Labubu

A chemical cloud or cancerous growth
XXCongealed in space and sealed in a vacuum
XXThen cast in a polymer and painted blue
Served both for body and its monstrous head
XXIn which a sickly smile, painted yellow,
XXWas outlined with a synthetic sunscreen.
If it had eyes, they were hidden behind
XXThe glasses of a ’50s beauty-queen
XXWho died long ago on Coney Island
Pink as candy-floss in the melting sun.
XXIts vestigial fingers long since useless
XXThe flapping flippers of a beached turtle
Clasped, like the hands of a dyspraxic child,
XXA beach towel moulded in red plasticine.
XXBeneath were a pair of legless feet
Encased in cowboy boots in matching pink
XXThe high heels and pointed toes of which
XXShined with the surf of a salivating sea.
This demon child of the new century
XXHad been baptised with the nickname of ‘Vee’
XXWritten on the yellow plinth that stood
For the plastic sand of its holiday
XXFrom which four letters in metallic blue
XXThat rose like blades from the shiny disc
Spelled in Chinese and English translation:
XX‘Visa Chief Experience Officer’.
XXA decoder app of corporate cant
Described the job of this company mascot
XXAs ‘humanising’ digital payments
XXWhile officiating over whatever
Experience I borrowed to purchase
XXWith the authority of a creditor
XXConferred on it by my credulity.
And so they led me, and I followed them
XXTo explore their domain in broad daylight
XXAnd set down, from memory, what I saw.
Around the corner, a crowd had gathered
XXTo stare at something I pushed through to see:
XXA kitten! — wrapped in a white bandage
From its tail to its neck, like those with which
XXThe Chinese swaddle their new-born children
XXOr the Egyptians their mummified dead.
And although no more than a few days old
XXIn the wide blue eyes of its tiny head
XXI saw, as I approached as in a nightmare,
That terror had long overtaken fear
XXWith a state of shock at its predicament —
XXTo my Western eyes most terrifying.
Defenceless amid the stampede of shopping
XXAnd deprived of every means of escape;
XXBalanced upright, instead, on its bandaged feet
Like a China doll, there on the pavement;
XXExposed to the pity of the street
XXAnd the gaze of the smartphone screens through which
A flutter of girls — who cooed like mothers
XXOver this torture — captured the horror
XXIn a murmuration of digital eyes.
As I kneeled down to unpeel the binding
XXWith which this most feral of animals
XXHad been domesticated to a furry toy,
The owner, one of a gang of street boys,
XXSnatched his living doll from my reaching hands
XXAnd vanished into the consuming crowd
Pursued by my useless protestations
XXIn a language he didn’t understand
XXAnd a sentiment he did not recognise:
‘You cannot do that to a living creature!’
XXHe left me on the edge of violence,
XXPinned by the weight of the consequences
In which I heard, as I pondered their meaning,
XXSpoken in Chinese without translation
XXThe foreign welcome: ‘Ni hao, waiguoren’.
Like the other boys — like the girls confused
XXBy my failed attempt at intervention —
XXHe had, hanging from a backpack tagged
With the logo of some U.S. fashion brand,
XXOne of the maniacally grinning monsters
XXThat every urbane Chinese person —
From the young women who dress like schoolgirls
XXIn short pleated skirts and knee-high socks
XXTo the young men who so resemble them —
Has tied to their bag with the label intact.
XXNot real, these creatures, not a breathing thing,
XXBut the object of their breathless pursuit
Through the shopping malls of their concrete cities
XXWhere every Instagram spot is painted
XXWith the cats they groom in pet grooming spas,
Their nails painted pink like the girls who pet them
XXAs if they were the children they do not have
XXAnd will never swaddle in a blanket.
Indifferent to what difference is,
XXThese dying generations, when the image
XXAnd the real are close as life and death.
I turned away, and once again I felt,
XXAnd feel still, the uncrossable distance
XXBetween me and the land of my exile
Which is not alone this alien place
XXBut the approaching country of old age
XXAnd that land from which no exile returns,
Eternity of death between the stars.

— Shanghai and Hong Kong, April-May 2026

• • • • •

My model for the verse in this poem was my concurrent reading of Allen Mandelbaum’s 1980 translation of Dante’s Inferno, mediated through the Dante homage in T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding (1942). Like both, I have adopted Dante’s terza rima without the rhymes. But while the horrors and tortures of the Medieval imagination were shown to Dante on his journey through Hell, and those of the Modern imagination were hallucinated by Eliot in the waning dusk of a night during the London Blitz, in China’s cities the horrors of our own time appear to the traveller in broad daylight.

Labubu is a line of stuffed toys created by the Hong Kong illustrator, Kasing Lung. Variations of a furry monster with sharp teeth and large ears said to be drawn from Nordic folklore, to my eyes they look derivative of Maurice Sendak’s popular children’ illustrated book, Where the Wild Things Are (1963). The toys are produced and sold exclusively by the Beijing-headquartered Chinese retailer, Pop Mart, which releases them in sealed ‘blind box’ packaging that conceals the specific character. As of 2025, there are over 300 different Labubu variations, including baby Labubus. Their elevated sale price makes their ownership a signifier of class; and in Hong Kong few Chinese people under the age of 40, particularly females but also many young males, don’t have at least one and sometimes several Labubu or other brands of plush toys attached to their backpack or handbag, and sometimes displayed in protective plastic toiletry or cosmetic bags; and the practice is almost as ubiquitous in the cities of mainland China. By July 2025, Pop Mart founder, chairman and CEO, Wang Ning, had amassed a US$21.1 billion fortune, making him the tenth richest man in China and, at 39 years old, the youngest of China’s 10 richest billionaires.

Both ‘And so they led me, and I followed them’ and ‘And set down, from memory, what I saw’ are a reference to, respectively, the last line of Canto I of the Inferno (‘Allor si mosse, e io li tenni dietro’) and line 8 of Canto II, (‘o mente che scrivesti ciò ch’io vidi’), when Virgil first sets out with Dante to explore Hell. In my poem, however, the guide is Vee. This designates both the first letter of the name of the Roman poet and the ‘Chief Experience Officer’ of Visa, whom I assume uses non-binary pronouns (they/them/their). The company name comes from the Latin charta visa (‘seen document’), itself derived from videre (‘to see’). ‘Credit’, which is how Visa turns its customers into debtors, comes from the Latin creditum, the past participle of the infinitive credere, ‘to believe’. In this case, the belief is that a loan exists as anything more than a promissory note to the banks that create money and call it a debt.

‘Ni hao, waiguoren (你好 外国人)’ is Chinese for ‘Hello, foreigner’, and was said to us by a child in Shanghai, where Europeans are still rare enough to be an object of fascination for small Chinese children.

My encounter with both ‘Vee’ and the cat occurred near the stop on line 10 of the Shanghai Metro called ‘Site of the First CPC National Congress — Xintiandi station’. Visited in 2025 by over 3 million people from across China as the site of the formal establishment of the Communist Party of China on 23 July, 1921, the surrounding area has been transformed into a retail hub for upmarket fashion outlets, commercial boutiques, expensive restaurants and other products of consumer capitalism. It was in front of one of these, the US fashion house Stüssy, to which a queue of Chinese queued patiently while staring at their smartphones, that I saw what Visa describes as its ‘mascot’.

A similar but less monstrous mascot nicknamed ‘Vick’ — which bears on its chest the Circled A of a million anarchist T-shirts in the West — stands outside a McDonalds restaurant outlet in what has been branded as the West Cultural Kowloon Cultural District, and this too was the backdrop to crowds of Hongkongers posing before smartphones with their fingers raised in the ubiquitous V sign.

In the district of Yau Ma Tei on the mainland of Hong Kong there are numerous murals dedicated to cats. A popular Instagram spot, the most recent addition, in March 2026, was painted by the Hong Kong artist, Li Hok-fung, and his students, the art collective Art Dreamers. A wall-sized mural, it depicts two cats sitting in a recogniseably English garden of grass (which doesn’t grow in Hong Kong) and pink roses, one with its head wrapped in a pink towel after a grooming session, the raised claws of the other painted with pink nail varnish, its lashes curled with mascara. The realisation in popular culture of the kitsch art of the US appropriation artist, Jeff Koons, this image was reproduced and commented upon in the South China Morning Post as though it were an important work of art and contribution to the culture of Hong Kong, and has drawn crowds of Hongkongers looking, as they always are, for an opportunity for a selfie and, on uploading it to their social media accounts, what they call a ‘viral sensation’. Like the other murals, however, in reality it is an advertisement, in this case for the beauty salon located next door called Beauty Care, the name of which is included with that of the collective on a wooden sign painted next to the cats in the garden.

‘These dying generations’ is from W. B. Yeats’ poem, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, which begins: ‘That is no country for old men’. Written in 1926 when the author was 61 years old, it was subsequently used as the opening poem of The Tower (1928), in which Yeats meditates on old age. The reference here, however, is to the ageing population of China generally, and even moreso of Hong Kong, which has a median age of 47.9, with 22.7% of the population being 65 and over, and a birth rate of 0.68 children per woman, one of the lowest in the world.

The penultimate line is a reference to Shakespeare’s famous description of death in The Tragedy of Hamlet (Act III, scene 1, ll. 85-86) as: ‘The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns’. Like all three parts of the Divina Commedia, my poem ends with the word ‘stars’, not of the grace of God, in this case, but of his absence from the universe.