Your Name in My Lexicon Means Yes

By | 8 June 2020
Once, you talked to me on the phone,

I complained about the loud wind

obscuring your voice. You responded:

Baby, I can’t make the wind stop.


The creation of meanings

takes three steps: saying yes,

singing no, unbinding maybe,

and be understood, un-annotated.


My Cantonese knows no new slang.

Your plurality of languages,

body, eyes, fingers like lovers,

speak of unfeasible eras.


You called me petty, naive, dishonest,

too cultural and too self-aware.

I said the latest version of you

legitimises your superiority.
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Tammy Lai-Ming Ho is the founding co-editor of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, an editor of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, Hong Kong Studies, and has edited a number of literary anthologies and features centring on Hong Kong. She is also the President of PEN Hong Kong, a junior fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of Humanities, and an Associate Director of One City One Book Hong Kong. An Associate Professor at the Department of English at Hong Kong Baptist University, she teaches poetics, fiction, and modern drama. Her first poetry collection is Hula Hooping (2015), for which she won the Young Artist Award in Literary Arts from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Her other books are Too Too Too Too (2018), Her Name Upon the Strand (2018), An Extraterrestrial in Hong Kong (2018), and the scholarly book Neo-Victorian Cannibalism (2019). She is currently editing several academic volumes and a bilingual anthology of Hong Kong poetry.

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