Too Too Too Too
Tammy Ho Lai-Ming
Math Paper Press, 2019
Review by Kate Rogers
Hong Kong poet, academic and translator Tammy Ho Lai-Ming’s latest poetry collection Too Too Too Too is political. In light of the kidnappings of Hong Kong booksellers, stabbing and expulsion of local journalists over the past five years—as well as recent online censorship—writing such a book is risky for a well-known Hong Kong personality. Tammy Ho Lai-Ming is a founding co-editor of the online literary journal Cha: An Asian Literary Journal , an associate professor at Baptist University and the president of PEN Hong Kong. She supports the local writing community in many ways. I should state up front that I know Tammy Ho Lai-Ming personally. She also supports Poetry OutLoud, the English language poetry reading series in Hong Kong which I have co-emceed for 12 years. (Poetry OutLoud celebrates its 20th anniversary in October 2019.) In Too Too Too Too, Tammy Ho Lai-Ming tackles subjects that have become increasingly dangerous for any Hong Kong writer with wit and courage.
Interestingly, the political poems about Hong Kong in Too Too Too Too are not found until one-third of the way through her book and are concentrated towards the end. Perhaps the ordering of her poems is down to the indirect approach to narrative which can be common in many Asian cultures (see scholar Yuxin Jia on indirectness in Chinese writing). Or, perhaps by starting her collection with the feminist poems, Ho wants to state that the personal is political. Most of the poems in this collection are very direct. In any case, I can’t help but wonder whether Ho organized her manuscript in this way to try to stay below the radar of Beijing.
In the poem “Beijing Standard Time”, Tammy Ho Lai-Ming begins with an epigraph from Louis MacNeice: “And thought is as free as the sun[.]” In her first stanza her narrator asks with simmering anger,
“Do you own the sun?
Perhaps you do—you do dictate time.
Everywhere across this vast land,
your time is the time.”
She describes Beijing as, “a city which imagines / that others orbit it, day in, day out” and states: “No wonder those distanced from the capital/perceive time their own way—independent of Beijing’s Standard.”
Online censorship of Tammy Ho Lai-Ming’s Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and its contributors in early June 2019, as well as the Hong Kong government’s decision to expel Financial Times journalist Victor Malett in November 2018 suggest that the activities of writers of all types in Hong Kong are being observed far more closely by Beijing than during the years immediately following the 1997 handover of Hong Kong back to China.
Of course, in the past five years Hong Kong has also seen the stabbing of Ming Pao newspaper editor Kevin Lau in 2014 and the 2015 kidnapping of five Hong Kong booksellers who published critical biographies of Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Too Too Too Too includes poems about the kidnapping of the booksellers. In “One Stone, Two Birds”, the narrator quips that China Central Television (which aired the forced confessions of the kidnapped Hong Kong booksellers) should employ a more creative way to explain future disappearances:
(…)
…say they have vanished
in the manner of the crew
on the Mary Celeste.
Blame is best placed on mystery…
…their restless spirits will
haunt the South China Sea,
(…)
Protection of existing freedoms and the implementation of universal suffrage in Hong Kong have become key demands in the recent Hong Kong protests. (Universal suffrage was also the focus of the 79-day Occupy Central protest in 2014). The Extradition to China bill which sparked the summer through autumn protests of 2019 sent millions of Hong Kongers to the streets in June and July because they were afraid that if the bill passed, critics of the government could be “legally” detained on the mainland. However, although the bill has been completely withdrawn by the Hong Kong government, the protests continue—attracting lawyers, students, teachers, lecturers and professors, airline pilots, small business owners and even Hong Kongers from the finance sector. They are motivated by intense concern about the loss of their freedoms and the prospect of worse. People who participate in the protests or make statements on social media which support the protests are losing their jobs. As I write this, more than 1,500 Hong Kong protesters sit in prison.
In order to understand Hong Kongers’ choice to protest as a way to communicate their dissatisfaction with government, it’s important to know they had every reason to expect more democracy to be granted to the population in the years following the Handover, not less. During talks about the Handover in the 1980’s, Beijing and Britain agreed that Hong Kong’s freedoms would remain untouched until 2047. Their Joint Declaration states that Beijing will appoint the chief executive based on the results of ‘elections or consultations made locally’. In the Basic Law, the mini constitution of Hong Kong, “universal suffrage is said to be the ‘ultimate aim’ in elections” for Hong Kong’s leader, Antony Dapiran states in his 2017 book City of Protest. Nevertheless, in 2014 the Chinese Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC) announced a prescribed selective pre-screening of candidates for the election of Hong Kong’s chief executive. For many Hong Kongers that was a terrible betrayal.
As mentioned earlier, censorship is becoming more common in Hong Kong. During the days leading up to the June 4th 2019 memorial for the democracy activists of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, Tammy Ho Lai-Ming had her first direct experience with online censorship. On June 2nd, as she was posting pieces for the “Tiananmen 30 years on” issue of Cha on the journal’s WordPress blog, Tammy Ho Lai-Ming’s received a message that her account had been suspended. She lost access for almost twenty-four hours. That was more than just a little inconvenient, since the blog included pieces for a public reading to accompany the “Tiananmen 30 years on” issue of Cha. Fortunately, after Tammy Ho Lai-Ming and supporters complained to WordPress via Twitter, she regained access to the Cha blog. Unfortunately, not long after that, Facebook blocked her posts promoting the Tiananmen memorial reading. She received a message on Facebook stating her post had “violated community standards”. (My poem “Twenty years in the People’s Republic of China” was among pieces in Cha’s censored blog and “Tiananmen 30 years on” issue. Facebook also sent me a message that my poem “violated community standards” when I tried to post it separately. It was circulated by Canadian poet friends on Facebook without difficulty, however.) Shadow banning of the Cha “Tiananmen 30 years on” issue has continued through the summer and autumn of 2019, limiting access to it online.
In order to understand the level of risk involved in standing up to the Hong Kong government and Beijing these days it is important to know that key Occupy Central protest organisers, academics Benny Tai Yiu-ting, of the faculty of law at the University of Hong Kong, and Chan Kin-man, a professor of sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, have been charged with causing a public nuisance and are serving jail time now. Student leader Joshua Wong, the face of Scholarism, the pro-democracy student activist group which launched Occupy Central, has been arrested several times. He is only 22 years old.
Tammy Ho Lai-Ming mentions Joshua Wong in her twenty-two-point poem of quotes and observations about Hong Kong’s loss of freedom, “How the Narratives of Hong Kong are written with China in Sight.” In point twelve, the narrator sarcastically remarks, “Someone must have slandered Joshua Wong…for one evening,/without having done anything outrageously wrong, he was/arrested.”
It is worth quoting the first five points of the poem as examples of Ho’s defiant wit:
1. Call me One Country, Two Systems.
2. It is a truth universally acknowledged that the democracy
fighters in Hong Kong must be genomically modified by
the West.
3. Hong Kong and democracy—it was love at first sight.
4. An order from the PRC comes and never leaves.
5. Many years later, as the Hong Kong people remembered the
‘generosity’ of the Chinese government for not shooting them
or overrunning them with tanks, they would be forced to cry
with gratitude.
Tammy Ho Lai-Ming is brave to express her sexuality through poetry. Her collection is political in its open and feminist sharing of highly personal poems. I see these poems as political because it seems to me that Hong Kong is still a patriarchal society influenced by Confucian values which can restrict women’s freedom. In her essay, “Concubine Love”, long time Hong Kong creative non-fiction and fiction writer Xu Xi describes the constraints and double standards applied to Asian women in Hong Kong.
Xu Xi wonders if “the perpetually colonial state of Hong Kong” (now of China, not Britain) is one reason for continuing patriarchal attitudes towards women in Hong Kong. She wonders why it is okay for men to have multiple lovers in Asia (but not okay for Asian women to do so without judgement). Xu Xi contends that, “It is hellish being an educated professional Asian female in Asia” because of all the patriarchal assumptions. Such women are “marked a harpy for being too feminist”.
In her poem “Is that Summer in Your Pocket”, Tammy Ho Lai-Ming’s narrator appears to play with stereotypes of Chinese women. She observes that, “The sky is heavy like wet hair/down to the waist/that no one can untangle.//My tanned skin is peeling/yet I do not feel like a snake./I give up on trying to look Chinese.”
In her poem “Leftovers”, the narrator observes with characteristic wit and irony, “The Chinese understand leftovers./How food can be made into other food./How whatever’s left in the pot can be…/cooked into something random, humble.//That women still unmarried/in their early thirties or beyond/are called sheng nu—/literally the ‘leftover ladies’”.
In these sensual and erotic poems, Tammy Ho Lai-Ming’s narrators enjoy the power of being the object of male desire. In her playful poem referencing James Joyce and German sociologist, Theodor W. Adorno, the narrator scolds at the start, “…You call me stern. I’m nothing on Adorno.”/ Later, she asserts, “…You also cannot possibly be stern, …/when you are naked with post-coital cock,/and me resting my head on your firm chest.”
In “This is just to say”, the narrator asserts her power, but then apologizes to her lover, “When we are laughing/at your joke,//I slap your face.//. In the final part of the poem, the narrator declares, “You’re such a marvellous cannibal.//Forgive me./I want to be provocative.”
Tammy Ho Lai-Ming’s latest poetry collection Too Too Too Too is as powerful as she is, defying expectations and asserting her freedom to be an independent woman and defender of Hong Kong. I highly recommend this provocative collection.
Kate Rogers’ poetry has appeared in World Literature Today; Tamaracks: Canadian Poetry for the 21st Century; Algebra of Owls; Voice and Verse; Twin Cities Cinema; Juniper; The 2017 Montreal International Poetry Prize Anthology; The Guardian; Asia Literary Review; Cha: an Asian Literary Journal; The Goose: a Journal of Arts, Environment and Culture, and Kyoto Journal among other publications. Her poetry won second place in the 2019 Big Pond Rumours Contest. Kate’s latest poetry collection is, “Out of Place” (Quattro/Aeolus House 2017). Kate’s reviews have appeared in CV2; Canadian Woman Studies and Cha: an Asian Literary Journal and forthcoming in Arc.