The Best Hong Kong Novels

What distinguishes Hong Kong as a literary landscape?

Hong Kong people love efficiency. We love productivity. Novelist Dung Kai-cheung once said that literature generates such little economic value, the people who choose to write in Hong Kong have to be the most passionate and dedicated. It’s a city of 7 million people and a claustrophobic world. Fiction gives you an escape, allowing you to create your own world when the outside world doesn’t respect what you’re doing. It allows you to imagine other possibilities.

The iconic Hong Kong writer Xi Xi (1937-2022) was a poet and essayist as well as a novelist. Her novel, Mourning a Breast, will be published by New York Review Books in July 2024. Can you tell me more about it?

This book shows you who Xi Xi is as a person. It encompasses seriousness in how it draws on the author’s first-hand knowledge and experience, as well as lightness in her optimism and language. It’s a novel with bits of poetry, elements of autofiction, essays, dictionary entries, pictures… it even asks readers to choose a sequence of chapters to read or skip. Xi Xi takes us through diagnosis, surgery, radiotherapy, rehabilitation, and how she rebuilt a relationship with her body. It’s a question of how the language of the body can be translated into a language that we can understand.

I particularly enjoyed how she uses mythology and metaphor to speak about her breast cancer experience. She compares her post-mastectomy body to various Chinese monsters defined by missing parts of the body to express her grief. As she’s recovering from surgery, she likens the human body to a seamless heavenly garment capable of healing. When a friend who has been touched by breast cancer reaches out to her, she thinks of her as the angel Gabriel comforting the Virgin Mary. Reading this novel is like taking a trip through Xi Xi’s personal museum of art, literature, and experience.

The novel was first published in 1992, some thirty years ago.

That’s right. At the time, it was the first breast cancer narrative to be published in Chinese, on a subject that was still very much taboo. Hong Kong had not experienced the movement around breast cancer awareness that took place in the Anglophone world, where many female patients wrote about their illness as a way to reclaim the narrative dominated by medical practitioners, and to advocate for political changes surrounding breast cancer and its treatment. When Xi Xi found a lump in her breast, the Chinese superstition to avoid speaking about illnesses was still dominant. But Xi Xi was not bound by any rules. She featured a breast cancer patient who was a man. She used painting, sculpture and architecture to reflect on the meanings of breasts in different cultures and histories. She wrote about how illness helped her to listen to the language of the body. She wanted to help others by demystifying the illness and breaking the silence around it with her writing.

For Xi Xi, illness is a siren telling us that we need to stop and go back to the language of the body, and figure out how to properly listen to it, and how to translate it through the work of doctors and science. She takes long walks around Hong Kong, she’s interested in physiology and art and language, she wonders out loud what bras people can wear after they’ve had a mastectomy. She compares translations of Madame Bovary during her hospital stay, and comments on the nutritional values of different foods using a poem featuring characters from Journey to the West. Mourning a Breast is really a book that lets you see every facet of Xi Xi as a writer.

The next novel you’re recommending is The Drunkard, by Liu Yichang—perhaps best known for inspiring the cult classic Wong Kar-wai movie In the Mood for Love.

Unusually for its time, this is a novel that’s completely focused on the inner life of the protagonist. He lives in Hong Kong and wants to pursue ‘serious’ or highbrow literature, but he’s forced to make a living writing serialized wuxia or martial arts fiction for newspapers. He finds it degrading, but he also desperately needs the money because he’s addicted to alcohol. He’s always drunk.

A friend of his similarly loves highbrow fiction, and his mother has given him her life savings to fund a serious literary magazine in Hong Kong. The friend invites the protagonist to be the editor of this magazine, but the protagonist’s drinking keeps getting in the way of his either doing meaningful work on the magazine, or selling out by writing wuxia fiction. There seems to be no way out for the protagonist trapped between his love for highbrow literature and the highly capitalist city that does not reward many writers with financial stability. Liu himself lived a similar double life at one point of his literary career: he once said that he wrote popular fiction to entertain others and ‘serious’ fiction to entertain himself. He wrote The Drunkard in his spare time whilst being a busy newspaper editor by day. Writers and artists will identify with the angst captured in the novel. It’s a book that drags you into the protagonist’s dark inner life.

One thing that always stands out to people about the movie In the Mood for Love is its depiction of what Kyle Chayka calls “glamour with a streak of grittiness” in the ambience of 1960s Hong Kong.

Liu Yichang’s depiction of Hong Kong is more cynical and jaded than Wong Kar-wai’s portrayal of the city. It’s a city in which nobody cares about literature and everybody worships money. Prostitutes are selling their services to American sailors in the bars of Wan Chai. Desperate men are turning to robbery. It’s by no means romanticised. And we’re seeing Hong Kong through the eyes of the protagonist, who is depressed. When he’s drinking, the tone of the stream-of-consciousness narrative shifts, and the protagonist starts saying whatever comes to mind for him. Yet, when he sobers up and meets his friend to discuss literature, he can give you fully thought out monologues on China’s May Fourth Literature and experimental literary works from the Western world he considers must-reads for the highbrow reader. I really like how the author brings together the dreamy world of the drunkard and the serious world of highbrow literature in the same book: these contrasting poles tied together with the daily struggles of a drunkard leave a lasting impression.

Let’s talk about Dung Kai-cheung’s Atlas: Archaeology of an Imaginary City. What’s distinctive about the way in which Dung tells stories?

Dung Kai-cheung is very cerebral. And this particular book is about the study of history as a way of thinking, with a fictional spin on the history of some of Hong Kong’s most beloved places. It was written around 1997, the year when the sovereignty of Hong Kong was passed from the UK to China, and afterward, he said that he wanted to look back into history to try and see the future of Hong Kong. So even though the subject of the book is serious, there’s a certain playfulness in Dung’s fiction. He plays games with fiction masterfully, by writing the absurd in a serious way.

For instance, one of the pieces in the book is about Ice House Street in Central, which got its name from an ice house that was the new colony’s only source of ice, imported from North America. The ships would dock in Central, and then they would push these huge blocks of ice into the storage facility, hence the name of the street. But in Dung’s narrative, the European colonists would come to the ice house to store their hopes and dreams there, because they were afraid that their fragile dreams would decay in the subtropical heat. He writes that the homesick Europeans kept a secret society in the ice house, a space decorated like a typical British sitting room, but in which the fireplace emanates not warmth but the coldness of the ice.

That’s fascinating and also sounds very genre-bendy.

Yes, Dung took a lot of theories about how maps and historical records are made, and wrote the novel as if he was writing a non-fiction book. As the reader comes across the carefully placed fictionalised details puncturing the historical facts behind real street names, whether history must always be so serious becomes questionable. In Dung’s writing, history, too, is a narrative form that will resonate differently with each individual. It reminds you: depicting something through the lens of fiction is a choice rather than a given. Ultimately, in The Atlas, Dung Kai-cheung is fantasizing about an alternate history of Hong Kong. The homesickness for Europe that he’s describing certainly existed. But placing it in the ice house is Dung’s move.

Chan Ho-kei’s The Borrowed is a very different kind of book—a gripping detective novel.

The novel spans half a century. We start with meeting the two detectives in 2013, and then you go backwards in time (as far as 1967) to meet their younger selves and see how what happened in the past informed what happened in the future. The novel encompasses a number of classic detective stories that play with the conventions of the genre: there’s a starlet falling from a bridge to her death, a kidnapping, rival gangs, the 1967 riots against the colonial government. It shows how Hong Kong evolved from a city rife with corruption to one of the least corrupt places in the world. And there’s also a dimension of social commentary: during the colonial era, many higher-ranked policemen were white men.

What did you like most about the book?

It’s a page-turner. It’s a thick book—a block, basically—but I couldn’t put it down. It draws you in with all its twists and turns, and its powerful sense of momentum. The Borrowed has won major awards in Japan and Taiwan and been translated into over a dozen languages. And of course, you know a book’s made it when Wong Kar-wai buys the movie rights.

Let’s talk about the last Hong Kong novel you’re recommending, which is The Kite Family, by Hon Lai-chu.

Here I’m cheating a little—this is a collection of six novellas, but although they’re not linked in plot, I think they’re very connected in terms of their style. Hon Lai-chu has a very distinctive way of using language. She takes the most familiar aspects of living in Hong Kong—the streets, the construction noises, even the mother who nags you when you want to sleep in at the weekend—and re-examines them through a surreal, almost Kafkaesque lens. One character wants to become a chair. Another goes to the dentist and complains of teeth growing out of their mouth. Hon Lai-chu conveys the inner struggles of modern city dwellers who are lonely living their isolated lives.

This surreal lens, including the verbal tic of describing Hong Kong with an alias (such as “City Y”), has been influential to a generation of Hong Kong writers. Nowadays, the trend in Hong Kong literature tends towards a more realist approach with more direct commentary on events. But when I was a young writer, works like The Kite Family really inspired me to think about how far away from reality I could possibly go while still remaining grounded. It invites you to look into its collection of memories and experiences and find your own ways of interpreting Hong Kong.

Tell me more about how these books shaped your journey as a writer.

All these writers go above and beyond—look at all the research Dung Kai-cheung does on subjects like mapmaking and the history of printing. Look at how Xi Xi perseveres through the experience of losing function in one of her arms as a result of breast cancer. Hon Lai-chu’s work inspired me to think about issues of personal style and the power of fictionalising the world—Liu Yichang’s endless experimentation with the form of fiction encouraged me to always look for new ways to tell stories. Chan Ho-kei’s work remind me that reading fiction can be an intensely engaging and entertaining experience, and each genre has its own joys for me to discover. There’s just no way of running away from fiction if you really like it. It will end up pursuing you.