Deluges of Memory in the Dark: An Interview with Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin
I met Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin for the first time via Google Meet; she was in Edinburgh, and I was across the Atlantic Ocean in Toronto. Despite only being connected through a computer screen, we were able to create a bridge and connect on matters of love, loss, identity, family relationships, memory, and rain. Lots of rain.
Much of Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin’s first full-length poetry collection, Fire Cider Rain, is about these subjects—and more. Our heartfelt conversation about her book took us in different directions, including maternal lineages, queer relationships, and the familiar feeling of reaching out into the dark—hoping to find something also reaching for you. The interview was edited for length and clarity.
Rebecca Mangra: Rhiannon, I found your collection, Fire Cider Rain, beautiful. It was very intimate. First, I want to talk about the title. From what I read, it’s basically a tonic that people create using apple cider vinegar to treat illnesses and colds. It’s interesting that you added the word “rain” at the end because, to me, your poems felt more like these really controlled downpours. Rain almost seems too light of a word. The poems were charged with a lot of emotions—longing and heartache. How did you come up with the title for this collection?
Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin: That's a good question. This title was a bit of a journey because, from the very beginning, I had the idea for a different title. It was the original title of one of the poems—“Lessons in Southern Water Cycles”—and the name I submitted the manuscript under. Up until almost the print run, it remained the title. But after some discussion, we (the publisher and I) agreed that it sounded too much like a science textbook. It was proposed that I change the title, so I thought, okay, maybe. I had become quite attached to the original one because it took me through the whole manuscript and stayed with me from beginning to end. I spent a long time coming to Fire Cider Rain. It was not as natural as I expected it would be, but I did know immediately that I wanted fire cider to be in the new title. It comes back a little bit through the book and has a lot of meaning for me: fire cider vinegar is, as you said, a tonic. My mom used to make it all the time for sore throats and general warming. It tastes strong, spicy, and vinegary because you just put all the ingredients in a jar and let them percolate for a couple of weeks. I have so many memories of just watching this jar of horseradish, garlic, greens, spices, and vinegar sitting on the counter during the summer, watching it change colour over the days.
Even though fire cider is not a particularly persistent symbol in the book, it was quiet enough that I thought of including it in the title and adding “rain.” Of course, throughout the book, rain is a motif. Rain is the way in which the narrator experiences these deluges of memory, as you said earlier. The moments of her life sort of come back in unexpected downpours that are bittersweet and which force her to acknowledge the dislocation from her island identity. And so, the [final] title of Fire Cider Rain evokes the contrast between that warmth of fire cider, the feeling of it burning your throat, and the cold feelings of loss and almost grief that the narrator feels for her fading identity.
In the end, I was very happy with the title, but it was not the one I was expecting to see on the front cover at all for most of the process!
Fire Cider Rain evokes the contrast between that warmth of fire cider, the feeling of it burning your throat, and the cold feelings of loss and almost grief that the narrator feels for her fading identity.
RM: Diving into the collection, there is a lot of geography that is traversed. Sometimes we're in Canada, other times we're in Mauritius. I was reading an interview you did with The Malahat Review last year and you said, regarding Mauritius, that the island has been “omitted from children’s globes and pocket atlases as though its existence is arbitrary.” Did that add a lot of pressure when you began pulling these poems together, knowing this might be someone’s first introduction to the island and its culture/history?
RNCH: Yes, it did. I felt pressure for two reasons. Firstly, people often haven't heard about Mauritius. In certain circles, everyone knows Mauritius and where it is but, in most circles, you have to explain that it's this tiny, tiny dot off the coast of Madagascar. You have to zoom in so much on Google Maps to even see it.
Secondly, I wanted to represent Mauritius in a way that was real and that was true to the island and its culture and its beautiful landscape and its people. My family is from Mauritius—I have family that lives there, and, while I have visited, I have never lived there. I was able to quell that anxiety and that feeling of pressure by identifying with the narrator. She has a very hazy understanding of what this island is actually like. She knows that Mauritius is at her core, but she holds a certain grief that comes from not being able to see or feel, lucidly, what that identity means to her. In looking back over her shoulder towards this place, she almost borders on romanticizing certain elements of the culture and of the landscape as a means of feeling closer to that identity. That's not very different at all from my own experience and my own family history. The narrator helped me to feel okay with not having as much of that connection myself, and then to feel around in the dark for something—a distant identity—that I know is there, somewhere. So that pressure dissipated a little bit once I started to give myself permission to embrace that loss and distance.
In looking back over her shoulder towards this place, she almost borders on romanticizing certain elements of the culture and of the landscape as a means of feeling closer to that identity.
RM: That's a really great way of putting it. I think a lot of second-generation writers feel that sense of discomfort or confusion regarding where they've descended from, but also a pull. Sometimes, it clashes with the country and culture they were born into, which adds another layer of complication and brings up the question of belonging and whose story is truly theirs to tell.
RNCH: Exactly. It will never be possible for one person to represent Mauritius and all the people who live there through a book. The Chinese population itself in Mauritius is tiny anyways—only three percent. Mauritius is such a multicultural nation with a history deeply rooted in mass immigration, indentured work, and colonialism. The Chinese experience in Mauritius and the Chinese population is a subculture of a hundred subcultures, and so there was also that feeling of wanting to write a book without saying, This is a book about Mauritius and this is what Mauritius looks like and, if you read it, you'll understand exactly who its people are. That's not what I wanted to do at all. You make a good point about having to recognize and acknowledge that I grew up in Canada and there is so much that I don't know about Mauritian culture. So, there is a need to balance that as well.
RM: Maternal relationships are a huge part of the collection. You are exploring the lives of three generations of women (the narrator, her mother, and her grandmother), and how all their lives are kind of entangled. There's a lot of love there, but a lot of distance as well. I feel like the narrator was close to her grandmother and has a more distant relationship with her mother; she is trying to pull something from her mother, to understand something that escapes her. What compelled you to focus on maternal lineages in the collection and why do you think so many women writers explore this theme in their work?
RNCH: That is also a good question, and one that I fear I don’t have a clear answer to. I do want to share that this book is not a direct reflection of my own life. In my own life, my father’s side of the family is from Mauritius and my mother’s side of the family is from Scotland. The way maternal relationships are experienced and explored in this book are distilled from a number of sources—from stories I have been told about my family’s matrilineal lineages (on both sides of my family), and from some of my own experiences growing up. Maternal relationships are incredibly intimate, and the distance between mother and daughter grows and then shrinks and folds in unexpected ways as we grow older. In Fire Cider Rain, this ever-changing distance and growing coldness is directly related to the growing distance between them and their island identities. It results in an unsteady and confusing relationship. One thing that was always obvious was that the narrator sees her mother as a direct vessel back to this place that she knows very little about, and the fractured relationship between her and her mother translates directly into a broken path back towards the warmth of their Mauritian identity. I think that’s the truth for many diasporic families, where our families—the traditions, languages, and memories they hold—are our channels back to these distant places. In terms of why women writers are drawn to this topic, I feel like that is such a deep and complex question, and I am not sure I can answer it or speak on behalf of this group.
I think that’s the truth for many diasporic families, where our families—the traditions, languages, and memories they hold—are our channels back to these distant places.
RM: I feel like as women, of course not all of us but many of us, are interested in “unbraiding” where we have come from and investigating the things that get passed down to us. What can we reject? What must we accept? What do we want to accept? These relationships may not be historically important for the rest of the world, or even meaningful to most people, but we still devote a lot of our creative practice to other women in our lives, even our friends.
RNCH: Yeah, and in my book the narrator had a closer relationship with, or she was really interested in, her grandmother because she's a product of her mother and her mother's a product of her grandmother. The narrator's trying to investigate this fraught relationship with her mother and trying to, as you said, “unbraid” where she comes from and what this pain is inside her that she knows is linked to her mother, but she's exploring that through her grandmother. She wants to know what happened. Why is her mother the way that she is and why is their relationship the way that it is? And she doesn't go directly to that relationship—she goes further down towards the roots.
RM: I also want to talk about Selia, the narrator’s partner. At one point in the collection, you have this great line about her, which is: “we ache for the day we no longer hold / our mothers accountable for who we are.” I thought that was powerful and added a unique layer to the narrative: not only are we exploring family and what gets passed down but also what gets passed between partners, the different ways in which intergenerational trauma blooms between lovers. Could you speak more about Selia and writing queer love in this collection?
RNCH: Halfway through writing this collection, I realized that the narrator needed a source of warmth. I had been focusing so much on the cold—the Ontario/Quebec waterways, the deluges of memory, the feelings of grief, of aimlessness. Selia here embodies one of the most reliable and tenacious sources of warmth I have known—wlw love. Selia provides a refuge to the narrator, and, although we don’t get to learn much about her, we know that there is trust in that partnership. History is passed between them. To be honest, I didn’t intend for this book to be a meditation on queerness or queer love—as the narrator is navigating questions of uprootedness and ambivalence, this relationship is simply a grounding force.
That line and that poem are important to me because they explore the ways in which the narrator fears she will also lose Selia in the same way she feels she is losing her way back to Mauritius. For many people in queer relationships, there is the constant task of re-negotiating one’s identities and experiences in relation to what one has been taught or believed to be expected of them. When you come into queerness, all of a sudden, you are asking yourself the terrifying question, How wide is the world? All our norms and touchpoints for what we believed the world to be just dissolve into air. So, when we are also bringing our personal histories into a queer partnership, it can be difficult to know where to shelve all those questions. Sometimes, in that confusion, the narrator conflates Selia with the other women in her life, with the rain, and with the deer in that poem—she fears Selia will evaporate along with everything else she knows about herself. But I like to believe that, together, through self-reflection, communication, and mutual humility, the two of them maintain that space of trust, warmth, and groundedness well after the story ends.
For many people in queer relationships, there is the constant task of re-negotiating one’s identities and experiences in relation to what one has been taught or believed to be expected of them.
RM: That is a really touching way of describing their relationship. Zooming out a bit, your collection beautifully combines science and art. I am guessing this is due in part to your master’s degree in environmental toxicology. A lot of pieces have very scientific titles like a series of poems titled “The Laws of Thermodynamics.” Many people might say that science and art are incompatible—the former being so methodical and the latter so hard to map or hypothesize about. In this collection, was it about finding a middle space between the two and writing from there or presenting these very disparate things on the same page and honouring those differences?
RNCH: That is a great question. I started writing this book after I had finished up my undergraduate degree in Life Sciences. I had been up to my shoulders in scientific learning for four years. I have always loved science, especially chemistry and biochemistry, and, when I started writing this book, my natural inclination was to draw upon the scientific language to which I had become so accustomed. I know that this is a criticism of the book—the inclusion of language that feels like it belongs in a textbook. And I have thought about that a lot. One book that completely changed my approach to my own writing was Infinite Citizen of The Shaking Tent by Liz Howard. It changed the way I was able to approach language, poetry, and that intersection between art and science. I was so fortunate to be able to work with her later too. Liz was doing things that I didn't even know you were allowed to do in poetry—using scientific terms and blending them so beautifully and so appropriately with other languages of landscape and being, while directly interrogating normative language as an oppressive apparatus.
In terms of the idea that science and art are incompatible—I don’t think science and art are at odds at all. In fact, I think they are both trying to do the exact same thing—trying to make sense of this enormous, chaotic world. Their tools may be different, but the earnest, dedicated search for meaning is similar. Poetry and science can be equally methodical, equally ambiguous, and equally desperate in their searches for truth. And, like poetry, science involves a lot of flailing around in the dark, and when the rare, dim light comes on in the corner of the room, we move towards it.
Poetry and science can be equally methodical, equally ambiguous, and equally desperate in their searches for truth.
RM: I love that image! Could you speak more about what it was like working with Liz Howard and the value of her mentorship?
RNCH: It was really nice to work with Liz as part of the Writers’ Trust Mentorship Program. It was a huge honour. She was sort of the first person who I showed my manuscript to, and she really embraced some of the language that I was using in a way that I hadn't experienced before. Instead of making me second-guess my use of certain words or concepts, she invited me to explore those thoughts more deeply and made me see things within the manuscript that I had not considered yet. She is a very kind, encouraging mentor and I was extremely lucky to be able to work with her. She has a way of meeting her mentees where they are at and recognizing where they are coming from and what their strengths are.
RM: Since we are at the beginning of the year, many people make resolutions. I like the word “intentions” better; it puts less pressure. Do you have any writerly intentions for the year?
RNCH: Yeah, I like the word intention as well! I am an associate poetry editor for Plenitude Magazine, and I want to put even more time into my work there. I just finished my master’s degree, so I was a little bit all over the place this past year. One thing that I really want to do is work with more queer and trans poets from Canada and beyond—to sort of give back to that community that has given me so much personally. In terms of my own writing, it's been very strange. I haven't written much of anything since I submitted my manuscript almost two years ago. And I think that is something that I want to get back to—I feel terrified to submit my work anywhere, afraid that it's going to get rejected and I'll be like, Oh, it was all a fluke. But my main intention for writing is to overcome that and start writing poetry again. I don't think imposter syndrome ever goes away, but I would like to move past it, at least to a functional level. Maybe also start dabbling in fiction! We will see.
