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Summer Cicadas

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Summer Cicadas

by Jennifer Wong

Chameleon Press, HK$99

This first collection of Jennifer Wong's poetry gives insight into being a young, sensitive, Hong Kong Chinese girl who wins an undergraduate scholarship to read English literature at Oxford.

There's the excitement of opening the letter of award, with its hopes for the future; then the adaptation to the special culture of Oxford with its 'reading men', Bodleian Library, Radcliffe Camera, college gardens and quads. There's the hope that, with application, reading English books can become the same for her as it is for locals, who do it as 'a native leisure'. There's the burden of getting tenses right, so that people will understand her meaning, and the comfort of speaking to her mother on the phone, in her mother tongue, which has no tenses at all.

She comes to like Chinese food adapted to British tastes, visits London's Chinatown, and suggests that these opportunities mean one need not lose one's Chineseness when living in Britain. Balanced with this are her Hong Kong places, thoughts and experiences before, during and after her permanent change in personality - the result of living overseas.

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