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Hong Kong ID:  Stories from the City's Hidden Writers

Edited by Dania Shawwa

Haven Books, $120

Hong Kong ID  brings together a  diverse selection of 19 writers who take Hong Kong as their subject in 20 short  stories. Unfortunately, it's a Hong Kong viewed through the lattice of sometimes cumbersome prose. The contributors range widely in ability, with fresh graduates and second-language English speakers alongside experienced  writers,  and they've been poorly served by some loose editing.

A couple of the stories are, frankly, incomprehensible,  and others would have benefited from the writers killing their  darlings - an old dictum advising  that it's  often the  sections of prose a writer likes best that should be pruned.

Some of the stories seem truncated,  with the characters unable to gather enough dimension and the plot much momentum before the piece reaches an abrupt and premature end. Yet a truly talented writer  can distil a good story into a single page.

For stories to succeed within the confines of so few pages, a much tighter narrative  and more rigorous editing is necessary.  There's also a disappointing lack of nuance and reliance on stereotypes.

Yet, for all its failings, this book, as a project to encourage new and established local writers, and to unearth unique glimpses of  the city, deserves praise.

The writers have given us a fresh look at Hong Kong scenes (in Star Travel,  Andrew Doig  describes the Star ferries as being run on 'equal amounts of diesel and sentimentality') and they've shown the city to be at once strange and familiar.

In Eat and Sleep,  Freddy Au Pok-shun  captures the rhythm of family life of long- time city dwellers; Karen Chaulam  Cheung's  No Suspicious Circumstances  sketches the  last day in the life of a lonely elderly woman, for whom the city can no longer be considered a home. Roseanne Thong's  Beyond the Horizon  describes the hopes invested in  the territory by an illegal immigrant;  Victoria Button's  Dirt  is a charming vignette  of an alienating city where love can flourish;  and Ilyas Khan's  sparse and poignant Tattered Epaulettes  reveals the invisibility of a Sikh family who have made the city their home  for generations,  embracing it without always being embraced in return.

The epilogue, Finding My English,  by  Xu  Xi,  speaks of the joy of a multilingual writer's quest for an English that suits her fiction.  Xu Xi suggests that the western world might not be ready to embrace the narratives  that employ new and unfamiliar vernaculars  within English-language writing. Yet a good yarn is a good yarn and readers will persevere with an unfamiliar vernacular for the sake of  a good read.

Xu Xi says that 'finding language for your fiction is rather like finding the language  for love'. It begins with 'infantile babbling' and becomes more 'shapely' as love matures. With the encouragement of collections such  as this, may Hong Kong's writers learn to express, without artifice, their experience  of  the city.



Hong Kong ID: Stories from the City's Hidden Writers