In poetry, Karen Cheung connects with Hong Kong’s protests
Editor’s Note: On the night of September 26, 2014, students climbed the fence around Civic Square, the patch of land in front of Hong Kong’s government offices, to demand universal suffrage. Thus began two months of citywide sit-ins and protests known both as Occupy Central and the Umbrella Movement, so named for the iconic image of a protester shielding himself from tear gas with an umbrella.
This poem from Karen Cheung’s forthcoming zine, Roses in a Beer Can, weaves the songs and symbols of the protests into the narrative of her absence from them. Cheung writes:
“Whenever fellow journalists trade tales about how they were tear-gassed Hong Kong’s pro-democracy Umbrella Movement in 2014, I feel a mixture of embarrassment, resentment and most of all grief for having missed the protests entirely. It wasn’t until after I read Henry Wei Leung’s Goddess of Democracy: An Occupy Lyric that I was able to forgive myself.”
‘After Occupy’ is not just repentance in free verse, but a meditation on the vitality of Occupy and the void left in its wake. By the time Cheung has absolved herself, the “residue of conflict” has already been scraped off the streets. – Anne Henochowicz
After Occupy
my screen erupted into a grey mist
but my eyes did not water
eight hours and 9562 kilometres away
“pepper sprayed is no credential” the poet wrote,
two years later, same city different protest
i made sure the world knows i was pepper sprayed,
(for i did not hear the people sing.)
writers wrote books about umbrellas
filmmakers made films about yellowing
scholars published papers about democracy
(for “nothing we did could have saved” -)
please take me to admiralty,
i begged the taxi driver
one week too late in december:
no ribbons, no banners, no residue of conflict;
the site and the stories of seven million people
both expired after 79 days.
“too local,” they ruled,
even when i key the bespectacled boy
into the headline.
it is not cool to speak of occupy anymore,
a localist told me:
a failure, a romanticization, a left plastic’s dream;
(i am quietly relieved.)
the journalists, the diaspora, the protesters
have left us
for china, for home, for better causes;
(but i am still here, that’s what counts, they say.) ∎