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Asteria Mao

Dr Benjamin BARBER

Contemporary Literary Theory (1001)

19 December 2023

Crossing with the “Leaf of Passage”: A phenomenological reading of Leung Ping-Kwan’s poem

Becoming an astronaut who travels among galaxies seems to be a wild childhood dream.
In the 1990s, people used “Astronaut” to refer to a particular group of people: those “new
emigrant fathers from Hong Kong who leave their wives and children in Vancouver in order to
return to Hong Kong to earn a living (Leung 203).” As they are busy commuting between two
places, travelling physically across boundaries also equips them with a transcultural identity.
Similar to them, Leung Ping-Kwan, a Hong Kong writer, possesses a transcultural background
and writing style since he grew up during the colonialized history. His poem “Leave of Passage”
is written in response to Andrew Parkin’s poem “Astronaut”, opposing his idea that these
emigrated fathers are hedonists and irresponsible. Inspired by the statue: “The Spirit of Haida
Gwaii” located at the heart of the Vancouver International Airport, Leung’s poem portrays the
artwork as an ekphrasis and displays it with the Astronaut emigrants, emphasizing the rootless
and loneliness states of them struggling between two cultures. This essay then focuses on
Leung’s ekphrastic poem, a literary meditation on an artwork (statue, in this context) and takes a
phenomenological way to deconstruct the intertextuality, as well as the Intermediality hiding
behind. It will first analyse at the format level, and then demonstrate its intertextuality and
Intermediality from the content level, trying to merge my understanding with this poem to
comprehend the crossing between borderlines in Leung’s writing.
The format aspect, or the meter and rhyme breaks the boundary between tradition and
innovation, as well as the author and the reader. This poem has both English and Chinese
versions, which made it necessary to consider the negotiation between two cultures. Leung
confessed that he wrote firstly in English, then shifted back to Chinese halfway and finally,
translated the rest of them into English again. It merges the Western-style free verse with the
traditional eight-line Chinese regulated verse with parallel couplets. According to Chinese
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traditions, an eight-line verse (or Lü Shi1) often has five or seven characters in a line composing
two paralleled couplets called lian2 with a strict metrical scheme and special rhyme requirements.
However, “Leaf of Passage” does not follow the regulated rules of Chinese eight-line verse.
Except for the eight lines (in Leung’s case there are eight couplets, each couplet considered as a
line), the whole poem takes on the form of free verse, a subversive Western style with no
rhythmic pattern organized into a regular metrical form. This combination is innovative. In
English, there is no prominent rhyme (internal or end rhyme). But as a bilingual reader, I can
easily sense where Leung shifted back to Chinese:
舟上有利齒的海貍揮槳向前，有鯊女暗通海洋無邊神秘
豺狼爭利踐踏誰的脊樑？被強徵入伍者默默助航但謀生計
The sharp-teeth beaver paddles away, the dogfish woman converses secretly with
the mysteries of the ocean.
The Wolf, vying for position, tramples on whose back? The reluctant recruit aids
in silence, clinging on.
In Chinese, 神秘 (mysteries, sound: shen mi) and 生計(clinging on sound: sheng ji)
rhyme in the vowel sound “i”. 無邊神秘 (boundless mysteries) and 豺狼爭利 (The Wolf, vying
for position) both have the tone pattern of “ping/ping/ping/ze (flat/flat/flat/oblique)”. The end
rhyme and tone system thus create a special musicality—particularly in Chinese, people can
immediately feel the rhythm of them. This, as Jarvis suggested, could be the kind of thinking
“whose medium, instead, is essentially prosodic: a kind of thinking in tune (438).” Based on the
theories of affect, which ask “how bodies are impelled by forces other than language and reason
(Truran 27)”, this rhythm, even though one does not understand the meaning, or only focuses on
the sounds of them could sense this immediate response of emotion. Thus, the author and the
reader communal together to finish this poem: by referring to non-semiotic meaning, the poet
creates affect within the poem; as readers, the rhythm and musicality combine and you naturally
foster an emotion, or pleasure. In this back and forth, Leung’s poem creates a “text of bliss” as it
“unsettles…the consistency of [the readers’] tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his
1
Lü Shi: refers to a specific form of Classical Chinese poetry verse form. One of the most important poetry forms of
classical Chinese poetry, the Lü Shi refers to an eight-line regulated verse form with lines made up of five, six, or
seven characters.
2
Lian: a couplet (two lines with mostly 5 or 7 characters in each line as in Lü Shi) called a lian. A traditional
Chinese eight-line poem has four lian, including Shou Lian (the head couplet), He Lian (the jaw couplet), Jing Lian
(the neck couplet) and Wei Lian (the bottom couplet).
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relation with language (Barthes 14), thus blurring the line between “him” and “I”, also, eastern
and western culture traditions.
The content of this poem could also illustrate the transcultural idea, among which
intertextuality and Intermediality are the most prominent. Leung, in his “Writing Between
Chinese and English” claimed that “when I wrote in English, I must have secretly brought some
of the Chinese sentiments over to the passage (Leung 204).” In the first and last lines of the
poem, this is most obvious. Leung said “Sailing through wails from both banks (line 1)” is
inspired by Li Bai’s “Setting off early from Baidi City”. However, since the poem describes the
complex feelings of emigrants, it sounds to me more like an allusion to Li Daoyuan’s3 “Three
Gorges”. In Li’s prose, wails of apes are symbols of sadness and sorrow, which is more coherent
in this context. The last line originated from Li Qingzhao’s “Wulingchun4”, although the woes in
Li’s lyrics and Leung’s poem are different, both used “boat” as a major image. Here Leung
applied a very Chinese metaphor: compared a boat to a leaf5, while the boat as an imagery in
Chinese traditions carries the meaning of departure, wanderer and rootless (a bit like the bard).
This metaphor is so vivid that it concretizes the living states of the emigrated fathers, and also
the woes on their shoulders. Based on the above analysis, two levels of intertextuality emerge.
On the one hand, Leung alludes to Chinese imagery in English writing, which means this
“literary text is in fact made up of other texts (Abrams 401).” On the other hand, my personal
reading experience proves “the notion of intertextuality replaces the notion of intersubjectivity
(Kristeva 66)”, meaning not directly from the author to the reader, but from other texts to the
readers. A Chinese cultural background allows me to further browse the infinite possibilities of
apes’ wails and boats. It is through the mutual understanding of certain texts that I conclude “this
allusion sounds more to me like this one instead of others”. In this sense, Leung’s poem again
travels through different texts and two cultures, allowing readers to join in together in generating
the meaning.
Just as many post-structuralists asserted, real life is also text that is constituted by a
structure of signifiers. Except for the literal meaning of texts that cross the boundaries, texts of
3
Li Daoyuan: was a Chinese geographer, writer, and politician during the Northern Wei Dynasty. He is known as the
author of the Commentary on the Water Classic (Shuijingzhu), a monumental work on China's geography in ancient
times. “Three Gorges” is one of the most famous texts in Shuijingzhu.
4
Wulingchun: 词牌名 (meaning: a name for a lyric/tune).
5
Boat and leaf are related as they look similar. In Chinese traditional idiom: 一叶扁舟 (a tiny boat that looks like a
leaf).
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the real world in Leung’s poem also convey a borderless meaning. Given the ekphrastic nature of
his poem, maybe Intermediality is more suitable to define. As a literary genre, “ekphrasis is the
verbal representation of visual representation (Heffernan 35).” Taking a post-structuralist view of
it, Leung’s poem transcends the borderline between single signifiers and makes it into a chain of
significance. The original statue of the “Spirits of Haida Gwaii” had undergone several
reproductions. At first, it was a 1/6 scale clay model, then enlarged to full scale in bronze and
displayed outside the Canadian Embassy in Washington D.C. The one Leung wrote on is jade
made which was placed finally in Vancouver International Airport. As an ekphrasis, Leung’s
poem expands the story of this statue and adds something outside the mythology with what he
saw and thought. Whether the secretly converses dogfish or the wolves vying for position, Leung
projects his emotion onto this statue itself and puts it into the real world where “[the canoe]
stranded near customs officers, amidst immigrants waiting in line (line 2).” This depiction
provides a narrative of this statue, not the statue itself, but as Jameson Fredrick claimed, the
simulacra of the original one. Similarly, the understanding, or the emotions readers experienced
as mentioned above, is not the same emotion as what Leung had at that immediate moment, but
an artificial copy of it. Moreover, one must admit that the media specificity made language
sometimes less likely to produce the non-verbal intensities that an artwork overwhelmed us
(Kennedy 83). The interplay of different media/texts thus creates a chain of significance, on
which we keep on producing the simulacra, the “otherness” of media/texts. Even though none of
us managed to represent the “truth” of that statue, we achieved a better understanding of multiple
transboundary meanings in Leung’s writing.
At this level of analysis, Leung’s poem is a work that transcends many boundaries. From
its format, it blurred the line between authorship and readership. From its content, intertextuality
and Intermediality cross the cultural, textual and formal boundaries of art. My personal view of
this poem joined together in finishing the “transboundary” meaning of it. One interesting yet
ironic thing is that I chose a quite “bordered” way to analyse this borderless poem. But, perhaps,
sometimes only by keeping certain boundaries could we better achieve the crossing part.

Appendices
Appendix 1: Leaf of Passage
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Is this a jade or a wooden canoe? Sailing through wails from both banks,
Only to be stranded near customs officers, amidst immigrants waiting in line.

Myths of Haida Gwaii at your elbow: Bear Father with young son sits at the bow
Looking back at the past; Bear Mother rowing hard, gazes into the future of her children.

The sharp-teeth beaver paddles away, the dogfish woman converses secretly with the mysteries
of the ocean.
The Wolf, vying for position, tramples on whose back? The reluctant recruit aids in silence,
clinging on.

Has our Chief with great vision disappeared from sight with his talking staff?
Under our eyes only the amphibious frog crosses over the boundary between two worlds.

Not an astronaut bringing home legends of space odysseys. Not at all.

Just a lonely father shuttling back with heavy twigs to build new nests.

Worries add to one’s age, diseases accumulate. Transit is never as smooth

As sages on blades of weed. See those mottled stamps on a suspicious passport?

Not so easy to roll a house into a backpack; lost forever are the familiar
Land and language. Departing, you imagined yourself a snow goose flying south,

Crossing the frozen earth in search of a warmer port? What one foresees
Are sneers from both soils: how can a leaf move that many woes?

Appendix 2: Leaf of Passage translated (Chinese ver.) 渡葉

這一葉是碧玉還是木頭的輕舟？ 兩岸啼聲不住
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卻擱淺在機場移民官員肘旁，伴着眾人輪候隊伍

海伊達族人的神話在我身邊：小熊父親抱着小兒
背坐船首回看昨日；母親辛勤划水望向孩子的前程

舟上有利齒的海貍揮槳向前，有鯊女暗通海洋無邊神秘
豺狼爭利踐踏誰的脊樑？被強徵入伍者默默助航但謀生計

我們會不會永遠失去了高瞻的族長和他的言杖？
只有水陸兩棲的青蛙來往穿越兩個不同國度的邊界

並非穿梭的太空人帶回逍遙遨遊的神話，只是
一個孤獨的父親來回穿梭銜回沉重的枝葉建新巢

思慮令人衰老，腸胃和皮膚的疾病蔓延，往返不見輕易
不似昔日高人一葦渡江，只是可疑的護照戳上斑駁的印記

把一所房子捲成一副鋪蓋總怕有種種差池，漏失了
熟悉的語言與泥土，連根拔起好像雪雁向南展翅

穿越冰封之地尋覓溫暖的港口，卻又老怕招惹
兩幅土地排斥：一片葉哪裏載得動這麼多煩憂？

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