Looking for Wong May

There were two things i wanted to do in Ireland. I wanted to go to a bog, and about this I was emphatic, reminding my husband daily that the trip would be a failure if there were no day at the bog. Any bog would do. The second thing I wanted to do was find Wong May, a poet with whom I’d begun corresponding in the months preceding.

I was quieter about this second desire because I knew the trip was precious time: it was our first trip alone after the birth of our firstborn, who had just turned one, and we knew such an opportunity—to wander countless hours through unknown streets and fields, to stay late at a pub and then sleep it off the next day—would not come again easily or soon. It was safe to assume that the last thing my husband would want to do on this trip was track down an elusive expatriated poet I had only just recently discovered.

And yet, since we began planning the trip, I had fantasized about my rendezvous with Wong May. I could take her out for a whiskey at Temple Bar. We could stroll the paths of St. Stephen’s Green, stand side by side in front of the Henry Moore sculpture of Yeats, and recite by heart our favorite lines from his poems. Whatever the scenario, I was convinced that by virtue of our cosmic affinity for each other we would inevitably end up at her house, drinking tea in her primrose garden, sharing secrets about our poems, our ancestors, and our anxieties about reading too much Kafka and Ezra Pound.

But I could not tell my husband about these fantasies, as much as I was sure they were premonitions of what would become a lifelong friendship. It did not escape my attention that Wong May in my imagination had become, like my husband and myself, another rabid literary tourist, enthralled by Ireland’s cultural heritage, despite having lived there for thirty-some years. In fact, I had no idea what she thought of Yeats or Joyce, though in one e-mail she responded indifferently to my query about Seamus Heaney: “How did I manage to spend thirty-five years in Ireland without meeting Seamus Heaney? Well, do I regret not having met the Dalai Lama? There must be—certainly a perverse streak in me.”

Her response was not merely indifferent. She was mocking my fan-girl solemnity for capital-L literature. She was—by nature—irreverent. I found this quality utterly bewitching.

“There must be—certainly a perverse streak in me.”

________

My correspondence with Wong May began in July 2014. Earlier that year, I had caught sight of her name on the website of Octopus Books, the small press about to publish her first book in thirty-six years, Picasso’s Tears: Poems 1978–2013. I was as curious about her name as I was about that span of time, years that comprised nearly my entire life. But I was also embarrassed by my curiosity, which struck me as slightly solipsistic. Born in 1944 in Chungking, China, and then raised in Singapore, Wong May was roughly the same age as my mother, whose family had likewise migrated from China as world and civil wars besieged their country. But Wong May, I conjectured, did what my mother could not. In 1966, she arrived in the United States to attend the Iowa Writers Workshop, staking a claim on an independence that my mother never could. She published her first book in 1969 with Harcourt Brace and published two more with that New York trade house in 1972 and 1977 before relocating permanently to Ireland in 1978. She had an Irish husband and two sons; her fourth book would not appear until August 1, 2014, days before I found myself in Dublin scanning the crowds for a face that looked like mine.

But I’m getting ahead of the story. I had a basic biographical sketch and my superficial projections. The subtitle—Poems, 1978–2013—suggested she had not stopped writing; however, she...