Hong Kong Literature Series – serie

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 createexquisite 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.

The Drunkard is one of the first full?length stream?of?consciousness novels written in Chinese. It has beencalled 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 postwar Hong Kong.The often surrealistic description of the Narrator’s inexorable descent through the seedy bars and nightclubs of Hong Kong, of his numerous encounters with dance?girls and his ever more desperate boutsof 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 andChinese 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.

Leung Ping?kwan brought as much talent and inspiration to the writing of his short stories as he did to his poems. ‘I have drawn on magical realism to explore the absurdity of Hong Kong,’ he wrote of the story See Mun and the Dragon (1975) in which we find him using a simple, clipped style. The later story Drowned Souls (2007) was written in a more symbolic, lyrical and complex manner, influenced by the style of the traditional Chinese tales of the supernatural. Although the two stories are separated by over 30 years, dragons play a prominent part in both. The dragon has always been a fascinating creature, a complex embodiment of the timeless soul of China and a symbol of the creative energy and transformative possibilities of the Tao. Both of these enchanting stories are anchored in the author’s ideas of freedom and liberation.Through the keen eyes and curious mind of a young girl, Ying?tzu, we are given a glimpse into the adult world of Peking in the 1920s.