“Tears and Smoke:
Voices from Hong Kong to America”
Fall 2019
Moe’s Books, Berkeley, CA
from the Closing Statement
I’d like to end tonight by telling you about the bauhinia blakeana orchid, this flower that has become the emblem of Hong Kong. The bauhinia is a hybrid, but its male parent is still unidentified. The bauhinia is also sterile. That means every bauhinia tree in Hong Kong today is just a clone from the one a French missionary discovered in 1880. In Cantonese, we call it 洋紫荊. 洋 means “from the oceans,” meaning “from the West.” But after the Handover in 1997, the 洋 was removed and renamed 紫荊花, confusing our flower with another 紫荊花in China, the floral emblem of Tsinghua University in Beijing.
It is now late September and the Amazon is still burning. California is bracing for another year of fires. In Siberia, an elk was running with its antlers on fire; the Congo was also burning. Tonight you have heard about the nuances of Hong Kong. Now let me tell you how Hong Kong is also a symbol of the whole world. In this generation, Hongkongers live on the highest floors, the densest streets, the smallest square footage, while working the longest hours, for the cheapest price, laboring for an empty, unaffordable future. We are 7 million people trapped in a world city. Hong Kong will show you the limits of human capacity, the apocalypse of progress.
We are each a little screw in a complex global society that stripped our species of the most basic needs. We make man poorer than ants as we dispose of everything, destroying ourselves, escaping from one place to the next, until no place is left but neo-nihilism. Some say the greatest crime today is procreation. But the Buddha says: “有情一切苦”. To be sentient is to know pain. And fifteen-year-old Greta Thunberg says: “The world is waking up and change is coming, whether you like it or not.”
This is a time when overseas Kashmir children take the streets in San Francisco to cry out for the voiceless back home. When young Israeli teens choose prison over conscription. When a child of the Chinese Communist Party hears about the Uyghur people and closes her eyes for one moment, before swallowing the tears and restoring her blank face. When juvenile Hongkongers pour out their cash for strangers fleeing from the police, and keep suicide notes in their backpacks, and still shield baby lizards in their hands while the tear gas smokes around them. Today’s children don’t need to be told what’s right, because they know too well what’s wrong. They are the ones who will take the bullet for what adults are too afraid to face.
I will tell my future children that we are here to learn what real strength is: not to survive pain by getting out and winning for yourself, but to survive pain by returning to it and fighting for others. I look forward to hearing how their generation will redefine strength. I ask each of you here tonight to stand in solidarity with Hong Kong by standing in solidarity with the world’s children. How many generations it took to fuck up the world is how many generations it will take to clean it up.
I was recently contacted by a Chinese Canadian who, like much of the diaspora, grew up with a murky sense of his identity. He told me that Hong Kong is his spiritual home. That it is a physical place on earth where ethnically Chinese people live with liberal values and freedom in their blood, just like him. He described himself as an exile longing for a country that doesn’t exist yet. But look outside: the children who led this week’s climate strike in over a hundred different nations come from all different backgrounds, and yet also have the same values in their blood. These children are exiles longing for a world that doesn’t exist yet.
Last Friday, I handed one of our poetry postcards to a 10-year-old protestor in San Francisco’s climate strike. She read it in front of me. The lines go: “My mom said if I go out, / She won’t let me back tonight. / They were still scolding me when I left. / I’m afraid of cops beating me up / But you can’t stop just because of fear.” These were the words of a 10-year-old in Hong Kong. In that exact moment, I saw the Bauhinia Project blooming. These words are an ordinary poetry, lowbrow, belonging to the people. They’re like the poems that were hand-carved on walls on Angel Island, by early immigrant detainees who had no return and no idea what was ahead. What the Bauhinia Project envisions is not to eliminate differences, but to draw from the elemental and connect the human that is within all of us, beyond the politics, the language, the translation. We want to develop an idiom that the next generation can use as they connect, an idiom that lets them be hybrid but not sterile, so they can bloom and rise together across continents and oceans.
Henry and I will close with a short poem. Over this last month, over 28 mysterious corpses have turned up in Hong Kong. The police keep closing the files as “unsuspicious suicides.” Sadly, this phenomenon is already familiar to dissidents and activists from the PRC. The poem we will read is a requiem for the young suicides in Hong Kong and around the world. It is also a prologue for the coming epic of a children’s revolution.
天亡 血咒 大地起
牢牢大海 連根 拔起
日蝕盡處 腳踏 行雷
十方湧至 吐絲 護山
風眼守 冰凝玉金香
曇花 不忍 吐一線曙光 打動
人間一片胸膛 千念輪迴
朝天 伸出雙手 | 不惑 | 萬靈擊掌
十指長枝頭 嫩芽生
從此
不認天地postmortem sky · blood spell rising from earth
locked-down sea · yanked by the roots
eye of the eclipse · riding in on thunder
the ten directions rush in · folding a mountain in a gossamer
cyclone-eye protecting · frozen fresh-gold-jade
udumbara flower can’t bear it · spits a strand of light · setting in motion
an upright mortal coil · a thousand thoughts reincarnate
heavenward both hands extend · |sureness| · clap of manifold spirits
ten fingers of twigs tender leaves grow
from here on
disown heaven and earthThank you all for coming tonight, and for your support for Hong Kong.