What do we know but that we face One another in this place? – W. B. Yeats, “Man and the Echo” HK. I loved my mountains, rivers, and trees long before towers and families, but if the only way the sea can speak to the hills is through the moon I will speak to you from the ink-dark about the changing tides, the slow equivocal pain of transition, how things are moving away from the norm, the deceptive comfort of a norm, the fading neon noises on Mong Kok streets, the kind of yellow you’ll only find in my heart, the Lion Rock spirit and the endangered species named after me: the grouper, cascade frog, incense tree. Echo. What do we know but that? HK. What’s the meaning of life in numbers? Although I count every second of mine I remember nothing of those Crownappointed governors come and gone who said nothing, did nothing, changed nothing. What are the promises in a red flag with five stars shooting out from one bauhinia? Twenty-two moon-calendars since I was re-unorphaned I stray and obey like a tree, half-crown, half-root, branching out and bedding in, each growth year a scar tissue erased by the smudges of shared stocks, fireworks, new railways and bridges. Echo. We face one another? We face one another? HK. What am I but the high-rise windows reflecting the sun and the lives below? Come, look into every single one and find millions of homemade voices in an impasse, in fissures, in boxlike existences where one language is never enough. High above I see black kites, sometimes white-bell sea eagles gliding between glass and cliff, drones and signals, eyeing the quick chance while larks, thrushes, and titmice are twittering in bamboo cages, bird to bird, sharing the captive sky with their distant counterparts as one sun drops under the horizon and a different one rises. Echo. In this place? In this place? In this place? Hong Kong and the Echo by Kit Fan Kit Fan was born and educated in Hong Kong before moving to the UK at twenty-one. His second collection, As Slow as Possible, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, one of the Guardian’s fifty biggest books in 2018, and The Irish Times Poetry Book of the Year. Visit worldlit.org to read Kit Fan’s poem “Lettuces in the New Territories.” HONG KONG PHOTO: JOEL FULGENCIO/UNSPLASH WORLDLIT.ORG 57 ...