The map doesn’t love you back. That thought came to me somewhere between lines. Between the familiar churn of a departure board and the quiet horror of finding a place you once called home crumbling like damp paper. In Jennifer Wong’s ‘From Beckenham to Tsim Sha Tsui‘, there is no shriek, no monster, no blood. And yet something deeper—colder—moves beneath it. A geography of vanishing. A metaphysical hunger gnawing at the borders of time, memory, and body.
The poem begins with the mechanical voice of transportation, a voice the reader will trust: “The next train to Beckenham departs from platform six.” But soon after, the expected rhythm falters. We’re offered a list of refreshments: tea, coffee, soft drinks, gluten-free cakes. And then—a quiet fracture in reality: but we won’t be serving you jasmine tea or red bean cakes, cup noodles nor hot wave crisps. This is a linguistic sleight-of-hand. The comfort of a train journey turns uncanny through absence. These items—beloved staples of Hong Kong convenience stores—are missing. The reader, if as attuned as I am to my childhood snacks, will feel the absence like phantom limbs. They are not just unavailable. They are forbidden, as though censored from the menu of a new world. It’s not a customs issue—it’s a cultural exorcism. The omission is existential. This is the first note of horror: what nourished you cannot follow you here. In this brief moment, Wong captures the fundamental violence of exile: not just the absence of home, but the stripping away of the very things that once gave it form and substance. This moment is not the loud, clashing horror of alienation but a quiet erasure of the familiar.
Each toponym—Brixton, Prince Edward, and more—is offered without flourish, like evidence at a trial. We begin to feel a creeping paranoia—who are we on this train? Are we the commuter, clutching a map that no longer reflects our inner terrain? Or the revenant, crossing dimensions of memory, folding space over and over like origami until the past breathes through the folds? This twin geography reflects not a physical journey, but a psychic odyssey, with the mind pulling between two disparate worlds. The poem’s spatial dislocation is unsettling because the speaker is forced to navigate two cities that exist not in separate locations but in the same consciousness. The presence of one city is not in competition with the other but folds and mingles with it. In this way, Wong creates a linguistic boundary collapse: the train journey becomes both an external and internal experience, pulling the speaker from one world to another, over and over.
Wong continues by evoking the cityscape of Hong Kong—a place now in a state of disrepair in the speaker’s memory: “a city of swordlike high-rises, flyovers, buddhist temples and bauhinia trees”. Here, Hong Kong’s cityscape is fractured. The sharpness of the high-rises, described as “swordlike,” signals a violent rupture in the speaker’s emotional connection to home. The buildings that once stood as symbols of strength and stability now feel threatening—as if they are cutting into the speaker’s memories, tearing them apart. The towering high-rises, often symbols of economic progress, have now become symbols of loss, unyielding and indifferent. The poem culminates in the lines: “the years I have lived here / have cost me all those places I once tried to / leave from, am leaving still”; the body can move physically, but emotionally, it remains in a perpetual state of flux, never truly at rest. The speaker does not return home—home never returns to them. Even the syntax mirrors this instability. Lines break prematurely. Thoughts bleed across stanzas. There is no finality, no resolution. This is a poem of hauntings without closure. Of maps without legends. Of cities that breathe inside your chest, long after you’ve left them.
‘From Beckenham to Tsim Sha Tsui’ is a horror story in disguise. It reads like a love letter, until you realize the address no longer exists. It’s a map to a place that has disappeared. Or worse, one that never existed outside your own need. There are others on the train, but they don’t see it. They don’t feel it. The quiet disintegration of the self. They sip their coffee, read their papers, as if everything is fine. As if they belong. As if they’ve always belonged. The name of Beckenham fades again. It might never have been anything more than a place in a dream—a place that will never belong to you again.
Words by Cassandra Fong
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