Two Poems

COVER FEATURE HONG KONG King of Kowloon In your white vest and blue flip-flops, you wandered about in the fierce sun, a can of black paint in your hand. We read your family history on lampposts: your escape from Liantang, your ancestral home, settling for Pink Shek in Kowloon. You hailed Wen Tianxiang and Sun Yat-sen, charged the Queen for usurping your land. 新中國皇 曾榮華 曾福彩 中 英 香港 政府 A self-declared king for fifty years, painting all over the colony – a city where the British lived like paradise birds on mid-Levels while the Chinese sweated, selling meats in wet markets. But the freedom to march and shout, to do what you did! Defiance on the lampposts, defiance at the ferry pier. 撐住五十年不變! 高度自治 叉燒 飯碗 撐住! 撐住! Your furious characters on the red postbox kindle in us a flame we have always known. @kuochuqu #historyofthebees #gardenwall #blah #sowhat In 19__ I broke an expensive urn. Since then I have been breaking and defacing everything from home because breaking is the only way to tell the fake from fake. In my blue cotton top and working-class flip-flops I am dangerous as a bee. Violence in a broken jar. Violence in my seed. Violence in my tweet. They are hoping to catch all the venomous bees like me Inside the garden walls. I’m ugly and obvious as a mountain. The hidden cameras stare at me with envy, plotting their own escape. Two Poems by Jennifer Wong Born and raised in Hong Kong, Jennifer Wong studied English at Oxford University and has a creative writing PhD from Oxford Brookes University. She is the author of Goldfish (2013) and teaches part-time at City Lit and Oxford Brookes. WONG PHOTO: TEREZA CERVENOVA Rainy Afternoon Hong Kong 2018. Photo: Joan Pabona 58 WLT SPRING 2019

Art · Art history · Literature · Poetry · History · Socioeconomic Development in Asia