Mountain Songs

An interview with poet Tegan Smyth

Tegan Smyth. (Photo kindly supplied by Tegan.)

This week’s post is an interview with Tegan Smyth, a biracial poet with roots in Hong Kong and Australia. Her work has been published in Asian Cha, Voice & Verse, and The Economist, among other publications. Her beautiful first collection, Mountain Songs, was recently published in Hong Kong by Proverse Publishing.

You can find out more about Tegan via YouTube here or on her website here.

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Jeffrey Streeter: How long have you been writing poetry, Tegan? And when did you realise that you wanted to be—or rather, you were—a poet?

Tegan Smyth: I think it's coming up to 19 years. I started writing poetry in high school, and the first time I was published was in an international anthology by young writers.

I was 16 years old at the time. I think I was still developing my voice as a writer. So if anyone is able to find that work, it might be a bit mortifying for me.

But I only really started to get very serious about my poetry, I think, in 2015. I moved back to Hong Kong the year before, and I started to go to Peel Street Poetry, which is a local open mic event in Hong Kong.

There's quite a dynamic English-language poetry community, as well as a local Cantonese community. I started performing my work, and I think that in performing my poems, I ended up writing a lot more. 

I guess I'm now a poet and author, but calling myself an author still feels a little bit foreign, which I think is always the case with your first publication, but that's true of me now.

How far do you feel connected to the work of other poets in Hong Kong? 

So I would say that I'm quite connected to the fellow poets that go to Peel Street Poetry. As a diasporic Chinese person who's grown up overseas and came to Hong Kong, I find the environment welcomes people of all backgrounds. 

There are a few poets who share multiple identities, and I think it's something I've gravitated to. So it is really interesting reading work from their lens because often it's like reframing the ways that we think about Hong Kong and the city that we're in.

We're all experiencing the city at the same time, but we're experiencing it differently because we move through it very differently.

Now going back to Mountain Songs, how did you feel when you saw the book in its final printed form for the first time?

Ah, pretty amazed, honestly. It's quite surreal to see something in your hand that has previously only lived within your computer on a Word document. It took around seven years to put Mountain Songs together, really thinking about what poems would work for the type of message that I was trying to convey in the collection.

Could you tell us a little bit more about the inspiration that you draw from the oral tradition in the Hakka language in Mountain Songs?

I'm biracial; my mum is from Hong Kong; she is Hakka, and her whole family are Hakka. The Hakka people are essentially nomadic; the Chinese characters for Hakka (客 家) literally mean "guest families." I don't speak the language, unfortunately, and that's true of a lot of people of Hakka heritage; a lot of people might have parents that come from a Hakka-speaking community, but the dialect is perceived as not being useful or valuable economically. It's not language that occupies economic or political space.

In the book, I wanted to look at the temporal nature of a disappearing language, not because the culture itself is disappearing but just because the speakership is dwindling.

Mountain songs are not things that've been written down. They’re just something that you experience, and if you're not there to experience it, you are told about it.

And I thought that the mountain songs were an interesting metaphor for how it feels to be Hakka, to not know how to identify with your culture anymore, to still ultimately identify with being Chinese in some way, but not having the tools of language at our disposal.

I really wanted Mountain Songs, as my first collection, to be about my mother and my mother's family and about identifying myself in the environment that I'm in.

Linguistically, if you're not able to draw upon Hakka directly, where do you draw your inspiration from?

I used different anecdotes from my mother's family—things that I was told about. I was thinking about food, which is how most Hakka people can identify with their culture.

I thought, How can I convey the sense of a culture that's being forgotten when there isn't a strong literary heritage?

So this is what I drew upon, because a lot of what we heard about were these mountain songs.

What languages do you read poetry in?

I speak Mandarin, though I'd say that I'm not well versed in Chinese language literature, but I do speak other languages. At university, I majored in French in addition to my legal studies.

So I actually ended up studying a lot of French poetry, and I think it influenced my understanding of what a poem could be and the sort of poetic forms that could be used.

Are there any writers who have influenced you in particular? 

The writers who really inspired me a lot along my journey are Sarah Howe, who wrote the collection Loop of Jade, and Omar Bin Musa, who is an Australian poet and also biracial. He wrote a great collection called Millefiori.

I’m also in debt to Sally Wen Mao and Ocean Vuong, who are both Asian-American poets, for their poetics and the ways that they've pushed language to describe immigrant experiences and also forge their identity.

Where do you write your poems?

So this is really interesting because I actually wonder how other people write their poems. For me, it actually often comes to me quite spontaneously.

I might be walking, and then a line comes into my head, and I’ll take out my phone and make time to write it because I realise that a poem is being birthed. And then I'll probably just get on with my day.

Later, when I have a moment, I'll start composing something around those lines and then doing different iterations.

I feel most inspired by looking at everyday events and happenings. I'm quite politically engaged. And I don't have the artistic setup where I sit down by a lake with a pen, look out, and write.

What do you do when you're not writing poetry? 

I work in the charity space these days. I trained as a lawyer in Australia and worked for many years in finance. In 2016, I started doing community organising while I was still working full time.

Then in 2020, I received charity status for an organisation that I set up, which works with refugees and asylum seekers in Hong Kong. It’s called Grassroots Future. And since 2021, I've been working almost full-time with my charity and with the refugee community.

This work relates to one of the social commentaries that I was hoping to have come across in Mountain Songs.

I didn't want to single out any particular culture as being wholly good or wholly evil. It was more that we've all got a part to play in terms of creating a welcoming society, giving people access to a homeland or a place to call home, and welcoming them.

Outside of work, I spend time with my husband, who is also very active in the poetry community. I would definitely recommend having a partner or companion who also writes; it’s very good for your own poetic practice.

I have a couple of other interests in the arts and creativity, too. Poetry is probably the medium I know the best, but I try to push myself to explore different mediums because I think in some ways it helps me write poetry. I do a lot of fabric arts; I do installations of different sizes. I've actually explored doing crochet poems where the pattern is based on a rhyme scheme. That's pretty fun to do. 

Something that comes through so beautifully in the collection is a real sense of connection with the past. How about place? How is your identity tied to a sense of place?

The mountains that generated this idea of singing over a hillside are in China, but we also have terrain like it in Australia.

The reality is that every generation in my family was born in a different place, and I think that speaks volumes about this sort of migration and the fact that home means different things to different people. My grandmother was born in mainland China, in Guangzhou, and my mum was born in Hong Kong. I was born in Sydney, Australia, or the Gadigal Land, to use the Indigenous name for that place. 

I would say that we're all holding different identities in a way already, just by virtue of where our passport says that we're from and what our birth certificate says if we have such a thing available. But I think we're still connected by family. So I'd say that home and identity are ultimately dictated by the people who are around you—the meals that you share together and the experiences that you have—rather than about the place you find yourself in.

Often, the place you're in is not your choice. It's a choice that's made for you by other people, either on a voluntary or an involuntary basis.

How widespread is the Hakka diaspora?

I believe that it is probably more so than I’d anticipated. For example, Hakka people are in places like Indonesia, with its large Chinese community. But also, a lot of southern Chinese migrated to the West during the Gold Rush in North America and also in Australia, some of whom would potentially have been Hakka. And there are Hakka people in Jamaica, in Peru, and in India.

They don't all have a common language anymore because not everyone speaks Hakka, but the connection comes through the shared food culture because there is quite a strong food tradition for Hakka people, and it's something I wanted to touch upon in my poems.

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MOUNTAIN SONGS I

by Tegan Smyth

My mother tells me

that in the old days  –

men and women courted each other through verse

cried raw over hillsides,

impromptu

like slam poets.

One of her 阿姨 sang these 山歌,

mountain songs.

She could sing it

warbled

so it could carry across valleys

though she never knew

how to hold

a pen.

阿姨 (aunt)

山歌 (mountain song)

Copyright © Tegan Smyth 2023, reproduced by kind permission of the publishers, Proverse Hong Kong.

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Mountain Songs is available here (Amazon) or via Tegan’s website (for local orders).