14 — April 18 – May 1, 2018
INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER
ARTS
Pei Pei the Monkey King: Playful poetry with serious resonances By Denis Mair IE Contributor
discussion of “vertical life” in an interview she did for Apogee Magazine #9. “Vertical life” refers to withdrawal from the city’s horizontal workaday surfaces which are chaotic and hotly contested, seeking a space to free one’s own mind.
This is a book of children’s poems for adults, or perhaps one could call it a book of adult poems for a reader’s inner child. The poems articulate author Wawa’s multivalent feelings about returning to This theme of space promised or Hong Kong (and to her native language) foreclosed is also addressed in the poem after a sojourn abroad. “Hardhearted Rabbit,” in which the Although couched in allegorical terms, speaker complains to the stern rabbit: the poems carry an emotional punch “You told the leverets/ That on earth because they grapple with social realities there is truly no grass…/ I drew windows in Hong Kong and with recent assertions on your warren door/ Made the leverets of popular will, such as the Occupy see grasslands/ You used to take a look at Movement and the Fishball Revolution, the window/ Then take a look at me/ Now both of which the poet joined in at street you just watch me and laugh.” level. The question of finding space to free The book is curiously polyvocal: in one’s mind is one of life-or-death. As this slim volume we encounter three Wawa puts it in the appended interview, major kinds of discourse: 1) a Preface by “local mothers talk about their children Henry Wei Leung gives a theoretically ‘winning at the starting line.’” In other informed treatment of linguistic words, even children are under pressure circumstances behind these Chinese- to succeed, and there is little time to play. language poems by Wawa, given Hong In other poems we see the result in the Kong’s “doubly colonized history”; 2) the poems themselves are fables written form of child suicides. One poem speaks in playful storybook language with of “raising steel umbrellas” designed serious resonances; 3) the appendix is a to protect pedestrians from people who conversation in which translator Henry jump off buildings…“So we can resume Wei Leung prompts Wawa to open up on a life with heads lowered/ The streets a “meta” level about her temperament, back to business” (“Death of the Green motives and mental state as a poet. Balloon”). Only near the interview’s end does he The children lose direction because reveal that they are husband and wife. their socialization doesn’t give them (He proposed to her three days after the a coherent sense of who they are. The outbreak of the Fishball Revolution.) poet’s sense of urgency and her impulse In many of these poems, the speaker to act are expressed in absurdist terms: makes efforts to connect with the society “Holy Shit! Mr. Satan’s schooling in the where she grew up. She tries to connect school!/ I’ve busted in but my feet are directly with a “monkey of the soil,” a glued down!// Holy Shit! Mr. Satan’s blade of grass, a royal poinciana tree, a schooling in the school/ One by one I “rooftop sleeper” and other denizens of scoop the flowers up/ Crawl out on my her haunts around Lion Mountain (above arms/ Both my legs are rubbering//…My the quintessentially Hong-Kongian legs stringier and stringier!/ The flowers starting to bloom evil faces!/ But my face district of Mongkok). slowly vanishing!...” She tells them she was friends with In spite of these encounters with Pei Pei the Monkey King, evidently a horrific social phenomena, the poet character to be reckoned with in her keeps digesting her experience in a way youthful halcyon times, but the denizens that yields transcendent perspectives, at seem preoccupied and are not roused by least as reference points. references to past camaraderie. In the final poem of the collection, she The speaker also tries to re-connect by looks back upon all the onetime cronies sympathetically contemplating the city’s and creatures she encountered upon her spaces where people dwell and move return. She calls all of them “immortals,” about. What she sees takes imagistic form: for instance, tenement buildings and enumerates the perspectives that belong uniquely to them. She does not are massive birdcages. forget the caterpillar that “fell into her For every mention of a constraint that arms” and hitchhiked a ride under her holds people down, there is an answering collar, eager to see the city’s sites of evocation of freedom. For instance, bustle and commotion. for the children cooped within those Perhaps this caterpillar poem multiple cages, there are flying trees prefigures the actual situation of the that draw near the windows to visit the children. The speaker recalls that as a poet, who now lives with her husband in child she found release by spending time Hawaii and is expecting a daughter. In her “Letter to a Future Daughter on the with those trees. Occasion of the ‘Fishball Revolution’” In “Kingdom of the Rooftop”, the (Guernica Magazine), she declares that speaker visits a rooftop sleeper who she fully intends to take her daughter loves to pursue his own daydreams on back to Hong Kong. elevated platforms. He admits that his erstwhile transcendent dreams have gone off-kilter, but nevertheless insists that “my city is arriving soon.” This
reminds
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poet’s