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Dorothy Tse (author), Natascha Bruce (translator), Owlish, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023. 224 pgs.
The “-ish” in Owlish by Dorothy Tse suggests a suffixed impreciseness, a mutating unknown blurred between two states. Originally published in Chinese in 2020, and in an English translation by Natascha Bruce in 2023, Owlish is written in a voice lucidly familiar with the ambiguities and absurdities of the ways of life of Hong Kong, which is fictionalised here as Nevers. In Ackbar Abbas’s words, Hong Kong exists “on the imminence of its disappearance”. Tse extrapolates this premise to Nevers: to be unaware of Nevers’s decay, in the “-ish” between consciousness and death, is a luxury she never opens to the reader. Owlish aestheticises everyday distraction to suspend this “-ish” in the encroaching motions of a real, unfantasised nightmare.
The novel’s protagonist, Professor Q, objectifies and projects distraction. While student protests at Lone Boat University swell to consume Nevers’s entire territory, Professor Q embarks on a private rebellion of love with Aliss, a life-sized ballerina existing in the “-ish” between doll and woman. He enlists an old friend, Owlish, to help him hide Aliss from his decade-long marriage to Maria, the perfect, virginal wife. Another decade-long marriage in the novel is the relationship between Nevers and the Vanguard Republic. Professor Q’s affair takes place in the tenth year of Nevers’ return to the Ksanese mainland, which Tse brilliantly transposes onto her dreamworld from Hong Kong’s history.
Valeria Island, “the war inland”, “water [turning] to concrete”: Tse’s sparse, efficient exposition, meticulous enough to constitute a Hong Kong History 101, foregrounds the importance of personal memory in fomenting a collective cultural consciousness for societies previously deprived of the chance to do so. The “[festering] spaces” between immigrants’ toes nourish Nevers as much as the Valerian colonisers’ “barracks, opium depots, dance halls and bars”. Ten years post-Handover, Nevers is now a space of distraction for Professor Q and his companions with the portents of “soundless deaths”, “imitation marble floors and glittering false ceilings”. Their memories inherit the myth of Valerian “arrogance, luxury and indolence”. They unknowingly resist the warnings that plague Nevers, just as it’s easy enough to look only at your reflection in the glass skyscrapers of Central district, and never through them.
I was a child when Hong Kong Disneyland opened to the public in a pink riot of princesses, dolls, and magicians. In the mystical bowels of Nevers, where Professor Q wins Aliss’s soft body, if not her heart, an equal fantasy presides. “Water poured out of an open pipe at the end of the corridor, forming a little river. A tiny clockwork boat bobbed along it while a musician the size of a thumb paced the deck playing a tiny violin.” Nevers is a small, small world indeed, no more surreal than the flowers sprouting in lungs and from the tips of guns in Boris Vian’s Mood Indigo. While Aliss distracts Professor Q and their love affair distracts the reader, Tse twists the knife of narratorial omniscience in the reader’s eyes. Just as “the world around [Professor Q] seemed to vanish into his blind spot”, the magic of Tse’s narrative extends the blind spot to also subsume the reader. Yet, for a novel about Hong Kong, whose revolutions have twice succumbed to increasing authoritarianism in the last decade, to circumvent explicit violence is not to ignore it, but to summon forth its subtler, fiercer shadow in expectation.
Words, too, can be made dangerous as they fade into censorship, but there is a way to evade them without losing meaning: to say “-ish”. In Tse’s original, Chinese-speaking Nevers, euphemisms and puns erect a shimmering mirror of irony. She prises names from their literality in a semantic echo of Hong Kong’s dislocation into Nevers. In Chinese, for instance, Nevers is called 陌根地, which plays on the name of the Burgundy region, 勃艮地, through homonyms and visually similar morphemes. This reference to France exemplifies a broadly European colonial heritage for Nevers, but Tse supplants the sound and meaning of 勃艮地 to build a “Burgundy” raised on shadow and subversion. Literally translated, Tse’s homophonic play on “Burgundy”, 陌根地, becomes “Unknown-Roots-Land”, or “the Land of Unknown Roots”. Tse also puns, because 陌, “unknown”, is a Cantonese homophone for the negation 勿, which might transform “Burgundy” into “No-Roots-Land”, or “the Land of Rootlessness”. Given Hong Kong’s history as a city of migrants, and Cantonese’s infamous penchant for double meanings, 陌根地 would be an apt epithet for Hong Kong itself, let alone Tse’s discomfiting dream of it.
Natascha Bruce renders Tse’s uncanny world-building in an equally allusive and alluring English. Her translation retains a marrow-deep sense of written Chinese syntax and semantics, which makes reading Owlish a linguistic as well as substantive thrill. Bruce’s choice to translate 陌根地, “the land of unknown rootlessness”, as “Nevers” more than measures up to Tse’s polysemous innuendos. More than its posit as a profound and spectacular repudiation of hope, disjointed from the future as well as the past, Nevers is also a town in Burgundy where, in 1939, the French government incarcerated Walter Benjamin after the Nazi regime stripped him of his German citizenship. Tse’s “dialectic between dreaming and waking” draws precisely on Benjamin’s materialist dreamscape of Paris in the nineteenth century, incredibly influential in Hongkong cultural studies. Bruce’s Nevers conjures up the “imminence” of Hong Kong’s disappearance, absorbed into Benjamin’s dream of waning modernity.
On the literal, “real” surface, Owlish appears to be the story of a love affair between a professor and a doll-ballerina-woman-ish, but shadow realms and secreted spaces emerge as Tse’s narrative snakes through irreverent reveries, superposing these shadows on the map of reality until “real” and “dream” merge in the indistinguishable. The novel metamorphoses into an abstract negotiation with power, control, blindness; of infidelity to the lover, the institution and the state; whether in hidden churches or the greater arenas of political ploys, incredibly prescient of the mounting scale of Hong Kong’s horror. As Tse writes in her afterword, the structure of the novel also culminates in a moment of anguished, terrifying “ksana”: an eternal, paralysed flow of “unquenchable torrents”.
Maria, Professor Q’s wife and a high-level government worker, is one of the quiet observers of these greater arenas of horror. In a brilliantly inserted chapter, slackening the pace’s tautness about a third into the novel, the reader accompanies her on a day to work. She encounters there not only the ordinary terror of urbanity, exacerbated in Hong Kong’s cityscape, but the cadre’s terror of bureaucratic mishap in the reception of a mis-sent email, detailing what she interprets as redevelopment projects for Nevers’ future. A first shade of Nevers reveals itself to Maria in her office, reminiscent of the Minitrue office in George Orwell’s 1984, remapping her reality: “New islands had appeared in the sea… Several districts had vanished entirely.” These layers of Nevers recur with increasing frequency as Owlish accrues tension and fear. Professor Q sees them blossom in his palms, through windows, on screens, in “whole clusters of ghostly cities”. What does it mean if the strange map of Nevers, attached to Maria’s misdirected email, is government-sponsored? The final government line throws a handful of dust in the reader’s eyes, as blinded as Professor Q’s: “What happens in a dream stays in a dream. It doesn’t affect reality.”
As dreams cast pulsing shadows across and beneath Nevers, reality flickers in sharpening coruscations of light. Only light can “[slice] through [Professor Q’s] line of vision” and transform his reality into “flashing warning signs”. The litotes of political reality echo across Hong Kong and its rootless, fictionalised counterpart: “No, not because of the student arrests. […] Not because the seaside sitting-out areas were turned into army barracks. Not because the history textbooks were altered and your memory warped…” Perhaps light is what Hong Kong needs. In the dictionary of the Anti-Extradition Law Movement, to attend a protest is to “dream” and to start a fire is to “use magic”, because to speak of reality is to risk an imprisoned decade. But of course, what happens in a dream stays in a dream. The eeriness of Tse’s Owlish is that her dream of Hong Kong does shape reality, and does have a tangible impact on her readers. Copies of Owlish propagate across my friends’ bookshelves and my mind. I can’t stop reading into it as a mirror, a cursed reflection of my city’s reality, and I know I stand far from alone.
Who is Owlish and who are “you”? Tse strides the path of most resistance to such concrete questions, even as government authority pierces through her shadow-light Nevers, imposing concrete answers on Q, Aliss, and Maria. A terrorising sequence in the final pages of the novel mass-manufactures an oppressive hyperventilation of pronouns. From “you” to “you” to “you”, each person generates an additional cogwheel of fear in the production chain of “Do Not Retreat. Do Not Talk. Do Not Anything, Everything Is Forbidden.” These given-up selves, stolen from you by decisions as abstract as those made by men in power in a distant state, seem to congregate around you, the reader. Tse creates a sinisterly vertiginous paranoia as the mob of divergent “yous” close in. If on a winter’s night, a traveller might encounter the horror of his sleepwalking face, Tse has authored it here. Hong Kong’s own face, post-National Security Law, is left dismembered, ajar.
“Where was the line between a human being and a doll that could move?” Owlish’s narrator asks. Equally, where is the line between freedom and the pretence of top-down “autonomy”? Where is the line between dream and reality? Hong Kong, then, is the doll that can move, and dolls are objects that can be disappeared. Even Nevers’s shadow worlds end up shackled, though “how many layers of underworld” the city has, and how many “yous” inhabit them, extend beyond the final page of the novel. Owlish is a brilliantly plotted, rigorously playful yet bloody experiment in disrupting Hong Kong’s immanent, imminent disappearance. If Nevers is the dream, Hong Kong is reality, yet we continue to live in the “-ish” of this city’s untouched shadows: “Everything is clearer when viewed from behind closed eyes.”
How to cite: Suen, Michelle. “The Shadow of Hong Kong in Dorothy Tse’s Owlish.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 16 Jul. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/07/16/shadow-of-hong-kong/.
Michelle Suen is from Hong Kong and lives in Dublin, Ireland. She is studying English literature and history at Trinity College Dublin and is an assistant editor of fiction for Asymptote. [All contributions by Michelle Suen.]
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