RETURN OF THE KING
THE SECRET MESSAGE ONLY appeared when the wall was drenched with rain. For weeks, I had been scouring Hong Kong for these misshapen Chinese characters, but the way they materialised out of nowhere was a shock. It was an unremarkable yellow-grey stone wall in the middle of Central, Hong Kong’s political and economic heart. The words were only revealed when the wall had been soaked; in this case after a downpour in July 2015, which left the wall darkened and damp. Suddenly it was possible to see spots where the dove-grey paint had flaked off, revealing traces of Chinese calligraphy. The writing, in clumsy, off-balance characters about 20cm high, was instantly recognisable for its lack of grace, elegance or learning.
I can’t remember the first time I saw characters like these. They were everywhere when I was growing up in Hong Kong in the 1970s and 80s, a feature of our city just as much as the bottle-green snub-nosed Star Ferry and the noisy trams. Their author was a fixture of the landscape as well: a filthy, toothless, often shirtless, rubbish collector with mental health issues. He called himself the King of Kowloon. Hopping on his crutches, with plastic bags swinging from the handles, his crablike, bow-legged silhouette was so distinctive that, if people saw him in the distance, they would cross the road to avoid him. As he passed, parents would shield their kids’ eyes from him and mutter, “Chi-sin a!” Crazy! He even became a playground taunt – “You’re the King of Kowloon!” – levelled at the slow kids, the weird ones, the poor ones, the outcasts.
His given name was Tsang Tsou-choi, and he had crossed the border to Hong Kong from mainland China at the age of 16. Tsang had since become convinced that Kowloon peninsula, the southernmost point of what is now mainland China, had belonged to his family and had been stolen from them by the British in the 19th century. He later extended his claims to the whole of Hong Kong.
It was in the 1950s that he started his graffiti protest against the loss of his land to the British. His denunciations took the form of tottering towers of crooked Chinese calligraphy in which he painstakingly wrote out his entire lineage, all 21 generations of it, pairing names with the places they had lost, and occasionally topping it all off with expletives like “Fuck the Queen!” He was careful in his choice of canvas, only writing on government property – walls, flyovers, electricity boxes, postboxes. His messages were almost always immediately painted over by an army of government cleaners with thin hand towels hanging from their hats for makeshift sunscreens. But overnight his words would be back
