Cha: An Asian Literary Journal

21/08/2025

21/08/2025

[𝐍𝐄𝐖 Cha: An Asian Literary Journal 𝐄𝐗𝐂𝐋𝐔𝐒𝐈𝐕𝐄—𝐑𝐄𝐅𝐋𝐄𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 & 𝐑𝐄𝐕𝐈𝐄𝐖] In "𝑇𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑏𝑒́: The Forgotten Faces of Globalisation", Emma Zhang reflects on her shifting identity as a language teacher in an age when machine translation threatens the role of English as a bridge to the world. Seeking cultural understanding, she visits 𝑇𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑏𝑒́, an exhibition by Mauritanian artist Saleh Lo, who paints haunting portraits of West African Qur’anic students trapped in poverty, exploitation, and outdated educational systems. Using repurposed tomato cans—symbols of global trade and survival—Saleh captures both despair and possibility, leaving faces unfinished to signify resilience and hope.

/ I am not a connoisseur of modern art. I remain deeply sceptical of artists who tape a banana to the wall and call it 𝐶𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑎𝑛, or place a glass of water on a shelf and call it 𝐴𝑛 𝑂𝑎𝑘 𝑇𝑟𝑒𝑒. What compelled me to travel from my Ta Kwu Ling home to the 𝑇𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑏𝑒́ exhibition in Central, amidst a black rainstorm, was my recent identity crisis. /

⧉ 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐢𝐞𝐜𝐞 𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞: https://chajournal.blog/2025/08/21/saleh-lo/
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21/08/2025

[𝐅𝐑𝐎𝐌 Cha: An Asian Literary Journal 𝐀𝐑𝐂𝐇𝐈𝐕𝐄𝐒] Thiago Braga writes about Petrus Liu’s 𝑄𝑢𝑒𝑒𝑟 𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑥𝑖𝑠𝑚 𝑖𝑛 𝑇𝑤𝑜 𝐶ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑎𝑠 (Duke University Press, 2015):

/ Recent scholarship on the flows of desire and subject formation in China has seemingly operated with the idea that a fundamental shift in attitudes—both governmental and social—towards q***rness took place after Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. They have emphasised the agency of q***r desire against state prescriptions, while also suggesting that new sexual politics may inhere in new forms of advanced liberalism. In that perspective, Marxism and q***r theory stand outside of each other, and it is precisely a turn towards neoliberalism and post-socialism and that has enabled a q***r culture to emerge in the PRC. The emergent Chinese q***r subject mimics its Western counterpart, and seeks inclusion in society through the learning, embodying, and reproducing of normalised behaviour to demonstrate that g**s and le****ns are too morally upstanding citizens. In this “homonormative turn” where China’s neoliberal integration into global flows of capital accompanies gay normalisation, “q***rness” is couched in the signifier of identity, and the fight for “q***r rights” becomes a mark of linear civilisational progress. /

⧉ 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰 𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞: https://chajournal.blog/2023/08/18/two-chinas/
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21/08/2025

𝐀𝐍𝐆𝐋𝐎𝐏𝐇𝐎𝐍𝐄 & 𝐒𝐈𝐍𝐎𝐏𝐇𝐎𝐍𝐄

17–18 November 2025 · University of Toronto
Call for Abstracts – Deadline: 7 September 2025

Since its founding in 2017, Backreading Hong Kong: An Annual Symposium has brought together scholars, writers, translators, and artists to share their cross-disciplinary humanities research and findings on the city that we call home—Hong Kong, and to ignite stimulating and rigorous discussion.

It has moved across time and space: in Hong Kong itself from 2017 to 2019; in the digital ether of Zoom during the suspended years of 2020 and 2021; and, in recent times, in Toronto—2023, 2024, and now, once more, 2025. Its conversations have ranged widely, from diasporic identity to translation as cultural mediation, from dystopian visions of the city to the shifting contours of adaptation within exile and return.

This year’s symposium builds upon our earlier dialogues to contemplate the fraught yet fertile encounter between the Anglophone and the Sinophone within Hong Kong’s cultural and literary fields.

Too readily are these categories imagined as stable domains of language, as geopolitical markers, as the boundaries of literary tradition. Yet in Hong Kong they resist all fixity. They are the sediment of colonial inheritances and the shadow of Cold War entanglements; they shape diasporic imagination, flow through media ecologies, and open contested terrains of translation, aesthetic experiment, and creative reinvention.

Our task in 2025 is not to rehearse these terms as binary opposites, but to think them as porous, shifting, historically contingent—frameworks through which identity, creativity, and resistance might be re-envisioned in and through Hong Kong.

⧉ Further information: https://backreading.com/2025-2/
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21/08/2025

{{{ They are accepting submissions until Friday 5 September 2025: https://tinyurl.com/RainstormCALL }}
𝘕𝘶𝘳 𝘰𝘯 "𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘙𝘰𝘰𝘮"

☔ Once a migrant domestic worker in Hong Kong, I spent Sundays at the Central Library reading Rumi, Hafiz, and Yeats. After returning to Indonesia, I pursued English literature and now work with a foundation in Yogyakarta that supports migrant returnees. "The Silent Room" reflects this journey: silence as shelter, the inner space each of us carries—small yet enduring—that holds grief and solace, fragility and strength.

The rainstorm, with its ruptures and renewals, mirrors the life events that shaped my migration journey of more than a decade—years unsettled by uncertainty and change, yet also marked by growth and transformation. In returning to work alongside the migrant returnee community, I came to understand that even the most ordinary and delicate lives can both embrace and cradle such storms. These lives may appear unadorned and fragile, yet, like walls stitched back by sunlight, they endure. "The Silent Room" will be my first published poem.
。。。。。

In Issue 86 of 聲韻詩刊 Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, we will publish an English-language section on 𝗥𝗔𝗜𝗡𝗦𝗧𝗢𝗥𝗠.

Nur Hasanah's "This Silent Room" will be included in this section. [ Contributors to the 𝗥𝗔𝗜𝗡𝗦𝗧𝗢𝗥𝗠 feature: tbc ]

{{{ We are accepting submissions until Friday 5 September 2025: https://tinyurl.com/RainstormCALL }}
𝑁𝑢𝑟 𝑜𝑛 ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑝𝑜𝑒𝑚:

☔ Once a migrant domestic worker in Hong Kong, I spent Sundays at the Central Library reading Rumi, Hafiz, and Yeats. After returning to Indonesia, I pursued English literature and now work with a foundation in Yogyakarta that supports migrant returnees. "The Silent Room" reflects this journey: silence as shelter, the inner space each of us carries—small yet enduring—that holds grief and solace, fragility and strength.

The rainstorm, with its ruptures and renewals, mirrors the life events that shaped my migration journey of more than a decade—years unsettled by uncertainty and change, yet also marked by growth and transformation. In returning to work alongside the migrant returnee community, I came to understand that even the most ordinary and delicate lives can both embrace and cradle such storms. These lives may appear unadorned and fragile, yet, like walls stitched back by sunlight, they endure. "The Silent Room" will be my first published poem.
✑ Nuͧrͬ Haͣsaͣnaͣhͪ resides in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Her poetry first drew inspiration from her readings of Yeats and Hafiz during her years in Hong Kong, and later from Louise Glück while she pursued academic studies in English Literature and American Studies. These voices continue to shape her sensibility as she explores themes of silence, resilience, and the vastness contained within ordinary moments.
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21/08/2025

{{{ They are accepting submissions until Friday 5 September 2025: https://tinyurl.com/RainstormCALL }}
𝘗𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘰𝘯 "𝘈𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘜𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘌𝘺𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘮":

☔ [...] The poem also recalls the year 2021, when Super Typhoon Odette struck the Philippines, bringing with it torrential rains, violent winds, and storm surges. The devastation left us without electricity and bereft of access to clean, potable water for several days; the landscape, in turn, resembled the aftermath of some child’s game of make-believe—yet this was a super typhoon we had never wished to host.
。。。。。

In Issue 86 of 聲韻詩刊 Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, we will publish an English-language section on 𝗥𝗔𝗜𝗡𝗦𝗧𝗢𝗥𝗠.

Prince Marlo D. Montadas's "Acceptance Monsoon" and "Ants Under the Eye of the Storm" will be included in this section. [ Contributors to the 𝗥𝗔𝗜𝗡𝗦𝗧𝗢𝗥𝗠 feature: tbc ]

{{{ We are accepting submissions until Friday 5 September 2025: https://tinyurl.com/RainstormCALL }}
𝑃𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑜𝑛 ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑝𝑜𝑒𝑚𝑠:

☔ “Acceptance Monsoon” is a poem that draws a parallel between the workings of a thunderstorm and the culmination of the lives of those we most deeply love and cherish. It intimates, with quiet modesty, how the passing of a beloved feels like lightning, with thunder reverberating through flesh and soul alike. We are told that the distance of thunder may be measured—three seconds’ delay is roughly one kilometre—according to the old rule of thumb that light outruns sound. It has now been a year since my grandfather’s death. Wistfulness and acceptance meet and mingle; a permanent cloud formed and settled upon our home. It is simply one of the conditions that loss imposes. There was no sudden rainstorm of tears at the moment when the palms of Providence drew the filament of his life, but rather a long, blinding flash of light before us—confounded and overwhelmed—until at last the tears came. It is a wrestling with oneself to accept; long have we acknowledged the inevitability of death in thought, yet in presence it strikes and stuns. And so, now, the rain has come.

☔ "Ants Under the Eye of the Storm" is at once a reflective and satirical poem about how I, as a person, am sentimental and frail in placing blame for most of my downfalls—whether trivial or weighty in the fabric of our mundane lives—often preferring external attributions. This tendency, I believe, is a means by which human beings seek to cope with grief and sorrow. It is true that God or nature may at times appear cruel, volatile, and indifferent. Such is how I express it, despite the welcome, beauty, and spirituality that their implications may also hold. Yet even after the heavy rains pour without relent, a silver lining eventually emerges—and this, too, is cyclical. We choose to believe it is the natural order, as it must be, and so we release our emotions—our displeasures, our aversions—as deftly and as gracefully as we once gathered them. The poem also recalls the year 2021, when Super Typhoon Odette struck the Philippines, bringing with it torrential rains, violent winds, and storm surges. The devastation left us without electricity and bereft of access to clean, potable water for several days; the landscape, in turn, resembled the aftermath of some child’s game of make-believe—yet this was a super typhoon we had never wished to host.
✑ Prͬiͥncͨeͤ Maͣrͬloͦ D. Moͦntͭaͣdͩaͣs is an author and poet currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Teaching English at Father Saturnino Urios University. In his leisure, he delights in exploring secondhand clothing markets, discovering retro and stylish pieces, and composing poems inspired by quotidian reflections and tender moments shared with his partner. He is presently engaged in the production of chapbooks, and his works have appeared in the “En Route” section of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.
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20/08/2025

The Shanghai Literary Review

20/08/2025

/ The Hong Kong authorities have a new favorite buzzword: “soft resistance.”

The phrase, which is used to describe anything seen as covertly subversive or insidiously defiant against the government, is showing up in news reports, speeches by top officials, and warnings from government departments. Officials and propaganda organs have warned of the threat of possible “soft resistance” in a book fair, music lyrics, a U.S. holiday celebration and environmental groups.

The term and its widespread official use reflect the political climate of a city that has been transformed since Beijing imposed a national security law in 2020, after quashing mass pro-democracy demonstrations in 2019. /

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/world/asia/hong-kong-soft-resistance.html
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With pro-democracy movements long squashed, the government is targeting any hint of subtler expressions of discontent. Even establishment figures say it may be too much.

20/08/2025

As Cha: An Asian Literary Journal is, well, an Asian literary journal, we are particularly interested in pieces that explore Asian cinema in its many dimensions. By "Asian films", we mean not only works produced in Asia—ranging from the rich traditions of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Korean, and Southeast Asian cinemas, to the emerging voices in Central and West Asia—but also films by Asian diasporic directors and artists who reflect on identity, heritage, and cultural negotiation in global contexts. We are equally keen on essays that examine how Asian philosophies, mythologies, and aesthetics are expressed through the cinematic form, whether in popular blockbusters or in more experimental, independent productions.

We are currently accepting submissions for 𝗙𝗜𝗥𝗦𝗧 𝗜𝗠𝗣𝗥𝗘𝗦𝗦𝗜𝗢𝗡𝗦, a section of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal devoted to compact reviews of books and films (300-800 words; negotiable) that may also offer personal reflections. We welcome first impressions on any books and films, old or newly released, with an Asian angle. We haven’t published many film reviews and we particularly hope that can be rectified. Please write to Tammy Lai-Ming Ho ([email protected]) if you would like to contribute a piece.

Our first 𝐅𝗙𝗜𝗥𝗦𝗧 𝗜𝗠𝗣𝗥𝗘𝗦𝗦𝗜𝗢𝗡𝗦 entry is by Susan Blumberg-Kason, who writes about Dorothy Tse’s 𝑂𝑤𝑙𝑖𝑠ℎ (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023), translated from the Chinese into English by Natascha Bruce.

Susan: “I’ve always sensed that Hong Kong has a unique way of combining the old and new in ways few cities can pull off. When I walk through parts of Kowloon or the New Territories, I can still find many of the same buildings and shops I knew from decades earlier.”

⧉ 𝐆𝐮𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬: https://chajournal.blog/2025/08/19/impressions/
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20/08/2025

{{{ They are accepting submissions until Friday 5 September 2025: https://tinyurl.com/RainstormCALL }}
☔ 𝐁𝐢𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐩𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐞 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐨𝐞𝐭

In every country there are poets so influential and beloved that every devotee of literature feels compelled to absorb their work. In America, there is Whitman or Ginsberg; in France, Verlaine or Éluard. And in Japan, there stands the short-lived giant of modernist poetry, Nakahara Chūya (1907–1937).
Although he began his career composing haiku in classical Japanese, in the 1920s Chūya became captivated by fragmentary, experimental verse shaped by the spirit of Dada. His work frequently interweaves classical diction with experimental imagery, modern turns of phrase, dialect, onomatopoeia, and repetition—thus propelling the relatively staid poetic language of his time in bold, unprecedented directions. At moments, however, his verse betrays a vein of sentimentality that recalls the French poètes maudits whom Chūya so admired. This rare fusion of qualities has secured his place as one of the most cherished poets of twentieth-century Japan. "(Namu dada)" and "Late Night Rain" are drawn from his youthful notebooks and Songs of Days Gone By (1937), both published posthumously.
。。。。。

In Issue 86 of 聲韻詩刊 Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, we will publish an English-language section on 𝗥𝗔𝗜𝗡𝗦𝗧𝗢𝗥𝗠.

Nakahara Chūya's "(Namu dada)" and "Late Night Rain", translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles, will be included in this section. [ Contributors to the 𝗥𝗔𝗜𝗡𝗦𝗧𝗢𝗥𝗠 feature: tbc ]

{{{ We are accepting submissions until Friday 5 September 2025: https://tinyurl.com/RainstormCALL }}
☔ 𝐁𝐢𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐩𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐞 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐨𝐞𝐭

In every country there are poets so influential and beloved that every devotee of literature feels compelled to absorb their work. In America, there is Whitman or Ginsberg; in France, Verlaine or Éluard. And in Japan, there stands the short-lived giant of modernist poetry, Naͣkaͣhͪaͣrͬaͣ Chͪūyaͣ (1907–1937).

Although he began his career composing haiku in classical Japanese, in the 1920s Chūya became captivated by fragmentary, experimental verse shaped by the spirit of Dada. His work frequently interweaves classical diction with experimental imagery, modern turns of phrase, dialect, onomatopoeia, and repetition—thus propelling the relatively staid poetic language of his time in bold, unprecedented directions. At moments, however, his verse betrays a vein of sentimentality that recalls the French poètes maudits whom Chūya so admired. This rare fusion of qualities has secured his place as one of the most cherished poets of twentieth-century Japan. "(Namu dada)" and "Late Night Rain" are drawn from his youthful notebooks and Songs of Days Gone By (1937), both published posthumously.
☔ 𝐁𝐢𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐩𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐞 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫

Jeͤffrͬeͤy Angleͤs is a poet, translator, and professor of Japanese literature at Western Michigan University. His collection of original Japanese-language poetry, Watashi no hizukehenkōsen (My International Date Line, 2016), received the prestigious Yomiuri Prize for Literature—an honour bestowed upon only a handful of non-native speakers in the prize’s history. He has translated many of Japan’s most significant modern authors and poets into English, and he is a firm advocate of the translator’s role as activist, dedicating much of his work to rendering socially engaged, feminist, and q***r writers. His translation of poems by Nakahara Chūya, Angel at the Earth’s Extreme, will be published by Penguin Classics in 2026.
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