Felix Chow shares a poem on the theme of archiving Hong Kong.

The newspaper copies are copies. A scrapbook of self.
All show the same glittering face of the harbour
named Victoria: a foreign monarch whose
(as of recent) rule we were never under. 

We learn 事頭婆 stirred shit, 肥彭 was fibbing,
white hands cleaved city from nation.
A raising of flags. A change of curriculum.
The ground which we stood on torn open.

We're asked to churn
our own ocean-pored bones.
Let them lie, lie, more closely
Take what is left, carefully sift it through safenets.
Scrub youthful faces from memory. 

Leave grey flower-pots where white words
baked by sun, used to lie. Ulcer our minds.
Shed the screams from our spines
in dark night, witnessed by floodlights.

Like our great-grandmothers,
who ate dead bark from trees
We fabricate new plastic flowers.
Plant them in concrete heaped over sand
grey hands reclaiming what's ours.

Felix Chow is a Mphil student in English Studies at the University of Hong Kong. His poems are published/forthcoming in The Lincoln Review, Voice and Verse Magazine and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. He is interested in Hong Kong localist discourse and its representations in Hong Kong English-language writing, as well as emerging local identities in the city. Forever a HongKonger.