‘We are a floating island’: 102 Hong Kong poets across continents write the city’s new chapter in Where Else

SINGAPORE – Before poet Laura Jane Lee, 25, left her native Hong Kong for Singapore in 2021, she knew of nowhere else to call home.

Lee, a newly minted Singapore permanent resident, now finds herself in between places.

Her new poem, Rock, references a natural landform in Hong Kong said to resemble a woman awaiting the return of her dead husband.

“To some extent, I identify with the husband, never to return. But in other ways, I identify with the waiting,” says the English literature and linguistics undergraduate at Nanyang Technological University.

Her shifting sense of home is perhaps emblematic of the more than 200,000 Hong Kong residents who left the city amid the pandemic in the wake of pro-democracy protests in 2019, as well as Beijing’s subsequent introduction of a sweeping National Security Law.

She is one of 102 poets featured in Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology, a new book that grapples with the changing complexion of the Hong Kong diaspora and the city’s shifting demographic.

In this first anthology of its kind, the book’s poet-editors – Jennifer Wong, 45; Jason Eng Hun Lee, 39; and Tim Tim Cheng, 30 – have assembled a slate of poets based in Hong Kong, Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, Italy, Japan and Singapore, among other places.

Lee, who is of British and Chinese Malaysian ancestry, says the editors included poets living in and outside of Hong Kong “to pitch our work to the newly planted diaspora and to try and speak of their condition, and their fears of homesickness and dislocation”.

Lee, a lecturer at Hong Kong Baptist University who teaches Hong Kong literature, says the latest wave of poetry is characterised by a form of “future nostalgia”, as many featured poets yearn for Hong Kong even before leaving it.

In Hong Kong-born poet Ethan Luk’s Dough, the speaker says of his late grandfather: “Through a slot machine, he sees / me, running around / new cities, in search / of a temporary home / for my twenties.”

Where Else’s co-editor Wong, who is based in Britain, adds: “It’s a moment to recognise that home is not just a fixed place, it’s a lot of things you carry around as part of your identity.”

Wong, who researched contemporary English-language poetry from the Chinese diaspora for her doctoral dissertation at Oxford Brookes University, says this anthology should remind Britain’s poets that Hong Kong poetry is “part of the British landscape as well”.

In recent years, Hong Kong’s English-language poets have been making waves internationally.

They include Mary Jean Chan, who won Britain’s Costa Book Award for Poetry in 2019; and Eric Yip, the youngest winner of the Britain-based National Poetry Competition in 2021.

Where Else also captures another generational change in Hong Kong poetry: English-language writers are experimenting with multilingualism as a way to develop a distinct idiom for poetic expression.

English may seem to dominate the anthology, but smatterings of untranslated Cantonese, Hakka, Mandarin and even an invented creole script make the poems peculiar to these Hong Kong writers’ linguistic landscape – a shift that the editors compare with Singlish in Singapore.

“We’re calling it Kongish,” says Lee, “which is basically using different idiomatic systems and trying to merge the languages in such a way that it becomes almost unintelligible to Chinese speakers from outside of Hong Kong and native English speakers. It’s a kind of appeal to localism.”

In a Cantonese and English epigraph to his poem, New Zealand poet Chris Tse, who has Chinese heritage, writes: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.”

Lee adds about the emergence of trans-language wordplay and code-switching: “There’s so much richness to what’s coming out of Hong Kong now because of political events. The imposition of the National Security Law means that people have to be more creative about how they represent themselves.”

Despite censorship looming over Hong Kong, including a recent bid to

ban protest anthems

, the editors want to represent the sentiments of Hong Kong writers at the city’s turning point, despite the risk.

“Sometimes, you have to actually take the government’s word for it that there is still freedom of expression,” Lee says. “At the end of the day, we still have the opportunity to try to make something of this place, to be artists, to be creative.”

Co-editor Wong agrees. “You have to do what you want to do, and someone needs to capture these voices in a timely way.”

The 102 voices in this anthology hark back to a diasporic mentality captured through the lines of a 1997 poem by Louise Ho, one of Hong Kong’s most recognised poets, writing in English: “We are a floating island / We have no site / Nowhere to land / No domicile.”

Where Else – “a statement, a question, an imperative, a declaration, or a combination of all the above,” as Lee puts it – is a chorus of replies, across continents and generations, to this fraught sense of place in an unfolding chapter of Hong Kong’s diasporic history.