Poetry reading - Ghosts in the city: Hong Kong poems of protest and memory

In this reading, I draw upon my three collections—Hula Hooping (2015), Too Too Too Too (2018), and If I Do Not Reply (2024)—to trace Hong Kong as a city of hauntings: haunted by famine and imprisonment across the border, by the looming shadow of Beijing, and by the unresolved grief of protest. From the depictions of hunger and political violence in Hula Hooping to the evocations of banners, graffiti, and resistance in If I Do Not Reply, these poems follow the outlines of a city at once fragile and unyielding. They do not merely mourn; they remember, record, and bear witness. In voices both intimate and collective, Cantonese idioms, crowded buses, small courtesies, and scarred walls become part of the record. The poems ask what endures when banners are torn down, when silence becomes survival, when memory itself resists erasure. They suggest that poetry can carry ghosts with it: keeping the absent present, and refusing the consolations of forgetting.

Tamara Lai-Ming Ho, Honorary Researcher at the University of Toronto and Editor-in-Chief of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, reads from her poetry collections, discussing Hong Kong voices of protest and memory on Friday 24 Oct 9:00am at KCL Strand campus.

This is an in-person event. Registration is required.

NB This is a free event, which means we overbook to allow for no-shows and avoid empty seats. While we generally do not have to turn people away, this does mean we cannot guarantee all ticket holders a place. Admission is on a first come, first served basis. Those without tickets will not be admitted.

Tammy Lai-Ming Ho is a Hong Kong-born poet, translator, scholar, and former tenured professor of English literature. She is the editor-in-chief of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, the first English editor of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, and a founding co-editor of Hong Kong Studies, currently the only peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to research on Hong Kong affairs. Tammy's first collection of poetry was Hula Hooping (Chameleon, 2015), for which she won the Young Artist Award in Literary Arts presented by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Her first short-story collection Her Name Upon the Strand (Delere Press), her second poetry collection Too Too Too Too (Math Paper Press), and chapbook An Extraterrestrial in Hong Kong (Musical Stone) were published in 2018. She is also the author of the academic volume Neo-Victorian Cannibalism (Palgrave, 2019) and she has published widely on Hong Kong literature and culture.

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