The Friday Poem: Maggie Cheung’s blue cheongsam, by Nina Mingya Powles
Nina Mingya Powles (Photo: Supplied)
A poem from Nina Mingya Powles’ Ockham-shortlisted collection Magnolia 木蘭.
Maggie Cheung’s blue cheongsam
Maggie Cheung’s blue cheongsam is patterned with pink peonies. Dark magenta, dark magnolia, a colour that is edible. Nests of deep green leaves extend from the base of each fat flower, their edges painted gold. It has the same pattern as the plastic vinyl tablecloths at roadside cafes in Singapore and Malaysia, the kinds of places where my mother would have stopped off on her way home from school to sit on plastic stools and sip sweet teh tarik and eat kuih made of layers of fluorescent pink and green glutinous rice. It has the same pattern as a cloth lantern I bought from a shop in San Francisco’s Chinatown; I saw it from the street, luminous, blue. Ducking under an arch of gold paper lanterns and lucky double fish, I asked about the blue lantern and the shop-owner smiled, fetched her stepladder. Above the till, rows of white and red spheres with cut-outs in the shape of 福 cast intricate shadows on the tiled floor. In In the Mood for Love, Maggie Cheung’s blue cheongsam appears in doorways, in windows, half in shadow, never in full view. Now it hangs in my bedroom. At night I can see it from the street below, flooding the room with warm blue longing.
Magnolia 木蘭 (Seraph Press) is a finalist for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. The winners will be announced on May 12.
The Friday Poem is edited by Chris Tse. Submissions are welcome and will be open until the end of April. Please send your poems to chris@christse.co.nz.
Nina Mingya Powles
Nina Mingya Powles is a poet, zinemaker and non-fiction writer of Malaysian-Chinese and Pākehā heritage, currently living in London. Her most recent book, Magnolia 木蘭 is shortlisted in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in the poetry category, and the UK edition was shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She is also the author of a food memoir, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai (The Emma Press, 2020), poetry box-set Luminescent (Seraph Press, 2017), and several poetry chapbooks and zines, including Girls of the Drift (Seraph Press, 2014). In 2018 she was one of three winners of the inaugural Women Poets' Prize, and in 2019 won the Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing. Nina has an MA in creative writing from Victoria University of Wellington and won the 2015 Biggs Family Prize for Poetry. She is the founding editor of Bitter Melon 苦瓜, a risograph press that publishes limited-edition poetry pamphlets by Asian writers. Her collection of essays, Small Bodies of Water, is forthcoming from Canongate Books in 2021. Photo by David Marshall.
