Poetry is sometimes written out of need – it builds out of what cannot be said and speaks – like water flowing through a narrow conduit. Necessity has its own authority. This is the case in Mary Jean Chan’s superb second collection, Bright Fear, a development of their Costa-winning debut, Flèche, which was partly about their mother’s life growing up amid the political turbulence of 20th-century China. Chan’s own turbulence is more personal. They are queer and have translated themselves from Hong Kong into the UK. They explore here the pain of disappointing parental expectation, of breaking free from hidebound familial hopes. What is unexpectedly touching is the complicated tenderness with which they write about their parents. In A Denim Shirt, they talk about meeting them at an airport and regret they were not kinder: “Too much honesty can be a fault, I remind my impatient heart.” In the same moving poem, the mother comes wordlessly closer to accepting her daughter’s sexuality. It ends with the discovery that she has slipped a denim shirt into their suitcase and wrapped it round a box of Godiva chocolates:
For you and J, you said. You did
not mention the shirt, the kind you had always told
me never to wear. I thanked you, for the chocolates.
Chocolates speak louder than words but it is the denim shirt that is the clincher.
In a poem from the sequence Ars Poetica, they write: “I am asked why my poems are so clear. I’ll confess/it’s what happens when you want to be understood.” Their clarity gives pleasure but the “apology” is edgily ambiguous: they are not confessing to a failing.
Reading Bright Fear is like testing the blade of a knife and finding it exquisitely sharp. There is a shining, workmanlike, incisive quality to Chan’s writing. They are processing several oppressive subjects: the pandemic, fear of death, discovering that the “romanticised elsewhere” of the UK is compromised by racist microaggressions. They also touch on the complexity of having mastered English as if you could have an acquired first language (in poems such as In the Beginning Was the Word). And they let one in to what it is to endure emotional lockdown.
Titles are not Chan’s strong point – Bright Fear seems too vague and adrift – as if, when it came to titles, they did not want to be pinned down; fireworks on the tongue is also exaggerated (it would not pass in a restaurant review). But the poem itself is a winner. Try reading it aloud and hear how it builds to a pitch, the way “yes” fights defensively against an implied backdrop of “no”. The absence of punctuation encourages a sense that it should be spoken rather than read. The self-deprecating humour charms (even if we can only guess at why reading an article on Korean dystopian fiction in translation proved so cheering).
The collection’s penultimate poem, Out, appears to offer resolution:
Can I be myself now? I ask
my parents in a dream.
There is a long silence that lasts
for years, punctuated by half-
finished sentences.
Later in the same poem, Chan records an affirmation (“yes” used to transform, unlike the “yes” of the earlier poem):
Yesterday,
as we spoke, my parents
looked at me and simply said, yes.
Yes? I asked. Yes, they replied
We love you.
It is a shame that Chan chose an uncharacteristically less than clear “postscript” as a final poem rather than letting the powerful simplicity of acceptance have the last word.
fireworks on the tongue
and yes I bit into the turbot sautéed in herb oil and yes I made
the conscious choice to be pescatarian in spite of those tragic
documentaries about farmed salmon and yes I craved the
smell of burnt meat and yes I could not miss the homeless
man sitting outside La Petite Maison and yes I called an Uber
for us to return home and yes home is a nice apartment in East
London and yes I read an article on Korean dystopian fiction
in translation and felt better for it and yes I slept that night in
a bed with only me in it and yes my partner had stayed that
week in an Airbnb in order that my parents might visit me in
peace and yes I am still trying to achieve my way into love and
yes I cried when my mother told me to take care of her since
it has been so long and yes the turbot it was so moist it was so
soft and yes fine dining has forever been a social lubricant in
my family and yes without fireworks on the tongue to distract
us into harmony there would have been all the love we could
muster or a desolation none of us could have withstood.
• Bright Fear by Mary Jean Chan is published by Faber (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
