Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, Hong Kong
For some, the art of leaving isn’t hard
to master. The one-way plane tickets, the house,
possibly a backyard. The city loses something
each day: freedoms; its finest lawyers, writers,
scholars who will one day look back
at this broken ship of a town
with loving nostalgia. The art of staying, however,
must be mastered regardless of how, for those
whose roots evidently know this is the land
where their bones shall be ground to dust. The
mountains have seen their ancestors. They own
this city, this realm, even the bittersweet summer
sun. Some wonder if the harbour will smell
the same. The trees? How long will it take
before mail is confiscated? When will coins
and banknotes erase Hong Kong? Will we
speak a different tongue and become
a placid province? Going, going, gone.
Tammy Lai-Ming Ho is the founding co-editor of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, the English Editor of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, and an editor of Hong Kong Studies. She is an Associate Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, the President of PEN Hong Kong, an Associate Director of One City One Book Hong Kong, and a Junior Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of Humanities. Her literary translations can be found in World Literature Today, Chinese Literature Today, Pathlight, among other places, and were published by the Chinese University Press. Her first poetry collection is Hula Hooping, for which she won the Young Artist Award in Literary Arts from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Her other books are Too Too Too Too, Her Name Upon the Strand, and An Extraterrestrial in Hong Kong. Her first scholarly book is Neo-Victorian Cannibalism.
