[ESSAY] “The Unstuck City: Dorothy Tse’s City Like Water” by Luca Griseri

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Dorothy Tse (author), Natascha Bruce (translator). City Like Water, Graywolf Press, 2026. 112 pgs.

The novel resembles a décollage precisely because it leaves exposed the alternative narratives it has rediscovered.

Armed with a penknife, the Italian artist Domenico Rotella (1918-2006) would often wander around Rome at night, cutting thick strips of advertising posters and cinema bills from billboards. Back in his studio, he glued them onto canvases and sliced through them to expose the older material that had been covered over time. He pioneered décollage (literally, “unsticking”): the new artworks he created did not combine disparate elements, as in a collage, but removed layers to reveal what had been hidden within pre-existing material.

Dorothy Tse’s City Like Water (originally published in 2021 and recently translated into English by Natascha Bruce) is also an example of décollage: Hong Kong is the surface through which she cuts, and her writing is the tool that recovers what has been covered up. She uses memories and nightmares to disrupt the way her city is narrated.

While Rotella and the other Nouveau Réalisme artists excavated the material fabric of consumerism, Tse’s novella uncovers the remains of a fading social framework: cherished personal memories; forgotten events, both personal and public, small and large; and the stifled mood of the city, exposed through the many surreal incidents recounted by the protagonist.

An Uneasy Narrator

At heart a chronicle of how change creeps up on society, City Like Water belongs to the recent wave of fiction exploring Hong Kong’s perceived fragility.

The nameless narrator is neither corrupted by the materialism that causes Ling’s callousness in Lau Yee-Wa’s Tongueless nor affected by the lack of ambition and desire to conform found in Tse’s previous novel, Owlish. Yet, like the protagonists of these novels, she is entangled in a feverish atmosphere that she cannot control and that threatens to overwhelm her.

In her restlessness, sense of loss, and inability to maintain a firm grasp on her own city, she most closely resembles the main character in Hon Lai Chu’s Mending Bodies. They undergo different experiences but share the same coping mechanism: they tend to distance themselves from the events they witness while remaining acutely aware of them. Tellingly, Tse’s narrator fears that she might have inherited her father’s detachment from the people and events around him. Of course, detachment is indispensable to anyone striving to be an objective reporter. Yet it also becomes an essential act of self-preservation, a comprehensible search for personal respite, and a means of maintaining one’s identity. More ominously, perhaps, such distancing signals that the city’s malaise is already affecting the protagonists of these novels, desensitising them and, in some sense, presaging what lies in store for the city.

The Layers
of the City

Like a canvas by Rotella, City Like Water is characterised by a distinctive textural quality. The restless narrator describes the verticality of an urban space in which dark staircases seem to extend endlessly into buildings, while objects and people fall from above. She walks through old streets that “are no longer on the city’s epidermis” but reside deep within people’s memories, and observes people scattering and hiding in the recesses of the urban landscape.

Another similarity lies in the many references to city life. While Rotella used mass media and mundane objects in his creations, Tse’s story draws upon everyday events and well-known events: the Mark Six lottery, the wet market, the TVB Jade television channel, the bookshop that disappears, migrants arriving from the North, and a longing for the industrial past, when success came to those who worked in the city’s industries. These details identify the novel’s unnamed city as Hong Kong.

Yet, for all its attention to the ordinary and mundane, City Like Water is decidedly not a realist work. It is neither an analysis of social issues nor an elegy for a long-lost past, although a notable streak of nostalgia pervades the novel. Instead, it uses the quotidian to recover the city’s hidden layers: memory, allegory, and surrealism.

First, urban life shapes the protagonist’s childhood memories. When reminiscing about mundane family events, such as her mother preparing meals for the family and her father collecting coupons and watching television, she rediscovers the micro-stories that would inevitably be omitted from any official narrative. These intimate portraits of everyday life restore the layers and nuances that were always present beneath the surface but have since been smoothed over.

Yet there is a contradiction implicit in any décollage: what is reclaimed, whether glued onto a canvas or retold by a flawed narrator, remains inherently fragile. Recollections are hazy and unreliable. “My own memory is a mess. A ravenous, never tied store-room, constantly in motion. A chaotic sea,” laments the protagonist, who has almost forgotten her sister’s existence. The fact that much of the past is experienced only as a series of disconnected memories does not imbue the novel with nostalgia. Instead, it places what was previously hidden, and has been painfully rediscovered, beneath the overbearing fear that it might yet be lost again.

In addition to memories, Hong Kong’s cityscape provides the setting for the book’s many non-realist episodes. Some are allegorical and closely evoke recent events: birds are people and become books; a man with a patch of blood on his suit cannot find his way through the underground. Others are surreal: ears fly around like butterflies; entire floors of a hotel are suddenly closed. Still others employ a decidedly more sinister form of surrealism: school authorities force schoolchildren to promise to be happy, while the news absurdly labels protesting housewives “members of a criminal gang disguised themselves as housewives”.

In general, the very fact that these events are narrated matters more than their precise meaning. They are exposed layers that once again tear through the city’s surface. Because they are so firmly rooted in the everyday, their presence is incompatible with any official narrative and constitutes an obvious irritant to any sanitised representation of what the city is supposed to be.

Shapelessness

Within the context of the author’s oeuvre, the memories, allegories, and surreal events in City Like Water place it closer to short stories such as “Dark Things” and “The Man Who Ate Everything” than to the more restrained tone of her previous novel, Owlish. They lend her latest work a certain cinematic quality, not so much in relation to its plot or character development, both of which are sparse, but to its increasingly feverish and oppressive mood. A cinematic equivalent of City Like Water might be any of Bi Gan’s films, with their fluid, oneiric atmosphere, their blurred boundaries between reality and fantasy, and their ultimate resemblance to a prolonged nightmare.

As reality leaches into nightmares and the real into the surreal, “being like water” becomes the city’s very essence and exemplifies the shapelessness that Tse narrates. Beyond the phrase’s obvious reference to the city’s recent past, Tse’s Hong Kong is like water because it assumes different forms according to the narratives that attempt to define it. With its own story fractured into incomplete shards and dispersed across a collection of incoherent memories and disconcerting episodes, the city’s lack of shape is the product of the competing discourses that purport to contain it.

This shapelessness is challenging and disorientating. It creates a restless atmosphere that confuses and provokes. Indeed, the novel can be regarded as an example of psychogeography, the study of how geography affects people’s experiences of a city, a movement in which Nouveau Réalisme artists such as Domenico Rotella were involved. Reading the work becomes an act of dérive (drift), intended to heighten one’s awareness of what is happening and to prompt questions about one’s own position, almost as though Tse wished to echo Guy Debord’s famous invitation to embrace the unfamiliar and disorientating.

In this gritty urban archaeology, real experiences are replaced by recollections and nightmares. Perhaps the very process of seeking the city’s hidden layers was always destined to be feverish and hesitant. More fundamentally, this shapelessness is produced by the memories and surreal experiences that Tse recounts. They have scraped away the notion of a unitary, coherent city and left behind something far less uniform and much more undefined, hazy, and feverish, and therefore far removed from any standardised narrative. The hidden layers that have been so laboriously rediscovered are left exposed for all to see, rather than being reinterpreted, and perhaps concealed once again, within a new, homogeneous alternative narrative.

Indeed, City Like Water confirms that dissecting a pre-existing narrative does not necessarily produce a different whole or an alternative, singular narrative to replace the previous one. The novel resembles a décollage precisely because it leaves exposed the alternative narratives it has rediscovered: the forgotten micro-stories and inconvenient episodes of gritty urban life revealed through memories and nightmares. It neither covers them up nor subsumes them within another overarching story.

The Unstuck City

As a result, it is inevitable that the Hong Kong of City Like Water should remain unstuck (décollée), its original surface scratched away and an incomplete alternative narrative uncovered in its place.

This unstuck condition opens the door to possibilities, to the extent that City Like Water becomes a celebration of what might still be. It brings to mind the cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who once said that the purpose of his work was to give space and voice to the unspoken, and to give it a form in which it had never previously been perceived. Similarly, and like any true décollage, Tse’s work reveals the plurality hidden beneath the surface. It also promises that, once its unspoken stories have been uncovered, this city, and indeed any city, cannot be confined to a single shape or narrative.

Yet the author’s method of rediscovering lost possibilities could scarcely be more different from Doyle’s. Her story is not softened by redemptive lyricism or nostalgia, and it even lacks the wit and striking turns of phrase, whether in the original or the translation, of her previous novel. Crucially, Tse avoids facile redemptive trajectories. Hers is not restorative fiction, and it does not return the unity the city has lost. City Like Water is episodic in both form and content, comprising self-contained vignettes that do not culminate in any evident sense of progress. No coherent new narrative emerges from the story she tells, and no viable, detailed alternative is proposed. Although the protagonist remains acutely and painfully aware of what is happening around her, she is as powerless at the end of the story as she was at the beginning. Indeed, her possible solution appears to be leaving Hong Kong. As for the city itself, nothing suggests that its present course can be altered. In other words, this novel is a dismantling operation through and through, and it never becomes a collage.

One might be tempted to regard the writing of the novel itself as evidence that coherence has been achieved, with the possibility of an alternative emerging through the very processes of writing and reading. Yet the book’s true value lies precisely in its refusal to remedy the shapelessness it has uncovered. Tse is confident enough to leave the layers exposed and visible for what they are, held together largely by fear and confusion. Precisely because her décollage produces something incomplete and undefined, she reminds us of the importance of rediscovering and preserving the hidden strata that underpin any narrative, particularly when powerful social interests are actively attempting to cover them up.

Tse understands that the purpose of her work as a décollage is to disturb and dismantle what might once have appeared perfectly formed. She shows that what truly matters may sometimes be the recovery of difference and the indication of what might still be possible. This reveals the most important message of her book: the conviction that narrating shapelessness is more meaningful than imposing an alternative narrative.

^{Dorothy Tse}

How to cite: Griseri, Luca. “The Unstuck City: Dorothy Tse’s City Like Water.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 10 Sept. 2026, chajournal.blog/2026/09/10/tse-city-water.

Luca Griseri (he/him) studied history and postmodern philosophy in his native Italy. After obtaining an MBA from the University of Warwick (UK), he embarked on a career in marketing and over 18 years lived in London, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. He is currently based in Penang, where he indulges in his passions: running, hiking in the forests and eating street food. [All contributions by Luca Griseri.]