Nicholas Y. H. Wong
I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong. I teach Chinese-English translation and am interested in writing literary history via methods from economic history, legal history, and digital humanities (DH). My current book project traces how extractive capitalism has shaped the formation of Southeast Asian Chinese writing. From Malaysia and Singapore, I received my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago, and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at HKU.
I also translate fiction and write poetry and review essays under my pen name Zhou Sivan. They have appeared in journals such as Almost Island, Asian American Writers' Workshop–The Margins, Asymptote, Chicago Review, Counter, Full Stop Quarterly, Kisah Journal, and Lana Turner. My three poetry chapbooks are Zero Copula (Delete Press, 2015), Sea Hypocrisy (co-published by DoubleCross Press and Projective Industries, 2016), and The Geometry of Trees (Sputnik & Fizzle, 2022). The latter can be purchased in the US (Sputnik & Fizzle), Singapore (Epigram Books), Paris (After 8 Books), Berlin (Zabriskie), and Hong Kong.
I also translate fiction and write poetry and review essays under my pen name Zhou Sivan. They have appeared in journals such as Almost Island, Asian American Writers' Workshop–The Margins, Asymptote, Chicago Review, Counter, Full Stop Quarterly, Kisah Journal, and Lana Turner. My three poetry chapbooks are Zero Copula (Delete Press, 2015), Sea Hypocrisy (co-published by DoubleCross Press and Projective Industries, 2016), and The Geometry of Trees (Sputnik & Fizzle, 2022). The latter can be purchased in the US (Sputnik & Fizzle), Singapore (Epigram Books), Paris (After 8 Books), Berlin (Zabriskie), and Hong Kong.
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Book Reviews by Nicholas Y. H. Wong
Papers by Nicholas Y. H. Wong
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/DKKQ8XUSYDSRVYDDFRG2/full?target=10.1080/27683524.2023.2205822
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/3XAWSHRX4MV2NTZ2REJS/full?target=10.1080/02690055.2023.2238406
In this dreamscape, accessible from a hidden railway track of a Mass Transit Railway (MTR) station in Hong Kong, a boy named Kenichi meets a host of characters, from a vagabond called Pestilence who solicits the boy’s dreams as a valuable commodity at a government-run Sleep Bank, to a salamander who convinces the boy to become water, and a witch who prompts him to recall a dream—all in the name of securing his safe passage. The setting is the town of the Ruins (feixu 廢墟), run by a trapped, older generation of feiqing 廢青, which I translate as “Juveniles” to convey the negative image of feiqing as jobless, wrongly aligned sleepwalking youths. A Leng’s short story turns this stereotype on its head, via a Menippean satire about the cruel monetization of the lack of prospects for Hong Kong’s youth. In this recent example of Hong Kong speculative fiction, the young’s desire to dream without pawning it or giving it up, and to find a way out without looking back, captures the heat and heart of Hong Kong’s current movement.
To reflect the differences in tone and syntax of the Cantonese dialogue from the story’s Mandarin Chinese narrative, I adopted colloquial English used in Malaysia and Singapore—or, Malaysian English and Singlish—to translate the Cantonese. This choice, I think, aptly highlights the influence of Cantonese grammar, not excluding other southern Chinese topolects, Malay, and etc., on contemporary English in ex-British colonies in Southeast Asia.
https://aaww.org/the-sea-lion-that-jumped-across-terraced-fields/
"As evocatively translated by Nicholas Y. H. Wong, the story unfolds a heartfelt elegy for the Latin American Left even as it draws comparisons to Taiwan of the contemporaneous period. Throughout the experiences and sensibilities of what one might call the 'non-G7' world are powerfully and hauntingly expressed, suggesting new sources of literary imagination."
https://www.cuhk.edu.hk/rct/toc/toc_b96.html
After reading this short story in Mirror Fiction, I decided to translate it and assign it for my course at the University of Hong Kong in Spring 2021, “Fiction and Film in Contemporary Chinese Societies.” Its understated, quiet dreams of transnational intimacy featuring a Malaysian Chinese (or Mahua) newspaperman and an undocumented Yunnanese sex worker in Thailand, provided an edifying contrast to almost all the other “romantic” films from the course, which end with a jealous male partner murdering the working-class female protagonist for pursuing sex work. The possessive males in Wong Tin-lam's The Wild, Wild Rose (1960) and Midi Z’s The Road to Mandalay (2016) view, but ultimately refuse, sex work as a necessary evil. As migrant laborers who fall prey to capitalism’s demands, they take out their personal masculine rage—or misrecognize their fate—in a hyperbolic tragic ending. But such “tragic” endings are not inevitable. "Search for a Tiger” views sex work as work, rather than narrative device. It models fresh ways of acting and consoles those outside of state recognition: the Mahua man departs on friendly terms from his girlfriend, whom he discovers is married to a mute man and raising an orphan as her daughter. This tale of mobility and intimacy in the borderlands is a rare treat in contemporary Mahua literature. Its characters also trace their lineage to Kuomintang troops in Yunnan but come from a different class background to the more well-known resettled Yunnanese entrepreneurs in northern Thailand.
https://www.pratajournal.com/searchingforatiger
Books by Nicholas Y. H. Wong
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/DKKQ8XUSYDSRVYDDFRG2/full?target=10.1080/27683524.2023.2205822
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/3XAWSHRX4MV2NTZ2REJS/full?target=10.1080/02690055.2023.2238406
In this dreamscape, accessible from a hidden railway track of a Mass Transit Railway (MTR) station in Hong Kong, a boy named Kenichi meets a host of characters, from a vagabond called Pestilence who solicits the boy’s dreams as a valuable commodity at a government-run Sleep Bank, to a salamander who convinces the boy to become water, and a witch who prompts him to recall a dream—all in the name of securing his safe passage. The setting is the town of the Ruins (feixu 廢墟), run by a trapped, older generation of feiqing 廢青, which I translate as “Juveniles” to convey the negative image of feiqing as jobless, wrongly aligned sleepwalking youths. A Leng’s short story turns this stereotype on its head, via a Menippean satire about the cruel monetization of the lack of prospects for Hong Kong’s youth. In this recent example of Hong Kong speculative fiction, the young’s desire to dream without pawning it or giving it up, and to find a way out without looking back, captures the heat and heart of Hong Kong’s current movement.
To reflect the differences in tone and syntax of the Cantonese dialogue from the story’s Mandarin Chinese narrative, I adopted colloquial English used in Malaysia and Singapore—or, Malaysian English and Singlish—to translate the Cantonese. This choice, I think, aptly highlights the influence of Cantonese grammar, not excluding other southern Chinese topolects, Malay, and etc., on contemporary English in ex-British colonies in Southeast Asia.
https://aaww.org/the-sea-lion-that-jumped-across-terraced-fields/
"As evocatively translated by Nicholas Y. H. Wong, the story unfolds a heartfelt elegy for the Latin American Left even as it draws comparisons to Taiwan of the contemporaneous period. Throughout the experiences and sensibilities of what one might call the 'non-G7' world are powerfully and hauntingly expressed, suggesting new sources of literary imagination."
https://www.cuhk.edu.hk/rct/toc/toc_b96.html
After reading this short story in Mirror Fiction, I decided to translate it and assign it for my course at the University of Hong Kong in Spring 2021, “Fiction and Film in Contemporary Chinese Societies.” Its understated, quiet dreams of transnational intimacy featuring a Malaysian Chinese (or Mahua) newspaperman and an undocumented Yunnanese sex worker in Thailand, provided an edifying contrast to almost all the other “romantic” films from the course, which end with a jealous male partner murdering the working-class female protagonist for pursuing sex work. The possessive males in Wong Tin-lam's The Wild, Wild Rose (1960) and Midi Z’s The Road to Mandalay (2016) view, but ultimately refuse, sex work as a necessary evil. As migrant laborers who fall prey to capitalism’s demands, they take out their personal masculine rage—or misrecognize their fate—in a hyperbolic tragic ending. But such “tragic” endings are not inevitable. "Search for a Tiger” views sex work as work, rather than narrative device. It models fresh ways of acting and consoles those outside of state recognition: the Mahua man departs on friendly terms from his girlfriend, whom he discovers is married to a mute man and raising an orphan as her daughter. This tale of mobility and intimacy in the borderlands is a rare treat in contemporary Mahua literature. Its characters also trace their lineage to Kuomintang troops in Yunnan but come from a different class background to the more well-known resettled Yunnanese entrepreneurs in northern Thailand.
https://www.pratajournal.com/searchingforatiger