Anonymous poems collected from the anti-extradition protests of 2019, from voices now banned or criminalized
THE BAUHINIA PROJECT is a collective of artists and activists seeking to bring international attention to and understanding of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, as well as to forge bonds of solidarity between that movement and struggles against oppression worldwoide. The collection started in 2019 with the distribution of postcard-poems by an anonymous author in Berkeley, California.
'Exile yourself to the street,’ an anonymous poet writes in the
landmark anthology Hong Kong without Us, ‘It’s our only way home.’
It’s also the only way toward peace and democracy as Hongkongers
have courageously demonstrated in wave after wave of public
resistance, here through witness and dreams. The Bauhinia Project
collective has distilled and translated the poetic spirit, grit,
and compassion of ordinary citizens—children, students, workers,
parents, elders—fighting for their freedoms and sovereignty on the
city streets. Their voices rise up from the tear gas and arrests,
suicides, and national security laws past the skyscrapers and
across the encrypted seas, reaching our hearts. This is what a
people’s poetry feels like in a wrecked world: numinous heat in the
floating city of the oppressed.
*writer and translator of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo’s
June Fourth Elegies*
The poems in this book are a snapshot of postcolonial Hong Kong’s
voices and souls, young and old. If the stories we enact become the
writing of history, then these poems will illuminate ordinary
Hongkongers’ ways of seeing: their anxiety, affliction,
frustration, joy, courage, hope, and dreams. These poems confront
cognitive barriers by returning to human basics—an embodied world
of sound and word. They will guide readers into our strange land,
permeated with the many fumes that shape our city.
*Alex Yong-Kang Chow, Hong Kong activist*
Poems found scrawled or printed on Hong Kong Walls, last wills and
testaments, anonymous poems from a protest movement 'led by
children' who covered their faces during the uprising, but whose
protest woke up their country-people as this book, I hope, will
wake up readers everywhere.
Here is my evidence: 'I'm just a housewife / Last night I joined a
rally / It was pouring // When I looked up / An umbrella was
shielding me / raised by a teen.'
This is one of the most moving and humanly compelling testaments I
have ever read. But this fragment is also a lyric translated
beautifully with an elegant and light touch. Out of such fragments,
scraps of voices, and scenes, the larger panorama of communal
protest arises, a whole city comes alive, like a lit-up
stained-glass window that creates an epic out of many tiny shards
of glass. The beautiful, despairing, inspired, and unforgettable
chorus of voices in this book is a testimony, it is a poetics of
witness in the truest sense.
*author of Deaf Republic*
Consider this anthology a time capsule and a seed. Not to mourn for
a lost past (but it can be that), rather a chapter among many in a
love story. Hong Kong Without Us is an anthology both fixed in time
and tactile, for future Hongkongers to return to, or serve as a
stepping stone, solid ground, from which to step into the next
chapter.
*Cha: An Asian Literary Journal*
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