Editor’s note: In this interview, poet and critic Tiffany Troy speaks with translator Chenxin Jiang about her recent rendering of for now I am sitting here growing transparent (Zephyr Press, 2025) by Hong Kong poet, filmmaker, and scholar Yau Ching. Jiang reflects on the complexities of translating Cantonese-inflected Chinese into English, and on the broader questions of identity, resistance, and longing that permeate Yau Ching’s work. The conversation moves between the linguistic and the political: from the “jagged, translingual skyline” of Hong Kong to the fraught legacy of colonialism, and from questions of pronouns and punctuation to the lived experience of translation as a form of cultural negotiation. Jiang also shares her encounters with Yau Ching’s interdisciplinary career, the discovery of resonances between different versions of her poems, and the ways in which translation can illuminate both the city and the self. Alongside this, Jiang speaks candidly about her collaborations with other poets and her current projects, which continue to extend her engagement with contemporary Chinese and European literatures.

INTRODUCTION

Tiffany Troy

In for now I am sitting here growing transparent by Yau Ching, translated by Chenxin Jiang from Cantonese-inflected Chinese, the speaker considers how “Modernity colonised you” while, conversely, “Colonialism modernised us.” The ambiguity between the “you” and the “we” in the poem bleeds into the provocative claim that “we / have never been modern of all things we looked down on justice/ and equality.” This self-implicating positioning—like so much of Yau Ching’s poetry—stems from the fact that the modernised, colonised subject has, in certain senses, absorbed the coloniser’s values (“if your name is not an English name / the island will give you one”). Yau Ching confronts with graphic detail the “debris facing backwards” and the “pepper police batons” in Hong Kong. Elsewhere, in quieter poems, the transparency of “[a]n empty sheet of lined paper,” the loneliness in Chinese, which differs from the English “longing,” stresses the duration of feeling rather than its absence. Yau Ching transmutes that noble ideal of love into something as quotidian as the speaker’s mother’s love of Shanghainese cold noodles, as “she grumbled about the lack of demand,” underscoring how even an object of desire exists in relation to others. Yau Ching writes of herself, “I have to turn in a one-line biography/ which forces my presbyopic middle-aged eyes to take a hard look at / what Yau Ching is/ I am always over-acting the part.” The theatrics and performance of Yau Ching on the page are underscored by the visual poetic forms and the craft techniques deftly translated into English by Chenxin Jiang.

Translating Hong Kong Identity, Resilience, & Longing

Tiffany Troy & Chenxin Jiang

Tiffany Troy (TT): What is the act of literary translation to you?

Chenxin Jiang (CJ): To the hedgehog, literary translation is one big thing, and to the fox, it is many things. My answer would have to be different for each language that I work from and for each author and text. for now I am sitting here growing transparent (hereafter transparent for brevity) is a personally significant project for me: it is my first book-length translation of poetry and the first book I have translated by a writer from Hong Kong, the city where I grew up. To me, Hong Kong is itself a translated city, and literary translation is the act of tracing the city’s jagged and variously translingual skyline onto a page.

TT: In your Translator’s Note you observe how “Yau Ching was writing with startling prescience about the impossibility of Hong Kong’s position caught between Britain and China.” How did you come across Yau Ching as a translator, and what prompted you to translate her?

CJ: Fellow translator Steve Bradbury first introduced me to Yau Ching when we both translated her poems for Asymptote years ago. The qualities that I fell in love with are the ones that I remark on in that introduction—the poems are clear-eyed, intimate, deeply attuned to language, and very funny.

TT: Yau Ching writes in Cantonese-inflected standard Chinese, which you describe as “standard Chinese with some word choices influenced by Cantonese.” In “Island Country,” the anaphora “There’s an island” connects the standardisation of language with the identity of a country, with “five thousand years of grievances / the island fashions / a TV channel its howls quake the Great Wall.” How do you carry that indignation into the English?

CJ: I describe Yau Ching’s language as Cantonese-inflected standard Chinese because I think that description is more accurate than calling it Cantonese per se: her writing is generally perfectly intelligible to non-Cantonese-speaking readers of standard Chinese, but here and there she slips in a Cantonese word or form of grammatical usage. The indignation that Yau Ching describes certainly has a linguistic edge to it: it is anchored in part in the disregard for local identity that animates the line “if your name is not an English name / the island will give you one.” (Yau Ching does not go by what Hong Kong people would recognise as an “English” or Western name; as a person who has a Chinese pinyin name, I can attest that when I was growing up in Hong Kong I was asked once a week whether I had an English name.)

It is worth noting that the poem does not explicitly identify its titular island as Hong Kong—and Yau Ching herself would observe that Taiwan is also a plausible referent. In the English, I mostly render the indignant quotational shouts (“go north! north! north!” “shame! shame! shame!”) using repetition that mirrors the Chinese, with the exception of the cluster foreign/cosmopolitan/the world (in the line “it’s a multinational corporation shouting about being foreign! / cosmopolitan! the world!”) for 國際. To my ear, this was helpful in breaking up the repetition in the stanza and avoiding the five-syllable mouthful “international.” But I think it also captures some of the complexity and resentment that comes with the extreme disparity in wealth mentioned elsewhere in the stanza.

TT: What was the translation process like, whether with fellow translators such as Steve Bradbury, or with a living poet with impressive interdisciplinary scholarship and an international footprint?

CJ: Steve and I have each translated some of Yau Ching’s work, but we have never co-translated. He is a fantastic interlocutor—I think our instincts are also fairly different, such that he always pushes me to think about a line in new ways. As for Yau Ching, it has been a treat to read her poems so closely with one of their most critical readers (in the person of the poet herself). The poem “Bauhaus Exercise in Vulgarization” appears in two versions (twenty years apart) in the collection, and I think it gives you a sense of how Yau Ching reads and rereads her own work—including in translation.

TT: Let us turn for a moment to the two back-to-back versions of “Bauhaus Exercise in Vulgarization.” What are some discoveries that you made in translating the two iterations of Yau Ching’s prose poems, two decades apart? I was especially struck by the punctuation (or lack thereof), the line length, and the removal of the “I” in the final stanza’s “Poke a fork to its armpit” in Yau Ching’s original, and how you envision the exercise as imperatives involving the “you.” (Perhaps you can use this opportunity to speak of translating discoveries or challenges for the collection overall.)

CJ: As you can see, in the 2020–2021 version the line lengths are shorter—Yau Ching and I were hoping there might be a way to justify the text of the English poem, but concluded that we could not make it work typographically. The later version does not contain a single pronoun, and what I like about the use of “you” is that it intensifies the inward turn of the speaker’s claustrophobia, the sense that she is speaking to herself rather than explaining herself to anyone else. That is how I ended up with the imperative (“Poke a fork…”) which I think captures the clipped desperation of the poem better than a pronoun would.

TT: In “I am a Foot,” Yau Ching writes: “I have to turn in a one-line biography/ which forces my presbyopic middle-aged eyes to take a hard look at / what Yau Ching is/ I am always over-acting the part.” Who is Yau Ching to you?

CJ: Yau Ching is one of those people who has somehow managed to live six whole lives for the price of one: she has lived on three continents, is an eminent filmmaker and film critic, and did pioneering work as a queer activist in Hong Kong. As a poet, she has a vast range. So for her to describe herself as overacting her own part has echoes of role theory and (later in the poem) pre-Socratic philosophy—but with a self-deprecating reference to presbyopic reading glasses thrown in. To me, her work reads as being deeply grounded in her experience, and I have truly rediscovered the city where I grew up through her writing.

TT: What are you working on now?

CJ: I am working on poems by the Hainan-based poet Jiang Hao, who I think is one of the very best poets writing in Chinese today; we did a fellowship together at the Vermont Studio Center, and the collection is coming out with Northwestern Press next year. I am continuing a longstanding collaboration with the Swiss-based poet Zsuzsanna Gahse, translating an experimental text about Venice that engages with the city’s literary resonances and overtourism challenges. Finally, inspired by Yau Ching, I am continuing to work with Hong Kong authors, translating short stories by Li Chiu-chun and Wong Ching Hang. It is exciting to see a new generation of writers grapple with the city’s preoccupations, and as their translator I get to watch it all unfold and then share the journey with readers elsewhere.

How to cite: Troy, Tiffany and Chenxin Jiang. “On Translating Hong Kong Identity, Resilience, & Longing.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 5 Oct. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/10/05/chenxin-jiang.

Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and the chapbook When Ilium Burns (Bottlecap Press). She translated Catalina Vergara’s diamonds & rust for the Toad Press International Chapbook Series. She serves as Managing Editor of Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor at Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote, and Co-Editor of Matter. [All contributions by Tiffany Troy.]

Chenxin Jiang is a PEN/Heim-winning translator from Italian, German, and Chinese, and a member of the Third Coast Translators Collective. Her translations include The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Ji Xianlin for New York Review Books and Tears of Salt: A Doctor’s Story by Pietro Bartolo and Lidia Tilotta. She was born in Singapore, grew up in Hong Kong, and now lives in Denver. Visit her website for more information.

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