十月城岸的病忘书

I don't live in Hong Kong; I've been there at most five or six times. But like many across the world, I followed last year's Umbrella Revolution closely. Watching news accounts of protestors, many of them students, peacefully gathering and asking for liberties that we in the West take for granted (at our peril), likeminded people, myself among them, couldn't help but sympathize. The participants were organized, tidy, civil, and tolerant, allowing discussion, disagreement, and the creation of art and literature within their own ranks. That flourishing conversation, and the youthfulness of so many of the protestors, made the ensuing violence an affront to everyone—or at least to all those who value open discussion and civil society.

"The political is the personal," as the saying goes, and Lok Fung's "October in the City" bears that out. Lok Fung was born and raised in Hong Kong. She is connected intimately to the city, to its politics and its future, and, as a university professor, to its young people. Her poem approaches the protests through the lens of a friendship crumbling in the interpersonal gulf that has split open under the pressure of political disagreement. In the context of the poem, as for many in real life, the protests are a defining moment, an event that forces people to choose sides. Hong Kong has experienced such moments before, such as the handover in 1997, and at this point it's hard to say if anything concrete will come from the turmoil. But as Lok Fung puts it, "the reborn me can't recognize you anymore." Personal ties as well as political ones have been permanently severed, and the city can only settle for a new, likely temporary, normal.