ABSTRACT

In this essay, Mary Jean Chan explores their relationship to English and to multilingualism, having been raised bilingually in Hong Kong until the age of eighteen. Through exploring their relationship to (queer) literary texts including William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure and Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo’s Measures of Expatriation, Chan charts the evolution in their thinking in relation to language, translation and queerness.

KEYWORDS

Poetry, multilingualism, language, English, Chinese, translation, queerness, gender, race.