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Derek Chung (author), May Huang (translator), A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist, Zephyr Press. 2023. 140 pgs.
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Reading A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist, translated from Chinese to English by May Huang, is akin to exploring a bilingual menu, allowing one to savour literary renditions of “pineapple bun” and “milk tea” (incidentally, both of which have been listed in the Intangible Cultural Heritage Inventory of Hong Kong) and to immerse oneself into the vibe of cha chaan teng (as in “The Cha Chaan Teng on Fortune Street”). Other than introducing the unique Hong Kong-style “tea restaurant” and its iconic cuisine, this literary “menu” extends beyond the diner’s interior—offering glimpses into local daily life through vignettes such as “Chopsticks”, “Mosquitoes”, “Floorboards”, “The Can”, “The Well”, and “The House”, where Chung’s exquisite literary craftsmanship transforms everyday banal scenes into extraordinary experiences.
The collection opens with “Bowrington Bridge”, and it is a poem that intriguingly echoes the themes found in William Carlos Williams’s “The Term”, which was also collected in Chung’s Chinese translation. Both poems depict the journey of paper (“A piece of paper on the road” [Chung]); “A rumpled sheet / of brown paper” [Williams]). In each, the paper embarked on a rather bumpy journey, with its thin and fragile nature making it susceptible to the hardship of the road.
The “brown paper” in Williams’s two-sentence poem was “rumpled” since it had stayed long enough “in the street”, and it was “crushed” by a car (“a car drove down / upon it”). These sufferings, however, still failed to completely tear the paper apart. It just “rose / again rolling // with the wind over / and over to be as / it was before”; in contrast, Chung’s “paper” endured a different fate given its experience, appearance, and formed material. With a torn corner, the paper had more interactions with its surroundings, though in a passive manner. It has not been crushed by any vehicles; rather it just somersaulted while cars were passing by. While Williams’s “The Term” draws a parallel between the brown paper and a man’s experience, Chung emphasises the “solitariness”, or “nobodiness” of the paper by evoking empathy for its isolated condition. By the end of his poem, Chung further suggests an uncertainty, apparently a hopeful one, to the forthcoming fate of the paper (“Waiting for a broom, or another chance to fly”).
Chung once revealed the inspiration behind his “Bowrington Bridge”—the ritual tradition “Petty Person Beating” (打小人, also known as “villain-hitting”) in Hong Kong and explained how he handled the imagery during his poetry recitation on the RTHK programme “Artspiration”:
While writing this poem, I didn’t mean to focus on the folk practice Petty Person Beating itself, but simply found the fate of a sheet of paper rather fascinating. The sheets were beaten and stripped piece by piece, and I can always see some stripped paper floating and falling at the roadside…the paper itself can be regarded as a metaphor of a person, and I was trying to show his experience, feeling and fate in the edge of this city…[1]
Chung’s poetry is well known for its focus on “everyday objects” (See “Contributor”, 97), and he often employs a style that is deceptively simple yet undeniably charming. “Butterfly”, a piece both featured in this volume and Dusk at Quarry Bay, his first bilingual poetry collection (translated into English by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho) published in 2019, serves as an exemplary example of this approach. In this poem, “I” discovered a butterfly flying around, and it sparked a cascade of thoughts and reflections in the poet’s mind in a short instant.
Composed of seven stanzas, each line capped at five Chinese characters and varied in length, the poem masterfully echoes the erratic fluttering of a butterfly in flight. Both Ho’s and Huang’s translations skilfully approximate the similar syllabic rhythm in their respective translations. Huang, in particular, takes extra care to preserve the weight of the poem by changing all the wordings in lower case for the entire collection (excerpt “I” in the second and fifth stanza).
“Umbrellonely” describes another encounter between an umbrella and the narrator (“I”). Despite the homophony of the original Chinese title 離傘 (which can be translated as “Leaving the umbrella” or “[A] departed umbrella” in English) to “離散” (“diaspora” or “scatter”) in Cantonese, the poet’s mother tongue, it would be unnecessary to consider the poem to be about the movement of any group of people away from their homeland.[2] On the contrary, the coined title composited with “umbrella” and “lonely” somehow indicates an unexpected connection between the abandoned brolly and the narrator.
The poem unfolds with the narrator’s chance discovery of a discarded umbrella in a pond, and then in a rubbish bin. In a personified perspective, the poet depicts the umbrella as having “slipped off slightly” its “dark green coat”, and later “poking out” its “head in a nearby trash can”. As for the narrator, he is also perplexed, and has to head back to office after experiencing “the storm”. Intriguingly, the imagery “fish” appearing around midway through the poem, would well remind readers about the aphorism of Zhuangzi, “It would be better for two fish to forget each other in rivers and lakes, rather than moistening each other with spit in a drying spring.” （相濡以沫，不如相忘於江湖）. This allusion subtly underscores the transient relationship between the narrator and the umbrella—it has never sheltered the narrator, and “I” have never tried to give a hand to the umbrella on the other way round.
The repetitive and lengthy verses in some of Chung’s works lend a distinctive aesthetic appeal and define his poetic style. Significant examples can be found in “The House” (“The house is not mine, it’s…”) and “Housework” (“Ah ah-ing, …”, “What was love?”). Needless to say, his great endeavour in writing “In the Rain Stands a Bright House” and “Fish Tree” in sestina form has contributed to his unique literary success in fixed verse, enabling a tasteful fusion between local rustic imagery and Western traditional poetic form. Both Ho and Huang translated the respective end words of “In the Rain Stands a Bright House” (“A Bright House After Rain” in Ho’s translation) in the same way (i.e., wampees / weight / days / sound / house / dream). Notably, Ho even thoughtfully translated 父親 and 母親 into “Father” and “Mother”, starting with capital letters throughout the poem, which fairly highlight their importance in the poet’s life.
Regarding his long verses, Chung said,
The poems I’ve later written might have dealt with some complicated topics, which could be less likely expressed with a single image, or in a clear and transparent artistic perspectrive. As a result, I’d prefer writing lengthy meticulous verses to cover more subjects, and to create a multi-layered and echoing effect.[3]
Many poems in the collection share the aforementioned features, while “Lanterns” further shows Chung’s love, patience, and tenderness for his family. Rather than focusing on the increasingly rare art of making paper lanterns, it describes more on the poet’s family life (having soup and the pork from the soup, checking son and daughter’s homework, insects getting into the flat, etc.) before the day of mid-autumn festival. The phrases “The day before Mid-Autumn” and “The night before Mid-Autumn” appearing alternately at the beginning of each stanza form a delightful reciting pattern, and even loosely align to the laws of nature (e.g., rise and fall of the sun, or the different lunar phrases). The poet concluded his work on a heartfelt note: all the materials were well ready, and the family could finally make a paper lantern in the form of “an insect” (butterfly?) together. “Smiling, we fly, / Meeting the moon before the moon arrives.” Rather than pursuing a surrealistic ambiance, the poem highly resonates with classical Chinese poetics which appreciates the blend of scene and feelings or emotions. This is a reunion not only of family members, but also of the poet and his memories of the festival.
It might never be so easy to imagine how “a cha chaan teng that does not exist” exactly looks like, and how clichéd it would sound to say every Hongkonger has their own cha chaan teng in their heart. Chung and Huang have, nevertheless, devoted themselves to presenting a vivid view of Hong Kong, a place that the poet lives and loves, as well as the things he holds dear in this bilingual collection. The original and translated texts reverberate with each other and simultaneously record exactly what you might expect in this East-meets-West city—the dynamic cacophony of the lively noises and voices—not more, not less.
[1]「我寫這首詩時，並非真的想表達打小人，而是覺得一張紙的命運很特別，一張紙被人打，路邊也經常見到紙條飛來飛去，（我寫這首〈鵝頸橋〉時，運用了擬人法），把一張紙比喻為一個人，想寫這個人，在城市邊緣的遭遇、心境及命運，⋯⋯」，Artspiration 好想藝術 (2018): 點算好 [ 藝術當方法? 係咪好辦法?] ; 自作業 [ 詩人鍾國強的三首詩 ]; English translation by author (same below).
[2] In her review titled “Translating Home”, Jenna Tang also pointed out this homophonic feature (though considering its title in Mandarin) while starting to analyse the poem.
[3] 「我後期的詩，要處理的東西可能比較複雜，並非單一意象或一個澄清透明的意境或片段可以應付，所以寫的時候便傾向於運用綿密緊湊的長句，因為這樣涵蓋的東西比較多，容易造成層遞送進、反覆交響的效果。」WONG, Leung Wo (2008): Open the Window of Poetry: Conversations with Hong Kong Poets (《打開詩窗——香港詩人對談》)
How to cite: Lau, William. “A Bilingual Local Tasting Menu: Derek Chung’s A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 15 Apr. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/04/15/cha-chaan-teng.
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William Lau has an MA in Translation from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and an MA in Antiquity from the University of Birmingham. Considering himself as an “amateur writer and translator”, he has published poems, translated works and book reviews on various literary platforms, including Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, The Lens News, Ming Pao Monthly, among others. He was the Chinese translator of Estonian poet Mathura’s Entering the Landscape, a trilingual (Estonian, English and Chinese) pocket-sized poetry collection featured in International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong 2019.