Hong Kong echoes across English ghost lands: A decolonizing of English-language poetry

This article focuses on three women poets who deploy a Hong Kong Chinese imaginary, an imaginarium filled with memories, popular cultural references, fragments of Cantonese, and isolated Chinese characters. Jennifer Lee Tsai was born in the UK of Hong Kong immigrant parents, while Jennifer Wong migrated from Hong Kong to the UK first to study and then to write poetry. Tim Tim Cheng similarly migrated to the UK to study, having grown up in Hong Kong. Their English-language poems are peppered with Cantonese images and linguistic elements that challenge the reader to address the postcolonial condition of the poetry. Written in English in the UK, their poetry represents a poiesis of the local and the personal. While articulating a local everydayness, their work seeks out from afar and from the past, in the migrant in-betweenness of Chinese-British borderlands, poetic resolutions to the binds of their postcolonial subjecthood.

Automated summary

This article explores the works of three women poets who use a Hong Kong Chinese imaginary to create a unique poetic context. Their English poems integrate Cantonese images and linguistic elements to challenge the postcolonial condition of their poetry. The poems represent a local and personal expression, reflecting the everyday life while seeking poetic resolutions to the constraints of postcolonial subjecthood in the Chinese-British borderlands.