An Indelible City, Indelibly Marked: On Hong Kong’s History of Resistance

“You notice things if you pay attention,” says the graceful and melancholic Mrs. Li of Wong Kar Wai’s Hong Kong classic, In the Mood for Love, played by the luminous Maggie Cheung. The wisdom of these words has endured, becoming truer than ever in Hong Kong today. For a new transplant to the city, in the wake of the National Security Law, which was imposed in 2020, it can seem like the pro-democracy movement of 2019 that rocked the city hadn’t happened.

As if a political wave of energy had surged like a flashflood through the city, then, just as suddenly, retreated and ebbed. In Indelible City: Defiance and Dispossession in Hong Kong, Louisa Lim takes her reader on an intimate and dream-like wend through the streets of Hong Kong, revealing layers of the bracing, complex, and palimpsestic city.

Pierced through with Lim’s clear-eyed limpidity and passion, the book is predominantly about the 2019 protests yet woven together with Lim’s excavation of the story of street artist Tsang Tsou-Choi, known fondly as the King of Kowloon. However, necessary to understanding these—as well as the longer story of Hong Kong—is grasping the fact that Hong Kong as a place, an idea, and an entity is a slippery one to begin with.

The very concept of Hong Kong is malleable. In 1842, Hong Kong referred only to what is now Hong Kong Island, then stretched to encompass Kowloon in the 1860s, and finally the New Territories in 1898 which were ceded on a 99-year lease, ending with the handover in 1997.

Lim clearly lays out the piecemeal acquisition of Hong Kong, a slow carving-up and reassemblage that was in some parts accidental and in others, nefarious, beginning with the two Opium Wars. She unearths how Hong Kong’s palimpsestic nature is reflected even at the level of sediment and archaeology—tracing the history of the locale as salt fields, the ancient inscriptions and tombs found in different areas that date and adumbrate the history of Hong Kong as a historical space.

If Hong Kong is, as Abbas Ackbar has theorized, defined by “a culture of disappearance whose appearance is posited on the immanence of its disappearance”—an un-place which is geographically and geopolitically unstable, its territories carved up repeatedly, “returned,”  “handed over,” and “leased”—then the strength of the Lion Rock Spirit, that unwavering determination of Hong Kongers, can be observed in how consistently its people have demanded more from their changing leaders.

Lim describes how Tsang Tsou-Choi, known as the King of Kowloon, “waged his graffiti war first against the colonial British government, and then against China, after Britain returned Hong Kong to Chinese control in 1997.” She traces this across various uprisings in Hong Kong’s long history, against the British as well as against mainland China, making visible a constellation of historical events marked by a distinctive Hong Kong spirit.

Lim details one such gripping saga, the Six-Day War of 1899, when locals revolted against their British colonial masters, who killed about 500 villagers without any losses on the British side. She compares this event to the 2019 protests, noting, “Both were leaderless, grassroots movements aimed at defending Hong Kongers from an all-powerful colonizing force.”

There is no easy reducibility for understanding Hong Kongers’ relationship to their past and to the powers they have been subject to. Lim expresses this with sensitivity and candor. Crucially, she outlines the economic stress faced by Hong Kong people, carefully outlining the history of economic dispossession in tandem with political dispossession. Lim explains how Hong Kong exists as an oligopoly of a few wealthy family-owned conglomerates who controlled almost all aspects of Hong Kong life, slicing Hong Kong up in an almost feudal manner. This system, which began under the British, remained unchanged even after the handover. As Lim points out, “Beijing depended on the tycoons … summoning them at times of political tension to ensure they kept the ship steady.”

By weaving together multiple histories and narratives, those real and fictive, sanctioned and preserved, erased and newly discovered, Lim pushes back against the authoritative, state-imposed narrative. Lim braids details like the origins of local delicacies such as pun choi and the myth of half-man half-fish Lu Tings, believed to be the indigenous ancestors of Hong Kongers, into the fabric of Hong Kong’s history of resistance. The endeavor, in her words, is to “put Hong Kongers front and center of their story” by unearthing how these “hidden histories placed the insurrections of recent years in the context of a far longer narrative of defiance and dispossession.”

Throughout a book that can be heavy with political and existential dread, Lim’s writing is nonetheless gorgeously evocative. As she writes about the King of Kowloon’s calligraphy, her own writing on calligraphy is similarly full of vibrant details in describing that most basic and foundational horizontal stroke in Chinese writing, which alone, means “one”:

its jaunty slash contains a world of unspoken conventions that an outsider would never notice. The calligrapher begins by tilting the brush to give a dapper slant to the left-hand side of the dash. Then the brush is swished across the page, pressure slightly lifted. The trickiest moment comes when navigating the right-hand extremity of the stroke; the writer must flick the tip of the brush around and back in a clockwise movement in order to create a debonair backslash that balances out that side of the heng.

Lim is right when she writes that “In traditional Chinese culture, calligraphy is both the apogee of all art forms and a tool of power.” This reflection can be seen manifested in the collection of Hong Kong’s long-awaited M+ museum which finally opened its doors last year, where calligraphy is used and subverted in multiple works throughout the museum.  The opening of M+ was marred by the “scandal” that the media focused on: the absence of a work by Ai Weiwei where he raises his third finger to Tiananmen square.

I wished instead that they had focused on the Ai Weiwei piece that was part of the exhibited collection, a large format installation titled, simply, “Whitewash.” The work comprises clay vases, some covered in a whitewash and others not. Over time, the whitewash itself has begun to peel and flake. It is, in other words, a powerful meditation on revisionism and erasure, which, in the work’s endurance, performs and reveals the triumph of truth. A vastly profounder reflection than flipping the bird. In fact, I wished that the media had been more attentive to another work altogether.

The first work in one of M+’s inaugural exhibitions, titled “Hong Kong: Here and Beyond,” is by none other than the King of Kowloon himself, and embodies a similarly powerful performance of defiance and persistence. The King of Kowloon represents an outlier and a resolutely ungovernable figure and his calligraphy, which at one point covered swaths of Hong Kong surfaces, including mailboxes with “post no bills” signs on them, enacts this resistance. Believing himself to be the rightful owner of Kowloon after discovering some ancestral documents, he lay claim to the land by leaving his mark, quite literally—indefatigably—through inscription, producing walls of calligraphy on public spaces and structures.

Tsang’s writings are audacious, insistent, and insubordinate, but unfortunately, not indelible. Government contractors work quickly to whitewash public walls and the effects of Hong Kong’s heavy rains and humid weather are unforgiving. Yet, the enduring legacy of Tsang’s works and the mythology around Tsang himself are testament to the transcendent nature of his works. Willie Chung, Tsang’s friend and collector whom Lim interviewed, revealed his wry trick in his attempts to preserve Tsang’s work—painting over remnants of his writing with a protective layer of oil or plastic, then covering it up with gray paint as the government contractors do. As Lim puts it, he was “practicing destruction for the sake of conservation.” What may appear to be an act of erasure, even a form of capitulation, is in fact its opposite.

Today, this wisdom has been absorbed by the Hong Kong public, and what may seem to be a quelling of spirit by onlookers in the West and elsewhere is a similar misunderstanding of a sentiment that has had to morph in order to preserve itself. John Lennon opens his book Conflict Graffiti by saying he discovered graffiti through the smell of its removal. Similarly in Hong Kong, I noticed graffiti in the ironic visibility of its absence—patches of whitewash on walls, holes in the ceiling next to security cameras where an older, damaged one had been removed.

Hong Kongers have learned to lean creatively into their anxiety around erasure, circumventing restrictions and censors through oblique references. Protest slogans are whittled down to a single word, signifying nothing and everything at once. Illegibility passes for erasure, and invisibility becomes ubiquitous. These absences are everywhere, and they congeal with the weight of an insistent presence, ghostly yet energetic.

Today, I see with new eyes: blank Post-its signify resistance—marking the removal of the “Lennon walls,” which had been full of Post-its with pro-democracy messages during the protests which are now illegal—and a smudge on a subway wall no longer reads as a smudge but declares to me how it persists, indelibly, as the remnant of protest graffiti. In many ways, Lim’s book felt like an answer to a question I hadn’t yet articulated. For those who guess at what many of the stoically silent residents in the city think, Louisa Lim might say—and I would echo: the writing’s on the wall.

*

In his travelogue, Rudyard Kipling made the racist remark that there are three races that can work but that only the Chinese can swarm. Like Bruce Lee before them—whose words “be water” became the enduring slogan of the movement and who challenged the notion that the Chinese were the “sick men of Asia”—Hong Kongers reclaimed the racist image of the swarm. Drone footage of the 2019 protests, most notably in documentaries such as Revolutions of Our Times (2021), indefatigably showcase this: a mass of black bodies marching together, then flowing, in and out through the streets and alleys of the city, chased by police, bulking together then sighing apart, slipping like mercury through nooks and crannies.

Not a swarm but a murmuration of starlings.

Not an unthinking throbbing mass, but intelligent, united, leaderless.

There is a humble irony to the slogan, too, for the logic of water is that it follows the path of least resistance; yet, Hong Kongers adopted this stance in order to launch a strong resistance against an all-powerful force. In the first page of the opening chapter, Lim makes this subverting rhetorical gesture too, using the word “swarm” to describe Hong Kongers’ creative and energized takeover of their city with colorful Post-its, incredible graphic design, passionate slogans.

In fact, Lim demonstrates her rhetorical resistance even more boldly elsewhere, On the cover of her book, beneath the title, is emblazoned in bright yellow the words: 香港人加油. This is not a translation of the title in any form, but in fact a slogan that was embraced by the protest movement, translating to “Hong Kongers, add oil!” and which has since become verboten in the city. This message would only be legible to readers of Mandarin and Cantonese, and it is them that Lim addresses directly.

In the weeks after the National Security Law took effect, there had been buzzing around a “Yellow Economic Circle,” an informal collective of businesses that marked themselves as “yellow,” the color that had come to symbolize the movement (as opposed to “blue” which represented the other side) so consumers were able to “vote with their dollar,” so to speak. It was a remarkable experiment in liberal democracy of the kind that many progressives in America advocate for: a sustained commitment to anti-competition, a challenge to capitalistic democracy, a deep belief in community and mutual aid. Alas, its success would be its downfall.

Soon, many of these shops were targeted by officials, and many took down their prominent paraphernalia. By the time I arrived in Hong Kong in late 2021, the Yellow Economy was rarely spoken about as such, and slogans that referenced a Hong Kong identity were outlawed. Today, I have my guesses as to the leanings of the businesses that I have come to cherish and frequent the most—which is, in part, because small, owner-run businesses simply tend to feel more genuine, take more pride in their product, and are therefore better.

The remnants of these markers now mostly take the form of oblique calls to “remember,” to take care of each other, to stay strong. In the face of historical revisionism, material erasure, and digital deletion, what people have chosen is a deep belief in mutual aid and support. What could be more radical? This, in fact, is what I’ve come to recognize as the Hong Kong spirit.

*

At dinner the other night, I request the music of a local indie band, known for their wry and politically tongue-in-cheek songs. The restaurant owner gives me a look, then pours me a shot of bourbon on the house. Sometime later, we got to talking about wine with our host. “Beautiful sunshine and perfect soil don’t produce good wine,” he says. I nod, though I know nothing about wine, sensing that we’re not really talking about wine anyway. “When your vines are stressed, that’s when they have to work, have to get creative, that’s when they go deep, go underground. There, they reach more unique nutrients and minerals. That gives you the best grapes. It’s the same with people.” We clinked glasses and shared a knowing nod.

There is usually something trite about calling people who have suffered resilient; resilience feels like a consolation prize that never makes up for what has been lost. But there was wisdom to what he said that went beyond this—pointing to a vivacity that surpasses survival. I put my glass to my lips and sipped. The bitter tannin spread across my palate, oppressive. But then—like an answer to a call—the sweet bloom of the aftertaste, unwilling to be overshadowed. Imperceptibly but indelibly there. Bright, bold, defiant.