The Fundamental Tenets of Early Hong Kong Modernism

The study of Hong Kong modernism often uses the term “modernism” without a clear definition. For instance, Liu Yichang yu Xianggang xiandaizhuyi (Liu Yichang and Hong Kong Modernism), edited by Leung Ping-kwan et al. and published in 2010, discusses Hong Kong modernism, arguing that it shares similarities with Shanghai modernism while differing from its Western counterpart. However, the contributors seem to consider the concept of modernisms to be self-evident and do not provide a definitive definition. Further study is needed. I raise the question of Hong Kong modernism in The Hong Kong Modernism of Leung Ping-kwan (2020). Since Leung Ping-kwan considered himself a modernist, I suggest examining the characteristics embodied in Leung’s work to help define Hong Kong modernism. This approach “seems to raise another potential issue, which is the extent to which Leung’s work can represent Hong Kong modernism; this problem can apparently be tackled with adequate contextualization of the work of Leung in Hong Kong literature” (Au, 1–2). Tracing the origins of modernism in Hong Kong, as well as the characteristics represented in early Hong Kong modernist works, is one potential solution.[1] 

Although no consensus has emerged on when literary modernism first began in Hong Kong, a former British colony (1841–1941, 1945–1997), it is generally believed that Wenyi xinchao (Literary New Wave), one of the important Hong Kong modernist magazines, played an important role in the development of Hong Kong modernism.[2] In 1956, Ma Lang (a.k.a. Ma Boliang, Ronald P. Mar, 1933?–), who fled to Hong Kong from Shanghai in 1951, served as a poet-cum-editor of Wenyi xinchao.[3] The magazine ceased publication in 1959 before he left Hong Kong for the United States in 1961. Ma was born into an American overseas Chinese family in Macao, and he returned to mainland China (Shanghai) in the 1940s. Although Ma is always considered a Hong Kong writer these days, his overseas Chinese identity and upbringing did not suggest a strong link between the poet and the former British colony, not to mention the British Empire, in the 1950s. Nevertheless, Ma exhibited an anti-communist sentiment similar to that of Stephen Spender. One might think that the lyrical aspect embodied in Ma’s poetry was also influenced by Spender’s Romantic lyricism, but the poem which will be discussed below exhibits an intermixture of different kinds of lyricism—Romantic lyricism, modernist lyricism, and Chinese lyricism—in an imperial melting pot instead.

As an advocate of Hong Kong modernism, Ma Lang’s background suggests that he was not a colonial poet in every sense of the term, though he was interested in imperial poetics, and lyricism in particular. To further complicate matters, the British Empire was by no means a conventional colonizer after the 1950s. Despite being the colonial ruler of Hong Kong, the British Empire had a deep sense of vulnerability after World War II. Threats came not only from communist China and Britain’s imperial decline but also from America’s Cold War requirements. Colonial rule struggled to find a balance between containing China’s influence and restraining America’s belligerent China policy, whilst at the same time maintaining a collaborative Anglo-American relationship.[4] Thus the conception of Hong Kong modernism is inevitably unique in several ways. For example, Hong Kong modernism cannot be straightforwardly characterized as embracing imperial modernism or advocating anti-imperial modernism. In addition, unlike modernists from other colonies or former colonies, such as African modernist writers in the late 1950s and early 1960s, who tend to see modernism as more committed to aesthetic autonomy, Ma was similar to those English modernist poets and writers in the 1930s who were interested in political themes.[5] However, it is noteworthy that Ma was only interested in Spender in relation to the poet’s experiences as a former communist. Ma had little or no interest in Spender’s fellow modernist poet W. H. Auden, who is often considered the most representative English modernist poet of Spender’s generation. Ma also differentiated himself from other advocates of modernism, for instance Pierre Do-Dinh, with his lack of any sense of urgency to transmit the modernist literary trend from metropole to colony.[6]

Due to the limited scope of this essay, its primary concern is to delineate the fundamental characteristics embodied in early Hong Kong modernism—political awareness and lyricism—by examining Wenyi xinchao. Nevertheless, I understand very well that this apparently straightforward issue is far more complicated than it looks. As far as the emergence of Hong Kong modernism is concerned, both Ma Lang’s background and the British colonial government in Hong Kong suggest that multiple imperial powers were at play. To complicate matters further, when Ma launched Wenyi xinchao in 1956, he was still obsessed with his experience of living on the mainland before 1949. Ma Lang claimed to have never joined the Communist Party, but he eventually became involved with the leftist-nationalist political movement in mainland China. Due to the drastically deteriorating political situation there, Ma fled to Hong Kong shortly after 1949. Although to some extent Ma was obsessed with national affairs, he understood that communist rule brought collateral damage to innocent people (some of his co-workers were killed for their unorthodox political views). According to Ma, his belief was reinforced by Spender’s article collected in The God That Failed in which he described his brief experience with the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).[7] Ma was exposed to multiple cultural influences due to his unique background, and the extent to which Hong Kong played a role in the formation of his multiple cultural identities, or in the development of early Hong Kong modernism, needs further study. 

Wenyi xinchao published a wide range of poetry, fiction, criticism, translation, and drawings by locally, nationally, and internationally known writers and painters. These included Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Tennessee Williams, Eugene Ionesco, Peter Weiss, and Jorge Luis Borges. There were special issues on the national literatures of countries such as France and two special issues on modernist British and American poetry. Some of the poets included in these two issues were Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Spender. In comparison to this wide array of literary works, only two significant critical essays on modernism were published in Wenyi xincha. One was written by Spender, the other by Lee Wai-Ling. As far as foreign authors were concerned, Spender had the most impact on the magazine, since one of his critical essays and three of his poems were translated and published in its pages.

In the eighth issue of the magazine Ma Lang personally translated three of Spender’s poems, “To a Spanish Poet (for Manuel Altolaguirre),” “Fall of a City,” and “oh young men oh young comrades.” At the end of his translation, Ma provided a brief description of Spender’s political positions and poetic style. According to the note, Spender (1909–1995) was born into a liberal family.[8] Spender’s father, Harold Spender, “was a reformist journalist with the London Daily News and a [sometime] Liberal politician” and that Spender, with his friends Auden, Louis MacNeice, and others, is best remembered as a poet of 1930s Oxford.[9] Ma held Spender in high regard, considering him both progressive and brave. Spender fought in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and joined the CPGB in the 1930s but became disillusioned with communism shortly afterwards. As Spender pointed out in his article collected in The God That Failed, he “was a member of the British Communist Party for a few weeks during the winter of 1936–37.”[10] In fact, Spender found himself in disagreement with Harry Pollitt, the then General Secretary of CPGB, on the day he joined the party. For example, while Spender showed no hatred of capitalism, Pollitt believed that “hatred of capitalism was the emotional driving force of the working-class movement” (Spender, The God That Failed, 231). In order to support the Spanish Republic, Spender and Pollitt agreed to disagree; nevertheless, Spender’s political compromise did not last long. He was not convinced by the communist conviction that the world would become better when power was highly concentrated in a few people’s hands. Spender further elaborated in his article that “because I do not believe that the central organizations of the Communists are capable of making a classless society, or indeed of doing anything except establish[ing] the rule of a peculiarly vindictive and jealous bureaucracy, I do not feel that I should surrender my own judgment to theirs, however powerful and effective theirs may be, however ineffective my own” (269–270). Ma could easily put himself in Spender’s shoes since he was similarly unconvinced that Chinese Communist Party rule would create a better world.

In addition to Spender’s political stance, to a certain extent Ma Lang also shared his poetic sensibilities. Spender was influenced by poets as diverse as William Wordsworth and W. H. Auden. Samuel Hynes points out that “Spender’s poetry, like Spender himself, is always lyrical” (Leeming, Stephen Spender, 5). Indeed, in his early years Spender drew his poetic inspiration from Wordsworth and nature. This was the result of Spender and his family living for years in the countryside, at Sheringham and sometimes in the Lake District, due to his mother’s health issues. He recalled vividly what inspired him to become a poet: Spender overheard his father reading Wordsworth’s poems to his mother on rainy days and he felt that the “words of these poems dropped into my mind like cool pebbles, so shining and so pure, and they brought with them the atmosphere of rain and sunsets, and a sense of the sacred cloaked vocation of the poet” (13). Nevertheless, during his years at Oxford University, Auden inevitably exerted an influence on Spender’s poetry.

Spender and Auden were different in a variety of ways, with contrasting personalities as well as distinctive poetic styles. Leeming, Spender’s biographer, remarked that the

Spender-Auden relationship was always based on the essential differences in their personalities. . . . Spender was shy and retiring, often self-denigrating, always seemingly anxious for constructive criticism. Auden gave the impression of supreme confidence and was more than willing to criticize. He was a born teacher and Spender was a born pupil. (30)

Interestingly, these personality differences contributed to the establishment of distinctive poetic styles: while Spender is considered a romantic or an emotional poet, Auden is considered an intellectual one. Auden urged Spender to employ more modern images such as “trains, gasworks, electric wires,” and so on, instead of making use of idyllic objects and landscapes (quoted in Leeming, Stephen Spender, 32).  Auden’s influence on Spender was enormous; however, since Spender found his calling by reading Wordsworth, his poems differ from those of other Auden Group poets in terms of the romantic and lyrical aspects they embody.

It was the lyrical aspect in Spender’s poetry that Ma was interested in. In his brief description of Spender’s poetry, Ma argues that it surpassed that of Auden in embodying such lyrical qualities as romanticism, passion, and imagination (Wenyi xinchao, 60). It is safe to assume that Ma was interested in Spender’s poetry due to the fact that the Chinese literary tradition as a whole is frequently identified with the lyrical tradition.[11] Although it is notable that English Romanticism is by no means equivalent to Chinese lyricism, both English and Chinese “lyricism” share common ground, pointing to “an intense personal quality expressive of feeling or emotion, an engagement with temporal caesura and self-reflectivity, or an exuberant manifestation of subjectivity in an art form such as music or poetry.”[12]

Wenyi xinchao’s engagement in politics and the lyrical aspect advocated in the magazine were obvious from the beginning. Among all their poems, I believe the war poems of Spender and Ma best exemplify the political and lyrical aspects of their work. Ma’s “The Prodigals Sons Who Burnt Their Harps” bears a striking resemblance to Spender’s war poetry in terms of mood, lyrical images, and themes and a comparative study of the two poets will help us further understand the modernism found in Wenyi xinchao. The manifesto of Wenyi xinchao can be interpreted as a “call-to-arms” issued by its editorial board members. The magazine aspired to recruit “combatants” (writers) to fight for a utopia and overcome what was seen as the dystopia of mainland China and it strove to accomplish the editors’ dream of creating a national literature.[13] “The Prodigal Sons Who Burnt Their Harps” echoes the fighting spirit embodied in this manifesto and is dedicated to fighters in mainland China. Because the poem was written in 1949, the reader might immediately associate it with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and perhaps also the Korean War. However, Leung Ping-kwan dismissed the idea that the poem was mere propaganda and said Ma was attempting to synthesize lyric and political issues within it.[14] The poem was not published until 1955 and, based on remarks made by Ma, was published “after many of his friends who returned to the mainland to serve the new China had been killed in the Korean War (1953–1954).”[15] It consists of twenty-eight lines, which exhibit both the lyrical and political aspects clearly.[16]

In his article “The Inheritance and Transformation of Hong Kong Modern Poetry in the 1950s,” Leung Ping-kwan draws our attention to two significant characteristics of the poem which are intertwined with each other. Firstly, Leung notices that binary oppositions are employed by Ma in order to portray which of two opposite sides he considers to have the upper hand. The binary oppositions depicted in the poem include the lyrical and the rough (to use Leung’s words), constructive and destructive, and so on. Secondly, Leung believes that Ma’s poetry is indebted to both Chinese and Western poets, with Dai Wangshu, He Qifang, Spender, and Auden serving as examples. Leung further points out in his article that Spender’s works inspired Ma Lang to reflect critically on the relationship between politics, the lyric, and modernism (Leung Ping-kwan, “Inheritance and Transformation,” 109). Leung’s observation is highly perceptive and accurate, but further explanation is needed. If we take a closer look at the images that Ma employs in his poem, we can immediately discern two main oppositional categories: the modern and the idyllic. Such images as “harps,” “tears,” “dream,” “flower on the tree,” “water,” “spring,” and “mountains” refer to the latter, which could be associated with Spender’s romantic or idyllic style. On the other hand, images such as “bronze,” “metallic,” and “city” remind us of Auden or the modern world. These two oppositional categories in fact correspond to the binary opposition of constructive and destructive as well.

Ma tells us in the poem about a group of prodigal sons who are totally disappointed by the reality of the “ancient city,” which easily reminds us of China. The “harps” depicted in the first line could be translated as lyres instead. Since lyric poetry reading was always accompanied by the lyre in ancient Greece, the lyre and lyric poetry are closely related. This relationship further reinforces the idea that Ma is depicting the situation in China, since ancient China was always considered a nation of poetry, and of lyric poetry in particular. The lyrical or idyllic images Ma uses in this poem are usually found in classical Chinese lyric poetry. However, these prodigal sons decide to burn their harps and leave the idyllic landscape and “glorious past” behind. They feel hopeless because they cannot do anything to avoid the Korean War. These prodigal sons smile no more, and the images employed in here are destructive: “skin and bones” and “blood” (in “skin and bones have been bloodily shed”), “naked primitives,” “corpses,” “forever howling,” and “inferno.” To our surprise, the prodigal sons are no longer hopeless at the end of the poem—they decide to build another city “in the ashes of an inferno.” In addition to the lyrical aspect, the poem also embodies an indirect political message. This is undoubtedly an anti-war poem, though its central motif is overcoming the current predicament rather than mere condemnation of war and political ideologies.

Among the three Spender poems that Ma translated, two are directly related to Spain—namely, “To a Spanish Poet (for Manuel Altolaguirre)” and “Fall of a City,” the latter of which deals with the Spanish Civil War. Spender was a supporter of the Republicans, and in “Fall of a City” the poet delineates their defeat in an allusive manner. This anti-war poem reminds us of Ma Lang’s “The Prodigal Sons,” which also delicately expresses anti-war sentiments. “Fall of a City” was written in the 1930s, at least a decade prior to the composition of Ma’s poem.[17]

Spender depicts an abandoned place that could be a deserted memorial hall in a Spanish city. In line six, the poet uses the oxymoron “victorious hurricane” to subtly question the victory of the Nationalists, and numerous oppositional images to reinforce the motif of the futility of the Spanish Civil War. The poem opens with some ephemeral objects such as “posters” and “leaflets” that are “destroyed” by the nationalists. Emotion is intensified when “the names of heroes . . . on the walls,” which are supposed to be long-lived, “are now angrily deleted” and turning to dust. Among these names we find two great poets, namely Ralph Winston Fox and Garcia Lorca, who fought for the Republicans. Ironically, the seemingly enduring walls are perhaps long gone, but Fox and Lorca become immortal in history. The images of “rain” and “tears” help further stir up sad feelings and the emptiness of the war is reinforced by the lyrical aspect embodied in the poem. The “peasant” and “donkey” remind us that things are going backwards. Although the Republicans’ efforts are in vain, the poem does not end in despair. Unpleasant images such as a “skull,” “an irrefrangible eye,” and “old man’s memory” serve as a backdrop for other more significant images of the poem, namely the “child” and a “bitter toy.” Spender uses another oxymoron of “a bitter toy” to imply that there is still hope, though it cannot be fulfilled easily or at least not without pain.

A simple discussion of Spender’s “Fall of a City” and Ma’s “The Prodigal Sons Who Burnt Their Harps” not only helps highlight both poets’ political awareness, especially their anti-war sentiment, but also demonstrates an intermixture of lyricisms. These two salient features would undergo transformations, and in fact go on to become two fundamental aspects of Hong Kong modernism, in the years to come. For example, although the magazine’s engagement in politics was obvious from the beginning, its political stance shifted from nationalism to localism over the years. In an interview with Du Jiaqi in 2003, Ma Lang recalled he held in high esteem six of the young local writers working at that time: Tang Zhou, Yan Wudai, Leng Ning, Bo Chen, Chen Jiayi, and Sun Ai (“Why ‘Modernism’?” 26). These writers were less concerned with national matters than their daily lives or the so-called local elements that developed in the 1970s. Localism has become one of the significant tenets in Hong Kong modernism to which Leung Ping-kwan has devoted most of his works on the topic of everyday life.[18]

As a modernist poet, Spender was highly regarded by Ma Lang. The English poet considered emotion to be the essence of poetry (Leeming, Stephen Spender, 31). This coincided not only with the lyrical elements embodied in Ma’s lyric poetry but also with those local fiction stories advocated by the magazine, which was deeply indebted to the Chinese lyrical tradition. In 1977, Leung Ping-kwan wrote a critical article on Ma Lang’s poetry in which he delineated the relationship between the Chinese lyrical tradition and modern Chinese poetry.[19] He pointed out that the lyrical element embodied in Ma’s lyric poetry, and especially “The Prodigal Sons Who Burnt Their Harps,” is indebted to the poets Dai Wangshu, He Qifang, Bian Zhilin, and Ai Qing. Ma attempted to modify the literary tradition in order to adapt to the conditions prevailing in 1950s Hong Kong, and thus helped initiate the development of a localized lyrical tradition (Ma Lang, Ronald Mar’s Poems, 22–42). In recent years, with the contributions made by the Hong Kong critics Leung Ping-kwan and Chan K. K. Leonard, discussion of the Hong Kong lyrical tradition has flourished.[20]

The account given here is far from exhaustive and only touches on some of the most significant and fundamental issues observed in Wenyi xinchao and its relationship with modernism. In addition to the issues mentioned at the beginning of this essay, Laura Doyle’s conception of “inter-imperiality” and Huang Yunte’s notion of “transpacific imaginations” can help shed further light on the discussion of Hong Kong modernism. If Ma provided one interpretation of modernism when he was in Hong Kong, he offered another when he left Hong Kong for the other side of the Pacific Ocean—America (Los Angeles)—in 1961.[21] Ma has continued writing poetry in the United States, and, in 2011, a collection of his poems was published under the title Ronald Mar’s 30 Poems in America. To push our thinking a bit further, if we take Ma’s literary works written in Shanghai into account, we will have one more Asia Pacific location to consider. A comparative study of these works may form the basis of a comparative Sinophone modernisms, and perhaps also an inter-imperial analysis.