Editor’s note: In this feature, we present an interview with Jennifer Wong on her new collection Light Year, conducted by Cha’s staff reviewer Michael Tsang. Wong’s work is widely recognised for its attentiveness to memory, language, and the complexities of diasporic experience. In Light Year, she continues to explore these concerns with a heightened sense of introspection, reflecting on questions of identity, relationships, and belonging across shifting personal and cultural landscapes. In this conversation, Wong discusses the evolution of her poetic practice, her engagement with multilingual expression, and the ways in which her recent work responds to change and uncertainty. We are pleased to also include a poem from the collection.

[CONVERSATION] “Writing Through Loss, Language, and Home: On Light Year” by Michael Tsang and Jennifer Wong

Jennifer Wong. Light Year, Nine Arches Press, 2026. 72 pgs.

Michael Tsang (Michael): Congratulations on your new collection Light Year! It has been more than five years since your last full-length collection, Letters Home 回家. In what ways is Light Year a reflection of the changes that have happened to you in this period?

Jennifer Wong (Jennifer): You are right, it has been a while since Letters Home was published, and I think Light Year is an attempt to reflect on the changes since then: what changed inside me and outside of me.

Light Year is, in a way, connected with Letters Home, as it navigates the impact of migration. The book reflects on what is missing, on what it is like when love collapses, on the value or composition of friendship and love. It also taps into my own reflection as a mother, a partner, a friend: what did I do right and where did I fail. So, in a way, it is personal, metaphorical, and quite dark too. I was going through a period of grief from the loss of a marriage and the grappling of my queerness, and so these poems reflect the uncertainties of the reality I carry, and how it is to understand or accept yourself or even to forgive yourself in a more authentic way.

Michael: I was struck by the poem “Twelve Questions” when the speaker says the body is “marked with history”. To what extent is talking about history, personal, familial, municipal, ethnolinguistic, important to you and your poetic practice?

Jennifer: To me, “history” is always present, a living thing. The poem was written in response to the twelve questions in Bhanu Kapil’s poem in Jennifer Lee Tsai’s workshop. I like the way we can ask ourselves questions and come up with surprising answers.

I am marked by history as an artist, as a partner, and as a mother.

I think we tend to underestimate how much we are shaped by our own history and collective history. I am marked by history as an artist, as a partner, and as a mother. I feel that history changes us, the way we look at reality, and our own desires are, as a result, polished by the sea like smooth pieces of glass. We lose our jagged edges.

When I was writing these poems, I thought a lot about the pandemic period too, because that is when I experienced a long period of silence between me and my mum, and later, me and a friend. Then there is also a larger sense of silence or difficulty in understanding the world we live in, which is precarious and full of silent conversations. That is pre-history, and that we are all shaped by it, but in different ways.

“Twelve Questions” is available at the end of this conversation.

Michael: A number of your poems, especially those in Section II such as “Diary”, explore matrilineal relations, daughters, mothers, grandmothers, a theme that you also explored in your previous pamphlet, time difference (2024). In what ways is this gendered, matrilineal connection important to you and your work?

The matrilineal side feels emotionally close to me but physically far away, and full of gaps.

Jennifer: I have always been much closer to the matrilineal side of my family because of the tension within my family. Strangely, although we as a family lived with the paternal grandparents for a number of years, we were less close to them because of the tense relations between my parents and my paternal grandparents. My childhood was punctuated with frequent and regular monthly visits to my maternal grandmother, who lived on the other side of Hong Kong, at the end of the Tseung Kwan O line. My maternal grandmother could not write, could not walk easily, and spoke Mandarin. So the matrilineal side feels emotionally close to me but physically far away, and full of gaps.

The other matrilineal poem is “婆婆”, which is an elegy, in a way, as I try to remap my own history: what if I can do something to place my maternal grandmother, my “por por”, on the map, bringing her with me to England? What kind of joy or completeness will I experience? That is a reimagined version of what my por por can be, as a woman who reclaims her freedom, from bound feet and illiteracy and gender stereotypes and all that.

^{Poems in this collection explore family relations through shared memories. In “Time Difference”, for instance, soup dumplings become imagery for family meals in Hong Kong. (Credit: Jennifer Wong)}

Michael: I am also interested in how you create resonances with readers by sharing intricate details about your family. In the poem “Wai Ta Nai 維他奶”, the speaker’s father listening to one Kenny G song in a hotel room is a particularly strong image. How do you choose which family episode to write about and how do they help you convey the themes of your work?

I think these family memories are sort of ineradicable, and resurface as I compose.

Jennifer: I think these family memories are sort of ineradicable, and resurface as I compose. I do not think I came up with anything planned. Often it is just the way one experience is connected with another, and as I scribble down ideas and phrases spontaneously, the intermittent imageries, conversations, and experiences come back to me. I am sometimes surprised by them, and occasionally I wonder if it was really me who remembered them. For example, one salient image that came back to me about my father is that Mum and I were standing along the Tsim Sha Tsui promenade, seeing him at work inside the hotel, through the floor-to-ceiling window of the dining room. And when he is at home, he is usually very silent, having spent his voice with the customers.

I tend to be drawn to the family episodes that I am not fully able to understand, and try to work out their meanings as I write about them. It is at times embarrassing or makes me feel guilty writing about them, and so I also rearrange or reinvent the truth, so that I can make it accessible to myself and the reader.

Michael: Your poem “Because” in this collection is a powerful reflection on your UK-based status that I am sure will resonate a lot with many recent migrants in the UK. How have the UK’s recent politics and social attitudes towards immigration affected your identity and your poems?

Some days, I wake up feeling shocked that not only has racism not disappeared, it has in fact become worse over the years.

Jennifer: I wish that things had moved on, but the truth is the society I now live in has failed to give a level playing field to migrants, and I see it as an important thing to keep fighting for more space, more justice for migrants, especially in the UK. Some days, I wake up feeling shocked that not only has racism not disappeared, it has in fact become worse over the years, and I begin to see the pattern repeated for different types or different generations of migrants, even though they may not be aware of it. I have often been asked when I am going home, which, to someone who was researching and writing about the notion of home during the PhD, and someone who has given birth in that country, I think my indignation is justified. I do not go about meeting new people and then asking them when they would be returning home. This thought is also echoed in Daisy Hung’s moving memoir I Am Not a Tourist (2025).

I use the refrain as a scaffolding because I think we often ignore how much migrants are repeatedly subject to that same unfairness, the unfairness of being looked at differently, being heard differently. Is there something intrinsically wrong about being a migrant? And what is the allegiance for a migrant? Is it acceptable to love the new country of residence? How does a migrant continue to keep hold of “home”, their place or culture of origin?

Michael: In “Dream Street”, the speaker says, “It wouldn’t have made sense / even to go back / to snap a picture”. This is both a poignant epiphany and a powerful decry of capitalist urban redevelopment. And of course, Hong Kong, as always, is featured in many of the poems, such as one of my favourites, “Sitting in the car with my brother, on a Monday morning, somewhat cloudy, before leaving”. How important is it for you to write about the city, or indeed, against the city?

I suppose for someone who grew up in a city, you never leave the city.

Jennifer: I suppose for someone who grew up in a city, you never leave the city. The backdrop of sounds, people’s voices, things on the move, the sleeplessness of it all never quite leaves. And after university, I also worked for property companies in Hong Kong twice, and those experiences or that knowledge have shaped my imagination. With “Dream Street”, I was thinking both personally and historically, the impact of the act of removal, the nature of an artificially altered landscape, how the man-made changes, or as you mentioned, the urban redevelopment, could have changed the land and how you access or navigate it so completely. In London too, where I lived for a number of years, one often sees gated gardens in upscale neighbourhoods, how manicured and well-maintained they are, yet out of reach to most people. It is something people aspire to, living in, say, Notting Hill or Chelsea, and in Hong Kong places like Kowloon Tong or the Mid-Levels, but the fact is that I remain an outsider to those places, just like most of us are, and yet our minds refuse to accept that.

In writing that poem, I am particularly happy that I included the Sikh and the way he gave away so many fruits on the last day of his shop. I just felt that it captured for me the sense of grief I had, the way you offer a place or someone what you have, and when your effort is unappreciated or when your shop fails, what do you do? You have to say goodbye to the neighbourhood or the people you love. In Chinese there is the phrase, “There is no banquet that never ends”.

I am also very grateful to Poetry London for first taking on and publishing the poem!

^{“The magnolia trees were gone. / Don’t ask me how.” says the speaker in “Dream Street”. Here is a picture of a magnolia tree taken by Jennifer Wong at Wisley.}

Michael: In “Crumbs”, you explore the politics of friendship. Through the speaker’s tone, the impatience, and the sarcasm, the poem does such an impressive job in painting the crude emotions involved in both unfriending someone or being unfriended by someone. Could you talk a bit about how you turn such relationship trauma into poetry?

Jennifer: I am glad that I have kept it for the book! At some point this was a poem I wrote and then wanted to chuck into the wastepaper basket, so to speak. In writing the poem, I was reminded of a scenario once when I was walking in a National Trust property, which is a beautiful but massive woodland, and I was trying to find my way out and realising it was getting dark and there was no phone signal in the woods. The dread that you may not survive. But I do not know, I was hoping that the sense of frustration also embodies one’s inadequacy and desire to be understood, to ask for the crumbs of whatever is left in a relationship, to be forgiven even.

I love bringing social media to the forefront of the poem, the ways that we engage so much with it and yet these social media buttons of likes, follows, and unfollows cannot fully register our own engagement or experience. You can click like on something you do not actually like. You can unfriend someone you love or care deeply about, and yet that may be a deliberate thing to do, you are still left with all those memories and it is not as if any friend will totally disappear from your life the moment you click unfollow or unlike. I also remember being scolded once by a friend that I should not go back to re-like some old posts.

Michael: Compared to your earlier poems, one thing I have noticed is that over the years you have started adding more Chinese characters in your poetry. Also, in light of the many editorial works you have done, such as Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology (Verve, 2023), do you think these multilingual experiments reflect a broader confidence that poets from Hong Kong nowadays have with using foreign languages in their work?

Jennifer: It is absolutely wonderful to see that so many poets now have embraced that element of multilingual expression in their creative work, and it is surprising that it has taken so long for poets to realise that it is vital to capture certain experiences or trajectories of our minds through those multilingual expressions. How we need to permit ourselves to reclaim, in part, the linguistic worlds we inherit.

I enjoy the multilingual composition in “Cleanly”, which came from the visual collage pieces I explored with in Melissa Fu’s workshop in Oxford. It was fun, and I was struck by how much etymology is in each character, how several meanings reside in the same word, and what if you split up a word or single out a word from its context. Can you do that? Will anyone still understand?

Michael: Could you tell us a bit about your writing and editing process? For example, some of the poems from your pamphlet time difference (2024) appear here but with some edits. How do you go about editing your own writing or poems? Do you tend to edit yourself a lot?

There were poems that I decided to edit further at the last minute to protect myself and others, to make them “safer”.

Jennifer: Thank you for bringing into the picture the process of editing, which, I think, is such an open process, and although I often find it daunting to edit a poem well, I also enjoy it immensely. I have different versions of different poems, I do not keep them too systematically, but the different versions do mean something. In time difference, there were poems that I decided to edit further at the last minute to protect myself and others, to make them “safer”, to create a sense of distance from the reality, and there are also poems where I further edited to make them less safe, to take more risks, and be more honest with myself. I will not be able to elaborate too much on which is which, but I am proud of some changes to make the poems better. At the end of the day, you do what is best for the poem, not for yourself. But some of the poems are also very unedited, for example, poems such as “When you stopped talking to me for a year” or “Time difference” came out very much unedited or minimally changed. I guess it was because I so badly needed an outlet for those spontaneous, pent-up thoughts that when those thoughts have been bottled up for so long, they just arrive as they are, complete and waiting to be released.

At the same time, because I was feeling such pangs of grief and despair for quite a long while working on Light Year, to the point of having to postpone the collection for half a year, I realised that some poems that were included only months or even weeks before the deadline were quite unedited. They are quite raw, to some extent, and would I have wanted to edit more or for longer? Yes, probably, if I could have another extension, but I am also fond of their “raw” edges now, so to speak, as they embody some lack of closure, I guess.

Michael: You have been publishing poetry in English for more than 20 years now and this is your fourth full-length poetry volume. Looking back, what is a tip you would have given to your younger self about creative writing?

Jennifer: This makes me feel old! Well, it is true, there are several books, and I think each time I learn something new about writing. I think it is a brilliant thing if we could even give advice to our younger self. There would be so many things to say to my younger self, honestly. One tip I must share with my younger self is definitely to be more adventurous and more trusting of yourself, to go ahead with what is important to my work and not to worry too much about what anyone else says. And at the same time to be humble and to learn from others, to know that every day there will be poets who write better or more exciting work than you and that your mind can be changed or educated by those new works too, so not to be fixed in your mindset or stagnate in your learning of the craft. And also, to love your own work, claim your own work. I realise that I have to be the advocate or to love my own work, this is the duty to myself and my own writing.

^{How to cite: Tsang, Michael and Jennifer Wong. “Writing Through Loss, Language, and Home: On Light Year.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 20 Apr. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/04/20/light-year.}

Michael Tsang is an academic, a writer, and for the first time ever, he can call himself an “artist”. His creative works can be found in Cha, Wasafiri, Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology  among other places. He teaches literature and popular culture of East Asia at Birkbeck, University of London. [Michael Tsang and chajournal.blog.] [Cha Staff]

Jennifer Wong is the author of Light Year and Letters Home, both published by Nine Arches Press; both collections received a Poetry Book Society Commendation. Wong holds a PhD in creative writing from Oxford Brookes University and is currently a visiting lecturer on the MA in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. She is editing the Rebecca Swift Foundation’s inaugural Woman, Mapped anthology, which features work by selected contemporary women poets in the UK. The anthology will be published in July this year. [Jennifer Wong and chajournal.blog.]