Anita Ngai

Poems and associated soundscapes of 'The First Chinese Students of MMU'. First performed as part of ISWAS International Storytelling Festival 2024. Part of Manchester Histories Festival 2024.

Anita Ngai is a poet and artist and a poetry MFA student at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her work bears witness on lives in between. Drawing on past lives as an engineer, strategy consultant and marketer, she works with different media, including the poetic word, data and space. Born in Hong Kong and raised in North America, Anita’s writing was long-listed for The National Poetry Competition 2021 and commissioned for the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. 

The First Chinese Students in the Manchester Metropolitan University.​​

The poems and associated soundscapes of ‘The First Chinese Students of MMU’ came about from research on the early histories of the Manchester Metropolitan University’s Chinese student body. Through telling the stories of these first Chinese students, this project forms the first step in chronicling the community’s legacy on Man Met as well as the school’s impact on these individual lives.​​

Having arrived recently in the UK to read poetry, I have been interested in situating my cultural identity within the larger context of the school’s and city’s history. But I quickly realised that the school has very little knowledge about the beginnings and development of its Chinese (and other international) student body: who they were, what years did it start admitting these students, how their school life unfolded, etc.

Using university archives and public records – handwritten student registers from the School of Art and Manchester Municipal Technical School (precedent institutions to Man Met), printed examination results, the 1911 Census and the UK Incoming Passenger List (ship) – I distilled out the names, addresses and key areas of study of a group of thirteen Chinese students who attended the school from 1902-1911 (after which many school records were burnt during World War II).​​

  • Anita Nagi standing on a stage at Manchester Central Library reading her work. Chinese woman with jacket & blue jeans

While researching, I created four poems, tracking different phases of the students’ life trajectories: arriving in the UK, school life, walking through the city from their lodging to school and life after leaving the school. The first three take on the voice of a student, with details amalgamated from multiple students’ biographic details, newspaper articles and other records existing from that period such as an invitation to a social gathering held in honour of a professor; the fourth is written from a modern narrator’s perspective. Soundscapes accompany the poems, each aiming to conjure up the sensory environment experienced by the students: alighting a ship; interacting with people in school and markets in China, then UK; walking through the streets of Manchester, with its horse carriages and mills in the early 1900s; and travelling around the world and distortedly across time to the present.

​I invite you to read and listen to these works while envisaging some moments in the daily lives of these students – through this brief experience of imaginary re-enactment, I encourage us to draw courage from these students’ ability to face up to vicissitudes while in Manchester, as well as hope from the infinite possibilities in their trajectories upon leaving the school, given the many gaps in our knowledge of their life histories.

This is how I arrive, without a wave, without a splash, without a ripple​

This is英格蘭 England​

Shoulders heavy with my father’s debt, my sibling’s education, and the name of my clan​

I carry a light suitcase to make my way to曼策士特 Manchester​

As I bid farewell to my fellow Chinese student who is off to威爾斯 Wales​

And what of me now ​

 ​

I was born in 1888 in 天津 Tianjin. I had a father a mother ​

a sister a brother and 34 cows and 26 mou of land​

all eaten up by foreign outside tribes​

I moved to Soochow to sit for 科举 keju, the imperial examination​

Stayed for its gardens and silk​

And left to seek machines and chemicals​

 ​

As the anchor drops down and the steamer makes its deep whistle​

I feel my clothes hang loose on me after the 43-day journey ​

This marks the stone I place my first step with my canvas shoes​

(and a small hole in the sole forces me to feel its unevenness)​

Here, my future unravels itself one by one​

Until it stands naked before the port, the rivers and the ocean​

And all the rest reaches out its hand to me and follows

Listen to the soundscape & poem. Words spoken by Anita Ngai.

A Tong and a Tong walk crisscross in front of me​

one white, one yellow​

their paths nothing in similar yet found an intersection point​

 ​

Fabric on me: silk, cotton, and wool. Some coins too: a few Chinese, and a few English​

 ​

To not have your name to yourself​

Shared with another person, another clan, another life​

Or another continent, another moon, another time​

 ​

Yesterday, I was called a yellow problem​

But in the laboratory, yellow is least of a problem ​

The colour comes easily from natural dyes​

Weld and fustic are what I handle all day​

 ​

Willow trees in 拙政園 Zhuozheng Yuan​

Draw weeping ghosts​

But in the shadows of Manchester’s chimneys and a few horseless carriages​

only the smoke of phantoms and devils​

shows up in my vision​

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The day before, at the Past and Present Students’ Lunch for Professor Dixon, his acquaintance asked me when his servant can pick up his shirts​

Yes, I have heard of the Chinese laundryman​

The chinaman here and the chinaman there​

Would I ever be connected to them at home? ​

 ​

To wash clothes​

To be born to wash clothes​

To exist only as a laundryman​

But we are not a sick man

Another gentleman wants me to work for him, the duties simple​

I would stand still in the window of his tea shop​

A veritable Chinese​

I was mistaken as a stamp for his goods​

 ​

Yet a Mr. Fothergill, the kindness of his heart,​

brought me the books of the Jesus all in Chinese​

The comfort of the characters ​

 ​

It was so dark.​

I had to be guided by feeling the walls with my hands ​

But what is it that my fingers are feeling?​

I lock the door to the laboratory, I am always the last one to leave

​​

Listen to the soundscape & poem. Words spoken by Anita Ngai.

From the window of the laboratory​

All I can see are​

unfamiliar trees, unfamiliar grass, ​

unfamiliar horse carriages, ​

unfamiliar suits and unfamiliar ties​

all rubbing up against me ​

​

as cold as the howl of the evening winds​

is as cold as the bread and cheese served at the teacher’s party​

is as cold as the power looms in the Sackville Street Building ​

is as cold as my hands ​

is as cold as my father’s body when he died 20 days after I left home​

and I wait patiently for spring ​

​

My hands shake​

As I continue to take notes in the cold classroom​

A train passes and the windows shake with my hands​

Out of sync​

Dissonance, it must be​

​

Please the celestial, help me​

Help me to help myself​

​

Yet the cold keeps following me.​

It trails me from the laboratory ​

to the classroom ​

to the library ​

to the store ​

to Sunpar’s lodging, to my lodging, ​

through the front door​

to the salon to the kitchen to my attic room. ​

And my dreams and worries lurk in the rear​

falling behind at times ​

and catching up at others​

always slow and lingering, ​

and maybe just, maybe they will come defend me ​

in case the cold swallows me

This, a, the, an​

I keep forgetting them when I speak in 英格樂屬English​

This the professor told me this morning as he knitted his eyebrows again​

​

Nothing needs to be so determined in Chinese​

This yarn, that yarn, a yarn, many yarn​

I look at the spinning jenny, and it is connected to the metal castings, and how that is connected to the power loom​

But you might only see them as independent entities​

 ​

My last day in England, the newspaper headline reads: Limitation [in the proposition) of Chinese immigrants to tonnage to be increased to one for every five hundred tons​

We are mistaken for cargo​

 ​

I walk, I stumble​

The dark does not reveal the horse manure on the way​

The mills offer little consolation​

The smells and the particles do not only line my lungs​

But sometimes seep through my pores

​

Listen to the soundscape & poem. Words spoken by Anita Ngai.

Les Chinois ne sont pas des ingénieurs, et la Chine n’est pas le pays susceptible d’en faire des ingénieurs.​

The Chinese are not engineers, and China is not the country likely to make them so.​

The gentleman from France said​

This is what the returning student had to translate this as a message to his people​

His classmates could only stare at him as response​

​

Tomorrow, the dawn will be filled with their footsteps, breaths, dreams and worries,​

finally the air saturated and the skies of Manchester will pour down cold rains​

​

People’s breath is musty under the humidity ​

The rust, the mildew finally surfacing ​

The mold feasts on ​

On the winds blown in from the seas​

​

But a moon has fallen tonight​

Streaks of light cut open the night skies ​

Dreams and stories gush out ​

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Books printed in English continue to lie on Chinese tables

Listen to the soundscape & poem. Words spoken by Anita Ngai.