Write Words
I was in New York this past summer when the King of Kowloon passed away. He was in his 80s, lived in an old folks home, and his health had deteriorated to the point where he couldn't walk around and practice his life's passion: se jih. Write words. I have loved his work since the moment I first saw a mural he painted on the wall of my friend Lau Kin Wai's restaurant, the Yellow Door. Mr. Lau, who writes a column for Seun Bo, used his connections to get the King into the "real" art world--he helped get Gau Lung Wong's works included with Hong Kong's contributions to the Venice Biennale.
The mural at Mr. Lau's restaurant was unusual, for the King of Kowloon preferred to paint on Hong Kong's public spaces--walls, pillars, underpasses. This I dug a lot, because I lived in New York City during the Graffitti Years, which spawned two of the great visual artists of the 1980s, Keith Haring and Jean Michel Basquiat. I can remember walking in the New York subway in the late 1970s, searching like a treasure hunter for Haring's and Basquiat's characteristic icons--the stick figure man, and the little crown with the words SAMO--sketched in white chalk on empty black advertising billboards. There were a lot of these unsold billboard spaces at the time, because New York back then had just declared bankruptcy, and the city was broke. All cities go through these phases, booms and bust times. Hong Kong is the same. The late 70s in New York had the empty, desolate feel of the spring and summer of 2003 in Hong Kong, SARS time.
The King of Kowloon was, by most reports, a bit of a madman. He really thought he had a claim to Kowloon, and his calligraphy was his way of making a public protest. If you translate his work, you'll come up with an obsessive repetition of his name(s), and those of his ancestors. (He also enjoyed dissing the Queen of England.) The King was "tagging" his turf, just like the new York graffiti artists of the 70s and 80s. Was there anything to the King's proclamations? Who knows--but the important thing is he shouted out over and over again, in bold, aggressive, modern brushstrokes full of soul and personality, anywhere he could find an empty space or a sympathetic person to give him a platform (like Mr. Lau, or more famously, Fruit Chan in his movie Hong Kong Hollywood. Fruit had the King do his thing on the body of a pig. As an expression of Cantonese protest culture, I can't think of a more perfect vehicle.)
Just about every day, when I'm walking around Hong Kong or anywhere else in China for that matter, I think about the King of Kowloon. I see his traces in the crude but lively hand-lettered signs posted on pedestrian gates by the second-hand electronics dealers, in the quickly scrawled but personality-filled daily menus tacked to the walls of a cha chaan teng.
In Chinese, the written word carries a greater weight, relative to the rest of the culture, than in English. A Chinese character has serious gong fu. It can be, at once, art, literature, history, performance and protest. As a writer who works in the English language, I get a little jealous when I contemplate the awesome power of the Jung Man jih. It wraps meaning, symbol, history, personality, passion, dance movement and aesthetics into a single act. We English-language writers console ourselves with the old saying "The pen is mightier than the sword." But in Chinese language, the pen really is the sword.
In Mainland China, the art and practice of se jih has suffered two heavy blows since the Communist revolution of 1949. The first was the forced introduction of simplified characters in the early 1950s--a messy and hastily conceived affair that had good intentions (the less-complex characters were supposed to make it easier for more Chinese to learn to write), but a couple of really bad side-effects (the new system messed up the character radicals, the building blocks of meaning in Chinese writing. The new character set is also an aesthetic nightmare that turned beautiful, balanced and meaningful iconography into chicken scratch--it is the Chinese equivalent of Gregg shorthand. Okay I'll stop ranting now.).
The second blow, no surprise, was the Cultural Revolution. "It totally disrupted the education of my generation," my 43 year old friend from Wenzhou lamented to me over the summer. "We missed elementary school and never learned to write characters properly. I can tell the age of anyone in mainland China by their handwriting."
Or by their lack of it. Computers have finished off what the politicians and bureaucrats started. Ask anyone under-30 in China to write a "complicated", less-used character on paper, and they may not be able to do it. (The flip side of this is all the computer illiterate 50-somethings who can only write by hand. Long Hair writes his dozens of newspaper articles in pencil on exercise sheets with little blue-lined blocks that mark off the space for every character. When he's finished, he faxes the pages to his editor, who then gives it to someone to enter into a computer. Many, many of Hong Kong's daily columnists do their jobs the same, painstaking, low-tech way.)
Anyway, my sadness at the steady erosion of the world's most beautiful handwritten language is why, walking through a public park early one morning in Shanghai the other week, my heart suddenly stopped when I saw this:
He's doing calligraphy on the pavement, using traditional characters...and, in place of ink, water. I'd never seen this before, but friends in Shanghai told me they see it a lot these days. Like early-morning tai chi, it's considered a form of exercise and relaxation to se jih in the park.
I watched this guy for a long time, gracefully executing each bold stroke, each waak. In the dry morning air, his water-characters quickly evaporated. One minute there was poetry, the next minute only empty pavement. Beauty, swallowed by time, transformed into memory.
Like I said, it touched my heart. But it also made me restless and yearning for the noisy, yit lau streets of Hong Kong, for the freestyle glossolalia of its written signs and placards, for the shouts of the hundreds of political banners hand-lettered every day in this city of (still, mercifully) free public assembly and speech. And for the exuberant, inimitable calligraphy of the great King of Kowloon. May his strong and immortal waaks dance defiantly on Hong Kong's pillars, walls, and highway dividers, long after his passing.
the art of chinese writing... my heart aches when i think about how bad Chinese people's chinese is nowdays (not that i'm any good, afterall, I left for America when i was 11; but then i dare say my Chinese is the best among all my Chinese friends here XP). Chinese language is THE world's most beautiful, meaningful, and fun language (in my biased opinion). (Cantonese's THE world's most interesting language in my biased opinion, but that's another story) Although i love cantonese, i always feel sad when I see newspapers and magazines that use Cantonese instead of 'Chinese' writings, alright, it's unique and special, and kinda emphasize Hong Kongers' sense of identity )because only Hong Kongers can understand it), but it makes people forget the 'right' way to write Chinese. (it's also why Canto pop songs nowdays irritate me so, each word alone mean something but string together by those 'lyricists' they are meaningless... or maybe it's just me?) I have a tendency to digress, so i'll also say this - Hong Konger's english is also a lot worse than they used to be too! I blame the whole Mother language education they put in place after 1997. and also computers... This phenomenon is happening everywhere though.
I think I lost my point somewhere in my rant... Ng ho yi si...
I THINK what I wanted to say is - i'm glad there's a small revival going on in China, it's not only in Shanghai, I think some other cities are witnessing the same thing too - water calligraphy. But you'll notice, they write in Simplified chinese, not traditional... (which makes me want to rant again... stupid simplified chinese writings are SO ugly!!!)
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I think computers aren't what to blame but those who don't make good use of them. Just a click on this
and it will take you to a treasure trove of the ins and outs of Chinese characters.
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You can see Water Caligraphy everyday and everywhere across China.
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I've seen people practice their calligraphy on the grounds inside the Summer Place in Beijing. But instead of a small brush, its a large brush, the height of a mop. I think its a great.
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I'm one of the few 20-something who would rather write in long hand than type in Chinese: since I don't need to type Chinese in my school life (being in EMI secondary school and studying abroad), my Chinese typing skills are very slow 速成 (always wanted to learn 倉頡, but not persistent enough). However, that's still better than my parents, who can't type Chinese in computer at all (you know, those above 45)[1]. Indeed, I just ordered myself a bunch of Chinese square papers (like those used by Long Hair and many columnist) to write! You might have not noticed, but the latest trend in the Hong Kong Blogosphere is to paste one's blog written in paper, calling it "papercast"[2]!
However, my written Chinese is nothing to proud of: I can write neatly but that's too much hassle, so my written script (lambasted by my Japanese teachers!) is really runny without grace (行書 is a valid written script, you know). Though it is fit for purpose (no one complained to be unable to read my Chinese, my cursive English handwriting is even worse...)
[1] There used to be Chinese officers in government offices to draft documents in Chinese and more importantly type Chinese. Of course, this is a luxury nowadays, but I bet people like those accountable officials still need them to run the day.
[2] an example of papercast
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Thanks for your really interesting post. No, I didn't know about "papercast" blogging, and I just took a look at the website that you linked to. But for some reason, the "papercast" was too blurry from my screen to read...I think it was designed for a large screen view. I should recommend this to the staff in Leung Kwok Hung's office, who spend hours transcribing his written articles and speeches to post on his website.
The aspect of Chinese publishing that fascinates me is the typesetting. I can't even imagine how it was done, but back in the moveable print days, the process of setting Chinese type for printing must have been awesome to watch. And I love the old fonts...the first Chinese type book that studied from was the old Yale series. I found out later that the type for that book was moved out of China right before the Japanese occupation by some Yale professors...and it is still in New Haven somewhere.
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I am in minneapolis but I back in the late 80s I would visit NYC with my friend. We stayed in Brooklyn Heights and I remember one particular train ride that wold pass a abandon station and had some cool graffitti on the wall that as you passed by the pillars created "frames" that made these animals and and shapes move and change shape. Not sure what line it was, but it was heading in to Manhattan. I remember two sections. Very cool. Are you familiar with this work?
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I know that work well--it was actually a "real" work of art, commissioned by some New York City agency in the 1980s to decorate the tunnel leading from the Manhattan bridge exit to the De Kalb Avenue station in Brooklyn. After the avant garde graffiti boom of the 1970s, the local government tried to incorporate that artistic energy into some legitimate channels, and "subway art" became institutionalized. Like a lot of these initiatives, there was little or no funding, so over the years, the little cartoon-strip got defaced by vandals, and never was repaired. A few years ago I noticed that it had been removed completely.
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Once in a while in HK I used to see lampposts encircled with English graffiti. It was written really small, in black, and used the phrase "cats and kittens" a lot. Someone told me this was done by the King of Kowloon too, but your article and the ones it links to makes it sound like the stuff I was reading was really different than whatthe KoK was doing. Is anyone familiar with the graffiti I'm talking about? If so, who wrote it? It was in Kowloon, with a lot in the HK Science Museum area.
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MF - indeed I do remember the cats & kittens stuff. I used to patrol that area and see it a lot but it must have been removed as I'd completely forgotten about it and haven't seen it for years.
The 'culprit' was believed to be a wierd Chinese spinster in her 50s-60s who lived in the vicinity and wandered around muttering to herself & feeding stray cats. She was always quite well dressed and stories abounded regarding what had triggered her looniness off (usually centred on a British soldier/sailor/cop who'd loved & left her). Again I've not seen her for years so perhaps she, sadly, has passed away.
On the subject of eccentrics, there used to be a pair of blond English twins in their 40s-50s who would prowl around Mid Levels & Lan Kwai Fong cackling to each other and also feeding stray cats. They would literally hiss at anyone who gave them more than a passing glance. Haven't seen them for at least 7-8 years. Any ideas where they've gone?
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Inspector--The cackling hissing blond twins you spotted were most likely me and Hemlock! We got bored with the cats--blogging is a lot more fun.
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If Hemlock was involved you were no doubt poisoning the poor blighters. I could have nicked the pair of you and been the darling of Expat housewives across HK, "Off duty Expat cop nicks kitty killers"! Another opportunity for promotion cruelly missed.
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Tell Longhair to get a Chinese handwriting input device.
My colleagues at work use them. My husband bought one as well.
The brand at work is 小 蒙恬. You can buy it in Hong Kong here:
http://www.penpower.com.hk/
It allows you to write the characters with an electronic pen thing-y. The character then appears on the screen. It allows you to edit it if you made a mistake.
It's great for people who have not trained in the various forms of Chinese character input like Cangjie and for people who are not familiar w/ pinyin or bo-po-mo-fo.
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