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Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, If I Do Not Reply, Shearsman Books, 2024. 110 pgs.

^{Tammy Lai-Ming Ho in Chicago, November 2024}

Christopher K. Ho’s installation Return to Order, exhibited in Hong Kong during Art Basel 2025, interrogates what it means to create order through art—and, perhaps more urgently, questions the artist’s role in that process.

Similar concerns lie at the heart of If I Do Not Reply, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho’s latest poetry collection, which likewise engages with the role of art in society and its capacity to respond to the most pressing issues of our time—in short, with the question of whether art can at least suggest a sense of order within an ever-changing reality. Unsurprisingly for so perceptive and critical an observer, the Hong Kong poet intimates that poetry offers only partial answers—tentative, limited, and uncertain at best. And it could hardly be otherwise: poems are “scared”—forever at risk of being unread, forgotten, or deemed “insignificant”; they rarely “say enough” and seldom effect change. Poets, for their part, are not oracles. Rather than offering definitive answers, they turn to their craft to reflect the contradictions of chaotic times and to give voice to doubt.

This sense of uncertainty animates the collection in two distinct yet interwoven directions: the personal and the societal. On the one hand, it renders the author vulnerable, allowing her to open herself to the reader through intimate, deeply felt reflections. On the other, it lends authenticity to her voice as she addresses the reality of Hong Kong—most pointedly in the section titled “Are We Becoming Critically Endangered?”, where her observations resonate with anguish and fragile hope. Here, she reminds us that the impulse to restore order can also carry a distinctly sinister undertone.

A Conversation
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The most personal dimension of the collection is conveyed through a vivid authorial voice. Colloquial and unvarnished in its confessions, it draws the reader into an intimate conversation. In doing so, it reveals a distinctive persona—one that embodies a range of contrasting emotional states. At times, the voice appears fragile and hesitant, particularly in the poems where the speaker confides her most intimate thoughts or expresses doubt about the role of poetry. At other times, however, she finds courage, delivers bold assertions, and does not hesitate to address the reader directly with striking imagery.

This assuredness recalls Morphology of Desire by Dorothea Rosa Herliany—another collection in which the poetic persona emerges through an intense and direct dialogue with the reader. While Herliany’s tone is often violent and jarring, If I Do Not Reply is more subdued and tentative. And yet, there is an unmistakable affinity between the two, particularly in the manner in which the reader is addressed (in “If I Do Not Reply” and in several other poems), and in the use of vivid imagery—such as the final image of the title poem, in which the speaker disappears into a body of mirrors reflecting other mirrors.

The Idea of the City
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While Herliany’s poetry often relegates social reflection to the background, for Ho the travails of her time are intensely personal. A few years ago, she wrote of her sense of self being subsumed—or even replaced—by Hong Kong. The city is her “eternal home”, and she cannot help but regard it with a pained gaze. So inescapable is its presence, and so acute the poet’s awareness, that Hong Kong emerges as the second central figure in the collection, standing alongside the poet herself.

Yet the Hong Kong of If I Do Not Reply is not rendered through intimate evocations of everyday spaces, beloved haunts, or vanishing landmarks fondly recalled. On the contrary, the city appears slightly out of focus—consistently observed from a distance, its contours sketched only faintly. Specific details are few, and when mentioned—such as the goldfish market in Mong Kok—they lack vivid description. This absence of the microcosmic stands in contrast to much recent Hong Kong literature. Works such as Derek Chung’s A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist or the anthology Making Space foreground the city’s lesser-known locales with affectionate specificity.

Ho, by contrast, speaks of her city through a kind of distancing—whether geographical, due to the sparseness of descriptive detail, or temporal. What this distance never becomes, however, is emotional. Her love for Hong Kong remains palpable. This detachment serves a purpose: to hold the reader at arm’s length from the physicality and particularity of the city so that its symbolic resonance takes precedence. The absence of nostalgia is striking. What concerns the poet is not the loss of childhood memories or neighbourhoods altered by urban development—as touched upon in “Writing Despite Inarticulateness”—but the erosion of values, the disintegration of what Hong Kong once stood for and what, for some, it still represents.

This is a city in flux, as depicted in “Tomorrow”, yet the transformations that threaten to render it unrecognisable are not merely spatial or generational. They are rooted in unfolding events—events that many residents would prefer to overlook, but which the poet confronts with unwavering clarity and anguish.

The Impossible Forgetting
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In other words, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho constructs a form of distance that abstracts away from the specificities of city life in order to lend greater resonance to her personal concerns. It is this very detachment that sharpens the collection’s most striking images. At times, these are direct—such as in “To Thyne Own Self Be True,” which presents the dilemma in uncompromising terms: Do we turn a blind eye, or do we fight? A city of people reevaluating life, calculating what is worthwhile. I look at myself in the mirror: why the hell can’t you do more? At other times, the images are daring in their juxtapositions—as in “The Eye”: A young woman lost an eye in her beloved city, the result of certain people already having turned half blind.

This profound connection with Hong Kong, so powerfully articulated in these images, is in fact declared from the outset—in the epigraph, whose message reverberates throughout the collection. The poet is Eloisa and Hong Kong is her Abelard. Her love for the city is a source of torment and unhappiness; her plight is all the more painful because, unlike the vestal, she knows she will never be able to reconcile herself to the city’s current condition.

After all, simplicity is not an option—as suggested by the title of one of the poems. Perhaps the vestal could dwell in blissful ignorance, forgotten by and ignorant of the outside world, while still preserving her innocence. But in today’s Hong Kong, ignorance and indifference demand too many moral compromises, too many inconvenient truths to be overlooked. In this light, Pope’s epigraph becomes not a wistful echo but an accusation—levelled at a city and its inhabitants who, absorbed in material pursuits and all too willing to exchange awareness for comfort, have rendered themselves deserving of the world’s indifference.

It is, then, a condemnation—but also a fervent plea to the citizens of Hong Kong: to renounce materialism, and to strive or at least a minimal (self) awareness. As “Writing Despite Inarticulateness” makes clear, the challenge lies in whether people are willing to pause and reflect on something of consequence—beyond the trivialities and immediate concerns of an affluent, consumerist society.

A Certain Type of Answer
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As much as through the inability to forget and let go, the pain evoked by the city’s present condition is conveyed through the act of not replying—an ostensibly simple gesture that nonetheless acquires a range of complex and contrasting overtones. On one level, it plays a constructive role: a private act of subversion that allows the speaker to claim space for herself—to step aside, regroup, and take time for reflection. It becomes a means of escape when the emotional weight of remembering becomes overwhelming. Through silence, the poet resists certain expectations—such as those who insist that a writer from Hong Kong must write exclusively about Hong Kong—as captured in “Read On,” which echoes the frustrations voiced by authors like Karen Cheung in The Impossible City.

At the same time, however, not replying carries a more negative resonance. Fittingly for a work that expresses scepticism about poetry’s ability to retain relevance, the poet may be unable to reply simply because poetry itself can offer only partial or inadequate answers. Alternatively, the failure to respond may signal a limitation on the part of the speaker—a loss for words, a lack of clarity, or an inability to formulate a coherent response.

More ominously still—and in keeping with a collection that insists on being read in both social and personal dimensions—not replying becomes an act of social critique: a reflection on those who wilfully ignore the city’s predicament by choosing silence. It is not merely that they cannot reply, but that they refuse to.

Order Restored
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In the end, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho is too sensitive and discerning an observer to conclude her work with a defeatist message—or, indeed, with anything that might be construed as an abdication of responsibility on the part of the poet (and, by extension, the intellectual or the ordinary citizen).

Thus, despite the doubts voiced throughout many of the collection’s poems, If I Do Not Reply ultimately leaves the reader with a sense that order—however partial or unsatisfying—is being restored. In a construens, rather than reactionary, spirit, the collection gestures toward an alternative order grounded in critical awareness of the city’s condition. It does not make grand proclamations or indulge in fanciful faith in the redemptive power of art. Instead, it embraces vulnerability and contradiction, seeking a fragile equilibrium—one achieved through boldness and openness, through the assertion of personal space, the honest expression of disappointment, and the unflinching articulation of despair for the city’s fate.

In a collection that is always meditative but never militant or “angry”, we may find here an answer to the enduring question of what poetry can achieve in a divided society. It contributes to the creation of a constructive order—not by offering definitive solutions or a clear path forward, but by recording the malaise of a city and the unease experienced by (at least part of) the generation living through it. In other words, If I Do Not Reply reminds us that poetry may reimagine an imperfect order—and retain a measure of relevance—whenever it dares to pose uncomfortable questions and shows that there is value in being critical, self-aware, contradictory, intimate, and fragile.

How to cite: Griseri, Luca. “Order in the City: Tammy Lai-Ming Ho’s If I Do Not Reply.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 1 Jun. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/06/01/reply.

Luca Griseri (he/him) studied history and postmodern philosophy in his native Italy. After obtaining an MBA from the University of Warwick (UK), he embarked on a career in marketing and over 18 years lived in London, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. He is currently based in Penang, where he indulges in his passions: running, hiking in the forests and eating street food. [All contributions by Luca Griseri.]

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