How Hong Kong poet Mary Jean Chan is wowing Britain’s literary circles with first collection, Flèche
- Since moving to London, Chan has been named among top 10 most influential BAME writers in Britain
- In 2017, aged 27, she became youngest shortlisted nominee for Forward Prize for a single poem
“It was desperation really,” she says. “I was in a very bad place bordering on depression. My parents saw that and knew something had to change.”
Talking to 29-year-old Chan a decade later, in her adopted home city of London, it’s hard to believe she enrolled in the first place. Sensitive and thoughtful, she seems the antithesis of a hardbitten banker or financier. “I always knew I didn’t have a talent for numbers. Maths was my worst subject. My parents were taken aback [by her decision to leave]. My teachers wanted to talk about it.”
Nevertheless, if she hadn’t endured a year of sleepless nights trying to understand accountancy, Chan never would have taken an anthropology course (with the too-good-to-be-true title, “Meanings of Life”), or met the professor who encouraged her to study at America’s Swarthmore College, where her love affair with poetry began. “It was my hobby,” she says. “Gradually my hobby overtook everything.”
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This is an understatement. Flèche, Chan’s first full-length collection, was published this year by Faber & Faberand won an Eric Gregory Award, given to poets aged under 30. Her poem The Window was shortlisted for the Forward Prize’s award for best single poem. It is Chan’s second nomination; her first, in 2017, made her the youngest poet to be shortlisted in the prize’s history.
Rounding off an extraordinary 12 months, Flèche has just been nominated for the Costa Prize for Poetry. Little wonder Scottish poet laureate Jackie Kay, in The Guardian, named Chan as one of the top 10 BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) writers in Britain, describing her work as “psychologically astute and culturally complex”.
The same could apply to Chan herself. Born in 1990, she lived initially under British colonial rule. Her seventh birthday fell the day after Hong Kong’s handover, in 1997. “There were fireworks on July 1,” Chan recalls. “I remember asking my dad what was happening. He said, ‘They’re for your birthday.’”
This touching gesture reflects a supportive family. Her mother was a film critic and television scriptwriter. Her father, a doctor, was an endless supplier of books. Writing was in Chan’s blood.
“Unlike a lot of Chinese parents, who would have been delighted if their daughter went to business school, my mum never wanted any of that for me,” says Chan. “My parents are quite special. My father has a strong belief that you can only do something well if you love it.”
As her enrolment at the business school implies, Chan was fashioning an “impeccable persona”, as she would write many years later, that concealed inner turmoil.
The poet whose works struck a chord with Chinese diaspora in the 1960s
While she would explore these schisms through language, they were initially a question of language. “We were taught from a very young age that English was more important than Chinese. You were supposed to speak only English in the classrooms. In the playground we used Cantonese. It’s play time so you can speak in your mother tongue.”
Chan resolved to excel at her imposed second language, in part to gain acceptance in a “competitive school environment. I was called the ‘English girl’ by some friends, jokingly. That was a compliment. Winning the English literature prize was seen in some ways as more prestigious than winning the Chinese one. The irony is we were all Chinese girls.”
Cantonese was the language of the playground and also of Chan’s family. Her mother is also fluent in Mandarin and Shanghainese, but still faces condescension for not speaking English. “What does it mean to be educated? My mother knows three Chinese dialects perfectly – I would call them languages – writes amazingly in Chinese, and is far more literary than her peers, but they know some English.”
Chan’s mother encouraged her daughter to study calligraphy and the masterpieces of classical Chinese literature. “I would read Confucius and Lao Tzu and sometimes enjoy them, but I felt like I owed them something,” she says.
Teetering under the “weight” of her Chinese literary heritage, Chan read English works with fresh enthusiasm. “It was crucial in that period that I fell in love with English – because of Shakespeare and the freedom it gave me,” she explains. “English was not a language with this massive lineage. I didn’t owe Shakespeare anything or the English canon anything. They were so different from me, I didn’t feel I had to tread in their footsteps. I could take what I wanted from them.”
Written over several years, the poems in Flèche allow these fluctuating tensions to play out, without any need for resolution. When I mention how accessible and clear her writing is, Chan suggests it reflects the insecurity of the non-native English speaker. “The first goal of learning a language is being able to convey yourself in ways that others can understand. The last thing I want is to befuddle people, in a way. Not because I don’t believe in intellectual befuddlement, but because I don’t want you to think my English isn’t good enough. I want you to hear me.”
One of her more experimental works, What My Mother (A Poet) Might Say, consists of one line repeated six times:
that Mao wrote beautiful Chinese calligraphy.
Between this one tolerated utterance are a series of excised hopes, some of which pertain to Chan herself:
That I shall love a man despite his strength.
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A sharp critique of political censorship doubles as an exercise in more intimate repression. “I was taught on a very subconscious level to be ashamed of what was natural to me,” Chan says of the enervating effect of being indoctrinated with the belief that Chinese was inferior to English. But the shame applies equally to other parts of her nature: namely her sexuality, her queer identity and the initially adverse reaction of her family.
“Flèche maps a trajectory from a defensive position emotionally, as a closeted self, towards the last section, which is more empowered but still unsure,” she says. “Thinking back, so much was beneath the surface. Everything was deeply repressed, but more complicated than that. Simmering.”
Indeed, Chan’s poetry generates intense emotional heat by jamming the pristine lid of her writing onto the roiling energies beneath. It is also bubbling in the title. Flèche is a literal allusion to Chan’s childhood love of fencing: “It is a very high-stakes, high-risk move,” she explains. “Essentially, you charge at your opponent with your arm outstretched.” The French term swivels on its anglophone homonym (“flesh”) to point variously towards skin, race, sex, gender, mortality and even food.
Fencing for Chan was not just a sport, but a release of covert feelings and sensations. “Being a fencer was quite strange. In those moments, I felt confident about my body, at ease with who I was. Once I took off the fencing kit and went back to my normal life – being queer, being uncertain – my body lacked a confidence it had in that space.”
It is tempting to read Flèche the book as the literary equivalent of a flèche in fencing: a flamboyant, even transgressive attempt to win over opponents, and a place where Chan imaginatively projects a more composed version of herself.
If so, it seems to be working. “The ‘I’ who is queer, who is multilayered, who is Chinese and multilingual, who questions gender, and is also at ease, happy and OK is very new to me,” she says. This contentment-in-progress owes much to Chan’s settled personal life: “My mother is incredibly accepting now.” This approval applies both to her English partner of five years and her own work as a poet, critic and teacher: Chan is a member of the creative writing faculty at Oxford Brookes University.
“My mum knows what a writer does. She has a lot of respect for this field.” Chan draws similar strength from her father. “He once said, ‘As a doctor you can cure one person at a time. As a writer you can heal a whole society.’”
While Chan is visibly moved by his praise, she modestly disowns such grandiose claims. If her poems heal anyone, she is happy if this includes the reader and perhaps herself. “It isn’t about changing the outside world. It’s about healing the rifts within.”