[FICTION] “Encroachment” by Hazel Shu Chen

Hazel Shu Chen on her story: “Encroachment” is my very first attempt at fiction writing in an adopted language, English. The story is about a female expatriate’s life in Hong Kong, her choices, and those moments that define her choices. I do not want to analyse the character, whom I have never known in real life. Fragments of her, glimpses from the Mid-Levels escalator, anecdotes from friends, allowed me to piece things together, and there she is. The story does not have a neat narrative arc, an anticipated climax, or a passage in which the protagonist moves from incomprehension to newly gained perception. It is my observation of the incongruity between the “theory” and practice of leftist ideals in a post-colonial context, and of the sheer loneliness one experiences even with the most intimate ones.

^{A still from the New York Story, Night on Earth}

Upon completing this story, I watched Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991). The anthology film consists of five taxi rides taking place simultaneously across different cities. I was fascinated by the New York one: so uncannily realistic, the camera capturing the bleak liveliness of New York, yet so opaque, the frivolous, meaningless chatter that interpretation cannot penetrate. Nothing pretends to profundity or is dramatically plotted. It is absurd on the surface, true underneath, a muddle from life, but with possibilities hidden behind the objects and actions caught on camera. I am fascinated by that precision. Fiction, on screen or on the page, is a calling of something from the void, yet everything in it is pressed from the impressions of lived life, distilled to suggest a truth, not facts, about the realm of being. In the same vein, I hope “Encroachment” could suggest, or remind its readers of, what it means to live between cultures and languages, or at least draw a gentle smile from those details with which one resonates in living in Hong Kong.

English is my adopted language. At my best, I can use it to communicate and theorise, for the sake of paper publication. My knowledge of the giants of English literature is always filtered through theorists, the depth, the forms, the implications; the text itself is unfathomable to me. Usually, the book gets put down when I encounter a string of convoluted sentences laced with adjectives and adverbs, lyrical or lavish. I cannot taste it, despite all the ravings. Then I discovered Alice Munro and Raymond Carver. I read Munro’s “Passion”, about the woman figuring out how to do the washing of the washtubs. She writes, “Passion gets pushed behind the washtubs.” I was dumbfounded by the power of its precision, the cruelty of its verbs. It was the first time I felt satiated consuming fiction in English.

Yiyun Li writes in “To Speak Is to Blunder” that one’s thoughts are slavishly bound to language: “Like all intimacies, the intimacy between one and one’s mother tongue can be comforting and irreplaceable, yet it can also demand more than what one is willing to give, or more than one is capable of giving.” While attempting to write creatively in Chinese, I was sunk in my mother tongue, entangled in clichés, metaphors, and all those shimmering names in modern Chinese literary history. So that did not go anywhere. After all, maybe a creative mind cannot cohabit with a critical one

My choices of words in English are limited. They do not come to me. When I have a scene in mind, I have to fetch the few I know, arrange and rearrange them, until they sound almost neutral, or indifferent, to me. It is a pushback against judging too quickly what I know and think. I like verbs and objects, creating rather than describing an image.

I am grateful to Tammy, chief editor of Cha, for her willingness to publish this piece. It is a warm answer to my utterance in a language that I know but also do not know. I will continue to knit pieces in English. It is a resistance against my own profession and its utilitarian adoption of this adopted language in the context of Hong Kong.

Encroachment

Elisa always picks a random Thursday afternoon to go to Macau, gets on the bus from the ferry terminal, and arrives at the Black Sand Beach in Coloane. En route, she buys half a dozen tarts from Lord Stow’s Bakery, then eats two slowly sitting on the beach. Milder and softer than the original from her hometown, but it is okay; the humidity of South China grows on everything. The beach feels like the same fishing village where she is from, without the crispness in the azure of ocean and sky.

Elisa was a practising architect before Hong Kong. She met Francesco in London, she was young, beaming through the haze of winter London. She would take him to see Broken Wings, a dance featuring Frida Kahlo at Sadler’s Wells, and the immersive theatre on the outer edge of the city, men danced naked in goats’ heads, swinging their genitals at the audience. The night usually got wrapped up with ethnic cuisines, Ethiopian or Peruvian. In summer, she brought him to her town in Portugal, a surf town on the Atlantic. A wave took them both under and held them there, turning them over and over. She taught him about fear, and what a tsunami could feel like.

“She is different,” Francesco told his parents when they decided to get married. He accepted her feminism, veganism, the gluten-free everything, and all the progressive ideals she enfolded in her black Issey Miyake pleats.

Then came the offer, a family office in Hong Kong. The package was too good to think twice about. She quit her job. They landed in Kennedy Town with two suitcases. Her books arrived later by sea.

The first three months after that September were bliss. They went treasure hunting in the Yau Ma Tei jade market, an old film poster of Wong Kar-wai and a bronze Buddha head. Weekends yielded to trips to islands in Southeast Asia. It felt like eternal summer there.

After Christmas, Elisa wanted to work again. It was harder than she thought, because she was not registered to practise in Hong Kong. She could contribute ideas, ideas for a small house project on low cost and clean energy. She presented at the board meetings with local real-estate developers. They nodded and smiled in appreciation of the shape of the house, as if she were a sculptor, a project that could be set out in the plaza, against the glass curtain façade.

She also tried teaching at the universities in Hong Kong, but she could not land a tenure-track job, with a Master’s degree from a European design institute unheard of. One month of labouring in the studio with students paid less than their rent, but Francesco could introduce her at the party: “My wife teaches architecture at the University.” Then the conversation would move on to art, cinema, and why architects always wear black. Some of the wives wanted her opinion at the Art Basel.

The university did not renew her. They told her that her student feedback questionnaire score was not high enough. One student wrote: “The design of the studio was too theory-driven, no practical insight into Hong Kong, plus her accent was hard to understand.” She cried for a whole day. Francesco held her: “It is okay. I can file you as my dependent. We will save on tax.”

She refused the word housewife. Still, her project shifted from designing a house to running one. She bought a handmade rattan basket to carry fresh produce. A friend introduced her to the Shek Tong Tsui wet market. She went in the early morning and realised that “wet” was not figurative: a grouper flapped water onto her feet. Its head was banged, its belly opened, the blood hosed off the board, the fish wrapped in red plastic, tossed to the fifty-year-old Cantonese woman beside her. Meat, organs, feet of different kinds of animals, the sanguine, mixed with smells of fermented beans and dried herbs, permeated the 98% humidity of Hong Kong, attacked her.

Elisa only bought some oriental orchids from the entrance of the market that day. After that it was stores that Taste, Super, International. She knew where to stock her organic gluten-free flour for banana bread mixed with flaxseed, the superfood of that year.

Superfood could not keep Francesco. He had the sanguine temperament, needed to be out there, making deals, moving funds, taking cuts. Hong Kong was no London. The airport was as close to him as home. He took off and landed in places with exotic rhymes, Shangri-La, Fukuoka, Jakarta, and called her around 8 pm to say goodnight.

A child then was the project. George came along after one year of IVF. She took all the shots, for the motherhood.

The way George looks at her, that azure in his eyes, reminds her where she is from. She puts George in a stroller, walking down the Kennedy Town promenade of babies and puppies. People love his azureness and the blondeness too: “What a doll, is it a boy or a girl?” That makes her happy.

She refused to use a stay-home domestic maid; it was against her belief. She had watched a film about a 1950s American household refusing to let the black maid use the same toilet as the hosts. The whole theatre of Hong Kong laughed at the black maid’s “chocolate pie” revenge.

Segregation would not be in her K-town apartment with a shoebox-sized cabin with shower and toilet adjacent to a bunk bed.

George cried a lot. The IVF baby came into the world with a weak immune system. Midnight runs to the paediatrician happened three times a week. Watch his food, the doctor said. Keep the apartment cool and dry.

She fell asleep on the mat in her yoga class. A nice British woman woke her up at the end. “You do not have a helper?” with a singsong intonation. Elisa got invited to her house for a tea party. It was an apartment on Kennedy Road. She saw the reflections of the two Filipina maids working behind the kitchen counter on the half-open glass panels of the airy balcony. “You can’t find proper clotted cream here. It has to be homemade.” Everyone nodded in agreement.

The clotted cream was very good. Creamy, velvety.

Then Ester came. She has fleshy palms and the neck of a walrus. She can hang George off one arm. At night, she disappears into the shoebox, like magic.

Elisa insisted on Ester calling her by her first name. Then one evening, Francesco was taking a shower and called for a fresh towel, the water muffled his voice, and both women answered.

“Ma’am” is easier.

Elisa’s life in Hong Kong runs from Causeway Bay to Kennedy Town. Everything she needs is in-between. Kowloon is farther than the airport, and they still sell snake soup there. She saw that thing in the cage once. China? No. She watched the Nicole Kidman series, the one where the boy is lost at a night market.

She gave up on Cantonese a long time ago. Mandarin too.

Now her three hours are nearly killed in Macau. The buses still speak Portuguese here. The names of the cathedrals bring her to tears. The ferry drops her at Sheung Wan. City’super has Francesco’s favourite chorizo and all the vegan and gluten-free produce she needs. She swims against the currents of Central workers in her beaded bohemian skirt.

Ester picks George up from pre-school. The hour before bed is a war: the food processor, the vacuum, the ventilation fan, the oven whistling, and under it all, George crying. His eczema itches. Elisa has Ester vacuum at least twice a day.

Francesco is not home. He is never home. Hong Kong sets him in motion. The city is a stopover. He enjoys the transit lounges, the way he hands over the Cathay diamond card to the French-twist receptionist, whose smile is curvier than her waistline.

Elisa gives the rest of the egg tarts from Macau to Ester at the end of evening. “Thank you very much, ma’am!” Ester’s sweet tooth beams. She takes the oil-stained box and vanishes behind the kitchen.

Elisa is happy. She has done good deeds today. She is thinking of adopting a Chinese Village Dog

^{How to cite: Chen, Hazel Shu. “Encroachement.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 13 Sept. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/09/13/encroachment.}

Hazel Shu Chen is a teacher and scholar of modern Chinese literature and film culture, as well as a literary and dance theatre critic. Born in China, she has lived in Hong Kong for more than two decades. Her scholarly interests encompass sound studies, Sinophone literature and culture, and transnational cinema and visual culture. Her research has appeared in Sound Studies, Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, and Journal of Modern Chinese Studies. Her criticism frequently appears in Dance Journal/HK and Hong Kong Literature Bi-Monthly. She is currently working on a book on sound and affect in the modern Chinese context. This is her first published work of English fiction. “Encroachment” is her first published work of fiction.