David Wong Hsien Ming (b. 1988)
CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
Written by Christian Yeo
Dated 2 Aug 2024
For The End Comes Reaching, David Wong Hsien Ming’s 2013 collection, lives and tarries in the land of grief. This beautiful phrasing comes from one of his acknowledgements. The heart of the collection is expressed by its blurb: this “meditation on the ineffable sense of loss that accompanies each having” centres around the persona’s loss of his father. It moves from visceral image families accompanying cancer’s slow arresting of the body to cinematographic vignettes warping through the family life of the persona’s father.
Perhaps surprisingly for its subject matter, Wong’s collection is utterly unsentimental, taking a forensic lens to the deceased’s relationship with his wife, who survived him, and with his son, the persona whose voice is the lens by which we interact with each frame. Wong’s collection asks universal questions: how do we remember those who have failed us insuperably? How does this change in response to living under patriarchy, where to be married to a man is often at least an inchoate death knell for a woman’s freedoms and sense of self? How do we forgive our fathers, especially after they’re gone? What does it mean to be fathered? Where does a child’s love go, if not into the ether? These are the questions that relentlessly people Wong’s collection, and for these reasons they carry the shock of recognition in the universal experience of grief that haunt the best confessional collections. In an interview of David Wong with The Group, interviewer Jonathan Chan says that “poetry comes out of the lives that we live”, that in a way it comes down to “getting to that thing that survives or remains after tragedy” (Chan, “Interview with David Wong Hsien Ming”).
Wong’s collection opens with “Stockholm Syndrome”, the only standalone poem that exists outside the realms of the collection’s three parts. The poem is a meditation on the nature of writing about grief. It takes a meta-perspective on the collection itself and the twin, interlaced roles of the poet as griever and the poet as lyricist. In the breaking and re-forming, in the then and the now, is the act of poetry an act of individual and collective healing? Is it to scour the wound for a meaning that may not come? Here, Wong writes reflexively, writing in the sonnet the following supposition:
To live inside a sonnet where Hiroshima and the Murmansk Run
never happened. To be blood under the bridge
between bones, between meander lines that define the borders
of sorrow. Better still to live between enjambments that hold and feed like marrow, that send you to work dreaming
through the twelve bars of the human ribcage,
the unfinished sonnet—
to live inside that.
The persona’s subjunctive, paratactically unfurled thought experiment describes, via sonnet, a persona taking refuge in the world of a sonnet, simultaneously virtual and real. In the counterfactual where the nuclear bomb hadn’t been dropped on Hiroshima, and the Canadian World War II delivery of supplies to the Soviet Union via the Murmansk Run hadn’t occurred, the persona lives in sorrow itself, engaged in constant psychogeographic navigation. This navigation is one with explicitly poetic content: “the unfinished sonnet—to live inside that”. The question posed through the metaphoric vehicle of “two women [offering] different flavoured salvation” is clear: should we process the lessons of grief and attempt to migrate outwards, perhaps insistently (“when I burn to fill my urn / death will stoop to teach me”), or is there value in the simultaneous relief and unrelief of staying within the land of grief (“You will not run out of road, so stay; here, / where there is nothing more to say.”)?
This grappling is not a new one, and it should not be falsely framed as a question of moving on, in a stoic, stiff-upper-lip sort of way. This sort of notion has been safely left behind in contemporary studies on grief and trauma and is best left with previous generations of the unreformed.
What instead should be asked has to do with the specific praxis of poetry. In the sense of storytelling, how much should we comb over the past to formulate hypotheses and narratives? This question cuts across all media by which we interact with memory, and may not just pertain to poetry, or indeed art itself (in its wider formulation). In the sense of imagery and symbolism, do we make lodestones of burning moments in the past? Are these questions over which one has even conscious control, and if they are, ought we attempt to answer them? One way into this territory is psychiatrist Bessel A. van der Kolk’s summation that “as long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself”. It neither behooves nor benefits the traumatised to deny what they know.
On grief and the process of healing, inchoate or otherwise, through the act of poetry investigating that grief, poet Emily Berry writes in her essay “Further Injury: Surviving Poetry”,
I had often seen this or that poet saying on social media that writing poems saved their life… When I saw these kinds of posts I would think about my own poetry and how I did not feel it had saved my life. In fact sometimes I felt the opposite — I wondered if my life would be better (more ‘saved’) if I stopped writing poems. I had written a book that compelled me to delve deep into a festering wound, and when I was writing it I kept saying to myself (and sometimes other people said to me), ‘Is this a wise thing to be doing?’
(Berry, “Further Injury: Surviving Poetry”)
Certainly, the quality of the poems in the body of For the End Come Reaching are steeped in elegy. The query goes unanswered but unfurls in Wong’s collection with complete imagistic control. In “Before the Last War”, a cockroach asks “what is infinite joy if married by a moment of infinite grief?” The wound is gouged, the scab ripped; there are no fictions in Wong’s work, and it is this that provides one prima facie answer to the question, is this a wise thing to be doing?
In “9 to Light”, the persona describes a scene of his father’s gradual deterioration:
your lips like a frayed water hose sputters surprise
at my scrubbing the toilet floor,
both of us in only our underwear.Every time you reach one horizon
you fall into another.
It is not so much baptism
as it is drowning.
Sibilance, interchanging metaphors, and biblical subversion combine to create a scene of unresolvable heartbreak. There is a kind of intimacy in the image of both the persona and his father in their underwear, scrubbing the toilet, hinting at what’s to come, what is to be lost. The clarity of the breaking body is repeated; there is no salve to this gradual death, and certainly not the grotesque insult of a religious one. The same answer to the same question, is this a wise thing to be doing?
We know that by the end of this collection the persona’s father dies; we (the reader and poet) are living in the after. Much like in the opening poem “Stockholm’s Syndrome”, though with the clarity of the particular, the persona describes a scene in the world where his father has not died in “Imagined Days”:
On weekdays we write. Your second book,
my first. I am kind to your drafts.In June we get mom to sit through the flight to New York;
we repeat the twenty-block walk across the upper west side[…]
So you plan for the Barcelona trip
you could not bring her on
when you were both young.And you are both still young.
Wong’s extended allegory of discovering dead birds’ wings reminds us that grief does not follow a syllogistic structure. “Red in the middle of all that spring” in “Potomac Tidal Basin” and “its wings shouted with a stark honesty / your life” in“Friday” are followed by “not an animal, but God himself” in “Potomac Tidal Basin” and “the bastard sun / after a violent cough / shines indifferent / over the remains of hope / and the remains of hate” in “All the World a Memory”. Its cogency lies in the lack thereof; in life as in poetry, obliqueness and derangement replace the minimalism of argumentative structure. The formal vision Wong exercises throughout this collection is immaculate; the characters in his poems speak with sparse, incisive clarity, invested almost with an eerie prescience, or sense for that most unusual sort of aphorism (the true kind). His sense for the portmanteau, even the half-rhyming portmanteau as identified in an interview with Kitaab (Kon, “The Lounge Chair Interview: 10 Questions with David Wong Hsien Ming”), continues in this vein; in an era of contemporary poetry where rhyme has long become obsolete and free verse is the default lyric vehicle for the devotion to clarity, Wong’s work is reminiscent of poet Christian Wiman’s devotion to form as “simply feeling carried to its furthest and finest expression” (Walker, “A Conversation with Christian Wiman”), and is all the more magnificent for it.
*
A continual wrangling with God carries through the collection; in “Under Construction”, the persona’s mother says “fuck you ontology / fuck you and the celestial lava cake”, and in “To Nietzsche, Re: The Death of God”, the persona tallies the different names of God, namely
God-the-lover, God-the-friend, God-the-asshole, God-the-fiend,
God-the-virgin, God-the stain, God-the-paradox, God-the-rain, God-the-Oh-
my-god-do-that-again, but never have they ever heard of God, who’s dead.
Inescapable is the Judeo-Christian imaginary in Wong’s work. Wong does not perform the injustice of articulating an uncomplicated relationship, and his work echoes or is echoed by Christian Wiman, more so than someone like George Herbert. The characters around the persona, and the persona himself, are quite happy with a brutal honesty generally welcomed as immaturity or heresy in institutional Christianity. See the following in “Birthday Party”, for instance:
We thank the Lord for making this day.
What a cop-out. Like thanking the cheap lighters
for flames we persuaded onto candles ourselves.
[…]
I watch sheets of ice hug themselves into continents
above the fruit punch. Is this you, Lord,
waiting to break it all?
The question of faith is not simply an abstract or theoretical one: it is a question of the possibility and/or impossibility of faith in the face of absolute and inexplicable suffering. Perhaps this question can be summed up well:
If God is a salve applied to unbearable psychic wounds, or a dream figure conjured out of memory and mortal terror, or an escape from a life that has become either too appalling or too banal to bear, then I have to admit: it is not working for me. Just when I think I’ve finally found some balance between active devotion and honest modern consciousness, all of my old anxieties come pressuring up through the seams of me, and I am as volatile and paralyzed as ever. I can’t tell which is worse, standing numb and apart from the world wanting Being to burn me awake, or feeling that fire too acutely to crave anything other than escape. What I do know is that the turn toward God has not lessened my anxieties, and I find myself continually falling back into wounds, wishes, terrors I thought I had risen beyond.
(Wiman, “My Bright Abyss”)
At once the possibility of belief both erupts and is demolished in the face of absolute grief. Wiman’s admission of the failure of Christianity as psychic salve echoes Wong’s line in “Potomac Tidal Basin”: “yes, God, you could have been cleaner”. These processes—belief and grief—are co-constitutive and not obviously binary. As Wiman goes on to suggest in the book, certainly there is a psychological element to this, but then so is there in most things; to suggest that bereavement creates psychological motivation of some description is probably bereft of original contribution. This contention with belief, though, is quite clearly distinct from the contention with the institutional church, which itself is dominated in the context of Singapore by American-imported right-wing evangelicalism. In his interview with The Group, Wong describes it as such:
I felt from that early age, the moment I saw it, like man, in Jon Stewart’s language, you smell the bullshit immediately. Obviously, it’s a personal response, but for people who feel like this reeks so strongly of something problematic, where are you gonna go from there? But just because I think it’s bullshit doesn’t mean someone else does. This is a nuance that’s really important, especially for social media today. Just because I feel it’s bullshit doesn’t mean I’m gonna say the church is bullshit immediately, right? And there are still other things that can anchor that work to be done or things to be experienced together. But that is an extra layer that needs to be navigated.
[…]
We do have Christian students who very often cannot believe that I’m a Christian. Like are you just saying that? Are you trying to troll us? But like no, guys, heart on sleeve, I’m serious. I believe the same thing you believe, but the way you practice is probably quite radically different.
And I’m not trying to tell you that you’re being the wrong kind of Christian. The point is not to make them like me, right? The point is to show there are all these different ways in which joy, beauty, or whichever faith-adjacent word you want to use operates, right?(Chan, “Interview with David Wong Hsien Ming”)
If the baby is not to be thrown out with the bathwater, the bathwater first has to be separated and then dispensed with. Wong’s Judeo-Christian imaginary is scathing precisely because it has a subterranean tenderness operative throughout it; to want something to be better so desperately is another name for love. To mistake the real, hard work of faith, complicated and so all the more genuine, and lazily dog-whistle to immaturity or unfaith, is to direly misapprehend the nature and fabric of faith itself. As Christian Wiman writes, “Lord is not a word. / Song is not a salve” (Wiman, “Lord Is Not A Word”).
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When an unnamed “she” in “Potomac Tidal Basin” shouts, “[t]hen God should have been cleaner!” and then “is gone among the cherry trees”, this experience of explosive resentment, and its attendant shock of recognition, instantiates Wong’s gift for speaking to the universal through the particular. In as many words, if grief is particular to the griever, it is also a universal and thus collective act of solidarity. Elegy is at once an individual and collective practice; a spiritual if not religious one, to borrow from Wong’s wrestling. In his interview with The Group, Wong states:
[C]ertain things are quite apart from [quality control] and maybe this book was one of them. At least for me on a surface level, a lot of the poems that emerged felt necessary. Not to say that it was easy to write, it’s just that some poems obviously came really quickly. The overall progression of the book came from a feeling of necessity or inevitability for myself... if the voice in the poem is speaking to someone, it’s not really speaking to my Dad, right? Because he's not there. That’s part of the mindset in terms of how works are meant to connect with a reader. It’s more than just, someone’s dying and you’re really sad about it… everyone’s dying all the time… In terms of like, the construction of the artefact, like an aesthetic, artistic work, that was my goal. So it’s a blending of that inevitability of what the book is, but what solidified it as something that to me felt okay to release into the world was that at some point a lot of these elegiac poems were speaking to some sort of stranger. Some of the poems are speaking to a figure like my Mum or like my then girlfriend, now wife, or speaking to a friend. But there is definitely a pretty good chunk of poems that were elegiac in nature that are just speaking to a stranger… it’s this kind of amorphous stranger, and I’m just telling you something and through this telling, I just want to create something and through this telling, I just want to create this feeling like there is something compassionate between us.
(Chan, “Interview with David Wong Hsien Ming”)
The act of community-building begins with constellating around the locus of individual grief in a, perhaps the, time of mourning. Art and the artist’s role in the community amplifies this even further; for culturemakers with their fingers on the pulse of the zeitgeist, it becomes all the more imperative to coalesce and unify around moments of irreversible fracturing. These cannot be buzzwords and god forbid they become a tool of aesthetic, all the more pernicious for the endless performance we are now wrought to do to each other, all the time, with the integration of social media into social ecosystems; if we are interested first and foremost in the practice of solidarity, we must be interested in moving through and back into and out of and forever inside the land of grief together. Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib writes the following in his essay collection They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us:
All things do not pass. Sometimes, that which does not kill you sits heavy over you until all of the things that did not kill you turn into a single counterforce that might. No matter what comes out of a person in these times, the work that we make when we feel like we no longer want to be alive is not the best work if it is also not work that, little by little, is pushing us back toward perhaps staying, even if just for a moment
(Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us)
Even Emily Berry concludes in “Further Injury: Surviving Poetry” , surmising from her initial scepticism of poetry’s capacity for containing and then managing the progression of grief, saying:
[T]o have one’s life saved is probably not generally a comfortable experience. It might be an adrenaline shot plunged into your heart after which you wake up screaming… After all, people who have endured terrible physical or psychological trauma (a word that means wound) describe themselves as survivors. If having your life saved wasn’t in fact about unalloyed happiness, a luscious infusion of relief, I started to think, then maybe writing poetry had saved my life after all. Why else would I devote myself to something whose value I couldn’t explain, which was rarely lucrative, required continual self-examination, was likely to wound, an occupation better described as a preoccupation – unless it had some vital, sustaining role in my existence? If you can’t live without something, does it not follow that that thing has saved you from dying? All the times I wasn’t sure I was alive, and then poetry stabbed me in the heart and brought me back from the dead.
(Berry, “Further Injury: Surviving Poetry”)
Is the act of writing poetry in response to grief helpful? Should we scour the wound? Is there any other choice when we are who we are? This reviewer should perhaps end this with a personal note. I had read For The End Comes Reaching in the COVID summer of 2020. Quarantining in my little room, I encountered the raw, heart-stopping nature of Wong’s work for the first time. Lines from Wong’s work continue to structure my understanding of grief, both in the concrete moment of, and in the abstracted ether without. In the course of one sweat-drenched afternoon, I read Wong’s collection, felt what might best be described as my gut falling out, at least seemingly, before starting from the beginning again and reading it all the way through two more times. Since then, I’ve read Wong’s collection at least once a year, revisited its final poem so many times my friends and I quote lines from it, using them as handles of sensemaking for each other for that great dog when it hangs its head. Till the valley becomes a road, we might say. Shadows argue for light well enough. Elegy as individual howl and community mourning: the question is probably not how to grieve, a question of irrelevance in almost every instance, but how to grieve together.
Works cited
Abdurraqib, Hanif. They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us. Columbus, Ohio: Two Dollar Radio. 2017.
Berry, Emily. “Further Injury: Surviving Poetry”. Too Little/Too Hard. Summer 2023. 15 January 2023.
Chan, Jonathan. “Interview with David Wong Hsien Ming”. The Group. 15 May 2023. 15 January 2023.
Kon, Desmond. “The Lounge Chair Interview: 10 Questions With David Wong Hsien Ming”. Kitaab. 7 November 2015. 15 January 2023.
van der Kolk, B.A. The Body Keeps The Score. New York, New York: Penguin Books. 2015.
Walker, J.M. “A Conversation with Christian Wiman”. Image. 15 January 2023.
Wong, David. For The End Comes Reaching. Singapore: Math Paper Press. 2012.
Wiman, Christian. “Lord is Not A Word”. Every Riven Thing. New York, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux LLC. 2011.
With special thanks to Bidhya Tigela Lim Limbu for our conversations around, and research material on, trauma and bereavement.
