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Reading Global Hong Kong

Fabulation as Healing: Reading Dung Kai-cheung’s Hong Kong Type Diasporically

Fabulation comme guérison : Une lecture diasporique du Hong Kong Type de Dung Kai-cheung
Michael Tsang

Résumé

This article aims to offer a diasporic reading of Dung Kai-cheung’s 2021 novel, Hong Kong Type 香港字 (Hoeng1 Gong2 Zi6). Although set in post-2019 Hong Kong, the novel offers constructive ways for Hongkongers living abroad to think about the relationship between their diasporic locality and Hong Kong culture. The novel features a female protagonist recovering from her mental health issues (triggered, as insinuated in the novel, by the protests) through helping out at an exhibition on Hong Kong’s first lead movable types for printing in Chinese, manufactured by the London Missionary Society in the 1800s. In the process, the protagonist finds out more about her own family history, as well as hallucinates a dialogue with those lead types who teach her Hong Kong’s publishing history. Thus, weaving together Hong Kong cultural history with personal family history, the protagonist’s ‘hallucinations’ become part of her journey of healing. Furthermore, such hallucinations, I argue, can be read allegorically for any Hongkonger affected by the protests, whether for those who remain and those who have left. With reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of ‘fabulation’ or ‘myth-making’, which sheds light on how myths are collectively produced for communities, I will highlight how literature (that is, storytelling understood as fabulation) reminds Hongkongers that wherever they are, an engagement with Hong Kong culture and history is a vital coping mechanism in the post-protest era.

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Introduction

  • 1 Jennifer Creery, ‘Hong Kong Population Decline Slows as Financial Hub Reopens’, Bloomberg, 16 Febru (...)
  • 2 Peter Lee, ‘Over 144,000 Hongkongers Move to UK in 2 Years Since Launch of BNO Visa Scheme’, Hong K (...)
  • 3 Michael Tsang, ‘Whither the Incipience; Or, the Beauty of Schisms’, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, (...)
  • 4 Tomaz Wong Ho Wai, ‘The Narrow Road of Suffering’, trans. by Mary King Bradley, in Writing in Diffi (...)

1According to statistics of the Hong Kong government, more than 180,000 Hong Kong residents have left the city since the end of 2019.1 Ever since the UK government created the BNO visa in 2021, over 140,000 Hongkongers have moved to the UK.2 As a new perceived wave of emigration is observed, rifts between those who have left and those who remain could form. I have reflected elsewhere that even during the 2014 Umbrella Movement, schisms existed between those who were participating physically in the movement in Hong Kong at the time, and those abroad who could ‘only’ watch live streaming of the movement for countless hours: by virtue of their physical absence, overseas Hongkongers were sometimes made to feel they were ‘second-tier’ and could not voice any doubt at what was happening at the protest sites at the time.3 More blatantly, and recently, a Hong Kong author writes that those left Hong Kong in this current wave of emigration ‘feel no strong ties to Hong Kong, and so they can simply pack up and leave, just like that. For those of us who love this city, this is very close to betrayal’.4 The attribution of moral high ground to those remaining in Hong Kong perpetuates deep-rooted prejudices and misunderstandings among Hong Kong society. And yet, together with the shame and guilt that Hongkongers abroad may feel in the face of their friends’ pain and anguish at being teargassed, the diasporic Hong Kong community too is stuck with a pertinent question: what can and should we do for the city we still love?

2
This article is an attempt to reflect on this question through reading Hong Kong writer 董啟章 Dung Kai-cheung’s 2021 novel, Hong Kong Type 香港字. Dung is one of Hong Kong’s most accomplished writers, having published 38 books and won a number of literary awards. I will perform a diasporic reading, reflecting on the implications of the novel’s themes—how to heal after a major trauma—to the perspectives of a Hongkonger. Although it may seem counter-intuitive to read this novel diasporically as it is set almost entirely in Hong Kong, I argue that in fact the novel offers constructive ways for Hongkongers abroad to think about the relationship between their diasporic identity and Hong Kong culture.

  • 5 Since there is no official English translation published yet, I transliterate character names in th (...)
  • 6 On 29 June 2019, a female university student jumped off a building in Ka Fuk Estate in Fanling. Bef (...)
  • 7 See: Michael Tsang, ‘World-weaving in Nineteenth-century East Asia: The Case of Hong Kong’s Earlies (...)
  • 8 See https://hk.heritage.museum/en/web/hm/exhibitions/data/exid265.html for the exhibition webpage.
  • 9 Kai-cheung Dung, Hong Kong Type, Taipei, Thinkingdom Media Group, 2021, p. 336.

3
The novel opens with ‘San-fai’s Farewell Note’ 晨輝遺書, the main narrative arc concerning San-fai 晨輝,5 a young Chinese major at university waking up at hospital after a failed suicide attempt. Although the reason of her suicide is never made explicit, it is strongly hinted at that she was mentally affected by the 2019 Hong Kong protests, to the point where her family no longer watches television so as to not stimulate her. She also sees and hears a girl living across her building shouting and writing a long message in red pen on a wall before jumping to her demise, an allusion to the unfortunate suicide by a girl on 29 June 2019 who did the same.6 This and other events mentioned in the novel suggest that the novel’s main narrative arc is temporally set in the traumatic atmosphere after the protests. In the process of recovering, San-fai is introduced to a curator working on an exhibition about the history of printing in Hong Kong and she was tasked to read about the story of Hong Kong Type, the world’s first set of lead-made movable type used for printing Chinese characters, manufactured by missionaries of the London Missionary Society (LMS) at Ying Wa College 英華書院 in 19th-century Hong Kong. These lead types kickstarted the city’s Chinese printing industry and, for instance, were used immediately in the printing of Hong Kong’s first Chinese newspaper, 遐邇貫珍 (Xia’er Guanzhen in pinyin, Haaji Gwunzan in Jyutping, 1853-1856; also known as Gems from Near and Afar).7 The types, however, had since been lost in Hong Kong, with a copy now being kept by the Dutch National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden. Its history was ‘recuperated’ in 2018 and finally presented to the Hong Kong public through the exhibition ‘Between the Lines—the Legends of Hong Kong Printing’ held at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum in 2020-2021.8 This was the very exhibition that had inspired Dung to write the novel—he was so moved upon seeing the types that he felt an urge to write about their history, and the novel subsequently imagined San-fai working on this very exhibition.9

  • 10 In other words, the most plausible ‘realistic’ interpretation of this séance is that San-fai, in a (...)
  • 11 Dung has provided a comprehensive bibliography on the LMS and its missionaries. See Dung, pp. 343-3 (...)

4
At the same time, San-fai’s family decides to clean out their ancestry flat in Sheung Wan, where she finds some movable types that belonged to her maternal great-great-grandfather Dai Fuk-sang 戴復生 who owned a printing factory. Working on her hunch that the movable types are connected to the history of Hong Kong Type, the two narrative arcs jointly compel San-fai to recuperate history on two levels, first, the cultural history of Hong Kong Type, and second, the more personal family history about her maternal ancestors. In this journey of healing, she first hallucinates a trance-like séance—an out-of-the-world ‘dialogue’ on her computer screen with the ‘spirits’ of those movable types—which forms part of the novel’s middle section called ‘A Séance with the Spirits of Movable Types’ 活字降靈會.10 Written in free indirect discourse, the spirits and San-fai discuss the key figures and events involved in creating lead type printing for Chinese characters, such as the careers of LMS missionaries Robert Morrison (1782-1834), William Milne (1785-1822), Samuel Dyer (1804-1843), and their missionary work first in Malacca and then in Hong Kong, as well as those participating in the eventual manufacturing of Hong Kong Type itself, such as Walter Medhurst (1796-1857), James Legge (1815-1897), Wang Tao 王鞱 (1828-1897) and Wong Shing 黃勝 (1827-1902).11 Then, in the latter half of the novel, the narrative moves to ‘Six Letters of Fuk-sang’ 復生六記, which is an (auto)biography for Fuk-sang because although it is written in the first-person voice of Fuk-sang—in slightly archaic Chinese mixing wenyan 文言 (the literary register) and baihua 白話 (the vernacular register) which reflects the Chinese spoken in the late nineteenth century—this ultimately is a document produced by San-fai, again in a trance-like state, as part of her healing.

5
The novel is therefore made up of three main parts: A) ‘San-fai’s Farewell Note’ in six chapters, B) ‘A Séance with the Spirits of Movable Types’ in three chapters, and C) ‘Six Letters of Fuk-sang’ split into two parts. Each chapter in Parts B and C is then intercalated with Part A, in this narrative order:

A1: San-fai’s Farewell Note 1
(A2)–>B1: A Séance with the Spirits of Movable Types 1
A3: San-fai’s Farewell Note 2
(A4)–>B2: A Séance with the Spirits of Movable Types 2
A5: San-fai’s Farewell Note 3
(A6)–>B3: A Séance with the Spirits of Movable Types 3
A7: San-fai’s Farewell Note 4
(A8)–>C1: Six Letters of Fuk-sang 1
A9: San-fai’s Farewell Note 5
(A10)–>C2: Six Letters of Fuk-sang 2
A11: San-fai’s Farewell Note 6

6To clarify, both Part B, ‘A Séance with the Spirits of Movable Types’, and Part C, ‘Six Letters of Fuk-sang’, are hallucination-like séances that San-fai conjures, even though the title of Part C does not explicitly suggest so. At the end of Part B, the spirits bring San-fai to another séance in order to re-create a lost book written by her great-great-grandfather Dai Fuk-sang on his relationship with a Eurasian girl called Hang-ji 幸兒:

  • 12 Dung, p. 202.

He [Dai Fuk-sang] wrote a book, called the Six Letters of Fuk-sang.
Where can I [i.e. San-fai] read this book?
It no longer exists, but, you can be the one writing it out once again.
I write it?
Write it out through a séance.
Séance with whose spirit?
With Dai Fuk-sang’s.12

7In addition to demonstrating the novel’s use of free indirect discourse, with each paragraph break indicating a speech utterance alternating between San-fai and the spirits, this short episode reveals that just like Part B, Part C is also a kind of séance, this time communicating with the spirit of Dai Fuk-sang. In short, both parts are séances that San-fai imagines in order to help her heal; the difference is that Part B recovers the history of Hong Kong Type and publishing in Hong Kong, hence a broader sociocultural relationship with Hong Kong history, while Part C recounts the imagined lives of San-fai’s own ancestors who nonetheless was involved in publishing.

8
The narrative structure is of note here, in addition to the intercalation outlined above. Although the content of Parts B and C—the late nineteenth-century stories of the LMS missionaries and of Dai Fuk-sang—are historical, these two narratives are nonetheless imagined by San-fai along as she recovers from her suicide attempt in the main narrative of Part A set in post-2019 Hong Kong. Thus, while at first sight the novel may sport disjointed, back-and-forth temporal settings, a more nuanced understanding of the book’s narrative structure is that it is still largely linear, with each episode in the overarching fabula of San-fai’s healing (Part A) being followed by her conjuring a trance-like episode that nonetheless contains a historical syuzhet. Nor is it accurate to regard the narration here as reverse chronology, for Part B on the creation of Hong Kong Type temporally precedes and indeed sets the stage for Part C on Dai Fuk-sang’s life. To highlight the nature that Parts B and C are not meant to be historically factual, but only a present reimagination of history, in the narrative order above I have prefixed each B and C episode with an A notation ((A2)–>B1, (A10)–>C2 etc), to denote that they should seen more as frame narratives derived from the main timeline of Part A (hence the arrow). This understanding is, in my view, important, because although half of the novel contains history (Part B with the LMS missionaries’ biographies is informative but may appear particularly dry), the way such histories are being presented—via the form of an imagined dialogue between a tranced San-fai and the spirits of Movable Types—reminds readers that the act of imagining these séances is in chronological order with the Part A narrative, and are not meant to be historically accurate given that they are merely San-fai’s subjective reimagination.

  • 13 Salman Rushdie, ‘Imaginary Homelands’, London Review of Books, Vol 4, no. 18 (1982) https://www.lrb (...)
  • 14 Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West, London, Routledge, 2005, p. 35. (...)
  • 15 Steven Vertovec, ‘Three Meanings of “Diaspora”, Exemplified Among South Asian Religions’, Diaspora,(...)

9
The complex narrative layers also pave the way to my reading of the novel via a diasporic lens. Writing about the Indian diaspora in Britain, Salman Rushdie’s seminal claim the diasporic community ‘are not willing to be excluded from any part of our heritage’, including the right ‘to draw on its roots for its art’13 has enabled me to think through how the community of emigrated Hongkongers can regard Dung’s novel as inspiring ways to keep their connections to Hong Kong alive. For a diasporic Chinese context, also illuminating is Ien Ang’s understanding of ‘Chineseness’—which for our current purpose can be substituted by ‘Hongkongness’—as an ‘open signifier’ paying attention to the fact that ‘ethnic Chinese people [one can substitute with Hong Kong people here], wherever they are, construct new, hybrid identities and communities’.14 Most saliently, Stephen Vertovec’s insight on the fractured nature of memory for diasporic communities is key to highlighting that understandings of histories and identities are multiplicitous and should be seen as an ‘adaptive strength’ of the diaspora rather than as ‘a kind of schizophrenic deficit’.15 In other words, memories cannot reliably demonstrate an entire ‘History’, but the point is precisely not to construct a single ‘definitive’ version of ‘History’, but to affirm personal accounts of ‘histories’ as a positive strategy of adaptation to one’s diasporic identity.

10
While not entirely comparable, on some levels the experience of a diasporic person and their relationship with their imagined homeland bears similarities to San-fai’s post-suicide healing. Both live their lives coping with various realities in the present, but at times their minds will jump back in time to reimagine history subjectively, whether in the sense of the personal/familial or the broader sociocultural. Therefore, as will be demonstrated in detail below, San-fai’s healing strategies—which consist of forming/forging her own personal connections to both Hong Kong’s broader sociocultural history and to her familial ancestry—may be inspirational for the Hong Kong diaspora as they move away from the city they have long called home.

11
Having discussed the novel’s synopsis and narrative structure, in the following sections I will discuss how we can make sense of the healing power in San-fai’s imagined séances by understanding them as what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘fabulations’. Fabulations carry healing power for San-fai in two ways: first, by helping her acknowledge her and Hong Kong’s mixed (read: impure) origins; and second, by helping her realise that her connection with Hong Kong rests on Hong Kong’s history, culture and language, and not necessarily on the geographical territory itself. Both the anxieties of one’s (impure) origins and their connection with the (imaginary) homeland are common issues explored in literature of the diaspora; hence, San-fai’s journey could serve as a guidance for Hong Kong communities overseas.

Fabulation and the Impurity of Origin

  • 16 Dung, p. 336. Unless specified, all English translations of Dung’s novel from the Chinese are the a (...)
  • 17 Dung, p. 336.

12In the novel’s afterword, Dung explains that ‘in the course of cultural development for humankind, myths generally emerged first, then legends, and finally history. In this book, I reversed the order: starting from history, then creating a legend, finally making a myth’.16 Hence, San-fai’s way of healing is in essence to create her own myths on how she can connect to her family history, and how that family history can be connected to the broader cultural history of Hong Kong. Dung calls this ‘personal mythmaking’.17 Additionally, in this phrase, the word ‘personal’ does not preclude the possibility that other Hongkongers can also partake in this myth-making exercise. While the myth that San-fai has weaved for her healing process is unique to her (for not every Hongkonger has a family that owns a printing company), the act of myth-making as part of healing is not, and every Hongkonger can create their own stories to maintain their connection with Hong Kong.

13
I propose to understand this myth-making process using the term ‘fabulation’ discussed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Fabulation is defined in this article as an individual’s or community’s creation of stories, narratives and myths that engage with both national/regional and personal/family layers of history. As a theoretical term, ‘fabulation’ goes beyond its literal meaning of narrative stories; these stories need to enable individuals and communities to comb through their own relationship with the histories, cultures and territories they are related to.

  • 18 Henri Bergson, Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. by R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brere (...)
  • 19 Daniel Reyes, ‘Deleuze and Guattari’s Geophilosophy: The Fabulation of a People-to-come and Becomin (...)
  • 20 Reyes, p. 86.
  • 21 Gilles Deleuze and Guattari, Félix, What is Philosophy?, trans. by Hugh Tomlison and Graham Burchel (...)
  • 22 Reyes, p. 86.
  • 23 Deleuze and Guattari, p. 109.

14
Deleuze and Guattari trace the concept of fabulation to the philosopher Henri Bergson’s concepts in Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). For Bergson, fabulation or mythmaking in primitive societies is negative and conservative behaviour often associated with what he calls ‘static’ or ‘natural’ religions,18 because fabulation often involves interpreting natural phenomena with the intention to indoctrinate societies into closed, disciplined social groups. Deleuze and Guattari, however, take a different stance. They recognise the element of creativity in this activity and see fabulation ‘as indispensably contributory to the process of genuine creation’.19 The biggest potential of this understanding of fabulation lies in its insistence on giving political meaning to fabulation: fabulation is an indispensable process for creating what they call a people-to-come; an idea to which I return in the following section. As philosophy scholar Raniel Reyes comments, while a majoritarian concept of ‘the people’ hinges on ‘principles of unity, stability and identity’,20 a ‘people-to-come’ is dynamic, multiplicitous, and creative. Fabulation, the art of creating myths, gives the people-to-come the possibility of resistance—‘resistance to death, to servitude, to the intolerable, to shame’.21 In other words, fabulation destabilises accepted explanations or static interpretations of identity, refusing to endorse monolithic, flattening accounts of origin. It disturbs embellished claims of unity and unison imposed by ruling authorities. Most powerfully, equipped with the notion that ‘art is resistance’,22 the people-to-come ‘summoned forth by art and philosophy is not the one that claims to be pure but rather an oppressed, bastard, lower, anarchical, nomadic, and irremediably minor race’.23

  • 24 To name a few examples of such narratives: demographically Hong Kong has a sizeable, albeit often h (...)

15
This last is a particularly powerful quote because it highlights the need to acknowledge and proudly lay claim on Hong Kong’s variegated, multifaceted, impure origins—an idea that in fact permeates the entire novel both in content and in form. Moreover, making this acknowledgment is the first of San-fai’s two-step healing process, the other being the deterritorialisation of Hong Kong, to be discussed in the next section. While cliched narratives about Hong Kong’s East-meet-West characterisation are all too familiar,24 this novel nonetheless continuously underlines Hong Kong’s complex genesis on the levels of metaphor, plot, and writing style.

16
Hong Kong Type is the par excellence metaphor for this: the first set of movable metal types for printing in Chinese was initiated not by the Chinese, but by missionaries from the West; begun in Malacca but completed in Hong Kong; through a collaboration between, on the one hand, Scottish and English reverends like Morrison, Medhurst and Legge, and on the other, Chinese visionaries such as Wang Tao and Wong Shing. At the same time, inasmuch as Hong Kong Type was an amalgamation of East and West, Hong Kong’s history was itself a hybrid of Chinese and Western influences. This enables us to read the novel not only diasporically, but also allegorically: while the novel ostensibly retells the story of Hong Kong Type, this story is also the story of Hong Kong’s origin, and any narrative about Hong Kong Type (and Hong Kong) inevitably requires looking beyond Hong Kong.

  • 25 Dung, p. 166.
  • 26 The trip to Holland turned out to be another of San-fai’s hallucinations. See below for a thorough (...)

17
On the level of plot, ‘The Six Letters of Fuk-sang’ recounts that Fuk-sang’s love interest, Hang-ji, had Eurasian mixed ethnicity that brought her turmoil and discrimination in a relatively conservative 19th-century Hong Kong—in this sense, San-fai, being Hang-ji’s great-great-granddaughter, has 1/32 European heritage. But more importantly, it is suggested later in the novel that San-fai’s grandfather has committed unethical sexual practice with his own daughter, i.e. San-fai’s mother. This is epitomised by the recurring metaphor of the Japanese mythic creature called 蛭子 hiruko, or leech, born out of an impure deformation, which San-fai dreams so much about that it is pointed out to her that her infatuation with leech reflects her own ‘anxiety as a child born deformed’.25 Associations of ‘impurity’, however, do not only apply to her origin, but also to her future: at the end of the novel, San-fai, who struggles with delusions and hallucinations and therefore shows symptoms of schizophrenia, has intercourse with a friend who has dissociative identity disorder (commonly mistaken as schizophrenia but in fact different) and who is likely to be sentenced to imprisonment for participating in the 2019 protests. This happens on the night before San-fai believes she is leaving for the Netherlands to recast the lost Hong Kong Type.26 Had that intercourse ended in pregnancy, San-fai would effectively give birth overseas to a new life whose parents have mental health issues. This can therefore be read as a process of growth: by the end of the novel San-fai has come to terms with her own impure origins, to the point where she does not mind having a ‘deformed’ baby.

  • 27 For an example in academic writing, see Tam, Wing-yu, review of David C. S. Li and W. M. Leung, Bil (...)

18
Last but not least, on the level of stylistics Dung does not shy away from writing in vernacular Cantonese when the moment calls for it. There is even use of English words, Arabic numbers, and even an emoji. While Cantonese is commonly regarded as a spoken language, endeavours of incorporating written forms of Cantonese do exist both in academic and creative writing,27 and Dung’s novel represents a substantive attempt to do justice to the importance of vernacular Cantonese in Hong Kong, balancing it with standard written Chinese as well as classical wenyan Chinese. This is most cogently demonstrated in the ‘Six Letters of Fuk-sang’ in Part C. This part opens with an overarching self-introduction written in wenyan, before switching, in the six main chapters, to a mix of standard written Chinese plus an older-style baihua colloquial Cantonese reflecting the speech patterns in Hong Kong at the turn of the twentieth century. The main chapters in Part C are Dai Fuk-sang’s autobiography retelling his life and his love story with the Eurasian Hang-ji, but they are also epistolary ‘letters’ that Dai Fuk-sang writes with Hang-ji in mind as the intended reader. This is clearly expressed in the first line of the first chapter (first letter):

  • 28 Dung, p. 222.

幸兒,我講過會寫信過你,你不信,我現今就寫與你看。
Hang-ji, I said I’d write letters to you. You did not believe me, but I am writing them right at this moment.28

19This sentence alone shows Dung’s mix of written and colloquial Chinese. The clause 我講過會寫信過你 (‘I said I’d write letters to you’; ngo gonggwo wui seseon gwo nei) is colloquial, but of a slightly older variety using the word gwo3 as the preposition ‘to’—in contemporary Hong Kong Cantonese bei2 would be more common. The last clause 我現今就寫與你看 (‘I am writing them right at this moment’; ngo jin’gam zau se jyu nei hon) is standard written Chinese.

  • 29 See for example Gina Anne Tam’s recent book, Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960, Cambridge (...)
  • 30 Dung, p. 220. 「語言駁雜體例不一」

20
The self-introduction that precedes and frames the six letters introduces a further layer of nuance. Because the ensuing six letters are a private dialogue of sorts between Fuk-sang and Hang-ji, the language is more colloquial. But the overarching introduction is the outer frame narrative with a less restricted readership, and given the fact that the self-introduction is dated December 1911, Dai Fuk-sang’s use of the literary register with archaic wenyan illustrates the distinction between high/literary/written Chinese and low/colloquial/spoken Chinese before the 白話文運動 Vernacular Baihua Language Movement gained momentum in the early 20th century, when written Chinese sought to remove said distinction and reflected more closely how people spoke.29 At the same time, in this introduction, Dai asks for the readers’ forgiveness on the use of ‘mixed languages, ununified styles’ in the subsequent letters.30 This is a telling moment of self-recognition about Hong Kong people’s diverse linguistic repertoire, and while Dai Fuk-sang in 1911 may be begging for pardon, what is important is that Dai nonetheless puts this linguistic mix in writing, which can then become a precedence to inspire future generations.

  • 31 Dung, p. 190. 不是支配而是融合 Bushi zhipei, ershi ronghe; Bat’si zipui, jisi junghap

21
This can then be extrapolated to all instances and reminders of San-fai’s—and by extension to Hong Kong’s—‘impure’ origin in the novel. In addition to Fuk-sang’s linguistic demonstration, the spirits of movable types also stress that different origins ‘do not conquer or dominate each other, but fuse together’.31 The notion of ‘fusion’ recognises a propensity for co-existence as a constructive attitude towards such ‘bastard’ blend, in the same way that Hong Kong Type was a work of collaboration between Western missionaries and Chinese technicians. What is rejected—conquer and domination—is the attempt to erase the fact of multiple origins in favour of an unnuanced monolithic claim on the origin of Hong Kong (and Hong Kong Type).

Fabulation and Deterritorialisation

22Having learnt of the history of Hong Kong Type through the séance with the spirits of Hong Kong Type in Part B, San-fai then finds out through the six letters in Part C that Dai Fuk-sang, an apprentice and later employee of the Ying Wa printing workshop, is in fact her maternal great-great-grandfather. This becomes the pivot through which she can activate a personal/familial connection to Hong Kong’s broader history. In the meantime, she is also contributing to the sociocultural history of Hong Kong Type by fabulating a continuing lineage for Hong Kong Type: Even though the object—the complete set of Hong Kong Type—no longer exists in Hong Kong, the lineage of manufacturers still does, with San-fai being the inheritor.

23
Readers may contest this reading by arguing that while the LMS reverends, Wong Shing and others mentioned in Part B were real historical figures recorded in official historical documents, there is no actual proof that Dai Fuk-sang existed. A realist reading would hold that Dai is a fictional character and thus San-fai’s imagined connection to Hong Kong Type is not real. Even if there were someone with that name in Hong Kong at that time, San-fai is not biologically related to him, because according to Fuk-sang’s letters, he only adopted Hang-ji’s child, whom Hang-ji conceived not with Fuk-sang but with one of her clients while working as a prostitute. This child is San-fai’s biological great-grandfather, but the adoption could add a further layer of uncertainty and doubt to San-fai’s role as an inheritor of Hong Kong Type.

  • 32 Gregory Flaxman, Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy, Minnesota and London: University (...)
  • 33 Flaxman, p. xiv.
  • 34 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. by Martin Joughin, New York, Columbia University Pre (...)
  • 35 Deleuze, Negotiations, p.126.
  • 36 Flaxman, p. 4.

24
Let us remember, however, that San-fai, too is a fictional character—Dung has written a novel, not History. Thus, whether the story of Dai Fuk-sang is true or not is not the point, because in fabulation, veracity and accuracy are never the focus. This may raise eyebrows as it may be taken as an exoneration for lying about one’s origin and/or connection to a place. Indeed, in the context of communities making myths, Deleuze rejects the notion that these myths are lies, and suggests that ‘[l]ying isn’t the fall from which we seek redemption’,32 rejecting the notion that lying is a sinful act that we must remedy by seeking objective, unalterable ‘truth’. Instead, lying is about recognising ‘the “truth” that there is no God, Man, or World apart from fabulation’.33 Truth, for Deleuze, always ‘constitutes a matter of invention’: ‘There’s no truth that doesn’t “falsify” established ideas’.34 On the contrary, ‘[t]he powers of the false designate the powers to create’.35 Gregory Flaxman interprets this to mean that: ‘to write is to fabulate new modes of existence. […] In writing […] the question of “being” or “essence” (what is ... ?), […] gives way to an experiment in experience and existence, which is pursued to the most improbable ends (what if ... ?)’.36 Hence: what if San-fai’s ancestry had indeed taken part in the history of Hong Kong Type?

  • 37 Dung, p. 319.

25
Such is the new ‘mode of existence’ that San-fai attempts to write: to write herself into existence in the story of Hong Kong Type, and that of Hong Kong. In a line reminiscent of Deleuze’s writing in the last paragraph, ‘[b]iological lineage’, writes Dung, becomes ‘not the only truth that matters; what can be truly inherited is the inner soul, not the external, corporeal shell’.37 Regardless of whether San-fai is biologically connected to Dai Fuk-sang, she has nonetheless found a pivot (Fuk-sang’s letters) through which she can plug herself into Hong Kong’s broader cultural history. And with this exercise of fabulation, I would argue that Dung is also showing Hongkongers can do the same but in their own ways. The rejection of biological lineage is significant, because at the same time it privileges the connection to the ‘soul’ of Hong Kong, which necessitates any Hongkonger to narrate their own way of connecting to Hong Kong. In other words, ‘Hongkongers’ are no longer defined by ethnicity nor birthplace, but can include, for instance, ethnic minorities that have taken root in Hong Kong for generations, expatriates living in the city for a long time, and diasporic Hongkongers who have either left or are born to those who have gone abroad. ‘Hongkongers’ are defined by the depth of their relationship to Hong Kong, the profoundness of their experience of Hong Kong culture. To do justice to such depth, one must strive to narrate their own connection.

  • 38 Dung, p. 204. 「字由人造。人由字生。字即是人。人即是字。」
  • 39 Dung, p. 134.
  • 40 Reyes, p. 87.

26
Here is then another layer of meaning for the name ‘Hong Kong Type’—'type’ not just as movable metallic pieces of Chinese characters for printing, but also as a ‘type’ of people-to-come called ‘Hongkongers’. In Part B of the novel, the spirits of movable types utter an almost fable-like passage: ‘Words are created by humans. Humans are born out of words. Words are humans. Humans are words’.38 The second phrase, ‘humans are born out of words’, is a literal translation, but a more accurate understanding is that ‘human civilisations are born out of language’. Whereas the novel’s Chinese text creates an explicit metonymic equivalence between ‘words/language’ and ‘people/civilisation’, its official English title, Hong Kong Type—also printed on the cover—employs a more straightforward double entendre. Thus, as the spirits proclaim, ‘the story of Hong Kong Type is the story of Hong Kong’,39 and by extension, the story of Hong Kong is the story/stories of Hong Kong people. It is imperative to point out that for Deleuze and Guattari, a ‘people-to-come’ does not refer to a real ‘historical entity’, only ‘a collectivity condemned to be “eternally” to come’.40 This is particularly fitting in the present context where Hong Kong people disheartened by recent events have decided to leave their hometown and migrate elsewhere—their search for collective identity will continue in a foreign place. By positing Hong Kong people as a ‘people-to-come’, I do not mean naively that one day Hongkongers will become a mature ‘people’—as it is eternally in the making—nor do I mean that Hongkongers abroad will be able to return to an ‘ideal’ Hong Kong in future. Rather, the notion of Hong Kong people as people-to-come refers exactly to the constant process of fabulation that we should conduct in order to keep telling our stories, to claim tirelessly our links to Hong Kong, and to keep rethinking what Hong Kong means to us and to the world.

27
And this we can do regardless of where we are physically in the world, which brings us to the final characteristic of Dung’s idea of myth-making (or fabulation), which is that it is deterritorialising. A main paradox of the novel, in fact, is that although it is entirely set in Hong Kong, textual evidence discussed below reveals that Dung is cleverly displacing the locality of Hong Kong and prioritises instead an engagement with Hong Kong culture and language. Perhaps, during the penning of the novel between October 2020 and October 2021, Dung was already aware of the emigration brewing in the city. In this sense, Dung’s own paradox here validates my consideration of the diasporic lens in this article, allowing the Hong Kong diaspora to create fabulations that invigorate their links to Hong Kong beyond geographical boundaries, and to contribute to the enrichment of Hong Kong culture even if not to the territory of Hong Kong directly. Wherever we are, through fabulation, the story of Hong Kong people (as people-to-come) continues. Thus the story of Hong Kong continues.

  • 41 Dung, p. 54.

28
Deterritorialisation is expressed most powerfully through a telling wordplay in the novel. In one of the first conversations between the movable type spirits and San-fai, the spirits employ a Chinese idiomatic expression: 字靈人傑 (ziling renjie in pinyin, ziling jan’git in Jyutping).41 San-fai then scolds them for misusing idioms, to which the spirits reply that the collocation of words can always change. Indeed, the Chinese idiom 字靈人傑 does not exist, and it is a wordplay on the original idiom 地靈人傑 (diling renjie or deiling jan’git), which means ‘a remarkable place breeds an outstanding people’. By replacing the character for place with the character for word (therefore language), the meaning now becomes ‘a brilliant language gives rise to an outstanding people’, language here of course not just referring to the Chinese language but also the materiality in which they are reproduced on the page, i.e. the movable types.

  • 42 Dung, p. 190.
  • 43 Dung, p. 190.
  • 44 Dung, p. 135. Note also the use of the equal sign in mathematics as another example of linguistic p (...)

29
The displacement of locality then opens up a liberation that considers how the voice of Hong Kong people can engage with the world in conversation, and the history of Hong Kong Type is a testimony to this. As Hong Kong Type was successfully manufactured and fulfilled the dreams of LMS missionaries to print Chinese characters on page, it opened a new era for Chinese printing and was sold widely to China, Japan, France, Russia, the Netherlands, and many other countries. Thus, ‘Hong Kong Type became also World Type’.42 For sure, Dung is careful not to advocate a complete severing of ties to Hong Kong—as the spirits reiterate, ‘our roots will always be Hong Kong’.43 But deterritorialisation means that Hong Kong stories can be written from outside of Hong Kong and contributes as much to Hong Kong culture. Elsewhere, the movable type spirits claim that ‘Words = Stories. Words = World’,44 highlighting how words and language are the synapses that help Hong Kong writing transmit to the globe. Remarkedly, this formulation is even printed on the cover design.

  • 45 Dung, p. 331.

30
Last but not least, the novel’s notably ambivalent ending is in fact revelatory on the politics of deterritorialisation, in its negotiation between despair in the present moment and hope for the future. As San-fai learns that a set of Hong Kong Type is kept in the Netherlands, she has taken it upon her shoulder to fly there to make a new set based on the Dutch copy, so that Hong Kong Type could finally ‘return’ to Hong Kong. After a lack of funding from both the exhibition curator and her own father, she even thinks of volunteering and going on her own. Yet, without any further development on this branch of the narrative, the ending of the novel suddenly shows San-fai going to the airport, thoroughly convinced that she has booked a ticket to the Netherlands, only to be told that there is no reservation under her name. Her father and the exhibition curator arrive at the airport, and before taking her home, the curator says: ‘One day you will be able to go, but not now. Yes, you can go, but just not now. Let’s go home!’45

31
This peculiar ending denies San-fai the chance to escape, and therefore rejects the immediate possibility of recasting Hong Kong Type. A more optimistic ending could have allowed her to leave behind the traumas in Hong Kong, and may also resonate more with readers who are aware of the ongoing emigration. For sure, the published ending may be more realistic, as San-fai is still experiencing hallucinating episodes about air tickets, and Covid both at time of Dung’s writing and in the story’s temporal setting is not over yet. Facing another entrapment in Hong Kong, the novel’s very last line is a more positive foray into the future:

  • 46 Dung, pp. 332-333.

I have started to write. Only when I am writing am I truly living. I live in and among words. […] If I die one day, this [text] shall be my farewell note. But before the time comes, I shall wait patiently until the day I can recast Hong Kong Type. I do this not in order to earn any external accolades or contribute to history, but only to realise the fulfilment of my soul, and to bring completion to the mythical story. For someone as unaccomplished as I am, this will be a lifelong mission.46

32One day, San-fai, this ‘impure’ person-to-come who is always in the process of becoming, may still be able to go to the Netherlands and fulfil her dream of recasting Hong Kong Types. But for now, she can only write, and Hongkongers, too, should write.

  • 47 Deleuze and Guattari, pp. 167-168, italics original.

33
This is as Deleuzian an ending as it gets. On the relationship between fabulation and writing, Deleuze and Guattari offer these illuminating words: ‘every work of art is a monument, but here the monument is not something commemorating a past’, but a fabulation of ‘present sensations […] in words and sounds’.47 The two narratives produced by San-fai, namely ‘A Séance with the Spirits of Movable Types’ and ‘The Six Letters of Fuk-sang’, demonstrate that the main achievement of their writing (both San-fai’s and Hongkongers’) is not to articulate grand narratives of History, but, as my two-pronged discussion here shows, to articulate the ‘present sensations’ in post-2019 Hong Kong and offer ways to heal from these sensations: by acknowledging the truth of Hong Kong’s mixed origins and fabulating one’s own relations with Hong Kong culture and history irrespective of locality.

Conclusion

34As one of the first academic discussions on Hong Kong Type, this article presents an attempt to interpret Dung Kai-cheung’s latest novel through the central question of how people concerned about Hong Kong can navigate their relationship with Hong Kong as they emerge from their experiences of the protests. I read Dung’s novel as a call on Hongkongers – a people-to-come carrying ‘impure’ origins – to narrate our stories, to find ways to fabulate our connections with Hong Kong, no matter where we are. I have learnt from reading this novel that there is value in our fabulations even if they are not always historically factual or we are not physically in Hong Kong. I have no intention to romanticise or privilege the community of diasporic Hongkongers who have left the city on whatever motivation, but I have learnt that when it comes to loving Hong Kong and being concerned about Hong Kong, there is no need to classify people into hierarchies.

  • 48 See Dung, pp. 192-200.

35
Hong Kong Type is a very rich novel. Future research is needed to discuss its treatment of Christian and Chinese religious and philosophical concepts. In recounting the life of LMS Reverend James Legge, who was Principal of Ying Wa College and published five epic volumes of Chinese classics in translation before becoming the first Chair of Chinese at Oxford, the novel discusses Legge’s argument that the Chinese concept of the Heaven and the ruler above 上帝 (Shangdi) shares common grounds with the Christian idea of Heaven and God.48 The potential here to reconcile the perceived differences between Chinese and Western philosophies deserves thorough treatment. There is also room to discuss the representation of patriarchal and racial politics in early colonial Hong Kong, and intertextual echoes with Japanese literature, Biblical scriptures and others. Last but not least, my discussion on deterritorialisation here opens the door to a diachronic and comparative study on whether and how the sense of place has shifted across Dung’s work, especially from his earlier novel Atlas (1997) to the recent Hong Kong Type.

  • 49 Deleuze and Guattari, p. 174.
  • 50 Dung, p. 112.
  • 51 I thank Dr Astrid Møller-Olsen for organising the panel at ‘Unknown Futures: A Seminar on Hong Kong (...)

36
In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari believe that a ‘great novelist is above all an artist who invents unknown or unrecognised affects and brings them to light as the becoming of his [sic] characters’.49 With Hong Kong Type, I believe that Dung has achieved this. At one point, San-fai asks a psychiatrist—who the novel hints may, again, merely be an existence imagined by San-fai in the first place—whether part of her healing involves writing novels, to which the psychiatrist answers: ‘Of course, it is fine if you want to call it a novel. [But the idea is] to create your own stories, including real ones and fictional ones, experienced ones and imagined ones. […] This is the only way to heal a soul’.50 Here is a clear proclamation of literature’s therapeutic power, and I hope the Hong Kong diaspora will draw strength from it and write their own stories.51

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Notes

1 Jennifer Creery, ‘Hong Kong Population Decline Slows as Financial Hub Reopens’, Bloomberg, 16 February 2023 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-16/hong-kong-new-census-data-to-show-if-exodus-is-finally-slowing? [accessed 26 November 2023]

2 Peter Lee, ‘Over 144,000 Hongkongers Move to UK in 2 Years Since Launch of BNO Visa Scheme’, Hong Kong Free Press, 1 February 2023 https://hongkongfp.com/2023/02/01/over-144000-hongkongers-move-to-uk-in-2-years-since-launch-of-bno-visa-scheme/ [accessed 26 November 2023]

3 Michael Tsang, ‘Whither the Incipience; Or, the Beauty of Schisms’, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 33 (2016) https://www.asiancha.com/content/view/2479/579/ [accessed 26 November 2023]

4 Tomaz Wong Ho Wai, ‘The Narrow Road of Suffering’, trans. by Mary King Bradley, in Writing in Difficult Times, ed. by Nicholas Wong and Li Mei Ting, Hong Kong, Cart Noodles Press, 2021, pp. 123-132 (p. 131).

5 Since there is no official English translation published yet, I transliterate character names in the Jyutping system.

6 On 29 June 2019, a female university student jumped off a building in Ka Fuk Estate in Fanling. Before her fall she graffitied a wall with messages expressing concerns at the Extradition Bill, and some believed that the Bill had partly caused her to commit suicide, although the exact cause was never made clear.

7 See: Michael Tsang, ‘World-weaving in Nineteenth-century East Asia: The Case of Hong Kong’s Earliest Chinese Newspaper, Gems from Near and Afar’, in Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century: Spaces beyond the Centres, ed. by A. Bhattacharya, R. Hibbitt, and L. Scuriatti, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022, pp. 61-86.

8 See https://hk.heritage.museum/en/web/hm/exhibitions/data/exid265.html for the exhibition webpage.

9 Kai-cheung Dung, Hong Kong Type, Taipei, Thinkingdom Media Group, 2021, p. 336.

10 In other words, the most plausible ‘realistic’ interpretation of this séance is that San-fai, in a trance, types out the imagined dialogue with those spirits which also retells the history of Hong Kong Type.

11 Dung has provided a comprehensive bibliography on the LMS and its missionaries. See Dung, pp. 343-347.

12 Dung, p. 202.

13 Salman Rushdie, ‘Imaginary Homelands’, London Review of Books, Vol 4, no. 18 (1982) https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n18/salman-rushdie/imaginary-homelands [accessed 20 October 2023]

14 Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West, London, Routledge, 2005, p. 35. See also recent discussion in Wong, Jennifer, Identity, Home and Writing Elsewhere in Contemporary Chinese Diaspora Poetry, London, Bloomsbury, 2023, especially the Introduction.

15 Steven Vertovec, ‘Three Meanings of “Diaspora”, Exemplified Among South Asian Religions’, Diaspora, 7(2) (1999), pp. 277-299 (p. 281).

16 Dung, p. 336. Unless specified, all English translations of Dung’s novel from the Chinese are the author’s.

17 Dung, p. 336.

18 Henri Bergson, Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. by R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton with the assistance of W. Horsfall Carter, Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 1977, p. 205.

19 Daniel Reyes, ‘Deleuze and Guattari’s Geophilosophy: The Fabulation of a People-to-come and Becoming-Revolutionary. PHILIPPINIANA SACRA 55, no.164 (2020), pp. 75-100 (p. 84).

20 Reyes, p. 86.

21 Gilles Deleuze and Guattari, Félix, What is Philosophy?, trans. by Hugh Tomlison and Graham Burchell, New York, Columbia UP, 1994, p. 110.

22 Reyes, p. 86.

23 Deleuze and Guattari, p. 109.

24 To name a few examples of such narratives: demographically Hong Kong has a sizeable, albeit often hidden, population of other nationalities and ethnicities living among the city’s ethnic Chinese majority; historically It was ceded away from imperial Chinese territory to the British Empire; culturally it is often said to be a melting pot of Chinese customs and Western habits; linguistically Hongkongers are believed to be biliterate in standard written Chinese and written English, and trilingual in spoken English, Cantonese, and Mandarin.

25 Dung, p. 166.

26 The trip to Holland turned out to be another of San-fai’s hallucinations. See below for a thorough discussion of the novel’s ending.

27 For an example in academic writing, see Tam, Wing-yu, review of David C. S. Li and W. M. Leung, Biliteracy and Trilingualism: Language Education Policy Research in Hong Kong (2020), Hong Kong Studies, 3.2 (2023) https://cup.cuhk.edu.hk/image/catalog/journal/jpreview/HKS3.2.07.pdf [accessed 20 November 2023]

28 Dung, p. 222.

29 See for example Gina Anne Tam’s recent book, Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2020, for more.

30 Dung, p. 220. 「語言駁雜體例不一」

31 Dung, p. 190. 不是支配而是融合 Bushi zhipei, ershi ronghe; Bat’si zipui, jisi junghap

32 Gregory Flaxman, Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy, Minnesota and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, p. xiv.

33 Flaxman, p. xiv.

34 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. by Martin Joughin, New York, Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 126.

35 Deleuze, Negotiations, p.126.

36 Flaxman, p. 4.

37 Dung, p. 319.

38 Dung, p. 204. 「字由人造。人由字生。字即是人。人即是字。」

39 Dung, p. 134.

40 Reyes, p. 87.

41 Dung, p. 54.

42 Dung, p. 190.

43 Dung, p. 190.

44 Dung, p. 135. Note also the use of the equal sign in mathematics as another example of linguistic plurality.

45 Dung, p. 331.

46 Dung, pp. 332-333.

47 Deleuze and Guattari, pp. 167-168, italics original.

48 See Dung, pp. 192-200.

49 Deleuze and Guattari, p. 174.

50 Dung, p. 112.

51 I thank Dr Astrid Møller-Olsen for organising the panel at ‘Unknown Futures: A Seminar on Hong Kong’ at the University of Copenhagen in May 2022, which first gave this article its initial shape. I thank the seminar organisers and participants for their comments and feedback on this work. I also thank the editor of this special issue, the journal’s editors and peer reviewers for their advice and suggestions.

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Référence électronique

Michael Tsang, « Fabulation as Healing: Reading Dung Kai-cheung’s Hong Kong Type Diasporically »Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化 [En ligne], 18 | 2023, mis en ligne le 30 décembre 2023, consulté le 10 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/2528 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12u26

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Auteur

Michael Tsang

Michael Tsang is a lecturer in the School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication at Birkbeck, University of London. His research interests lie in world and postcolonial literatures with an East Asian focus, in particular Hong Kong, Japanese, and Chinese literatures and cultures. His writing has been published in Japan Forum, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Wasafiri, and Sanglap. He is a founding co-editor of Hong Kong Studies (Chinese University Press), the world's only bilingual academic journal specifically devoted to Hong Kong, and the co-editor of Murakami Haruki and Our Years of Pilgrimage (Routledge, 2022). He is also staff reviewer at Cha: An Asian Literary Journal to which he has contributed an extensive range of reviews of Asian literature.

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