Working towards a poetry collection and a scholarly book, this project explores the lives of women married young, or married to the dead, through arranged, forced, and ghost marriages. It begins with Tammy Lai-Ming Ho’s own family history, with a tongyangxi (童養媳), a child bride transferred in early childhood to the household of the younger boy she would later marry, and made at once maid, labourer, quasi-daughter, and future wife. The work will then trace related practices across cultures and centuries and seek to read child bridehood and ghost marriage within wider discussions of asymmetrical dependency, as practices that impose kinship rather than sever it, marked by natal alienation, transferability of persons, and loss of autonomy. It will ask how such systems outlive official abolition, persisting through trafficking, corpse markets, and intergenerational trauma. Within CURE’s annual theme of bodies, the project attends to bodies transferred, commodified, and coerced into kinship arrangements they had no power to refuse.
TAMMY LAI-MING HO
CURRICULUM VITAE
Tammy Lai-Ming Ho is a Hong Kong-born poet, scholar, translator, and editor. In 2027 she celebrates twenty years of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, which she co-founded in 2007 as Hong Kong’s first English-language literary journal and has led as editor-in-chief ever since. Now published in exile, Cha has been a home for dissident, displaced, and marginalised voices, and its Reading Series has hosted over one hundred sessions. She is also founding co-editor of Hong Kong Studies, the only peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to all aspects of Hong Kong, and English Editor of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine. Forthcoming are the special issues Reparation and Sinophone Literature and, with Chris Song, Hong Kong Dystopias and Translating Hong Kong. A former tenured Associate Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, she is currently Honorary Researcher at the University of Toronto and Cheney Creative Fellow at the University of Leeds. Her books include the monograph Neo-Victorian Cannibalism (2019) and the poetry collection If I Do Not Reply (2024), featuring a Forward Prize Highly Commended poem. A 2024 CURE fellow, she returns as Artist-in-Residence (2026/2027) to develop Daughters of the Shadows, a poetry and research project on arranged and ghost marriages. Her first poetry collection, Hula Hooping (2015), which earned her the Young Artist Award in Literary Arts from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, will appear in a second edition from Shearsman Books in 2027; its section on family is particularly relevant to this project.
© Tammy Lai-Ming Ho