Jennifer Wong

Cited in the preface to the State of Play: Poets of East and Southeast Asian Heritage in Conversation anthology (Outspoken Press, 2023), leading British-Jamaican critic-scholar Stuart Hall suggested that cultural identity is ‘a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. This idea is pervasive across Writers Make Worlds, but in these days of global citizenship and cultural diaspora, it also relates specifically to diasporic Asian identity which is open-ended and subject to change. Indeed, looking only at Britain today, ‘it is impossible to fully encompass the complexities of Asian identities.’^[1]

Instead, the conversations in the book open up spaces to initiate exchanges among poets who identify as Asians, to encourage ‘accepting the complexity and diversity’ and appreciate ‘what they care about, write about, struggle with, or call out against.’ For example, in the conversation between Sarah Howe, author of Loop of Jade (2015) and Monica Youn, author of from from (2023), the task of writing about race and racialised experiences is addressed with searing honesty, and ranges from the complexity of the lyrical self to the writing of dailiness and motherhood.

Conversations in the book are generated from a diasporic community of Asian poets, as they corresponded with each other across continents and generations, sharing their thoughts on many levels: from languages, the meaning of home, gender and racial identities, to the craft of writing and their everyday life. Not only did the anthology lead to more visibility for the work of these Asian poets in Britain, it has also brought their works into dialogue thematically, highlighting the relationship between the works of minority writers and the ‘mainstream’ British literary canon. Moreover, the anthology makes space for discussing taboos and challenges these Asian poets face collectively. As US-based Chinese-Scottish poet and author of Imperium, Jay Gao, puts it in the book: ‘We’re allowed gratitude, glee, pride, cheer, joy—all tempered, or marbled, by some degree of modesty. What gets discussed far less, at least in public, is the private discomfort and alienation.’

On 28 November 2023, Professor Elleke Boehmer moderated a special reading and launch conversation in Oxford with some of the State of Play contributors including Sarah Howe, London-based Vietnamese-Chinese poet Natalie Linh Bolderston, joined by Asian-American poets Chen Chen and Lora Supandi. The poets reflected together on shared themes, including their complex, sometimes contradictory sense of belonging and racial heritage, their connections with the languages they grew up with, and the themes they feel compelled to write.

Amplifying the conversation further, to mark the LGBQT+ history month in February 2024, the English Faculty at the University of Oxford added a digital companion to the anthology, featuring short interviews and excerpts of conversations from the book with the anthology LGBQT+ contributors. As they noted, their sense of belonging in Britain is complex, because in addition to their racial and cultural belonging, their LGBQT+ identities also matter deeply. Therefore, the process of writing for the anthology prompted several of the poets to rethink their artistic work and the intersectional spaces in their writing, and how their work contributes to or finds a home in the contemporary literary scene. In particular, we see how individual Asian poets have always been readers themselves, and form part of the literary discourse, such as Kit Fan whose literary influences include Bishop, Wilde and Highsmith.

Born and raised in the Philippines before moving with his family to the UK in 2007, Troy Cabida noted in his contribution that we need to acknowledge the challenge that exists in writing about desire. On a personal level, the dynamics of sharing his writing and life journey in the anthology has also led him to reconsider the importance of being Asian and queer as formative experiences. At the same time, the experience of belonging to a writing community such as the one gathered between the covers of State of Play, has been helpful to him in becoming bolder and more playful in his expressiveness as a poet.

A Nepalese writer who studied English at Oxford, Mukahang Limbu published his first pamphlet, Mother of Flip-flops (2022) at the age of 20. For Mukahang, his creative practice involves finding space within and beyond migration: ‘for all the different facets that are not so separate; my mother, my father, being a migrant, boyhood, growing up, superstitions, softbois, and being gay can all fit in one poem.’

In a number of Asian countries or city-states such as Hong Kong, China and Singapore, the attitude towards LGBQT community is still conservative and queerness is regarded as subversive, morally dubious or controversial. Against this background, one can more fully appreciate the boundary-pushing nature of the works by these minority writers and the impact of migration on their creative work. As Marylyn Tan, Singapore-based poet and the first-ever female winner of Singapore Literature Prize, remarked, the anthology contribution has led to a new ‘space for re-discovering the community in an intimate and informal fashion’. She also notes how much she enjoys ‘the simple and mere fact of epistolary.’

As from the conversation between Asian-American poet Yanyi, author of Dream of the Divided Field (One World, 2022) and The Year of the Blue Water (2019) and the UK-based Hong Kong-Chinese poet Mary Jean Chan, author of Bright Fear (2023) and Flèche (2019), writing is a way of embracing the unknown, hidden parts of oneself. Yanyi concedes that ‘each one is the new poem you wanted to write that you didn’t know how to write.’ For Chan, having their book gifted or included in libraries or someone’s book collection is a way of feeling or being seen, and this sense of belonging is especially precious because, as a queer writer, they grew up in a society with far fewer models for their queer poetics.

In the dialogue between Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (2022) and Lora Supandi, Stanford graduate of Indonesian heritage, one becomes aware of how many painstaking struggles and epiphanies emerge from excavating meaning within different forms of relationships, including familial relationships, friendships and romantic love. In Chen Chen’s letter, he wrote: ‘Ache knows how to find us. Maybe because ache is life, too, alongside non-ache. They are neighbours.‘ In writing about pain, therefore, these writers also discover and acknowledge the necessity to celebrate or chronicle joy that exists alongside grief, and how those feelings will shape them as writers of colour.

^[1] Eddie Tay and Jennifer Wong, Editors’ Preface in State of Play: Poets of East and Southeast Asian Heritage in Conversation (Outspoken Press, 2023), piii-iv.

Cite this: Wong, Jennifer. “Rethinking cultural identity and belonging: East and Southeast Asian Poets writing in and beyond Britain.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-wong-state-of-play. Accessed 7 February 2026.

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Sarah Howe

Something sets us looking for a place.
For many minutes every day we lose
ourselves to somewhere else. Even without
knowing, we are between the enveloping sheets
of a childhood bed, or crossing
that bright, willow-bounded weir at dusk.
Tell me, why have I come? I caught
the first coach of the morning outside
the grand hotel in town. Wheeled my case
through the silent, still-dark streets of the English
quarter, the funereal stonework facades
with the air of Whitehall, or the Cenotaph,
but planted on earth’s other side. Here
no sign of life, save for street hawkers, solicitous,
arranging their slatted crates, stacks of bamboo
steamers, battered woks, to some familiar
inward plan. I watch the sun come up
through tinted plexiglas. I try to sleep
but my eyes snag on every flitting, tubular tree,
their sword-like leaves. Blue metal placards
at the roadside, their intricate brooch-like
signs in white, which no one disobeys.
I am looking for a familiar face. There is
some symbol I am striving for. Yesterday
I sat in a cafe while it poured, drops
like warm clots colliding with the perspex
gunnel roof. To the humid strains of Frank
Sinatra, unexpectedly strange, I fingered
the single, glossy orchid – couldn’t decide
if it was real. I picked at anaemic
bamboo shoots, lotus root like
the plastic nozzle of a watering can,
over-sauced – not like you would make at home.
I counted out the change in Cantonese.
Yut, ye, sam, sei. Like a baby. The numbers
are the scraps that stay with me. I hear
again your voice, firm at first, then almost
querulous, asking me not to go.
I try to imagine you as a girl –
a street of four-storey plaster buildings,
carved wooden doors, weathered, almost shrines
(like in those postcards of old Hong Kong you loved) –
you, a child in bed, the neighbours always in
and out, a terrier dog, half-finished bowls
of rice, the ivory Mah Jong tablets
clacking, like joints, swift and mechanical,
shrill cries – ay-yah! fah! – late into the night.
My heart is bounded by a scallop shell –
this strange pilgrimage to home.

*

The bus sinks
with a hydraulic sigh. So, we have crossed
the imaginary line. The checkpoint
is a concrete pool. The lichen-green uniformed
official, with his hat brimmed in black gloss,
his elegant white-gloved hands, his holstered
gun, slowly mounts the rubber steps,
sways with careful elbows down the aisle. I lift
this crease-marred passport, the rubbed
gold of the lion crest – a mute offering.
Two fingers brace the pliant spine, the thumb
at the edge – an angle exact as a violinist’s
wrist – fanning through stamps to halt at the last
laminated side. He lifts his eyes to read
my face. They flicker his uncertainty
as he makes out eyes, the contour of a nose:
half-recognition. These bare moments –
something like finding family.
The mild waitress in Beijing. Your mother…
China… worker? she asked, at last, after
many whispers spilling from the kitchen.
Or the old woman on the Datong bus,
doubtless just inviting a foreigner to dinner,
but who could have been my unknown
grandmother, for all I knew or understood.
She took a look at me and reached up
to grasp my shoulders, loosing a string
of frantic, happy syllables, in what
dialect I don’t even know. She held my
awkward hands, cupped in her earthenware
palms, until the general restlessness showed
we neared the stop. As the doors lurched open,
she smiled, pressed a folded piece of paper,
blue biro, spidery signs, between my fingers,
then joined in the procession shuffling off. Some,
I realised then, were in hard hats, as they
dwindled across the empty plain, shadowed
by the blackened, soaring towers of the mine.

*

Something sets us looking for a place.
Old stories tell that if we could only
get there, all distances would be erased.
Wheels brace themselves against the ground
and we are on our way. Soon we will reach
the fragrant city. The island rising
into mist, where silver towers forest
the invisible mountain, across that small
span of cerulean sea. I have made
the crossing. The journey you, a screaming
baby, made, a piercing note among grey,
huddled shapes, some time in nineteen-forty-
nine (or year one of the fledgling People’s
State). And what has changed? The near-empty
bus says enough. And so, as we approach,
stop-start, by land, that once familiar scene –
the warm, phthalo-green, South China tide –
I can make out rising mercury
pin-tips, distinct against the blue
as the outspread primaries at the edge
of a bird’s extending wing. So much
taller now than when I left
fifteen years ago. Suddenly, I know –
from the Mid-Levels flat where I grew up,
set in the bamboo grove – from the kumquat-
lined windows on the twenty-fifth floor,
tinted to bear the condescension’s glare –
you can no longer see the insect cars
circling down those jungle-bordered boulevards.
The low-slung ferry, white above green,
piloting the harbour’s carpet of stars,
turned always home, you can no longer see.

~

Published in Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015).

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Lorraine Lau

“Crossing from Guangdong” from Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015). Watch Sarah Howe read the poem, or read it yourself in full. 

For Sarah Howe, the English-speaking daughter of an orphaned Chinese mother, the themes of motherhood and mother tongue are inextricably linked. A narrative poem in Loop of Jade, “Crossing from Guangdong”, explores the relationship between language, family, and cultural identity. Howe examines her relationship with Hong Kong by reimagining her mother’s childhood there. At the same time, she recognises that her inability to understand Cantonese, the dialect of Hong Kong and her mother’s native tongue, limits her ability to engage with her birth city. In “Crossing from Guangdong”, the speaker’s fragmentary relationship with the Chinese language represents the incompleteness of her search for her Chinese identity, while also repositioning the family narrative as circular instead of progressive.

“Crossing from Guangdong” foregrounds the relationship between motherhood and mother tongue: Howe establishes a parallel between her bus journey from Guangdong to Hong Kong as an English-speaking adult, and the same journey taken by her mother as an infant. The poem is narrated in the first person by an adult woman assumed to be Howe. When she “[c]ounts out change in Cantonese”, Howe notes that her knowledge of the dialect is reduced to single-digit numbers, “Yut, ye, sam, sei”, as “scraps that stay with [her]” (3). The simile of counting “like a baby” establishes a parallel between the speaker and her mother. Howe reinforces the comparison when remarking to her mother that she has embarked on “the same journey you, a screaming / baby, made, a piercing note among grey, huddled shapes, some time in nineteen-forty- / nine” (5). The comparison frames the speaker as an orphan child like her mother, rootless and innocent. As Howe explains in an interview with Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, her mother had decided not to teach Cantonese to her children, as she was concerned that bilingualism might negatively impact their English skills (Ho 44). Yet “Crossing from Guangdong” suggests Howe’s lack of Cantonese skills is what keeps her in a childlike state. Fluent in English, she nonetheless feels “like a baby” upon her return to Hong Kong. Unable to understand the cultural signifiers embedded in the Cantonese dialect, she is hindered from learning about Hong Kong’s culture through verbal communication.

Throughout her bus journey from Guangdong to Hong Kong, Howe actively imagines familial relationships with the Chinese strangers she encounters. These imagined relationships simultaneously reveal the range of possibilities for familial connections, as well as her cultural and linguistic distance from the Chinese locals. Howe’s moments of “half-recognition” are made more poignant by her lack of knowledge about her mother’s biological family. Meeting a friendly old woman on the bus, Howe muses that the latter “could have been [her] unknown / grandmother, for all [she] knew or understood” (4). This imagined relationship indicates Howe’s desire for an understanding of her maternal lineage. While Howe assumes that the old woman is “doubtless just inviting a foreigner to dinner”, her lack of maternal family opens up a possibility of a direct family bond (4). However, unable to understand the old woman’s speech, Howe fails to communicate beyond gestures and speculation. In spite of her display of affection, the old woman’s intentions and Howe’s speculations remain a mystery to each other, preventing the option of a dinner visit or other form of acquaintanceship. Howe’s relationship with her mother and mother tongue presents a paradox. On the one hand, her physical characteristics allow locals to identify her as visibly Chinese like them. On the other hand, her lack of knowledge in Cantonese emphasises her position as a stranger.

The tone in “Crossing from Guangdong” is at once regretful and hopeful, expressing a longing for cultural recognition that can only be partially achieved. The poem concludes on a cautiously hopeful note in which Howe finally recognises a direct relationship to Hong Kong, while registering how the city has changed in her absence. She begins her journey “try[ing] to imagine [her mother] as a girl” in Hong Kong, but as the bus crosses into the city, she recalls personal memories from her own childhood. By realising, “The rising mercury / pin-tips” of skyscrapers are “[s]o much / taller now than when I left / fifteen years ago” (4), Howe reclaims Hong Kong as a space that she had once inhabited, establishing a connection to the city through herself instead of her mother. The poem closes with her reflection:

The low-slung ferry, white above green,
piloting the harbour’s carpet of stars,
turned always home, you can no longer see. (4)

Tammy Lai-Ming Ho argues that Howe is acknowledging Hong Kong as a “place of permanence” (45), being “always home” despite her years apart. Yet the following phrase “you can no longer see” adds ambivalence to her reclamation of cultural belonging. The poem ends not with a clear resolution on Howe’s place in Hong Kong, but with an acknowledgment of the city as a space of constant change. Since leaving Hong Kong at the age of seven, Howe has visited regularly every few years. Her constant returns disrupt the idea of a linear narrative of departure or return, instead framing her search for home as the continuation of a cycle.

Overall, “Crossing from Guangdong” introduces the theme of circularity and cyclicality that looms large throughout Loop of Jade. The image of a circle is evoked in the volume’s title, “Loop of Jade”, which refers to a jade bracelet bought for the infant Howe by her adoptive grandmother (18). The idea of circularity suggests that a person’s cultural identity is an ongoing journey without a fixed beginning or end, one that exists both within and without the framework of familial relationships. By framing her journey to Hong Kong as part of a cycle, Howe subverts the expectation that family histories must progress in linear narratives. Instead, “Crossing from Guangdong” shows how Howe’s relationship with Hong Kong draws from a hybrid of childhood memories and imperfect reconstructions of her mother’s stories.

Cite this: Lau, Lorraine. “Motherhood and Mother Tongue in Sarah Howe’s ‘Crossing from Guangdong’” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2018, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 7 February 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Sarah Howe (photo: Hayley Madden)

The work of the British-Hong Kong poet Sarah Howe negotiates between Britain and elsewhere, revealing the strangeness of home, and the familiarity of foreign places, especially for those who are migrants and refugees. Howe frequently experiments with language in her poetry to explore the complexities of her dual heritage. When awarding Howe the honour of Young Poet of the Year in 2015, Sunday Times editor Andrew Holgate praised her for being a “writer always conscious of language.” The poems in her debut collection, Loop of Jade, hold a wide scope both linguistically and thematically. Poems such as “Drawn with a very fine camelhair brush” and “Having just broken the water pitcher” examine Chinese characters, words that Howe incorporated into her poetry as she learned them in real life. Other poems reference a vast array of poets in the western literary canon that Howe has read and studied, from Philip Sidney to Ezra Pound and John Ashbery. In particular, Howe has cited American poetry, which she discovered as an exchange student at Harvard, as a major influence in her writing. Overall, she claims that all of the poems in Loop of Jade are “related by the fact that, at different times and ways, they shaped [her] personhood.”

A recurring theme in Howe’s poetry is her limited memory of and deep desire to reconnect with her Chinese heritage. Three narrative poems in Loop of Jade – “Crossing from Guangdong”, “Loop of Jade” and “Islands” – focus on reimagining her mother’s childhood as an orphaned girl in Hong Kong. Howe has claimed that poetry, as a form of life-writing, allows her the freedom to explore unverified family tales without the expectation of accuracy. The visual spaces in her poems reflect pauses and silences in her mother’s storytelling. To fill in the gaps of her family history, Howe often borrows from her knowledge of literature and mythology in various cultures. An example is “Tame”, a myth-like narrative that focuses on the daughter of a Chinese family, but which draws from the Roman myth of Apollo and Daphne. The mix of allusions allows Howe to interpret her mother’s experience of gender discrimination, but also clues in the reader that the text is an imagined representation from the perspective of a westernised poet.

Howe’s poetry also provides commentary on contemporary politics in China and Hong Kong. In Loop of Jade, the poem “Innumerable” attempts to reconcile Howe’s memory of the Tiananmen Massacre as a child and her knowledge of the tragedy as an adult. As a Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Centre, Howe wrote a sequence of erasure poetry titled “Two Systems”. By removing words from the Hong Kong Basic Law, she reshaped the document into a “self-destructing text” to emphasize Hong Kong’s diminishing autonomy under China’s tightening hold.

—Lorraine Lau, 2018

Cite this: Lau, Lorraine. “Sarah Howe.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2018, https://writersmakeworlds.com/sarah-howe/. Accessed 7 February 2026.

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