Communing with Ghosts
A conversation between Jennifer Lee Tsai and Natalie Linh Bolderston
Jennifer Lee Tsai, Natalie Linh Bolderston
Jennifer Lee Tsai: The exploration of matrilineal heritage is something I feel we share in our poetry, but from different perspectives. I really like the poem ‘When my mother tells her mother “we will eat together again soon”’, and the multiple ways the speaker translates the significances of this expression. I was wondering if you could say something about the process of interweaving your voice with your mother’s and grandmother’s voices?
Natalie Linh Bolderston: That was mainly a process of listening. For years I have heard and absorbed my mother’s and grandmother’s stories, their sayings, songs, specific turns of phrase. I have watched their gestures, their rituals, the ways they express love. To an extent, I therefore understand the tender layers and histories that lie beneath what they say and do. The poem you mentioned, which was written during the first COVID-19 lockdown, gently deciphers some of those layers; the promise to eat together again is a promise that both women will survive the pandemic, that nothing will stop them returning to each other.
I should mention that when I write about Mum’s and Bà Ngoại’s stories, or include their voices, I am very aware that I’m writing from the perspective of a daughter born in the UK. I access their history through what they tell me, and the small ways in which their bodies move when they speak about the past. As such, their stories are refracted through my personal lens, and then reconfigured poetically. The emotional core remains the same, but many physical details are obscured or filtered. The three of us become a kind of matrilineal chorus. Mum also reads everything I write before anyone else sees it. In these ways, I aim to make sure that her voice and my grandmother’s are honoured and protected.
I love the way your collection also reaches towards ancestry in every sense – blood ancestry, musical ancestry, literary ancestry. When you write, do you also feel like you are communing and chorusing with your predecessors? What makes you reach for specific people?
JLT: Thank you, Nat. That’s a beautiful response and question. I think a sense of quiet observation and emotional truth comes across strongly in your work. I also share that desire to protect and honour my family in my writing.
Melete explores narratives of migration, ancestral memory, and mysticism across three generations – both my paternal and maternal heritages spanning Liverpool, China, and Hong Kong, from the perspective of a second-generation British-Chinese woman. My writing about my predecessors is often inspired by the desire to speak with and for them, to represent British-Chinese voices that have not been heard historically, or have been rendered invisible or silent . I feel this strongly, especially with members of my family who have passed away: my paternal grandfather, who migrated to Liverpool as a seaman on the Blue Funnel Line; my maternal grandmother, whom I’ve written about in both my poetry and prose including a lyric essay ‘A Matrilineal Semiotic’, published in Poetry London, which interrogates the seams of language, poetry, and survival inflecting women’s lives across generations as well as my father, who left Communist China during the time of the Great Famine and entered the UK as a teenager. I explore these intersections across race, class, and identity, tracing their connection to Liverpool’s long established Chinese community, the oldest in Europe.
My poem ‘Mersey River’ is a tribute to the Chinese seamen of Liverpool, thousands of whom were forcibly repatriated after the Second World War by the British government. ‘Tso Kin Tsai’ depicts my paternal grandfather’s flight from Mao’s Communist China to a new life in Liverpool. ‘South China Tiger’ reimagines my father as a young man, ‘making his way / in a white man’s world’, ‘armed for the grand battle / on an English field of dreams’. With regard to my matrilineal heritage, I write to navigate the painful process of grief, loss, and mourning and in doing so, breaking ancestral silences and cultural taboos – particularly in relation to the death of my maternal grandmother by suicide in Hong Kong when my mother was a few years old – and to attempt to make sense of a kind of void that has been inherited as well as to find healing, solace and recuperation. This is illustrated in poems such as- ‘About Chinese Women’, a lyric/hybrid prose poem, ‘Fallen Star’, which explores embodiment and connecting to ancestral bodies ‘through generations, countries,/boundaries, thresholds’ and ‘1961’ which traces the origins of ancestral trauma in my maternal heritage, going back to recreated experiences and memories of my grandmother and mother in Hong Kong. Writing helps me connect to and reimagine these complex patrilineal and matrilineal histories and stories, to piece fragmented narratives together.
Language is a way for me to discover, transform, and place myself; to situate my ancestors within their social, historical, literary, and colonial context. I wanted to counter the erasure that has been historically enacted upon British-Chinese immigrants, and to bear witness to their existence, their resilience, the complex processes of their assimilation, and their contributions to British society.
As for literary ancestry, I find myself sometimes writing in response to, and in communion with, women writers I particularly admire, and whose work I have engaged with deeply over many years both as a critic and in academic work. This includes writers such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Jean Rhys, Audre Lorde and French feminists Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray. In doing so, I feel that I’m establishing my own literary community of women writers, being in dialogue across space and time.
I found your poem ‘Legacy’ particularly moving, and poignant in exploring similar questions of inheritance and intergenerational trauma. The speaker sees ‘a thick root of hurt’ that is passed down from a mother to a daughter and asks, ‘Did you know that I would become an archive of your griefs?’ How does this intention to ‘become an archive’ of ‘griefs’ play out specifically in your work?
NLB: There is so much I don’t fully understand about how trauma is passed down to us. Does it start in the womb? Are certain hurts carried in our blood? Is pain simply passed down via the behaviours of those around us, whether extreme or subtle? I don’t have all the answers, but I’ve often had the feeling of carrying something dark and unnameable. Since I was very young, I’ve always been aware that the story of how my mum came to live in the UK was a painful subject, and I learned the specifics piece by piece as I grew up. Some of our conversations went even further back, to the sad stories of other female forebears.
Knowing more about my mum’s experiences helped me see which parts of her behaviour seemed to be rooted in past trauma – both first-hand and inherited – and which parts I seemed to mirror. My poem ‘Legacy’ aims to capture the isolating bouts of sadness and alienation we’ve both occasionally fallen into: ‘The air has acquired a milky scum / and every touch falls mute.’ It also aims to acknowledge the fact that such pain did not start with us; the ‘thick root of hurt’ extends far into the past, probably further than we’ll ever know.
My poem ‘Suitcases’ illustrates another facet of inherited trauma that is difficult to explain: a tendency towards hoarding, and a habit of storing certain items in suitcases – which, of course, can be grabbed and dragged behind you at a moment’s notice. Being surrounded by suitcases engenders a simultaneous sense of permanence and impermanence within the home – a knife-edge which my mum, as a refugee, has negotiated for much of her life. At the end of my poem, I aim to articulate some of the feelings behind this complicated behaviour: ‘I, too, have this compulsion to gather. Sometimes, being weighed down feels like belonging. Sometimes a dress is not a dress, but the outline of a person you miss.’
I feel like you are faced with similar complexities when giving voice to difficult material in your poems. Did you find that having Melete, the Muse of thought and meditation, as a kind of avatar or alter-ego helped you navigate such complexities? What made you choose her, and what kind of paths has she opened up for you?
JLT: The concept for ‘Melete’ came from various creative sources. One of my chief inspirations was Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1982), a work I have been deeply immersed in for a long time. Cha uses the nine Muses to frame her book: Clio (History), Calliope (Epic Poetry), Urania (Astronomy), Melpomene (Tragedy), Erato (Love Poetry), Elitere (Lyric Poetry), Thalia (Comedy), Terpischore (Choral Dance), Polymnia (Sacred Poetry). I was interested in how she uses these figures to retell personal narratives of memory, displacement, exile, and intergenerational trauma – themes which are prevalent in my own work. I have loved the Classics and classical myth ever since my school days where I studied Ancient Greek and Latin. I was fascinated to learn about the three elder Muses in Greek mythology who represented the essential components of poetic and artistic creation before the development of the nine Olympian Muses. The three-part structure of my book relates to the three original Boeotian Muses: Melete, the Muse of contemplation, meditation and practice; Mneme, the Muse of memory and remembrance; and Aoede, the Muse of song/voice. These Muses embody the basic creative process of early humanity.
Although my work combines elements of the confessional, and lived experiences, I am conscious of the need to navigate the boundaries between life and art with care. Thus, the character of Melete operates as a kind of an alter ego or avatar, ‘a melody, a light, a note’, ‘a beautiful hybrid’. She opens up ways for me to expand the lyric space and explore the lyric ‘I’, in a way that distances myself and enables me to write more freely, to reach for a literature ‘that can accommodate the complexities and nuances of a British-Chinese subjectivity held within the space of a book’. The character of Melete runs throughout the book and is reflective of the multiplicity of poetic selves that come and go: past self, present self, future self – a self that is both me, and not me, a symbol and shield for my writing self. As a British woman of Chinese heritage who has grown up in the UK, I was conscious of refusing stereotypes and resisting the inclination to exoticise myself. The character of Melete reflects my education in the Western canon and my love of classical myth and archetypes, and asserts the right to claim, re-invent, and transform one’s subjectivity: ‘She is reassembling herself in and through language. / She is making something new with these fragments. / She is rebuilding herself.’
I love how you make use of Vietnamese and Chinese myth in your work, as can be seen in ‘Fragments of My Mother’s Homeland Underwater’ and ‘Praying to Âu Cơ After My First Cervical Screening’. How did you approach the use of these myths in your writing? Could you say more about the presence of female divinities in your work and what they represent?
NLB: I absolutely love what you said about using mythical alter egos to expand ‘lyric space’ – that’s such a beautiful way to think about this. And yes, I very much chime with the idea that using avatars allows us a degree of protection or distance from vulnerable subject matter. I would say I have a similar approach when using Vietnamese and Chinese myth in my work. There are often difficult things I want to talk about. In the two poems you mentioned, for example, I think about climate change, the way in which war devastates both the human and natural world, and the complex feelings and associations that arise during intimate examinations. These are all subjects that I ruminate on a lot, but which I needed to find a ‘path’ to poetically; they felt too big and unwieldy to explore without some kind of frame to help organise my thoughts.
‘Fragments of My Mother’s Homeland Underwater’ parallels a Vietnamese creation myth – the story of Âu Cơ and Lạc Long Quân, who are considered to be the ancestors of all Vietnamese people – with the painful beginnings and endings precipitated by the Vietnam War and the climate crisis. Given that Âu Cơ is a mountain spirit and Lạc Long Quân is a dragon king associated with the sea, they feel very emblematic of the natural world. Once I started writing about them, I found so many echoes between their myth and the realities I was exploring; the themes of disaster, separation, and longing rose to the surface. But the connection I felt with these figures also added a thread of hope; their myth reminds us of the ancestral strength and fierce love that we carry within. This gave me a somewhat tender place to land at the end of the poem:
Once, we wanted to believe that we’d survive the flood because we were born from a collision of mountain and sea. Because nothing has ever held us as closely as water.
Of course, Âu Cơ also haunts ‘Praying to Âu Cơ After My First Cervical Screening’. When I began writing that poem, I was still in pain from the examination, and I was considering all the women in my family who might have had similar experiences. This was a hurt that connected us – something we bore silently to try and keep ourselves well. I reached further and further back until I came to Âu Cơ – the first mother, who carried and birthed a hundred children. The nature of my pain made me feel a new affinity with her, and communing with her in that poem made me feel less alone. Addressing the piece to Âu Cơ also helped me to better shape it at a technical level; there are a lot of watery, natural, and dreamlike images, which seem to reflect the hazy, wistful wanderings of my mind during the examination quite well.
With regards to the presence of female divinities in my work in general: I’ve always made a conscious decision to focus on female histories, mythologies, and inner lives. Such stories contain a kind of strength and defiance that inspires and moves me, and somehow makes me feel part of something larger than myself. Growing up, I found it difficult to situate myself in the mostly white and male-dominated literary and mythological landscapes I encountered at school. Now, exploring the lives of Vietnamese and Chinese deities and historical figures gives me the chance to seek out my own literary and mythological lineage of women, who in different ways remind me of my mother, my grandmother, and my aunts.
Jennie, speaking of the complex landscapes we grew up with: both of our collections touch on accounts of racial microaggressions and macroaggressions. In Melete, I particularly noted ‘British Chinese/East and Southeast Asian Citizen’, which is written after Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. How did you navigate finding the right register to enter that painful space? In an interview, I remember Rankine mentioning that her use of the second person ‘opens up the writing so that it becomes a collective experience’ – did you feel similarly when using the second person to narrate such events?
JLT: The initial impetus behind the poem was to focus on instances of racial micro-aggressions that I had personally experienced around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. As I started to write, the poem quickly began to expand and develop to include both personal and public incidents of racial violence towards East Asians. Originally, the provisional working title of the poem was ‘Anti-Asian-ness’, and it began as a documentation of a series of events or incidents, a catalogue of litanies.
My decision to use the pronoun ‘you’ was inspired by Rankine, who writes in Citizen: ‘Our very being exposes us to the address of another […] We suffer from the condition of being addressable […] Language navigates this.’ The ‘you’ implicates, involves, and addresses the reader and enabled me to write about painful experiences with objectivity. It removes the sense of distance between the speaker and the reader. It has the effect of making the described situation or event less personal and more inclusive of the reader. My intention in writing this poem was to explore the ways in which instances of racial violence towards East-Asian people became heightened during the time of the pandemic.
The use of lyric hybridity was a formal consideration and a strategy that runs throughout the book as well as this particular poem. It captures the plurality of East-Asian subjectivities across time and space that I investigate throughout. In this poem, I chose to write using a prose style to explore the sense of trauma and injury caused by systemic and structural racism in the UK. My poem explores a series of everyday encounters with anti-Asian racism, on both personal and public levels. In much the same way as Rankine with Citizen, I wanted to create a poetics of racial trauma that illustrates the effects of racial injustice on the bodies of British-Chinese/East-Asian individuals across different experiences, histories, and intersections of class.
One of the focuses of the poem is specific microaggressions and undercurrents of racial tension in urban settings around Liverpool: outside a supermarket, in town, in a suburb. The compactness of prose poetry makes it particularly useful for exploring micro-aggressions. In addition to microaggressions, this poem centres on the very public rise of hate crime towards British East and Southeast Asian people during the pandemic. In writing about race in this long poem sequence, it was imperative for me to address public tragedies concerning the deaths of Chinese and ESEA people in recent years, namely the Morecambe Bay cockling disaster in 2004, the deaths of fifty-eight Chinese immigrants in a lorry in Dover in 2000, and the thirty-nine Vietnamese migrants who were found dead in a lorry trailer in Essex in 2019.
NLB: Yes, I feel like it all comes back to the question of how we find the voice to bear witness to such horrors. I’m very moved by the idea of using lyric hybridity to convey the dailiness of macro- and micro-aggressions directed towards East Asian people; everything in the sequence you wrote pulses so close to home for me.
To finish, I’d like to ask you a question inspired by Romalyn Ante’s second collection, Agimat: is there a poem in Melete that you consider your ‘talisman’? In Divinations on Survival, mine is ‘Love Poem in a Safe City’, which was written for my partner, Dan. Like most of my poems, it considers the complex reasons I’m here, but also reminds me of the love and tenderness that fills my present life. I usually end every reading with it.
JLT: What a great question to end with, Nat! ‘The Pendant’, which is a prose poem, does refer to an actual talisman I have – a jade pendant that belonged to my paternal grandmother and which was passed down to me by my dad. But in terms of thinking of a poem that has a particular significance – ‘Vivien Leigh’s négligée’ was written at a pivotal time, and I have to thank Melanie Abrahams for the original commission through Renaissance One and the RAMM Museum and Art Gallery in Exeter. The poem brings together musings on memory and childhood, diaspora, maternal ancestry and inherited trauma, the importance of sisterhood across space and time, grief and loss, and a reminder of the presence of love, hope and faith in my life, all triggered by ‘this diaphanous garment’.
Jennifer Lee Tsai is a British-Chinese poet from Liverpool. She has received a Northern Writers Award for Poetry and the Women Poets’ Prize. Jennifer is an Artist in Residence at the Bluecoat and an AHRC Doctoral candidate at Liverpool University. Her debut collection, Melete, is published by Bloodaxe.
Natalie Linh Bolderston is a Vietnamese-Chinese-British poet from Stoke-on-Trent. She has won an Eric Gregory Award and the Women Poets’ Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Her debut collection, Divinations on Survival, is published by Liverpool University Press.
