Ongoing Moments: A series in which teaching staff and students from the English Department respond to a photograph of their choice. [Read all entries.] [Revisit the “Interrogative” series.] This photograph, taken by Tammy Ho in Venice in 2013, is titled “Caption”. I recently visited my childhood home, shown here, looking far better than I fondly remember…
Ongoing Moments: Lian-Hee Wee
Ongoing Moments: A series in which teaching staff and students from the English Department respond to a photograph of their choice. [Read all entries.] [Revisit the “Interrogative” series.] . This is the back of my 1991 class T-shirt. Koko did the graphics and I was to write all the classmates’ names on the back, so this was/still…
“So Much Depends Upon A Pretty Heroine” by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming
Everyone knows the story of Snow White. A wicked stepmother,1 upon finding out from her magic mirror that her stepdaughter, Snow White (who is ‘as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood in the window frame’), is fairer than herself, orders a huntsman to kill the girl. The man, influenced by…
“You Can’t Take a Picture of This” by Holden Liang Qichao
It is a perfect Sunday afternoon in autumn. The sun finally decides to grace the earth with its warm glow after days of bleak grey sky and biting wind. The shedding trees have been giving the sanitary crew a hard time, but in the comforting nook of one’s own backyard, their rich foliage has weaved…
“緣 Yuan” by Vinton Poon
An experience I had when I was an undergraduate is still vivid today. On one breezy autumn afternoon, I was strolling around the campus between classes. In a community centre I saw a poster advertising a series of religious talks, one of which was on Buddhism. Since the Buddhist talk was just half an hour…
“Julia” by Stuart Christie
Julia, you recall, was Winston Smith’s great love in George Orwell’s 1984. She is both a character in the book and, at least for me, an emblem of what disinterested love itself can, and often does, result in just prior to the moment of capture, just prior to the moment the repressive secret police (of…
“Traversing Urban and Rural Space: Sexuality and Bodily Presence in Under the Skin (2014)” by Suzanne Lai
The movie is divided by the moment of the woman’s awakening (Scarlett Johansson) when she, for the first time, is under her own gaze. She sees her own reflection in the mirror on the wall. That is the moment of epiphany. The group of extraterrestrial beings she belongs shares the same gender concept as human…
“How Honest Are You In Your Diary?” by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming
Someone once told me a story from Greg Egan‘s Axiomatic. The story, titled “The Hundred Light-Year Diary”, is about a future invention that allows people to send messages to themselves from the future. Every person can send about 100 words every day. The protagonist of the story is a guy who has been writing a diary…
Alumni News: Viggo Cheng
Viggo Cheng (鄭浩輝), BA, English (Class of 2012)/MA, Language Studies (Class of 2014) has been awarded a postgraduate student assistantship to pursue PhD studies in Sociolinguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Renewable for up to five years, the assistantship (covering tuition and health insurance) will allow Viggo to pursue research in his areas of…
“Now Lost” by Lian-Hee Wee
Watercolour sketch in about 20 minutes, 8.3.2013. Accompanying Eunice who didn’t want to study alone. I playfully refused to make a gift of the painting, instead it went to the wall at a nearby restaurant. Later, Eunice offered to buy the painting from the restaurant owner who refused (I don’t know why). The owner sold…
“A Wintry Hypothesis” by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming
On 9th January 2015, I became an aunt for the first time. My youngest sister, Ying, gave birth to a baby girl having been in labour for over fifteen hours. On 9th January 2015, I gained a new identity—I am now my little niece’s “Big Aunt Mother” (大姨媽). It sounds so old. When I first…
“Are The Yellow Ribbons ‘We’?” by Nicola Chan Oi Ching
We are nonconformists who conform to wear the yellow ribbon in the heart of hearts singing “Umbrella Revolution” We create a utopia-to-be. No screenings or selections. No appointed positions. No age differentiation. No gender discrimination. We learn to unlearn to relearn words like “policemen”, “umbrella”, “democracy” Denotations and connotations shifting in time with history. Since when to…
“LA MINOR” by Ivan Delazari
LA MINOR is a music band based in St. Petersburg, Russia. They don’t write their own songs, but skilfully arrange and play Russian “urban songs”/”chanson”/”blatnaia pesnia” embedded in the vernacular culture and most often associated with crime, prison and alcohol. Sometimes those are anonymous songs, at other times popular tunes from the last 100 years…
“An Encounter at City Express” by Thomas Deng Guochang
. On “An Encounter at City Express”: The free verse poem was drafted during my summer residency at the MFA creative writing program at City University of Hong Kong in 2011. City Express is the name of the canteen at AC1, CityU, in which I had my first writing workshop. I was at City Express one…
“Narrative” by Jason S Polley
. My tattoos, or, rather, my single narrative tattoo, essentially charts the Eastward migration of Buddhism from its Hindu sources in India through its multiple manifestations / incarnations / influences in Tibet, Myanmar, Thailand, Indochina, China, and, finally Japan. Not unlike Shakespeare’s Parolles, from the ironically (at least from Parolles’ point of view) titled All’s…
“The Controversy of “We are All Chinese”” by Ruth Y.Y. Hung
《無間道-「我想要回身份」》, 磁漆布本 Infernal Affairs, “I want my identity back”, enamel paint on canvas, 100cm(H) x 150cm(W), 2007 [Via.] Nearly two decades after the Handover of 1997, the PRC and its SAR HK have not come closer though the latter has become increasingly dependent on the booming mainland economy. Early this year, the 34-year-old local star Ella…
“Urban Youth” by William Ng
. It was inspiring for me to attend the English Department seminar “Urban Youth, Language and Literacy Development in the Digital and Global Environments” [abstract] delivered by Dr. Myrrh Domingo from the Institute of Education, University College London on Monday 26th January 2015. Recently, the image of me approaching the classroom of my future students has…
“What Broccoli Tells Us About the Umbrella Movement” by Vinton Poon
From a poster “KEEP CALM & STAY TOGETHER” seen in Mong Kok. Photo by Jason S Polley. The people involved in the Umbrella Movements have been called many names by those who disagree with them. They were described as being ignorant, provoked, misinformed, and manipulated. In the eyes of the opposition, the protesters, who wore…
“Conference Reflections: The 22nd Annual Conference of the English and American Literature Association” by Jessica Siu-yin Yeung
. My Paper A look at literature will show readers that many literary texts deal with characters’ incessant quest for happiness through various means. A prime example is Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998). By making special reference to Mrs Dalloway written by Virginia Woolf in 1925, Cunningham uses her novel to link the quests for…
“What is Professional Discourse?” by Kenneth Kong
The following is from the first chapter of Professional Discourse: What does it mean to be a professional? What does a professional do to distinguish themselves from laymen and other professionals? To many people, being a professional means a degree from a medical school, many years of experience in an occupation or even just an…
“Intersection Collaborative Learning Project” — A Showcase of the Best Works (with an introduction by Heidi Huang and Holden Liang Qichao)
This month, students from the English Department’s Master’s programme in Literary and Comparative Studies (MALCS) joined the students from the undergraduate course Hong Kong Stories (taught by Heidi Huang) in an “Intersection Collaborative Learning Project”. The collaborative field trip which they undertook throughout Hong Kong was inspired by local modernist writer Liu Yichang’s short story…
“The Rainbow Award for Honours Project on Social Justice” by Lian-Hee Wee
Source: Umbrella Creation (via.) “I repeat , I’m only representing the donors who called themselves ‘the anonymous teachers from HK’. And no, the donors do not represent HKBU or the English department. The gesture signals disgust at corporations that forget their social responsibilities. The prize may be small but it is intended as a reminder that…
“Auricles and Oracles — Lessons in Character” by Douglas Berman
. Lord only knows the reasoning behind the paths we take. Why this fork and that fork and this ravine and gorge? Letters diverge by one syllable, bifurcate once, twice, and then all at once a riot of unknowns. The event in question occured around one year ago. I was wandering through South East Asia,…
“Bamboo in Repose” by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming
Photo by Sammy Wan These pictures, taken by Sammy Wan and posted by Real Hong Kong News on Facebook, show a group of construction workers building a bamboo ‘matrix’ at Admiralty, replacing the iron barricades that the police had cleared earlier this morning (Monday 13 October 2014). Hong Kong has long been known as a forest…
Announcement: Kenneth Kong’s Professional Discourse Published
Dr Kenneth Kong has recently published his monograph, Professional Discourse, with Cambridge University Press (2014). Using a wide range of professional genres (such as research papers, business reports, performance commentaries, guidebooks and legal documents) Professional Discourse focuses on the discourse of professional writing, employing analytic paradigms from systemic-functional linguistics, pragmatics, text analysis, sociology and anthropological…
Umbrella Uprising — What We Think
. I have run out of umbrellas to lend to my students, braving all weathers, all scorn, for a future they no longer have any option but to believe in. Now it is my heart I would shelter them with. I do so happily, without reservation. They were the first, and will be the last,…
“HongKongopoly” by Jason Eng Hun Lee
. . The object of the game is to become the wealthiest player through buying, renting and selling property. Parker Brothers Pick up a top hat, tailor made, or try on new leather boots, the latest edition for players, enter by steam ship or train and take a stroll across town, ready to turn your…
“cemetery miss you” by Jason S Polley
Jason S Polley at the Taj Mahal, Agra, India, mid-May 2004. Photo by Maria Fernanda Jaramillo Zapata. . . folder b file 1 0 min 17 sec hash it come in sheet with a stamp every sheet have to be stamp with a company name so you always want the company name its valuable you…
The Interrogative Mood: Questions with Suying Yang
The following questions are taken from Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood. Was there ever enough time? . No. There was never enough time for what I wanted to do. . What are the top three things in your life you wish you had not done, or done differently from the way you did them? . I…
“Zhang Longxi on World Literature” by James Au
I first heard of Professor Zhang Longxi in Dr. Heidi Huang’s lecture. She introduced his article “The True Face of Mount Lu: On the Significance of Perspectives and Paradigms”, which I found truly impressive. In that article, Zhang mentions the importance of not analysing anything from only one perspective and suggests one trying to read from…
Department of English, Hong Kong Baptist University 