Review | Hong Kong Writers Circle’s anthology Masking the City uses allegory to explore life in Hong Kong
A collection of tales from sixteen English-language authors reflects and refracts the reality of life in the city told through allegory
Masking the City: Hong Kong in Allegory edited by Nathan Lauer, Hong Kong Writers Circle
Writers’ groups provide isolated or gregarious literary artists with the comradeship of shared successes and shared commiserations. They vary from highly organised groups with clear writing and publication goals to rough collectives of drinkers in need of company.
Hong Kong Writers Circle has been bringing together English-language authors in the city since 1991, and is at the more structured and productive end of this spectrum. It conducts critical workshops, social meetups and produces an annual anthology. Previous editions have collected members’ stories of the ghosts of Hong Kong, crime and work.
This year, contributions to the anthology – to be launched at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival – were invited to shelter under the umbrella of allegory. Sixteen authors offer a range of often clever and sometimes very funny strategies for indirectly addressing contemporary life and its changes in Hong Kong. Forms range from legend-like tales through realist contemporary narratives to next-minute and high-fantasy strands of science fiction.
It is, editor Nathan Lauer indirectly suggests in his introduction, in the spirit of the age.
In her allusive fantasy, JM Wong imagines “a world made up of four cities on the backs of four sacred beasts”. In Jason Y Ng’s domestic drama, “The Visits”, authorities return a child to his Chinese birth parents after 10 years of being fostered by a Chinese-British family. The reunification is not smooth and 14-year-old Jake Kai Fung stays in his room playing video games Doom and Fallout. Nonetheless, Mr and Mrs Zhong assure the inexperienced social worker that everything is perfect, everyone is happy, and the family should never have been separated in the first place.
Suggestions of family disharmony are apparent elsewhere in the collection. Jervina Lao’s “Til Death Do Us Part” – a story of waning love – is set in the office of the renowned but unlicensed marriage counsellor Dr Liberty Wong. The character names in “Chasing the Green Dragon” by Sam Lee could have leapt from Thomas Pynchon – Placebo Pang, Aphrodite Rumstrum and Feldman Fu are caught up in financial drama around WeDontWork™.
Stewart C Mackay’s Swiftian satire “Motherf***ers” closes the collection. It’s an Oedipal tale of sorts. The narrator’s life pivoted on his encounter as a child with the alien rudeness of a sweary gweilo. Flash-forward, and courtesy is declining everywhere. The near-future governor legislates The Polite Society Act, drawing resistance from the young. The pink-dressed, anti-politeness movement leads rude chants, neglects niceties, deliberately fails to show respect and leads an insurrection based on widespread insolence.
Pro-government groups respond: Dad and a whole load of other people his age go en masse to shopping malls to be aggressively polite. Pro- and anti-pink rumours spread: the movement has been infiltrated – depending on which social media bubble one inhabits – by either government spies or agents of the West.
As might be expected in any anthology, some stories are stronger than others. Here, allegory is better suited to some contributors. That said, Masking the City brings a double reading of surface and allegorical connections – which gives it a timely charge and an extra, resonant layer of invention.
Masking the City launches at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival on November 13
