Tiffany Troy reviews
A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist
by Derek Chung
(translated by May Huang)

To listen to Derek Chung read his poems in Cantonese is to learn how to slow down and take in even the plight of “a piece of paper” stuck in the road at Bowrington Bridge with empathy. What, after all, is more radical a foil to the objectification of people than the personification of objects, which illuminates the way in which the most marginalized in society continue to be “read dust/ [to] be read by dust.” By the end of the first poem, “Bowrington Bridge,” of A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist, a bilingual edition translated by May Huang, the paper that has become acclimated to “the broom” also dreams of “another chance to fly.” In that forgotten, unseen piece of paper is the poet’s hope for the vendors at Bowrington Bridge whose traditional ware and food sold is rendered less relevant by rapid urbanization.

Readers identify in his flights of fancy care rooted in familial memory, cultural tradition, and Hong Kong’s resilience. By resilience, I mean not that Chung’s speaker is really able to stop the “sky of mosquitos” from swarming his parents’ home. Rather Chung’s speaker effectuates change by listening to the “high frequency of the wings” of mosquitos, “piercing through the pain [the speaker] had forgotten.” That pain of being forgotten and in forgetting runs throughout the collection, whether on the streets of an older Hong Kong or in the cubicle of the “air-conditioned sea.”

As we learn in translator May Huang’s thorough and oft-revelatory Translator’s Notes, Chung is crowned the “friendly neighborhood poet” in Hong Kong. But behind the friendliness, and the close proximity to the peripatetic ho-hum of the crowds depicted by Chung’s poems is a loneliness characteristic of “people with long faces” who “look down” and insist on forgetting. His poems are rooted in place and memory: he teaches us that behind each “old house’s loneliness” is the aroma of the “milk tea” handed out to the construction workers of Chung’s–and by extension–the people’s childhoods. And behind each new house–owned by Chung’s father, Chung, or the bank–is the question of the ethics of belonging in a society where ownership is no longer about who built a house or the memories within it, but who owns it. In another poem, Chung looks to whether emptying blood of the old hen can ever be “love.” Chung posits that it cannot be, and forces us to stare at the cruelty in the eye, in intergenerational arrivals and departures, as embodied in the bakery shop or a cha chaan teng.

In poem after poem, the collection bring us close to the streets of Hong Kong, as we familiarize ourselves with the walking routes of the city, and in the rim of the old-style porcelain teacup, the people of Hong Kong see who they have come from, and where they are going next, the name of a friend still remembered because it is also the name of a cha chaan teng. Chung writes how “on lucky days, there is nothing to write.” His poetics, then, which in the bilingual collection features poems that we read by turning the page on its side, Bishopian sestinas, and narrow stanza free verse teach us to see people we have learned to ignore and feel their pain, as we retain a hope for a place filled with our childhood memories and adult aspirations.

Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and co-translator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert/ El próximo desierto (forthcoming, Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the 4W International Women Collective Translation Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, and Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review.

Derek Chung (Chung Kwok-Keung) is an acclaimed poet, essayist, novelist, translator, and critic from Hong Kong. The author of eight poetry collections, three essay anthologies, two short story collections, and two books of poetry criticism, he is known for turning his gaze towards everyday objects and writing poems that weave personal history with broader societal themes. Chung has received Hong Kong’s Youth Literary Award and Biennial Award for Chinese Literature, among other accolades. He has also been named Artist of the Year (Literary Arts) by the Hong Kong Arts Development Awards. Notable works include The Growing House (2016), Umbrellas that Blossom on the Road (2015), A Bright House Standing in Light Rain (2018), and The Lives of Animals (2023).

May Huang is a writer and translator from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Her translations have appeared in The Common, World Literature Today, Circumference, The Massachusetts Review, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. Writers she has translated include Derek Chung, Leung She-Kwan, Chiou Charng-ting, and Clayton Lo. Huang was selected to participate in ALTA’s 2020 Emerging Translators Mentorship Program, and received an Honorable Mention in the 2020 Gulf Coast Prize in Translation. She is an avid crossword constructor.