Steffi Sin Reviews Looking Back at Hong Kong: An Anthology of Writing and Art

Nicolette Wong is a writer from Hong Kong and the author of Stone Bride Madrigals published by corrupt press (Luxembourg). She is the editor in chief of A-minor Magazine, and the founder of A-minor Press. A recipient of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council Project Grant (Literary Arts), she has been a featured author at the Hong Kong Book Fair and Hong Kong International Literary Festival. She is currently the Writer in Residence at the Research Centre for Human Values, Department of English, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Looking Back at Hong Kong: An Anthology of Writing and Art features English-language writing about Hong Kong from writers who are former residents. Edited by Nicolette Wong, the anthology from Cart Noodles Press focuses on how to remember the past, the validity of a Hongkonger’s grief during the protests, and how to find a way forward in the aftermath of trauma. Looking Back at Hong Kong is available for purchase via The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press and Amazon.

“Slowly, she unties the ribbon and unwraps the box. She lifts the lid to find a black resin rollerball pen inlaid with that unmistakable symbol of a snow-covered peak. Not a pen. A writing instrument. A weapon,” Q.M. Zhang writes (136). Each writer in this anthology picks up their pen in the wake of violence and destruction from the protests. In Looking Back at Hong Kong: An Anthology of Writing and Art, Zhang’s piece, titled “Proximate Things,” reflects on her experience as a teacher in Hong Kong. She invites her students in 1990s Hong Kong to discuss democracy, and Zhang’s act of writing, of remembering, reconciles with not seeing the political reality of Hong Kong until now (125). One student states simply, “Education is the foundation of democracy” (124), while another is torn between colonial ideals and cultural traditions (129)—reactions very much situated in the past. As the essay evolves, Zhang ruminates in third person on the Hong Kong that now only exists in her memory, and what Hong Kong means to her as a Chinese American, both in the past and in the present. The collected works in this anthology continually urge the reader to consider, and reconsider: what does it mean to be Chinese? What does being a Hongkonger mean after one physically leaves Hong Kong? And what does someone who once lived there owe Hong Kong now?  

Zhang asserts that Hong Kong was “a liminal place for liminal people with no expectations of racial, cultural, or national purity, a place where identity was always a work in progress, where she might be able to carve out her own motley way of being Chinese” (130) because there are many ways of being Chinese (134-135). The writers in the anthology convey the ideas of “diasporic dissonance” and “diasporic privilege” with eloquence and awareness. Shui-yin Sharon Yam’s essay “Diasporic Discordance: On Memories and Hong Kong” discusses struggles with survivor’s guilt and imposter syndrome (138) for those who left Hong Kong. She emphasizes, “Diasporic dissonance means always having to toggle between two conflicting realities” (141).

Those realities include waking up with heartbreak for a place, a home, the writer can no longer lay claim to; wondering if she has the right to grieve if she is half a world away. It’s being torn with guilt for not carrying through with her responsibility as an educator to protect her students “as they come face to face with a government and police force that dehumanized them as cockroaches” (141). Yam and other writers in this anthology push readers to question the “ethical weight of witnessing from afar” (143). Does emigrating from Hong Kong and physically leaving behind the political turmoil make someone’s identity as a Hongkonger less valid (143)? To further complicate matters, who to call an ally becomes deeply convoluted when American politicians during the Trump Administration took a stance on the Hong Kong protests, since those same politicians “called for military suppression of Black protestors domestically” (144), using the Hong Kong protests to further their own agendas. Yam’s words ring true: “a diasporic subject’s sense of allegiance does not fall along neat nationalist lines” (144).

The anthology offers insight for Chinese Americans, whose parents or grandparents have emigrated from Hong Kong, or if they themselves claimed new citizenship out of necessity or nomadic desire. It encourages Chinese Americans to reflect and dissect the roots of their heritage without handing easy answers to its readers. For those who haven’t learned or experienced Hong Kong history firsthand, a quick internet search is required to decipher the meaning of important dates and references to specific laws and factions in the fight for democracy. But because the writers of the anthology do not hand over the answers, they ask readers to acknowledge their commitment to understanding the complexity of Hong Kong identity, and make readers work to unearth their own answers instead. Knowledge, like democracy, is not given freely.

 As Xu Xi writes in “Where the World Unwrapped,” “It’s too easy to remember the good old days as good, and overlook what was wrong about the city, why we chose to leave, why we did not return more often than we could have” (16). It’s easy to entertain sentiment because “sentiment often arises from privilege” (17), the same “diasporic privilege” Yam puts under the microscope (146). There is privilege in Hongkongers who left and can “pick up the baton” in their current countries and homes without the same risk of the criminal charges frontline protestors face now. That said, Yam, like many of the writers in this anthology, ponders if the next lecture or essay will be the one that endangers her return to Hong Kong in the future.  

In the U.S., students are wary of a return to Hong Kong. Appearing briefly in recent news cycles is a mention of the removal of the Tiananmen Square memorial statue. There is also privilege in people who don’t have ties to Hong Kong, who were born into democracy and have the luxury to look the other way when others fight for their rights on the other side of the world. Looking Back at Hong Kong invites readers to confront their guilt, their complicity, their privilege, no matter their roots. Looking Back is a collection “about a Hong Kong that no longer exists” (Xi 17), but most importantly, it is a collection of art, of poems and prose, on the grief and trauma from the aftermath of the protests, on things that can’t be found from a simple search on the internet peering into the fraught political history of Hong Kong. With subtle yellow imagery and umbrella metaphors, the writers in this collection pick up their pens. They wield their weapons. They look back, they dissect the past, and they complicate a Hongkonger’s frustration and sorrow to find a way to move forward. And to find a way forward is to sit and face the “blank sheet [that] appears on the table in front of her,” to put “pen tip to paper,” Zhang writes, because “the personal is political” (136).

Steffi Sin is a Chinese-American writer from San Francisco. She will be graduating from the MFA program in Creative Writing at Arizona State University in May 2022. Her work has been published by The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She is Nonfiction Editor of of Hayden’s Ferry Review.