September 2024: Hongwei Bao
Hongwei Bao (he/they) grew up in Inner Mongolia, China, and currently lives in Nottingham, UK. He teaches at the University of Nottingham. He uses poetry, short story and creative nonfiction to explore queer desire, Asian identity, diasporic positionality and transcultural intimacy. His creative work has appeared in Carnations, Violets & Lavender, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Covert Literary Magazine, Eunoia Review, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Medusa’s Kitchen, Messy Misfits Club, Poetry Catalog, Shanghai Literary Review, The Anthropocene, The Hooghly Review, The Other Side of Hope, The Ponder Review, The Rialto, The Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine and Write On. He is the author of the poetry pamphlet Dream of the Orchid Pavilion (Big White Shed, 2024) and poetry collection The Passion of the Rabbit God (Valley Press, 2024). His flash fiction ‘A Postcard from Berlin’ was a runner-up for the Plaza Prize for Microfiction in 2023.
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This month we're delighted to be featuring three poems from Hongwei Bao's collection The Passion of the Rabbit God, published this year by Valley Press (who we should note are an excellent independent Yorkshire publisher!).
The Rabbit God is the patron saint of LGBTQIA+ people in China and many other parts of East and Southeast Asia. Hongwei Bao’s debut poetry collection rewrites ancient Chinese myths, revisits haunted queer and trans past, performs queer joy and feminist rage, and addresses contemporary issues such as migration, racism, homophobia and political protests. The book celebrates Asian identity and queer desire, exploring their complex intersections and offering poetic musings on Asian identity, queer desire, feminist politics, diasporic positionality and transcultural intimacy. Moving across time and space, these works are intimate, affective and politically engaged at the same time, articulating a queer Asian diasporic politics for contemporary times.
To find out more about the collection overall, there's a fascinating, in-depth review by Kika W.L. Van Robays, in Cha.
There's also a very interesting interview in Write On! from May 2024, where Hongwei talks more about his writing journey:
I write in English as a second language, a language I wasn’t born into and only learned in later life. In many ways, my writing also navigates the in-between spaces between linguistic, cultural and literary traditions...
The COVID-19 pandemic was an important context for my creative work. The pandemic has affected all of us in different ways. People from racial, ethnic, gender and sexual minorities were particularly vulnerable at that time. For example, there has been a rising Sinophobia and anti-Asian racism in the UK and globally. Many LGBTQIA+ people couldn’t stay at home and keep socially distanced because ‘home’ meant different things for them. The book was written from a queer Asian perspective, reflecting on the impact of the pandemic on marginalised individuals and communities.
And if you'd like to read more of Hongwei's work, you can also check out his pamphlet Dream of the Orchid Pavilion, published by Big White Shed Press.