Hong Kong- The Wind of Changes

I didn’t return to the brothel after that day. Summer passed and a new semester started. I went back to school, and soon the brothel and the girls faded from my memory, as if it never happened. My conscience must have troubled me deeply. So it wasn't something that I liked to think about, and I never related my experience of the brothel to anyone. Nonetheless, I further withdrew from hanging out with the street gang. It worked out just fine because they thought that I had become a freak. They often criticized me because of my long hair and bell-bottom jeans. To rising gang members, I looked out of place and no longer fit in. As they looked at me with disdain. So I quickly moved on to friends who welcomed me outside of my old neighborhood. Since my street-smart social persona had already earned me popularity among friends and schoolmates, there was a whole new world of distractions from an ever widening network of friends and acquaintances. I was busy growing. It didn't take long for me to be anywhere and everywhere in the small city. Like the vast majority of people in Hong Kong, I became fashion conscious and dressed only in designer jeans or custom designed clothes, which I often wore beneath my white school uniform so that whenever I was off or skipping from school, instantly I would be well dressed for the theater, disco, or luxury hotels under the city light. The only trouble was that I began to let my hair grow past the neck boundary, which was a violation of the school mandate. It seemed that all of a sudden everyone in my immediate surroundings had me under the spotlight. It was as if my hair was threatening to bring down the moral fabric of Chinese civilization. Teachers and parents considered my “long” hair a sure sign of degeneration; even the street thugs thought my new look was despicable. I had old ladies following me down the street, cursing at me with obscene language. My hair made me the common enemy in the eyes of the mores. It didn't take long for me to realize that unwarranted harassment only happened in the working class neighborhood. So I ventured further out, hanging out only in Tsim Sha Tsui, the tourist district, where I finally felt like I belonged, and not like I was out of place. In fact, my long hair and designer jeans suddenly turned into an advantage. I noticed that most services had become exceedingly courteous, no matter if I was in an expensive boutique or in a luxury hotel. Later I realized that they had mistaken me for a tourist, and at times some thought that they recognized me as a movie star. I supposed that the general acceptance of the European influence and American hippie culture had made Hong Kong truly a cosmopolitan city-- at the least in this part of town.

One day, by chance, I ran into Chung, an old classmate I regarded highly. I was happy to see him because I had admired his gentle nature, his build, and his good looks before he dropped out of school a few moths earlier. As he returned my greetings in his usual sweet demeanor, I noticed that he seemed a little weary. “So, what have you been up to?” I asked him. With a somewhat embarrassed smile, Chung began to tell me that since he left school, he had joined a group of Leon Trotsky Marxist intellectuals and students. Their political objective was organizing protests to stop the British Imperialists' exploitation of Hong Kong. As he spoke, suddenly I noticed that the bridge of his nose was crooked, bending to the side of his face. He sensed my surprise at once, and without my asking, he told me that the police beat him up while he was passing leaflets and making a speech to the workers in the factory district. Then he was locked up for a week, and his father was angry with him and never bailed him out of jail. Upon hearing these words, I felt shock and dismay at the injustice that was inflicted upon him. But Chung was trying to downplay the incident and said that what happened was nothing, and he continued to tell me stories about how the Hong Kong police had been routinely torturing protesters with beatings and feeding them trimmed hair, for it’s indigestible and caused chest pain for life. Partly because of my sympathy, and partly because of my outrage, I met with Chung the next day and promptly joined the group. Then I sat in the meeting and listened to their ideology debates. After a couple of hours, I still hadn’t gotten the faintest idea of what they were talking about. Just as I was about bored to tears, they found out that I could paint and draw. At once, I was assigned to do the graphics, and within a couple of hours, I had my first silkscreen poster off the press. Then later, under the cover of the night, we went to post them on the streets around the industry zone.

By then, I understood that those who found faults in our hair and in our clothes were just using them as excuses to hide their corruption and shame. The aristocrats and the uneducated masses were just a bunch of turkeys with their fat heads buried in steep Chinese traditions. Not only did these people refuse to face the changing times, most of them preferred to turn a blind eye to real issues like child prostitution or social injustices that occurred under British rule. Neither in school nor on the street, I never heard any one of these people speak of equality, even though all of the foreign owned factories were full of teenage slave laborers, and the Brits held all the high posts in the colonial Hong Kong government and private sectors, and were entitled to twice the salary paid to Chinese workers in equal positions. I do not believe that these people ever worked for any social change, but just sat pretty on their laurels. No, I never heard any one of them speak out about the brutality of the Gurkha army sent by the Brits to suppress the labor movements and torture demonstrators after their arrests. So what was it in their virtuous conducts that led them to feel so proud and righteous? How noble of them to spit on children because of their hair. What a bunch of hypocrites! These hypocrites imposed on us false values. They were compulsive liars who couldn’t face the truth, pseudo Confucius cronies who hid their rotten flesh under the tattered robes of tradition, the walking dead whose souls had long been buried in their delusions. All these creatures were everywhere. They were ferociously trying to hold on to the past, which they themselves had forgotten. They saw the dawn of a new generation as a sign of their death. So they bared their teeth just to coax us into hopelessness, stretched their claws in an attempt to suffocate the children with their iron grip, and cried out loud in the name of morality and decency, just so that they could viciously extinguish the rising flame of a new life force.

More than ever, I didn’t feel like I belonged to the life to which I was accustomed. But I had no idea who I was, and had no aspiration to become someone else. So I often ended up just walking down Nathan road, and up again to the tourist hub, hoping to meet a friend who would stay to keep me company. In any given day, I walked by hundreds of stores and thousands of people between countless high-rises; under the blue sky or beneath the bright neon lights, I wandered about without a purpose and without a dream. Despite all the phenomena in the Perfume Harbor, my world was a desert and I was one lost sheep found between the dead and decaying. But I was alive with an undaunted heart at least, and my soul was pure like a sheet of white silk waiting to be painted. Since Tsim Sha Tsui was a small area, it didn't take long for me to find out that I wasn't alone. There were so many of us lost children trapped between yesterday and tomorrow, laying dormant in a secret attempt to evade the industrialized existence in a corrupted civilization. Like mice escaped from the laboratory, eventually we found one another inside the concrete jungle, below the silver screen in a theater by the Ocean Terminal. All because the theater played only one movie over and over again: Woodstock.

Every Sunday morning, ten or more of us would meet in the same theater and dream with eyes wide open. The music of The Who, Joe Cocker, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, and others in the movie roared and thrust into the depth of our psyche, like thunder and lightening penetrating into a dark sea. The hippies who soaked in the mud and the rain, dancing naked to the music, called out to us, urging us to be free. The music and images in Woodstock intrigued us with a world far beyond the reality we knew in Hong Kong. The movie challenged and contradicted the moral abyss in traditional Chinese culture to such an extreme that we were left with no alternative other than to stand up and dance to the new beats of liberalism.

Hence as the movie ended, our friends would always stand up and eagerly look for one another in the theater. We wanted to share our excitement, we wanted to sing or speak the lyrics we heard in the movie. Although we knew that somehow the hippie movement had justified our rebellion against the falsehoods of Chinese traditions, we were simply too young to articulate this hypothetical proposition with words. Nonetheless, the message continued to echo in the core of my beliefs. In time, I came to understand that Woodstock taught me to love others like brothers and sisters. I embraced the power of flowers, instead of bombs and guns. Free love and free will are the hammer and chisel for breaking the chains of religious and political rule. Long hair is a declaration of individual liberty, countering the conformism of the norm. Moreover, it is the responsibility of the youth to question the establishment, so that the world can face a better future, and not repeat the mistakes of the past.

When I first discovered the Flower Children youth movement in the song “If you’re going to San Francisco,” I was likely three years behind the boom of the hippie subculture in the West. Nevertheless, this American subculture became the backbone of my personal culture. Whence the development of my life as an artist may be attributed to an image painted thirty years earlier that became fundamental to my artistic expression and continues to be so to this day. It pleases me to think a seed that contains the energy to germinate ought to land at the right place and at the right time, that even a drop of rain can bring forth the breath of inspiration that would flower and bear fruits in time. It seems that the most important events that happen in life may appear insignificant, and often happen by chance. It so happened one late afternoon, when my mindless wandering on a side street in Tsim Sha Tsui led me to pass a bookstore. Suddenly, my eyes were drawn to the window display case, where a mounted poster of a painting sat firm and square on a makeshift easel. For a brief moment, I paused in awe of my discovery; then, the closely guarded gates to my perceptions starting to dissolve as I held my breath. At once I was both the captive and the free man emerging from the giant egg-shaped embryo earth as depicted in the painting, in which I saw a brilliant red drop of blood, dripping like mercury onto an untainted white sheet that lay before me like a tapestry for my soul to glide through the turbulence of a barren planet. As if I saw the revelation of my liberation in true colors, my spirit rose and expanded into the far end of the painted vista, where I found myself immersed into the plexus of its lines and forms, and floating in the blue and gold pulsations of the artist’s veins. It was then that I saw my own reflection intersecting with a colorful world far beyond the gray concrete pavement on which I stood. Then I felt my nose pressing against the cold glass window, and so I took a step backward, but remained there with a naked heart. To settle my heightened senses I took a deep breath, then started to walk off into the sunset with the beauty and metaphor I found, and carried with me a magical image for poetry, a rainbow colored formula to unlock my chains. So, just what did I see that set my spirit ablaze? It was “Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man,” by Salvador Dali.

Still, not once did I ever entertain the impossible idea of becoming an artist.

Artist As A Young Dog

1-- I Remember China >>

2-- The Family In Hong Kong >>

3-- The Street of Hong Kong >>

4-- Monsters Among Us >>

5-- The Wind of Change >>