Hong Kong authors are a highly reflective, melancholy lot, if those represented in a new collection of short stories are typical. The quiet, slow pace of their storytelling and their proximity to our natural selves contrasts sharply with this city's less personal commercial pulse.
If film stories serve up instant thrills, Eva Tung's selection of literature offers the opposite. These are stories to savour slowly, to be enjoyed for revealing the souls of students and office workers, of those living in housing estates or even the supposedly glamorous in the film industry.
Although highly modern in form - shunning traditional storytelling techniques - they are also imbued with Chinese cultural identity. Addendum To A Conversation, by Chan Po Chun, and The Young Shen Nong, by Dung Kai Cheung, for instance, both intertwine present-day relationships with ancient myths.
Addendum offers a new take on divorce. Chan explodes the traditional view that the mythical Chang E must have regretted taking lonely refuge on the moon. Instead, she is turned into an icon for abused, disappointed women who secure their peaceful independence from their men.
In The Young Shen Nong, another myth is reversed in modern life. Dung tells the story of the ox-head character who invented agriculture and medicine but found misery in his immortality following the death of his beloved mortal partner, Lei. In the present, he is incarnated as a 'Screwball' student, a greeny obsessed by environmental perils, and hard to love. Unlike the chivalrous hero of mythology, he is full of the mortal weakness of male arrogance, yet powerless to protect himself.
A motley Hong Kong film crew is the vehicle for exploring modern Chinese history in Wong Bik Wan's Plenty And Sorrow. Wong also writes screenplays and borrows the film world's style and lingo, in a story of love smashed by revolution.