11 minute read
出入口 Passages
from 出入口 Passages
by lianafu
入口 to import [enter the mouth]
[ Did you know the character for sea, 海, is a mother below a person beside the water? Did you know there are no tenses; no past, no future, only now? Did you know you are here on borrowed time in a borrowed place?
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There are six tones in the Yale romanization of Cantonese meaning: There are six ways to contort a sound meaning: Cantonese is a spoken language meaning: Everything, once said, is lost meaning: There is a physicality to speaking meaning the whole body moves you into the world Meaning: what I say is an act of my body making meaning: What is written is not the same spoken meaning I wonder if you can hear me if that gives what I say meaning it is not lost on you ][
When asked why I decided to come to Hong Kong to study Cantonese I say because of language and they respond: why study a useless language? And by useless they mean inevitable by 2047, mean it makes no money, mean I must be learning Mandarin instead. By language I mean meaning-making. I mean the guarded pictorial language of traditional Chinese is unforgiving: know me or know nothing at all. Know me and you know the stories within me. Refuse me, lose the weight I carry in every measured stroke. Someone once told me that there’s an impenetrable quality to Cantonese—I think it is protection and patience, both an opening and a closing. [
I taste the word diaspora in my mouth and I think it must be mocking me for my reverse-diaspora. So you think you can come back here like you know anything? You think you suffer from an eternal longing? Is there a diaspora poem waiting to be written in every rainstorm? Are you asking what home is again, as if home isn’t just an imagined nation? Are you writing poems for your past, present, and future self, or are you writing them for easy digestion?
記得
I stay in my mom’s childhood home in Yuen Long and I think it is a poem. I imagine what my life could have been if it weren’t for movement and it takes the shape of a poem. There is a hole I keep filling and filling—do you make of that a poem?
in Cantonese you are called a 竹升 / meaning you are not a bamboo with no entry / or exit, / hollowed out. but you are / the water trapped inside, / unable to connect to the other end. do not see this as a failure. / why can’t the side you enter from also be your exit, / why do you have to connect to a body / of water, / what if you are a pocket of water, / a passage / not trapped but waiting, / to be read / free to leave if you wanted to, / whole as you are, / an ocean of yourself / who mouthed to the sea— \ feeling not enough for either side is false \ when the distances tearing you apart are \ contained in the portal that is your body, \ there is no such thing as brokenness. \ not of language, of culture, of bodies. \ you are bent \ on living and you will never break \ for there is a whole inside of you. \ and it is filling.
Can you hear [ ]?
thick bamboo pole[1] (who are you?) hollow // water does not flow through me // in one end not out the other // disconnected from even this metaphor // i find my name in a wikipedia entry // a true 香蕉人[2] // something about being thick-headed // knock on skull // when 阿婆[3] speaks to me, i petrify // compendium of sounds, no definitions // see also, inherited silence // see also, i know the language of shame // once in a club in beijing i told two men i was a 坏人 huàirén[4] instead of a 华人 huárén[5] // perhaps i meant to confess the sin of unknowing // 對不起[6], i’m sorry we plucked our tongues like weeds // i’m sorry i can only google translate my way home // the metaphor is that jook-sings are not part of either culture[7] // but we grow here, an empty forest // meaning, the water flows back to the source // meaning, even bamboo people ascend _________________________
[1] zuk1 sing1 – an american-born chinese person who has little or no command of any chinese language [2] xiāngjiāorén – banana person (yellow outside, white inside); an assimilated asian american [3] āpó – granny [4] huàirén – bad person [5] huárén – ethnic chinese person [6] duìbuql – unworthy; to let down; i’m sorry [7] Quoted from Wikipedia
政見
So you think you can see yourself In the reflection of a body of water
Which is just a puddle, Left aside by a long, warm storm
Or maybe the thundering of footsteps during rush hour Jogs a memory you never had
And the mountains loom large like dragons Holding everyone, but also you, close
Let it be a moment then, to feel lost Not guilty for being torn apart
Forgive yourself for thinking borders Meant one should be drawn on you,
Be kind to the person who ached to belong In one floating nation
All you have is her, and she is growing And she is alone
Except for her time spent Listening to the world
And letting herself be moved Like waves and waves
Or like boats upon them Because every time she stumbles
On the train she thinks It must have been a memory buried inside me. ]
[ 7/22/19 ] Everything feels so overwhelming. I’m in Hong Kong and I’ve always wanted to be here, to come here on my own terms. I’m living in my mom’s childhood home. I take Cantonese lessons every day. I learn more and more about my family’s history the longer I stay here (from my aunt’s memories). I have to write a creative project. I’m taking pictures with my mom’s old film camera gifted to her by my grandpa, who I now know began buying cameras once he accumulated wealth. I think of money, its unequal distribution and flow and power and it’s the reason why so much movement has occurred my life. I think of why I hoard things, spend impulsively. I feel guilty. I am in Hong Kong, the capitalist epicenter of Asia, currently witnessing protests against China. I feel like a privileged outsider to all of this, imposing my western-centric POV on something I don’t entirely understand. [ ]
[ ] I hate being a diaspora writer, writing the same things, being stuck on my family’s history and migration. I know I can—and already have—connected my life to issues bigger than me but it doesn’t feel like it’s [ ]. I feel like I have no community to write for, only against. I keep getting stuck on hating [ ] for wanting to [ ] so much so I feel like I have something worthy to say. I hate feeling [ ] about all of what I’m feeling now. I saw a poem the other day with almost the exact same title and formatting as a poem I had just written. It made me feel [ ], [ ], [ ]. What am I meant to be doing? I keep worrying about what to write about when all of this is already so much to write about. My fears, my shame, my anxieties. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to write about—I’ve never been this vulnerable in my writing before. [ ]
白做
Hong Kong Poem
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2047 2194 3069
返回
[There’s so much at stake. When will I let myself breathe? Not everything has to be a metaphor for something else. I stayed home today because my intuition told me to. I saw triads attacking protesters in Yuen Long, saw all over the news how police did nothing about it, saw people with their faces bloodied. I have an irrational fear I will be caught in it—something I have no right to be a part of yet feels entirely like my right to know about, to feel tension with. The chaos, conflict, and turmoil surrounding everything overwhelms me. My thoughts feel like they’re all over the place.]
人山人海
天黑了
Posters on a concrete column in Yuen Long showing the characters 黑 (black; also referencing triads) and 警 (police) combined together
— Rey Chow, “Between Colonizers: Hong Kong’s Postcolonial Self-Writing in the 1990s”
Because I am here on borrowed time I can leave. Because my family has left before, left because they could, I can leave. These days I no longer cough but feel a heaviness in my throat. I hope I have learned enough Cantonese: what I carry on my tongue will be proof of that. One time, in my aunt’s apartment in Mei Foo, I felt my eyes sting until they watered and looked out the window, down to the street. I thought it might be remnants of tear gas scaling up the sky. But there were no crowds of people in black, no rows of police wielding batons and shields. Just people waiting for the walk sign to turn green, double decker buses coming and going, the numbers on the front showing not their destination but, according to my little cousin, their age. “Look, that one is 99 years old!” And I think, I have so much time left here. But Hong Kong is a ticking bomb fighting the inevitable. By 2047, China’s slowly tightening grip on the border island will suffocate it for good. There is urgency in every moment now, but it feels different from the usual fast-paced way of life. It is a question lingering behind every breath: if not now, what then? What is there to lose when loss is inevitable, is predetermined for the future?
The violence keeps escalating. Yesterday (August 11), police shot a bean bag round into plastic goggles, stealing a woman’s vision in one eye for good. They shoved a man into the road until his front teeth broke, until he saw his own blood pool before his eyes. They fired at people, point-blank, who were fleeing by foot down an escalator in an MTR station. The government, in response, condemned the protesters and stood behind the police. This is what I’ve sat with since I’ve arrived in June but felt too afraid to say, scared about imposing my Western diasporic ideology onto a centrally Asian issue: the police should not exist and neither should prisons. This is a
struggle for power, for freedom. This is more than impeachment, it’s revolution against state authoritarianism, against the capitalism and rampant class inequality that’s put 1 in 5 people below the poverty line. It is postcolonialism in process, in practice. It is complex, layered, unable to be easily boxed into the “black and white” of protesters against pro-China sympathizers—it is the people against the state and its weapons, and it is not an equal battlefield. It comes with a history: of always being a borrowed place, a time bomb, waiting to be passed to another owner. It comes with classism, xenophobia, colorism, sexism, exploitation of SEA migrant labor—it cannot be easily understood as neoliberalism against “communism.” Hong Kong has always been an in-between place, a place in process, a place straddling postcolonial struggle with British-imposed capitalism, both being consumed and consuming. It has always known how to hold multiple truths at once. During protests, small groups of protesters wave American and British colonial flags, hoping to appeal to some Western power, or perhaps to romanticize a retrofuture for Hong Kong. They cannot represent the possibility, the potential, this place has to overcome its colonial burdens. The struggle, the work, the obligation and duty of this borrowed place is to create itself— imagine itself. What could this place be, if not the few options the world has tricked itself into believing are the only ones? What would this little border island of 7 million people look like without China, without Britain, without America? Without capitalism, without class inequality? Without police?
解散警隊 全民自治 Abolish the police, self-governance for all
[Hong Kong, I can’t stay for long. I don’t have answers for you. I leave you, heartbroken and hopeful. You have taught me how to live with contradictions, with multiple truths. You embody the impossibility of easy resolutions. I know I will be back soon. I would say to add oil, but I think you are water.]
出入口
Passages
By 傅嘉恩 Liana Fu
lianafu.com
lianafu@gmail.com
Hong Kong, 2019
For more information & resources visit:
tl.hkrev.info (complete timeline of the movement)
bit.ly/2m0ETT2 (timeline, analysis, and interview)
bit.ly/2m6f3wI (ways you can help internationally)
lausan.hk (HK diasporic decolonial leftist collective)
