Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime?
— Milton, Paradise Lost
Entertained by two boys stripped to their boxer shorts,
Their brown-skinned bodies muscular and glistening
And whose primary intention appears to be
To sink their teeth into the other’s flesh
(A feat in which one of them finally succeeds);
And repeatedly disturbed by one or another
Of the conflagration of Indonesian girls
Who, like birds-of-paradise fallen from heaven,
Try different tricks to distract my attention
From the wall of televisions behind the bar —
Like someone who, dreaming, wishes he were dreaming,
I order round after round of drinks whose prices
I briefly glimpse and immediately forget
On the screens of handheld point-of-sale devices
I never grasp in my hand, but still against which
I rub my debit card as rigorously
As the Thai-boxers grapple with each other
On every screen in this underworld — as though
Drinking were a sport I have a chance of winning
With my soul still intact.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxAnd that’s entertainment,
As I sit outside chatting with the Kashmiri
Bar-owner, drug-dealer and money-launderer,
His Russian girlfriend (one of many, he winks at me),
The Nepalese manager moonlighting as bouncer,
The Filipino bar-singer and mother of four,
A Kurdish nationalist I greet in Turkish,
A Colombian I met at the cubicle door,
An Israeli engineer turned cosmetics salesman
(Because it earns him, he says, a better living),
An English lawyer for victims of state torture
And, deep in the night, a Hong Kong entrepreneur
Who tells me of the protests and how much the city
Has changed under the rule of China — discussing
The state of the world, the rise and fall of empires
And angels, and whether ambition is to serve
In Heaven or to reign in this mournful Hell,
Where every value is exchanged for money
On the path to an elsewhere that doesn’t exist,
The eternity of a means without an end,
The limbo of now in sæcula sæculorum.
Above us the long night turns suddenly to day
Aflame in the glass and metal towers
But darkened with the ashes the morning breeze
Carries heavenward from the pyres of Tai Po.
— Hong Kong, November 2025/February 2026
• • • • •
The epigraph is from Book One of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), in which the rebellious archangel, Satan, arrives in Hell, where he arouses the fallen angels with the lines:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.
In Canto XXX of Dante’s Inferno, in which he reaches the eighth circle of Hell that is reserved for falsifiers, the poet sees two naked men, one a defrauder and the other a counterfeiter, entwined in eternal combat, the former of whom sinks his teeth into the latter’s neck. Rebuked by Virgil for his fascination with the gruesome scene, this passage contains the lines:
Qual è colui che suo dannaggio sogna,
che sognando desidera sognare,
sì che quel ch’è, come non fosse, agogna,
‘Even as one who dreams that he is harmed / And, dreaming, wishes that it were a dream, / Longing for what is, as if it were not’. This scene was represented by William-Adolphe Bouguereau in his painting, Dante et Virgille en Enfer (1850).
At 2pm on Wednesday, 26 November, 2025, a fire started in the plastic safety netting wound around the bamboo scaffolding on which contractors were refurbishing the eight 31-storey tower-blocks of Wang Fuk Court, a residential complex of 1,987 apartments built in 1983 in Tai Po New Town, an area of recovered land in the New Territories of Hong Kong. Seven of the towers caught fire and burned for two days, killing 168 people, including 10 domestic workers and 1 firefighter. It took me a while to appreciate the extent of the disaster, partly because, a month earlier, a fire had broken out in the netting of Chinachem Tower, an office building in Central, without loss of life. Today, the Wang Fuk Court fire is the highest loss of life from fire in Hong Kong since the Wing On warehouse fire of 1948.
A Communist in Hong Kong 