In City Like Water,the Hong Kong writer Dorothy Tse depicts a hallucinatory metropolis in decline, with “some schools…abandoned completely, becoming cavernous cemeteries of public life,” and so many “cause-of-death-unknown corpses” that students are made to sign an official statement: “I promise that I’m happy. I promise not to kill myself.”The unnamed and featureless narrator, perched precariously on a rooftop, describes the residents’ discombobulation: “I couldn’t resist turning to look, and that’s when I realized the city I thought I knew had been switched for a different version of itself.”

The narrative emerges as a series of phantasmagorical vignettes, in chapters whose titles largely correspond to the stages of the 2019 Hong Kong protest movement. That June more than one million people took to the streets to demonstrate against proposed extradition legislation that they believed would undermine the territory’s autonomy from Beijing. Months of unrest followed, including pitched battles between protesters throwing Molotov cocktails and authorities responding with tear gas, batons, and rubber bullets. In the ensuing crackdown, more than 10,000 people were arrested and 2,900 were prosecuted for taking part in the protests.

Tse’s title invokes the movement’s motto, “Be Water,” taken from the martial artist and actor Bruce Lee’s exhortation to adopt water’s formlessness and adaptability. The book charts a movement led by housewives, including the narrator’s mother, who are enraged at having been sold lotus roots engorged with blood at the local wet market, a visceral metaphor for the brutality with which the authorities crushed the protests. On the TV news, the middle-aged protesters are presented as members of a counterrevolutionary criminal gang who disguise themselves as housewives.

Tse’s debut novel, Owlish, depicted a failing academic’s torrid affair with a life-size music box ballerina doll as protests grip the fictional Nevers, a city of “shimmering, mirrored façades.” City Like Water is slimmer and even more disturbing.The city and its residents are in a state of dizzying flux. A restaurant turns into a ship, birds turn into books, buildings droop like octopus tentacles, cities turn into paper, ears turn into bloodied butterflies, and people mutate as they eat wonton noodles: “Their mouths slowly elongated into snouts, and their teeth spilled fang-like over the edges of their lips.” This is an allegory of the displacement felt by the exhausted people of Hong Kong as they witnessed the post-protest transformation of the territory by forces beyond their control. One study found that almost one third of adults in Hong Kong reported symptoms of PTSD during the protests, with levels of depression comparable to those experienced in a conflict zone.

In 2020 Chinese authorities imposed sweeping national security legislation that outlawed secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces. This had the effect of annihilating Hong Kong’s once vibrant civil society as political parties, newspapers, trade unions, and nongovernmental organizations that supported democracy closed down one after another. Tse writes, “We walked the same streets we had always walked, but now we felt like deep-sea explorers.”

The cultural theorist Ackbar Abbas has characterized Hong Kong as a “culture of disappearance”—a culture that emerges only when it is in imminent threat of disappearing. In “The Reader,” one of the stories in Patchwork Dolls, by the British-born Ysabelle Cheung, who has lived in Hong Kong for ten years, disappearances are the point:

You wake up one morning and it’s gone. There is a blankness inside of you: carved, scraped, dry. But you cannot name it. Everything looks the same. The unwashed cups on your bedside table, the puddle of clothes on the floor, the way the air conditioner spits a fungal mist. What is missing, you wonder? Is it your memory that has been erased? Or something else? You had heard of this happening: entire timelines wiped clean, people fading, even buildings disappearing.

The Reader discovers there are no books left in the small studio apartment. Not only have they vanished, but so have all memories of them, which had formed the core of the Reader’s identity. As in City Like Water,the depersonalization of the narrator—in this case, by using the second-person voice—has the paradoxical effect of making the experience feel universal.

In this choose-your-own-adventure story, the actual reader can pick between several different courses of action, though they all ultimately send the fictional Reader bumbling aimlessly around the city in a nightmarish and confusing flashback loop: “Trauma fractures all timelines…. We live on top of ghosts—the ghosts of our ancestors, the ghosts of violence, the ghosts of ourselves. We exist as palimpsest. If we write, if we paint, we also erase.” The questions Cheung raises remain unanswered. What is a reader without books? What is a Hong Konger without Hong Kong? How can an identity be maintained when it is actively being dismantled?

The recent flurry of new fiction by Hong Kong writers, including Tse and Cheung, is reminiscent of an earlier literary movement, known as scar literature, that reckoned with the consequences of China’s Cultural Revolution. Named after the short story “The Scar” by Lu Xinhua, which was published in the Shanghai newspaper Wenhui Bao in 1978, scar literature tracked the invisible costs in personal suffering, psychological trauma, and family fracturing that resulted from the decade of political turmoil. This short-lived movement, which began under Mao Zedong’s successor, Hua Guofeng, represented a shift away from the familiar Communist theme of class struggle. Its works offered some measure of catharsis, with authors like Zhang Xianliang shattering political taboos by writing about violent struggle sessions and brutal labor camps.

Hong Kong’s trauma literature, as typified by Patchwork Dolls, offers neither catharsis nor closure. The title story follows so-called patchwork dolls, young girls of color who sell their facial features to wealthy white womenwho want new, trendier faces, swapping them out in a cut-and-paste procedure called “transdermal patchworking.” Although this story is set in New York, Hong Kongers may read it as evoking Beijing’s demographic strategy toward the territory, which was colloquially known as “Keep the fishbowl, change the fish,” meaning to exert control by replacing rambunctious Hong Kongers with more pliant mainlanders.

The narrator, Sophia Leung, herself a patchwork doll, describes how crude needling could leave “visible scars around her eyes and lips like the tiny perforations on stamps,” while even the most up-to-date techniques fail to completely disguise the surgery. Leung sells her entire face to buy “frivolous things like clothes, jewelry, expensive meals,” but in a gruesome turn, her body begins to reject its new face: “I felt my flesh melting off of my skull; I had to use my palms to push it back in, and when my fingers came away they were coated in a rusty discharge.” After more surgery, Sophia’s body learns “to assimilate and live with the trauma. Once or twice a week I woke at night and felt myself separating, as if my flesh was radiating a homing signal to the other parts of me that were gone.”

Patchwork Dolls and City Like Water, by writers still living in Hong Kong, portray surprisingly similar dystopias, often populated by automatons in the form of robots, dolls, or clones. These evanescent worlds are undergirded by loss, with characters haunted by ghost siblings and plagued by disappearances. The violence is often shockingly sudden and brutal. The books invoke the alienation and phantom pain experienced by Hong Kongers as they adjusted to the new political reality following the suppression of the 2019 protests. Seven years later the city remains in the grip of a slow-rolling post-protest purge, with ever-tightening national security measures muzzling political discussion and artistic freedom.

Time expands, accordion-like, in the depiction of those halcyon days of protest when the city was transformed by common purpose, while the repressive aftermath is portrayed as a hallucinatory fever. One abiding urge is to preserve the spirit of Hong Kong’s protest movement in literature, to guard against the amnesiac cursor of the omnipresent censor. Tse writes:

Time seems to have frozen since then, coalescing into a single moment of stillness: the noise of fleeing footsteps stopped; tear gas an opaque cloud in mid-air; a shimmering haze over every splattered face.

In Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Decolonization Struggle, the sociologist Ching Kwan Lee characterizes the 2019 protest movement as the zenith of Hong Kong’s ongoing decolonization struggle. She traces its progenitors, such as the 2014 Umbrella Movement, when prodemocracy activists occupied a main thoroughfare for seventy-nine days, and she switches between summaries of historical research and lively interviews with young protesters who describe their evolution into militants on the front lines.

Lee explains how the political identity of Hong Kongers was reborn through protest as they became a community brought together by kindness and care: “Rather than being ‘faceless’ and ‘leaderless,’ the movement could be described more accurately as a mosaic of the multitudes in which every tiny dot was a center of leadership and capacity.” She sees the sufferings of a population that had become accustomed to tear gas and brutality as providing a further source of solidarity, as well as a clarifying force: “Paradoxically, the collective trauma Hong Kongers sustained had also resurrected the city, reclaimed for the first time by the people as theirs forever—an identity, a homeland, a cause.” Yet the two rounds of national security legislation imposed on Hong Kong in 2020 and 2024 have largely succeeded in dismantling—even criminalizing—that identity, that homeland, that cause.

Lee’s own story presents a cautionary tale for those who dare to openly debate Hong Kong’s identity. She first came under attack in 2020, when two local Beijing-backed newspapers attacked her for a banal statement she had made six months earlier that as a global city, “Hong Kong does not belong to China, it belongs to the world.” The newspapers accused her of spreading pro-independence statements and violating the national security law with her work, even though she had made the comments before the law came into effect. Her employer, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, came under increasing pressure to “dispose of” her, and she was told to turn herself in to the police. She eventually left the university and Hong Kong, and publishing this book will likely preclude her return.

Censorship of the arts has become a fact of life in Hong Kong. At least thirteen movies have been banned and around fifty have been censored under new legislation. Art exhibitions are regularly canceled, and the multimillion-dollar M+ museum removed several artworks from its galleries, leaving them languishing unseen in storerooms, and dozens of images from its website, including two by the controversial Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. In 2024 the Academy for Performing Arts canceled its graduation show, a staging of Dario Fo’s satirical play Accidental Death of an Anarchist, for what the production team called “ obvious” reasons.

This sort of repression runs through “Please, Get Out and Dance,” another short story in Patchwork Dolls, in which the authorities mandate daily dancing and beat or arrest those who depart from the standardized choreography. This happens in a city where so many belongings disappear that residents begin holding funerals for them. An online group itemizes the disappearances: “Black ink pens. An indigenous flower species. Mailboxes. Apples.” For Hong Kong readers, such descriptions summon up the 2019 import restrictions on items used by protesters, such as black clothing, umbrellas, yellow helmets, and face masks. In “Please, Get Out and Dance,” a woman with a poster in her hands screams and screams, although no one can hear what she is saying. Suddenly she is gone: “How or where she went nobody knew, although the entire event was filmed live.”

This is a nod to Hong Kong’s recent history of people disappearing. During the protest movement, mysterious corpses were found floating in the sea. Dozens of prominent democracy activists and politicians are now serving long jail sentences on national security charges. More than 170,000 Hong Kongers have gone into exile in recent years, while mainlanders have been encouraged to move to the territory.

Hong Kong’s writers face an existential decision. Staying in the territory requires adaptation to the demands of the national security legislation, whose red lines have proved more arbitrary and harder to navigate than China’s entrenched censorship regime over the border. Yet leaving removes them from the source of their inspiration. One of the most popular authors to have left is Gigi L. Leung, also known as Leung Lee-chi, who moved to Taiwan before publishing Everyday Movement, a novel that began as a series in a Hong Kong literary magazine that was dropped after the imposition of national security legislation.

In the book’s foreword, Leung describes the shift of mindset brought about by that legislation. “People I knew were arrested, many friends left, and many of us lived with a quiet fear that our words might one day endanger us,” she writes about the moment she realized that she could no longer write with any peace of mind. Leung’s book, which she saw as “small and intimate,” was judged so threatening that the organizers of the 2024 Hong Kong book fair warned independent bookstores to remove it from their shelves.

Yet Everyday Movement is far from polemical. It explores the worlds inhabited by two university roommates, Ah Lei and Panda, as they become ever more enmeshed in the 2019 protests. Like the Cultural Revolution’s scar literature, Leung’s work focuses on the schisms inside the movement between moderates hoping to change the system from within and radicals seeking to replace it with something completely different. She also probes generational divides between Gen Z protesters who are disgusted by the historical inaction and apolitical pragmatism of their elders and the older generation, who find their children’s naiveté incomprehensible. The mother of one protester warns her to stop: “For your so-called justice, you’re slicing off your own flesh, giving up your own bones. But it’s all a lie! This movement, it will eat every part of you until there’s nothing left.”

Everyday Movement takes readers inside Hong Kong’s schools, where teachers protest on weekends yet spend weekdays confiscating protest gear from their students. Classrooms are petri dishes of demographic change, attended by so many teenage commuters from neighboring Shenzhen that going to school is “like crossing a border.” One teenage character, Sai Mui, imagines that her mainland classmates have more privileged lives in spacious apartments with parents who can cater to their needs. To her, China seems a place “full of secret sources of happiness.” Leung’s portraits are tender and finely drawn, yet the episodic nature of the chapters is ultimately unsatisfying; the book lacks a clear conclusion that gathers together all the disparate threads.

The question of voice—or the absence of it—is central to Hong Kong writing. In 1992 the cultural theorist Rey Chow asked, “What would it mean for Hong Kong to write itself in its own language?” Lau Yee-wa’s novel Tongueless illustrates the pressures on Hong Kongers, who traditionally speak Cantonese, as they are increasingly required to speak Mandarin, also known as Putonghua, in institutional and educational settings.

Lau’s slow-burn horror, written before the 2019 protests but published in English in 2024, has just won the Grand Prize of the first Chommanard International Women’s Literary Award. It is set in Sing Din Secondary School, where the unsympathetic and vain teacher Ling charts her colleague Wai’s attempts to master Putonghua in order to gain the necessary teaching qualifications. Wai is described as a “weirdo” with a “mushroom head” who is so desperate to attain fluency that she only communicates with her colleagues in broken, stuttering Mandarin. Her attempts to “change [her] brain” symbolize the metaphorical tonguelessness of Hong Kong’s Cantonese speakers and the attendant identity loss.

Wai’s linguistic aphasia is more strongly reflected in the Chinese version of the book, which uses Cantonese or Mandarin, with some English for the dialogue but standard written Chinese for the narration. Such linguistic differences are harder to convey in English, but Jennifer Feeley’s translation uses stammering and misspellings, for example, “horde lurk” for “hard work,” to portray Wai’s broken Mandarin.

Wai’s cubicle in the teaching office has “a small round convex surveillance mirror, a mosaic-studded vanity mirror, a small mirrored decorative box, and on and on.” By the end of the novel, Wai even places mirrors in front of her computer screen: “The countless mirrors formed a sea, reflecting a circle of curious eyes.” This ever-present surveillance creates a stifling atmosphere of suspicion and betrayal. In one scene, Wai flicks the mirror between Ling and herself, asking, “In fact, what’s the difference between me and you?” This question underlines the impotence of Hong Kong’s Cantonese-speaking population, whose language has for a second time been superseded by that of the ruling power.

Ling, who tells her students that the best quality of Hong Kongers is their strong adaptability, gets plastic surgery, since she fears that she is falling out of step with the conformity required for success in this new environment. The book ends with her in deep debt in a hospital bed, her head swathed in gauze “like a giant glutinous rice ball,” completely unidentifiable.

One important element of China’s scar literature is the guangming de weiba,or “bright tail”: an ending pointing characters toward a brighter future, often led by the Communist Party. Hong Kong’s scar literature has no catharsis and no bright tails; it ends only in destruction and bleakness. In Tongueless,Wai’s suicide is telegraphed from the first page, yet when it happens, it is brutal and shocking: she bores into her head with an electric drill on live-stream. In an interview with me on The Little Red Podcast, which I cohost, Lau described the ending as inevitable: “You need to destroy yourself in order to adapt to the environment.”

Even surviving has come to mean exile and loss—of self, of future, of home, and of the possibilities so tantalizingly present that hot summer, which disappeared in a cloud of tear gas. Tse captures that mood in the last lines of City Like Water:

That was the day I watched you open the umbrella and fly out the bus window. I didn’t try to catch you, didn’t even cry out or alert our sleeping parents. I just watched, with infinite admiration and infinite sorrow, as the umbrella carried you higher and higher into the far-off sky.