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Chan Kwan Ee Tom, Listen, Atmosphere Press, 2023.
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Inspired by Allen Ginsberg’s seminal masterpiece Howl, Chan Kwan Ee Tom’s Listen is an urgent, insistent, and compelling procession of poetic and prosaic testaments that captivate the zeitgeist of contemporary Hong Kong at a crucial time in its turbulent history. The book veers from the raw realities of Hong Kong’s frenetic urbanscapes to its hidden, surreal interstices, while remaining firmly grounded in a bittersweet love for a tempestuous city buffeted by the gales of transformation.
Listen’s heart-rending passion for (almost) everything and anything within the bounds of the Fragrant Harbour only deepens as it delves into more personal, intimate realms. It begins as the titular poem, “Listen”, intones incantations of a city “that has no place for lucid dreamers”, “only innocent children who let themselves roam free in the darkness”, hearing them “sing songs of hope, of grand ideals”, “amassing for a time-honoured embrace, for new life beginnings”.
The dynamism of change in such a city, “has always been about moving forward and not dwelling in the past”, maintains Chan, but decries the complacency of “domesticated men and women (who) are too ingrained for cultural inclusivity”. Chan implores readers, and indeed the metropolis to “listen to all the voices that we’ve gathered along the way” as a paean to love, optimism and devotion “from one of many young, unsounding and lovingly displaced states of mind”.
Love gives way to fear in “Trembling Feet”, as Chan recounts fresh terrors of the streets, “a newfound silence piecing fancy pictures from the screen / the bodiless body resting cold, curdled blood on a plastic bucket on the floor / bloodied fists red terror in the streets” to remind readers of the surveillance and violence that consumes the landscape with the threat “an uneasy child makes when walking on trembling feet”. Fear then leads to hope, and the book’s atmosphere begins to smoulder with the frenzied kinetics of “Mockingbird,” the maxim-inflected wisdom of “Man”, the sodden aftermath of “Trickling Waters”, and an exhortation in the two-poem piece “To My Students” to speak of real experiences even in the face of societal phantasmagoria.
Throughout Chan’s heady, passionate blend of prose poems and shorter pieces, Hong Kong the city and first-hand experientiality with it are firmly centred through the eyes of those engaged in struggle, whether quotidian, personal, or societal. In “Walls”, he asserts, “There is something within these four brick walls / within these tightly packed compartmentalized flats / That encapsulates the old Chinese meaning of ‘Family’”, but Chan’s family is expanded to include an entire territory, of students and workers, tycoons and beggars, stalwarts and dreamers in simultaneous negotiation, contestation, and adoration with a homespace caught up in historical flux.
In his final poem, in celebration of the local English-language poetry collective Peel Street Poetry, Chan laments, “Where have all the poets of our generation gone?” Judging from the prodigious efforts of his debut collection Listen, Chan has succeeded in becoming an important new voice for this generation of Hongkongers. The poets of contemporary Hong Kong have not departed, but this one has certainly arrived.
How to cite: Jeje, Akin. “A Bittersweet Love for a Tempestuous City: Chan Kwan Ee Tom’s Listen.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 28 Nov. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/11/28/listen.
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Canadian poet Akin Jeje lives in Hong Kong. Jeje’s works have been published and featured in Canada, the United States, Singapore, and Hong Kong. His first full-length poetry collection Smoked Pearl: Poems of Hong Kong and Beyond was published by Proverse Hong Kong in 2010. Jeje’s most recent publication “Land of Rain” is in Hong Kong’s Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine (Issue #51, January/February 2020). He is working on another full-length poetry collection entitled write about here. Jeje is a previous MC of the English language poetry collective Peel Street Poetry and one of its three directors. He is also a regular contributor to Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine and Cha. [All contributions by Akin Jeje.]