Lorong belakang by Sook Jin Ong
A poem on belonging and finding one’s place in the world.
First published in Pandan Weekly in January 2025.
From the author:
Kuala Lumpur is my beloved birthplace, and a place I still call home. It is easy to be enamored by the shining lights and rapid development, but as someone who spent a significant amount of my life in the city, I find curious comfort in the hidden spaces such as the back alleys in Setapak (where I grew up) that always felt like portals to a different KL — the birds, belukar, biawak, insects, hints of humanity left behind, etc. As an immigrant to the USA, I grapple with the complexities of migration, rights of land, and who belongs where in my writing as of late. “Lorong belakang” challenges what it means to find belonging, and whose right is it to determine that for each of us.
It was inspirational to find SEA Lit Circle as a community of creatives! I am thankful to Rae who introduced me to this group, and to my August 2024 workshopmates — Yla, Jen, Steph, Rafael — for the insights that helped this poem burrow deeper into the root of its being.
Listen to the author read her work:
In the dense swarm of city lights, turn the corner until the hum of humanity is a whisper, hush. Here you find the lane that bears no name in the dusk. Here lies a sanctuary, safe for the outsider, the stranger, the misfit. Here lies the pause between an inhale and an exhale — yours, or the city’s? This long outstretched portal begins to buzz, hum, hiss, sing. Sing your note in harmony with this din, like a friend recognizing a friend in a new place. Sing, arrived one, find your place in this muddied land. You deserve to have a place here with the civet cats, the bats, and the gentle biawak that mothers generations by the large storm drain. Walk among yours in the backstreets of Kuala Lumpur. Behold lushness at the end of this lane — a stocky verdant bush drinking like mother deer from the lonely stream, her thick roots undeterred by concrete. She goes about in patient defiance, loved by many. She holds symphonies in the cradle of her crown, families in her folds. You are welcomed, too. Breathe. Take root. As the night falls, birds tuck their lullabies under their wings, and tune out to crickets. Rest your head, arrived one, selamat pulang to a city belonging to many.
Sook Jin Ong 翁淑君 (she/her) is a Minnesota-based Malaysian Chinese poet. Poetry reading and writing is part of her rest practice, and a way to connect to her lineage, her identities, her experiences, and her being. Sook Jin resides in Minneapolis.
Instagram: @sookjinong
Twitter/X: @sookjinong
Website: ongsookjin.com
Thank you for reading!
Pandan Weekly is a bi-annual zine and weekly email series produced by SEA Lit Circle, a community of writers and readers from Southeast Asia and the diaspora. At SEA Lit Circle, we inspire each other to write fresh, compelling work that’s true to ourselves, and we encourage each other to read and be more open to new works, stories, and perspectives within and beyond the region.
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