Conversation With

Tim Tim Cheng

Tim Tim Cheng is a poet and teacher from Hong Kong currently reading her MSc in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. She has over 40 poems published in a plethora of magazines and journals, a corpus accompanied by her prose articles and other various projects. You can find her work on her website (www.timtimcheng.com). Also, keep an eye out for her chapbooks Tapping at Glass and CUTS: A Tattoo Lyric, to be released very soon!

Tim Tim’s poetry can be lively, powerful, political, it can also be heart-warmingly lovely. No less lovely is the poet herself. My experiences with Tim Tim reveal a poet who wants to succeed with people. In workshops she is always encouraging and when it comes to events, indomitable. She is not only worth reading, but also befriending. She has been gracious enough to answer a couple of questions about her work for Outcrop and for that we are incredibly grateful.

Poetry can be characterised as an art of communication. What does it mean for you to be a communicator by vocation?

Haha... it is... tough. I used to be a teacher for grassroots and artsy teenagers. I thought writing poetry meant less communication and administration. That is both true and false. Sometimes I can write a chuckle- or sigh- inducing line that surprises myself and some readers; but more often, I am just drafting lines that leave my poetry workshop classmates saying, ‘can you clarify this?’ or ‘you can do better than this, Tim Tim.’ For me, a good poem needs to be both idiosyncratic and universal. It also takes some luck to find a good audience for your poems. I am learning to be less nervous talking to people after reading my poemsat events, too.

Poems like ‘Field Notes’ and ‘The Sand I Stand On Is Not My Own’ suggest the importance of nature to you work. How would you characterise your approach to the natural world in your work?

I am a city girl. My family ran away from their rural life in China to settle down in Hong Kong. I was brought up with the idea that ‘the city is a place of progress while nature symbolizes backwardness’. The more I read and travel, the more I question this forced dichotomy. I like to remember the raw poetry in my experiences with nature by describing them as closely as possible. It recently came to me that when I am in touch with nature, I am re-discovering the animal and inner child in myself. That helps me understand my place in the world, and by extension, our place as a species.

Has your experience of the UK and Scotland especially affected your poetry?

Oh yes for sure... there seems to be endless festivities to celebrate poetry in the UK and Scotland. I feel less embarrassed telling people that I write poetry here. I wonder if it is just one of those freedoms that you feel when you are far from home. I am also aware that I am trying harder to write things that I never thought I could write before, such as flowers and love. My local plant shops are fully responsible for this.

Notions of family, friends and home are everywhere in your corpus. What does it mean for you to immortalise moments likethose in ‘F.R.I.E.N.D.S, but in Tin Yuet (2021)’ ‘Icarus, A Girl, Talks To Interviewers’, and ‘Shin Ramyun’?

I write about them because I am not sure about them most of the time... (sorry friends and family). I am intrigued by the idea that there are things we are always running away from although very often, we cannot.

How has your career as a teacher influenced your poetry?

I went through this undergraduate poetry phase when I was too shy to share my work in public, so my best friends suffered. I would spam multiple drafts of the same thing in the span of a few hours. Teaching, though, involves encouraging students to do things out of their comfort zone. They do not have to be perfect. If I am happy for my students every time they choose to share their learning with me, I should be happy about my not-soperfect works too. I guess I have become slightly more open and less logically inconsistent since I have met my students.

In poems like ‘NO LANGUAGE’ and ‘Eat First’ you touch upon the poignancy and power of everyday objects. What is the role the mundane plays in your poetry?

I love ‘love in clumsy forms’. I came from a working-class immigrant family who raised me on social subsidy. When I was a kid, I had no language for the family traumas that were a result of poverty, wars, and colonial legacies. It took me quite some time to realize how my family members have already done the best they could. Finding beauty in things and people that are not deemed beautiful in the first place somehow works as a validation of their values in my mind. I often think a more generous understanding of one’s hurt is a step towards healing, and healing, a step towards a better world.

Did the pandemic have any impact on your poetry?

The pandemic pushed me to my limit... I was doing hybrid teaching and trying to plan for all contingencies while the protests in Hong Kong were doubly curbed with social distancing measures. I needed a way out, so I resorted to spamming my poems and essays to international magazines that none of my friends and family read. (That sense of secrecy made me feel safe) The rise of online meetings also gave me a chance to become a speaker at literary events and a writer in residence with great writers from all over the world... I would say I am one of the pandemic writers... if there is such a category.

Formally, you seem drawn towards free verse and to the sort of categorising of sections either with numbers (1, 2, etc…) or letters (i, ii, etc…). How would you describe your relationship with poetic form?

Unfortunately, I did not read much poetry until I started writing... (That is liberating and scary at the same time... like I am never well-equipped enough.) I started out reading non-fiction and novels. I never completed writing a single English poem until I did my undergraduate programme, where I was told to submit one to a competition as a course assignment. But the ‘poetic’ impulse has been always there since my teenage years. I loved story-telling band sounds. I loved writing lists of strange things. I read Kahlil Gibran without fully understanding. Most of my poems started out as a response to things around me. As a sunGemini, moon-Scorpio, and rising-Sagittarius; an ESL poet whose first language is Cantonese; the first university graduate in my family, I hold a multitude of contradictions. Sectioning my poems seem to be a way of giving space for disjunct things to coexist.

Which if any of your poems, poetic achievements or otherwise are you most proud?

I am proud of joining open mics. I used to learn from books more than real life. I did not know to respond to ‘how are you’ a few years ago when I had no English-speaking friends. I knew the standard answers, but it never felt natural. I am good at continuing conversations after that now.