Here is a bit of background to the work. In 2005, my short story “Let Her Go” won a second runner-up place in a writing contest co-organised by The Standard, an English-language newspaper in the city; part of my reward was a one-year subscription of the newspaper. (The Standard is now a free newspaper.) Every morning, about seven o’clock, someone would deliver the paper to my doorstep, and one day, the sight of it on the floor inspired me to write the poem.

Despite its origin in my own life, the poem is not strictly autobiographical. You can see that in the piece, I have changed The Standard to South China Morning Post. That is not the only altered detail: in reality, we did not ‘dress well’ (L5) when going down to the little family-run store to buy beers — we dressed exceptionally well (just kidding). It wasn’t San Miguel, either. It was Tsing Tao. Also, nobody discussed Memoirs of A Geisha at the Department at that time, as far as I remember.

I would also hope that I am not quite as arrogant or as insecure as the narrator in the work. Still, I must confess there are authentic sentiments there. I have perhaps felt some version of the smugness evident in the first stanza, and I have certainly experienced the sense of admiration for monolingual neighbours and the feeling of deflation among ‘real English speakers’ of the second stanza.

I drew upon these conflicting emotions for the poem, and tried to structure the work around them. You can say that the pretentious characters in the first part of the poem have their comeuppance in the second (from boastful (L8) to humbled (L20)). The poem, to some extent, exposes the folly of self-proclaimed bilingual speakers whose sense of superiority and inferiority depends entirely on the contextual backgrounds (e.g. domestic and university).