5 Questions with Eileen Chong
Eileen Chong is an Australian poet of Chinese descent. She was born and raised in Singapore, and came to Australia as an adult migrant.
She started writing poetry in 2010, and is the author of 11 books published in Australia and the United States. Her work has been shortlisted for numerous prizes, such as the Anne Elder Award, the Australian Arts in Asia Award, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, and twice for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award.
Her first book, Burning Rice, is the first single-author collection of poetry by an Asian-Australian to be studied as part of the NSW HSC English syllabus. Her ninth collection, A Thousand Crimson Blooms was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry at the 2022 NSW Premier's Literary Awards.
She lives and works on unceded Gadigal land of the Eora Nation.
No.1
Congratulations on your tenth book! How do you think your poetry practice has evolved over time?
Thank you! I’ve now been writing for nearly 20 years, and certainly at the earlier stage of my career there was a lot more anxiety around material, voice, form and process. While I don’t take the muse for granted, I have also finally accepted that creativity is something that is inherent in my life, that it has now become so much part of the fabric of my being—it is not something that I can carelessly misplace. I have a lot more trust and confidence in the creative process now than when I first started writing.
I also try to hold on to a sense of the interior and the intrinsic, rather than the exterior—this is something I learned very early on, to try to keep the core of my art separate from the business. The American poet Dana Levin has talked about this in an interview, around the theory of manifestation, and how little we really control in this world for anything to happen at all. So I try to let go of many things while focusing on what I can make, and to try to keep making art to the best of my ability given whatever resources I have at the time.
No.2
We Speak of Flowers is a structurally imaginative collection, in that it features 101 poems (described as “layered fragments”) which can be read in any order and where new interpretations can emerge. How did this structure come about and what was your logic when it came to arranging them?
I’m certainly not the first person to write in a non-linear or unorthodox fashion—I think of the Anne Carson translation of the fragments of Sappho, Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquietude, Timothy Yu’s 100 Chinese Silences, Victoria Chang’s OBIT, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, for example. My previous collections were a little more conventional in their structure, with around 50 poems each in various sections. [But] I started to think about how so much of what I write about is organised in a fashion much more akin to Helene Cixous’ l’ecriture feminine, and of how I circle obsessions, images, and concerns across place, space, and time. We Speak of Flowers is also a book of grieving, written after my last grandparent, my maternal grandmother, passed away in 2020 in the country of my birth.
When I was growing up in Singapore, I attended Methodist and Anglican schools, but at home with my grandparents, our belief system was Buddhist, with elements of Taoism and folk animism. My grandmother used to take me to the Guan Yin Temple at Waterloo Street in Singapore to get my fortune, which required us to kneel in meditation before an altar, while shaking a bamboo container filled with numbered sticks until one would fall out. We would then throw two crescent-shaped clappers up in the air to determine if the fortune was accurate. If it was, then you took the stick to a man or woman behind the counter, who would give you your fortune according to the number on your stick. On one side was a Chinese poem, and on the other side, an interpretation of the poem, along with a lucky number.
To this day, when I return to Singapore, I go and get my fortune told at that same temple. It is my own ritual now. I really wanted to somehow honour this in my new book in memory of my grandmother. The grieving process for me was absolutely isolating because I was apart from my family in Singapore—it was hard for me to mark the important cultural dates and events around my grandmother’s death while in Australia. In my family’s Buddhist observances, the soul is thought to be in limbo for 100 days, before being reborn on the wheel of dharma or to have achieved nirvana. So my book is a kind of wish, a hope that somehow my book can contribute to my grandmother’s, and my ancestors’ spiritual ascension and release in a small way.
No.3
Your writing is preoccupied with ancestral roots and familial ties, not to mention grief. What is it about these subjects that compel you to return?
As far back as I can remember, I was always fascinated by the notion of familial history, of ancestry, of inheritance. I grew up in a very large extended family—almost a clan—in a shophouse on Victoria Street in Singapore. It’s hard to explain to people who have only grown up in nuclear families. My father’s family lived in Malaysia, and we lived in Singapore in this multi-generational household with my maternal grandfather’s mother, my great-grandmother, as the matriarch of this family. To this day, I can’t understand how every person in that household was related—there were siblings, cousins, parents, children and grandchildren. It was chaotic, unpredictable, but also oddly comforting, routine and secure.
At the same time, I often felt lonely and misunderstood as a child. My parents and my brother moved into our own home, a small public housing flat on Sims Drive when I was about 4 years old, and I remembered how time moved differently from when we were in the shophouse, how connections between family members changed. In a way I feel like I have been mourning this loss all my life.
My paternal grandfather passed away when I was 7, and I was a little too young to remember him beyond some very superficial encounters. However, I have several memories that are as sharp as if the events took place yesterday. And so his presence in my life is marked by an absence. My maternal grandfather, who I was very close to and whom I absolutely adored, passed away when I was 13. He was unwell for some time before that, and I remember pulling away from him and distancing myself in the months before he died. I have felt awful about that all my life, even though I know I had been only a child trying to process anticipatory grief in a very flawed and limited fashion.
I was also quite a young person, in my early 20s, when I was diagnosed with a very serious illness, and I still live with several chronic health conditions now. So it did feel like illness and death is familiar, in the almost spiritual sense of the word—a familiar of sorts. I suppose I live with what the Japanese describe as ‘mono no aware’, a deep awareness of the impermanence of things.
My paternal grandmother passed away when I was 28, shortly after I moved to Australia. I had reconnected with her in my adulthood, despite a language barrier (she only spoke Hakka, which I speak very little of). I remain grateful for our time together, and for the opportunity to show her my love, respect and affection for her during our short time together. I was closest with my maternal grandmother, and she suffered from dementia for close to a decade before her passing. I don’t have any regrets around my relationship with my grandmother. She and I were soulmates of a kind, we understood and loved each other in a way that transcended words, distance, and time.
What did compound the grief of her loss was how, due to the pandemic [border closures], my parents and I could not return to Singapore for her funeral, or for the rituals that marked the 3rd, 7th, 49th and 100th days after her death, all significant days in our cultural practice. And so it felt like I had to make up my own rituals, to mark my grief in my own manner, which I did through writing these poems. Grief is the other side of love; we grieve because we love. I don’t think I would have it any other way.
No.4
The cover of We Speak of Flowers was created by your brother, the artist Heman Chong. Can you speak more about this decision?
Initially I had asked my friend, the artist Raquel Ormella, to create the cover art for my book. We had talked about a possible collaboration for many years, and it seemed like the right time. However, as I was working on the poems, I found myself thinking a lot about my childhood, my family, and also of my brother and his creative practice, which I deeply admire and respect.
I only became a published poet when I was 30—for many years before that I felt like I had been resisting becoming a writer or an artist of any kind. I really wanted to be practical, to be ‘normal’, to have a regular job. My brother, however, has been committed to his art practice since he was in his teens. Heman is a highly accomplished artist who works a lot with the written word, and one of his painting series involves creating book covers. (Oddly enough, so much of my writing is ekphrastic, and relies heavily on imagery.)
I decided, on a whim, to ask him if he would create the cover artwork for me. He asked for a copy of the manuscript, and the only parameters I gave him was the size of the cover. The artwork features an image of pelargonium graveolens, rose geranium—I don’t think Heman was necessarily aware of the botanical name or species of the flower—but I thought it was fitting how the name of the flower has graves in them, and how the hearts of the flowers also look like faces screaming. The text on the cover is not part of Heman’s artwork, and I am very appreciative of the generosity and trust he had in me and my publishers to use his artwork in this manner.
I also have a long-running collaboration with an embroidery artist, Dita Felici, who lives in the UK. She makes custom book clutches, and has made one for every single one of my books so far. Her embroidery has gotten better with every book, and I love seeing both our crafts combined in these objects. I carried the book clutch version of We Speak of Flowers to my book launch in Sydney. Raquel ended up continuing to make the artwork and gave it to me, and she was beautiful in blessing my choice to work with my brother. Raquel’s artwork is stitched from fabric scraps, and I have it framed and hung in my home next to the entranceway. Everything about this book has been such a gift. I feel so blessed to be surrounded by this creative energy, by these artists who have given their time and expertise to my book.
No.5
Do you enjoy performing poetry in front of an audience? Do you think that the reception of a poem changes when it’s delivered orally versus when someone reads it on the page?
My ‘proper’ job before becoming a writer was that of a high school teacher. I still teach poetry in schools in NSW today (my first book, Burning Rice, is on the HSC curriculum for English). I am a very natural public speaker; I don’t ever get stage fright. However, my poetry can be quite serious and dark; it is really at odds with my personality, which tends to be very playful and quite irreverent. My poetry can be spare and distilled, but I am chatty and verbose. So sometimes it is a little strange when I read my poetry in front of audiences! It’s like someone else wrote those poems. I have to resist being a bit of a clown, and let my poetry speak for itself.
I have always maintained that poetry is an oral art which needs to be heard in space and in real time. I often say to my students, do you not listen to music in real time? Something happens to a person when they read poetry aloud, and have the words form in their mind, body, on their breath, and received by the ear, not just the eye. Pay attention to your body when you read a poem. Different poems will affect your breath, your posture, your heart rate, your emotions in different ways. They are all part of getting to know the poem, of its magic, its mystery.
Poetry is also an art form that demands the reader co-create alongside the poet, which might also be why it can be a little less accessible to the average reader. Reading poetry can seem like hard work! However, reading poetry is such a rewarding endeavour unlike any other. When one reads poetry aloud, when one listens to poetry, when one memorises verse, it becomes part of you, it becomes embodied into your being in a way that no one else can replicate or take away from you.
One of my best friends, Janice, is someone I love to read my poems to. Janice is a medical doctor and an extremely logical person who has never studied poetry. When I read her a poem, and if she responds to the emotions in the poem, I know it to be a true poem. The true poem, for me, transcends logical understanding; it is a stiletto that slips through the ribs and strikes you in the heart. Poetry belongs in our minds, bodies, spirits, and in the deepest parts of our psyche. When you read a poem I have written, it becomes yours in a way. Your thoughts, your memories, your feelings are folded into the reading and re-reading of it; you are creating an individual experience of it. By coming to it, it is now your poem, too. We have made it our poem.
Find out more
We Speak of Flowers, Eileen Chong’s sixth collection, is a wondrous extended elegy dedicated to her ancestors. Its 101 pieces are a spacious, meditative record of an attempt to make sense of grief in the face of great pain. Chong’s interweaving of memory, history and possibility showcases her mastery of poetic form and craft, all the while displaying her signature light touch in exploring the pathos of things. This is poetry that thrums with feeling, of deep connections to place and ancestral roots, and of the search for meaning in a broken world.
Get it from UQP here.