Hot Desk Extract: Panda Wong

As part of the Wheeler Centre’s Hot Desk Fellowship programme, Panda Wong worked on salmon cannon be into the abyss, a collaborative poetry EP.

Dedicated to my dad, who died in 2017, it features four tracks that piece together moments, scenes and sensations of grief and loss.

i wrote my poems in fragments—on my Notes app, receipts, scraps of paper, work documents, text messages, emails to myself. i recorded my poems by speaking into a microphone through a stocking stretched over a hanger, or on my geriatric iPhone. vocal processing changed my voice into new impressions and textures. found sounds reference both the precious and banal, such as pearl extraction, orchestra tuning, cicadas, a clicking mouse and shimmering. in sending my recordings away to my friends for them to return as something new, i felt a sense of release. – Panda Wong   Title of track: eternal phone lock screen image Musical composition by Jamie Marina Lau.   eternal phone lock screen image dad with head on hand on leg on chair blue jeans and half smile his precious fragile redundant body… did you know pearls are the only precious gem made by a living creature? I’m recently obsessed w/ this TikTok channel pearl6680 montages of pearl extraction set to Lil Nas X’s Call Me by Your Name an oyster spits a pearl out into the palm of pearl6680’s hand reminds me of viral pimple popping videos the way that pain can become a thing so totally foreign like thinking you see the one that got away in the distance and upon closer inspection realising that instead they are just a sculpture made from mincemeat with wet raisins for eyes… unlock phone to see dad with head on hand on leg on chair something wild about how we proliferate the technology’s blasé void with the endless dandruff of our memories something tender about how young he looks in this photo where I wasn’t born yet the way the future is pouring out of his face… I’m reading about how pearls are a defence mechanism layers upon layers of a crystalline secretion called nacre build up encasing any threat to the mollusc like how Julietta Singh wrote extreme physical pain swallows its object this isn’t some trite analogy about how pain can become beauty or a sad Disney metaphor for its lifechanging qualities or the tired rag narrative of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger it’s about how it is consumed… it’s about how it is digested… it’s about how it is accumulated… dad with head on hand on leg on chair his life a pearl I hold between my teeth I keep feeling and feeling with my tongue for that elusive fuzz   Artwork by Amy Yu