The Death of a Poet Who Defined Hong Kong

BEIJING - Leung Ping-kwan, the poet and intellectual who celebrated and defined Hong Kong, had just been released from 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 Sunday, Dec. 9, 2012.

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; 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 c lever and fitting title for a poet who excelled at what he called “things” poetry, an “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 â€" before the tumult of Hong Kong's handover to China, an event which lies at the core of the 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 t he 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 people to see their city as a place with an identity, a place with a future. P.K., who was age 63 when he died in Hong Kong, 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 â€" he found this significant â€" P.K. was brought by his parents to Hong Kong as a child. Early on he found its â€" and his â€" 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 writer's delegation â€" 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, post-colonial, socio-political 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 â€" 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 â€" for a full list, see this from Lingnan University's Web site, where he was professor of Comparative Literature â€" but another collection stood out, “Traveling with a Bitter Melon,” published in 2002, by a writer who was seriously interested in food â€" 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 many others, in poems named “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, 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 th e 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 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 aesthet ic 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.”

How Much Are Americans Willing to Spend to Defend Europe?

BERLIN - At the end of this month, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the NATO secretary general, will release new figures on defense spending by the 28 Alliance members.

They will almost certainly show a decline for most countries. The global financial crisis, followed by the euro crisis, has put immense pressure on finance ministries to cut budgets, including, in most places, defense budgets.

It is interesting to note that Greece, of all European countries, has maintained a fairly high level of spending. Given the shape of the Greek economy, that creates problems of its own which I discuss in my latest Letter from Europe.

Mr. Rasmussen has repeatedly asked Alliance members to invest in defense to deal with new threats, such as cyber and energy security. He also fears that the technological gap between Europe and the United States will widen so much that ‘interoperability,' the ability to operate together on missions, will be endangered.

The United States spends 31 percent of its defense budget on investment. The Europeans spend 22 percent, according to Claude-France Arnould, the chief executive of the E.U.'s European Defence Agency, which was established over a decade ago to promote defense cooperation.

There are few signs that Europeans are willing to invest more. Indeed, defense spending among E.U. member states was at a record low, Ms. Arnould said during a security conference in Berlin last November.

Both NATO and the E.U. believe there is one way to try bridge this gap: through smart defense or “pooling and sharing.”

In practice, it would mean NATO and E.U. members, the majority of whom belong to each other's organization, cooperating much more on defense, instead of - for example - duplicating expensive equipment.

Ms. Arnould has warned E.U. countries not to use pooling and sharing as an excuse to invest even less. “Pooling and sharing offers a way to acquire together what is out of reach individually and get more efficiency in the deployment of these capabilities,” she said. “We see that Europe risks losing significant industrial capability between now and 2020.”

Yet, for all the cajoling by NATO, the E.U. and Pentagon officials, little has changed.

European governments still believe that defense policy and defense spending are intrinsic elements of national sovereignty.

And while governments will agree to participate in small collaborative projects, such as the European Defense Agency's helicopter training program, they shy away from anything big enough to really improve Europe's military technology sector or its security.

What a foolhardy attitude to have, say analysts, considering that
the Obama administration's security agenda is focusing increasingly on Asia. Surely, analysts add, this should be the time for Europe to take on more responsibility for its own security.