Jennifer Wong’s third collection, 回家 Letters Home, is a moving addition to the 2020 Nine Arches Press lineup. Told in five sections, Wong’s poetry is in constant motion, as she reminisces xiaolongbao on the Hong Kong metro, reveals racism in a London Uber, and seeks comfort foods on foot in both cities. Utilizing map imagery, Wong topographically recounts her departure from Hong Kong to attend Oxford and eventual immigration to London. When not in physical motion, Wong keeps us in mental states of in-between as we navigate her languages and cultures, which aims to show us that when you live between identities, your body, mind, and spirit are constantly in flux. From the very first poem, “of butterflies,” “there” becomes synonymous with Hong Kong, while “here” is recognized as London. Though the collection is a love letter to Hong Kong, we are left wondering: If the cities were reversed, would the collection have the same title?

 

With its linguistic code-switching, and attempts to adapt Chinese recipes to suit a lacking Western kitchen, 回家 Letters Home places itself amongst other Asian-heritage poetry collections such as Mary Jean Chan’s Flèche (Faber & Faber 2019), Will Harris’s RENDANG (Granta 2020), and Nina Mingya Powles’s Magnolia, 木蘭 (Nine Arches Press 2020). Like her fellow poets, Wong exposes systemic racism as the optimism her eighteen-year-old self feels when she steps off the plane to attend university is quickly marred by the Customs officer who asks, “Why would they offer you a place at Oxford?” (“Arrival”). Wong’s conflicted feelings of gratitude for studying abroad in a land of opportunity, complicated by the reality of racial aggressions she faces, also recalls Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings (One World 2020).

 

Besides Wong’s lyrical musicality shown in her command of the line break, what strikes me as a bilingual poet is Wong’s effortless code-switching between English, Mandarin, and Cantonese. Whether she quotes Confucian analects or sings a lullaby to her daughter, Wong aims to prove to readers and herself that a language she considered “inferior” in her youth is one made to coexist with English. In “An engraved Chinese teapot,” Wong teaches us about the Chinese particle le, which can designate both completed and future completed action. Using le, Wong recognizes that Chinese places “so much emphasis on history it’s hard to realize the present needs a life of its own.” 回家 Letters Home proves this true in recording histories, from Wong’s homages to literary activists Ba Jin and Bei Dao, to the ghosts of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, to her fear for her parents’ safety during the 2019 Hong Kong protests.

 

Though Wong’s address of the protests renders 回家 Letters Home extremely timely, one critique I have of the collection is her Notes section. While she does not use footnotes to translate her Cantonese pinyin or Chinese characters, Wong does so in her Notes section. Today, when readers can and should reach for Google translate, I feel Wong too easily caters to monolingual audiences. Her explicit translation guidance releases me from the need to fully engage as a reader and retracts the powerful effect of momentarily becoming an observer to her poetry, before quickly being welcomed back with her next captivating English line.

 

Despite this translation guidance, Wong’s collection represents a hauntingly wise contribution to diaspora literature. Quiet and controlled, but never tired, 回家 Letters Home teaches us that simple language never needs to become complacent. Though most poems in it capture brevity in traditional couplets on an unassuming page, “Mountain City,” is a testament to Wong’s poetic stamina, and her ability to drift in-between time and space while proving her timeless, universal truth: “Nothing is authentic/ except what we are missing.”