Burning Rice

by Eileen Chong

Thought is composed of strength
from a tree, clear sight, and anchored
by a heart.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

50 pages

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Eileen Chong was born in 1980, in Singapore. She moved to Sydney, Australia in 2007.

She won the Poets Union Youth Fellowship in 2010 and was an Australian Poetry Fellow for 2011-2012.

She was the poet-in-residence at the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney and the Bundanon Trust in 2016.

Her poetry collections are Burning Rice (2012), Peony (2014), Painting Red Orchids (2016), and Rainforest (2018), all from Pitt Street Poetry, Sydney.

Chong writes about food, family, migration, love and loss. The Singaporean-Australian poet Boey Kim Cheng has said that ‘Chong’s work offers a poetry of feeling, rendered in luminous detail and language, alive to the sorrows and joys of daily living.’

Awards & Achievements

Her books have been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Anne Elder Award 2012 for a first book, the Australian Arts in Asia Award 2013, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award 2017, and the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award 2013 and 2017.

Prizes individual poems of Chong’s have shortlisted for include the Ron Pretty Prize 2014, the Newcastle Poetry Prize 2016, and the Australian Book Review‘s Peter Porter Poetry Prize 2015 and 2017. She also longlisted for the University of Canberra’s Vice-Chancellor Award 2014, 2015 and 2016. Her poems are widely anthologised in Australian and international anthologies.

Reviews

[Michael Livingston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful poems, especially the nostalgic section on growing up in Singapore. Chong's imagery is vivid and surprising - another tiny brick in my poetry-reading wall.

[Declan B · Rating 5 out of 5]

I watch the glossy streets and see myself aged three, seven, twenty. It's as though I can never leave

one of my favourite poetry collections.
It uses almost deceptively simple images to communicate some very complex ideas and emotions connected to Chongs experience as a member of diaspora and her cultural connections. love to see WOC slay and i love eng ext!!

i think chinese ginseng was 100% my favourite poem but here are some excerpts from others that I enjoyed:

I wonder where our bloodline begins. We are guest people without land or name, moving south and south, wild birds seeking a place to call home

scorched rice like black gold, my ancestors' ashes in a bowl

she looks beautiful now in her sequins, glitter and paint. Her name is Linda or Nancy for the sailors who visit. I glimpse her night life in seconds for as long as I can jump. I know that in the morning she will look like all the others: plain, tired, leached of colour.

[Hermine · Rating 4 out of 5]

The feelings covered in this collection were familiar in ways, invoking memories that span across both our experiences. If I was writing poetry in response, I know I'd draw on the grain of rice/drop of sweat parallel in my own version of the opener. Anyway, I'm grateful I can read works and be in conversation with them at a personal level. I also came across a very comprehensive teaching resource for the poems, and while it makes me wish I had the space to be giving thoughts in my past, I'm glad for the current and future.

[duKe · Rating 4 out of 5]

A captivating little book of poems that took me by surprise. Chong’s style and use of vivid imagery was easy to connect to and her underlying concepts were made resoundingly clear, while also leaving room for surprise and awe. I enjoyed her use of other stimuli as grounds for for pieces of her poems.
A must read for those who enjoy poetry, and for those who don’t.

[Kira B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, crisp imagery of life's highs and lows.

[Ronnie Tan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Slice of life writings
About local traditions
Please give it a go

[Esther · Rating 2 out of 5]

This just didn’t gel for me.

[Kristy 施玮 · Rating 4 out of 5]

…I wonder where
our bloodline begins. We are guest people
without land or name, moving south and south,
wild birds seeking a place to call home.

- My Hakka Grandmother

A personal note on how I picked up this poetry. It’s such a tiny book sitting amongst a sea of other taller and thicker poetry books. But I was captivated by the book title. It reminded me of my Malaysian Chinese heritage. I pulled it out and flipped open one of the pages, and my eyes landed on My Hakka Grandmother. It was then I knew I had to pick this up despite haven’t heard of the author. It hit home. To hear the word Hakka on the street is rare, to hear it amongst friends is a given, but to see it as a word imprinted on the paper and published in Australia is a massive sign of comfort and acceptance.

Ironically, when I went home I looked up the author, I was hoping to better understand the works of this Australia immigrant Singaporean Chinese poet. To my surprised, I’m already following her on Twitter as Eileen Chong 张奕霖. But I always remember by her Chinese name. She is one my favourite Twitter influencers, next to R.F. Kuang. All her tweets always hit home for me.

Ask who wants to eat. Don’t forget the sambal.
How to make sambal? That’s another dish. Today
is Hokkien Prawn Mee. Eat now, while it’s hot.

- Grandmother’s Dish

The author dedicated a lot of poems to her grandparents. Poems about her grandmother, like My Hakka Grandmother and Grandmother’s Dish hit home the most because it’s so relatable. The rest of the poems made reference to Chinese culture, both Singapore and the ancient Chinese dynasties. I enjoyed reading the creative intimate perspectives of various imperial consorts throughout the Chinese dynasties and the beautiful poem about Mulan - Lady Fu Hao. Other poems reflected the author’s childhood upbringing in a lower class environment where she lived with her family, grandparents, and extended family and had to share many things together. These poems evoked feelings of nolstalgia and sentimentality. When I read Clockwork, I empathise for her loss, especially having just read the Chinese Ginseng.

I think Chong's work is original because it's very rare to come across an Australian published work with references to Chinese or Singaporean/Malaysian cultures.

then shaves the ginseng into slices so thin
I could melt them on my tongue. He weighs them
on a brass scale pinched between forefinger and thumb,
then wraps portions into paper packages. There is no point
in telling my mother what she doesn’t want to hear: polycystic ovaries,
endometriosis, infertility. Instead, I just listen - I can almost taste
her soup: sweet dates and wolfberries, smoky angelica and lilybulb,
but above all, the unmistakeable bitter-sweetness of Chinese gingseng.
- Chinese Ginseng