The Savage is flying back home from the New Country
in native-style dress with a baggage of sensibility
to gaze on the ancestral plains with the myths thought up
and dreamed in her kitchens as guides.
–Denise
Riley, ‘A Note on Sex and “The Reclaiming of Language”’
This Easter I spent five weeks or so
living and writing in Hong Kong. It was only the third time I had been back
since my family left for England in 1991, when I was almost eight. That childhood migration didn’t surprise me or, I
think, my Chinese mother (though my little brother was tearful for days after
it was announced, believing he would have to leave all his toys behind). My
father had swapped East London for the Far East thirty years earlier, but had
always encouraged us to think of England – a country we had scarcely visited –
as ‘home’. I had it marked with a toothpick Union Jack on the world map in my
childhood bedroom. But two decades later, it was Hong Kong that had come to
feel for me like a place in the imagination.
People often ask me how much I can
remember of it – and the answer is, surprisingly, a lot. But of course they’re
a small child’s memories. The yellow-crested cranes in the enclosure at the
park. The banyans hung with fishing-line hairs that sentried my walk down the
hill to the school bus. The neon-silver vista of the skyscrapered harbour,
peered at through the kumquat trees that lined our living room window. But I
had no residual sense of the island’s geography, of how those memories would
relate to each other plotted on a map. So this year, in what turned out to be
an unusually wet and sultry April even by Hong Kong standards, I went on long
walks, trying to knit together the places I could remember, or at least could remember
being told about – sometimes a bit of both.
My hope was that all this would seed
new poems, but what I didn’t expect was the unintended fact checking of older
poems I fell into. Unintended, because it hadn’t really occurred to me I might
have got things wrong – or that it would matter if I had – in the handful of
poems about Hong Kong I’d already written over the past few years. One long
poem, ‘A loop of jade’, which interleaves my early memories with my mother’s
childhood in ’50s Hong Kong, proved especially problematic. Some errors were
simply factual – retelling a Chinese fable, and embroidering one particular
scene, I’d placed the draped bride at the ‘head’ of her wedding procession
rather than in its midst. If I hadn’t stumbled on a traditional bridal sedan
(plus explanatory plaque) in the history museum, I would still be oblivious of
that modest howler. With its smoothed dark wood carry-poles, it looked much too
small to fit a person inside.
Other errors were more to do with
visualisation – details that were slightly off. I’d written how worshippers
casting their fortunes at the temple would ‘shake out a fan / of red-tipped /
sticks’ from the cylindrical box, then pick one to entreat their fate. Yet when
I stood in the courtyard at Wong Tai Sin, watching the rows and rows of people
before the altar alternately bowing and rattling out their quivers of bamboo
staves, I found I’d remembered the exact sound the sticks made when shaken
(like clackier maracas), but that my mental picture, though vivid, was
completely wrong. The sticks didn’t ‘fan’ out at all – I must have conflated
them with the way playing cards spread – but rather sheared forward until,
after several low bows on the supplicant’s part, one scarlet-painted tip would
come to the fore. After some pondering of alternatives (bundle? box?) I finally
deleted ‘fan’ and typed in ‘sheaf’, resolving that that was the best I was
going to get out of one syllable.
Conflated memory was certainly the
issue a few stanzas away, where I’d described the temple’s ‘fluttering,
tree-tied pleas’. Many times in temple precincts on the Chinese mainland I’d
seen these extraordinary wish-festooned trees – their every reachable branch
tied round with torn strips of red cloth, like Rambo’s headband, onto which thousands
of supplicants had permanent-markered their hopes. The idea of these trees made
such an impression, I guess, that I edited them in to my mental summoning of
Hong Kong’s temples. During Easter, in all the temples I walked around, I never
saw any sign of this particular practice – the closest thing was the way people
at Wong Tai Sin had clipped shiny-beaded lucky knots onto a patch of chainlink
perimeter fence.
Yet all these fact checking endeavours
were complicated by the fact that the temple scene described in the poem was
set 30 years ago: it was not something I or even my mother had witnessed
directly, but part of her own adoptive mother’s experience. This old woman, who
I never really knew, had taken in, somewhere in Guangdong province, the abandoned
girl baby that would become my mother. Within a year of the adoption, by 1949,
the Communists came to power and they fled, together with so many others,
across the water to Hong Kong. When I was a newborn, my mother’s mother had
gone to the temple to have blessed for me a jade bracelet sized for a baby’s
wrist, and to have my future told. I asked my mum, but she didn’t think she’d
ever seen any red-ribbon ‘fluttering, tree-tied pleas’ around and about such
scenes. ‘There aren’t many trees left in Hong Kong,’ she ventured. ‘I don’t
think people would want to risk hurting them.’ My adoptive grandmother
seemingly never told what exactly the fortune-teller said that day. I wonder if
he got it right.
These details might seem trifling, but
cumulatively they made me think hard about what it means to tell the truth in a
poem. Although descriptive precision has always been important to me, this more
‘documentary’ sense of truth is not a quality I’ve ever particularly sought out
as a reader of poems. So it seemed strange to suddenly be getting het up about
it. With a bit of thought, I became aware of all the small untruths I’d glossed
over in previous poems, which had gone into making them feel right, artistically shaped. One example was
the way I’d omitted the presence of my then boyfriend (now husband) from one or
two poems based on our past travels in China. It just seemed more right – more
true – to be wandering lonely as a cloud, especially when there was some kind
of lyric quest at stake. I don’t think Marc minds being airbrushed…
The literary critic part of me
suspects this is a naive set of questions to be asking – except that the
literary expectations revolving around autobiography and ‘authenticity’ (I’m
thinking now via Graham Huggan’s important book, The Postcolonial Exotic) seem particularly charged when
(female) minority writers are concerned. What I had written in my latter years
away from Hong Kong, was it – like the ancestral plains imagined by Denise
Riley’s homebound Savage – so many ‘myths thought up / and dreamed’? My flurry
of Hong Kong fact checking had, in fact, exposed the clash between a place in
the imagination – the backdrop for one’s self-mythologizing – and a place where
you might sublet a studio flat for five weeks.
That tension between reality and
projection is one I’ve been thinking about a lot in recent months. I’m coming
towards the end of my year’s tenure in the Harper-Wood Studentship from St
John’s College, Cambridge. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s not far off heaven
– a year’s grace in which to travel and write poems. I’ve used my time to learn
Mandarin and to spend a substantial time in China and Hong Kong, writing poems
on the way. I’ve been trying to work out how you might use poems to explore the
historical encounter, broadly
conceived, between China and the West (not least because I’m one product of
that cultural encounter, albeit pretty far down the line). I’d like to spend
the rest of my posts this week musing on a few highlights from my travels,
which have stretched from Hong Kong in the East to the Silk Road in the far
West. Perhaps the most enjoyable path I followed was in tracking, late last
summer, the northward progress from Macau up to Beijing of the first and most
famous of early modern Jesuit missionaries to China, Matteo Ricci (1552-1610).
I managed in four weeks of buses, high-speed trains and internal flights a journey that took Ricci
twenty-eight years.
But even as I trekked across China, I found myself
still fascinated by Western accounts and imaginings of the country I was seeing
– partly because I know I can’t escape the European cast to own my vision. The
kind of willow pattern fantasizing you get in Chinoiserie is a mode that
fascinates me, not least when it turns up in English language poetry. I
recently stumbled across a moving example in a poem by the American poet Cathy
Song:
He thinks when we die we’ll go to China.
Think of it—a Chinese heaven
where, except for his blond hair,
the part that belongs to his father,
everyone will look like him.
China, that blue flower on the map,
bluer than the sea
his hand must span like a bridge
to reach it.
An octave away.
(Cathy
Song, ‘Heaven’)
Rather as I spent
my first seven years staring at a tiny Union Jack blutacked to the pink
triangle of England on my bedroom wall, the speaker’s son imagines China’s
‘blue flower on the map’ (like the blue flower gracing a porcelain bowl?) as
the place where he will perfectly belong. I’ve experienced that same elated
sentimental fiction of belonging all three times I’ve walked off the plane into
Hong Kong airport – it even smells like home! That is, until I get a bit
further down the arrivals corridor and realise that, though I might, from
behind, for a second, mistake one of the older women for my mum because of the
way her hair falls along her chin, they would never make the same mistake with
me. On a flight from Lanzhou to Chengdu last week, the very nice stewardess
asked me where I was from (‘Oh, Engelan!’), and then told me I looked like Lady
Mary from Downton Abbey – a programme I’ve never watched, but know enough about
to know I don’t look very much like Lady Mary. Maybe Downton Abbey stands to
England as blue-white painted willows stand to China.
I have to say, I’m
more comfortable with these lines of Cathy Song’s than I’ve ever quite been
with a poem like Derek Mahon’s ‘The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush’:
While I sit with my paper and prawn chow mein
Under a framed photograph of Hong Kong
The proprietor of the Chinese restaurant
Stands at the door as if the world were young,
Watching the first yacht hoist a sail
–
An ideogram on sea-cloud –
and the light
Of heaven upon the mountains of Donegal;
And whistles a little tune, dreaming of home.
(Derek
Mahon, ‘The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush’)
The proprietor of the Northern Irish
seaside town’s (one?) Chinese restaurant ‘whistles a little tune, dreaming of
home’ – a home we’re meant to imagine corresponds to the ‘framed photograph of
Hong Kong’ hanging above the speaker’s chow mein laded table. I know that Mahon
is quite conscious of the way what looks at first like empathy here is
actually, on closer inspection, a kind of overwriting – but then that kind of
representational imposition is hardly alien to Ireland’s own colonial history. Of
course the idea is that both men are equally outsiders, and usually I find
Mahon compelling on place and home and exile and homelessness. (‘What's the
difference between an exile and an expatriate?’ he jokes in one interview. ‘It
seems to me that an Englishman in France is an expat, but an Irishman is an
exile.’) Maybe it’s just ‘little tune’ that grates with me. Perhaps unfairly, I
can’t help hearing that diminutive slip from qualifying the tune to qualifying its
whistler.
Plate
with a view of Burghley House. Qianlong period (c.1745-1760). Fitzwilliam
Museum, Cambridge.
I’d like to leave you with one other, to
my mind, charming example of the problems involved in conceiving (let alone
representing) otherness. This
eighteenth-century Chinese plate is in the collection of the Fitzwilliam
Museum, Cambridge, and was produced to order for a British market hungry for
Chinoiserie. The ceramic dish is decorated traditionally in blue and white, yet
looks at first glance rather odd – it features a linear rendering of the
Elizabethan facade of Burghley House, perhaps copied from an English print. But
what makes the object so fascinating is the way its two artistic vocabularies,
Western and Eastern – one might even say ‘realistic’ and ‘fanciful’, while
noting the terms’ Orientalizing charge – sit in it side by side. That is to
say, the backdrop the Chinese artist has imagined for this Lincolnshire pile is,
to our eyes, the realm of fantasy. The house is set among a stand of twisting
Chinese mountain pines, as a phoenix flies past in the glaze of sky.