Recent — and Not So Recent — Hong Kong Poetry and Prose

AFTER THE DEMOLITION, as I strolled among those old things salvaged from the Walled City — sign boards removed from antiquated shops, discarded abacuses, old account books, yellowing photographs — I seemed to have wandered into an old, forsaken city, seemed to be greeted with all kinds of ambiguous signs pointing to all sorts of bizarre meanings. But I knew that those disjointed signs, the scattered artefacts, could never equal the solid, lived-in place from which they came.

If we now think about this soon-to-vanish site, it is not for reasons of nostalgia, but in order to understand better the place in which we live, the space which we all share.

— Leung Ping-kwan, “The Walled City in Kowloon: A Space We All Shared”

The celebrated poet Leung Ping-kwan (1949–2013) wrote these words in 1993 about the destruction of the Kowloon Walled City, an unincorporated patch of territory that was once the most densely populated spot on earth. But his sentiments are just as apt for Hong Kong as a whole today. In more ways than one, the city that Hongkongers once knew is being demolished. The civil liberties and independent judiciary that defined Hong Kong and which were guaranteed under the Basic Law are being rapidly eroded under the draconian National Security Law (NSL) imposed by Beijing in 2020.

Month after month come new reports of disturbing disappearances. August 2021, when I am writing this, has been no different. [1] Earlier this month, the 95,000-member Hong Kong Professional Teachers Union, which had represented teachers for half a century, disbanded due to increasing official pressure. A few days later, the Civil Human Rights Front disbanded, and the Hong Kong Bar Association has been targeted in a People’s Daily editorial. At the same time, Hongkongers themselves are disappearing, some into jail for violations of the NSL, some into exile abroad, some into the silence of self-censorship. In the face of all of this, how can those who live outside of Hong Kong and who do not speak Cantonese or read Chinese get a better understanding of “this soon-to-vanish site”?

One good place to turn is nonfiction. There has been a bumper crop of books in English about the protests of 2014 and 2019, including Antony Dapiran’s City of Protest: A Recent History of Dissent in Hong Kong (2017) and City on Fire: The Fight for Hong Kong (2020); Joshua Wong’s Unfree Speech: The Threat to Global Democracy and Why We Must Act, Now (2020), a memoir co-written with Jason Y. Ng; Ben Bland’s Generation HK: Seeking Identity in China’s Shadow (2017); and Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (2020). For a sense of how the protests felt on the ground, Aftershock: Essays from Hong Kong (2020), a particularly poignant volume on the city’s travails edited by Holmes Chan for Small Tune Press, offers an excellent introduction. Aftershock brings together the reflections of 11 Hong Kong–based journalists who covered the 2019 protests for local and international news outlets. Editor Chan invited contributors to set aside their customary journalistic distance and share their feelings about what they had witnessed. These brief essays,…