[FICTION] “Their Voices, Varied and Many” by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho and Reid Mitchell

Do you know where I can buy them in Hong Kong?

Tammy Lai-Ming Ho’s on “Their Voices, Varied and Many”: Reid Mitchell came to Hong Kong from New Orleans and, as he put it, “refugeed” in the city for one crucial year. He joined the Hong Kong Writers’ Circle, taught American Studies at the University of Hong Kong, and became my writing partner, my friend and, now and then, my kindest editor. He later served as Consulting Editor of 𝐶ℎ𝑎 (2009-2019). Our friendship was a long conversation that turned into poems and literary dialogues, among them the villanelle “Caught in the Flood” and the chapbook Lovers’ Conversations, unpublished.

“Their Voices, Varied and Many” is set in a Hong Kong tower block. The building’s walls are “expensive and thin”. Six neighbours share these walls. The story features confessions, seductions and small cruelties.

A previous version of “Their Voices, Varied and Many” was published in Love & Lust, edited by Jeff Zroback (founding-co-editor of Cha) and me by the Hong Kong Writers’ Circle in 2008, pp. 163 to 179.

Reid died in 2023. You know what’s interesting to me? I really can’t tell which sentences were written by me and which were by Reid. I wish I had one of those hairpins. But maybe I’m wearing one in this picture.

Mrs Yeung

That girl runs. Into the elevator, out of the elevator, down to the street, up the steps from the taxi. Sweat sparkles on her forearms as if she had plunged her arms into diamonds, and sweat kisses her upper lip. Sweat blesses her already blessed body. Sweat forms a dark hand that caresses her nipples, that draws a wet path past her belly button. Her blood is in her face. She’s a sunset, she’s a harvest moon.

I walk sedately, seemingly more secure, actually in terror. As I age, what if my body loses its allure for my young man? I am childless so I could keep this body. Nothing stretched. Everything trim and tight. He says I am beautiful. Before the end, he will remember his family’s name and need. When he looks at me, he will observe that I am a moon that wanes. While she has wide hips to breed, and the flush under her skin announces she lusts to become a mother of fine-pepper sons and tofu-eating daughters. Not Sarah. Some girl. Some girl soon. Perhaps Sarah. Not so long ago, in China’s broad history, I at least would have been kept as first wife, and the shameless hussy would have to wait on me; beloved as she might be, she would be impatient for that next concubine to push her out of place of slave in bed and out.

If my time comes, I will continue to dress like a fashion model; it will be the smoke at the bar in the Peninsula that will put the lines I fight now onto my face. And the men who admire me will be ten years older than I am. Young men will importune me no more.

Sarah and Charles

Sarah: The sheets last night smelled of starch and felt stiff. This morning they smell of sweat and they cling to our bodies.

Charles: Here walls are papered, expensive and thin. You scream, and the neighbours hear knowingly and perhaps bitterly too. Our two voices often take turns to form unintelligible but rhythmic verses; but sometimes they overlap. Marvellous sound textures. The moment we stop giving a damn about the ears of the Yeungs and Wongs over the uncracked walls, we have liberation.

Sarah: When we ride the elevators, the old couples often look at us as if we were still naked and dripping. I cannot resist smiling at their censorious faces. Only that little old man living opposite us, Mr Wong, smiles back and even takes his little bow. Of course they all find us amusing.

Charles: The Wongs are fighting less these days but there is a constant suspenseful atmosphere enveloping their overly decorated door, dragon and phoenix and all that. Mrs Wong with her wrinkled and multiple chins seems to have forgotten that her shrilling yells out of anger are no less delicious than sounds we make when we play naked games.

Sarah: Mr Wong is our true audience. He dreams of my legs but never envies your prick. His age saddens him but he welcomes laughter, welcomes the smells of spring and the sound of summer, and admires me in my health, my beauty, and, most of all, my eagerness.

Charles: What is with the excessive amount of old Chinese New Year fai chuns on their door? They have refused to peel them off for two years; and they have also stopped giving us laisees. Perhaps they no longer care about ceremonies, polite routines and repetitive rituals. Perhaps, I should not think, but they might have ultimately stopped peeling each other’s clothes.

Sarah: If he still enters her, he dreams of me.

Mr Wong and Mrs Wong

Mr Wong: In supermarkets we fought, in cinemas we argued, in beds we hated each other. Over the years, we said goodbye, we departed and vowed not to get back together. Every time your absence was unfamiliar to me. But you came back with your tired expression again and again.

Mrs Wong: Now, we are too old to pretend that we make new lives for ourselves.

Mr Wong: I never had the courage to ask you where you went in the summer of 1965. That time, you were away for three long months. You came back to me eventually, but your lips were even more unforgiving and your teeth constantly grinding, like the whole world was gossiping about you and you dreaded it immensely.

Mrs Wong: Of course you didn’t dare ask me when I came back that September, the September of 1965. I could still make men stare, and stutter, and trip themselves like drunkards in the summer of 1965.

Mr Wong: You know those few months, summer filled with cicadas, early-grown lilies and secrets, have been foregrounded in our relationship.

Sarah

I have never seen so many rooms and so few people. Nobody cooks in the courtyard. No grandmothers command their grandchildren. Every woman gets to wash her body with water from pipes, water cold and hot, with nobody to watch her but her boyfriend or husband. When I realised this, I thought, they have built a space for lovers of all ages. I lay down in my bed and touched myself here and there and there, and I waited for Charles to come home. All that long drowsy afternoon, with the sun in my face. I lay there and listened to the elevator rising and falling, doors opening and closing, buses and taxis bringing people home, men and women coming together and pulling away satiated and satisfied or satiated and still not satisfied, automobiles honking in greeting and in farewell, and I touched myself to be sure I was wet when Charles came home.

Mr Yeung and Mrs Yeung

Mr Yeung: You really ordered those panties.

Mrs Yeung: Yes. Three pairs of used schoolgirl panties from Japan. One red, one striped and one Hello Kitty pair. And see, she sent us photographs of herself masturbating while she wears the panties.

Mr Yeung: I like the striped ones; they remind me of the first time you seduced me.

Mrs Yeung: You were only twenty. And a virgin! And shyer than any Japanese schoolgirl.

Mr Yeung: How could I not be? Those breasts of yours breaking through the black bra. I almost could not control the first gush of sticky juice coming out of my spoiled little brother.

Mrs Yeung: You got better.

Mr Yeung: Not really. You always have new things, new techniques that stun me. In you I escape from the mundane.

Mrs Yeung: There’s nothing novel in fantasies about Japanese schoolgirls. It’s embarrassing we are just getting around to them.

Mr Yeung: But in these panties you look like twenty. Who would have guessed you are forty-five?

Mrs Yeung: Twenty is pretty old for a Japanese schoolgirl, fool. But now that I’m wearing this pair, put the Hello Kitty pair (they’re rayon) on your right hand and then…

Mr Wong and Mrs Wong

Mrs Wong: He wasn’t anybody you knew. Back in 1965. Not that your friends didn’t try me. And your boss too. I had that much respect for you at least.

Mr Wong: I knew they preyed on you.

Mrs Wong: That is you, a man trying to think the way he thinks a woman would think. Nobody preyed on anybody. I liked the different faces, the different smells, the cocks many and various, each one with a different girth or slant. I liked the different lies and promises and protestations. I never liked betraying you. I have never regretted the betrayal either. Men loved me, women too. During those precious, precarious, perishable minutes, I was the centre of the world.

Mr Wong: I did not expect such a long speech from you. I envy that you were the centre of the world once, even though now no one would even lay an eye on you.

Mrs Wong: Still an amateur at cruelty. Maybe a woman can only have so many men and they came to me quickly. I have fingers and memories.

Charles and Mrs Yeung

Charles: I love those hairpins that Mrs Wong has. They look like something that women would wear in old Shanghai posters. The pins must be antiques. Do you think they are from her mother?

Mrs Yeung: Oh, so you study old women. I will warn all the others.

Charles: I observe.

Mrs Yeung: You know, only a connoisseur would have noticed those hairpins. Women your age don’t require adornment. Your wife is splendid au naturel.

Charles: No, I am not married yet. Sometimes I think she is too boyish. I wonder how long she expects me to wait until she sheds her teenage-hood completely and wraps herself in a more mature layer of skin.

Mrs Yeung: Don’t flatter. I have no money for you to take.

Charles: You notice so many things about Sarah.

Mrs Yeung: And you want to know if I notice you. She’s fresh and refreshing water. You are cognac. I need fresh water, but I don’t dilute cognac.

Mrs Wong

My hand stretches out blindly. I knock an ashtray, an alarm clock from the table by my bed. My husband is gone; my lovers all dead; and my real body has been taken away and this doll of rags and bones and suet substituted but is not me. This doll is not me. The seagulls took my heart and flew to the north once the rivers melted. Next door, a young woman is beginning to learn all the ways that a woman can cry. In the harbour, the seagulls dance and call. They come for me. They will come for the young woman too.

Sarah and Mr Yeung

Sarah: Isn’t the rain going to ruin your nice suit? You always look so prim and proper.

Mr Yeung: Not always. You should see me when I’m working out.

Sarah: Do not tease me. That is a sight best left for the eyes of Mrs Yeung.

Mr Yeung: So you are not used to admiring muscles? Or do you only adore slender men with thin limbs like your boyfriend?

Sarah: It’s not muscles or even your musculature, as manly as it no doubt is. I will look at any Greek god, so long as he remains in marble. Remember, not too many years ago, I was a schoolgirl who loved athletes. Now I am a college girl and must learn to love the mind most of all.

Mr Yeung: But the mind is at its most lovable state when mind and body are one. How much do you know?

Sarah: I know very little. I suspect a lot. I am just wise enough not to imagine one man’s supple mind can enter another man’s supple body.

Mr Yeung: How about one man’s supple mind and a woman’s supple body?

Sarah: Oh yes. We finally agree. You and I have obvious minds. Mrs Yeung’s supple mind and your supple body, my supple body and Charles’s supple mind. You see? The philosophers will shut up when we solve the Mind/Body problem.

Mr Yeung: One needs to be more flexible and adventurous than that. Are you happy being confined to one mind, one body?

Sarah: If I were any more flexible, Mr Yeung, I would be a yoga teacher. And I never start a new adventure until the one I am on is over.

Mr Yeung: You are still young. You have time left for many adventures.

Sarah: Shall I say the same thing to you, Mr Yeung? Shall we keep this as our little secret?

Charles and Mrs Wong

Charles: Your hairpins are really nice, Mrs Wong. Sorry if I am blunt, but are they expensive?

Mrs Wong: They did not seem so at the time. Now I think I gave up too much.

Charles: I think my aunt might like them. Do you know where I can buy them in Hong Kong?

Mrs Wong: Young man, somebody gave these to me. I am sure he bought them somewhere, but where? He was a man who liked to travel, a man who liked adventure, a man who liked to exchange things. Do you have something to exchange for my hairpins?

Charles: No, I have nothing to exchange for your hairpins. All the precious things I have, I give up for limited-edition hardcover books.

Mrs Wong: If you really like my hairpins, I can give you a few. Maybe I can give you all of them. But you need to promise to give each to one important woman you love: your girlfriend, your aunt, your mother, your mistress, whomever. These things do not mean much to me now.

Charles: You must have meant a lot to the man who gave you these.

Mrs Wong: You think so? I made that mistake too. Maybe your hands can take the curse away.

Charles: Does Mr Wong know about the man? If some man gives something beautiful and expensive to Sarah, I will be very hurt.

Mrs Wong: Tell Sarah to be very careful with those hairpins. They can scratch. Ask my husband.

Sarah and Charles

Sarah: You want me to wear her hairpins?

Charles: Only one of them.

Sarah: While you clutch a whole handful? Wow. I don’t know which bugs me the most: that you want me to wear my hair like Mrs Wong or that you don’t think I’m good enough for a full set of hairpins. One for me, one for that secretary in your department, two or three for Mrs Yeung.

Charles: Calm down! Mrs Wong was very generous to give me these five hairpins; you have no idea how expensive they are. They are made of old Sinkiang jade. She has said I can only give one to one woman. I am not sure about giving one to Loida but I will definitely give one to Mrs Yeung. I hope you do not object to that? Also, one for my aunt and one for my mum. I do not want you to wear your hair exactly like Mrs Wong; your hair is not thick and long enough. I just thought that the butterfly one looks good on you.

Sarah: My hair isn’t good enough for Mrs Wong’s hairpins. You decided to spare me one anyway. Maybe I had things backwards; maybe you dream of Mrs Wong before you enter me!

Charles: Don’t be ridiculous! You know I am not attracted to her: her multiple chins repulse me and she always looks gloomy. I honestly am only interested in her hairpins. I have noticed them for all these two years.

Sarah: Why on earth do you want to give a hairpin to Mrs Yeung?

Charles: She’s always been nice to you.

Sarah: Did Mrs Wong give you a deadline? You have to give all five hairpins to five separate women by dawn or the dead come to reclaim them? Ooooo, scary.

Mrs Yeung and Charles

Mrs Yeung: This is so lovely. Can you really mean for me to have it?

Charles: A pair of ducks. If you don’t mind, Mrs Yeung, when I saw the hairpin, I could see this design floating in the knot of your hair.

Mrs Yeung: I think my husband would have picked out a snake. Which do you prefer? When I arrange the hairpin in this knot at the nape of my neck? See? Or when I withdraw it, now, as if to shake my hair loose and free?

Charles: Mrs Yeung, I am in awe of the beauty and fairness of your neck. It looks so soft. Can you put the hairpin back? One more glimpse of your neck, and I am a very happy man for the day.

Mrs Yeung: Oh, call me Barbara, Charles. You mean like this? Ooops, I am so clumsy! Can you help me? Yes, lift my hair, yes, oh your fingers feel so warm on my neck.

Charles: You feel like ivory, cool, and you smell of… what… pomegranates?

Mrs Yeung: You are confusing my scent with my perfume. Breathe deeper. Breathe closer. Are you kissing my neck, Charles?

Charles: Sorry, I can’t help it. I had better get going. I dropped by to give you the hairpin.

Mrs Yeung: No, don’t go. Keep kissing my neck. Your kisses are so gentle.

Charles: To kiss your neck thoroughly, you must let me undo this button, and this one too, your neck runs down through your spine. Yes and these buttons as well, your neck runs through your spine all the way to here, where your spine enters your pelvis. Why, you are sweating, Mrs Yeung, and your scent is stronger than pomegranate now. May I continue? Please let me, please let me, please let me.

Mrs Yeung: Don’t stop. There, open that drawer and cuff me.

Charles: Shall I handcuff you to the bed and leave you for your husband to find? Let him smell me on your body. I won’t let you rinse me off.

(Mrs Yeung: So delicious, so young, he doesn’t even know I have spare keys to the cuffs.)

Mr Wong and Charles

Mr Wong: See this scratch, boy? This one has almost healed. See these? Thin lines and thick, like somebody wrote poetry on my body. But I cannot take off my shirt. It is a ploughed field, a battlefield, a mass of open graves.

Charles: Are these from Mrs Wong? They seem to be her songlines on your body like the Australian Aboriginals’ on the myriad landscapes of their mythological world. Was she claiming her territory?

Mr Wong: Reclaiming her territory? Nobody ever wanted this body, heavy and old before its time. Every time we fight, she weakens me and I love her less. These scars are nobody’s victories.

Charles: Why do you fight? What makes you two creatures of the dawn?

Mr Wong: My ears are old but big. You and Sarah are creatures of the dawn. I think at dawn all our dreams, the good ones and the bad, wake us. Since you wake up to love, you imagine we wake up to hate. We wake up to indifference and inconvenience. Hate would be a more noble reason for us to fight.

Charles: Your wife gave me her jade hairpins. She refused to tell me the story behind them. Women seem to have so many secrets hidden in the mobility of their hearts.

Mr Wong: She gave you her hairpins? Cricket, snake, toad, butterfly… I cannot remember all five. She never let me take them away. How do they fall into the hands of a boy? Well, why not? She loves your girlfriend very much. But she used to love me, so long ago neither of you was born. Still, it pleases me and frightens me.

Charles: No, no, Mrs Wong said I can only give one of the pins to Sarah. Others I must give to other women. Do you think she is happy? She seems to be very pensive all the time; of course, you know better.

Mr Wong: I promise you, she is as happy as she will ever be.

Mr Yeung

If I have a pomegranate, does it mean I cannot also have the luck of the peach? If I have the finest meal in the most exquisite hotel, am I denied simpler food I eat sitting on a stool on the sidewalk? So young when Barbara introduced me to pleasure. Now I love Barbara and pleasure too. She taught me to love pleasure. And here I am, a devotee of her and of pleasure. She brings treats to our bed; I will bring treats to her. We both crave younger flesh. Let me be a teacher too. We both carve younger flesh: succulent morsels to pass from lips to lips. After all, when I eat a woman, her belly is more satisfied than mine. That’s all men and women need do: fulfil each other. At least, that’s what Barbara told me when she was still young.

Mr Wong and Sarah

Mr Wong: What are you studying? Shakespeare? Or Postmodernism?

Sarah: Oh, Mr Wong, that’s Charles. He’s the academic. You must have seen me carrying some of his books home. I try and try reading them, so I can understand what he is doing, and talk to him. He mustn’t learn how stupid I am compared to him.

Mr Wong: In the old days, it was a virtue for girls not to have any kind of intellect. What are they saying these days? “Hot” girls should have slim bodies?

Sarah: They say slim bodies are nice. But what if men call us skinny behind our backs? What if a man wants a girl with wide hips for bearing children and big breasts for nurture? Don’t believe all you read. Life is not so easy for us contemporary women.

Mr Wong: Oh, you are not yet a “woman”. There is an old saying: the young do not really know what sorrow is. They think their petty concerns eat them up and bring forth the end of the universe. When they get old they will know better. You think life is easy for us old folks? The world seems to mock our feebleness every time we climb the stairs or try to look decent. You know what, when I wake up every morning, I am stupid. It takes me fifteen minutes to get my eyes open and focus.

Sarah: You are joking!

Mr Wong: I’m not joking. I can walk into the kitchen, fumble around, and make a pot of tea with my eyes closed. And I think I am quite blind.

Sarah: If you are blind, the whole world weeps for you until it is blind too.

Mr Wong: You say the nicest things to an old man.

Sarah: Well, I know how the world treats you. That is why I always smile for you but rarely speak. But perhaps you first knew sorrow long before we met.

Mr Wong: Long before you were born, young lady.

Sarah: Yes, that is your story. I do not know the details. I don’t have to. That hurt a long time ago gentled you. What I cannot know is if the hurt happened once and never went away, or if the hurt waits for you in ambush.

Mr Wong: Come dine with my wife and me sometimes, will you? We need some young people in the house.

Sarah: Your wife, I think, Mrs Wong, she might have something to say about that.

Mrs Wong and Mrs Yeung

Mrs Wong: Ayeh, so he has already given them away. I paid with body and heart for all these.

Mrs Yeung: Our young man presented me with the pair of ducks. What else did he give you?

Mrs Wong: The clever bastard tried to tell a story: a pair of ducks, a butterfly, a three-legged toad, a cricket, a snake. He gave me the snake when he threw me out of his bed. He said I had earned something by my pains.

Mrs Yeung: Well, I would love to have the snake. Who do you think Charles gave it to? I really want to know.

Mrs Wong: You want the bitter dregs. I should have stayed home after the toad. And it should take young Charles twenty-five years to give five away.

Mrs Yeung: Do you think he gave that little bitch the snake? Does he think she’s a snake?

Mrs Wong: My own uncle, stealing me from my husband. I agree, you deserve the snake more than that little girl. Are you not planning to take something else from her?

Mrs Yeung: Nah. The only thing I want from her is her youth. That I cannot steal. I was very surprised, though, that you gave all the hairpins to the young man. What’s the deal?

Mrs Wong: I need pretty things no more.

Mrs Yeung: Nonsense! We all need pretty things until our last breath. I don’t give up easily. Oh I wish I had the snake. Perhaps I could talk to Charles. Force him even.

Mrs Wong: Ah, you are not going to take the young man from her. Only borrow, as a neighbour might borrow something for a party. But the hairpin. Only you would be insulted that the young man knows a woman he considered more of a snake than you.

Mrs Yeung: You wait and see. I will get that snake.

Mrs Wong: The hairpin? Why not? You already got his other snake.

Charles

I suppose I should admit to leaving a woman back home. I begged her to come to Hong Kong with me. But nobody had the money: I, she, fathers, friends, cousins, brothers, nor Mum. Her quiet beauty: I love her beauty. Sarah is brash, all passion and anger: I love her beauty too. But Sarah’s still a girl. Back home, I had a woman. Now, we make love in distance, through a number of send-able things in emails: poetry as foreplay, words for kisses, pictures our orgasm. A gush of violent emotion of curiosity. We are often covered in sweat, sticky with memories and expectations of what is to come, a tangle of comments of nudity and the state of affair. Desire possesses me and her silently, or the other way round? I wonder how long I shall stay in Hong Kong. Perhaps the rest of my life.

Mr Yeung and Mrs Yeung

Mr Yeung: I was setting out milk in a saucer, trying to entice a pussy home to us. But now I hear you have found a tomcat for us instead. Is that nice? An un-neutered tom will spray the flat.

Mrs Yeung: Some cats have to be hunted as a couple. Get on the telephone and order us a big bed. Order us what Americans call a king bed.

Mr Yeung: So soon? The pussy is not yet ready; she sounded cool when I talked to her last time. Give me some tips.

Mrs Yeung: Does it matter which one of us opens that flower? Once I have spread her petals, she will have no more spine, only her buds. That boy, that worthless boy, will open up her and offer her himself when I am through with him. With your permission.

Mr Yeung: I can never leave you. I am the cub; you are the tigress.

Mrs Yeung: Smell my scent and lick my fur.

Mr Yeung: Let me find the Hello Kitty panties.

Mrs Yeung: No, let me bare my teeth, reveal my claws and taste your blood. I am more of a man than you will ever be.

Mr Wong

How often was it? Every five, every seven years, she would bring them to me, the five of them, and ask me to take them as a New Year’s gift. Cricket for fighting, toad for not attaining, snake for selfishness, butterfly for beauty, ducks for partnership; did I deserve any of them? Take them, she would say. Let them be my gift to you. His gift to me, I said. This thin man with a moustache (yes, I had seen him in my mind, this thin merciless man) may send me gifts too, since he sent you back, but I do not want his gifts. I want the gift you brought me when you brought yourself to my bed. That night you pretended to be a virgin and I knew no better. Bring me your lies, not your honesty.

People say you are cruel to me, young Sarah says you are cruel to me, young Sarah loves me for your cruelty, but what I never can forgive you for is not the scars but the diminishment. When I look back, I am not sure who diminished me. I said no too many times. She took her treasures and looked around and saw a girl whose soul could not be attained, a sly selfish man, a man who thought he was an ox but who was as transparent as a butterfly, a woman yoked to her marriage. I was the poor, wee, feeble fighting thing.

Her hands were too wizened to give; they were too wizened to hold on to the talisman the thin man sent me. Now she’s given them away. And yet I am not comforted and I do not care to comfort her. If I did, would I start with a kiss, or a slap, or a cup of tea in the morning? I will make her a cup of tea in the morning. Iron Buddha. At least we will breathe. Perhaps we will talk.

Their Voices,
Varied and Many

Attendant 1: Come on, come on, come on, hurry!

Mr Wong: I think my wife is dying.

Mrs Yeung: She locked the door. Do you have an axe?

Attendant 2: They blocked the door.

Charles: You could always hear the voices.

Attendant 2: What do you ask me to do?

Sarah: Sometimes I couldn’t sleep.

Mr Yeung: The choices they had made were ugly. There were days I swore if I heard her hungry voice rave I would choke her.

Mr Wong: My wife will surely die.

Attendant 1: Step aside, step aside. This isn’t a puppet show or a pigeon stall or an invitation to a funeral.

Attendant 2: They make me feel I always carry the wrong bodies away.

Mrs Yeung: I will break down the door myself. You are mere men with worthless brains.

Mr Yeung: Whoever has the most to gain or the loudest words to blame, hold him.

Sarah: Just this morning, she reached out her hand and touched me. Her bones on my cheek.

Attendant 2: Do you mind? We have little time, and the time you spend now will be deducted when we come for you and yours.

(Several voices: He’s right.)

Mr Wong: I never meant anything I said to her.

Attendant 1: Get behind me. Shove, shove, shove.

Attendant 2: Oh my God. Who would have thought the old lady would have so much blood in her?

Mr Wong: Don’t let her head hang down, don’t let her head hang down.

Mrs Yeung: Has anybody telephoned the police?

(Several voices: She’s right.)

Mr Yeung: He’s not going anywhere.

Attendant 1: Come on, sorry, sorry, sorry.

^{How to cite: Ho, Tammy Lai-Ming and Reid Mitchell. “Their Voices, Varied and Many.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 30 Sept. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/09/30/their voices.}

^{Tammy Lai-Ming Ho & Reid Mitchell, early 2000s, Hong Kong.}

Tammy Lai-Ming Ho is the editor-in-chief of Cha, while Reid Mitchell was Cha’s consulting editor of the journal between 2009 and 2019.