Writing the Hong Kong self: fiction, artifacts and the making of history in Dung Kai-cheung’s Works and Creation: Vivid and Lifelike

Abstract

ABSTRACT Hong Kong’s tumultuous political history over the last decade has continuously shed some light on the city’s complicated relationship with the Chinese mainland. At its core, this relationship is manifested in a nexus of power struggles between three contending ideologies—localism, Chinese nationalism and Western imperialism—that has prevailed all through Hong Kong’s colonial rule. This paper attempts to offer an alternative conceptual framework under which Hong Kong’s coloniality and its connection to the mainland are viewed with more nuances. Centering on the Hong Kong native writer Dung Kai-cheung’s 2005 novel Works and Creation: Vivid and Lifelike, this paper examines the ways in which Works interrogates the shifting paradigms of knowledge production on Hong Kong identity alongside the historical development of the city. In particular, my analysis focuses on how the narrator purposefully sets up a parallel between the creation of self and that of modern artifacts, leading eventually to a parallel between fiction writing and existing discourses of history and identity. Such a way of presenting Hong Kong’s history draws attention not only to the deficiencies in existing discourses on identity as embedded in the above-mentioned power structure, but also to the danger of imagining Hong Kong’s future in a perpetually dichotomized manner. Despite being written in the opening years of the twenty-first century, Works proves to be an insightful contribution—as this paper ultimately seeks to demonstrate—to Hong Kong’s ongoing political struggles.