[INCIDENTAL] “The Ties That Bind Us: Listening to Catherine Cho on The Devoted and Hong Kong” by Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley
Catherine Cho. The Devoted. Fourth Estate, 2026. 368 pp.
Listening to Catherine Cho speak about The Devoted on 2 October 2026 at this year’s Lincoln Book Festival, I found myself returning to a question about the title: who gets to decide what devotion requires? The word suggests love and constancy, but it can also conceal an expectation that someone should give up part of their life for another. What follows is a response to the conversation and to the questions it opened up about belonging, inherited obligations, and the possibility of claiming a story of one’s own.
Cho described her debut novel The Devoted as a thriller set in Hong Kong, where she lived for several years in her twenties. Its origins lay in memories she had been unable to put aside: the city’s energy, its inequalities, and experiences that remained troubling long after she had left. Following the birth of her daughter, during the pandemic, she returned imaginatively to a place she could no longer visit. The idea took shape before she was ready to begin writing.
Cho recalled that, while caring for a young baby during the pandemic, she had little sense of being productive. Yet the idea for the novel was already taking shape. Her account suggested a less visible stage of creative work, when memories and experiences begin to gather force before they have found a clear form.
Her reflections on Hong Kong also resisted the easy authority of familiarity. She loved living in the city but left feeling that she had never fully understood it. After a relationship ended, she moved from a privileged part of Hong Kong Island to Mong Kok, entering what she described as a mirror world. It had always existed, but her earlier circumstances had kept it outside her view.
A change of address can expose the limits of what we thought we knew. Money and relationships shape the routes we take through a city and the people whose lives become visible to us. Cho’s account made me think about belonging as a position from which we see, as well as a feeling we possess. Affection for a place does not erase the inequalities that organise our experience of it.
For Cho, those limits also informed a choice about perspective. She explained that she had made the central family Korean because she did not want to assume a Chinese viewpoint she did not know. Her interest lay in a transplanted family learning the codes of another society, including those of its criminal organisations. The imaginative problem she described was how to write from a position of proximity without claiming complete understanding.
As someone who studies screen cultures, I was especially interested in Cho’s reference to Wong Kar-wai’s films. She spoke of the colours and movement through which she hoped to evoke Hong Kong. Cinema supplies images that can become entangled with our memories of a place. When we recall a street or a night-time encounter, how much belongs to experience, and how much to the films through which we have learned to see it? Her talk left me wondering how fiction might work with that entanglement, giving remembered images a new setting and significance.
Questions of perspective became more intimate when Cho discussed the move from memoir to fiction. Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness (Henry Holt and Co, 2020) recounts her experience of postpartum psychosis and recovery. Despite the vulnerability of that subject, she found writing fiction more exposing. In memoir, she could say that something had happened; in a novel, every detail was her decision.
I had assumed that invention might provide shelter. Her explanation suggested that it can expose a writer in another way. An invented event reveals what the writer has chosen to attend to, and a character reveals what she wants to understand. Fiction need not reproduce a life in order to disclose the concerns that persist within it.
Inheritance was one such concern in Cho’s account. Raised in Kentucky by Korean immigrant parents, she knew Korea partly through their stories, without feeling that she fully belonged there. A family’s past can remain influential even when the next generation cannot access it directly. It supplies stories and expectations, but also gaps. Those gaps may leave a person unsure which patterns they are continuing and which they might want to change.
Cho’s description of Eunha, the novel’s protagonist, brought this tension into focus. She spoke of a woman whose life is largely shaped by other people’s decisions, and of the difficulty of writing a relatively passive character in the first person. That difficulty raises a question beyond literary technique. Having a voice does not necessarily mean having the power to act. Someone may be able to describe the circumstances of her life while remaining dependent on the people who determine them.
This is where devotion becomes an unsettling idea. Cho described loyalty operating across families, marriages, and criminal organisations. She also spoke about expectations of sacrifice in Korean stories. Her examples prompted me to ask whose sacrifice makes a happy ending possible, and whether the person making it has a meaningful choice. Affection can make an obligation feel freely accepted even when refusing it carries a severe cost. To question that obligation may threaten both a relationship and the identity built around it.
Cho’s account of revision offered a smaller but revealing example of attachment. Scenes of shopping and cooking had helped her understand Eunha, but much of that material was cut. She still missed it. I was interested in the distinction between what a writer needs in order to discover and what a reader needs to encounter. The discarded passages had done work that their absence would render invisible. Cho recalled cutting about 30,000 words overall and writing another 30,000. Letting them go required judgement, supported by the collaboration she described with her agent and editor.
Towards the end of the talk, Cho spoke about home. After living in Kentucky, Hong Kong, New York, and London, she regarded London as home while remaining less certain about describing herself as British. Home had become something she constructed, associated with the people she loved. Her answer allowed attachment to exist without requiring a settled account of national identity.
Her reflections brought me back to my own time in Hong Kong. My husband and I lived there for five months in 2004, and we both developed a deep affection for the city. Yet I have found it extraordinarily difficult to write about it. The attachment has endured; the confidence to put it into words has not followed so readily. Listening to Cho, I recognised something of that hesitation. The Hong Kong I knew was shaped by the circumstances of our stay and by the small portion of its life that became visible to us. Those experiences mattered, but they could not tell me how much remained beyond my view.
Cho’s willingness to acknowledge the limits of her understanding struck a chord with me. It suggested a way to begin writing without treating affection as a claim to authority. I have not yet read The Devoted, but her talk has already helped me name a difficulty I have carried for years: how to give an account of a place I love while recognising how partial that account must be. Perhaps devotion to a place also asks this of us: to attend to what our memories hold while making room for the lives and perspectives they cannot contain.
How to cite: Rawnsley, Ming-yeh T. “The Ties That Bind Us: Listening to Catherine Cho on The Devoted and hong Kong.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 20 Oct. 2026. chajournal.com/2026/10/20/the-devoted.
Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley is a Research Associate at the Centre of Taiwan Studies, SOAS University of London. She is also Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Taiwan Studies and oversees two book series: Anthem Impact in Asian Media, Cinema and Communications (with Gary Rawnsley, published by Anthem Press) and Asian Cinema and Screen(with Wikanda Promkhuntong, published by Brill).