These two volumes offer a striking selection of Hong Kong 20th-century writing translated into English. The dynamic entrepot was for long considered something of a cultural desert but isn’t so now. These books show that in reality it wasn’t one for most of the last century either, at least as far as writing was concerned.
The title, uncontroversial as it sounds, nevertheless conceals a challenging stance. Everything in these books is translated from Chinese. In other words, international though Hong Kong was, and is, nothing written in any other language was considered for inclusion.
Was this right? Probably it was. London in the 19th century was an enormously powerful center, with many foreigners living there, but no one would expect an anthology of 19th-century British writing to contain anything by Zola (who lived there for nine months), or Marx or Engels (both of whom spent more than half their lives in England).
Even though there has been some wonderful fiction written in English about Hong Kong — notably Jess Row’s 2005 collection The Train to Lo Wu — the place is indubitably Chinese, and it isn’t an act of post-colonial vengeance to exclude non-Chinese writers from an anthology such as this.
The first volume consists of fiction, most of it short stories. The short story today, unlike in the days of Conrad, Kipling and James, is almost unsaleable — a recent volume of new Irish stories contained only one item that had ever been published anywhere else. But the result of this is that magnificent stories often now appear for the first time in anthologies. And some of the stories included here are magnificent indeed.
One such story is Patsy Lai Shan Kwan’s (關麗珊) The Angel and the Angel’s Halo (白色珊瑚的柔) of which the first sentence is “I know Patsy Kwan is not serious writer.” The speaker is a minor character in the story itself who wants to be made more important. This is a brilliant maneuver, and it’s developed with great sophistication. The character complains that she’s done important things, but that the author considers her insignificant. She discusses the author with the hero, hoping to get his support, but he takes the line that they have no free will in their particular situation. This quasi-theological debate makes for delightful complexity, which is added to by the heroine suffering from a multiple personality disorder.
Another fine story is A Girl Like Me (像我這樣的一個女子) by Xi Xi (西西). It’s told by someone who works as a beautician, but with the dead. Her aunt taught her the trade, and told her that she lost her lover when he found out. When the story opens the narrator is about to take her own boyfriend to her place of work for the first time. He shows up with some flowers, and the story ends with the line “He doesn’t realize what in our line of business, flowers are a last goodbye.”
Xi Xi has another story in this collection, Marvels of a Floating City (浮城誌異), illustrated with reproductions of paintings by Rene Magritte. It’s also brilliant, but I won’t reveal its plot this time, except to say that it doesn’t really have one. The two stories persuaded me I had to read anything by Xi Xi I could get hold of.
In the second volume Xi Xi had yet another piece, Elegy for a Breast (哀悼乳房), describing a cancer ward. All three items are characterized by tautly written confrontation with unpalatable facts spun out with an inventiveness that’s simultaneously logical and brutal.
The second volume is marginally less compulsive than the first. It covers poetry and essays, and the poems inevitably suffer from the fact that, off all literary genres, poetry loses most in translation. Many of the essays originated as newspaper comments on the shifting perceptions of Hong Kong under the British, and are frequently ironic, to say the least. Hong Kong Chinese during the period were caught between an often sublimated resentment at being anyone’s colony and a desire not to be identified with China, and this tension produced a penchant for sarcasm and all-too-transparent metaphor that is everywhere apparent.
But as the editor points out, Hong Kong received two major waves of immigrants from China, first during the Japanese invasion of the 1930s, then, in far larger numbers, following the Communist victory of 1949. Many established writers were included in both groups.
Furthermore, colonial Hong Kong permitted almost total intellectual freedom. It never banned whole swathes of writers in the way both Beijing and Taipei did from the 1950s through the 1970s, and its English-based educational system saw to it that the young could quickly become familiar, if they were so minded, with literary developments worldwide. The result was a unique culture, based in Chinese tradition but not limited to it. Taiwan achieved something similar, but later, and in a mix that gave greater priority to Japanese and American influences.
The editor who I have in part been quoting from is none other then Eva Hung (孔慧怡), praised in this space only two weeks ago for her edition of The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai (海上花列傳). She’s the driving force behind a wide range of literary translation from Chinese into English, and is the translator of not a few of the items published here.
Jiang Qing (江青) on trial on TV, a memory of China’s Cultural Revolution, a promised “high level of autonomy” for Hong Kong (like Tibet’s), the “sacred territory” of the Diaoyu Islands (total area 7km²), working in a restaurant in the US after gaining a degree from National Taiwan University — these essays are full of sardonic attitudes that would be welcome in Taiwan’s media even today.
Hong Kong is a place I’m always glad to leave. But it’s surprising how often I dream of going back.
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