The Hong Kong Modernism of Leung Ping-kwan by C. T. Au (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Hong Kong Modernism of Leung Ping-kwan by C. T. Au Howard Y. F. Choy C. T. Au. The Hong Kong Modernism of Leung Ping-kwan. Lexington Books, 2020. 202 p. Considered a sequel to her Modernist Aesthetics in Taiwanese Poetry Since the 1950s (Leiden: Brill, 2008) and a synthesis of eight Chinese articles and an English chapter published between 2009 and 2017, Chung To Au's 區仲桃 The Hong Kong Modernism of Leung Ping-kwan studies the creative and critical writings--including poetry, fiction, travelogues and essays--of writer-scholar Leung Ping-kwan 梁秉鈞 (nom de plume Yasi/Ye Si 也斯, 12 Mar. 1949-5 Jan. 2013) through the lens of modernism. Au's monograph is a new addition to earlier scholarship on Leung by Ackbar Abbas, Ikegami Sadako 池上貞子, John Minford, Leonard K. K. Chan 陳國球, Lo Kwai Cheung 羅貴祥, Rey Chow 周蕾, Wolfgang [End Page 218] Kubin and others. In the first chapter of five, Au defines "Hong Kong modernism" by relating Leung's modernist literature to Western modernisms as well as Chinese modernism of the 1940s, distinguishing it from Taiwanese modernism on the one hand and borrowing Peter Brooker's idea of "altermodernism," an alternative or variant postcolonial, multicultural modernism, on the other. Au discusses Hong Kong as a modern city and Hongkongers' problematic Chinese identity, placing Ye Si on a par with two early Hong Kong modernists, Lau Yee Cheung 劉以鬯 (Liu Yichang, 1918-2018) and Ma Lang 馬朗 (1933-). The following chapter further traces Leung's modernism to the Chinese shuqing 抒情 'lyrical' and yongwu 詠物 literary traditions. Starting from Leung's critical essays on lyricism, Au argues that his "poems on objects" (yongwu shi 詩), particularly those on food, are less successful than his fiction in maintaining the correlation between humans and objects due to his optimistic, instead of sentimental, tone and his control over food in poetry. Based on an interview with the poet, the author understands that such objects enable him to express his idea, rather than inspire him to write poems. Yet this power relationship is complicated and changed in his fiction, where food embodies metaphorical meanings beyond its normal function. The reviewer finds that such subject/object binary opposition attributed to Leung's poetic "failure" is too mechanical, untrue, and therefore unconvincing. The third chapter focuses on Leung's invention of the "extraordinary ordinary" under the subthemes of home, medicine, clothes and, again, food. The author suggests that the poet discovers his home in foreign places, such as the old houses of Freud, Kafka and Brecht in Vienna, Prague and Berlin, respectively. More interestingly, Ye Si's modernism is related to medicine, mainly madness, as found in Paper Cuts (Jianzhi 剪紙1977--while Au translated the title as Paper Cutouts, I prefer Brian Holton's rendition Paper Cuts [Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2015]). Au's coined term "colonial dis-ease," unfortunately, is not fully explained in the book. The issue of colonial identity is addressed allegorically in modern fashion, especially through an intertextual reading of Ye Si's Clothink (Yi xiang 衣想, 1998) and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Lastly, Leung's poems on food and his novel Postcolonial Affairs of Food and the Heart (Houzhimin [End Page 219] shiwu yu aiqing 後殖民食物與愛情, 2009) are reexamined in relation to the formation of a fluid, hybrid Hong Kong identity. However, the importance of the Cantonese daily language in his writings is not mentioned at all. Chapter four explores the writer's multiple perspectives developed from his travelogues and magical realist fiction in a global context. Au points out that Ye Si has gone beyond imperialism and colonialism in these two subgenres. He employs magical realism to describe mental illness and people's alienation to Hong Kong and meta-fictionalizes his "countertravel writings" by merging various forms of lyrical novel, prose, autobiography, criticism, odes, and even email from the standpoint of different types of travelers, including both the colonizer and the colonized. In the concluding chapter, Au returns to the beginnings of modernism through translation. Leung's literary career started with reading masterpieces of world literature in translation, such as Shakespeare and Tolstoy. Then, in the early 1970s, he translated foreign literature into Chinese, including French nouveaux romans...