Bei Ling sat slumped in his chair, his long arms dangling off the sides of the armrests. His waist-long hair was pulled back into a ponytail, but a handful of unruly curls stubbornly refused to follow suit and fell in his face. Dressed in baggy black shorts, an oversize quasi-Chinese shirt, and military boots, the poet looked more like your average bohemian-wannabe college student than like a 38-year-old veteran of the 1979-80 Democracy Wall Movement.
This is not the image of an Americanised, media-savvy, Armani-clad democracy or human rights activist lashing out at the Chinese Government on CNN.
Bei - currently a research associate at the Fairbank Centre of Harvard University - is another story altogether and not just because he lacks the designer threads.
Media-savvy he was not, though he was positively bursting with enthusiasm at being interviewed. He was full of suggestions for possible angles for this article ('Analyse me as an intellectual'), and he did not hesitate to give me tips on how to become a better reporter ('You should read more and research more, that way you can write with more depth'). Then he announced with pride that he had been featured on ABC's Nightline on June 30 as part of the American network's handover coverage ('They showed me reading my own poetry too!').
But apart from public relations skills, Bei sets himself apart from other dissidents through his somewhat unorthodox agenda.
'I am not trying to change the regime,' Bei explained. 'I want to change people's hearts. What I want to achieve can't be attained by yelling all day like the democrats in Hong Kong do. You can only change people's hearts through literature.' Bei has a long history of using literature to try to change society. But he is now bringing his work to Hong Kong by establishing Tendency Quarterly, a one-time underground literary journal in Beijing, in the SAR.