Panel: Note to Self: Why I Write What I Write (1

Lam, Agnes S. L.

English

Iowa Research Online

University of Iowa 
International Writing Program Archive of Residents' Work 
9-12-2008 
Why I Write What I Write 
Agnes S. L. Lam 
Panel: Note to Self: Why I Write What I Write (1) 
Rights 
Copyright © 2008 Agnes S. L. Lam 
Recommended Citation 
Lam, Agnes S. L., "Why I Write What I Write" (2008). International Writing Program Archive of Residents' 
Work. 745. 
https://ir.uiowa.edu/iwp_archive/745 
Hosted by Iowa Research Online. For more information please contact: lib-ir@uiowa.edu. 
Lam 
 
Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – September 12, 2008 
Agnes Lam (Hong Kong/Singapore), Hu Xudong (China), Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (Nigeria), Anat Pick (Israel), Leonardo Henríquez (Venezuela) 
For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” 
1 
Why I Write What I Write 
Agnes Lam 
 
My background 
 
Perhaps I should begin with a little note on my background. I was born in Hong Kong and educated 
in English from primary school. I left Hong Kong at 19 to study in Singapore because they gave me 
a scholarship. Singapore then sent me to do my Phd in linguistics in America. When I completed 
that, I taught at the National University of Singapore for some years before I returned to Hong 
Kong. I now teach at the University of Hong Kong. For the last year, I was also the Acting Director 
of the Centre for Applied English Studies there with 41 teachers, 12 administrative staff and about 
7,000 students. The nature of my job demands that I write a whole range of genres: teaching 
materials, development plans, budget justifications, staff appraisals, curriculum documents, research 
grant proposals as well as academic books and articles. Sometimes, I am invited to write newspaper 
articles about poetry. I have done some translation of poetry from Chinese into English when a 
friend needs my help. I also write poetry myself. In all my writing, I aim to use as few words as 
possible to capture what I want to say as accurately and as clearly as possible. I do not always 
succeed but that is my aim because my readers’ time is so precious. 
 
Why I write poetry 
 
Writing poetry is not a requirement of my job but just something I like to do. Because it is 
something I just like to do, it is not something that requires a reason or a purpose. Do we ask 
children why they like to blow soap bubbles into the air? No reason. They just like to see them rise 
into the air, refracting the spectrum of colours from the sun. Do we ask them why they like 
swimming? No reason. It just feels good to glide through the water. 
 
I have often been asked why I write poetry. I usually reply carelessly: ‘I don’t know. I just do. It’s 
like breathing.’ If I may quote from the introduction to my first collection, Woman to Woman and 
Other Poems (1997). 
 
… To me, poetry is part of everyday life. I see it and hear it everywhere in everything. I cannot trace 
how this awareness began. I was a rather quiet child who liked to sit by myself gazing at the sea. I 
also read a lot from a young age. The death of my father when I was thirteen and the difficulties in 
my first marriage could have enhanced that sensibility. The times when I could not speak of my own 
dissolution could have made me more sensitive to similar circumstances in other people’s lives. … 
Through writing poetry, I reorder my inner dissonance. If I can articulate the fury and the calm, 
perhaps my words may offer some comfort in resonance to another who does not. 
 
If there must be a reason for my poetry, then that is the reason – to understand, to empathize, to 
comfort, to create harmony and happiness … 
 
The first poem I ever wrote was written for my father when he passed away. In many of my teenage 
poems, mostly not published, I was just trying to understand myself, trying to make sense of the 
universe around me and within me. When I looked around me, I did not understand why there was 
so much cruelty in this world. I understood kindness because that made people happy but I did not 
understand cruelty because it made everyone unhappy. And when I closed my eyes, in the inner 
Lam 
 
Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – September 12, 2008 
Agnes Lam (Hong Kong/Singapore), Hu Xudong (China), Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (Nigeria), Anat Pick (Israel), Leonardo Henríquez (Venezuela) 
For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” 
2 
darkness, I saw the stars out there in the galaxy still and I did not understand the vastness of the 
spaces between them. So I wrote poetry … 
 
Then I went away from home, first to Singapore and then to America, and I thought constantly of 
the worlds I left behind. I felt the need to write about those worlds, almost as if I needed to 
persuade myself that they were there still, perhaps because it was in my connection with those 
worlds that I could retain my bearings in a strange land. There was a poem I wrote in America which 
seems to epitomize this existence, at once ephemeral yet with a reality of its own: 
 
Petals 
 
in three countries 
I can grow 
if but a little 
each time 
I transplant 
 
the air 
pollen dusted 
allergic to spring 
dripping with sodas 
in the heat of summer 
a chlorine bath later 
smelling burnt 
and crackling 
on autumn trees 
in the clear winter 
icicles break and bite 
 
extremes in America 
modulated in Hong Kong 
negligible on the Equator 
but always 
petals unfurling 
I thrive 
on the spectrum 
of colours smells noises 
temperatures humidities 
degrees of pollution 
in the pervading air 
 
ready to be 
watered by droplets 
pressed between a child’s 
small fingers 
a gift for Father 
 
without roots 
Lam 
 
Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – September 12, 2008 
Agnes Lam (Hong Kong/Singapore), Hu Xudong (China), Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (Nigeria), Anat Pick (Israel), Leonardo Henríquez (Venezuela) 
For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” 
3 
I grow 
 
with but the scent 
for a season 
even a moment 
translucent petals 
dancing in a raindrop spectrum 
 
mere petals 
of scent and light 
dissipated and mangled 
in an afternoon storm 
 
as the traffic 
halts on the red light 
and pedestrians 
cross in their umbrellas 
 
28 June 1986, LRDC 
 
I still remember the traffic junction in Pittsburgh when that image overwhelmed me so completely I 
had to write about it when I reached my apartment to free myself from it so that I could be peaceful 
again. 
Soon I found that my poetry could do something like this for other people around me as well. 
About a decade ago, one of my friends lost her baby. She was a foreigner in Hong Kong; when I 
visited her, she told me she could not bring herself to tell her relatives and friends back home she 
had lost her baby. That night, as I prayed for her, I seemed to see a happy baby floating in the air, 
not physically of course, but I felt her presence. And I wrote this poem. 
 
To Sonia 
 
Tonight I think of you, 
a child that should have been born 
to your mother in a foreign land. 
 
I would have held your little hand, 
nails trimmed by your Chinese grandmother 
with the baby clipper she brought 
 
all the way from Canada for you, 
her first grandchild so longed for 
from her first daughter-in-law. 
 
You were to be your mother’s first born, 
first loved, first bathed, clothed and fed, 
showered with presents from relatives and friends 
 
on the other Pacific shore. You were with her 
Lam 
 
Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – September 12, 2008 
Agnes Lam (Hong Kong/Singapore), Hu Xudong (China), Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (Nigeria), Anat Pick (Israel), Leonardo Henríquez (Venezuela) 
For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” 
4 
when she got onto the plane. Did you leave quietly 
over the ocean water? Did you walk 
 
through the window onto the clouds? She could not 
hold you to say goodbye. She could not 
look into your eyes, kiss your cheeks 
  
for the last and first time. She did not know 
you were leaving. She does not know 
where to find you now. 
 
I saw the tears in her eyes, her dark lashes wet, 
her chestnut hair tied in a short pony-tail, 
a child left alone, away from home. 
 
Sonia, Sonia, your mother’s first conceived, 
is it possible for you to visit her? 
Tell her you are well 
 
where you are. You are still alive, 
more so than before. On the other shore, 
you need not be fed or clothed. 
 
You are grown and need no care. 
You are loved by many radiant 
as you are, light, complete, pure. 
 
You, her first, know and love her so. 
 
1 November 1997, Rodrigues Court 
for my Canadian friend married to a Chinese immigrant to Toronto now living in Hong Kong 
 
Actually, my friend was not Canadian but, to protect the privacy of the people I write about, I might 
change a few details here and there in a poem and, before I publish any poem of this sort, I always 
seek permission from the people involved. In this instance, my friend took my poem and sent it to 
her relatives and friends and that helped her recover from the loss of her baby. A few years later, a 
young pastor in an English-speaking church in Hong Kong also had to counsel a young couple who 
lost their baby and he told me later he gave them this poem and it comforted them. 
 
Not all my poems are gentle like these two. I have written some poems about the political situation 
in Hong Kong and China and, occasionally, even about China’s relations with the West. I always 
write for peace but two or three of my poems have been misunderstood as poems to incite people 
to war. Perhaps I should take that as a compliment but I was grateful to read Peter Nazareth’s 
review of my second collection, Water Wood Pure Splendour (2001), in World Literature Today, in 
which he observes that my poems are “fighting poems that seek to heal”. Readers like him 
understand that my intention, even if I write about political circumstances, is to enhance 
understanding for greater empathy between different ethnicities and nationalities. 
 
Lam 
 
Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – September 12, 2008 
Agnes Lam (Hong Kong/Singapore), Hu Xudong (China), Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (Nigeria), Anat Pick (Israel), Leonardo Henríquez (Venezuela) 
For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” 
5 
 
These eighty days 
 
At this juncture of my writing, I seem to be going through a different phase. I might be returning in 
some way to some of the concerns in my younger days, though with a different idiom, I hope. It is 
not as if I have ever lost those themes, which might range from pure joy in a certain lyrical moment 
to metaphysical sadness. Some of my recent poems go somewhat beyond home, country, culture or 
ethnicity to an appreciation of beauty and philosophical explorations but I will not quote from them. 
There are a few samples on the International Writing Program web: 
http://iwp.uiowa.edu/writers/index.htm/, if you are interested. 
 
My revisiting these themes might have something to do with my age. Under a normal life span in 
Hong Kong, I have fewer than 10,000 days left to write. Eighty of these days are being spent in 
Iowa. Someone could go around the world in eighty days. I only seek to write part of a collection of 
poetry. Three weeks have already gone by. But I am now well adjusted to life in Iowa. I love my little 
apartment decorated all in white and green on a hardwood floor in a house exactly a century old. I 
now have a satellite vision of the grid of streets in this patch of America – Fairchild to my north, 
Prentiss to my south, Van Buren to my east and Madison to my west. I have acquired a mini rice 
cooker. I have also discovered I can remove tea stains on a mug with toothpaste and have learnt to 
hang up my laundry with such art I only have to do minimal ironing. And I have at last completed a 
chapter for an academic book on China for two forbearing editors. So finally I am free, temporally 
and emotionally, to walk along the river, to think, to write poetry … These eighty days are very 
precious to me. When they are over, I will have to write the next development plan for my Centre 
and all the associated genres again … 
 
For these eighty days of poetic freedom, I am most grateful to everyone at IWP for making life so 
easy for me here in Iowa. I also wish to thank my fellow IWP participants for being so inspiring and 
collegial and you, our dear audience, for being so supportive. Thank you very much, ladies and 
gentlemen. 
 


Why I Write What I Write

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Why I Write What I Write

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