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[ESSAY] “Hong Kong, Literature, Culture, History” by Jean-Claude Trutt, translated by Cyril Camus

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this essay, written in French, was published on 1 November 2022. The essay draws extensively on Jentayu, revue littéraire d’Asie, Hors-série n° 5: Hong Kong, edited by Coraline Jortay and Gwennaël Gaffric, with a preface by Gregory B. Lee (Éditions Jentayu, 2022).

Its author, Jean-Claude Trutt (b. 1935), is a French Alsatian engineer and lifelong enthusiast of world literature who has travelled extensively for business, including to Hong Kong and mainland China. Drawing on his personal experiences and his reading of Hong Kong literature, the essay combines memoir, literary criticism and historical reflection to explore the city’s cultural identity, colonial legacy and changing political landscape.

We are grateful to Jean-Claude Trutt for granting us permission to publish the essay in English. Our thanks also go to Cyril Camus for his meticulous translation. He carefully checked references and obtained several of the books cited by Trutt to ensure that quotations corresponded to their existing English translations. In some instances, he also had to restructure passages where the English translations differed substantially in their organisation from the French versions originally quoted.

Authors and translators featured in Jentayu, revue littéraire d’Asie, Hors-série n° 5: Hong Kong: Ng Hui-bin (tr. Sandrine Marchand), Leung Ping-kwan (tr. Sandrine Marchand), Xiaosi (tr. Lucie Modde), Dung Kai-cheung (tr. Gwennaël Gaffric), Xi Xi (tr. Coraline Jortay), Leung Lee-chi (tr. Brigitte Duzan), Jennifer Wong (tr. Lucie Modde), Chan Ho-kei (tr. Alexis Brossollet), Dorothy Tse (tr. Coraline Jortay), Tammy Lai-Ming Ho (tr. Lucie Modde), Wong Yi (tr. Lucie Modde), Nicholas Wong (tr. Lucie Modde), Hon Lai-chu (tr. Gwennaël Gaffric), Louise Law (tr. Coraline Jortay) and Lawrence Pun (tr. Gwennaël Gaffric). Illustrations by Missquai and Running Swan.

Coraline Jortay and Gwennaël Gaffric (editors), Gregory B. Lee (writer of the preface). Jentayu, revue littéraire d’Asie, Hors-série n° 5: Hong Kong, Éditions Jentayu, 2022. 215 pgs. (For full details of the authors and translators, please scroll to the end of the piece.)

^{Jentayu – revue litteraire d’asie – hong kong}

I must admit, however, that I never particularly liked the city.

Jentayu Éditions published an issue of their journal entirely devoted to Hong Kong in September 2022,¹ the same month in which they released their special issue on the Uyghurs, which I discussed in “Ouïghours, littérature, culture et camps” [Uyghurs, Literature, Culture, Prison Camps]).

I frequently visited Hong Kong on business. I must admit, however, that I never particularly liked the city, which was then still a British colony. I found Hong Kong’s Brits to be very “colonial”,² in the manner of the Raj. On one occasion I travelled there with my friend Gilbert, who ran our Sheffield subsidiary and took great pride in his membership of exclusive London clubs (first the Eccentric Club and later, once that club had closed, the venerable East India Club in St James’s Square). He wanted to take me to lunch at Hong Kong’s principal British club, located on the top floor of a high-rise, to which he had secured an invitation. We were greeted by a butler of sorts, who gave me a cursory glance and then, without looking at me again, asked Gilbert, “Is this your friend?” When Gilbert said yes, the man continued, “Would you tell your friend that we do not accept jeans in this Club?” I looked down at my trousers: they were Newmans, not exactly jeans, although the pocket openings were indeed cut horizontally. We did not press the matter. But as we left the building, I asked Gilbert whether they realised they would soon be thrown out (this must have been around 1986 or 1987, and Hong Kong was handed over to China in 1997). As for the local Chinese population, I had little contact with them, as I never once encountered a taxi driver who spoke English. I even wondered how the Brits had organised the education of the local people. Then again, perhaps my taxi drivers were immigrants from the mainland? I confess that, at first sight, the city held little appeal for me. During one of my early trips to China, I had to spend a weekend there before travelling on to Hangzhou. I was accompanied by several other executives from my company, one of whom had brought his wife, and they hurried off into the city to “go shopping”, an activity I have always abhorred. At first I walked with them for a while along a street, I no longer recall which, that was particularly famous for its shops; then I left them and continued on my own, suddenly finding myself the only European amid a vast crowd of Chinese people. “Where on earth are the Brits?” I wondered. Then, passing a large hotel, I noticed a basement with baths, a hot pool and massage services, so I decided to go in. I undressed and discovered that the men in the pool were naked! Feeling somewhat awkward, I went in anyway (there were only two or three of them), though I did manage to avoid the massage. After my bath, I felt better as I stepped back out onto the street and resumed my walk; suddenly, I came upon a convivial group of Go players sheltering beneath a few trees. Everyone, players and spectators alike, was utterly absorbed in this game of strategy, even though it is in fact a highly intellectual pursuit, far more so than chess! That experience went some way towards reconciling me with the city. Similarly, during the trip with Gilbert, we were out for an evening stroll when we approached a square, drawn by shrill sounds resembling the chirping of thousands of birds: it was a gathering of Filipino domestic workers, all meeting in the same spot for the evening, laughing and chatting away. A poem in Jentayu‘s special issue on Hong Kong captures this scene. Entitled “Dancing Silhouettes”, it was written in English by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, founder of Hong Kong’s leading online English-language literary journal, Cha: An Asian Literary Jouranl. The poem begins by noting that there are 380,000 of them today, women from across Southeast Asia who

[…] mind others’ children
while peering at their own
stored on phone screens.
Some sleep in unconventional places
[…] under stairs, on balconies
between shelves, in closets.

It then continues:

I’ve seen their striking faces, Sunday beams,
and dazzling dancing silhouettes.
I’ve heard their singing, animated conversations,
Laughter that propels you to also seize the day.
I’ve felt their collective energy—rigorous life—
moving this city forward
in their unique, significant way,
no less noble than the moneyed.³

Of course, we had an agent on the ground handling sales of our façade equipment (permanently installed roof-mounted units for façade maintenance and window cleaning, as well as suspended platforms for painting), but his English was poor and he was reluctant to approach local British companies. Later, when China opened up, he set up an office and workshop in Shenzhen, a new city near Hong Kong, but it was clear to me that he struggled with Mandarin when he tried to expand his business further into the mainland. In fact, businesspeople not only from Hong Kong but also from Singapore (where, as is well known, 80 per cent of the population is of Chinese descent) all saw the vast mainland Chinese market opening up, yet all ran into this language barrier. The same problem affected the engineer we had hired to work on China; he was a Hong Kong Chinese national and a British subject. He did not speak Mandarin and even struggled with the Chinese writing system. He told me that Mandarin lessons were offered only at university level.

This brings me directly to the issues raised in the preface to the Hong Kong special issue by Gregory B. Lee, Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and a member of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities. I knew that Cantonese (which is, more or less, the language spoken in Hong Kong) and Beijing Mandarin were not mutually intelligible, that Cantonese had two more tones than Beijing Mandarin (six instead of four), and that Mao Zedong had replaced many Chinese characters with simplified ones. But I was unaware of the other differences between the two languages: dissimilar vowels and consonants, significant lexical distinctions and different syntax. And while the two languages share a large number of Chinese characters, “there are characters in Cantonese that do not exist in standard written Chinese.”⁴ Additional characters are therefore required for printing and word processing (especially in digital formats). In any case, it is well known that neither Hong Kong nor Taiwan has adopted the so-called simplified characters. Let me digress for a moment to show you the character ma, meaning “horse” (although the phoneme ma has many other meanings depending on the tone, such as “mother”), in both its traditional and simplified forms:

It is easy to see exactly what was lost through simplification: the horse’s four legs and its mane. It is worth noting that the Japanese have retained the character in its traditional form within their writing system (among the 1,900 Chinese characters they kept). But there is another drawback, as Gregory Lee points out: “For well over two thousand years, the language of elite culture and administration in the region we now call China was wenyan.”⁵ To access it, a modern Chinese speaker must learn it; wenyan is no closer to Mandarin than it is to Cantonese, Lee adds, yet access to this “pre-modern language”⁶ is made more difficult by the abandonment of traditional characters. I must admit that, at this point, I am beginning to lose my way a little. And yet I have taken a keen interest in these unique Chinese characters (see, on my website, Voyage, tome 4: “Les caractères chinois” [Chinese characters]) and in their current use in Japan, as well as their past use in Korea and Vietnam (see Voyage, tome 3: “Langue et écriture” [Language and Writing]). Fortunately, a detailed explanation of wenyan can be found on Wikipedia. I learned a great deal there that I had not known before: that Dream of the Red Chamber is the only one of the great classic novels not written in wenyan, for instance, and that Tang poetry was originally rhymed, although those rhymes are lost when the poems are read aloud in any of today’s Chinese languages. All of this is very interesting, but it was Hong Kong I wanted to discuss in this post.

So, let us return to Hong Kong. The city is virtually the sole subject of most of the selected texts, as though there were a desperate attempt to define its identity. Some authors view it as a city of love and passion; others as a city of money, a notion that strikes me as more plausible. One author describes it as a sea of people. Oddly enough, that is exactly how I felt, more so than in any other Chinese city. And I have visited quite a few: Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing and Tianjin, among others. I even wonder whether it is possible to pin down the city’s identity at all, given the massive population shifts: the waves of mainland Chinese and people from the “Territories” flooding into Hong Kong, as well as the intellectuals who also emigrated from the mainland. Not to mention the fact that the Brits ruled over it for more than two hundred years! But did they leave their mark? And how many respectable Hong Kong citizens emigrated before the “handover”? How many acquired British citizenship? How many Australian? And how many later returned to do business with China once Deng had opened up the country?

This is, in fact, what Ackbar Abbas suggested. When he was a professor of comparative literature at the University of Hong Kong, he wrote: “The city is not so much a place as a space of transit”, “a city of transients”, as “[m]uch of the population was made up of refugees and expatriates who thought of Hong Kong as a temporary stop”, and “most of the energy is directed toward the economic sphere.”⁷ This quotation appears in Coraline Jortay and Gwennaël Gaffric’s introduction to the journal⁸ (Coraline Jortay is a literary translator and researcher at Queen’s College, Oxford, and Gwennaël Gaffric is a lecturer at Université Jean Moulin in Lyon and also a translator).

Yet Hong Kong can also be a land of love and sex.

The economic sphere. Yes, that was my impression too: Hong Kong, a city where money is king, a hub for dealmakers and billionaires. My friend Bob, who worked for ENSID (the steel engineering arm of the Creusot-Loire group), told me how he had spent months trying to secure a contract for a steel plant in Indonesia from a Chinese billionaire. Then, just as the deal was about to close, the billionaire invited him to fly by private jet to Hong Kong, where he owned a luxury villa in the hills. And there, even though the owner lived in Indonesia most of the time, everything was ready: servants, meals, beds. It was like a fairy tale! But Hong Kong had also long served as a convenient intermediary between China and the outside world. When we finally struck a deal with a major company in Hangzhou, China’s leading manufacturer of chain hoists and lever hoists, to distribute their products under our own brand in Europe and elsewhere, we were required to go through a Hong Kong company owned by a certain Mr Cheng. He was a “great friend of China”, according to Mr Shin, the company president, who was also a high-ranking Party official in Zhejiang Province. We soon realised that this arrangement chiefly allowed Mr Shin and his associates to build up a reserve of foreign currency for purchases outside China (see Voyage, tome 4: “S comme Shi Nai-an” [S for Shi Nai-an]). As a matter of fact, somewhat later, in the 1990s, after we managers had carried out a leveraged management buyout (LMBO) of our group, we too set up a Hong Kong company. We routed our purchases through it and set a little money aside to pay down our personal debt, all without our financial partners’ knowledge. We saw nothing wrong with that. On the contrary, I have always considered hoodwinking financiers to be a praiseworthy act! And it cost us nothing: tax on profits was 19 per cent on business conducted in Hong Kong (which was still British) and nil on external transactions.

Yet Hong Kong can also be a land of love and sex. This special issue of Jentayu features an interview with Xiaosi, a leading expert on Hong Kong literature who has, in fact, established an online research centre devoted to the subject. In the interview, entitled “Le Hong-Kong d’Eileen Chang et Wang Anyi” [The Hong Kong of Eileen Chang and Wang Anyi], she discusses the city’s presence in famous novels by these two writers, beginning with Eileen Chang‘s Love in a Fallen City. For much of the story, its two protagonists remain somewhat wary of each other. Only when Hong Kong falls to the Japanese do they finally acknowledge their mutual love. This leads the author of the novel’s English Wikipedia entry to observe that “[t]he city and their love share an antithetical relationship as their love triumphs while the city is defeated during the Japanese invasion.”⁹ Xiaosi notes that many people know Repulse Bay, a renowned beach in the south of the island, thanks to this novel: “its flame trees, the sound of the backwash”,¹⁰ and its mosquitoes (the novel’s two protagonists, Liuyuan and Liusu, slap themselves to swat them away). Personally, I had not even realised there were beaches in Hong Kong. I had only ever seen its harbour and the junks that filled it. The authors of the introduction also cite a short story by Eileen Chang entitled “Lust, Caution”,¹¹ which inspired the beautiful spy film of the same name by the Taiwanese director Ang Lee, and which is set in Hong Kong and Shanghai between 1938 and 1942, the latter then being governed by a Japanese collaborator. Yet the Shanghai-born Eileen Chang lived in Hong Kong for only a few years before moving to the United States. As for Wang Anyi, author of 香港的情與愛,¹² she describes the city, according to Xiaosi, as a city “of passion” and prone to “inciting adultery”, noting that ordinary appointments there could easily turn into romantic trysts.¹³

^{A still from In the Mood for Love}

This brings me to another novel that is somewhat better known in France: Liu Yichang’s Intersection, or rather the film adapted from it, the fabulous In the Mood for Love by the Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai. It is aesthetically stunning, thanks to its close-ups, colours, confined spaces and silences, as well as its magnificent stars, Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung. Its appeal may also stem from the fact that the Hong Kong it depicts is that of the 1960s, the era of Wong’s own youth. The authors of the introduction also mention another film that was highly successful in France: Farewell My Concubine. Yet its director, Chen Kaige, is Chinese (he was, in fact, the first Chinese filmmaker to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes), and the story is inspired by a Beijing opera and reflects China’s recent history. The novel’s author, Lilian Lee, however, is a prolific Hong Kong writer (with over 120 titles to her name!). She is a somewhat enigmatic figure who lives on the top floor of a grand hotel in the city and shuns all publicity.

The authors of the eight prose pieces published in the special issue of Jentayu are all genuine Hongkongers, and almost all of them write about their city. One of them, a former computer engineer turned crime writer, is Chan Ho-kei. I bought his book Hong-Kong Noir [The Borrowed], published by Denoël in 2016 and recommended by the journal,¹⁴ and read it with great pleasure. Remarkably well translated (by Alexis Brossollet), the collection comprises six short stories set in different eras, all featuring the same protagonist: Kwan Chun-dok, a brilliant detective and superintendent. In his afterword, Chan Ho-kei notes that the Japanese distinguish between “classic” detective fiction and “social” crime fiction. I suppose this roughly corresponds to our own distinction between the pure puzzle mystery à la Agatha Christie and the atmospheric crime novel à la Hammett. Chan Ho-kei attempts to blend the two: in every story, he writes, the emphasis is on “mysteries and plots”, “solving clues and logical deduction”. Yet the collection forms a cohesive whole, “a complete portrait of [Hong Kong] society” spanning nearly six decades. Thus, he concludes, he adopted the “classic” style at the micro level and the “social” style at the macro level.¹⁵ At the same time, he depicts his own city, with each story taking place in a different neighbourhood. Ultimately, he jokes, he “[woul]d be delighted” “[i]f some readers were inspired to visit these places after reading the novel […]”.¹⁶ Yet that is not the aspect that interests me. Nor am I convinced that his extensive collection of crime stories is truly “social” in nature. Of course, one finds the usual cast of characters: crooked cops and honest ones, violent and powerful Triad members, prostitutes and informants, as well as plenty of ordinary folk, such as shopkeepers, market traders, ferry captains, and British civil servants with their wives, all utterly out of their depth, unable to speak Chinese, let alone read it. No, the book’s chief appeal, it seems to me, lies in its historical dimension. With Chan, the journey is not through space but through time. The six stories are arranged in reverse chronological order. The final story takes place in 1967. The protagonist is still a mere beat officer. His companion, an ordinary citizen who narrates the story in the first person, seems to possess the sharper mind, although the officer is quick to act and saves the life of a high-ranking British official. For we learn that in 1967 Hong Kong is in the throes of an uprising. It all began with labour disputes (mistreatment, strikes and lay-offs) and was fuelled by the backing of Mao Zedong, who was keen to drive the British out of the colony thirty years ahead of schedule. The fifth story is set in 1977. The plot centres on a staged kidnapping; the “victim” is the child of a British official who has arrived to establish a new agency tasked with combating the rampant corruption infecting the police force at every level. The fourth story takes place in 1989 and features a massacre orchestrated by Triad bosses. The third story is set in June 1997, just before the Royal Hong Kong Police Force is due, on 1 July, to become simply the Hong Kong Police Force, and the crown on its emblem is to be replaced by the bauhinia, the city’s purple orchid. But neither the police officers nor most of Hong Kong’s residents seem particularly troubled by this change. At least, that is what the author would have us believe. The exception is a Triad boss who may be trying to exploit the commotion to make his getaway. The second story takes place in 2003. Kwan Chun-dok has retired and now serves only as a very special adviser. Six years have passed since Hong Kong was handed over to China, yet nothing has changed. The police force continues to operate just as it did before and is currently trying to bring down a major Triad figure. After all, Hong Kong is supposed to retain its special status until 2047! Then comes the first story. It is 2013. Kwan lies on his deathbed in hospital. His protégé is trying to solve an ordinary murder case involving a wealthy family. But something has changed.

First, there were the major protest movements of 2012 and 2013, which the police were tasked with opposing. Then there were the authorities and their associates, who began putting pressure on the police to protect their own interests. Kwan had taught his pupil that the police force’s true mission was to protect the public, and that “[i]f the rules cause an innocent citizen to get hurt or impede the course of justice, that’s ample reason to disregard them.”¹⁷ Yet, of late, the “gleaming image of the police force […] had started to fade”,¹⁸ which Chan explains thus:

[A]fter the territory was handed over from Britain to China, a society that had once been able to contain different value systems began to be torn apart into political factions. Rallies and protests became more heated, and the use of hardline tactics against protesters provoked murmurs about where the police really stood.¹⁹

Furthermore, according to Chan, “the profession” became even more “distinctly tarnished”²⁰ because “when the clashes impinged upon government institutions [the police] seemed to hold back”,²¹ and

[p]eople started insinuating that in Hong Kong, power was now able to crush justice, and that the police were just the stooges of those in authority, closing one eye when it came to groups supported by the government, serving no one but the politicians.²²

Chan concludes his afterword thus:

I have no idea whether Hong Kong after 2013 will be able to recover as it did after 1967, pulling itself on the right path, step by step.

And I don’t know whether we’ll ever recover the image of the police as strong, selfless, righteous, brave, honest, serving the people—so the small children of Hong Kong can once more be proud of them.²³

Chan’s book was published in Chinese in 2014. Rumour has it that Wong Kar-wai is to adapt it for the screen!

Several pieces in the special Hong Kong issue of Jentayu also address protest movements and their violent suppression by the Emperor of China, who evidently failed to keep his word. Since the publication of The Borrowed, the city has witnessed the movements of 2019 and 2020 and an even more violent crackdown. Predicting the city’s future is becoming increasingly difficult. Perhaps this is why so many writers seek to define its true identity. Some texts touch upon exile, such as the highly poetic “Empty Rooms” by Leung Lee-chi, a short story translated [into French, translator’s note] by Brigitte Duzan. Leung is a writer and graduate of the Chinese University of Hong Kong who is currently studying in Taiwan. Exile is also the theme of two short stories by Wong Yi, translated [into French, translator’s note] by Lucie Modde and entitled [in their English versions, translator’s note] “That Era” and “Overseas Bride”. Wong Yi is also a writer and the editor of a literary magazine with the lovely name Fleur des Lettres. The short text “Soleils noirs” [黑日] by the writer Hon Lai-chu, translated [into French, translator’s note] by Gwennaël Gaffric,²⁴ openly evokes the student protest movements, spanning the period from June to November 2019. And what powerful words: the “black rain” falling on the city, “against which umbrellas are powerless”; the “darkness”; the “vermin that have set out to devour the city”. She speaks of freedom, of the importance of freedom, which “begins with choice” and “is a conviction and a stance that supersede all others”. “It is only in places where freedom is withering that one acutely perceives its infinite value.” She also speaks of 5,000 missing people and of the students resisting by occupying the Polytechnic University. “The protesters are locked inside the campus, and those outside wish they could help, but are powerless: they are locked out. Being locked up has become the shared pain binding all the city’s inhabitants.” Yet it is also a pain that unites and fosters resistance. “When people face violence,” she writes, “they experience such extreme terror that, unwittingly, they find themselves standing in solidarity with one another.” That is how “the city’s inhabitants have opened a new chapter of history—one that belongs to them… Only those who, when faced with destiny, neither flee nor retreat but fully accept what is to come or what has already happened, living it with all their heart, for better or worse, will receive the key to their own story. Hong Kong has become a symbol—one with an ambiguous meaning, yet such a rich one.”

Dorothy Tse’s short story “Dark Things” (translated [into French, translator’s note] by Coraline Jortay) is far darker and much less optimistic. The “dark things” are the heads of riot police officers, which she imagines severed. And the Commissioner gazing at them is the very man who had made them his elite force, the men who protected the universally loathed mayor and suppressed the crowds until order was restored, the city regained a measure of stability, the slogans covering the walls were painted over, and the government seized control of all media outlets, “scrubbing internet footage of policemen ripping open young women’s clothing, or jamming their knees into the necks of youngsters lying prostrate on the ground, or barging into train carriages to beat passengers at random.” The city had returned to normal, and the Commissioner was about to retire. But, alas, the city had become unliveable for him: “it wasn’t until he was barred from entering the little noodle shop he had been going to all his life, and saw the look in the boss lady’s eyes, that he understood the extent of the city’s hatred for him.”²⁵

It is true that Hong Kong’s future looks bleak, especially after the flawless victory Xi Jinping secured in Beijing a few weeks ago, and given his determination to tighten his grip on the Chinese people still further, using every available technological tool, each more sophisticated than the last. On the other hand, reading these accounts leaves one convinced that Hong Kong does indeed exist as a distinct entity, with a unique culture and history and an elite committed to freedom of thought, much like Taiwan, with which it has forged strong ties. Time will tell.

Authors and translators: Ng Hui-bin (tr. Sandrine Marchand), Leung Ping-kwan (tr. Sandrine Marchand), Xiaosi (tr. Lucie Modde), Dung Kai-cheung (tr. Gwennaël Gaffric), Xi Xi (tr. Coraline Jortay), Leung Lee-chi (tr. Brigitte Duzan), Jennifer Wong (tr. Lucie Modde), Chan Ho-kei (tr. Alexis Brossollet), Dorothy Tse (tr. Coraline Jortay), Tammy Lai-Ming Ho (tr. Lucie Modde), Wong Yi (tr. Lucie Modde), Nicholas Wong (tr. Lucie Modde), Hon Lai-chu (tr. Gwennaël Gaffric), Louise Law (tr. Coraline Jortay) and Lawrence Pun (tr. Gwennaël Gaffric). Illustrations by Missquai and Running Swan.

Translator’s Notes

1. Jentayu Éditions is a French publisher specialising in making today’s Asian literature available to French readers. Their journal is also called Jentayu. ↩︎
2. Mr Trutt actually calls the British “les Anglais” (which means “the English”), but it seems to me that this faintly colloquial, slightly derogatory way of almost unwittingly reducing the UK to an arrogant England is very much idiomatic to French, and that the best equivalent, in English, of this casually dismissive way of referring to Britons is to call them “Brits”, rather than “the English” ↩︎
3. Also see Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, An Extraterrestrial in Hong Kong, Hong Kong: Musical Stone Publishing, 2018, p. 7. ↩︎
4. Coraline Jortay and Gwennaël Gaffric, eds., Jentayu, hors série N°5, Hong Kong (Andert-et-Condon: Éditions Jentayu, 2022), p. 8 (translation mine). ↩︎
5. Ibid., p. 9 (translation mine). ↩︎
6. Ibid., p. 9 (translation mine). ↩︎
7. Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics and Disappearance, Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp. 4-5. ↩︎
8. Jortay and Gaffric, op.cit., p. 11. ↩︎
9. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_in_a_Fallen_City_(novella)#Synopsis ↩︎
10. Jortay and Gaffric, op.cit., p. 45 (translation mine). ↩︎
11.  Jortay and Gaffric, op.cit., p. 15. ↩︎
12. Mr Trutt and the article from Jentayu he is quoting from and commenting on refer to this novel as Les Lumières de Hong-Kong [The Lights of Hong Kong], since the book was published in French under that title, in 2001, by the Asian-literature-focused French publisher Éditions Philippe Picquier. There is no English title, however, as, contrary to many other writings by Wang Anyi, her novel 香港的情與愛 (1994) was never published in English. ↩︎
13. Actually, this is not just “according to Xiaosi”, as she provides a specific quotation from the French edition of Wang Anyi’s 香港的情與愛, which is, in fact, what Mr Trutt quotes from: “Hong-Kong, ville passionnelle, portait parfois à l’adultère, des rendez-vous y devenaient des rencontres amoureuses.” Wang Anyi, Les Lumières de Hong-Kong, trans. (from Chinese) Denis Bénéjam (Arles : Éditions Philippe Picquier, 2001), p. 8 (English translation mine). ↩︎
14. The book in question is actually titled 13.67 in the original Chinese and was published in 2014. The English language edition, entitled The Borrowed, was published in 2017 (and was translated by Cha contributor Jeremy Tiang—and also reviewed for Cha, by Douglas Kerr). The version read by Mr Trutt is the French edition, entitled Hong-Kong Noir, which was indeed published in 2016 and translated by Alexis Brossollet. ↩︎
15. Quotations from Chan Ho-Kei, The Borrowed, trans. (from Chinese) Jeremy Tiang, New York: Grove Atlantic, 2016, p. 395. ↩︎
16. Ibid., p. 396. ↩︎
17. Ibid.p. 8. ↩︎
18. Ibid., p. 9. ↩︎
19. Ibid., p. 10. ↩︎
20. Ibid., p. 9. ↩︎
21. Ibid., p. 10. ↩︎
22. Ibid., p. 10. ↩︎
23. Ibid., p. 396. ↩︎
24. There is no English translation currently available of this text. The English quotes below are my translations of the passages Mr Trutt quotes from Gwennaël Gaffric’s French translation from the original Chinese. ↩︎
25. The English translation used to render Mr Trutt’s quotes is Natascha Bruce’s, fortunately made available online by the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing. ↩︎

^{How to cite: Camus, Cyril and Jean-Claude Trutt. “Hong Kong, Literature, Culture, History.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 2 Nov. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/11/02/hong-kong-hong-kong.}

Jean-Claude Trutt is a French Alsatian, born in Strasbourg in 1935. He studied mathematics and obtained an engineering degree from the École Centrale in Paris. He worked as an engineer throughout his career and, for eleven years, managed a multinational group of small and medium-sized mechanical engineering companies operating in fifteen countries worldwide. He has always had a keen interest in literature and owns a trilingual library of 4,800 books of world literature. He maintains three websites, the most important of which are Voyage autour de ma Bibliothèque (“Travels around My Library”) and Bloc-notes. Particularly fond of poetry, he was, among other things, a co-founder of an association dedicated to the Malaysian pantun (pantun sayang) and was responsible for the Alsatian section of an anthology of poetry in France’s minority languages.

Cyril Camus teaches English to post-secondary students at Lycée Ozenne in Toulouse and is an associate member of the Centre for Anglophone Studies at Toulouse University. He is the author of Myth and Fabulation in the Fantasy Fiction of Neil Gaiman, originally published in French in 2018, with an English-language edition published by McFarland in August 2026. He also wrote the historical horror novel Grand Guignol, published in October 2026, which had previously appeared with another publisher, in a slightly different version, under the title Sang de bœuf between 2019 and 2025. His academic publications address Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, comics, music, and postmodern fantasy. He also co-edited a 2021 journal issue on societal and environmental collapse in fantasy and science fiction. Further information is available on his website.  [All contributions by Cyril Camus.]