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Mary Jean Chan, Bright Fear, Faber & Faber, 2023. 72 pgs.
I first encountered Mary Jean Chan’s work in the bookstore I used to work in, across from the train station in my hometown. Flèche (Faber, 2019) stood out, the only visible contemporary work from an East Asian author, a debut collection that blew me away with all its possibilities. Writing this review on Chan’s second collection in Hong Kong, there is a stark contrast to the omnipresent invisibility in western Europe. Mary Jean Chan’s latest collection, Bright Fear, is an invitation to step closer to the poet. Chan talks to the readers intimately, with a vibrancy of “multisensorial ways of being”, a concept Olivia Lafferty (Brown University) introduced to me in a panel on (Re)Thinking Asian Solidarities. This is further emphasised by the intensity of the title—“bright” often indicates a strong and positive sentiment, unlike “fear”. But who is to say that these are mutually exclusive?
The epigraphs of Bright Fear—quotes from Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony and God, and from the poems ofRené Char—foreshadow the vastness of everyday life. It is an immediate reminder pointing out how fear is constructed and invented, something often attributed solely to humans, and how the earth has loved humans. Bright Fear, not unlike Flèche, is a book of tenderness and softness and does not shy away from pain, disasters as big as global pandemics, intimate sorrow like the sound of summer rain in Hong Kong or the silence of “sullen cities” (56), and the joy we all carry.
“Who can invent a new fear?”
—Anne Carson
“La terre nous aimait un peu je me souviens.”
—René Char
In three parts, Mary Jean Chan leads readers through a multitude of experiences, a “multitudinous light” (60). The first part, “Grief Lessons”, presents the world as it is: riddled with disease, a “failing earth” (1). They are not limiting themselves to illness such as COVID-19 but also racial discrimination and aggression it has brought along with it. Chan pulls the reader into the intergenerational world of the family, their father a doctor who never stopped working during the SARS outbreak, and the impact of this on Chan’s life. The main sequence of the book, “Ars Poetica”, contains 16 poems about Chan’s relationship with poetry and the reason that lies behind the actual writing of the poem. What has poetry done for Mary Jean Chan, and what do they wish to do with poetry? This collapses in sounds, constraints, the sensation of “a lotus flower sinking into my self / and blooming” (37). The collection ends with “Field Notes on a Family”, evoking participation at a distance that Chan aims to bridge, not unsuccessfully.
Bright Fear focuses on the significance of acceptance with vocabulary from teenage years, “like sacrifice, sacred, scared” (6), that Chan intertwines with words they learnt from “the long poem of our lives” (40), the unfamiliar river.
Extract from “Circles”:
I am not familiar with rivers,
but during those months of bubbles
when I did not hold anyone close,
I took to wandering along
a stretch of the River Lea which
several species of bird inhabited.
I watched and watched until even
the water seemed to recognise me,
the same coots, those shimmering
shapes their slender and agile torsos
made: the same form I had glimpsed
one spring morning on a friend’s
wall after lockdown had lifted (22)
In the opening and simultaneous title poem (I), Chan talks about dreams of silence turning into the solace of Cantopop from the 90s. Perhaps this can be situated in the context of the recent global pandemic, something Chan writes about with intent, not failing to make the connection with SARS in 2003. Something that ever so clear for the poet because of their geographical location, having grown up in Hong Kong but now residing and lecturing in the UK.
The first segment, “Grief Lessons”, is a testament to queerness, racial discrimination, and COVID-19. All of these contain indications of fear and Chan seamlessly moves in-between them. They find spaces of silence, its meaning (11), expectant silences (15), the silence of cities (58), and contrast these with their relationship with language. This keeps questions of race and the body in the air, as in the successive poems “London, 2020” and “Hong Kong, 2003”. If “bodies became repugnant” (6) and threatened, Chan asks the question whether language really means anything. “In the Beginning There Was the Word” gives that question more weight by taking into question Chan’s love for English and the impact of power relations, such as the Untited Kingdom’s colonial presence, or societal pressure.
“I finally summoned the will to write Life on my to-do list but kept postponing the task” (12).
Though seemingly timeless, the poems have a signature 21st century tone to them that we can find in their therapy anecdotes, laptops in cafes, and poems on EDI (Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion), the illusions of freedom these abstract nouns and terms and conditions in neo-colonies. EDI for Migrants (II) illustrates this by contrasting relief and disappointment at a Chinese New Year cultural awareness event with “I’d rather be doing something joyful” (18).
The main sequence, “Ars Poetica”, refers to poetry that in itself is advice for younger poets on the art of writing poetry. The term dates back to Horace’s poem of the same name from ca. 19 BCE and which has since inspired many other poets and authors. In asking what it means to write poetry, Chan breaks the boundaries between arbitrary boundaries such as fiction and non-fiction in a humoristic opening.
The poet opened a clean Word document, titled it POETRY, then saved it
in a folder titled NONFICTION, then saved it in a folder titled FICTION. (25)
In the following poems, Chan leaves the silence from before, holding back in observation of signs of weather. These do not only refer to people’s facial expressions but also the role of and their relation to English. This highlights the different sensorial ways in which to experience the world and, as such, poetry. In moving to the world of poetry, away from school and home, Chan writes increasingly more about affections, rather than the actual act of writing. The poems in this segment do not stop questioning freedom, how constant constraints may be one of the reasons “[they] cannot enjoy / the sheer amount of space a prose writer deserves” (27). These constraints come from, but are not limited to, whiteness and queerphobia. In V, Chan confronts us with biases, how some may choose not to engage with what is not normative but instead “pauses, turns the conversation elsewhere” (29).
There is a poem I wish I could have written, in which a powerful conversation ensues between us,
where the speaker of the poem speaks up. (V, 29)
Chan makes space for affections, reacts to these micro-aggressions that are rooted in fear, rage, and grief with poetry, orienting themselves toward the future, hopeful. They never let go of the vividness of poetry, call it “a struggle to translate the weight of flesh against bone into syllables” (32). In XIV, they explicitly refer to Sara Ahmed, how race is queer, how the unmarked becomes a queer matter. The queer poem, for Mary Jean Chan, “is a wish which stems from desire” (38).
I am asked why my poems are so clear. I’ll confess:
it’s what happens when you want to be understood. (XIII, 37)
It is in desire, affections, that Chan reminds us what is dear: teaching to students who will read their poems out loud, learning from parents how to care, “how to revere the light that language emitted” (39). For Chan, in another therapy session, home is where you are understood: “Where I begin to speak, and you hear me, unequivocally” (40).
In “How It Must Be Said”(55), a prose poem in the third segment, “Field Notes on a Family”, Chan complements this with an interrogation of the spatial and linguistic impacts on home. How they “understand [their] mother in three languages”, how fury translates different in different tongues, how missing a place can be about missing the language, by which to say, to miss the sound of “summer rain”. In the poem, Chan repeats a question they once asked their father: “What did language have to do with pain?” Chan’s field notes draw themselves on growing up, inter-generational differences, geographical distances “strung out between two realities” (53), they raise questions on grief and kindness, missing and hunger.
[…] and yes without fireworks on the tongue to
distract us into harmony there would have been
all the love we could muster a desolation none of
us could have withstood. (fireworks on the tongue, 44)
Chan concentrates on their family relationships, the hidden cracks and the way it hurts, a sudden sharp pain in the neck, but also acceptance and comfort, togetherness and love.
Bright Fear is an exhalation so vibrant it leaves “a hum in the throat”, as Olivia Lafferty puts it. Mary Jean Chan is the most of themselves, of this world, “a queer child’s vision of paradise where the trees are free to bear their multitudinous light” (60). Their words making every garden come to life.
How to cite: Van Robay, Kika W. L. “Vibrant Being in Mary Jean Chan’s Bright Fear.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 14 Dec. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/12/14/vibrant-being.
Kika W. L. Van Robays 文詠玲 (they/them) is a PhD student in Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kon. They are from Belgium and from Hong Kong. Kika’s research focuses on zines, queer communities, the Sinosphere, and Transpacific connections. Immersing themselves in solidarity and community care, they emphasise tenderness and platonic affections above all. Kika is a poet and the author of Let the Mourning Come with Prolific Pulse LLC (2022). They have an MA in Chinese Language and Culture (Ghent University) and in Gender and Diversity studies (Flemish joint university program).