2 days ago
Moving between cities and tongues, poet Tim Tim Cheng wants to put Hong Kong's writing on the map
Hong Kong poet Tim Tim Cheng's social awakening began on one Lunar New Year day in February 2011.
At that time, Cheng – still a teenager – was among a small crowd that gathered in Choi Yuen Tsuen for an arts festival, dubbed 'Choi Yuen Tsuen Woodstock,' put together by villagers, indie musicians, artists, academics, and activists to count down the village's final days.
The village was set to be torn down to make way for a high-speed rail project connecting Hong Kong to mainland China, despite fierce resistance from villagers and activists.
That day, Cheng watched frontman and lyricist Leung Wing-lai of Hong Kong band An Id Signal, who, with no stage to play on, stood barefoot in the dry soil and wailed into the mic as clouds of dust billowed around the audience.
Up to that point, for most of Cheng's life, Hong Kong had felt like a blur. 'Choi Yuen Tsuen captured moments when Hong Kong came into sharper focus for me,' she said.
Fast forward 14 years, Cheng, now a published poet who splits her time between Glasgow and Hong Kong, was in a much larger crowd at the band's album launch in April. Her connection with An Id Signal has also come full circle.
Cheng, who recalled first seeing the band as a secondary school student, is credited with the translation of the band's lyrics for its latest release. 'It was volunteer work,' she said of the translation project.
The band's single 'Volatile Consolation' makes an appearance in her latest English-language poetry collection, The Tattoo Collector – the off-kilter, dissonant screams translated onto paper. Writing about those moments, she said, was a way to connect with history.
'I think one of the biggest takeaways I got from writing this book is to sit with the pain of the disappearance of formative things, be it music venues or large-scale protests,' Cheng said, alluding to shuttered livehouses and mass protests in Hong Kong.
The Tattoo Collector, Cheng's second book, was published in 2024 – three years after she moved to the UK and just a year after she published a shorter collection, Tapping at Glass.
Two months ago, The Tattoo Collector was longlisted for the inaugural poetry category of the Jhalak Prize, which awards books by writers of colour in the UK and Ireland.
Earlier this month, Girl Ghosts, one of the poems in The Tattoo Collector, was shortlisted for the Forward Prizes for Poetry, one of the leading poetry awards in the two countries.
Now the poet is branching out and starting to think that translation could help deepen her relationship with Hong Kong's literature – in both English and Chinese – and the city itself.
New generation
Cheng, 32, is part of a new generation of Anglophone Hong Kong poets, following a lineage of literary figures and translators from the city, such as Jennifer Wong, Mary Jean Chan, and Nicholas Wong.
Hong Kong's English literature has found increasing recognition over the past decade. Thanks to those writers, there is a growing interest among academics in this literary genre to understand how residents feel about the social and political changes in the city.
'They paved the way for writers like me who write about Hong Kong,' she said.
However, save for a quip or two in English, Cheng's interview was conducted fully in Cantonese – reflecting her in-between cultural belonging.
Cheng grew up in a working-class family in a public housing estate in Tin Shui Wai, in the northwestern New Territories.
She was raised by her Indonesian-Chinese great-grandmother and grandmother, who moved to the city from Fujian. She never learned much about Hong Kong from them or her Cantonese-Hokkien parents.
'When I was younger, I wanted my English to be perfect, so I avoided Chinese books. But that was a terrible way to think,' she said, looking back on an Anglophilic streak she had during her time at an English-language secondary school and casting it aside as a symptom of the early-2010s-era British 'soft power' invasion.
Cheng did a double major in English and education at Hong Kong Baptist University, where she formally studied and wrote English poetry. After graduation, she spent several years working as an English teacher.
Teacher salaries were decent, but burnout eventually set in. Her last job as a full-time teacher was at the Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity, a somewhat unorthodox secondary school in Kowloon City, which allows students specialising in creative arts to work on their own passion projects in their own time.
Pointing to the catalysing effect the students had on her and lamenting the lack of 'sustenance' that the city could give her writing, Cheng left Hong Kong to pursue a master's degree in creative writing at the University of Edinburgh – with a loan from a friend – in 2021.
'Lived outside, hidden behind'
The poet signed copies of The Tattoo Collector by crossing out her transliterated English name, 'Tim Tim Cheng,' and scribbling the Chinese characters of her name underneath.
Occasional Cantonese colloquialisms appear in Cheng's English poems, possibly alienating – or engaging – readers outside Hong Kong.
She harbours a sense of scepticism towards the English language. Despite it being her default 'literary language,' she feels both close to and alienated from it. English is a language she has simultaneously 'lived outside' and '[hidden] behind,' she writes in her book.
While bilingualism is usually treated as a prized skill in Hong Kong, the poet has a more ambiguous take. 'BYELINGUAL,' Cheng wrote in a text message to HKFP, referring to the state of speaking two languages but losing proficiency in both.
It was her sense-for-sense translation of a Cantonese idiom literally meaning 'neither salty nor bland,' which she had earlier used in an interview to describe how she viewed her relationship with the two languages.
The Tattoo Collector oscillates between Hong Kong, where she was born and raised, and Scotland, where she is currently based. It features conversations on class and privilege with a classmate in Glasgow and memoirs of Hidden Agenda, a defunct live music venue in Hong Kong's industrial district that was raided by the police in 2016, as well as rural landscapes, motherhood, immigration, and pro-democracy protests.
Meanwhile, Girl Ghosts, a poem partly inspired by stories she heard from her mother and grandmother, is a homage to the poet's family roots in Indonesia and Fujian.
These hybridities and in-betweens have left Cheng feeling like something of an outsider, never involved enough in one place or one language. But her plans to live between Hong Kong and Glasgow have necessitated acceptance of that identity.
'If I'm writing about Hong Kong from the position of someone who's outside the city, there comes a point where I have to accept that my understanding can't fully represent the experience of people who are here,' Cheng said.
'This collection actually isn't very 'Hong Kong,'' she said about her new book.
There are just too many niche aspects of the city that would still feel foreign or unknown to the broader public at home, she explained. 'Hidden Agenda – who the heck would know about that?'
Yet, Cheng, who references specific policy issues in her work, is anything but detached from the city's affairs.
Hong Kong's cutthroat property market, a whale that succumbed to a gash on its back two summers ago, and a stalled reclamation megaproject appear as short vignettes in her poem 'Lantau (Rotten Head),' a reference to the archaic Chinese name for the city's biggest island.
Cheng admits she was a bit 'reckless' when picking out her subject matter. 'After I got the contract from the publisher, I realised I could write anything,' she said. It got to a point that Cheng received reviews saying that her poems were incomprehensible or that they were too reliant on gimmicky Chinese characters.
On the one hand, she dismissed the criticisms, saying that her critics would have understood her writing better if they had resorted to Google. On the other hand, she had a positive reaction.
'I actually like seeing these comments, because I started out writing with the intention of serving an audience that knows what happened, to write in our own language,' she said. It was a matter of balancing 'which people you want to reach and the scale you want to achieve.'
Diaspora
When discussing the locales that shape her work, she is hesitant to identify herself as part of Hong Kong's diaspora.
Indeed, she hasn't completely settled overseas. Cheng, who now lives – and writes – between Hong Kong and Scotland, is already preparing to start teaching at the Chinese University of Hong Kong's English Department in September.
Before flying back to Glasgow for a four-month stint in May, she spent a little under half a year in Hong Kong: teaching, holding book talks, editing, and supervising master's projects, scraping together funds to pay for a five-year talent visa, student loans, flights, and rent in the UK.
Yet she is somewhat wary of Hongkongers overseas.
'Some Hongkongers here don't want to hang around other Hongkongers because they're worried their children won't be able to integrate and become a 'real UK Citizen,'' Cheng said, with an air of contempt.
Cheng recalls attending a Lunar New Year fair, where Hongkongers – those 'who had decided they weren't going back,' she said – printed out Hong Kong road signs, mailboxes, and vending machines as decorations, as if to preserve an image of the city they knew.
'But maybe Hong Kong's streets have changed so much that they're no longer the same image,' she said. 'I still want to know what's happening on both sides; I'm a bit nosy like that.'
Slow to pigeonhole herself into overseas publishers' cliches of what a 'diaspora' poet might be, Cheng doesn't feel the need to idealise Hong Kong, as some self-proclaimed diaspora poets might do for their home countries.
'You left for a reason. Your origin might not have given you enough, so why talk about it like it's something great?' she asked.
For Cheng, translating is also a way to put Hong Kong writers on the map, without overtly caving to the Anglospheric gaze.
'I want to catch up on Chinese stuff that I missed out on, but I don't want to deviate too much from what I'm currently doing,' she said.
She recently began translating Hong Kong writer Lee Ka-yee's essay collection Exposure, under the mentorship of literary translator Jennifer Feeley, who translated the works of the city's late literary icon Xi Xi.
'It's also a way of putting my understanding of Hong Kong to the test,' Cheng added.
'A lot of writing that comes out of Hong Kong, especially work that can make it into the English-speaking world, always has this vibe that it was made with the expectation of being seen by other people. But Ka-yee and other local Hong Kong writers just approach writing simply in terms of how they see the world, how Hongkongers see the world. And I want to bridge those gazes through translation,' she said.
'Maybe it's also a way to tell my younger, 12-, 13-year-old self: You actually can flow between Chinese and English.'
