King of Hong Kong

Event Center A&B

“Hong Konger” and “Hong Kongese” are terms recently added to the Oxford English Dictionary. Despite the fact that the 2011 Hong Kong census identified Hong Kong as 93% ethnically Chinese, to most citizens of Hong Kong, the “Hong Konger” identity singled out by the Oxford English Dictionary supersedes the ethnicity shared with Mainland China's Chinese. Similar to the Taiwanese people’s distinction from Mainland Chinese, the desire to reject Mainland China's civically repressive rule and culture has never been more prevalent in Hong Kong than today. The “One Country, Two Systems” policy was established to ease Hong Kong’s transition from British to Chinese rule in 1997; it has instead progressed into “One Country, One System” rule that limits and suppresses civic freedom for Hong Kong's residents as it slowly drags the island back into Mainland China's ideology of governanc e. At the same time, Tsang Tsou Choi, a mentally ill man notorious in Hong Kong for his graffiti, in whic h he claimed to be the ancestral King of Kowloon (a region of Hong Kong), saw his scrawlings progress i n popular view from public nuisance to a symbol of an independent Hong Kong. The popularity of Tsang' s work and the addition of “Hong Konger” and “Hong Kongese” to the Oxford English Dictionary are no separate occurrences; they both happened as expressions of a culture struggling for liberty, independence, and even survival. My piece, which appropriates Tsang’s iconic graffiti and repetition of words, calls atte ntion to this struggle for independent identity.