By Yeow Kai Chai

For Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, poetry is testament to truth and history, not least the last couple of tumultuous decades in contemporary Hong Kong.

A Hong Kong-born poet, scholar, editor, and translator whose work sits at the intersection of literary creativity, cultural advocacy, and political witness, she has been actively engaging with her homeland as well as her current residence in Europe.

Even in a brief poem like "Distraction," there is palpable unease underlying a commonplace scene:

When a pigeon in flight
crashes into a passing train,
its feathers disperse like messy confetti,
and seconds later, its mangled body
can be found on the platform,
where curious children,
not knowing to feel sorry,
poke it with a stick.

Ho is best known as the founding co-editor and editor-in-chief of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Hong Kong's first online English-language literary publication which was established in 2007. She is also the founding co-editor of the academic journal Hong Kong Studies and serves as the first English-language editor of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine. In these editorial roles, Ho champions cross-linguistic exchange and the amplification of voices from Hong Kong and across Asia and beyond.

At the University of Hong Kong, she graduated with a first-class honours degree in English Studies and Translation before completing an MPhil, with a thesis on Charles Dickens's reading style and its influence on his prose. She obtained her doctorate from King's College London, and subsequently joined the faculty of Hong Kong Baptist University, where she held a tenured position as Associate Professor in the Department of English.

Ho's first poetry collection, Hula Hooping (2015), received the Young Artist Award in Literary Arts from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. This was followed in 2018 by the poetry collection Too Too Too Too; the short story collection Her Name Upon the Strand; and the chapbook An Extraterrestrial in Hong Kong. Her third full poetry collection, If I Do Not Reply, was published by Shearsman Books in 2024, and draws on the years between 2019 and 2022, spanning the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill protests and the Covid-19 pandemic.

A literary translator, she has served as an advisor to the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing and as an Associate Director of One City One Book Hong Kong. In 2023, she was writer-in-residence at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She is currently an honorary researcher at the Richard Charles Lee Hong Kong–Canada Library at the University of Toronto. She has also held positions as a Cheney Creative Fellow at the University of Leeds and as a visiting scholar at the Università Ca' Foscari Venezia.

Currently, Ho is co-editing several books on Hong Kong with Chris Song, a scholar and translator at the University of Toronto. She is curating a collection of short city fiction centred on Hong Kong, conceived in the spirit of contemporary city-based anthology series, as well as planning several book projects of her own, including one exploring the women in her mother's and father's families.

1. What are you reading right now?
I am always reading a number of things at once. On my iPad, for example, I am reading several books on Kindle and several others on Books. I will focus on two of my current reads.

Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979) inverts the temporal logic of haunting. Dana, a Black American woman from the present, is repeatedly pulled back in time to a Maryland plantation whenever Rufus Weylin, her slaveholding ancestor, faces mortal danger, and it is she, not the dead, who becomes the "ghost". As Charles Tonderai Mudede argues, Kindred proposes that only the living can haunt: "We can only look back in time, only we, the living, can haunt. And what we haunt is the past" ("Who Haunts?", e-flux 138, 2023). From the perspective of Rufus and his mother, Dana materialises and vanishes without explanation; she is the apparition, inexplicable and temporally alien. Dana's situation is one of ontological entrapment: Rufus must survive long enough to father the child who will eventually lead to her own existence, and she is involuntarily conscripted into preserving the life of the man who embodies the system that oppresses her.

David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) is a remarkable work. It offers, for me, transformative scholarship delivered with wit. For example, I laughed aloud at their demolition of Steven Pinker, whom they accuse of being "a modern psychologist making it up as he goes along." Pinker's argument in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011), that prehistoric life was defined by rampant violence, and that civilisation has progressively tamed our brutish instincts, relies, Graeber and Wengrow show, on the selective elevation of convenient evidence. Pinker presents Ötzi, a 5,000-year-old Alpine corpse with an arrow in his back, as a representative specimen of prehistoric humanity. The two Davids counter with "Romito 2," a 10,000-year-old burial unearthed in a Calabrian rock shelter, whose occupant suffered from acromesomelic dysplasia, a severe genetic condition causing dwarfism that would have rendered him both visibly distinct and physically dependent on others. Yet the same hunter-gatherer community, despite contending with poor nutrition and harsh conditions, evidently fed, sustained, and sheltered this individual from infancy to adulthood, and then buried him with care. The point is not that prehistory was peaceful, but that the picture can look very different depending on which body you choose to notice. There are many pithy insights throughout the book, such as: "One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem arises when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify." I also admire how Graeber and Wengrow show that European thinkers drew extensively on non-European sources, such as Chinese models of statecraft, Indian philosophy, and, above all, the political thought of Indigenous North Americans, yet this inheritance has been systematically effaced from the intellectual record.

Other works I am reading include Edwidge Danticat's We're Alone (2023), Nomi Stone's Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Politics of War and Empire (2022), Max Liboiron's Pollution is Colonialism (2021), The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (2009), Umberto Eco's posthumously published essay collection How to Spot a Fascist (2020; trans. Richard Dixon and Alastair McEwen), and a body of recent Hong Kong novels in English and in translation, largely from the late-2010s onwards, as well as the Chinese-language works of Human Ip, a contemporary Hong Kong writer and artist best known for her nature writing, especially her illustrated books on local plants and wildlife.  

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play or poem, what would you be and why?
Perhaps just for a moment, the "immortal bird" in John Keat's poem "Ode to a Nightingale" (1819). When I was still teaching regularly in Hong Kong, I had a kind of personal ritual of opening lectures by playing Ben Whishaw's recitation of the poem, recorded for Jane Campion's film Bright Star (2009), of roughly five minutes, just enough to set a kind of calm atmosphere in the room before we began. To be the nightingale, how beautiful that would be, though it is, in reality, a rather plain, small, ground-dwelling bird, invisible in the undergrowth, whose entire existence is its song, which is perhaps the point. Keats himself cannot sustain the flight. The word "forlorn" tolls him back to his sole self, and I suspect I would fare no better, airborne for an instant, then splashed on the floor.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
That I don't care, or that I care too much.

4. Name one living writer and one dead writer you most identify with, and tell us why.
I do not even identify with myself sometimes. With this pathology, perhaps the most honest answer is not an identification, but an aspiration. One writer I aspire to identify with is Wong May. Born in Chongqing, raised in Singapore, she has lived quietly in Dublin since 1978. After her third collection, she "disappeared" from the literary world, writing all the while. When she won the Windham-Campbell Prize in 2022, she said, "I have gone underground with my poetry for 40 years." "Anonymity is my element. I am free to do whatever I like because I am not obligated to the world." That freedom is one I understand the desire for, and cannot take. I know it may sound grandiose to speak of obligations, but in my own small, naive, perhaps foolish way, I find I cannot disappear. At least not right now.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
I believe some writers do experience writer's block, and I know the condition has a distinguished lineage of sufferers. My problem is rather the opposite. I am overexposed to potential ideas. Reading anything, anywhere, gives me the seed of a poem or an essay. I have very vivid dreams, some of which seem to arrive already structured, like short film scripts. These can be burdensome, but I should not complain: it is a good burden. Who knows, perhaps one day I might find myself staring at a blank page, or simply waking one morning to discover that the dreams have stopped and the ideas have dried up.

6. What qualities do you most admire in a writer?
This is, for me, actually two distinct questions: what do I admire in writers I read, and what do I admire in writers I would like to emulate. For the former, the quality I find most compelling is the ability to situate one's work inside the pressure of a specific time and place while simultaneously reaching beyond it. As for the qualities I would most like to emulate, I admire discipline above all. I admire dignity: the ability to engage with difficult or painful material without self-indulgence. I admire sensitivity to one's community and the wider human world. And I admire generosity and kindness, in the deepest sense: writing that treats its readers, and its subjects, as intelligent adults deserving of care and respect.

7. What is one trait you most deplore in writing or writers?
"Deplore" is too violent a word for what I feel, which is closer to a quiet sadness. The traits that sadden me most in writers are related, and perhaps ultimately the same trait in different disguises.

The first is posturing, a pretence of being something one is not, the adoption of a style, a set of references, a political or aesthetic position, as costume rather than conviction. This is different from the writer who enters another's perspective as an act of imagination, attempting to vacate rather than enlarge the self. The second is trendiness at all costs, the anxiety to be current, to arrive where the conversation already is, to write the book that the moment appears to demand. The third is what I call the proliferation of the self, the conversion of a genuine discovery into a procedure. A writer or critic finds that a particular move, a particular framework, produces a response, and from that point forward it is that move, that framework, indefinitely. XYZ this, XYZ that. The deeper loss is not to the readers, though they feel it too. It is to the writer. The first book made from necessity and the twelfth made to meet a schedule.

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
Geoff Dyer: "My motto is always, 'If you're not overprepared you're underprepared.'"

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I...
Few people know this, but I have struggled with sleep-maintenance insomnia since my teenage years. There are very few nights in any given year when I sleep through from beginning to morning. I usually sleep for a couple of hours, wake, and then try to return to sleep by reading or drifting in thought, before sleeping again briefly and waking once more an hour or two later. People are often asked what one thing they would change about themselves. For me, it would be the ability to sleep through the night, without interruption, and to wake feeling deliciously and extravagantly well rested

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy or an action thriller to watch, which would you go for?
Dark tragicomedy.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
Tomorrow, and tomorrow.

12. Compose a rhyming couplet that includes the following words: ghost, umbrella, rhizome.

The umbrella of ritual shelters the ghost of a groom;
the rhizome of girls spreads from household to tomb.

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
Assuming that I have the necessary writing apparatus, such as my laptop, a pen, and a notebook, I would also need: light, eyesight, time, and mind.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
Between waking and sleeping?

15. If you have a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
I would not reach for the usual suspects. I would invite my two grandmothers and my maternal great-grandmother, women who are not literary figures, and so, at first glance, seem unsuitable answers to this question. But I mean to change that. They were all alive when I was small, and I did not yet know to ask the questions that matter. Now I would seat them at my table and ask everything. What did it feel like to be a woman in China, in Hong Kong back in their time? What were their dreams and aspirations? What did they want for themselves? Is there an afterlife? I would listen. And afterwards, I would write. And in the writing, they would become literary figures, worthy, at last, of the question.

16. It has been almost two decades since you co-founded Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, the first English-language literary journal in Hong Kong, back in 2007. Considering what has transpired in Hong Kong since then, what are some of your concerns about continuing or sustaining the journal as it is? What are some of the other creative works do you hope to do if you discontinue it?
When Jeff Zroback and I co-founded Cha in 2007, a decade after the handover, I had hoped Cha would be a modest beginning, and that similar publications would follow, that we would, in time, be one voice among many. That has not happened. The journal has always operated without institutional funding, sustained completely by voluntary labour, and a stubborn belief in the value of what we are doing.

In Hong Kong, intellectual constraint, the suppression of thought, and a pervasive air of caution that leads one to check one's ideas, to self-censor in advance for fear of making life difficult, are part of daily reality. Since the imposition of the National Security Law in 2020, Hong Kong's once-vibrant publishing and media landscape has shifted from a chill to something closer to a freeze. Books have been removed from public libraries. Newspapers have been shut down. Article 38 of the National Security Law exerts extraterritorial jurisdiction over individuals outside Hong Kong who are not residents, meaning that its reach does not end at any border, including the one I now live beyond.

Cha has never been a neutral publication. We published a Tiananmen thirtieth-anniversary feature; we ran "Liu Xiaobo Elegies"; we maintain an affiliated site called Hong Kong Protesting. The journal's reading series has addressed issues ranging from protest culture and censorship to the Anthropocene and queer visibility. These are not the actions of a journal that can now claim to have no history. In recent years, writers have written to me asking either to withdraw already published pieces or to have their names replaced with pseudonyms, even for something as seemingly innocuous as a poem about a protest. Writing a poem about a protest does not make one an activist in any meaningful legal sense, but it is no longer clear what may be considered relevant or what a search engine may surface. The writers who write to me are being prudent; the distinction between prudence and paranoia, has collapsed in ways that would have seemed unthinkable when we began the journal.

If I were to discontinue Cha, there are book projects I have wanted to complete for years, collections of poetry, translations, critical scholarly work, that the labour of editing has continually deferred. A journal is, in many ways, the opposite of a book, and at times I do feel that I am always working on other people's words. But I will continue Cha for as long as I can, because it exists in a landscape where its absence would be felt, and because the writers who submit to it deserve a platform that is still willing to receive them. This is not to mention that, if Cha were no longer in my life, I would be very sad.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
"She knew."

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