Born to a Peranakan family in Kuala Lumpur, Wong began learning English at age 9.
Shortly after his first collection of poetry was released in 1968, Wong stopped writing in response to the introduction of a national language policy that sidelined non-Malay work.
At the same time he also attended a Chinese school, although he stated he took studying there less seriously, leaving him feeling more proficient in English.
[3] In 1964 some of Wong's poems were included in an anthology of Malaysian writing called Bunga Emas, that was published in the United Kingdom.
[6] An Acre of Day's Glass: Collected Poems was published in 2006, collating his previous publications.
[8] In 2013, he published the final version of The Hidden Papyrus of Hen-taui,[9] a poem about the spiritual and ecstatic experiences of a neophyte priestess in ancient Egypt.
Jeyam has claimed that here Wong successfully "eschews the postcolonial poetic space of contemporary and historical Malaya but, instead, chooses to delve into the possibilities of discovering a more transcendent world in the burial and funerary mythmaking of ancient Egypt.
[1] He participated in recording audio versions of all of his poems, which were shared in August 2022 at A Wasteland Of Malaysian Poetry In English exhibition in Kuala Lumpur.
Wong contended that the people of Malaysia had not fully developed into a nation with a coherent culture, and viewed his work as contributing to a new Malaysian identity.
He valued English for its practicality and widespread use, helping to compensate for the feeling that his family was "culturally rootless".
[2] Nonetheless, he did not view English as a language with an organic connection to his culture or emotions, a topic tackled explicitly in his poetry.
He described his cultural background as being "stony rubbish", fragmented by place, migration, colonialism, and ethnicity.
While some authors from similar backgrounds emigrated from Malaysia, Wong did not, and some of his poetry addressed his feeling of cultural displacement and being considered an outsider in what he thought of as his own country.