2022.04.19 追逐九龙之王

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IDEAS
CHASING THE KING OF KOWLOON
One man symbolized Hong Kong’s multitudes better than any other.

By Louisa Lim
A expressive ink painting of Tsang Tsou-choi
Adam Maida
APRIL 19, 2022, 6 AM ET
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About the author: Louisa Lim is a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne, and a former international correspondent for NPR. She is the author of Indelible City and People’s Republic of Amnesia.

The mood was one of eager anticipation when, four years behind schedule, Hong Kong finally unveiled its multimillion-dollar M+ art museum in November 2021. As the docents swung open the gallery’s entrance, they revealed the very first piece in the exhibition: a pair of wooden doors daubed with misshapen, messy Chinese calligraphy in black ink. The doors had been chosen, the museum’s curator, Tina Pang, says, because they represent Hong Kong’s visual culture. Yet the graffiti on the doors is the controversial work of a man once so far outside the mainstream that he was derided by the establishment as a psychopath. This elevation to the premium spot in Hong Kong’s newest art museum caps the unlikely rise of an improbable artist who spent a lifetime railing against Hong Kong’s overlords, whether they were colonial masters from London or, later, distant rulers in Beijing.


For years, I’d been obsessed with the man who had painted those wooden doors, who had become the unlikeliest of Hong Kong’s local icons. He was a mostly toothless, often shirtless, disabled trash collector with mental-health issues. His given name was Tsang Tsou-choi, but everyone called him the King of Kowloon. Over the years, Tsang had come to believe that the jutting prong of the Kowloon peninsula, adjoining mainland China and opposite the harbor from Hong Kong Island, had originally belonged to his family and had been stolen from them by the British in the 19th century. No one could say for sure why he believed this, but his conviction became a mania.

The cover of Louisa Lim's book
This article has been excerpted from Lim’s new book, Indelible City.
In the mid-1950s, the King began a furious graffiti campaign accusing the British of stealing his land. Using a wolf-hair brush, he painted directly on the walls and slopes that he believed he’d lost, marking his domain with the art of emperors: Chinese calligraphy. His denunciations took the form of tottering towers of crooked Chinese characters in which he painstakingly wrote out his entire lineage, all 21 generations of it, sometimes pairing names with the places they had lost and occasionally topping it all off with expletives like “Fuck the Queen!” When Hong Kong was handed back to China in 1997, he continued his graffiti war regardless.

He was exacting in his choice of canvas; he would paint on only Crown land, or, after the change in sovereignty, government land. He gravitated toward electricity boxes and pillars, walls, and flyover struts. His words played their own magic tricks before a captive audience of haggard commuters and weary retirees; they were there one day, gone the next, washed away or painted over by an army of government cleaners in rubber boots with thin hand towels hanging from the back of their hats to serve as makeshift sunscreens. But overnight his words were back again, as if they had never disappeared, in a game of textual whack-a-mole played across the entire territory for half a century.


Indelible City - Dispossession And Defiance In Hong KongLOUISA LIM,PENGUIN
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The unbelievable thing was that the King’s stratagem worked, despite his execrable penmanship. Through his misshapen, childlike calligraphy, he became a household name, first reviled, then feted. He’d had only two years of formal schooling, and he advertised that educational deficit in every crooked character that he wrote. His writing laid bare all the flaws and idiosyncrasies a proper calligrapher would have tried to suppress, but that is what made it memorable. His words were a celebration of originality and human imperfection with a who-gives-a-fuckness about them that was genuinely inspiring. He broke all the rules. This too was a facet of Hong Kongness: The city was an in-between space, a site of transgression, a refuge where behavior not acceptable in mainland China was permitted and even celebrated.

The issue of belonging has always been a complicated one for me, as a half ​­English, half ­Chinese person who was born in England but brought up in Hong Kong. My family moved to Hong Kong when I was 5 so that my Singaporean father could take up a civil-service job. As far back as I can remember, Hong Kong has been my home. So though I am not a native Hong Konger, I was made by the city. I was shaped by Hong Kong values, in particular a respect for grinding hard work and stubborn determination. Hong Kongers called it “Lion Rock Spirit,” after a popular television series about a squatter colony living at the foot of a local landmark, a small mountain topped by a rocky formation resembling a Chinese lion crouching down, poised to leap. To me, Lion Rock Spirit translated into a willingness to fight to protect my values, no matter how powerful the opponent.

In this, the King was an exemplar. By the time he died from a heart attack, in 2007, he had made an estimated 55,845 works in public space. His blocky characters had written themselves onto our brains to become a collective memory that was as iconic a marker of Hong Kong identity as the city’s bottle-green Star Ferries or its spiky skyline. For so many, his words served as the first articulation of an uncomfortable instinct they couldn’t quite voice themselves. “It’s a little bit like our political situation,” one commentator told me. (I have withheld their name to avoid any repercussions from Hong Kong’s draconian national-security law.) “The land was owned by the British, [and is] now owned by China. It’s supposed to belong to China, but most Hong Kong people, they don’t identify with the Chinese government. In some way, they still think that Hong Kong is a colony, a colony of China. So what Tsang Tsou-choi did is something they want to do.” The King was speaking for his people.

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When he died, Hong Kong’s newspapers erupted in a communal wail. “The King is dead, and everyone is missing him,” one announced. “The King is dead and, his people are crying and wailing,” said another. As his work disappeared from the streets, it appeared on the auction blocks of Sotheby’s, surging in price until it was the most valuable to come out of Hong Kong.

Some years ago, I was seized by the idea of writing a book about the King of Kowloon. It was a notion that I found hard to resist, even though it was obviously a fool’s errand: His family had always refused to talk with journalists, and there was almost no concrete information about him. But I stubbornly set off on my quest, trekking out to industrial buildings, public-housing estates, and far-flung villages nestled close to the Chinese border to find people who’d known the King. These were places I’d never visited in the four decades that I’d lived, on and off, in Hong Kong. Along the way, I discovered a multitude of Hong Kongs. The one I had grown up in had been a bubble within a bubble, and my pursuit of the King exploded that fiction.

As I worked my way through the eccentric cast of characters who had painted with the King, written about him, or simply known him, I found the story slipping away from me. At first my aim had simply been to find out whether his claims to the land had any truth to them. I’d assumed that I would be able to pin down exact details through my interviews. But everyone I spoke with disagreed vehemently about almost everything, even the slim handful of biographical data that existed, or about whether he was mentally competent. Worse than that, they spent endless hours sniping at one another. None of my normal journalistic approaches seemed to be working.

Still, my pursuit of the King took me deeper into Hong Kong’s story. To examine his claims to the land, I started looking at acts of possession and expropriation by the British colonizers. I soon realized that, in order to understand these acts, I needed to make sense of the complex saga of how Hong Kong had become British in the first place. I hadn’t intended to go any further back than that, but everyone who was interested in the King kept talking about the boy emperors of the Song dynasty who’d fled to Hong Kong in the 12th century. Eventually, my new interest in Hong Kong’s pre-colonial history led me all the way back to the middle Neolithic era, 6,000 years ago. The King had somehow taken me back to the beginning.

Along the way, I fell into other untold stories of Hong Kong, creation myths and legends, real and invented histories, tales of rebellion and courage that had been wiped from the record. They changed the way I viewed Hong Kong’s history, which I’d always assumed was an inventory of cut-and-dried facts. Instead, these hidden truths, in their kaleidoscopic, multicolor multitudes, pushed back against the idea of a singular, authoritative, state-imposed narrative. They put Hong Kongers at the front and center of the story, in particular reinserting them into the crucial negotiations over the transfer of sovereignty, a chapter in which the most important Hong Kong voices had never before been heard. These discoveries placed the insurrections of recent years in the context of a far longer narrative of defiance and dispossession.

But even as the focus of my interest shifted, I found that the King had burrowed into my consciousness as a prism through which Hong Kong’s story could be viewed. A prism bends and separates white light into a rainbow of colors; once prodemocracy protests filled Hong Kong’s streets in 2019, the King’s story refracted into variegated narrative stripes that illuminated the city in ways I had not anticipated. Like the story of the protest movement, his was a David-and-Goliath tale of a doomed rebellion against an overweening power. Like his story, the story of the protest movement has evolved into one about erasure, about who gets to tell Hong Kong’s story. Throughout their history, Hong Kongers have been minimized in, or even completely removed from, official accounts told by their successive rulers. Hong Kongers have never been able to tell their own story; none, that is, except the poor, sad old King—“the last free man in Hong Kong,” as he was called by the writer Fung Man-yee.

The King became, rather than my subject, my unlikely lodestar. Amid the scrolling whirligig of Hong Kong politics, I couldn’t help noticing a pattern emerging. When something big happened, I often already knew the main players through my pursuit of the King. When in 2016 a radical university lecturer named Chin Wan became the first academic to lose his job for his political views, I remembered that he’d written the first essay in a book about the King. When the legislator Tanya Chan was put on trial for her role in the Umbrella Movement, the 10-week-long street occupation in 2014 seeking greater democracy, I already knew her because of our shared interest in the King. In 2020, when Hong Kong’s top satirical TV show, Headliners, was canceled for its political content, I sent my condolences to its host, Tsang Chi-ho; we’d become friends after I interviewed him about a newspaper column he’d written on the King. Sometimes it seemed like the King was guiding me from beyond the grave, breadcrumbing my trail to Hong Kong’s most interesting thinkers.

This pattern was no coincidence. To think or write about the King is to consider his preoccupations: territory, sovereignty, and loss. He had publicly raised these issues at a time when no one else dared think about them. His very name held within it a rebuke to Hong Kong’s colonizers: He was the original sovereign, and Kowloon belonged to him.

Those preoccupations became intensely politically sensitive following Beijing’s imposition of national-security legislation on Hong Kong in June 2020. As that law views discussions of sovereignty or autonomy as potential secession, the King himself might nowadays be seen as a threat to national security. One solution has been a move to paint his work as decrying British colonial rule in a way that could be interpreted as pro-China, yet such a position strips the King of the throne he spent his lifetime claiming. Hong Kongers have instinctively understood his mission; in 2019, as they filled the streets, the poet Jennifer Wong wrote: “Your furious characters on the red postbox / kindle in us a flame we have always known.”

So who today are the kings of Kowloon? Are they the ancient clans in walled villages who were the traditional subsoil owners, the multinational corporations whose towering headquarters have transformed the cityscape, or the Communist Party leaders in Beijing who can impose their will on the people of Hong Kong by fiat and force? Or are they the ordinary people who occupy the streets of Kowloon with their bodies, reclaiming the space-time that is their own? As if seen through a prism, the answer depends on the angle of viewing.

This article has been excerpted from Lim’s new book, Indelible City.

Indelible City - Dispossession And Defiance In Hong KongLOUISA LIM, PENGUIN
BUY BOOK
Louisa Lim is a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne, and a former international correspondent for NPR. She is the author of Indelible City and People’s Republic of Amnesia.




理念
追逐九龙之王
有一个人比其他任何人都更能象征香港的众生相。

作者：Louisa Lim
曾灶财的水墨画，表情丰富
亚当-麦达
2022年4月19日，美国东部时间上午6点
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关于作者。路易莎-林是墨尔本大学的高级讲师，曾是美国国家广播电台的国际记者。她是《不可磨灭的城市》和《失忆人民共和国》的作者。

2021年11月，香港终于为其价值数百万美元的M+艺术博物馆揭幕，比计划晚了四年，人们的心情是热切期待的。当讲解员打开画廊的入口时，他们展示了展览中的第一件作品：一对木门，上面用黑色墨水涂抹着错乱的、混乱的中国书法。博物馆的策展人Tina Pang说，选择这些门是因为它们代表了香港的视觉文化。然而，门上的涂鸦是一个有争议的人的作品，他曾经远远超出了主流，以至于被机构嘲弄为精神病患者。这个被提升到香港最新的艺术博物馆的高级位置的艺术家不可能崛起，他一生都在抨击香港的霸主，无论他们是来自伦敦的殖民者还是后来的北京的遥远统治者。


多年来，我一直痴迷于那个画了那些木门的人，他已经成为香港最不可能的本地偶像。他是一个几乎没有牙齿、经常不穿衣服、有精神健康问题的残疾垃圾收集者。他的名字叫曾灶财，但大家都叫他九龙王。多年来，曾灶财相信，与中国大陆相邻、与香港岛相对的九龙半岛的突起部分原本属于他的家族，在19世纪被英国人偷走。没有人能够确定他为什么会这样相信，但他的信念成为一种狂热。

路易莎-林的书的封面
本文节选自林的新书《不可磨灭的城市》。
20世纪50年代中期，国王开始了一场愤怒的涂鸦运动，指责英国人偷走了他的土地。他用狼毫笔直接在他认为已经失去的墙壁和山坡上作画，用帝王的艺术标记他的领地。中国书法。他的谴责采取了由弯曲的中国字组成的颤巍巍的塔的形式，在这些字中，他煞费苦心地写出了他的整个血统，所有21代的血统，有时将名字与他们失去的地方配对，偶尔用诸如 "他妈的女王！"的脏话来结束这一切。当香港在1997年被交还给中国时，他继续他的涂鸦战争。

他对画布的选择很严格；他只在官方土地上作画，或者在主权改变后，在政府土地上作画。他倾向于在电箱、柱子、墙壁和天桥支柱上作画。他的文字在憔悴的上班族和疲惫的退休人员的观众面前玩着自己的魔术；它们今天在那里，第二天就不见了，被政府的清洁工大军冲走或涂掉，他们穿着橡胶靴，帽子后面挂着薄薄的手巾，作为临时的防晒霜。但一夜之间，他的文字又回来了，就像它们从未消失过一样，在整个领土上玩了半个世纪的文字打地鼠游戏。


不可磨灭的城市--香港的剥夺与反抗》林露莎，PENGUIN出版社
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令人难以置信的是，尽管国王的笔法很差，但他的计策还是成功了。通过他错乱的、像孩子一样的书法，他成了一个家喻户晓的名字，先是被谩骂，然后是被崇拜。他只接受过两年的正规教育，他在他写的每一个歪歪扭扭的人物中都宣传了这种教育的不足。他的文字将所有的缺陷和特异性暴露无遗，如果是一个合适的书法家，他会努力压制这些缺陷和特异性，但这正是使其令人难忘的原因。他的文字是对原创性和人类不完美的赞美，有一种谁在乎的感觉，这一点确实令人鼓舞。他打破了所有的规则。这也是香港特色的一个方面。这个城市是一个介于两者之间的空间，是一个越轨的地方，是一个允许甚至庆祝在中国大陆不被接受的行为的庇护所。

归属问题对我来说一直是一个复杂的问题，我是一个出生在英国但在香港长大的半英半中的人。我的家人在我5岁时搬到了香港，以便我的新加坡父亲能够从事一份公务员工作。从我有记忆起，香港就是我的家。因此，尽管我不是一个土生土长的香港人，但我是由这个城市造就的。我是由香港的价值观塑造的，特别是对磨砺的努力和顽强的决心的尊重。香港人称其为 "狮子山精神"，这是根据一部流行的电视连续剧，该剧讲述了一个居住在当地地标脚下的棚户区，一座小山的山顶上有一个岩石阵，像一只中国狮子蹲在地上，准备跃起。对我来说，狮子岩精神转化为一种为保护我的价值观而战斗的意愿，无论对手多么强大。

在这一点上，国王是一个典范。到2007年他因心脏病发作去世时，他已经在公共空间创作了大约55,845件作品。他的方块字已经写进了我们的大脑，成为一种集体记忆，与香港的瓶绿色天星小轮或其尖锐的天际线一样，成为香港身份的标志性标志。对许多人来说，他的话是对他们自己无法表达的不舒服的本能的第一次表述。"这有点像我们的政治局势，"一位评论员告诉我（我隐去了他们的名字，以避免受到香港严厉的国家安全法的影响）。"这块土地是英国人的，[现在]是中国的。它应该属于中国，但大多数香港人，他们并不认同中国政府。在某种程度上，他们仍然认为香港是一个殖民地，是中国的殖民地。因此，曾灶财所做的事是他们想做的事。" 国王是在为他的人民说话。

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当他去世时，香港的报纸爆发了集体的哀号。"国王死了，每个人都在想念他，"一份报纸宣布。"国王死了，他的人民在哭泣和哀号，"另一家报纸说。随着他的作品从街头消失，它出现在苏富比的拍卖场上，价格飙升，直到它成为香港最有价值的作品。

几年前，我萌生了写一本关于九龙王的书的想法。这是一个让我难以抗拒的想法，尽管这显然是一件愚蠢的事情。他的家人一直拒绝与记者交谈，而且几乎没有关于他的具体信息。但我顽强地开始了我的探索，跋涉到工业建筑、公共住宅区和靠近中国边境的遥远村庄，寻找认识国王的人。这些地方是我在香港断断续续生活了四十年的时间里从未去过的。一路上，我发现了众多的香港。我长大的那个香港是一个泡沫中的泡沫，而我对国王的追求打破了这种虚构。

当我在那些与国王一起画画、写他、或仅仅是认识他的古怪人物中工作时，我发现故事正从我身边溜走。起初，我的目的只是想弄清楚他对这块土地的要求是否有任何真实性。我以为通过采访，我将能够确定确切的细节。但是，与我交谈的每个人都对几乎所有的事情持强烈的反对意见，甚至对存在的一小部分传记资料，或对他是否有精神能力，也持反对意见。更糟糕的是，他们花了无尽的时间互相狙击。我的正常新闻报道方法似乎都没有用。

不过，我对国王的追寻使我更深入地了解香港的故事。为了研究他对土地的要求，我开始研究英国殖民者的占有和征用行为。我很快意识到，为了理解这些行为，我需要了解香港最初是如何成为英国的这一复杂的故事。我本来不打算再往前追溯，但每个对国王感兴趣的人都在谈论12世纪逃到香港的宋朝小皇帝。最终，我对香港前殖民地历史的新兴趣使我一直回到了6000年前的新石器时代中期。国王不知不觉中把我带回了起点。

一路走来，我陷入了香港其他不为人知的故事中，创造的神话和传说，真实和虚构的历史，被从记录中抹去的叛逆和勇气的故事。它们改变了我对香港历史的看法，我一直以为香港的历史是一个干巴巴的事实清单。相反，这些隐藏的真相，以其万花筒般的多姿多彩，反击了单一的、权威的、国家强加的叙述的想法。它们将香港人置于故事的前端和中心，特别是将他们重新纳入关于主权移交的关键谈判中，在这一章节中，最重要的香港人的声音从未被听到。这些发现将近年来的叛乱置于一个更长的反抗和剥夺的叙事背景中。

但是，即使在我的兴趣焦点转移的同时，我发现国王已经作为一个棱镜钻进了我的意识，通过它可以看到香港的故事。棱镜将白光弯曲并分离成彩虹般的颜色；一旦2019年支持民主的抗议活动充满香港的街道，国王的故事就会折射成各种不同的叙事条纹，以我没有预料到的方式照亮这个城市。与抗议运动的故事一样，他的故事也是一个大卫和歌利亚的故事，是一个注定要对一个过分的权力进行反击的故事。和他的故事一样，抗议运动的故事也演变成了一个关于抹杀的故事，关于谁可以讲述香港的故事。在整个历史中，香港人在历代统治者的官方叙述中被最小化，甚至被完全删除。香港人从未能够讲述他们自己的故事；也就是说，除了可怜的、悲伤的老国王--"香港最后的自由人"，正如作家冯文怡所说的那样。

与其说国王是我的主题，不如说他是我不可能的宿主。在香港政治的滚动旋涡中，我不禁注意到一个模式的出现。当有重大事件发生时，我往往通过对国王的追踪已经知道主要的参与者。2016年，当一位名叫Chin Wan的激进大学讲师成为第一个因其政治观点而失去工作的学者时，我记得他曾在一本关于国王的书中写过第一篇文章。当立法会议员陈淑庄因在雨伞运动（2014年为期10周的街头占领行动，寻求更大的民主）中的角色而被审判时，我已经认识她，因为我们对国王有共同的兴趣。2020年，当香港的顶级讽刺电视节目《头条新闻》因其政治内容被取消时，我向其主持人曾志浩表示哀悼；在我就他写的一篇关于国王的报纸专栏采访他后，我们成了朋友。有时，似乎国王在坟墓里指导我，让我找到香港最有趣的思想家。

这种模式并不是巧合。想到或写到国王，就得考虑他的关注点：领土、主权和损失。在没有人敢想这些问题的时候，他公开提出这些问题。他的名字本身就包含了对香港殖民者的斥责。他是最初的主权者，而九龙属于他。

在北京于2020年6月对香港实施国家安全法之后，这些关注点变得非常政治敏感。由于该法将有关主权或自治的讨论视为潜在的分裂，国王本人如今可能被视为对国家安全的威胁。一个解决方案是将他的作品描绘成以一种可能被解释为亲中国的方式来谴责英国的殖民统治，然而这样的立场使国王失去了他一生都在要求的王位。香港人本能地理解他的使命；2019年，当他们挤满街道时，诗人Jennifer Wong写道："你在红色邮筒上愤怒的字符/点燃了我们心中一直以来的火焰。"

那么，今天谁是九龙的王者？他们是作为传统底土所有者的围墙内的古老部族，是其高耸的总部改变了城市景观的跨国公司，还是在北京的共产党领导人，他们可以通过法令和武力将其意志强加给香港人？还是那些用自己的身体占领九龙街道，夺回属于自己的时空的普通人？就像通过棱镜看一样，答案取决于观看的角度。

本文节选自Lim的新书《不可磨灭的城市》。

不可磨灭的城市--香港的剥夺与反抗》LOUISA LIM, PENGUIN
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路易莎-林是墨尔本大学的高级讲师，也是美国国家广播电台的前国际记者。她是《不可磨灭的城市》和《失忆人民共和国》的作者。