How did the SARS epidemic impact your writing about the COVID-19 pandemic?

Growing up in Hong Kong during the 2003 SARS epidemic, the COVID-19 pandemic brought back vivid memories and influenced the speaker's emotional landscape, prompting a reflection on public health measures and anti-Asian sentiment.

Why do you choose to keep some Chinese characters untranslated in your poems?

The choice is intentional; it asks the reader to question their own frustration or sense of entitlement regarding transparency. For bilingual readers, it adds a layer of duality, while non-Chinese speakers are often provided enough context to discern the meaning.

How do you view the relationship between being queer and using the English language?

While English was initially an imposed colonial language, it provided a "safe space" for the poet to explore emergent queer feelings and identities, offering a sense of freedom and playfulness that felt distinct from their experience with their mother tongue.

Why does the poet find the form of poetry specifically attractive compared to prose?

The poet is drawn to the "incredible compression" of language in poetry, which allows for a heightened attentiveness to syntax, diction, and imagery. It also facilitates the juxtaposition of disparate ideas without the need for the narrative resolution often expected in prose.

Is your poetry primarily a form of grieving or a form of love?

The poet views their work as inherently both; they describe their books as "love poems" that also hold space for grief, disappointment, and conflict, ultimately using the poem as a container for complex human emotions.

The poem as a home | Interview with Mary Jean Chan

Writing About the Pandemic
📌 Mary Jean Chan’s poetry collection, *Bright Fear*, explores the emotional landscape of the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing parallels to their teenage experience during the 2003 SARS epidemic in Hong Kong.
😷 The collection addresses the anti-Asian racism and skepticism regarding masking that emerged during the pandemic, highlighting how the author adopted hypervigilance as a protective measure in public spaces.
✍️ Writing about the pandemic served as a necessary outlet for the author to process personal experiences as a queer immigrant and to challenge the stigma surrounding public health safety measures.

Language, Multilingualism, and Identity
🌍 Growing up in a British colony, the author experienced English as an imposed colonial language, yet discovered it provided a "liberating" space to explore queer identity that felt inaccessible in their mother tongue, Cantonese.
📚 In their poetry, the author incorporates Chinese characters to challenge readers' linguistic entitlement, asking them to sit with the discomfort of non-translation or to engage in the process of discovery.
🔍 The use of Cantonese, a highly tonal and musical language, allowed the author to experiment with sound and rhyme, creating a playful intersection between their bilingual reality and their creative output in English.

Poetry as a Safe Space and Home
🏠 The author views the poem as a constructed home—a controlled environment where they have total authority over structure, line breaks, and the juxtaposition of complex emotions.
🧩 Unlike prose, which often requires a narrative arc or resolution, poetry allows for the compression of language and the placement of disparate, difficult moments side-by-side without needing to reconcile them.
❤️ Poetry functions as a medium for both grief and love, providing a "container" to hold intense familial and personal dynamics while allowing for precise, careful attention to diction and syntax.

Key Points & Insights
➡️ Intersectionality in Practice: The author notes that identity is fluid; they may have racial privilege in Hong Kong but experience heightened visibility and marginalization as an ethnic minority in the UK.
➡️ The Ethics of Language: Treating words with extreme care and precision is viewed by the author as an ethical act, serving as a form of "love" directed toward the subject matter and the reader.
➡️ Creative Liberation: Embracing a second language can provide a unique sense of freedom, allowing writers to explore forbidden or emergent feelings under the guise of academic or professional study.

📸 Video summarized with SummaryTube.com on Apr 12, 2026, 14:12 UTC

The poem as a home | Interview with Mary Jean Chan

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