Hong Kong (English-speaking) PEN

The Hong Kong (English-speaking) PEN centre was formally chartered at a PEN Congress in Vienna, in November 1991, and began to actively meet, recruit and organize events in about February of 1992, with a high-profile launch at the Library Room of the China Club, in the Central Business District.

This was facilitated by the well-known British writer, Simon Winchester, who was consulting on the creation of the library of original works on China kept in that room. His interest and consequent support derived from the help International PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee had given him. As a journalist, he’d been covering the Falkland War from Argentina and was arrested and imprisoned. PEN helped secure his release.

I share this anecdote because it contains the defining purpose for virtually all of our centre’s 16-year history: to assist writers who are under duress from governments or under threat of violence from radical groups.  We have had members whose focus has been to create literary newsletters and events with local and visiting writers, but they have always been in the minority and our membership has been dominated by journalists.

I am unusual, in having both interests, and perhaps that’s why I’ve never been able to convince anyone else to stand for president of our centre. Not for lack of trying. It is to be regretted, because it demonstrates that our centre has lacked the consistent involvement of enough members needed to have a vibrant centre development.

Membership has gone up to a peak of about 70 writers, around 1997, down to years when we struggled just to maintain the minimum membership bar of 20 members. Hong Kong is a free place and so our membership moves up or down depending upon the local community’s sense of crisis. For instance, our membership more than doubled in the face of the Article 23 threat, in 2003.

Regrettably, most of the years of our existence have been in the latter category. But, ironically, that speaks well for the freedoms of writers in Hong Kong.

For expats, and particularly journalists, it is also a transient place; a foreign posting from which they will rotate elsewhere in two or three years.

Small size has not meant inactivity. We were formed primarily around concerns of writers in Hong Kong for the fate of Vietnamese writers who were locked in overcrowded, closed camps here for years.

They faced forced repatriation due to an international redefinition of their status to “economic migrants,” during the administrations of U.S. President, Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister, John Major.

In the end, we identified and, with help of a grant from the European Union, created a caselist of about 40 such writers. We then began an intensive lobbying campaign to gain them refugee status and freedom. This was fully supported by PEN’s WIPC.

In all, we helped free six writers and we still receive holiday wishes and expressions of gratitude from them every Christmas.

We also used the visit of a former International PEN president, Ronnie Harwood, as a platform upon which to initiate and forge links with the Hong Kong (Chinese) PEN Centre in the 1990s. Before that, there had been no communication at all. I’m pleased to say those cordial links still hold.

We’ve done other things over the years, besides continuously supporting PEN WIPC initiatives, such as providing a judge for the annual Human Rights Press Awards since their inception, now entering their 11th year and many ad hoc initiatives.

This year we have a focus that’s very complementary to the themes of this conference and, we believe, to the urgent needs of Hong Kong. That focus is on translation and the recruiting of translators from Chinese into English to join our centre. We will seek to create a joint or reciprocal membership programme with our friends in the Hong Kong Chinese PEN, so that both centres benefit by the presence of people who can read and speak both languages fluently.

Our emphasis will be on Hong Kong writers, working in the Cantonese language. We are very concerned that Hong Kong’s writers are in danger of being overwhelmed as an identifiable entity by attention to the Mainland, and that it is vital to the preservation of Hong Kong’s freedoms and the expansion of China’s that their unique contribution to Chinese letters and literature be recognised and nurtured.

One of our efforts will be to use regional platforms to celebrate that heritage, like the Asia Pacific Writers’ Network, which I will describe in a talk this afternoon. And we will be working with translators at Renditions, the Chinese University based translation centre publication and those at other universities, here and abroad. We have also proposed that International PEN’s Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee take up the publication of works from Cantonese writers as a threatened minority language group, whose identities are as much at threat as groups like the Romani.

Coincidentally, we will be working to raise the recognition of translators’ importance to both the sharing and transmission of literature between peoples and the defense of freedom of expression.

Finally, there is discussion of creating an anthology of Hong Kong and Guangdong writers with the working title: A Hong Kong Reader, Translations from the Cantonese.

Beijing holds ownership of the written national language, but it is not the natural language of Hong Kong. As Hong Kong moves through what our member writer, Xu Xi, calls its “50 Shrinking Years” to 2047, when “two systems” officially ends, Hong Kong artists in all media have been investigating the possibilities Cantonese idioms as markers of the local. Having had no say in the treaty that sealed their fate, they have turned inward to seek what Shakespeare called, “a local habitation and a name.”  Our PEN centre intends to help them do it.

Fred Armentrout, President
Hong Kong (English-speaking) PEN