The ‘Old Hong Kong’ and ‘A Gold-Sifting Bird’: Hong Kong and Chinese Ekphrasis in Contemporary British Poetry

Abstract

This article aims to establish two emerging literary traditions observed in contemporary British poetry. Starting with Sarah Howe's Loop of Jade (2015), there have been a group of debut collections by British poets with Hong Kong heritage. Some of them were born in the UK, while others emigrated there for personal, familial, or professional reasons. Examining their ekphrastic practices, namely, their poetic engagements with the visual arts, I will recognise two entangled, geographically specific kinds of ekphrasis, namely, Hong Kong ekphrasis and Chinese ekphrasis. I have observed that the former as seen in recent British poetry is used to reconstruct an ‘old Hong Kong', which is characterised by an expatriate or second-generation point of view and conflicts with the city faced by the social movements since 2014. The latter self-reflexively engages with traditional Chinese art and the most sensitive topics in China’s history. Together, the two overlapping but individually distinct types of ekphrasis enrich and complicate our understanding of the long ekphrastic tradition, the young tradition of Hong Kong poetry, the close connections between contemporary British poetry, cultural memory, and diaspora, and the complex geopolitical relations between Hong Kong, mainland China, and the UK.

Keywords:

• contemporary poetry
• ekphrasis
• Sarah Howe
• Mary Jean Chan
• Sean Wai Keung
• Jennifer Wong
• Kit Fan
• Jennifer Lee Tsai

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

The annual Wasafiri Essay Prize is open to Early Career Researchers from anywhere in the world. Visit www.wasafiri.org/submit to enter.

Notes

1 See Howe’s A Certain Chinese Encyclopaedia (2009); Keung’s you are mistaken (2017), how to cook (2018), and be happy (2020); and Wong’s Diary of a Miu Miu Salesgirl (2019).

2 See Widener’s essay about the ‘Tank Man’ on his artist website.

3 This is first suggested by the subtitle of the poem: ‘Poem on the Eve of May 35^th’. As the notes at the back of Loop of Jade indicate, the invented date ‘May 35^th’ was used by ‘Chinese web users to circumvent the ban’ (63).

4 In The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, Borges refers to a fictitious Chinese encyclopaedia, titled The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, where animals are divided into fourteen categories (Foucault xvi). Howe tells us this by opening Loop of Jade with a pertinent epigraph from Michel Foucault’s translation of Borges’ book, anticipating her uses of Borges’ animal categories as the titles of her poems.

5 See Michael Sullivan’s The Three Perfections: Chinese Painting, Poetry, and Calligraphy.

6 See, for instance, Toh Hsien Min’s review of Howe’s Loop of Jade in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, which calls the book ‘pragmatically saleable foreign culture for Little England’.