'Cross Over To Me': Our favourite Asian poetry from 2020!

At so many uncertain points over the past year, I've found myself turning to poetry for its uncanny ability to cut through the chaos of the moment. So many friends too (both writers and readers), have told me of how poetry has afforded them words of comfort or moral clarity amid the chaos of 2020. To round up the year at the Asian Books Blog, we asked four poets from around the world to share their personal picks for the 'Best Asian Poetry from 2020': resonant voices from a difficult year, that will carry us forward into 2021.  

– Theophilus Kwek

Mary Jean Chan: 

I have a lot of admiration for Will Harris’s RENDANG (Granta Books / Wesleyan University Press), which won the 2020 Forward Prize in the Best First Collection category. This is a debut that is by turns philosophical, contemplative and revelatory, and which rewards re-reading. One of my favourite poetic sequences in this collection is “The white jumper”, which reflects on a dream in which a white jumper recurs, touching on themes as varied as video games, race, Nietzsche and of course, the colour white:

13.

Lid and lip are little words. Little
things, too. The short i associated with
lightness and pith.

“The pith of my system,” said Coleridge,
“is to make the senses out of the mind
– not the mind of the senses.”

The mind’s white
  rind, not the white
    rind’s mind.

21.

Friedrich Nietzsche recounts a dream:

Once the distance between us was so small
you could have crossed over to me
by footbridge. 

            Cross it, I said to you.
Cross over to me.
            But you didn’t want to. 

And when I asked again, you were silent.

Now mountains and rivers have come
between us, and at the mention
of the footbridge you cry.

                                             (from “The white jumper”)

Mary Jean Chan is the author of Flèche, published by Faber & Faber (2019). Flèche won the 2019 Costa Book Award for Poetry and was a Book of the Year in The Guardian, The Irish Times and The White Review. In 2020, Flèche was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Chan is currently Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University.

ko ko thett:

How does one reconcile contemporary American poetry with the pre-Buddhist nat cult of Myanmar? The answer is Storage Unit for the Sprit House by Maw Shein Win (Omnidawn). In this exciting new collection of nat-themed poems, interspaced with ink illustrations by Mark Dutcher, Maw Shein Win goes back to her ancestral home, at least, in spirit. Her poems traverse between tangible spaces (Inya Lake, El Cerrito) and intangible spaces (the realms of nats) , between memories (as a child, I did not climb trees) and lived experiences (a detachment of hips, Jimi Hendrix Experience!). 

I suspect the poet has been to Myanmar in the flesh, and yet, lines such as “childhood / a burning kingdom / slap clap // pearl lantern /  bruised hands / clung to rowboat” mean that her Burmeseness is not short-changed. Maw Shein Win is a poet who “often collaborates with visual artists, musicians and other writers”, and her visual imagery in this lovely collection continues to delight me. 

There is a genre of traditional Burmese poetry called natchin, songs dedicated to nats. I am happy to pick this collection of American natchins, which has already gathered some critical acclaim and appeared on PEN longlist, as my favourite for 2020.

ko ko thett is a Burma-born poet, poetry translator and poetry editor for Mekong Review. He lives in Norwich, UK, and writes in both Burmese and English. 

Melizarani T. Selva: 

Hands down, the most powerful poetic energy I witnessed this year came from Kuala Lumpur’s homegrown livestream poetry fundraiser, If Walls Could Talk - Fever Dream Edition. On April 9, during Malaysia’s Movement Control Order, 21 poets from 7 countries, namely Australia, India, Philippines, Singapore, Syria, USA and all over Malaysia, embraced the virtual stage to raise funds for 600 refugee families. Within 3 hours of non-stop poetry readings, RM7,890 was raised for the purchase of groceries and basic needs. 

Having run ‘Walls’ for more than 3 years, my teammates Afi Noor, Daniel Cerventus Lim, Lily Jamaludin and I are still in absolute awe of the poets’ tenacity to pivot their poems and presence online in spite of timezones and irregular internet connectivity. Nothing could stop them from crafting the most wholesome multi-lingual pandemic-y poetry performances. We were also amazed by the roaring kindness of 1,100 strong live global audience who offered generous applause, ringgits and even a word/sentence to complete a social distance inspired ensemble poem, prompted by the phrase ‘Though I am not with you, I am…”. Some of our favourite moments were captured within the verses of Takahara Suiko, Bani Haykal and Ila and Omar Musa. If 2020 could be truthfully summed up in a poetry anthology, this would be it. 

Watch the show here! 

Melizarani T.Selva is a spoken word poet and author of the poetry collection ‘Taboo’. She co-founded If Walls Could Talk - Poetry Open Mic and co-published an anthology of 100 poems by 61 poets from Malaysia titled ‘When I Say Spoken, You Say Word!’

Marylyn Tan:

My pick for best Asian poetry of 2020 is Mok Zining’s The Orchid Folios (Ethos Books). With a voice both cutting and considered in its articulation, Mok intertwines technical floristry with lyric sentiment, then wields it to pry at questions of language, society and the body. Mapping personal disparagements and devastations onto a painstakingly researched, multitextual geography, she reveals a Singapore narrative as engineered as a commercial orchid. I particularly love how she uses the storied history of the Vanda Miss Joaquim, and its questions of who gets to claim ownership, conquest and discovery, as the fulcrum upon which her practice of docupoetics turns, in turn investigating and splicing side-by-side (de-)colonial concepts and emotional intimacies. 

I feel I must also mention two other poems/poets that have stuck with me: Darlene Silva Soberano’s 'The Weekend', whose queer poetics make me 17 and nervous to touch the first lesbian I’ve ever encountered in the wild again. The gay-ass yearning and singular intimacy of ‘after you leave i keep looking over / to see if maybe you’re still here’ is a feeling I guess I’ve been chasing over and over in a time where everything feels so fever-same and the sanest thing I can do is write myself out of it. There is also Innas Tsuroiya, whose gorgeous poem Your Name Means Garden holds the lines “There is a story of faith somewhere, like / magnificent clash. What if what remains / was only a door for departure not for / returning. What if there could be both but / after you molder the globe." which speak to me, personally—a line of inquiry that interrogates g*d and departures is something I’ve been wrestling with, in particular, this entire harrowing year. 

Marylyn Tan is a poet and artist. She aims to build community and emancipate the endangered body. Her first title, GAZE BACK (SLP 2020; Lambda loser), is the trans-genre lesbo witch grimoire you never knew you needed. Find her @marylyn.orificial on Instagram. 

A round-up of new fiction for the young in age, and the young at heart

 

Nicky Harman reviews three books for young readers translated from Chinese

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I have to confess that I am an absolute sucker for young adult novels. Given half a chance, I devour them. So I was excited to be given the opportunity to read and review the latest Cao Wenxuan novel, and decided to add two of my own by different authors.

Dragonfly Eyes

 

Cao Wenxuan is easily the most-translated Chinese writer for young readers, and he and Helen Wang, his translator, have won major awards. (Cao Wenxuan, the Hans Christian Andersen Award 2016; Helen Wang, the Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation 2017 for her translation of Bronze and Sunflower.)

 With Dragonfly Eyes, Cao and Wang have given us a substantial read (384 pages in paperback), pitched at 12+ years. This is a family saga spanning fifty years and three generations, which takes the reader from 1930s France where Ah-Mei's grandparents, Nainai and Yeye, met and fell in love, to poverty-stricken post-war Shanghai and the turbulent decades that followed in China. Ah-Mei and her French grandmother, Nainai, share a rare bond – Ah-Mei is the only granddaughter, and takes after her Nainai in looks too. Times are hard in Shanghai – money and food is in short supply ­– but she has loving parents, cousins, uncles and aunties, as well as Nainai and Yeye, and the family is resilient.

Cao Wenxuan has a lush, lyrical style which is beautifully translated by Helen Wang (anyone who has read Bronze and Sunflower will know what I mean) and I was lulled by the sweetness of the beginning into thinking that it was really intended for younger readers. But with the 1960s, life gets darker and more complex for Ah-Mei: society disintegrates around the family, Nainai is attacked simply for being foreign, and the story ends with what might be a natural death or might be suicide. Enthralling.

Dragonfly Eyes by Cao Wenxuan, translated by Helen Wang (Walker Books, January 2021)

 White Horse 

I was delighted when my translation of White Horse, a novella by Chinese writer Yan Ge, made it onto the short-list of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2020. It was in serious company: Tove Jansson and Natalia Ginzburg were also on the short-list, chosen from 132 entries in 34 languages, but White Horse is a book that can hold its own. As the judges said, ‘[This novella] portrays adolescence as heartachingly-recognizable the world over. Translated with charm and wit by the outstanding Nicky Harman.’

White Horse is about Yun Yun, a young girl growing up in a small West China town. Her mother has died in mysterious circumstances, but she lives happily enough with her father, aunt and uncle and older cousin Qing. Until her once-secure world falls apart, that is. Her cousin, who is a couple of years older than her, gets a boyfriend and clashes with her repressive parents, and Yun Yun is inevitably affected by the ensuing rows. Gradually, terrible family secrets are revealed, and Yun Yun is left isolated and alone as the adults, and her cousin, struggle to live with them.  It takes a while before we learn about Yun Yun’s mother (and I’m not going to spoil the plot here) but in the meantime, Yun Yun finds relief from the stresses and strains of growing up in this toxic atmosphere: she starts seeing a white horse. Is the white horse a friend? Is it a sign of something much more sinister? It’s certainly a fantasy, liable to pop up when Yun Yun is feeling at her most vulnerable and abandoned. 

This story is funny as well as spooky. It’s pitched as a teen novel, but don’t let that put you off if you’re a teen-plus. It’s creepy, and it gets under your skin, and it’s worth reading slowly, because some of the clues that the author drops are very subtle. Give them time to sink in.

White Horse by Yan Ge, translated by Nicky Harman (Hope Road, 2019)

 I Want to be Good

 

Huang Beijia is another writer who is famous for her books for young readers. I’ve translated two of her novels, I Want to be Good, and Flight of the Bumblebee (forthcoming) and I’m struck by the differences. Flight of the Bumblebee is a wartime novel, while I Want to be Good is contemporary and deals with that bugbear of Chinese children and their parents – school exams. You think that doesn’t sound like a racy read? Think again. It’s a mark of Huang’s skill as a writer that she creates two great characters, Ling and her put-upon mother, who, when they’re not struggling with her maths marks, live life to the full. Ling is an average sort of kid: cheerful, kind, brave when she needs to be, good at writing stories, but hopeless at maths. Her mother is an unexpected heroine: she had ambitions of her own as a young woman, but had to ditch them when her husband gets a demanding job. She tries so hard to support her daughter but she’s anything but a Tiger Mum.

 Ling and her friends get ready for their middle school entrance exam in their last year at elementary school, and the pressure piles on.  We share Ling’s adventures and misadventures, enjoy her small triumphs, and despair with her over her test marks. Then, just before the exams, something really special happens to Ling, something she is determined to keep a close secret. As the school year comes to an end, Ling has learnt a lot about life, and herself, and is ready to face the next stage of growing up.

I Want to be Good by Huang Beijia, translated by Nicky Harman (GDB Books, Delhi, India. https://www.amazon.in/dp/9384401528/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_IZd8FbAK90NA5. A UK edition is also forthcoming in January 2021.) Ages: 10+

 For more information on translated Chinese fiction for young readers, see Chinese books for young readers.

 

 

Human Bullets by Tadayoshi Sakurai - A Memoir of the Russo-Japanese War

The Russo-Japanese War is a fascinating conflict that, arguably, was one of the most important events in the 20th century. It contributed to the decline of the Russian Empire, paving the way for the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and gave rise to the Japanese Empire, paving the way to Pearl Harbor. And yet, this war is often overlooked in the West, leading to a dearth of first-hand English language accounts. Thankfully, Human Bullets (1906) by Tadayoshi Sakurai survives to fill that void.

Backlist books: The Golden Chersonese by Isabella Bird

Backlist books is a column by Lucy Day Werts that focuses on enduring, important works from or about Asia. This post is about The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither, as it was originally titled, which details the author’s travels through China and Southeast Asia from December 1878 to February 1879, and was published in 1883. The book consists of Bird’s letters to her sister, “unaltered, except by various omissions and some corrections as to matters of fact”. She says they lack “literary dress” because she wishes to convey her “first impressions in their original vividness”.

Readers will be favourably impressed by Bird’s appetite for the unfamiliar and tolerance for heat, mud and pests, whether she is drinking from a fresh coconut fetched by a tame monkey, slipping down from the back of an uncooperative elephant or discovering leeches feasting on her bloodied ankles.

See below to find out what you need to know to decide whether you should read The Golden Chersonese, or what you should know about it even if you never do!

A brilliant grappling with history through interlinked stories: Asako Serizawa's sterling debut 'The Inheritors'

Bio: 

ASAKO SERIZAWA was born in Japan and grew up in Singapore, Jakarta, and Tokyo. A graduate of Tufts University, Brown University, and Emerson College, she has received two O. Henry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. A former fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, INHERITORS is her first book. 

Synopsis:

Spanning more than a century, and revolving around the Pacific side of World War II, Inheritors paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of five generations of a Japanese family grappling with the legacies of loss, imperialism, and war. Written in myriad styles and set across Asia and the United States, each of the characters’ stories adds to the others to illuminate the complex ways in which we experience, interpret, and pass on our tangled history. A retired doctor is forced to confront the moral consequences of his wartime actions. His brother’s wife answers a call for first-person testimonies, gradually revealing the shattering realities of life in Occupied Japan. A half century later, her estranged granddaughter, raised in America, retraces her roots across the Pacific, chasing the secrets behind her father’s absence. Decades later, two siblings confront the consequences of their great-grandparents’ war as the world, mutated by new technology, is threatened by a violence more pervasive than the one that scorched the earth a century earlier. Serizawa’s characters walk the line between the devastating realities of war and the banal needs of everyday life as they struggle to reconcile their experiences with the changing world. A breathtaking meditation on the relationship among history, memory, and storytelling, Inheritors is a triumph of imagination and stands in the company of works by Lisa Ko, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Min Jin Lee. 

Of Suitcases and Superheroes: Poems between Singapore and the Philippines

As nations grow closer, so do their literary communities. In this month’s poetry column, we look at the cultural, economic, and literary ties between Singapore and the Philippines, and hear from two poets, Eric Tinsay Valles (whom we last interviewed in 2016!) and Rolinda Onates Espanola, about what it means to write between these two cities.

A translated novel: a team effort

 Nicky Harman reads Zhang Ling’s latest historical novel, A Single Swallow (Amazon Crossing, 2020.)

One of the best-written novels I’ve ever translated is Zhang Ling’s Gold Mountain Blues, about a family from Guangdong, China, torn apart when the men emigrate to work in Canada and their women wait long, long years to join them. So I was all agog to read Ling’s latest novel, A Single Swallow, translated by Shelly Bryant. I found it gripping. Better still, I got to interview all the main players, author, translator and editor.

The story: Three men – two American and one Chinese – reminisce about life in the rural village they were all stationed in during WW2. …and about Ah Yan, (‘Swallow’ in Chinese) who means different things to each of the men, although they each have strong and complicated feelings for her. This novel is set during a horrific time in China, but the human spirit triumphs.

3 Japanese Mystery Novel Recommendations

November is the perfect time for noir aka Noirvember, and that means it’s the perfect time for mystery novels. In Japan, the mystery genre is called suiri shōsetsu (推理小説) literally ‘deductive reasoning fiction,’ and has a long history in the Land of the Rising Sun. Here are just a few recommendations by Japanese authors to read during Noirvember.

 

A new short fiction collection from multi-awarded Filipino American writer and poet Eileen R. Tabios

PAGPAG The Dictator's Aftermath in the Diaspora (Paloma Press 2020)

My first encounter with the work of Eileen R. Tabios was in the middle of 1999. I was in the middle of sorting submissions and curating intentionally diverse work for a flash fiction anthology I had proposed to Anvil Publishing in Manila, that eventually came out in 2003, and was called Fast Food Fiction: Short Short Stories To Go. Tabios’ story in this book was a deft piece, just 469 words (I asked for flash of no more than 500 words, and many writers went far beyond that), focusing on a man who puzzles, genuinely it seems, over the aftermath of passion that had evidently gone too far, with the use of a black leather crop. Adding further interest, the title chosen for the story was, “excerpts from After She Left The Hotel Room” and its text was divided into four petite sections headed, “W, X, Y” and “Z”. 

Not only did I love the dark little story, I admired such clever little conceits suggesting to the reader that submerged beneath this sharp tip is an iceberg of more mysterious life, indeed, the entire alphabet’s worth of it. Noting the (many) books she has authored subsequently, I found none called After She Left The Hotel Room. However, further reading led me to an intriguing discovery. On her blog, Tabios has shared the blurbs for her first novel, Dovelion A Fairy Tale For Our Times, forthcoming this March 2021 out of the arts publisher, AC Books. The blurb from France-based Filipino Reine Arcache Melvin, author of The Betrayed (Anvil Publishing 2019), ends like this, “Tabios uses her pen like Elena uses her whip, provoking tenderness through intense sensation as well as illumination through sensuality and a passionate, hungry mind.” 

Reading this, I stopped short, delighted. Could this “whip” be the same black leather crop owned by the same “she” who “Left the Hotel Room” and is Dovelion's Elena this "she"? 

Tsundoku #15 - November 2020

 November and whether you're just heading into lockdown or just escaping it you need more books. So here's November's selection and don't forget, Christmas is just round the corner and bookshops everywhere could do with a little help this year....first up some new fiction...

What’s The Deal With Graphic Novels? Elaine Chiew Chats with Melanie Lee and Arif Rafhan on their collaboration for Amazing Ash & Superhero Ah Ma.

 

Photo courtesy of Difference Engine

About the Writer:

 

Melanie Lee is the author of the picture book series The Adventures of Squirky the Alien, which picked up the Crystal Kite Award (Middle East/India/Asia division) in 2016. She has also published Imaginary Friends: 26 Whimsical Fables for Getting on in a Crazy World, a collection of illustrated short stories, together with Arif Rafhan. Besides books, Melanie writes content related to arts, heritage and lifestyle for a variety of platforms including museums, documentaries, magazines and websites.  In addition, she is Associate Faculty at the Singapore University of Social Sciences developing and teaching media writing courses. 

 

Photo courtesy of Difference Engine

  About the Illustrator:

Arif Rafhan is a comic artist, illustrator and pre-production artist. His work has
been published in more than 10 books to date by MPH, Buku Fixi, Maple Comics,
and Marshall Cavendish. These includes comics, content illustrations and cover illustrations. He’s been working closely with Lat since October 2018 for Lat’s upcoming graphic novel (ongoing). He also works with various production companies creating pre-production visuals such as concept art, character designs, environment designs, and storyboards. 

About the Book:

Eleven-year-old Ash doesn’t have much to look forward to: maths tests, a naggy Mum, and an Ah Ma who doesn’t know much about her. That is, until she discovers something that will change her life—Ah Ma is a superhero! The best part is, Ash discovers that she has superpowers too! 

Life is so much more exciting as a superhero-in-training. However, Ash can’t help but notice that Ah Ma sometimes gets a little absent-minded while showing her the ropes. Amazing Ash & Superhero Ah Ma is a funny and heartwarming story about family and acceptance. Growing up and growing old is never easy—and all the more perplexing when secrets and superpowers are added to the mix. 

Holding Hands: Five Singapore Poets on the first digital #SWF

The Singapore Writers’ Festival kicks off this week – and for the first time in its history, will be taking place entirely online. In these tumultuous times, we asked five Singapore-based poets about why literary festivals are important, what a successful literary festival looks like (to them!), and what they’re most looking forward to at this year’s #SWF:

The Girl who did a Strip-Dance, by Wang Bang, translated by Nicky Harman

 In this post, Nicky Harman translates an article by Wang Bang, a writer, film-maker and translator based in the UK and featured here in September 2020. Wang Bang says, ‘I agreed to write for Love Matters because I think it is all about the making of girls, daring, dashing unconventional girls, about how our girls break away from social norms, toxic masculinities and a rigid, patriarchal society. …The results have been great. Most of my articles have been well received, with some of them getting more than 3,000 likes.’

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The thing that completely changed my relationship with my body was not losing my virginity, but watching a private striptease. It happened one hot day during the summer holidays, when I met Star. We had a lot in common: we were both at the ‘Bonjour Tristesse’ age; and she, like me, had dark skin, and came from a single-parent family. From then on, I used to tell my mum that I was going to a classmate's home to do my homework and hang out with Star instead.

There was something particularly fascinating about her body. It seemed to be softer and lither than anyone else's. I remember we found a dress in the suitcase her mother had left behind – round-necked, with an A-line skirt – and took turns to try it on. I got it tangled around my neck and then my elbows got stuck, but she just wriggled like an eel and the woollen fabric, shrunk from the wash, slid down over her body.

That summer holiday, Star seemed obsessed with trying on clothes. It was as if she was desperately trying to find her grown-up self in this jumble of fabrics and fibres. One evening, she drew the curtains and whispered to me that she was going to show me something special. With a mischievous smile, she began to pull her shirt up, then stopped half-way, pouted, and made a pretence of pulling her shirt down again, all the time swaying her hips. Finally, she pulled it up to reveal her small, flat belly… And she danced her way through taking her clothes off. There was no soundtrack, but her body seemed to open and close rhythmically, the way a seashell does. It was its own musical box. There was no stage lighting, but countless beads of sweat at her hairline caught the light instead.

Her dancing was naughty and provocative. It seemed to me then that she had made it up herself, though thinking back now, it was a lot like the striptease in a black and white photo of the American burlesque dancer Mae Dix. Mae Dix wears a hat with sparkly tassels, and holds a slender wand between her fingertips. Her silky dress has fallen to her hips, showing her alabaster backbone, her pert, fleshy buttocks, shaped a bit like a French snail, and her bum crack. She wears a neat pair of dance shoes, with copper-plated soles designed for tip-tapping around the dance floor.

Mae Dix’s act became a sensation. In those days, few women even wore trousers, and hardly anyone had heard of ‘striptease’. Instead, the mainstream media dubbed her teasing, flirty dance moves ‘burlesque’. The male reporters sent to cover the shows practically mobbed the stage, even if afterwards, they wrote about it with scorn. 

As girls, Star and I were separated from Mae Dix by nearly a century, but the society in which we lived did not seem to have grown much more tolerant towards women. My space, growing up, felt flat, crude and rigid, like a cardboard straitjacket. After I developed physically, I seemed to lose any right to do anything with my body apart from gymnastics to the radio broadcasts, sprinting and skipping. We had to sit bolt upright, walk with our toes turned in, and wear skirts down over our knees. It was a sin to touch ourselves in private, let alone make a spectacle of ourselves in public. Only the beautiful were allowed to dance, because only they qualified to join the dance troupes that added glamour to every public celebration. And only bad girls combed their hair into giant quiffs, wore bat sleeves and jeans, and sneaked into pop-up discos in basement fire tunnels. Our bodies were controlled, as rigidly as if we were statues of women displayed on the square, by a hidden but highly effective mechanism which reached right down to the micro level, to our families.

‘You should stop showing off your body every time you go out, okay?’ my mother would say, casting a stern, anxious eye over the sleeveless top I liked to wear because it was hot. ‘You’re asking for some hoodlum to slash your back. Have you any idea how many perverts there are out there, just waiting to slash a girl who’s showing a bit of back?’ My mother tried to teach me that clothes fell into two categories: ordinary, workaday, old clothes, were one sort. The other sort were for special occasions, when it was permissible to wear something a bit prettier. Jeanette Winterson writes in her memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal about her mother: ‘She had two sets of false teeth, matt for everyday, and a pearlised set for “best”.’ Every time I read this, I smile wryly.

If I hadn’t met Star, I would never have had the guts to stand in front of the mirror, examine my body, caress it, dance with it, go with it, let alone set off with it to cross continents and find my own way in life. No matter how critical other people are about my body, I have learned to accept it. I’m in love with all the ways it allows me to express myself. I think of it as a musical instrument, its every movement performing a dance. And I am the only person with the right to play it. 

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Wang Bang’s column was written for RNW Media, Netherlands radio station, Love Matters Chinese website