It was a simple dish. Roasted baby corn in husks, with salt and pepper on the side for dipping. I had this dish in a small seafood restaurant tucked away between two residential buildings in an alley off Yanji Street in Taipei’s East District. That evening my friends, partner, and I had far more tastier dishes for sure, but this one made me appreciate life more than the others at the moment, as the baby corn revealed itself to me in a form I had not yet seen before, and reminded me the sheer luck I had had to be connected to the world around me. There was a poetic quality to the baby corn.
A little more than a month ago on another occasion, I was able to meet with the renowned and prolific poet, essayist, critic, and scholar Professor Leung Ping-kwan through a good friend who had been his student. Besides, being an avid reader of literatures, like many of my graduate school friends, Leung is also a sharp-eyed reader of everyday life, unlike most of us. We talked about a lot of things. In passing, Leung recalled Hong Kong’s historic role in bridging the literary critic circles between Mainland China and the outside world. A colloquium hosted by the University of Hong Kong’s Department of Comparative Literature in the late 80s, for instance, provided such an interface for bodies and texts to mingle, and led to interesting developments. Lessons from this earlier, perhaps messier, era could provide some directions in clearing up some of the recent qualms with regard to Hong Kong’s place and identity vis-à-vis those of the larger and growingly intimidating People’s Republic. I offered my service to put his stories on record, as an oral history of sorts.
Although his stories are new to me, as I was either too young, or have already left Hong Kong for the United States to pursue my education in the pre-internet age , the point of view as reflected in his narration is hardly surprising. I have known Leung’s work through another voice of Hong Kong, Rey Chow, from whom I learned a large chunk of my theoretical repertoire dealing with orientalism and visuality. She writes a beautiful piece on Leung’s eulogies on everyday objects, and argues that his poems could be read against Hong Kong’s historical moment as a port city. She proposes the idea of cultural portability to undermine the kind of essentialism prevalent in discourse of Chineseness, as well as the cultural legitimacy that some claim by virtue of their collective victimhood in the past. In Leung’s poems, Chow reads, one can easily locate a nexus of belonging, memory, and beauty that is not predicated on wholesale nationalism, but on the concrete objects within the realm of the ordinary and the familiar.
A snapshot, flow, texture, color, sound, figure conveying an affect, idea, or impression; they are also the vehicles that transport us to another moment and place, yet without the clamor of metaphors proper. Leung’s poems do not redeem; rather, they engage in exchanges that are irreducible to desire. There have been numerous readings of Leung’s poems and I risk offering an inferior one if I attempt to do so here. As his collection, City at the End of Time is being reprinted by the Hong Kong University Press, I am sure there will be other astute ones that ensue. What I want to share, however, is the erudite educator’s infinite passion for life, travel, food, curios, and good company, which I find to be the quintessential Hong Kong character!
From the funerals staged in Hung Hom to the freak summer weather of Chicago, the mixed green salad to the duties of the dean of students, and early American films to the novels of the Asian Diaspora, on all the topics at the dinner table Leung, despite his ailing health, delivered a succinct and punchy observation or two in which you might learn something, or have been drawn into a communion. Leung would give, if he had limitless energy, one of the most interesting feeds in your social networking circle. Hong Kong people do share their life in updates, pictures, and tweets to the nth degree, but in my estimation, very few could be as profound, interesting, spontaneous, and unpretentious as Leung. In this sense, the local and the cosmopolitan cut across a persona that remains authentic, fresh, and generous as the updates and tweets are sent out through his verses and stanzas. I realize that I probably am the first, and so far the only one, to read him amidst the latest craze of social networking.
Thank you Professor Leung. Please carry on.
On the Ridge of Pratt 