Towards a cosmopolitan poetics the poetry of wong may boey kim cheng

TOWARDS A COSMOPOLITAN POETICS:
THE POETRY OF WONG MAY AND BOEY KIM
CHENG

JOANNE LEOW
(B.A. (Honors) Magna Cum Laude, Brown University)

A THESIS SUBMITTED
FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTERS OF LITERARY
STUDIES
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND
LITERATURE
NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE
2010


Joanne Leow

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Acknowledgements:
It has been a challenging journey to start my work in academia again and I
could not have done it with the advice, support and mentorship of my thesis
advisor Professor Philip Holden. I would like to thank him for his prompt
responses to my concerns and queries (even when he was on a different
continent), for his careful and precise reading of my endless drafts and for his
subtle insights on how my work could be sharper and more nuanced.
I would also like to thank Professors Ross Forman, Barbara Ryan and John
Whalen-Bridge for renewing my interest in literary studies and for bringing me up
to date with developments in literary theory and writing.
Of course, this would not have been possible without the love, patience and

the constancy of my husband Giuliano. I owe him all this and more.
Last but not least, this thesis is for my sons Luca and Dante, whom I hope will
grow up with the benefit of many homes, languages and possibilities.


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Contents
Summary

4

Introduction

5

Chapter one:
Familial Connections

14

Wong May’s universality

19

Boey Kim Cheng’s deracination and cosmopolitanism

30

Chapter 2
Travel, Migration & Return

46

Wong May’s “lostness”

54

Boey Kim Cheng’s “between home and home”

67

Conclusion

89

References

98


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Summary
National identity and the authenticity of a writer’s cultural and geographical
origins have been emphasized in much of the analysis of postcolonial literature. This

thesis will investigate what happens as writers travel beyond their “native” countries
and choose to disrupt the familiar patterns of exile, nostalgia and sentimentalism and
de-emphasize a sense of rootedness to a specific cultural origin. Through close
reading of the poetry of Wong May and Boey Kim Cheng through the lenses of
familial connections, and travel and migration, I intend to show how both achieve
different degrees of cosmopolitanism that have led to difficulties in critical studies of
their work. Wong and Boey show us the possibilities of a new world writing which is
not circumscribed by national or colonial rules and instead goes beyond more insular
aims of building national identity to become individual, eclectic and mobile.


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Introduction
National identity and the authenticity of a writer’s cultural and geographical
origins have been emphasized in much of the analysis of postcolonial literature. In her
book Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace, Sarah Brouillette notes
that this “association between an author and a national authenticity” has become “an
excessive burden within specifically postcolonial literatures, taken on as a partial
requirement of the cosmopolitan function of those literatures” (177). Brouillette’s
focus is on the global literary marketplace, but her analysis also holds true for
postcolonial literary scholarship. Indeed she sees that post-colonial authors and their
works are usually situated within “clearly differentiated political locales” and under
“the 'banners' of geographical affiliation”(145) whenever they are written about
critically. So what happens when these “banners” become irrelevant as writers travel
beyond their “native” countries and choose instead to not write about their origins or
write about them in ways that disrupt the familiar patterns of exile, nostalgia and
sentimentalism? Brouillette’s analysis of Zulfikar Ghose’s body of work seems to

suggest that because Ghose emphasizes his “deracination” and “homelessness” (153)
he has risked being forgotten critically, especially when it comes to canon formation
in the context of postcolonial scholarship. Not to say that inclusion into a canon
should be the goal of all postcolonial writers, but the question that must be asked is
why scholars and critics consistently avoid dealing with postcolonial writers who
shun their alleged responsibilities to either portray their purportedly native locales in
their writing or specifically work for or against the post-imperialist nation building
exercise.
To this end, the cultural specificities and narrative strategies of fiction
(postcolonial or otherwise) often make its intentions more transparent and more


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readily accessible for readers and critics alike to draw conclusions on the place of
national authenticity and cultural origins in a piece of writing. Yet, this is not always
the case for poetry, which is often predicated on elusive metaphors and elliptical, nonnarrative methods. Jahan Ramazani argues that postcolonial poetry uses some of these
methods to embed a certain hybridity in the vocabulary and syntax and that this
“distills the ambiguities, tensions, and discrepant temporalities of postcoloniality”
(Ramazani 2001 184) and in doing so opens up the conversation on “aesthetic
possibility and intercultural experience in our era of transnational
imagination”(Ramazani 2001 184). My thesis, however, will take a slightly different
look at postcolonial poetry that de-emphasizes a sense of rootedness to a specific
cultural or geographical origin, with a view to examining how the oblique techniques
described above, operate to complicate and even obfuscate ideas of culture and
identity. The poets that are the focus of this thesis, Wong May and Boey Kim Cheng,
might arrive at a place open to possibilities similar to the one described by Ramazani,
but their methods are slightly different. They do not seek to embed hybridity in their

work, but instead attempt to move beyond placing culture and cultural authenticity at
the centre of it. There is little in Wong’s work, for instance, which suggests a mixing
of cultures as much as an attempt to show how their assignations can be unreliable.
As for Boey, his poetry might at first glance seem to be full of cultural markers, but
he subsumes them in his attempt to achieve personal epiphanies and refuses to burden
his poetry with a sense of cultural verisimilitude.
Although the two poets write in two different periods in Singapore history,
Wong and Boey both spent their formative years in Singapore, Wong before it gained
independence in 1965 and Boey post-independence. In my analysis of their work, I
will show how through their emphasis on familial connections, diverse settings


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achieved through travel and the craft of their poetry itself, both poets achieve different
degrees of statelessness that have, in my opinion, led to difficulties in critical
reception of their work.
Firstly, it is important to address the genre of poetry as one where form is
central. Like with most poets, ideas in Wong and Boey’s work are enhanced and
underpinned by the form of their verse. In the case of Wong May, poetic style plays
an important role in distancing her work from the reader. Wong’s poetry is
fragmentary, disorienting, rich in double meanings and run on lines that serve to
create multiple levels of signification and ambiguities. This lack of a singular, clear
message poses problems for those who would have literature be a medium to instruct
or provide higher moral guidance. In some ways, her style recalls what formalist
Viktor Shklovsky writes about in his seminal work “Art as Device” – there he notes
that,
In our phonetic and lexical investigations into poetic speech, involving both

the arrangement of words and the semantic structures based on them, we
discover everywhere the very hallmark of the artistic: that is, an artifact that
has been intentionally removed from the domain of automatized perception. It
is 'artificially' created by an artist in such a way that the perceiver, pausing in
his reading, dwells on the text. This is when the literary work attains its
greatest and most long-lasting impact. The object is perceived not spatially
but, as it were, in its temporal continuity. That is, because of this device, the
object is brought into view. (12)
The text itself in Wong’s poetry is central and crucially aesthetic in nature. If, as
Shklovsky notes, "the language of poetry may said to be difficult, 'laborious',
impeding language"(13), then in Wong’s poetry it is this labor, this impediment that
produces a new way of looking at the world. In many ways, through her writing,
Wong pushes us to look at objects, people, places and emotions in new and interesting
ways, ones that go beyond boundaries and rules of national identity building or even
nations themselves. Boey, as well, uses self-reflexive asides, unusual choices in


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lineation and imagery that lend themselves to novel ways of perceiving his
relationships with people and places.
At this juncture it is important to note that while postcolonial studies and
writing have often privileged hybridity and marginality, they have often done this at
the expense of reifying cultural binaries in order to create the so-called third space.
Homi Bhabha for instance, focuses on “the inscription and articulation of culture’s
hybridity”, wanting the “‘inter’ – the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the
in-between space [to carry] the burden of the meaning of culture” (Bhabha 1994 389). Yet while in theory this might be possible, many writers working in the more
recent postcolonial context continue, in practice, to write from the perspective of one

culture at the expense of others, perhaps as Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin note to first
“[assert] difference from the imperial centre” (5). Local places, histories, philosophies
and languages are written with a sense of ownership and distinct belonging to a
specific geographical place. Yet in a sense, writers and scholars firmly embedded in a
particular culture are recreating imperialist and nationalist discourses that inevitably
privilege a centre – it is merely that this centre has shifted to the countries they are
writing from.
Poets such as Wong and Boey have often fallen through the cracks of
postcolonial scholarship and discourse because they refuse to be categorized in
national and postcolonial canons. If they are to be brought back into the conversation,
it becomes imperative to avoid the trap of an analysis that privileges a national stance
on literature written by a writer from a particular country. Most crucially then in this
thesis, it becomes imperative to eliminate an idea of a single origin or a fixed
definition of culture as tied to a writer. Arif Dirlik points out the pitfalls of these
ideas when he investigates the idea of what is “Chinese”, which he sees as a reductive


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placeholder for “references to territory, nation, culture, and race, which are often
thrown together without further analysis” (226). The two poets Wong May and Boey
Kim Cheng are cognizant of these and other complications in their work, looking
beyond the particularities of Singapore to the intersections at which culture comes to
be constructed and consumed. I will show how through Wong’s musings on the
instability of origins and identity and Boey’s confabulation of memory and history
that they are, as Dirlik puts it, aware of “the constructedness of ethnicity and culture,
which also makes them available for articulation to new circumstances” (225-6). It is
the possibilities of these “new circumstances” that are the most promising as we look

for new ways to approach these writers who would see culture not as a “prison-house”
(Dirlik 226) but as a gateway to new ways of remembering, discovering and
experiencing.
What is useful at this juncture is the lens of Bruce Robbins’ concept of
cosmopolitanism – one that has nothing to do with detachment from the national, but
is instead “a reality of (re)attachment, multiple attachment, or attachment at a
distance” (3). Wong and Boey’s lives and works have both been international, yet
their poetry is very aware of the spaces in which the poets move in and also
emphasizes familial connections that seem in many ways to transcend simplistic
drawing of national borders. These multiple attachments preclude any easy defining
of these two poets, which might explain the lack of critical work on their poetry. I will
examine two main aspects to these multiple attachments in two parts: one focusing on
familial connections, and the other on travel, migration and return. By looking at
these elements, I hope to show how these different ways of thinking about belonging
and understanding the world might provide alternatives to a more nation-centric view
of things. After all, Robbins notes how all of us are


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connected to all sorts of places, causally if not always consciously, including
many that we have never traveled to, that we have perhaps only seen on
television – including the place where the television itself was manufactured
[…] (3)
What Wong and Boey do then, especially with their poems about travel, is to lay bare
these multiple connections, cultural or capital, and ways of belonging that go beyond
what Robbins sees as “the childish reassurance of belonging to ‘a’ place” (3).
Whether it is Wong illuminating the contradictions inherent in the lives of Algerian
garbage men in Lyon or Boey’s unease with his struggling touristic gaze in India,
their work often throws up unexpected links that de-centre the text culturally and

complicate relationships between people and places.
I stress the importance of what cosmopolitanism in Wong and Boey’s work
can achieve and not what it is because as Robbins notes, cosmopolitanism “by
suggesting that that there is no right place to stand […] can take some of the moralism
out of our politics”(261) and instead “liberate us to pursue a long-term process of
translocal connecting that is both political and educational at once” (261). Taken in
this light, cosmopolitanism ceases to be a liability in its “full theoretical extension,
where it becomes a paraoid fantasy of ubiquity and omniscience”(260) but instead
functions as a “unrealizable ideal” and “produces normative pressure” on ideas like
binarism and hybridity. This means that the poetry of Wong and Boey does not seek
to embody the term cosmopolitanism in its strictest definition, but should be seen as a
movement towards an ideal that enables us to read them beyond the constraints of
fixed origins.
Thus, when observed, Boey and Wong’s choices of subject matter and form
frequently run counter to some of their contemporaries who see their lives and
autobiographies as illustrative of a postcolonial narrative that has national identity


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building in opposition to a colonial legacy as a central purpose. Wong, for example,
published her poetry between the years of 1969 and 1978 and the space between these
years saw the publication of Singapore poet Edwin Thumboo’s Gods Can Die and
Ulysses by the Merlion – two poetry collections that in many ways articulate the
struggles of a young nation. Thumboo himself writes in his essay “Singapore Writing
in English: A Need for Commitment” that “[p]oetry is but one of the forces working
towards a collective psyche”(66). Making his argument with Lee Tzu Pheng’s
seminal work, “My Country and My People”, Thumboo sees poetry as a way to “add
to the sense of our destiny as a people” (66). More interesting he delineates the
different races in Singapore, Indian, Chinese and Malay – rendering them somehow

completely separate before bringing them together in an uncomplicated way as
“elements which constitute an identity, that is shored up by a historical continuity
whose force is validated by the individual imagination” (66). For Thumboo, poetry
has the responsibility to tie together these different races in a way that emphasizes
both Singapore’s public and personal history. Even though Thumboo saw it fit to
anthologize Wong’s poems in his Seven Poets, it is clear at the later time when he
writes this essay, that she no longer fits into what he feels is a canon of poetry that
could create “a collective psyche” for Singapore since she does not in any way choose
to play a part in shoring up this “historical continuity”. It is not just Wong’s subject
matter that a critic like Thumboo would hold suspect, but her very positioning as an
international writer: able to dip in and out of cultures, not necessarily exhibiting
cultural confusion but instead a clear understanding of each context in which she
writes. Indeed, in a 1977 essay available online on his National University of
Singapore website, using Wong May’s second book Reports as a specific example,
Thumboo muses on the difficulties of charting a poetic style that is “distinctly


Joanne Leow 12

Singaporean” since “contemporary poetry in English has entered a phase where the
style, the vocabulary, the urban preoccupations are international”. However,
Thumboo views this not as an asset, but as a liability – since “poets tend to establish
an individual rather than a national identity”. More significantly, the focus on
individual identity is seen by Thumboo to be the reason “we do not have
contemporary poets comparable in status to either Yeats or Eliot”. With this
emphasis, Thumboo lays the responsibility of creating a national poetry with the poet
and fails to note, perhaps, how the methods of critical responses and ways of reading
such poets also play a role in shaping how their writing is received. By insisting on
the “specific elements that give it a local habitation and a name”, Thumboo espouses
a particular sort of national poetry that precludes the appreciation of poets like Wong.

Boey on the other hand, writes in a period where Shirley Lim has noted that
The majority of Singapore English-language writers, likewise, see the domain
of art as separate from the domain of the state (that is, expressed as the
government as national identity or as the public), and reject any attempt on the
part of the state to take literature into its sphere of influence. This autonomy,
this rejection, in almost all cases has meant a separation of the themes and
content of the work from the themes and content of state ideology (35).
Lim, however, sees this decision on the part of the writers as risky since by
“depoliticizing” their poetry they risk becoming irrelevant, “in a society where many
social features have become imbued with political significance” (Lim 37). I am not
suggesting that Boey is “depoliticized”; the poems that he does centre on Singapore
are imbued with a critique of its rapid modernization, which he feels has come at the
detriment of its history and people. However, as in Wong’s case, it is Boey’s
positioning which renders him suspect. Even before the poet migrated to Australia,
Boey’s outsider view of Singapore gives his poetry a detached style that sits
uncomfortably with those who would reify a national literature. Boey, now especially,
working occasionally on Singapore but distinctly apart from it, provides a jarring


Joanne Leow 13

clarity of view on Singapore’s rapid development that is often out of step with the
city-state’s view of itself. This sense of detachment sets him apart from other
Singapore poets like Alfian Sa’at and Cyril Wong who while are decidedly not of the
mainstream still embed their work deeply in the context of Singapore in terms of
setting, subject and point of view.
More generally speaking though, the position of the English-educated poet in
Singapore has been seen as suspect by some; Koh Tai Ann has written about his or
her alienation, specifically how he or she “cannot deny or escape the complicating
fact that he knows no other language or literature better than the English – otherwise

he would not be expressing himself in English” (17). Koh sees these writers as
embedded, albeit in a “troubled way” in English traditions in a time when “the
internationalizing of English has brought in its wake the further burden of a rich
cosmopolitan body of work and tradition” (17). Koh’s fear (like Thumboo’s) is that
the writer will be subsumed into a “neutral ‘international style’ […] and for the
country, a fear that writers should cease to belong to the national community, but
would harbour suspect international affiliations” (17). However, Koh’s essay does not
fully address the problematic of why such poets or writers should be suspect.
Furthermore, what is objectionable here is the idea of the “neutral ‘international
style’, the existence of which is difficult to prove. Through this thesis I will argue
that even though Boey and Wong have rejected a nationalistic way of looking at the
world, their poetry is no less rich, specific or unique. The two poets’ cosmopolitan
world-views lend themselves instead to a new way of looking at world literature – one
that does not have to be burdened with cultural origins.


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Chapter one:
Familial Connections
I will fall apart
I will become so many dogs
dogs of all directions
I will breed a whole race of lonely children,
Each dog a judgment
- “ The Judge”, Wong May
The idea of family is intimately connected to a sense of place. In most cases,
when one writes about home, one cannot help but write about family. The converse is
also true, with the concept of the family being used as an allegory for larger social
communities, specifically nations. One thinks of the use of words like “fatherland” or

“motherland” which allude to patriotic and nationalistic impulses in both colonizing
and colonized countries. This preoccupation with the family and its linkages to the
nation are further complicated and diversified in the literature of post-colonial
countries. Major literary works in the period leading to and post-independence refer to
the family and place a great significance on the social unit. For example, Chinua
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1959), posits the African family as the bearer of
traditional pre-colonial values, while Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981)
takes the vehicle of an Indian family saga to work through how these relationships
relate to the larger socio-political climate of the post-colonial period in India. Here
family is inextricably linked with country and culture. There are, of course, a vast
number of ways and complexities in which the family has been explored, yet one is
struck by its repeated use as a way to position postcolonial literature in a particular
cultural context.
Before continuing, it is useful to clarify that I use the hyphenated version of
the word “post-colonial” to simply refer to a historical period after previously
colonized countries gained their independence. Moving on to the unhyphenated term


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“postcolonial” is to talk about a movement in literature and literary studies that
examines the colonial relationships of power and seeks to dismantle or complicate
them. Ania Loomba cautions however that,
The word 'postcolonial' is useful in indicating a general process with some
shared features across the globe. But if it is uprooted from specific locations,
'postcoloniality' cannot be meaningfully investigated, and instead, the term
begins to obscure the very relations of domination that it seeks to uncover (19)
With this idea of specificity in mind, I want to turn my attention to the context of
Singapore and its postcolonial literature. Most writers in Singapore are similar to their
peers in other post-colonial nations in the sense that they see their families as cultural

repositories and chronicle the struggles of the family in the context of the great
changes taking place in the socio-political fabric of newly independent nations.
However, the work of the poets that I am examining, Wong May and Boey Kim
Cheng, represents a departure from the concerns of their peers, in ways that preserve
the bonds of family but release these ties from a single culturally specific context. I
want to examine a certain universality in these works to look at a post-national, postpostcolonial way of understanding Wong and Boey. This is not postcoloniality
“uprooted from specific locations” as Loomba fears, it is not “uprooted” but instead
able to exist in multiple locations and contexts that do not lose their individual
specificity. For the most part, Wong and Boey write about culturally nonspecific
contexts that focus our attention on familial relationships instead of embedding these
relationships in a particular place. This leads to an intensification of focus on familial
relationships, as cultural and national authenticities become tools in a search for a
cosmopolitan identity.
In order to better understand why the two poets’ works make a case for a
different look at family and the postcolonial context, it is important to examine the
writings of some of Wong and Boey’s peers. From Stella Kon’s play Emily of


Joanne Leow 16

Emerald Hill (1989) to Robert Yeo’s poem “Malacca Grandmother” (1999), to even
more recent works like Koh Buck Song’s poem “Ah Por” (2001) and Alfian Sa’at’s
“Minority Report” (2001) – the Singaporean family is always written about in a
specific cultural way. In earlier works like Yeo’s “Malacca Grandmother”, Yeo’s
grandmother is seen as “the sole remaining representative” (103) of a time that has
passed. He sees her departure for Southampton as detrimental to a sense of “history,
name and wealth” (103) that is conjured up by descriptions of “strangely
antique”(103) ethnic clothing and historic spaces. Stella Kon’s Emily of Emerald Hill
is a record of both a woman’s life in the second half of the 20th century in Singapore
and a rich document of the social and cultural elements of the time. The eponymous

character of the play is a matriarch whose identity is inseparable from the trappings
and mores of “a modern Nonya” or Peranakan woman. More contemporary works of
poetry like Koh’s “Ah Por” continue to use fixed cultural details to define and mourn
the passing of a certain cultural authenticity embodied in an elderly family member1,
now the only lights
you leave behind
are memories
of fragrant face powder,
snow mountain pallor,
smoothening the years,
your standard samfoo
of Samsui simplicity,
and scent of medicated hairpins (57)
One of Singapore’s most successful younger poets, Alfian Sa’at, also uses cultural
embeddedness for social critique in “Minority Report,” a poem in which he
characterizes his parents by details like his mother’s preoccupation with the Muslim

1

While Boey Kim Cheng has written two poem “Remedies” and “Her Hands” in his most
recent collection of poetry After the Fire about his grandmother that echo Koh’s sentiments in
“Ah Por”, I would argue that these are uncharacteristic pieces that do not represent the larger
trend in his work, which is a more complex rendering of the relationship between culture and
family.


Joanne Leow 17

head-dress and his father’s fixation with finding successful Malay scholars. Alfian
hints at the fact that he recognizes the problems with these fixations, seeing minority

Malays as “too eager / to recognize ourselves” (20).
This is but small selection of Singapore literature from this period – yet there
is a definite thread of the familial coupled with a cultural specificity that runs through
much of the work. Angelia Poon sees this idea of a specific cultural and geographical
location as “more than mere passive or neutral physical setting, place works with the
above writers’ evocation of the past to constitute the cultural specificity and identity
of particular individuals and social groups” (372). Poon sees Singapore writers as
engaged in “the production of locality” which uses geographical space as a starting
point to create a powerful imaginary. I posit that pursuing this strategy of cultural
specificity, there is no more affective and logical way than to associate place with
family and familial connections and that this has been seen in a great deal of
Singapore’s postcolonial literature.
As for the two poets that are the focus of this thesis, Wong May and Boey
Kim Cheng, they use the trope of the family in their work in unexpected and
unsettling ways. Wong delinks her familial connections from cultural specificities
while Boey emphasizes a deracination from his past and family due to a rejection of
their ideals and the physical disappearance of cultural and geographical spaces, which
only continue to exist in his unreliable memory. Cultural references are present in the
work of Boey and Wong (although they can seem to be particularly rare in much of
Wong’s work), but these cultural references are not central to the poems and the
works do not draw on these references to attain authenticity.
By moving beyond reinforcing a sense of cultural rootedness in their poetry,
Wong May and Boey Kim Cheng depart from the writing of their peers. Wong’s


Joanne Leow 18

poetry is more universal and Boey’s work is often a conscious rejection of an easy
understanding and acceptance of one’s cultural positioning. Both writers are
cosmopolitan and transnational. Their writing reflects a lack of connection to one

particular tradition or origin, and instead, either diminishes any connection at all or
draws on multiple connections that carry equal weight. Wong and Boey’s
relationships with their ancestors, mothers, fathers and offspring become ways for
them to either create bonds that become universal to the point of excluding the
culturally specific or repudiate existing cultural connections by creating and
imagining new ones that lead to a multiplicity of attachments. No production of
“locality” occurs in the poems that I look at in this chapter, at least not a locality that
exists geographically or that is easily recognizable. In Boey’s poems about his family,
spaces are opened up, but these are emotional, imaginary spaces, sometimes as
confabulations of history and memory or as a hybridized set of possibilities for the
future. In Wong’s work, we look into a universal space, devoid of a cultural compass
– an almost liberating experience.
The critic Carine M. Mardorossian writes about the “shift from exile to
migrant” which challenges the binary logic of “here” and “there”, between a
homeland and a new country. Mardorossian notes that by emphasizing “movement,
rootlessness, and the mixing of cultures, races, and languages”, a migrant’s identity
takes on a certain element of ambiguity and flux; she writes “her identity is no longer
to do with being but becoming” (16). This certainly seems to be the case for both
Wong and Boey, as they no longer look at their past or indeed their forebears as a
“fixed and comforting anchor” (Mardorossian 16), but as I have suggested a space
open to the possibilities of confabulation and free from the burden of cultural
specificity. While Mardorossian writes about what she calls a “paradigmatic shift”


Joanne Leow 19

from exile to migrant primarily through the narrative strategies in Hispanic American
fiction, Wong and Boey’s poetry also presents us with a different methods by which
ideas of family can be delinked from a culture. In the particular case of the family, it
is useful to observe how Wong and Boey scrutinize their relationships with family

members and familial history by using poetic techniques like unusual imagery and
lineation, which force a sense of defamiliarization on the reader, to either viewing the
idea of family in a way that removes it from a cultural context completely or setting it
against the context in sharp relief.

Wong May’s universality
In this section I will be looking at Wong’s poems on her family in
chronological order to better discern the development and evolution of her treatment
of the theme. Wong’s poetry is full of wordplay and self-contained, deeply evocative
images, which often resist easy interpretations. Some of her more immediately
accessible works, however, are about familial relations and a sense of her ancestry.
Wong’s mother features more prominently in her entire oeuvre than her father, with
all three of her books dedicated to her. The most directly personal poems that Wong
writes (of which there are only a few) are also about her mother. Her poems from her
first two books appear to address the idea of family and specifically her mother with
greater urgency than her last book, which was written after a longer hiatus. What is
problematic for the postcolonial or nationalist reading here is Wong’s lack of
contextual specificity. But it is precisely through the absence of this specificity that
Wong manages to write a poem that speaks to multiple saudiences
Many of Wong’s early poems use deceptively simple images to portray
familial connections and histories. This is particularly apparent in her first book of


Joanne Leow 20

poetry, A Bad Girl’s Book of Animals, which has poems like “History”. The poem
opens with a scene of snow at a door, an ephemeral image that plays with our
perceptions of permanence, since the snow can melt without leaving a trace. The
poem expands this to more consequential statements that culminate in our
understanding that history has become a series of lies, demonstrating its fallibility.

The unreliability of the past is extended to something as fundamental as biological
origins: “[t]he lie then / I’ve got a mother”. This is taken further in a disorienting turn
in the poem where child is conflated with mother and the space between different
generations appears to collapse. This early poem is crucial in making sense of Wong’s
relationship with the idea of the past and of her relationship with her family. The
confusion that manifests itself in this poem is a way of coming to an acceptance that
inheritance, heritage and the past are in some sense arbitrary and not predestined and
imbued with a greater meaning.
This theme of detachment forms the familial and the tone of bewilderment is
continued in the poem simply entitled “Your Umbrella, Daddy”,
Among other things I totally lack
this propensity of a young monkey
to hold on to its old. At high
noon I thought I could walk
the rest of my life with
out history geography
biology, a man
in his net weight with
out shadow. 30 years
later I ran into a ditch
heard 3 bones broken
The man helped me
out said it’s your
umbrella Daddy (18)


Joanne Leow 21

By beginning the poem with a distinctively de-romanticized view of familial
attachments, the poem suggests that familial relationships are biological, instinctual

and universal. The work appears to equate “3 bones” with history, geography and
biology, three words which stand in for family in the most complete way and yet are
referenced in a universal way without a link to a specific culture. However, she also
notes her inability to “hold on to [her] old”; she does not want to be “shadow[ed]” or
weighed down by the past or her ethnicity, even though she knows that these things
shield her from some of the challenges in life, as an “umbrella” of sorts. This short,
deceptively simple poem forces the reader to pause at Wong’s ambivalent conclusions
and pushes them home with the striking visual image of an umbrella, signifying a past
and a belonging that adds weight and encumbrance, something that both protects and
yet obscures. Because of the elliptical nature of this and other poems, multiple
readings are required to come to any interpretation of the work; a style that echoes the
actual complexities of pinning down the significance of one’s history, geography and
biology and refuses to settle for easy, comfortable conclusions about these issues.
Wong’s other poems on the subject of family suggest that she sees her poetic
persona as a starting point where meaning and history explode into something that is
far more complex and nuanced than a linear family tree. For example in the same
book, she writes in another poem “The Judge”:
Who goes on watch tonight?
I’m here to judge
My father the lonely man
My mother the lonely woman –
People who have never met
and are harsh on each other.
I tell you before daybreak
I will fall apart
I will become so many dogs
dogs of all directions
I will breed a whole race of lonely children,

Joanne Leow 22

Each dog a judgment (6).
Wong here focuses on the arbitrary tragedy of her parents’ union as she sets the
poem’s persona firmly above them, as a “judge”. The poem discusses the
consequences of this loveless relationship: a multiplicity of identities, “dogs of all
directions”, “a whole race of lonely children”. The subject confusion in these lines is
particularly poignant; “dogs” and “children” become interchangeable even as they
signify both the persona of the poem and her progeny. Ironically, the repetition of “I”
ultimately seems to suggest a fixed identity that is illusory.
The major relationship that is returned to continually in Wong’s poetry the
bittersweet and complex bond between mother and child and consequent meditations
on mortality:
Mother, this is not even it.
If I say the day is
Beautiful, it probably is.
I don’t affect it. Nor
Does it affect me. If I
say I love you, love
You, I probably do.
I cannot live with
Out you, yet I do.
Failing that, it doesn’t
Make me feel the
grapes are less sweet
Or cool. The insignificance,
mine. After yours
Or anybody’s funeral,
the world is not made
Ugly for me, it is (11).

Joanne Leow 23

This particular poem, “A Letter”, infuses these musings on death and maternal
attachment with a pragmatic sense of a lack of control. Wong does not want to
pretend to be responsible for creating a narrative about her mother’s death, and thus
she eschews a controlling sense of the situation that might make sense of the tragedy
of “yours/Or anybody’s funeral”. Instead, Wong conveys her “insignificance”, her
inability to “make” a world ugly, since it already “is”, and “I don’t affect it”. This
surrender of authorial control over her narrative is important, because it shows
Wong’s understanding of the reality of her mother’s impending death on multiple
levels. Even her choice of using couplets in run on lines also reinforces this
impression as she breaks and opens up meanings in each pair of lines, “I cannot live
with/ Out you, yet I do.” This poetic technique punctuates the reading of the poem,
forcing the reader to stop and consider the multiple ways of understanding each line
and emphasizes the idea that a singular meaning would be suspect. Wong has an
unwavering understanding of her context in a world that cannot be altered by her or
her writing, it is a world that she keenly observes, where the non-specificity of her
context is also one that is universal.
Continuing to write about her mother in the poem “Dear Mama”, Wong sees
herself as “a grafted green”, using an image of biological descent that permeates the
entire work:
By the same token I leave you,
I leave myself (with you). The
going forth
henceforth a grafted green
fit to live
or die.
By the same token I leave

you living,
dying, or
unfit for both, waiting


Joanne Leow 24

for my return: Your
big eyes,
short arms
that I inherited, failed. (59)
Wong uses a familiar trope of parental-child separation, but detaches the reader ever
so slightly by using the startling image of the “grafted green”. The image conveys the
feelings of liminality; between attachment and separation from the maternal (“… I
leave you, /I leave myself (with you)”) and between life and death: the “waiting” that
is in the middle. Wong returns to the idea of biological inheritance at the end of the
poem “Your/ big eyes, / short arms/ that I inherited, failed” and these disembodied
body parts seem to echo the image of the plant that pervades the poem. This piece,
like so many of Wong’s other poems, bears repeated reading in spite of its cryptic
restraint. Yet, it does not readily yield the culturally specific reading encouraged by a
conventional postcolonial analysis. Wong’s relationship with her mother is not
allegorized to a larger social context; it simply is what it is.
Wong’s portrayal of the familial is sharpened in her second, arguably best,
collection, Reports. In the poem “To My Mother”, the themes of mortality and
detachment remain and are more clearly articulated:
Does the hair feel pain
Do the fingernails complain
All right pain
is what connects me to myself
but your pain is yours

It separates us
as it goes on I realize
perhaps it only means to prepare us
each separately
for death (108)
Wong’s characteristic philosophical tone is again simple in its choice of words but
deceptively so. She plays with the repetition of key words like “pain” and “separate”,


Joanne Leow 25

and brings them back in slightly different permutations that play out almost like
musical variations on a theme. Her line breaks are significant as she uses form to echo
meaning, “but your pain is yours / It separates us”. This poem starts out fairly
coherently as Wong writes about the inherent alienation of the human experience with
lines like “How much of you has failed / to reach me” and “But already I understand
less and less / I can separate nothing from nothing”. Her persona yearns for clarity of
vision and simplicity when it comes to her relationship with her mother, “May you at
last occur to me / as a glass of water by my bedside / Yes we have loved”. The poem
reaches a tipping point when Wong finally gives the reason for her mother’s pain:
“Beginning September / I should be expecting your cancer report / which I will never
get”(108), the implication being that her mother will be dead by then. At this point,
Wong begins to push the repetition in the poem further, consistently beginning each
sentence in the poem with “I”, emphasizing the inability to understand anything from
any perspective but her own, leading to an almost litany like effect:
I remember
as a child I began to be aware of language
only when I began to be aware
painfully
how I cannot write without a pen

about you
Yes, even about you
I will perhaps never write about you
to this day I consistently write about other things
I wish so often love were otherwise
I wish so often to completely enter
the bark
the stone
to part-take