Leung Ping-kwan
From his roots in poetry and translation to his novels, essays and criticism, there isn’t much Leung Ping-kwan hasn’t penned. One of Hong Kong’s most well-known writers, the 63-year-old’s list of published works is pages long. One constant? His quest to understand Hong Kong, from its street culture to its search for identity. He talks to Hana R. Alberts a few weeks before the 15th anniversary of the handover.
My parents came to Hong Kong in ‘49. That was the year I was born, and that was also the year the People’s Republic of China was born. My parents were intellectuals, so they didn’t bring in enough money, but brought a lot of books. They first settled in Aberdeen… They grew vegetables and had chickens.
I read modern literature and a lot of the classics in translation... My mother used to recite poetry in Cantonese. It’s very playful—having fun, singing a song. It’s not like a lecture you have to memorize.
In primary school, I moved to North Point. I came from an old-fashioned, traditional family, so the modern way of life had an attraction to me—the freedom of the city, the choices.
I walked around to find out more about the city. I found it different from things I read in classical and modern Chinese literature—they always write about the villages.
I started writing in high school. No one from past generations wanted to write about Hong Kong. They were immigrants; they thought it was a transitional place.
But we grew up here.
In classical Chinese poetry, we have these seven- or five-character structures. But we were influenced by Modernist poetry. I read foreign writers like T.S. Eliot and E.E. Cummings. This new form of poetry [free verse] seemed attractive, and convenient for expressing my feelings.
When I graduated from university, I worked for a newspaper for eight years and wrote short stories and a novella. In Hong Kong, you can never survive as a writer.