MCLC: Leung Ping Kwan dies at 63 (4)

[Denton, Kirk]

obMCLC LIST
From: Jennifer Feeley <jennifer-feeley at uiowa.edu>
Subject: Leung Ping Kwan dies at 63 (4)
*******************************************************

P.K. was one of the warmest and most generous people whom I've ever
encountered.  A sad loss not only for Hong Kong literature and culture,
but for humanity as well.

Jennifer

======================================================

Source: NYT (1/8/13):
http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/the-death-of-a-poet-who-defi
ned-hong-kong/

The Death of a Poet Who Defined Hong Kong
By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW

BEIJING — Leung Ping-kwan, the poet and intellectual who celebrated and
defined Hong Kong, had just been released from the hospital and sat,
surrounded by spilling boxes of books, his trademark flat cap on his head,
in his home in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay district the last time I saw him,
on Dec. 9.

I knew that P.K., as friends called him, had been fighting the lung cancer
that ultimately killed him Saturday, yet when I saw him last month I was
taken aback at his appearance. Below the cap, his mouth and jaw were drawn
tight, as were his hands. And yet his bright chuckle, his wide-ranging
mind, his enormous appetite for discussion, were still there.

We talked about the recent changes in Beijing, where Xi Jinping had become
the new leader, and about the author Mo Yan, who had won the Nobel Prize
for Literature. He gave me his latest book, a Chinese-language collection
of poems titled “Dong Xi,” which means “East West” but also means
“Things,” a clever and fitting title for a poet who excelled at what he
called “things” poetry, a “unique ‘poetics of quotidianism,’ of the
everyday,” as Esther M.K. Cheung writes in her introduction to his latest
English-language book, “City at the End of Time,” republished in 2012 by
Hong Kong University Press.

P.K. was a loyal person. It was when my father, Antony Tatlow, was head of
his comparative literature department at Hong Kong University that his
seminal collection was first published, in 1992 — before the tumult of
Hong Kong’s handover to China, an event that lies at the core of a
collection that probes the thrilling, reverse temporality of nostalgia for
a future that Hong Kong was about to lose; skepticism about colonialism;
the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, and much more. “I have to thank
Antony for publishing that book,” P.K. said.

I demurred, saying I knew my father had been proud to publish it, that the
credit was entirely due to the writer. Yet with sorrow I sensed he needed
to say it, that he hadn’t long to live. P.K. was a man with many friends,
a kind and humane man who touched many lives personally or through his
writings, which inspired a generation of Hong Kong residents to see their
city as a place with an identity, a place with a future. P.K., who was 63
when he died, was the city’s most prominent literary voice.

Born on the Chinese mainland in 1949, the year the People’s Republic of
China was founded — he found this significant — P.K. was brought by his
parents to Hong Kong as a child. Early on he found its — and his — voice,
starting in the ’60s.

He loved the Cantonese language, a rich Chinese brimming with color and
puns; he loved Cantonese food (as he loved all foods), and he loved the
high-spirited humor when a group of Hong Kong friends was together.

“We treat everything with laughter,” he once said to me, in Frankfurt in
2009, where we were on the Hong Kong writers’ delegation — the overlooked,
freer, “younger brothers and sisters” of China’s Guest of Honor delegation
that year. “It’s a way of dealing with things,” he said.

Hong Kong people need their humor. On the edge of China, with a different
language, political system and social values from those of the mainland,
politics has grown tough in recent years, and P.K. was depressed at the
increasingly shrill nature of political discourse as positions drifted
apart with seemingly no mechanism for resolution: Resentment was growing
at the influx of people from China and the impact of enormous amounts of
mainland money, often obscure in its origins, on the fragile,
postcolonial, sociopolitical ecosystem of the small territory, to the
point where he didn’t really want to speak publicly about it any more.

I had interviewed him last October — about writing, not politics — and he
repeated the call that marked his life: that Hong Kong and other Chinese
places, inheritors of pre-Communist Party Chinese culture, with important
regional characteristics that represented the real varieties of China,
should be given their place in the sun and not overshadowed by the giant
mainland. As The South China Morning Post wrote in an obituary,
“Award-winning writer and poet Leung Ping-kwan’s dying wish was for Hong
Kong literature to receive the respect it deserves.”

His poetry speaks for him. A multiple prize-winner, P.K. was also a
path-breaker.

“As a student, I knew his writing,” Chan Koonchung, the author of the
novel “The Fat Years,” said in a telephone interview in Beijing.

“Later, in the 1990s and after the handover, a lot of people began talking
about Hong Kong’s identity. But he had already started a long time ago.”

Caught between its former colonial ruler, Britain, and its new owner,
China, Hong Kong, with 7 million people, had always struggled to know and
express itself.

“He was an early one to use the Hong Kong point of view to consider Hong
Kong. He often felt that outsiders used very simple metaphors to judge
Hong Kong. For example, they called it a ‘cultural desert,’ a
‘prostitute,’ ” said Mr. Chan. “Very early on he protested against this.”

The result was unpretentious, profound, sometimes humorous, poetry.

P.K.’s oeuvre was enormous and he was widely translated — for a full list,
see this from Lingnan University’s Web site, where he was professor of
comparative literature — but another collection stood out, “Traveling with
a Bitter Melon,” published in 2002, by a writer who was seriously
interested in food — another Cantonese trademark.

In the poem “Images of Hong Kong,” the narrator searches for a postcard to
send a friend overseas. Yet he finds mostly “Exotica for a faraway
audience / Entangled with what others have said / Why is it so hard to
tell our own stories?”

P.K. told Hong Kong’s own story through homely images of food, buildings,
traffic, fish and much else, in poems with names like “Papaya” or “In an
Old Colonial Building.” He spoke of how a city functions, of what is lost
as it develops so rapidly. Of the human spirit that wanders, looking for
its home, while finding welcome overseas. P.K. was both profoundly local
and international; he was as likely to be reading something by a Czech
writer as a Chinese poet. He studied in San Diego and traveled widely,
liking Berlin especially. There, in the strange tale of East-West division
and unification, he found echoes of Hong Kong’s own fractured identity and
tumultuous political changes.

In “Bittermelon,” he compared the ugliness of the vegetable’s “lined face”
with time: “Wait until this moody weather is over / That’s all that
matters… / The loudest song’s not necessarily passionate / the bitterest
pain stays in the heart. … / In these shaken times, who more than you
holds / In the wind, our bittermelon, steadily facing / Worlds of confused
bees and butterflies and a garden gone wild.”

P.K. also wrote about the 1989 Tiananmen Square military crackdown on
student-led democracy protests, which frightened Hong Kong. In a series of
three poems he compared Beijing to a room, a metaphor that alluded to the
cut-off nature of Chinese society that he believes persists to this day,
he told me in our last conversation, and that is reflected in writing from
there.

After the massacre, with the Communist Party in total control once again,
he wrote in “Refurnishing,” “Well, they returned with their grand old
tables and chairs / The solid stuff, the elegant, classy stuff that has /
Symmetry, unmistakable aesthetic appeal… / They hung their paintings and
calligraphy where you couldn’t not see / Couldn’t not honor the good old
snows, the flowers and birds smiling again / Though one crimson beak
seemed forced by the artist’s hand.”

“Hong Kong was always being described using other people’s words,” said
Mr. Chan. “But he understood Hong Kong’s changing culture. He very early
on spotted that Hong Kong needed its own voice. He had that special voice.”