Book Review

Fanling in October opens with a journey back to Pui Ying Wong’s Hong Kong roots, as questions of memory, home, and loss ebb and flow alongside equally personal inquiries into the nature and role of poetry for a poet and for humankind. Much like the waterways, squalls, and quiet rainfalls that wend throughout Wong’s collection, its two lyric sections travel through recurring thematic territory woven with keen moments of observation. Whether navigating complex political realities or reflecting on the need for art in our contemporary environment, Fanling in October is grounded in the natural world and populated by everyday people going about their lives, from child to bride, groundskeeper to unnamed passerby.

Water fills this collection, beginning with the appraising eye of an expatriate returned to a childhood’s coastal stomping grounds. Empire, colonization, domination—words that echo in the changed landscape, where ocean liners and vessels loaded with cargo have replaced family sampans and fishing boats. Wong’s efforts to revisit and remember are tinged with unmistakable loss. Wong’s depiction of Hong Kong’s 2019 demonstrations in “Be Water,” shows people who “…walk out into the heat / in mourning black, / trying to learn the way of water.” They are tired, like the poem’s bauhinias, of being “bedraggled / bruised” and seek fluidity in the face of surmounting obstacles. This mourning reverberates in the collection’s next poem, “Fanling in October,” where Wong and her family surround her father’s hospital bed encouraging him, when awake, to eat. The family’s thoughts and memories are submerged from one another “like an underwater city,” and Wong sees her father for what he is not: a young man inscribing love lines on a photograph, the working man who held his head high and his back straight “like a man who thinks about pride.” Due to the two poems’ close placement, Wong could as easily be writing about a government’s withdrawal from its people as her family’s own slow dissolution:

I think now about what’s rent between us,

how a family dies not by knife or fire

but by drought, it’s heart, shrinking,

so you wouldn’t

notice at first.

Wong luxuriates in such adjacencies throughout Fanling in October, both with poem placement and with intriguing use of simile, so that even her most simple poems gather currents and depth from what pools about them.

Wandering also plays a large role in Fanling in October, as poems move from Hong Kong to other shorelines, riverscapes, and writing residencies. Wong’s mind goes distances as well, exemplified in “Another Beginning,” the poem that opens the collection’s second section. An unspecified “you” is on a trail in September, noticing light between the trees while being “mindful of stones and sticks.” Some things, like past houses, have been left behind, while some light things, like a parka and a book of poems, are carried along. And contained within the poem’s boundary—a repetition of the first line as the last—Wong offers moments where existence is so much more than can be seen directly:

You think snow has no citizenship

and pain is not art. If a gaze

is as vast as love (as Paz envisioned)

it can hold the world and the world’s wreckage.

Many poems in Fanling in October range about the world and its wreckage: from a Bavarian Octoberfest celebration in “Hotel Munchner Kindl” where “the cobbled streets / weep all afternoon the sound of [horses’] hooves” to a French town where a river might overflow due to the nearby nuclear powerplant in “Bardigues,” to Loyang Town—immortalized by the Cold River poems Wong contemplates in “Meng Chiao”—where the titular poet “found / in every trail lost / many words for sorrow.”

Just as many poems rove pensive avenues with attentive gaze. One such poem is “The Walk,” where Wong—on her way to a station that will take her farther than her legs will carry her—studies the pattern of leafless trees, “a symmetry // in contrast to my own thoughts / which on this morning / are strands of formlessness.” In an attempt to make sense of the formless, Wong’s collection also seeks a role for art in a difficult, somewhat indifferent world. Is it true that “poetry is useless like house keys with no address,” as Wong states in the poem “In the City of Sirens”? Do poets just need to buckle down to their role as emotional cultivars—“acts of love begetting love…acts of faith begetting faith”—as in “New Year, Dawn”? Or are poets right to guard “a tiny flame / like a mother bear”?

Never settling on a conclusion, Wong seems to be indicating that questioning the world—its politics, its systems, and its lives—is what has worth. Humankind has much to learn from the simple and everyday people and objects we meet, including from the seemingly tenuous tree in “A Tree Grows on the Stone Wall”:

It grows. In spite of.

It learns to love the way

the way refugees learn to love

their host country.

It learns to take in rain,

nutrients through

secret channels.

…

All these take time. Then decades.

It is still learning.

Fanling in October is an appealing lyric expedition, and Pui Ying Wong is a hospitable travel companion. Her voice is clear and sonorous, and her images are precise—drawn from alert observations that are used imaginatively, so readers can feel the muck and charm of the world anew. It turns out that we, too, have much to still learn if we give ourselves enough time and reflection. Fanling in October is a collection that merits both.