Dorothy Tse’s stunning novella City Like Water fictionalises the quiet dissent of a city unravelling. Told in vignettes, this location is, and is not, a distorting mirror for 21st-century Hong Kong, marked by neocolonial history and the “muddied, contaminated memories” ghosting its streets.
Here, remembrance is fluid. This city has also long been a harbour for refugees, whose descendants remain. But its inhabitants hurry through a landscape of nightmarish surveillance, holding the knowledge that “every person is a potential criminal”.
Still, their lives continue amid the hum. As reality blurs into phantasmagoria, the narrator emerges, a teenage boy grappling with the anxiety of a world that turns to sea before him. He struggles to unearth answers about his little sister’s disappearance, seeking distraction in ‘the siren songs of the toe cleavage displayed by sex-workers near his home.
In school, his classmates are given slips to sign, which state “I promise not to kill myself.” When his poodle-haired mother joins a band of housewives protesting the sale of fake lotus roots, the city’s shadows grow teeth.
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Readers less familiar with Hong Kong’s past might miss some of Tse’s references to famous protests, recalling the violence meted onto activists from the pro-democracy movement. Tse traces these happenings while diving into intimate spaces of apartments, subways, lifts and wet markets with visceral relish.
