HOW TO READ

Buy here.

Tammy Ho Lai-Ming and the possibility of censorship

Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, Hula Hooping (Hong Kong: Chameleon Press, 2015).

Gold-plated R2-D2s are guarded over by immense Rilakkumas, whose faces advance inexorably the argument that cuteness is indifference is beauty is relaxation is wealth is law. Poster-teen for laissez-faire capitalism and Asian neoliberalism, Hong Kong is primarily structured to suit the needs of finance capital, luxury hotels, and shops. Expats piss about in geostationary orbit over Lan Kwai Fong. On Monday the 8^th February 2016, riot police tried to disperse some unlicensed food stalls in the working-class district Mong Kok, thereby causing a riot, which they were prepared for, being riot police.[1] In a swirling mess of concerns, possibly including but not limited to (1) the disappearances of five residents of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, some with citizenship in Britain and Sweden, affiliated with the publishing house Mighty Current which publishes gossip books about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Beijing, and hence (a) the apparent contempt the CCP has for the Hong Kong Basic Law, (b) it is now clear that though freedom of the press and of speech is enshrined in Hong Kong, this is irrelevant, in particular for locals,[2] (2) frustration that the predominately middle-class Umbrella movement (which, unlike most other Occupy-like situations, largely made arguments in legal terms) has not resulted in any alterations to the Government’s plans about future elections in Hong Kong,[3] (3) extremely high rent, and (4) the fact that it was Chinese New Year, the year of the irascible folk-hero Monkey, the crowd rejected the police’s monopoly on violence. As I write, then revise, then wrote, the mainstream media and C. Y. Leung’s government are, were, putting the finishing touches on the crackdown and the attendant process of disambiguating the participants of the riot into radical elements (in particular the nativist movement) and civilians who should have known better.[4] Local writers have been registering for some time the unease which appears to have temporarily burst its banks last Monday, and are now particularly worried about the issue of free speech and freedom of the press, i.e. 1.b. It is hardly the most pressing or urgent question to ask in this context, but what kind of poetry is written in these conditions? More on that later. I have begun with this potted overview, from the perspective of a monolingual newcomer hyper-aware of how provisional these impressions are, because it seems to me that the poet I am about to discuss composes poems which tend to deflect attention from themselves to truly obscure conditions and forces at work in Hong Kong right now. (To grasp that would take quadrolingual fingers of air.) And they sometimes also sink into autobiography. Tammy Ho Lai-Ming’s Hula Hooping, her first collection, is a book of poems which skates the mind’s surface tension. This poetry is belting piano keys with a plastic bag, which is a roundabout way of saying it is quiet but highly strung. Although these poems are muted, minor, cautious, they ask to be over-read, to produce unrestrained reactions. They ask that we attend to what is unsaid and really happening around them. Her poetics as a whole is laying the groundwork for something like a record or index of Hong Kong’s history, and in particular the extra-legal aspirations of the Umbrella Movement, whatever those are becoming.[5]

In the first section, ‘Family Affairs’, the poems largely stick to autobiography. Others swirl outwards, trying indexing the strangeness of, e.g., a father unknowingly channeling American capitalism and a new culture to his children via its common signifier, Coca Cola, wearing T-shirts he cannot read.[6] The 1959 famine is in more than one poem via conversations and nightmares, in ‘A Brief Meal’ and ‘Envois’. In ‘Envois,’ Ho says in a stream of autobiographical facts and reconstructions, that a “famine survivor wept before me some years ago”, while she was a researcher for Frank Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine (2010).[7] It s also the subject of 'The Famine, 1959-62.' She brings it up as a topic of conversation in 'A Brief Meal' with her mother. The mother is concerned with her immediate world (finding food and navigating the busy roads), while the famine is distant and doesn’t really bother her. It is not simply that she is selfish or lacks an awareness about recent Chinese history — she’s one of many struggling, tired, upset working-class people in the city. The daughter tries to bring in the famine again (‘Could they talk about a starving past?’) but more as a thought experiment. The poem ends with the mother’s quasi-Malthusian thought on Hong Kong after evading the unpleasant topic of the famine. The poem doesn’t sacrifice form, doesn’t try to break itself by attempting to encompass, embody, or amalgamate something like the famine. Like the mother, it evades it. And its implications and some gallows-humour (Hong Kong is overpopulated, famine isn’t so bad, it can be the result of overpopulation as well as badly distributed resources, and maybe I’d get a quicker lunch if even more people had died, or just feel less claustrophobic while I wait for the MTR?) remain subterranean.

History never breaks the back of these poems. It is always at a distance, oddly static. One might even say that the implicit stance some of these poems take is that to even think that they could bear the weight of these events would be improper.

Here is ‘Official causes of death in a Chinese prison,’ note that H is our author, editor of CHA:

A exhausted himself arranging sunflowers.

B drank too much hot water.

C suffered a heart attack passing a toilet roll to his comrade.

D lost his breath while playing hide-and-seek.

E was poisoned from the ink in the newspapers.

F stared too long at the air.

G used high-lead-content hand cream (supplied by his family).

H edited a literary journal named after a beverage.

[…]

N lost balance and fell off the bench.

O laughed.

P died after squeezing pimples on his arms.

Q simply failed to wake up.

R’s tongue was tied.[8]

The poem is loosely based on reports on the death of prisoners in China, which are usually quite ridiculous. A crowd, hearing it, guffaws. But the possibility of incarceration for publishing something which upsets the CCP is very real, as the ostentatious parading of Gui Minhai, one of the five publishers at Mighty Current, on Chinese State television makes all too clear.[9] Here is one of Ho’s recent poems, ‘The Bookseller’, a reaction to the disappearance of Lee Bo:

[…] booksellers seldom make the news.

Then one day this all changes when five

go missing, one by one.

People care a little, not too much,

about the first four: after all, they vanished

elsewhere. So long as the fire

does not burn too near, it’s all right.

Then the fifth, who once said:

‘I am not worried. I have avoided

the mainland for years,’

fails to come home to his wife.

The citizens know for sure

that something is not right.

The disappearances breed fear,

anger, even rumours of whores.

Some remove books banned

across the border or close their doors.

Others, trepidatious yet defiant,

continue to sell, print, write.[10]

This poem doesn’t strain itself through either uptoners nordoes it hide itself in downtoners. It doesn’t tell you what to do or whether to do anything. It eschews a we. In this poem there are simply things happening. People are demonstrating, now that a fifth one has disappeared. And self-censorship seeps into Hong Kong: other booksellers “remove books banned / across the border," to curry favour or avoid punishment. Here is realism as pre-emptive acceptance of the worst. Professionalization as self-censorship. And after this act of self-censorship by other booksellers, the poem takes itself off of its own bookshelf, i.e. the implied list of those who defiantly continue to sell, print, write. It is “[o]thers” not “we” who “continue to sell, print, write.”[11] Hong Kong has, until this, felt like a place where freedom of the press exists, in the sense that it exists in most territories under neoliberal administration. What are we to make of such pre-emptive redactions? I would suggest that this particular poem is suffering from locked-in syndrome, and so its slightest muscular twitches demand to be over-read. Self-censorship, like most other forms of censorship, need not be successful. In these conditions, perhaps we should begin to read purposively.

But let me return to Hula Hooping. For the moment, her poems suggest that their minimal notations should be all that is necessary to register the hysterical screams of history’s catastrophes. These poems can’t help but leave their centre, swirl off in excess for a split second, and for better or worse, for the moment, they always reign themselves back in. A wriggle of the waist might be all it takes, if you give it enough weight. Here is an abdomen swirling, and at any moment the centrifugal force might continue its tendency and outdo the centripetal at every degree of its rotation in an absolute sense, and each unit of the abdomen spin off in a straight line for all eternity, never to be reconstituted. But the centripetal force doesn’t let out, sometimes outdoes it, warping it all inwards more often than not. Somewhere below, purely inferred knees are bent, all rocks back and forth. For the moment.

[15/02/16 - you can send criticism/thoughts to rmdkiely AT gmail DOT com]

---

[1] https://www.hongkongfp.com/the-fishball-revolution/

[2] Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, in responding to the Foreign Secretary of Britain’s queries about the location of British Passport holder Lee Bo, simply stated that Lee Bo is first and foremost a Chinese citizen. https://www.hongkongfp.com/2016/01/08/the-curious-tale-of-five-missing-publishers-in-hong-kong/. China’s contempt for the sovereignty of Hong Kong was outlined in the PRC’s State Council’s White Paper, ‘The Practice of the “One Country, Two Systems” Policy in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region’, published on 10 June 2014.

[3] Cf. Sebastian Veg, ‘Legalistic and Utopian: Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement,’ NLR  92 (2015), 54-73; Joshua Wong, ‘Scholarism on the March,’ NLR 92 (2015), 43-52. The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC) ruled in 2007 that universal suffrage would be introduced in the 2017 election of Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, but on 31 August 2014 the NPC Standing Committee pronounced that candidates for that election would be vetted by a Nominating Committee and each of the two or three candidates selected would need the votes of more than half the Committee’s members. This was the immediate cause of the saccharine ‘Occupy Central with Peace and Love’ campaign, called by Benny Tai. The movement is general stuck to peaceful means and legal arguments as often as possible.

[4] After the riot the media spun the Hong Kong stock exchange downturn and attendant capital flight as a consequent rather than subsequent event – the Chinese and Hong Kong markets have been in downturn for some time. Slump as pecuniary mechanism. Also, on yet another sidenote, the nativist movement is at once more militant and more racist (against Mainlanders) than many other groups associated with the Umbrella movement.

[5] It is a shame that many of her more directly political poems were left out of this collection. 
One of the poems left out was ‘How the Narratives of Hong Kong are Written With China in Sight’, available online at http://www.radiuslit.org/2014/10/06/poem-by-tammy-ho-lai-ming-4/. For an exploration of the schizoid political status of Hong Kong, see Tammy Ho Lai-ming, ‘Hong Kong is a Science Fiction,’ Law Text Culture 18: Rule of Law and the Cultural Imaginary in (Post-)colonial East Asia (2014), 127-8. There is also an assortment of blog posts from Ho on http://buhk.me/category/t/. For a discussion of some of the Cantonese songs chanted by protestors and their significance, see Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, 'Who Hasn’t Spoken Out?,' http://aalr.binghamton.edu/tammy-ho-lai-ming-hong-kong/. 

[6]  Hula Hooping, 5.

[7] Hula Hooping, 93. Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine.

[8] Hula Hooping, 70.

[9] To name only two, Liu Xiaobo is in prison in China, and his spouse Liu Xia is under house arrest. They are both under X in 'Official causes of death...'

[10] http://www.radiuslit.org/2016/01/09/poem-by-tammy-ho-lai-ming-5/.

[11] Ho discussed self-censorship during her talk ‘Now Now: On Writing Political Poems’, 10^th October 2015, at Art & Culture Outreach in Wan Chai. 

KILLING THE COP IN YOUR HEAD

Buy here.