Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, Hong Kong Baptist University
ABSTRACT
Though I have edited an Asia-focused literary journal—Cha: An Asian Literary Journal—since 2007, the first time I encountered writing from the Philippines in a more intimate and substantial way was through my participation as a foreign panellist in the 2015 Silliman University National Writers Workshop (SUNWW), the oldest of its kind in Asia. Additionally, editing and publishing the “Writing the Philippines” issue (July 2018) of Cha earlier this year afforded me the opportunity to read a wide range of texts by writers from the Philippines, many of them emerging ones. Drawing on these two experiences, I would like to offer some observations on reading literature from the Philippines from an ‘outsider’ perspective, as well as outlining some of the ways in which I have found the literature challenged and even surprised me, and to give an idea of the impressions of the country I have formed through its myriad texts. Another strand of the presentation centres on some reflections on the complicated interdependent relationship between Hong Kong and the Philippines as seen in the short sci-fi film Come to Me, Paradise (directed by Stephanie Comilang, 2017). How are the stories of those from the Philippines currently living in foreign lands (such as Hong Kong) told? For whom are they narrated? How are realities made more fantastical and palatable?
BIO
Tammy Lai-Ming Ho is a founding co-editor of the Hong Kong-based international publication Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, an editor of the academic journal Hong Kong Studies, and the English Editor of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine. She has also edited or co-edited seven literary books and her literary translations have been published in World Literature Today, Chinese Literature Today, among other places, and by the Chinese University Press. Her first poetry collection is Hula Hooping, for which she won the Young Artist Award in Literary Arts in Hong Kong. She is an Associate Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University and she serves as the Vice President of PEN Hong Kong, a Junior Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities and an Advisor of the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing. She has creative and academic books forthcoming from Delere Press, Math Paper Press, Palgrave and Springer.