妳的書寫作為我城的時代見證，誠然十分重要；而此書能成功出版，完全有賴於如今台灣這片土地給予作者免於恐懼的創作自由，因此它能在台灣誕生，是一件可幸之事。

——〈家長〉，梁莉姿

Your writing, as an epochal testimony of our city, is indubitably important; and this book owes its successful publication to Taiwan, a land that provides authors with creative freedom devoid of fear. It is, therefore, fortunate that it can see the light of day in Taiwan.

— “Elder,” by Leung Lee Chi

In the wake of the 2019-20 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) protests in Hong Kong, many Hongkongers left the city, including outspoken authors who have directly addressed the protests in writing. Taiwan, a Chinese-language country close to Hong Kong, is one of the most popular destinations for the diaspora. If publishing in Taiwan used to be a privilege for award-winning Hongkongese authors, such as Xi Xi 西西, Yesi 也斯, and Hon Lai Chu 韓麗珠, this literary niche quickly grew into a haven for both new and established writers from 2020 onwards. Unlike in Hong Kong, where self-censorship and the 2020 National Security Law have severely restricted the freedom of expression, Taiwan offers a welcoming environment where publishers, readers, and literary awards are receptive to Hong Kong voices and stories. To quote the Hongkongese author Dung Kai Cheung 董啟章, the publishing space in Taiwan has become a “lifeline for literature from Hong Kong.”

The recent body of Hong Kong diaspora literature in Taiwan is a literature of resistance, loss, and displacement. Four short story collections by emerging Hong Kong authors stand out for directly engaging with the trauma of the Anti-ELAB movement, and the Hongkongers’ subsequent sense of disorientation. Daily Movement 《日常運動 (2022) by Leung Lee Chi 梁莉姿 (English translation by Mary King Bradley forthcoming) contains nine stories about individuals from different backgrounds—from middle-schoolers and university students to teachers and counsellors, from Chinese migrant workers to second-generation Mainlanders—delving into how they react to the protests, their everyday lives profoundly transformed. Perhaps in the Smoke《煙街》(2022), Mukyu 沐羽’s debut short story collection, tackles the sense of loss, grief, and entrapment in the movement’s aftermath (My English translations of some excerpts have featured in The Oxonian Review and La Piccioletta Barca). In Contemplating Flames 《觀火》(2024), Kay So 蘇朗欣 suspends judgement on political correctness to focus on how this social rupture transformed interpersonal relationships in Hong Kong. Last but not least, The Melancholy of Trees《樹的憂鬱》(2023), also by Leung, shifts to the disorientation faced by Hongkongese émigrés as they negotiate their new identities and authorial voices in Taiwan. All quotations from these works in this essay are translated by myself.

Conceptualising Loss in Postcolonial Hong Kong

Postcolonial reflections emerged in Hong Kong around the late 1970s and 1980s, and crystallized with the 1984 signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which outlined the conditions of governance after the 1997 transfer of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to Chinese control. As they witnessed the anti-democratic Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, Hongkongers began to critically consider the elusive meanings of the “Hong Kong way of life,” and the possibilities of  an ominous future under mainland Chinese governance. Writer and literary critic Yesi 也斯, one of the first to apply the Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha’s theories to Hong Kong, pointed out the paradox in Hong Kong’s peculiar postcoloniality: it emerged before actual decolonization. Rather than political autonomy and self-determination, Yesi defined postcoloniality in Hong Kong as a “self-awareness of how the colonial situation distorts relationships and culture, as well as how colonial power asymmetry shapes communication and interactions.” Unlike many other former colonies, Hong Kong has no clear pre-colonial cultural identity to revert back to, given that, prior to British colonization in 1841, Hong Kong’s territory was mostly marked by disparate fishing villages and local settlements. Moreover, the hegemonic narrative of Chinese nationalism and the spread of Modern Standard Chinese (Chinese Mandarin) pose an existential threat to Hong Kong’s identity, which defines itself in Cantonese, largely unintelligible with Mandarin. As such, postcoloniality in Hong Kong is an ongoing negotiation between the city’s colonial legacy of relative freedom, the encroachment of Chinese nationalism, and its own disappearing identity—a conundrum that is as relevant today as it was back in 1997.

The cultural critic Ackbar Abbas shares this view of postcoloniality in his landmark study, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (1997). He states that “postcoloniality begins, it has already begun, when subjects find themselves thinking and acting in a certain way; in other words, postcoloniality is a tactic and a practice, not a legal-political contract, or a historical accident.” According to Abbas, much of Hong Kong’s cultural production is a process of “self-invention” generated in “a space of dis-appearance.” He ties “disappearance” to the perceived threat of a different form of governance in the foreseeable future, an impending loss that precipitates preemptive grief and an intense desire to formulate a collective identity before it disappears. “Dis-appearance,” on the other hand, refers to false (self-)representation, both misrecognition and non-recognition of what is there. Paradoxically generative, disappearance alla Abbas stimulates the construction of a Hongkongese subjectivity through “[a] process of negotiating the mutations and permutations of colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism.” Another way to cope with disappearance, as Abbas outlines, is “using disappearance to deal with disappearance” by taking Hong Kong culture elsewhere, a strategy that we see in the current waves of emigration from Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is often represented as a port city—a colonial emporium, a gateway to China, a non-space of transit, a stop in multigenerational migrations, a floating city amnesiac about its past and uncertain about its future. Its “culture of disappearance” is intrinsically associated with marginality, hybridity, transience, and above all, loss. No wonder coping with loss and melancholy is a central topic in its literature. The essay collection Loss: The Politics of Writing, edited by David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, offers inspiring perspectives on how to engage with loss. Drawing on Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud, Eng and Kazanjian propose a politics of mourning that is “active rather than reactive, prescient rather than nostalgic, abundant rather than lacking, social rather than solipsistic, militant rather than reactionary.” Their mourning continuously engages with loss and its remains to “generates sites for memory and history for the rewriting of the past,” as well as “the reimagining of the future.” In the traumatic aftermath of the Anti-ELAB movement, Hongkongese literature, exemplified by the above-mentioned short story collections, perfectly fulfills the generative potential of active mourning. By reassessing loss and re(-)presenting Hong Kong, these works sketch Hong Kong’s shifting identity,  creating new understandings of the Hongkonger identity after this sociopolitical rupture in Hong Kong’s postcolonial history.

The Dis(-)appearance of Normality

In March 2019, crowds gathered for silent sit-ins outside the Central Government Offices. They were demanding the withdrawal of the proposed “Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation Amendment Bill,” which would make it easier for China to arrest political dissidents in Hong Kong and try them in the Mainland. The sit-ins soon grew into the Anti-ELAB movement, a city-wide demonstration for full universal suffrage. Multiple protests in June 2019 amassed up to two million participants, while the police resorted to violent dispersion tactics like tear gas, and firing rubber bullets at the crowds. Civilian public spaces, from streets and recreational spaces to schools and universities, soon transformed into battlefields, as the aforementioned writers illustrate:

阿離何曾想過，素常與同學吃飯時會合用的新城市廣場大堂，會滿佈防暴警察。裝備黑碩，帶著頭盔和棍，全身沉甸甸的一坨一坨，像電製的無機體，載滿其粗惡的言語和性子。都是尖叫哭喊聲，有人被噴中胡椒水，有人被捕，有人倒下。

[…] 但阿離不信，她不能信，甚麼能信？她原也相信，警察不會跑到商場來。在這舒適、有空調、時尚的廣場，這人頭湧湧，大家趕忙著消費、快樂、悠閒的地方，這樣安然闖進來，向人的眼睛噴射胡椒水，朝人的腦門狠狠棍擊，任血和哀嚎迴繞於商場中。[…] 這城市，還有甚麼可以相信？

——〈新城市〉，梁莉姿

Ah Lei never imagined that the atrium in New Town Plaza where she often ate with classmates would be filled with riot police. Heavy black gear. Helmets and truncheons. Their bodies weighed down with bulging equipment. They were like electronic mechanoids overloaded with foul language and bad temper. Shrieks and cries everywhere. People were mazed, people were arrested, people fell to the floor.

[…] Ah Lei doesn’t believe, can no longer believe – what is there to believe in? She used to believe that the police wouldn’t storm a shopping centre – this comfortable, air-conditioned, fashionable shopping centre filled with crowds who were busy spending, having fun, winding down – that the police would be so unapologetic about bursting in, pepper-spraying right into people’s eyes, brutally bludgeoning people’s heads, letting blood and screams fill the shopping centre. […] What is there left to trust in this city?

— “New Town,” Leung Lee Chi

有一晚，我和幾個舊拍檔上了Mody House，那天店員跟我說來了一款特地訂購的伏特加，要不要來點烈的，調杯Kamikaze。我說可以，這時樓下忽然響起劈啪聲響，我們就衝到窗邊去看，已經看不見馬路啦。到處都是煙，我們就好像浮在半空中那樣。那時我想，樓下一定很臭，臭得令人想哭，一邊哭一邊覺得難以想像，這世界居然會被認為是最好的一個。所有顧客都在窗邊並排，卻沒有人碰到別人的肩，好似大家都隔得好遠，這很奇怪吧，但那一刻我覺得所有人都在逃跑，一動不動地逃跑，從時間逃跑，拖著所有東西跑……

——〈為什麼靠這麼近〉，沐羽

One evening, a few colleagues and I went to a bar in Mody House tower. The waiter said a new, specially ordered vodka had arrived and asked if I wanted something strong, a glass of Kamikaze perhaps? I said alright, then explosions erupted from downstairs, and we rushed towards the windows to see, but we could no longer see the roads. There was smoke everywhere, as if we were floating in midair. I thought, it must stink so much downstairs, so much that it’d make you cry, cry and find it unimaginable that this was considered the best version of the world. All the customers were by the window, but no one’s shoulders were touching, as if everyone was far apart. Isn’t that strange? But in that moment, I felt that everyone was running away, immobile but running away, fleeing from time, dragging everything behind…

— “Why So Close?,” Mukyu

阿然出現在一張拍攝理大圍城事件的新聞照片上。圖中左邊是水炮車的藍，右邊是路障焚燃的紅，阿然舉起雨傘站在中間，黑色的背影消瘦慘淡。

眼中水和火渲染成一體，融掉中間的黑，三者密不可分。

——〈水與灰燼〉，蘇朗欣

Ah Yin shows up on a news photo about the barricade in Hong Kong Polytechnic University. On the left, the blue of the water cannon. On the right, the red of burning roadblocks. A Yin stands in the middle, holding up an umbrella, her black back thin and dismal.

In the viewer’s eyes, the water and the fire blend into one body, melting the blackness in the middle. The three are inseparable.

— “Water and Ashes,” Kay So

The schizophrenic coexistence of dramatic protests and ordinary life was as absurd as it was surreal. In Daily Movement, Leung dubs this the “ruptured normal”「割裂日常」: “It’s bonkers. Getting tear-gassed and running for your life is real; chugging beer while eating siu yeh is also real. Clashes are real, but ordinary life is also real.” As violence in the streets bled into everyday life, rifts also began to appear in private spaces. In Leung’s collection, a young university student refuses to return home because she finds her mother’s support for the pro-democracy camp performative (“Little Sister”), and a girl breaks up with her boyfriend because he refuses to argue with pro-government colleagues despite being  a militant frontline protestor (“V’s Train Carriage”). Subtler shifts and derailments also took place. Some disillusioned youngsters began to lead the protests, like the Little Professor in “Map in Flesh,” unfulfilled at work and seeking satisfaction in heroism during the protests. He leads the crowd in chanting political slogans and throws tear gas canisters back at the riot police, yet is cynical about the solidarity of protestors and the protests’ utility.

Many stories also dwell on how young Hongkongese students responded to the Anti-ELAB movement, as the tightening of Chinese control and the repression of democracy put their future on the line. Amongst junior secondary students, politics became a trending topic, replacing conversations about music idols and sports, while boasting allegiance to the pro-democracy camp and flaunting first-hand protest experience were fool-proof ways to gain respect from peers (like in Leung’s “Little Sister”). But these political changes transformed older secondary school students’ lives in much more profound ways. In “A Day, An Eternity” by Mukyu, adolescents throw themselves into the movement as frontline protestors instead of discussing their studies and pursuing love interests. One of them flees to Taiwan, while another gets arrested and murdered by the police. In “The Last Lesson,” Leung zooms in on the tension between pro-establishment school staff and pro-democracy students. Teachers are compelled to act as government proxies, censoring students’ actions and writing. The school insists on remaining “apolitical” by confiscating protest gear, questioning students who distribute political fliers, censoring the Democracy Wall board designed for free speech, and redacting student writing to suppress all social criticism.

但絕望與幻滅往往不是剎那而成。它與改變不同，改變是驀然樹立的閘門，迅捷築成，使人覺察存在；幻滅是不可見的籬，每次跨進被戳刺有傷，然未禁止嘗試，虛設希望，反復戲弄、嘲諷，直至消燃殆盡。

[…] 回避認真，拒絕真心。把少年們奉上的真誠坦露隨手丟掉，貶抑，嘲諷，棄如敝履，怕動搖秩序，賴以為生的圭臬格律，一旦稍稍放寬墮入混沌，則萬劫不復，繼而不得不，信手推開。若有什麼生出，是他們一同豢養育成的魔。

——〈最後一課〉，梁莉姿

But despair and disillusionment tend not to happen instantly. It’s not the same as change. Change is a gate erected suddenly, built swiftly, making people aware of its presence. Disillusionment, though, is an invisible fence that pokes and stabs you everytime you try to leap over it, but it doesn’t forbid you from trying. It sets up false hopes, tricks you and mocks you repeatedly, until you burn out completely.

[…] Evading earnestness, rejecting sincerity, casually tossing away the candour offered up by youngsters, demeaning them, mocking them, abandoning them like trash. For fear that existing order and rules [that teachers] abide by and depend on for their living be shaken up and loosened up, plunging them into chaos and ultimate doom, [educators] feel compelled to push away these youngsters. If anything will be born out of this, they’ll be demons collectively incubated and hatched [by these adults].

— “The Last Lesson,” Leung Lee Chi

As the movement’s pressure intensified and frustration built up, some young pro-democracy protesters radicalized and resorted to violence, marking the disappearance of a clear boundary between right and wrong, justified or excessive.

In “Be Water”, an attention-seeking student from Mainland China who clearly suffers from parental neglect has a habit of spewing outrageous pro-China political comments without understanding what he is talking about. The last straw is when he forwards the picture of a wounded, underaged protester, with a comment supporting the riot police. Soon, he gets ambushed by Hongkongese classmates and beaten up, while fellow students choose not to intervene. Shocked by the disproportionate violence and the students’ tacit complicity, a classmate asks, “Isn’t Yellow [the pro-democracy camp] righteous, and Blue [the pro-government camp] evil? Why, then, are they so violent? Why is everyone indifferent?”

So’s “Age Thirteen” also traces two boys’ descent into vandalism and attempted murder. Unlike his frontline protestor classmates, thirteen-year-old Ming Heem tries to stay neutral: “Ming Heem didn’t like it when people referred to the police as dogs, or referring to anyone as dogs.” But after the girl he likes is stabbed for adding  post-it notes expressing pro-democracy support to a Lennon Wall near their school, and the police lets her attacker off lightly, he becomes radicalized. His friend Wang Zak plans to ambush the stabber in his candy shop and kill him, and he follows along. But they don’t find the man there:

宏澤怒罵，如野獸咆哮，他圍繞店面，將觸目所及的每一塊玻璃逐一打碎，撬開，手法純熟。沒多久每一扇曾經光鮮亮麗的櫥窗都化成碎屑，散落在行人道和店裡的磁磚地板上。

… 明謙慌忙中朝著盛滿糖果的透明收納櫃用力打。櫃門凹陷下去，他的心臟彷彿漏了一拍，近乎鬆手；但什麼也沒有發生。他繼續重覆動作，將櫃子逐一打爛，地上慢慢鋪滿軟糖，混和了玻璃碎，室內充滿甜膩氣味。

…「這樣不夠啊。」他念念有詞，聲線壓低：「沒有殺到人。下次再堵他，不能在店裡，他會防備。這樣不夠啊。」…

有很多話想說，可是明謙首先脫口而出的是：「為什麼會變成這樣的？」

——〈十三歲〉，蘇朗欣

Wang Zak curses angrily, like a roaring beast. He walks around in the shop, smashes every single piece of glass and pries them open with expert moves. Soon, the once-gleaming windows of every cabinet broke into smithereens, scattered across the pavement outside and the tiled floor inside the shop.

… Panicked, Ming Heem forcefully struck a transparent cabinet where candies were kept. The cabinet door dented, and his heart skipped a beat, almost making him toss away the hammer. But nothing happened. They kept repeating the movement, smashing every single cabinet. Soon the floor was covered with soft candies mixed with glass shards. A sickly sweet scent spread through the shop.

… ‘This is not enough.’ [Wang Zak] mutters in a deep voice. ‘We haven’t killed the guy. Next time, we can’t ambush him in the store because he’ll be alert. This is not enough.’ 

… Ming Heem had so much to say, but the first thing that slipped off his tongue was, ‘How did we end up like this?’

— “Age Thirteen,” Kay So

Right and wrong muddle; rationality and normality completely disappear from the Hong Kong mired in the Anti-ELAB protests. Despite being fictional, these stories capture real grey zones and downward spirals in the pro-democracy movement, problematising moments when the movement’s original ideal and moral high ground disappear in the tumult.

The Loss of Home

With increased governmental crackdown and the COVID-19 lockdowns, which cut the protests short, a sense that the city had fallen spread through Hong Kong. Some individuals became internally displaced—arrested, imprisoned, withdrawing into themselves—while others tried to flee the city.

The National Security Law (NSL), passed in June 2020 and compounded in March 2024, further cracks down on any kind of “subversion” or “sedition.” Many of the ten thousand protesters arrested during the Anti-ELAB movement and now tried under the NSL were university students or minors, their futures indefinitely suspended. So’s ‘Outside of Time,’ inspired by the author’s older brother, documents this predicament: a young man waiting for his trial, which will almost certainly find him guilty, states that “time stopped for me two years ago.” When his friend tries to comfort him by reminding him of his future possibilities, he replies, “So these three to five years [in prison] are motionless, like a blackhole. Isn’t it like being cast away in a place outside of time?” He is far from the only one suffering from this fate—working in a shop that makes graduation plushies for students, he notes how some plushies never get picked up, because their intended owners have “disappeared” in one way or another: been arrested or emigrated. The protagonist considers fleeing from Hong Kong, but given the real example of the ‘Hong Kong 12’ case in August 2020—when twelve protestors attempted to flee to Taiwan on a speedboat but ended up intercepted, detained, and sentenced to prison in mainland China—the impossibility of flight intensifies the feeling of being trapped.

Those who manage to emigrate to Taiwan struggle to establish a feeling of belonging and freedom, both welcomed and exiled in their diasporic new lives. For many of these émigrés, endangered by the NSL, there is no imminent return to Hong Kong in sight. Ah Lam, a recurring character in Mukyu’s short stories, is the perfect example of an émigré suffering from depression as a result of displacement. In ‘Why So Close’, he copes with his depression through excessive sleep. Though he is physically safe, he remains emotionally unsettled, adrift in a non-place between the home he has left behind and Taiwan’s unfamiliarity. His girlfriend notes:

有時她覺得他身上就像拖著一個廢墟，一個沒有霓虹燈光或高樓大廈的，無以名狀也不知在哪，煙霧彌漫的舊日風景。

—— 為什麼靠那麼近，梁莉姿

… Sometimes she feels that he drags a ruin behind him—yesterday’s landscape filled with smoke, without neon lights or skyscrapers, without identity or location.”

— “Why So Close?,” Mukyu

For émigrés whose experiences mirror Ah Lam’s, Hong Kong is a lost home; all that remains is emotional baggage, trapping them in melancholy and transforming them into ghosts of their former selves. In ‘The Shapes of Stories,’ Ah Lam finally gets out of bed and begins socializing with fellow Hongkongers in Taiwan. They frequently gather in a café run by a Hongkonger, a space that recalls Hong Kong with its bing sutt décor, classic Hong Kong-style menu, and 1980s Cantopop playlist.

“The Melancholy of Trees” by Leung captures this tug-of-war between nostalgia for Hong Kong and the struggle to put down new roots. Despite being traditionally perceived as a temporary stop in multigenerational migrations, those who stay in Hong Kong become increasingly attached from generation to generation, making it difficult to leave. The diasporic community clings to every last trace of the city they call home.

這一代的憂鬱，是樹的憂鬱；上一代的憂鬱，是鹿的憂鬱。一隻動物上路，四蹄一躍，就是上了路，光溜溜，幾近無法回頭，無太多行裝，因而遷居至此，忍痛割捨。

如今他們卻被養得猶豫而奢侈，如一棵棵埋根極深的樹，枝間交錯，害羞，被動，遲滯。直至森林大火，不得不把根與枝幹拔削，裁成移行工具，許多包袱、負擔與傷感，無從抉擇。 

—— 樹的憂鬱（上），梁莉姿

The melancholy of our generation is the melancholy of trees; the melancholy of the previous generation, that of deer. For an animal to set off, it just needs to kick its hooves and take a leap, and then it’s on the go, naked, practically without any option to turn back, and without much luggage. Like so, they migrated here and severed off the past despite the pain.

But now, domesticated, they’ve become hesitant and fussy, like trees with deep-set roots and intertwined branches, timid, passive, inert, until the forest catches on fire, and then they have to pluck up roots and shave off branches, cut them into transport tools, bogged down by so much baggage, burden, and sorrow, unable to come to decisions.

— “The Melancholy of Trees (I),” Leung Lee Chi

To Write, To Remember, To Chart

It should be clear by now that literature about the Anti-ELAB Movement testifies to events that have fundamentally changed the lives of Hongkongers. How can a writer approach the protests and their aftermath? All three authors mentioned here incorporate a strong metafictional component in their work, questioning why they write, and how to represent Hong Kong. 

Published almost immediately after the Anti-ELAB Movement and the COVID-19 lockdowns, Mukyu often uses nonlinear or circular narratives in Perhaps in the Smoke to portray the chaos, confusion, and sense of inescapable devastation experienced by many Hongkongers. For instance, ‘Turbulence’ unfolds in two threads, using repeated and fragmented narratives to tell the stories of two Hongkongers trapped in a mental limbo. The first thread, narrated in the first-person, follows an anonymous Hong Kong author in Taiwan who wryly questions what it means to be a Hong Kong writer. He incisively points out the difficulty of representing Hong Kong by satirizing the abuse of stereotypical imagery like rooftops and subdivided flats: “Does an Egyptian poet have to write about pyramids in every poem?” This narrator-writer keeps asking questions, interrupting his narrative with gallows humor, Soviet jokes, obscene gags, and common phrases that change meaning with every new iteration, but he never quite reaches an answer.

In the second thread, the Hong Kong writer attempts to tell a broken story about his friend, Ting Cheung. Narrated in vignettes, we see how Ting Cheung becomes an obsessive traveller after his little brother “disappeared” during a protest. Like intrusive thoughts or recurrent nightmares, Ting Cheung visits sites associated with totalitarianism and massacre again and again: Lenin’s Mausoleum in Moscow, the concentration camp in Auschwitz, the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima. At the same time, he also travels inwards, recalling how his self-identification swayed between China and Hong Kong. He unintentionally teaches his little brother to stand up against totalitarianism, indirectly pushing him towards his death. Like the first thread, there is no answer or conclusion to the second. Even after Ting Cheung is hospitalized for COVID-19, trips through memories and strobing mental landscapes continue to carry him away.

As the author Liu Wai Tong 廖偉棠 notes, this whirl of memories resembles Jorge Luis Borges’s circular ruins, a labyrinth of convoluted legacies and identities, from which the grieving individual cannot free themselves: 

不斷往回憶深處挖掘的人是自由的嗎？相信不斷往外旅行才能心滿意足的人沒資格批判他們。

英國的奈波爾說，「如果你跟我一樣，並不了解你出生地的歷史，也沒人告訴你這段實際上並不存在，或者只存在於檔案中的歷史，當你這樣來到世界上，你就必須了解你的故鄉。這樣要花很多時間，你也沒法直接去書寫世界，彷彿一切都渾然天成，一切都已然給了你。」

——〈亂流〉，沐羽

Is someone who constantly digs into memories free? I dare say someone who constantly travels outwards to seek satisfaction has no right to judge them.

The British author V. S. Naipaul said, ‘When you’re like me—born in a place where you don’t know the history, and no one tells you the history, and the history, in fact, doesn’t exist, or in fact exists only in documents—when you are born like that, you have to learn about where you came from. It takes a lot of time. You can’t simply write about the world as though it is all there, all granted to you.’ (quoted from V. S. Naipaul, ‘The Art of Fiction,’ no. 154, The Paris Review, 1998.)

— “Turbulence,” Mukyu

Fiction opens up an expansive space to “learn about where you came from,” to sort through entangled identities and transnational histories of how the city ended up in its dystopian present state:

我的祖父輩從中國移民到香港，到了我們這一輩就移民他方。生命是一連串的遷移，中間插了一個名為香港的廣告。有些人信以為真，並為此丟了生命。

——〈亂流〉，沐羽

My grandfather’s generation migrated from China to Hong Kong. Now it is my generation’s turn to migrate elsewhere. Life is a continuous chain of migrations, in the middle of which an advert named ‘Hong Kong’ was inserted. Some people believed in it, and lost their lives because of it.

— “Turbulence,” Mukyu

What prevents one from writing openly and honestly is not just the threat of state retaliation (via the NSL), but also a deep-seated self-censorship. In The Melancholy of Trees, Leung extensively grapples with writing about Hong Kong. In “Elder,” a fictional confession letter from a mentor to his former creative writing student, Ming Mei, the mentor refuses to write a preface for Ming Mei’s semi-autobiographical novel about her Hongkongese identity and exile in Taiwan on the above grounds. Without morally judging such acts of self-preservation, Leung asserts the validity and reality of the difficulties of writing Hong Kong from within.

But writing about Hong Kong from the vantage point of exile is no easy task either. In the story “Lover,” Ming Mei receives an offer from a Taiwanese publisher for her book. She immediately wonders whether the “sensitive” content of her novel will be edited or redacted, and whether the author can dispute such editorial decisions. The Taiwanese editor, on the other hand, is not accustomed to such self-censorship: “I’ve been thinking about it for a while now, but I don’t get the definition of what is ‘sensitive.’ What can’t be published?” Leung bounces arguments back and forth between Ming Mei and her writer boyfriend Ka Yin, using an almost dialectical form to explore issues of readership, relevance, and the purposes of writing. Ming Mei mulls over whether topics important to Hongkongers have any relevance to Taiwanese readers; how to avoid shallow comparisons between Hong Kong and Taiwan; and how to avoid clichés and superficiality amidst a profusion of Hong Kong narratives in Taiwan. But the biggest question is whether there is even any point in writing about Hong Kong and the recent trauma. Is writing first and foremost an aesthetic exercise? Is it valid to use writing to document and process trauma?

Ming Mei’s writing is criticized for her obsessively detailed and repetitive descriptions of frontline protestors’ actions and thoughts—so detailed that her fiction reads almost like nonfiction. When a Taiwanese classmate manages to create more affectively pleasing stories—combining unambiguous characterization, a well-paced plotline, iconic Hong Kong elements (such as the famous rooftops), and clear symbolic imagery (fragile soap bubbles and unpredictable claw machines)—Ming Mei is shaken. Again, without passing judgement, Leung presents two arguments about how and why to write:

如果我把此刻身處異地的一切刻實記存，不添加任何典型印象，我可以指稱，這是屬於我的在地書寫——把幽微日常的裁片擷裁，以足夠自信去書寫，看似平凡淡然，無甚獨特或精闢觀點的修飾，擯棄所有靈黠的技巧、設計、點子，僅僅是張開感知的所在——然後坦然宣稱，也是此處，因為我們——就在此處。我們以眼目所見，耳廓所聽，每寸毛孔感知的種種，此身此刻，書寫即在地。

——〈愛人〉，梁莉姿

If I document every detail of my present in a foreign place, without adding any stereotypical imagery, I can say that this is my own situated writing—cutting and trimming the subtle fabric of everyday life, committing it to writing with sufficient confidence, even if it seems plain and ordinary, without decorating it with groundbreaking or witty opinions, letting go all clever techniques, plots, and ideas, and simply exit[ing] by opening up the senses—and I can declare openly that is local, situated, because we are here. What we see, what we hear, what we perceive through each pore, by experiencing this moment with this body, writing is situated and local.

— “Lover,” Leung Lee Chi

寫什麼不重要，寫下去才是。

——〈家長〉，梁莉姿

“What you write is not important; the important thing is to keep writing.”

— “Elder,” Leung Lee Chi

For Leung, the purpose of writing lies in the sustained effort to document and process lived experiences. Writing, in and of itself, is a gesture of resistance. What counts is the process in this open-ended journey, rather than a finite destination.

The title stories that conclude Leung’s eponymous collection, ‘The Melancholy of Trees (I)’ and ‘The Melancholy of Trees (II),’ present the reader with two different endings to Ming Mei’s novel, embodying this indefinite openness. The first leaves all questions about nostalgia, identity, trauma, and personal relationships unresolved, while the second contextualizes the history of colonial influences in and migrations to Taiwan, using the analogy of Okinawa pine trees to suggest hope. Echoing Leung’s notion that the “melancholy” of the present generation is similar to the uprooting of trees, Okinawa pines represent a species foreign to Taiwan that eventually managed to thrive there. Narratives, like migrations, don’t have to be finite; after upheaval and loss, one has to embark on the journey.

So’s ‘Letter Between Souls,’ set in the future, explores how writing processes the protests’ traumatic legacies—more specifically, how to navigate a sea of unreliable narratives to reclaim meaning and construct a new understanding of the self. The protagonist-narrator, the daughter of a protestor involved in a fictional suicide bomb attack during the Anti-ELAB movement, is profiled as a juvenile delinquent in need of constant surveillance and counseling. In order to work through her memories of her father, her councillor urges her to write a letter to him. 

這星期盧生交代要我給你寫信。內容字數自便，儘管洋洋灑灑寫下來──他說「寫」這件事本身有助於「梳理自己」──也不必讓他過目，他又說，做這些事是為了我自己好，和任何人無關。

This week, Lo Sang asked me to write you a letter. Content and length up to me, just let the words flow—he said that to write helps to comb through yourself—no need to let him read it, he also said, it’s for my own good and has nothing to do with anyone else.

According to the official narrative, her father was a mass murderer, “an example used to explain what a terrorist is.” But according to her mother, he was the scapegoat for an attack orchestrated by the government to delegitimize the movement. Her only memory of her father is of a visit to the Sandy Ridge Cemetery, near Hong Kong’s border with the mainland, to pay tribute to nameless protestors: “We should come here every year, many many people, lining up to come, to pass on the truth,” as her father told her. She has no way of knowing for sure what kind of person her father was, but as her councillor says, “he was first and foremost a human being.” The story questions the existence of “truth” when buried under so many layers of manipulated narratives, and foregoes the possibility of a clear moral verdict. Instead, the focus shifts to the trauma endured by the young girl—literally a child of the protests, deprived of the memories of her father. Writing, then, is also a way to comb through conflicting narratives, to formulate new understandings of one’s emotional subjectivity.

By addressing the Anti-ELAB movement and the ensuing waves of emigration, this open-ended, stylistically inventive, reflective body of Hong Kong literature documents a crucial transition in the history of Hong Kong, as old inherited forms of colonial governance are violently abolished, and its old identity dismantled.

如今沒有香港村，沒有流亡政府，沒有邊界，沒有中心，沒有定義，離岸的民族用減法削除到最後，如若百年前的思想家們佇立荒原，舉目皆是虛無。現在正是時候思考怎樣用加法增添意義。畢竟無論是哲學或經濟學，它們最重要的事情，是創造新的價值，而不是凝視著過往持續嘆息。

—— 〈H.K. State of Mind〉, 沐羽

“Now there is no Hong Kong Village, no government in exile, no periphery nor centre, no definition. At the end of the subtraction process, the diaspora sees only an expanse of nothingness, just like thinkers who found themselves in the wilderness a century ago. Now is the time to consider how to use addition to generate meaning. After all, be it philosophy or economics, the most important thing is to create new significance, not to stare at the past and keep sighing.”

— “H.K. State of Mind,” Mukyu

Writing constitutes such an “addition,” generating new meaning for Hongkongers within and beyond the city, as well as those who witness from afar. Translation, too, has the potential to become a vehicle to transport Hong Kong memories across geopolitical and linguistic borders, allowing a wider audience to extrapolate meaning from its recent history. Literature becomes a tool to chart an escape route from the disorienting present, inserting Hong Kong into a bigger postcolonial world as Hongkongers continue to reinvent their identity in Taiwan and beyond.

Catherine Xinxin Yu is a literary translator working with English, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Italian. She is interested in literature from Taiwan and Hong Kong, especially works that explore ecology, gender, indigeneity, and diaspora. Her translations are published in Asymptote Journal, The Oxonian Review, La Piccioletta Barca, and This Is Southeast Asia.