City Like Water by Dorothy Tse out from Fitzcarraldo and translated by Natascha Bruce, is her third book to be translated into English, following the surreal short story collection Snow and Shadow (translated by Nicky Harman) and the novel Owlish (translated by Natascha Bruce). As is not unusual with translated fiction, there has been a significant gap between publication in the original language and the release of the translation. Tse’s original Chinese novella, part of a larger collection, was published in 2020, shortly after the 2019-20 pro-democratic protests in her native Hong Kong. Like Owlish, in which student protests form the backdrop to a university professor’s love affair with a life-sized, animated doll, City Like Water bears the marks of Hong Kong’s shifting political realities, and its cultural and literary heritage, on every page.
Language in the floating city
In a 2011 essay for the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, Dorothy Tse described the experience of living and writing in a city where English, Cantonese, Mandarin and regional dialects are part of everyday life. Hong Kong literature inhabits its own sphere, distinct from mainland writing in that it contains “a tradition of resistance to the language of daily life” and uses “highly experimental language” as part of “an active rejection of utilitarian society and mundane everyday life.” In the same essay, Tse calls out Hong Kong author Xi Xi’s 1984 work Marvels of a Floating City, in which versions, or visions, of Hong Kong are reflected through thirteen paintings by René Magritte. Experimentation, surrealist imagery and rejection of mainland culture are part of the lifeblood of Hong Kong’s literary scene. Tse’s use of language and narrative, in Natascha Bruce’s precise yet poetic translation, is based on of a series of surreal images which, taken together, allow the reader to identify that the unnamed city at the heart of the book is indeed Hong Kong refracted through a prism of dream-logic which is often closer to nightmare, its identity crumbling under the weight of political oppression and crackdowns on free speech and the right to protest.
Umbrellas, subway stations and police brutality
The novel’s unnamed, unreliable narrator is living in a city in which memories cannot be trusted, and in which things are no longer as they were. Memory is “a ravenous, never-tidied storeroom, constantly in motion. A chaotic sea”. The streets on which the narrator grew up have been lost from the map, “no longer on the city’s epidermis”, their inhabitants having turned into cockroaches and “scuttled off into the dark”. The ever-shifting nature of reality is carried through the novel by the image of waves and the sea, the city like water forever breaking and remaking itself.
The central narrative is one of growing protest, rising police presence and disappearances. The narrator’s mother, having been sold a lotus root which bleeds, bands together with other neighbourhood women to complain to the police, only to find that it is a police officer who is responsible. Having occupied the local wet market in protest, the women are sprayed by riot police with a substance that turns them into “shimmering bronze statues” and disappear, only to be portrayed on the television news as “members of a criminal gang that disguised themselves as housewives”. The narrator’s father, left behind, retreats from reality and into his favourite soap operas to such an extent that he disappears into the television screen, becoming a background character in the programmes.
In the meantime, the world outside becomes more violent, the spectre of ‘The Law’ ever more present. Sleep-walking residents scream from their windows in an echo of the 2019 ‘million scream’ protests. The subway system becomes “a shiny new toy” for the police, who commandeer the control room, close station exits and cancel trains, and a man with a bloodstained shirt and a broken neck can no longer remember his way to Station 831 (a reference to the 2019 ‘831 incident’ in which police brutally attacked passengers at the Prince Edward subway station). Censorship and propaganda are portrayed through lies on the television news, the “internet black hole” which swallows search results and a retelling of the Causeway Bay Books disappearances in which books are portrayed as birds. The police are the object of both fear and ridicule, described both as overpowered children “giddy with excitement” about shooting protesters and as plain-clothed spies, ready to “flip and reveal themselves, like terrifying poker cards”. The narrator’s sister, missing and forgotten by the family, drifts through the story as a black-clothed figure scaling walls, or floating through the air with an umbrella.
The End?
As one might expect, there is no neat resolution to the story. The narrator, having escaped the city through an underground labyrinth, clings onto memories of a place that may never have existed, haunted by nostalgia. In the real Hong Kong, the 2020 national security law sparked a wave of emigration and ushered in a new era of state control from the Chinese mainland, furthered by the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance in 2024.
City Like Water is not only about Hong Kong. In the closing pages of the novel, the narrator mentions reading a book about “the familiar story of the downfall of our city, except the city’s name is unfamiliar and it’s 12,708 kilometres away from the place I used to live”. Censorship, erosion of free speech and the right to protest, police violence and denial of human rights are not limited by borders or geography. Tse’s book is, unfortunately, of increasing relevance to all of us.
Reviewed by Clem Clement for BookBlast®
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