Jocelyn Li Sin Ting | What Makes An Anthem | Poets Resist

Poets Resist
Edited by Len Lawson
August 13, 2020

Jocelyn Li Sin Ting

What Makes An Anthem

Someone in our crowd waves a colonial flag and you don’t understand. We come from a past swung into silence, scraped away memo sheets, our speeches like fish scales discarded on a chopping board. Before we had a song of our own I grappled onto each foreign word piercing through my lips. Swallowed translated histories and claimed them mine. We’d rather grind our incisors to fit a ni hao xie xie bu hao yi si or squirm through broken english because our cantonese raises permanent roadblocks across our tongue like worms torn out of cracked earth. It’s not the silence that scares us - we who live in sync with the shrieks of our octopus cards. The MTR intercom - three languages, mandarin before english bellows above the breath of our nation. A nation of only being told what we are not, never who our people are. But now, though not holding hands, not touching still, a slogan at ten porpoises through windows every night and we know. Our voices leap across and forth, the beginnings of a symphony on a starless night. We draw staccatos and light up the sky that goes on, and on, and on by giving it a name. Spell it on paper: gwong fuk heung gong* so even when they rip apart our vocal chords we can fold our song into a plane, let the language of our people break into the dawn.

*Gwong fuk heung gong: ‘Liberate Hong Kong’ in Cantonese romanisation, a popular protest slogan in Hong Kong which is now illegal under the National Security Law.