Literary Collections

How do we situate ourselves when we navigate the city of Hong Kong—physically, and in our minds? Against a backdrop of bustling density and movement, the difficulties of making space have shaped our days. From the challenges of limited living space and the quest for personal space, to the everyday negotiations of our identities in the social space, we are constantly confronted with the question: How do we redefine the distance between the city, others, and ourselves, and between the selves within us?

This collection features prose, poetry and artwork from writers and artists in or from Hong Kong, as well as those who have had a close connection with the city, that explore the (im)possibility of making space. How do we remake space in our lives and our creative practices? What does this (im)possibility mean in (or in relation to) Hong Kong today?

This is a most unusual book. For several decades Xi Xi has been widely known for her award-winning poetry and fiction. This time, she has chosen to write about the teddy bears she began making in 2005, after treatment for cancer, in order to improve the mobility of her right hand. She made the bears herself from scratch, choosing some of her favourite characters from history and legend such as the Taoist philosopher Master Zhuang, the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan, and Beauty and the Beast. She also created exquisite items of clothing for them and wove a series of delightfully witty essays around them, giving her readers fascinating insights into Chinese culture, and into the ways in which Chinese clothing and fashion have evolved through the ages.

This is a book for all who love literature and teddy bears.

David Hawkes, described by a distinguished fellow sinologist as "the best living translator in our field, as well as one of the nicest people to have graced our profession", celebrates his eightieth birthday this year (2003). In this unusual and varied Birthday Book (a Festschrift with a difference), over forty of David's friends, students, colleagues and admirers from all over the world have come together to wish him a happy birthday, and to celebrate the man, and his exceptional scholarly and creative achievements.

David Hawkes is best known for his masterful translations, in which he has set the highest standards, not only of scholarship, but also of creative ingenuity and eloquence, standards that have inspired a whole generation of translators. But as readers will discover from this rich collection, the books are only part of the story: over the years their author has touched and inspired a great number of people — as teacher, friend, and mentor — perhaps more deeply than his own modesty has allowed him to realise.

This book is divided into three parts. The first part consists of informal reminiscences, poems and personal contributions of various kinds; the second part brings together essays, both sinological and general; the third and last part consists of translations. The volume is embellished by a number of photographs, paintings, and pieces of calligraphy. The publication has been generously supported by the Hong Kong Translation Society, to honour one of the great scholars of our time.

Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), the brother of writer Lu Xun, was one of the most controversial intellectuals in modern China. Radically at odds with many of his contemporaries, Zhou opposed the May Fourth reformers. His work was banned in both mainland China and Taiwan for many years as a result of his collaboration with the Japanese puppet government during the Sino-Japanese War.

This collection of essays presents an alternative vision of China as a nation, questioning the dichotomy between modernity and tradition and espousing a literary style that values openness and individualism.

Amidst the reshaping of Hong Kong’s social, cultural, political and ideological landscape, how do we reenvisage a city that exists in our memories? For those who have left their hometown—or the place they once called home—the question, “What does it mean to be a Hongkonger?” marks a constant shift between conflicting realities, identities and perceptions. Beyond the act of remembering, how do we reimagine our relationship with Hong Kong in the present and the future?

In this collection of prose, poetry and photography by eighteen writers and artists, we see a gathering of reflections on the profound changes and subtle transitions that have transpired in Hong Kong, both in recent times and over the past decades.

After her celebrated The Teddy Bear Chronicles, Xi Xi turns her creative vision towards the world of the primate kingdom. At the age of 73, Xi Xi traveled extensively across Asia, from tropical forests to conservation centers, immersing herself in the natural world of apes and monkeys.
Xi Xi then documented 51 endearing ape and monkey puppets that she had sewn, weaving them into a series of insightful dialogues with her friend, the Hong Kong writer Ho Fuk Yan. These discussions cover the depiction of apes and monkeys in Chinese and Western literature, painting, drama, and film, as well as the close relationship between humans and their primate relatives. Xi Xi’s own words, imbued with a profound empathy, reveal the heart of her work: “If there is a common theme to our conversation, it is to respect life and speak for those lives that have been discriminated against in the history of human development, and apes are the starting point for this.”

The Drunkard is one of the first full-length stream-of-consciousness novels written in Chinese. It has been called the Hong Kong Novel, and was first published in 1962 as a serial in a Hong Kong evening paper. As the unnamed Narrator, a writer at odds with a philistine world, sinks to his drunken nadir, his plight can be seen to represent that of a whole intelligentsia, a whole culture, degraded by the brutal forces of history: the Second Sino-Japanese War and the rampant capitalism of post-war Hong Kong.

The often surrealistic description of the Narrator’s inexorable descent through the seedy bars and night-clubs of Hong Kong, of his numerous encounters with dance-girls and his ever more desperate bouts of drinking, is counterpointed by a series of wide-ranging literary essays, analysing the Chinese classical tradition, the popular culture of China and the West, and the modernist movement in Western and Chinese literature.

The ambiance of Hong Kong in the early 1960s is graphically evoked in this powerful and poignant novel, which takes the reader to the very heart of Hong Kong. Hong Kong director Freddie Wong made a fine film version of the novel in 2004.

This is a fascinating, insightful collection of essays by some of the world’s most renowned China experts, who share personal recollections of their time in China—often beginning in the 1970s, when foreigners were just beginning to navigate the linguistic and cultural terrain of that country—and reflect on what learning Chinese has meant to them in their careers and lives. Ian Johnson, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist notes in his essay, it is only by knowing the language that we can effectively enter people’s lives—their myths and histories, their interior lives and dreams. Trying to do this without speaking the language is usually fraudulent and results in only a clichéd understanding of other cultures. Simply knowing Chinese won’t solve all these problems, but the reverse proposition is true: we can’t really understand China and interpret it for audiences back home unless we know the language. Thomas Gorman’s equally sprightly essay tells how, in 1974, he set out hitchhiking to Vancouver in order to take a cheap flight to Hong Kong, where he arrived with only $150 in his pocket. Twenty-one years later, he was president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong.

These ten native English speakers (including veteran journalists, expert in Chinese art history, scholar in classical Chinese literature, teacher of Chinese language, economics policy advisor, businesspeople, and expert in Chinese law) share rare and, at times, humorous and intimate moments, of how learning and speaking Chinese has removed barriers, built rapport, opened doors, and sometimes led them down entirely unexpected roads that have changed the course of their lives.

Like every major culture, Chinese has its set of keywords: pivotal terms of political, ethical, literary, and philosophical discourse. Tracing the origins, development, polysemy, and usages of keywords is one of the best ways to chart cultural and historical changes. This volume analyzes some of these keywords from different disciplinary and temporal perspectives, offering a new integrative study of their semantic richness, development trajectory, and distinct usages in Chinese culture.

The authors of the volume explore different keywords and focus on different periods and genres, ranging from philosophical and historical texts of the Warring States period (453–221 BCE) to late imperial (ca. 16th–18th centuries CE) literature and philosophy. They are guided by a similar set of questions: What elevates a mere word to the status of keyword? What sort of resonance and reverberations do we expect a keyword to have? How much does the semantic range of a keyword explain its significance? What kinds of arguments does it generate? What are the stories told to illustrate its meanings? What are political and intellectual implications of the keyword’s reevaluation? What does it mean to translate a keyword and map its meaning against other languages?

Throughout Chinese history, new ideas and new approaches often mean reinterpreting important words; rupture, continuities, and inflection points are inseparable from the linguistic history of specific terms. The premise of this book is that taking the long view and encompassing different disciplines yield new insights and unexpected connections. The authors, who come from the fields of history, philosophy, and literature, explore keywords in different genres and illuminate their multiple dimensions in various contexts. Moreover, despite their different temporal focus, they take into consideration the development of selected keywords from the Warring States to the late imperial period, sometimes adding excurses that extend to contemporary usage.

ESSENTIALS IN THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRE-QIN PHILOSOPHY

The Mingjia (School of Names) is a notional grouping of philosophers first recorded as such in the Shiji. Their identifying feature was a concern with linguistic issues particularly involving the correct use of names. The origin of this concern is taken to be Lunyu XIII.3. The group, as listed in the Han Shu, comprised seven men living between the sixth and third centuries BC. Only four of these men have extant writings attributed to them (Deng Xi, Yin Wen, Hui Shi and Gongsun Long) and in three of these there are issues of authenticity. Nevertheless, it is an important group for an understanding of the development of pre-Qin philosophy as the men themselves and the concepts they explored feature prominently in the writings of the other schools.

The present work contains four sections: (i) the extant writings of the four men; (ii) all significant references to them in other works up to the fourth century AD; (iii) other significant writing on the topics up to that time; and (iv) four appendices on specific issues concerning the school.

Pai Hsien-yung is among the most important writers in contemporary Chinese and world literature. His masterpiece Taipei People is a classic of Taiwanese modernism; with an intensity of vision comparable to James Joyce’s Dubliners, it follows the individual struggles of the people of Taipei, with a mix of compassion, nostalgia, mourning, and tenacious clarity.

Fifty years after its publication, the collection continues to move readers around the world. Stories from this collection have been translated into French, German, Italian, Dutch, Hebrew, Japanese, and Korean.