We're delighted to introduce our next New Poetries VII contributor, Mary Jean Chan, whose ‘Three Sonnets: Versions from the Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars' is available to read below, alongside her introduction to her work in the anthology.
Mary Jean Chan is a poet from Hong Kong who is shortlisted for the 2017 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Her poems have appeared in The 2018 Forward Book of Poetry, The Poetry Review, PN Review, The London Magazine, Oxford Poetry and Ambit. She won the 2017 Poetry Society Members’ Competition, the 2017 Poetry and Psychoanalysis Competition and the 2016 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition (ESL). As a PhD candidate and Research Associate at Royal Holloway, University of London, Mary Jean won the 2017 PSA/Journal of Postcolonial Writing Postgraduate Essay Prize. Mary Jean is a Co-Editor at Oxford Poetry.
As a multilingual poet from Hong Kong, I have chosen to write in English, yet Chinese is always there in my work as its foil or fraternal twin, largely owing to the fact that I only speak in Cantonese or Mandarin Chinese with my parents, and my mother does not speak English. I love how Vahni Capildeo – another Carcanetand former New Poetries poet – depicts her relationship to language in Measures of Expatriation: “Language is my home. It is alive other than in speech. It is beyond a thing to be carried with me. It is ineluctable, variegated and muscular.” As a queer poet, I have felt language’s unique capacity for carrying and transforming trauma. I have experienced how an attentiveness to form – be it a sonnet or pantoum, or simply a tercet or couplet – offers a powerful means to negotiate complex emotions that arise from our lived experiences as social, political and historical beings. I hold fast to the words of Adrienne Rich, who maintained that “lying is done with words, and also with silence.” The poems that have been selected for this anthology represent some of my attempts at speech, with the hopes of revealing and overcoming the long shadow of shame cast by internalized homophobia and racism, all the while responding to the lyric demands of poetry: the necessity of honouring each poem’s inner music and cadence. I came to poetry at the age of twenty-one out of a desperate need for language, and found reassurance in the work of poets such as Mary Oliver, who offered my young, closeted self these generous, life-saving words in her poem Wild Geese: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.” I have since sought to write poems that reflect the struggles of queer youth, poems about how intergenerational trauma caused by historical events such as the Cultural Revolution can threaten to unravel the soundest of minds and the most loving of familial bonds. I wish to meditate on how we might hope to heal and care for ourselves as well as those we love in the most difficult and challenging of circumstances. Ultimately, these selected poems are expressions of desire for a more compassionate world in which we might learn, in the words of Claudia Rankine, “how to care for the injured body” so our best selves can thrive and flourish.
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Three Sonnets: Versions from the Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars
Èrshísì Xiào or the Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars is a classic text of Confucian filial piety written during the Yuan Dynasty (1260-1368), and has been used as an example of how Chinese children should honour their parents.
He Lay Down on Ice in Search of Carp
One of the strangest, this: how a boy mistreated
by his stepmother still tried to satisfy her cravings
for carp, sought out the frozen lake and thawed the ice with
naked flesh, brought home two pregnant ones
for a pot of soup. At eight, I learnt this fable from
my mother’s lips, offered immediately to out-do this filial son,
though there was no ice to be found all across the city –
our temperate winters incapable of frost.
Years later, I wonder why my mother did not mention
hypothermia or the possibility of drowning, did not
invite me to wonder at the boy’s lack
of self-respect, did not consider how his body
deserved its own morsel of warmth, how his fingers
should never have been bait.
He Fed the Mosquitoes with His Blood
Another begins with a sacrifice: a boy too poor
to afford mosquito nets offers his blood as nectar in his parents’
stead, as he sits on their bed on hot summer nights to keep
them safe from the unbearable scorch
of inflamed skin. I read this alone as a teenager,
my Chinese now oxidized as black tea, capable
of steeping in fabled warnings. Once more, I detect
how dispensable the child’s body is, how right it is that he
suffers for an ideological wound, how his parents
might have slept fitfully that night, roused by their child’s
cries as the mosquitoes encircled him, or perhaps
blinking back a tear while thinking how good
their boy is, how proper this bloody
business of proving one’s love.
He Dressed Up to Amuse His Parents
No longer a boy, but an old man, dressed up
as a child to amuse his elderly parents, his fists
adorned with toys: a wooden stick, a piece of polished
stone. This isn’t the worst fable amongst the twenty-
four, but it makes me rage, because I am now
twenty-four, no longer in need
of dolls, though my mother yearns
for my feet to shrink to the size of her
open palms, and for the rest
of me to follow. Some days I cannot be her
child again, although I pacify arguments
and tears with a playful voice
that pleases, if only to reassure her –
and to say that love
is patient, love is kind.
***New Poetries VII is available to pre-order now at the Carcanet website, and will be published in April 2018.
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