King of Kowloon

In your white vest and blue flip-flops,
you wandered about in the fierce sun,
a can of black paint in your hand.
We read your family history on lamp-posts:
your escape from Liantang, your ancestral home,
settling for Pink Shek in Kowloon.
You hailed Wen Tianxiang and Sun Yat-sen,
charged the Queen for usurping your land.
新中國皇 曾榮華 曾福彩
中英 香港 政府
A self-declared king for fifty years, painting
all over the colony – a city where the British
lived on mid-Levels like paradise birds
and the Chinese sweated, selling meats
in wet markets but Oh! the freedom
to march and shout, to do what you did!
Defiance on the lamp-posts,
defiance at the ferry pier.
撐住五十年不變
叉燒 飯碗 撐住!
Your furious characters on the red pillar box
kindle in us an identity we have always known.