[LITERARY ESSAY] “Navigating Endless Seas: Hong Kong” by Matt Reeck
DREAMING THAT, while still alive, they’d been translated to the Islands of the Blest where time had happily stopped, as on an antique clock.
The city is this island.
1
I WALK the walkways next to the road by the mall, the trees are labelled, but for whom? Senna siamea, Plumeria rubra, Casuarina equisetifolia, Delonix regia—
Is this the closest to the land I’ll come? If I touch the tree, when I cannot touch humans?
The air exposes me, the air is the right air here, and I’m not, the smell is the right smell here, and I’m not. The cicadas wind into their pulse and moan, the only sound for a second, ten seconds, then the air descends again, clinging to the world.
2
TO LIVE beyond the advertisement of elsewhere. To exchange the product for ground. To exceed the periphery.
I want to live in the edges, edges to myself, to avoid the obvious, though it comes back, the orthodoxy of the self. Is there any worth in fighting it off, to fight off what cannot be forsworn?
3
I CONFESS to you, but I don’t say, “I confess to you.” And so you don’t listen. I confess again, but the room is the wrong room, the time is the wrong time, the people are the wrong people, and I gain no absolution, I’m as full of the wrongheaded feeling that I’m too myself.
4
THERE IS the eternal repeat, the first barely over when the next begins, the circulation building in the want of some final sound, some summary note, some claim on the inconclusiveness of it. Did the day begin again, or was it never over?
In the morning, the ants follow the ant trail up and down the wall onto the bread with raisins left on the counter.
At the breakfast diner, minestrone soup with two cubes of meat, a buttered bun, two Vienna sausages, scrambled eggs, one day’s unpalatable coffee replaced by the next day’s unpalatable tea.
Photographs of people alone in restaurants, people eating alone in restaurants, their bodies no more than bodies, the people they know are all elsewhere, for them, then.
5
WHAT IT MEANS to have a protest is first to have a fake protest with fake protesters getting fake arrested by real police who take them to the real police academy where the real protesters will be taken on the day of the real protest.
What it means is the banks have reason to doubt the commitment of the state to the banks. What it means is the people are distrusted by the banks and so by the state, and so the banks and the property agents buy the land to sell to the people who can no longer afford to buy the land, and so the state creates a housing lottery for people to check on computers in coffee shops on their way to work.
6
“WE HAVE a serious problem of lazy tongue,” the language teacher says, as though offering a diagnosis of a real problem. But her tongue seems fine. She seems fine. She seems good.
That evening, the young businessman says, a friend of my friend, “I can take you to a couple douchey bars.” We go high up to a balcony full of foreigners, bankers, young women in going-out garb. From there, I watch the barges drop sand into the bay, building the island toward the mainland. They talk of ten years ago, I have trouble following, caring about people who are only names. I look at the sea, the island, the apartments, the skyscrapers, the buses, all of it crammed between the island’s mountains and the other mountains only a handful of miles away. Who would have thought to do this here? No one now will know if it was a mistake or not. No one knows why we are here.
7
I FLY the seven seas, I keep flying, the world is in flight, the only act that remains is to fly to another world, to fly into space for four minutes of weightlessness.
My body weighs the same here, half a world away, or several pounds less, as I walk the streets, as I look at the people unreachable though only a few feet away, they’re here in a different way, I’m a partial body, I must be asked the right questions to return to my body.
The sun on my face, the clouds, I hardly understand that the world is the world, the humidity, the rain splatters on my glasses, no one says anything, the contract has been signed—no one will say anything beyond the limit of what can be said. I’m not here, I’m here—no one notices the difference.
8
THE BODY is a deposition on being. A deposit on my future. A delinquency, wandering with me into the day. A demonstration. A protest against absence. A duty officer, letting things in, letting things out.
The body is dust, densely packed, unconfirmed until swept together into a cloth. A document, writing itself into existence.
9
NOT the earth’s end, but an edge, growing into the sea with human voracity.
If the ocean is swallowed, the water inches elsewhere, who’s to say where its home is? Lapping against the embankment, the land dumped here, a prosthesis asking a subtle question—What is land that was never a place?
It’s best to be a boat here. Then the land takes on its proper form—the water is first, the integument, reminder of what lies beyond one island, then the next—
What endless seas.
10
OUT to the island! Out to the island!
Shedding the cityscape for the fishing village where each day is one day closer to obsolescence. A temple, an old woman washing seaweed, the guidebook announces one hundred elders left, the last school closed a decade ago.
“Please don’t disturb the graves,” an old man says. We walk through the cemetery, the golden silk orb-weavers, palm-sized but dainty, scuttle away, the island recreation for city dwellers, a sense of contrast, the heat saturating our bodies, nearing homeostasis—the world and our bodies becoming one.
Then a sudden thunderstorm, a plane through the clouds, from the open water a pack of jet skiers break the sea into lines of white wake.
Back on the boat to town, we see the floating police station, the recruits on the speedboat with motorcycle helmets, visors down. The sense of return—return to each person’s one problem. Did the sage say, “One life, one poem?” Or, “One life, one problem?”
for Yiwen
11
THE FREIGHTER navigates the channel, takes a sharp left—the smokestacks of the ex-pat island are three splinters against the sky.
People come and go, a man yells in the hallway in the night, complaining about the size of the apartment he agreed to rent. He leaves. The next day another man comes in his place. The air conditioning never turns off.
Trash builds up on the streets. Public service ads warn how the dumps are about to overflow. They surround the city, next to the amusement parks, the city and its trash, a growth emerging from its skin, not treatable by lotion, unguent, or salve.
12
FOR MORE years than there are years, the clouds have passed to the northeast, overlaying the broken land with their commentary. It’s not up to me to wonder about beginnings—endless islands, endless sky.
From atop the park, the buildings orient around a new pivot.
The community centre, hidden at street level, becomes visible—its red and blue paint failing to mask its aged façade. The buildings build from top down, where they touch the sky, the new articulation.
13
“THERE’S NO GRASS because the government doesn’t want the foreign maids to sit on their day off,” he says, having lived here eight years.
One day of rest in seven, a ritual.
The tourists, “locusts from the north,” their empty carry-ons to be stuffed with clothes. All the tourists spending money—a ritual.
Public space where the people never rest, not even one beggar. It’s like shaving the body to prevent the human in us from escaping.
14
“I WAS human, but now I’m contingent …” I say.
All the processes of contingency.
“Once you become, you’ll be,” says the patriarch, atop the temple calendar. (Flaws in plain sight.)
“Once I rode my tricycle all the way to infinity,” I say, thrust onto the dais. Then I add, “And back again …”
15
MY HEART beats fast. I cannot quell it. It’s a perversion of the will to live.
“Don’t use vinegar,” the doctor says. “Don’t eat lychees.”
Fire on top of fire, an imbalance, though, what then, of the world’s imbalance?
I list, my ballasted heart, beating, beating, the sound growing over my body, a caul slipped over, the being inside wanting out.
16
IN THE PARK, the exhibition of animé figurines, bloated past human scale, their muscles rippling.
(A boy touches one forearm.)
Their gaudy primary colours, each figure on a two-foot metal pedestal, surrounded on four sides by a chain to prevent their drifting off, sublimated, to prevent too much human touching.
The statues heating up during the day, their colours fading, bound for a dump, their fibreglass lives quickly passed over in stories of holiday travel.
17
THE TYPHOON arrives, its endmost limb. First wind, then torrents of rain. The train stations have water in their names—bay, pond, pier. We eat, talk.
“The golden era has passed,” her friend says, talking about film, but the city’s life, too. The airport wants another runway, the dolphins, the sacrifice—they won’t mate with the dredging going on—as though place is only a question of what to build, whom to sell to.
Rain lashing the city, the city growing into the sea, the poor moved out, the commodity moved in.
18
I LEAVE the apartment, I enter the streets, I breathe in air, I feel, I’m breathing in air. I walk, I breathe, sweat clings to the small of my back, I stand as the red and white taxis turn left, I see the hill in the distance, the white mosque to my side, there’s something about seeing, breathing, being among people.
There’s no policy to this, the world here is apparent, there’s no standing off. The world, the sea, the hills, the clouds, the air, the banyan trees with their roots, the skyscrapers, the motion absorbs me.
I leave the apartment, I smell the air, I think, This is the air. I walk, I sweat, I try to live, I live.
How to cite: Reeck, Matt. “Navigating Endless Seas: Hong Kong.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 2 Nov. 2026. chajournal.com/2026/11/02/endless-seas.
Matt Reeck’s website describes him as a translator, poet, and scholar, though he is considering changing it to a translator, writer, intellectual, and dissident. A Guggenheim Fellow in Translation, he translates from Hindi, Urdu, French, and Korean. His poetry, translations, essays, and reviews have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in A Public Space, Fence, Harp & Altar, The Diagram, On the Seawall, Jacket 2, Himal, Wasifiri, and Hopscotch Translation. This is his first published work of fiction. [All contributions by Matt Reeck.]