KongPoWriMo: On People, Pandemic, and Protest

By Alan Fang

Ⅰ

I would’ve never even heard of KongPoWriMo (Hong Kong Poetry Writing Month), much less received an invitation to join, if I hadn’t ended up in Hong Kong this past January. That was before everything unraveled. 

 I was working on a research fellowship and a fiction project.  I decided to travel to  a city of staircases, high rises and borrowed time. There, I would be able to work on my projects and meet local writers. I also wanted to visit my aunt, see old friends, eat the seung chaan at a cha chaan teng and fish balls from the Mong Kok street stalls.

Hong Kong has always had this magnetism for me, from my love of its cinema to my memories of past family trips. But the protests had complicated things. It was impossible to escape the news; the images of hundreds of thousands of people moving down an avenue, riot police firing off their weapons and pressing their knees into the backs of black-clad protestors, entire streets barricaded or on fire, and young people who had died under uncertain circumstances. Though the unrest showed no signs of ending, I stayed the course. 

There was something surreal about it; the massive crowds, the policemen in their riot gear, their hands resting on their rifles. As hundreds of protesters were kettled into Admiralty station, I helped a woman bring her suitcase up the stairs and out into the street. 

The whole time, the specter of an ‘unknown virus’ hung over us. More details emerged. The city quieted. Every day, people lined up at dawn hoping to buy a single mask before the pharmacies’ supplies ran out. I had Lunar New Years’ dinner with my aunt’s family, then hunkered down in a tiny apartment living off 7-11 sandwiches and hand sanitizer.

Before the month was out, I flew back to America to finish my last semester of college. I could’ve never foreseen the true extent of the pandemic, that we would end up here, approaching death tolls of 300 thousand in America and 1.5 million worldwide.

Image: Alan Fang

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Through some twist of fate, it was a friend I had made that January who introduced me to Rachel Ka Yin Leung. She had a Facebook poetry group called KongPoWriMo in the works. A Hong Kong spin on the classic ‘write 30 poems in 30 days’ formula. Leung and co-founder Silvia Tse were directly inspired by Singapore’s own version of the group, SingPoWriMo, first established in 2014 by the literary non-profit Sing Lit Station. 

Its founder, Joshua Ip, came through to mentor Leung and Tse. He encouraged them to brainstorm Hong Kong-specific prompts as a supplement to those published daily by NaPoWriMo. He lent them his experience, resources, and SingPoWriMo’s archives. With this blueprint in hand, they could hit the ground running.

 For all their preparation, writing poetry might’ve been the last thing on anybody’s mind that April. Coronavirus had spread everywhere. Entire regions had been locked down. My classes were abruptly cancelled and my father kept going to work at the hospital every day, forced to reuse his PPE. 

Leung says she felt “a definite need to facilitate people to share their thoughts on” the past year’s protests and the pandemic. Though most of my time in Hong Kong had been spent as a tourist and a rubberneck, I felt similarly compelled to join. 

Leung firmly disdains gatekeeping, even as the protests have driven up localist sentiment in the city. As a result, KongPoWriMo became an amalgamation of native Hong Kongers, expatriates and immigrants from every corner of the global, students abroad, university professors, and me.

I will admit that I did not write thirty poems. I only wrote one. It was in two parts. The first, about my experience being stopped and searched by a pair of undercover police officers in an alleyway in Sai Ying Pun. The second, about the deterioration of the coronavirus situation in New York. 

I was happy reading everyone else’s posts. Their creativity in tackling each new prompt. Poems in English, Kongish and Cantonese. Searing political commentary and one about the spoiled contents of someone’s refrigerator. As the final poem in the anthology effuses, these works were important, they were “touchable.”

I messaged with one of the group’s more prolific poets, Akin Jeje, a Canadian man who immigrated to Hong Kong in 2005 and is now a permanent resident and one of three directors of the Central District-based spoken word collective, Peel Street Poetry.

“I personally was interested in the challenge of writing 30 coherent poems in 30 days,” Jeje says, noting they were often born from “a busy city street, to a snatch of news, or at times, just from a singular word or image [he had] in mind.” Many of his poems read as acts of preservation of memories, of spaces he navigates in that foreign yet now familiar city, and of the cultural moment.  

This group might’ve been its own sort of act of preservation. After almost a year of protests, and amid the worst global pandemic in a century, a small group of people representing a unique intersection of Hong Kong’s society, found shelter in each other, in the words they wrote and exchanged. Now, it’s possible that such a group may no longer be allowed to exist.

Image: Alan Fang

Ⅲ

Though the pandemic has caused me to lose faith in many things: the government, the basic decency of my fellow man, it also created the conditions that made a group like KongPoWriMo work so well. Shut in from the rest of the world, Leung and Tse were able to commit to the work of moderating the group. The hundred plus members also had ample time to post over three hundred poems in the space of a month.

“People in all different time zones, as long as we post the prompt, for twenty-four hours they can write whatever they want, they can write in the comfort of their rooms,” says Leung, who calls it the “pandemic model of literary collaboration”

KongPoWriMo is a microcosm of this change, Organizing is easier than ever before, and Leung hopes this is just the beginning of her work in this role. But it’s not been without its challenges.

In the wake of the group’s success, she and Tse began the painstaking work of curating and formatting an anthology, as well as securing a publisher. They have received push back from those who see their efforts as catering too much to expats over the local community. Yet, the biggest trial would come from beyond Hong Kong’s borders.

On June 30th, the Hong Kong National Security Law (NSL) passed unanimously in China’s National People’s Congress, effectively bypassing the city’s legislative system. In short, the NSL’s sixty-six articles criminalize any act of secession, sedition and subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces, all of which carry a maximum sentence of life in prison. What qualifies as these acts is, of course, entirely up to the interpretation of the government.

With the anthology originally set to come out in the summertime, they now had to pump the breaks. There was a decision to make. Disband the group and cancel the publication? Push forward and deal with the consequences later? Bite the bullet and censor as needed? Would censorship invalidate the entire project? To do so would inevitably trigger another round of controversy.

“We just went through the entire manuscript printed out,” Leung says, “and we found that there was quite a lot of politically sensitive material.” It was likely impossible to publish the anthology in its full uncensored form. Even the title would need to be amended.

In a few cases, poets withdrew entirely, and their work remains in the book as a set of black bars or a smattering of REDACTEDs. But many others chose to stay put. In my case, I tentatively followed Tse’s instructions to remove anything that could be construed as ‘separatist.’ Just a few words here and there that now seemed to carry so much implication.

For Jeje, his poems’ relative lack of political subject matter spared him from needing to do the same. But he does affirm something to me. “It is the duty of writers to express what they observe and feel—ultimately writing through perspectives, either one's own or others' is a subjective process, and this subjectivity cannot be completely policed.”

“We’re not just taking the word out of the book, we’re not just taking the idea out of the book,” Leung says. She hopes the overtness of this act can become a kind of protest in and of itself. “The fact that it’s such an explicit form of censorship—I feel like it’s treading that line.”

The anthology, People, Pandemic & ####### is set to be published in the middle of December by the UK-based Verve Poetry Press. Barring further coronavirus restrictions, the physical release is set to happen at an indie bookstore in Yau Ma Tei on the 15th.

It’s unclear what the future holds for Hong Kong and KongPoWriMo. Nevertheless, Leung has her eyes set on next April, looking to build on the lessons of the past year. The world will not stop changing, all we can do is stay fluid, persistent with our poetic ambitions, adaptable to any adversity. She tells me it goes back to the old protest motto: “be water.”