With Hong Kong having experienced another mass exodus after the COVID-19 pandemic, Hong Kong-British diasporic poetry has grown significantly as a subfield of Hong Kong literature. The notions of assimilation, cultural hybridity, and ambivalent identity inherent in diasporic literature find powerful echoes in the colonial history of the city. Such diasporic poets as Mary Jean Chan frequently use poetry as a medium for postcolonial criticism. Chan’s upbringing as a queer woman in colonial Hong Kong has given rise to internal conflicts ranging from the personal, familial, and matrilineal to the cultural, historical and sociopolitical. Similar to other diasporic literature written by women, Chan uses food tropes and matrilineal conflicts as symbolic of the interplay between pre-colonial Chinese cultural heritage and the hegemonic importation of colonial rules and conventions.

This paper will explicate the ways in which Mary Jean Chan utilizes food as a poetic motif to shed light on the cultural oppression upon her sexuality through colonialism and matrilineage. Drawing on Bhabha’s notion of hybridity, I argue that Chan’s experience reflects a liminal identity caused by a colonial hybridization which weaves together the importation of oppressive colonial norms and the practice of filial piety within Confucian ideology, in the form of consanguinity, into an inextricably oppressive totality against her sexuality. To begin the unraveling process, the first section of the essay will subvert the popular notion that sexual oppression stems from traditional Chinese ideology about filial piety and instead investigate how the history-laden culinary trope of tea reveals sources of oppression that take root in British colonialism. Then, the second section will reintegrate the role of Chinese ideology into the British-imported oppression on sexuality through the notion of consanguinity in Confucian ideology to reveal tensions in Chan’s lived experience.

I have had immense pleasure working with the poems by Mary Jean Chan. No other poet has had as great an influence on my understanding and appreciation of poetry. It simply felt right to culminate my undergraduate studies with a project surrounding her works. As someone looking to return to academia some day, I gained significant insight throughout this endeavor into the qualitative research process and what it was like to conceive, design, and develop an original thesis on an unexplored crevice of academic research. The research process was at times difficult but overall, immensely rewarding because I got to contribute to a much lacking critical discourse surrounding the works of Mary Jean Chan. Should I return to academia, I will look forward to developing my ideas further and continuing research on Mary Jean’s poems.