About the presentation
Informed by her experiences of migration, Ting draws on an interdisciplinary background in postcolonial literary studies, human geography, and marine conservation in New Zealand to discuss writing as a medium to reimagine rapidly changing social and environmental worlds. Drawing from intergenerational histories of continued displacement — transoceanic crossings of the Sinophone ‘coolie’ trade, riverine human smuggling in Hong Kong, to species extinction and sea-level rise — she highlights the potential for maritime ecocriticism to mediate the turbulence and precarity of life in the margins. The designation of 2021-2030 as the UN “Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development” marks an urgency to centre maritime discourses that recognise the importance of oceans in transnational imaginaries.
Ting will read excerpts from her work, connecting environmental anxieties to diasporic fragmentation, displacement and existential loss. Following Bhabha’s ‘third space,’ she argues that the oceans offer an alternative, ‘alien’ site for hybrid writers to superimpose their otherness. In her story Gutting, she examines the psychic cost of inhabiting transient identities and homelands through a whale stranding: “How ironic that animals called pilot whales could lose their navigation and end up stranded like refugees in an alien land.” Exploring the allegorical power of interspecies entanglements, she uses the eels’ catadromous transformation and migration as proxies for diasporic liminality. Inspired by the lo ting — Hong Kong’s half-fish half-human, cryptozoological ancestor who represents the island’s hybrid Chinese-British post-colonial identity — dislocation is projected onto more-than-human species in a tenuousness, nostalgic act of writing herself ‘home’.
About the presenter
Ting. J. Yiu is a writer whose poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction explores the intersection of diaspora identities and environmental imaginaries. Her hybrid childhood in post-colonial Hong Kong, adolescence in New Zealand’s settler-indigenous bi-cultural space, and adulthood in a Europe of increasingly contested borders has created an enduring preoccupation with navigating liminal spaces in both life and literature. She holds an MA in Transnational Creative Writing from Stockholm University. Ting was an environmental educator in New Zealand where she spent most of her time teaching in a wetsuit while submerged in oceans and rivers. Her works have appeared in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Two Thirds North, Orientaliska Studier among others. Her writing was anthologised in New Zealand’s first Asian literary anthology A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand (Auckland University Press, 2021). She was chosen as one of sixteen writers to represent New Zealand’s literary canon alongside Katherine Mansfield, Frank Sargeson, Patricia Grace, and Witi Ihimaera in Lit: Stories from Home (OneTree House Publishing, October 2021). In 2019, Ting founded The Writers’ Collective where she leads creative writing workshops. She is working on a short story collection and a polyphonic novel about the Chinese diaspora.
About the event series
The OSEH Environmental Lunchtime Discussion series consists of short, 15 minute presentations by invited guests, followed by a discussion. We invite speakers from a wide variety of fields, both academic and beyond. The presentations are accessible and are aimed at anyone with an interest in environmental issues. All are welcome.