Chinese and City Aesthetics

Chinese and City AestheticsA Conversation with Jennifer Wong Antony Huen (bio) and Jennifer Wong (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution hong kong, china - august 5, 2015 : stair art painting on nathan road 中英 Jennifer Wong is a poet, critic, and translator based in the UK. Her first two poetry collections, Summer Cicadas (2006) and Goldfish (2013), were published by Chameleon Press in Hong Kong, where she was born and raised. Her latest collection, Letters Home (2020), published by Nine Arches Press, has been named a Wild Card Choice by Poetry Book Society and includes poems from her pamphlet Diary of a Miu Miu Sales Girl (Bitter Melon, 2019). She studied English at Oxford and earned a PhD in creative writing at Oxford Brookes. In 2022 she is a visiting TORCH fellow at Oxford. Here she discusses her poetry, her wide-ranging interest in the visual arts and aesthetics, her understanding of the agency of art, and the notion of ekphrasis, now used to refer to literary descriptions of visual artworks. [End Page 49] Antony Huen: On your website, you call yourself "a writer and translator." Goldfish includes a group of poems that are translations of ancient Chinese poems. The poem "Painting," for example, is a translation of Liu Zongyuan's poem "Jiang Xue" (literally, "river's snow") and evokes the notion of "three perfections," which describes the Chinese interconnection of poetry, calligraphy, and painting. Your image of a man "seen on a lonely boat, fishing" also reminds me of the cover artwork of Letters Home. Do you always have an interest in Chinese art and aesthetics? Jennifer Wong: Like many other Chinese students, I grew up learning some of the ancient Chinese poems, including the ones I added to Goldfish. I love the clarity in the imagery and sound of these ancient poems. I picked the ones that speak most to me about landscapes, selfhood, and making art. I am largely a selftaught translator, and I see them as an approximation of the poems I learned, but I hope that by including them, the reader can get closer to these poems in the Chinese canon and how that must have affected my poetic sensibility. I am excited that the world is becoming much less Eurocentric. Huen: In Goldfish, the poem "Calligraphy" looks at Chinese characters as ideograms ("four sturdy strokes stand / for the gallops of horses"). In Letters Home, Chinese characters are embedded in many poems. Poets like Sarah Howe and Mary Jean Chan have also written about and included Chinese characters in their books. How do you think anglophone readers will respond to the Chinese characters and the writing about them? Wong: What's fascinating about writing or engaging with multilingualism is the sheer space and possibilities. I love the way Howe and Chan play with the language(s), and I think those experiments are so much part of their poems. Chinese characters are symbols, they are monosyllabic, and they also ask to be read out loud. And there are so many different layers of meanings depending on the context you put them in. My mom used to teach me about the multiple meanings of these pictorial characters. I love the fluidity and openness of the [Chinese] language, the way so much meaning is packed into those strokes, and want to share with the reader that openness about language. Nowadays, anglophone readers are actually becoming more and more receptive to multilingual expressions, not just Chinese but Spanish, French, Korean ... too. In blending Chinese characters and Chinese spoken dialects—Mandarin and Cantonese—in the text of Letters Home, I encourage readers to respond to the poetic narrative by translating it in their own ways. Personally, I am excited that the world is becoming much less Eurocentric, and that readers' curiosity and willingness to engage with the multilingual space embodies a new tradition and a new understanding about the polycentric world: we define and decode meanings via our own cultural consciousness, not someone else's or some other nation's. I also recall that some of your own poems, like "Cantonese Proverbs," play with the Cantonese language, actively involving the reader in unraveling what's in a dialect or

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