
milk powder; hospital beds for delivery; the
number of school places)
• Infantile language: the persona is a baby/
maimed in speech because of its status as a
social
misfit
b. The uncanny narrative voice
• Identity: The “nono” baby
• Defined by a series of lack
• Monstrosity: fragmented and intelligent speech, carnal
knowledge
• Tone: Self-negating, disoriented, perplexed, yet persistent
• What does it say?
• Declaring its existence, tracing its unanticipated birth,
making sense of who it is, describing what it sees
• An overwhelming multitude: There is more than one of “me”
“in sea of baby eye/ black
but tiny like sea of sesame dust of/ten mistake”
c. The theme of transgression
• Illegitimate birth: existence outside existing legal and geopolitical
boundary
• Deliberate grammatical and spelling mistakes
No plural inflection  singular (“me” being singular, the odd
one out in the social order?)
• Unconventional typographical and syntactical arrangement
• Deliberate code-mixing and repetitions (similar spellings)
“Chinese name has many meaning/ mean double
no double fly/ like butter
fly lover in theater mean two woman four hand”
• The uncorrected proof (a manuscript unapologetic of errors and
mistakes; but also one that has to be corrected)
> How far can mistakes, like “Nono” be accepted as signs of
creativity though?
(~ “Maria”)
Jennifer Wong’s “From Beckenham to Tsim
Sha Tsui”
SELF & LANGUAGE CITY LIFE &
IDENTITY & SPEECH SOCIO-ECONOMIC
STATUS

MANHOOD & LITERARY MEDIUM & COLONIAL &


WOMANHOOD CREATIVITY POSTCOLONIAL
SUBJECTIVITY

LOVE & SEXUALITY MULTICULTURAL SOCIO-POLITICAL


EXPOSURE & EVENTS
CONNECTIONS
a. The title
An impossible underground route enabled by literary imagination

b. The motifs of parallels and binarism


• Syntactical structure: The co-presence of Beckenham and Tsim Sha Tsui as nouns
• Lineation: 2 lines per stanza
• The affirmative content: the train annoucement
• The negative content: the persona’s mental commentary
• Imagery: A train that calls at railway stations of two cities
• The real and the invisible
• The physical and the mental landscape
• The past Hong Kong and the present UK
> Can two lines in parallel ever meet? Can binaries get close to each other?
c. Diasporic sentiment
• “I”: The split mind of a Hong Kong migrant
• Being geographically uprooted from Hong Kong
• Mentally live in Hong Kong in terms of taste and touch
• Home is eventually where one recalls its details daily
“all those places I once tried to/ leave from, am leaving still”
• The cost of migration: loss of Hong Kong (home) and her traces in
different corners of the city
• The status of “I”: in-betweenness, on the road (the train journey);
drifted; transcultural mind

> Is it possible to travel back to Hong Kong geographically and


temporally?

(~ “China Landscape in the Forecourt of the British Museum”)


Discussion questions
1. How does the persona regard Chinese-ness in “China
Landscape in the Forecourt of the British Museum”?
2. How is sexuality represented in “Nono (Uncorrected
proof)” and “Self-portrait as a Cubicle”?
3. Compare and contrast “269C” and “Going to my
parents’ place on a crowded bus”.
4. Describe and discuss the images of women in
“Diocesan Girls School, 1990-1997” and “Maria”.
5. What new ideas, viewpoints, and imageries do this
week’s selected poems make about Hong Kong?
Week 12’s readings:
Excerpts from Dung Kai-cheung’s Atlas: The
Archaeology of an Imaginary City (Preface,
Counterplace, Commonplace, Misplace, Mr. Smith’s
One-day Trip, The Curse of Tai Ping Shan, Tung Choi
Street and Sai Yeung Choi Street)
Excerpt from Kit Fan’s Diamond Hill (pp. 15-49)
Photo sources:
Khoo, Douglas. Be Still Hong Kong.
https://orientaldaily.on.cc/cnt/news/20130622/00174_001.html
https://media.timeout.com/images/103348039/1024/576/image.jpg
https://artsbu.hkbu.edu.hk/f/list_staff/367/305c305/Studio-2905_ENG_Dr%20Ta
mmy%20Lai-Ming%20HO_ok_1574931179.jpg
https://www.festival.org.hk/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Kit-Fan-cr.-Hugh-Haug
hton-copy-e1624239833439.jpg
https://i2.wp.com/asianreviewofbooks.com/content/wp-content/uploads/2020/03
/c4c3178ea219722e8ee5623a47fd526a1-e1585366395459.jpeg?fit=576%2C61
5&ssl=1
https://cdn.techinasia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/CONFIRMED-Alibaba-
buys-South-China-Morning-Post.jpg

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