Editorial

As we write this editorial, Hong Kong has just undergone another Chief Executive election, a process that involves the selection of a leader based on a 1,194-member Election Committee. The Committee itself represents a range of business interests in Hong Kong and members are generally conservative and Pro-Beijing in terms of their political orientation. In recent years, there have been efforts to revise this political process, and a number of constitutional reforms were proposed in 2012 and 2013, but these revisions have been met with fierce resistance from members of the public and various grass-roots political organisations. For many, the proposed reforms did not go far enough, and so in political terms Hong Kong appears caught in a deadlock.

Yet, despite the current political impasse, in other ways Hong Kong is finding itself at a new interstice. Twenty years after Britain lowered the Union Jack for the last time on Victoria Island and the Royal Yacht ‘Britannia’ left Hong Kong harbour, the territory has undergone much change. While challenged by the immense economic strength and political will of China, Hong Kong has gained opportunities to redefine its position both in relation to China and to the rest of the world. Its vibrant cultural scene has been involved in a process of self-reflexivity, one that has increasingly become visible outside of the region and on a global level.

For us, the editors of this special issue, this has been a journey of discovery. Wasafiri – with its blend of non-fiction articles, short fiction, poetry, and reviews – presented itself as the perfect forum through which to consider new critical and creative approaches that directly engage with Hong Kong's geography, history, politics and poetics. We have foregrounded the democracy protests by including visual images, stories, and poetry, all of which speak to the ways in which political identities in Hong Kong are expressed and formulated through different narrative forms. We have also sought to bring out questions relating to urban identity, globalisation, and social inequality. The result, we hope, is a diverse collection of articles, stories, poems and images to highlight the complexity of Hong Kong as a locality. In her foreword to Xu Xi and Mike Ingham's City Voices, (Hong Kong, U P, 2003) Louise Ho suggests that ‘our land and space must mean very different things in Hong Kong from what they mean generally, as both are densely compacted into an international cosmopolitan city’ (xiv). Indeed, what Ho points us towards is the complex oscillation between the global and the local and their points of interaction. In this respect, we hope this special issue will shine a light on the process of writing Hong Kong (rather than ‘Hong Kong writing’ as a specific category). There is a spatial dimension to this formulation, but also an expression of how people interact with this global, cosmopolitan and transnational location. Of course, locality and roots have an important role to play, and these issues have been at the heart of crucial debates to do with culture and new processes of identification in Hong Kong. In this nexus, too, the place of English needs to be considered – is English a colonial relic or, as a modern global language, a useful medium through which to express Hong Kong's reality? This also relates to the choice of genres — short story, novel, novella, poetry, graphic novels or film. In some respects, the diversity of language, form and genre leads to the question ‘what is the Hong Kong voice?’ and how does it express itself? Here, on closer examination, a sense of contention can be discerned over the local as well as anxiety around issues of Hong Kong's postcolonial identity. What emerge are not exactly questions about Hong Kong's voice in the singular, but rather problems around inclusion, exclusion, belonging and displacement – issues that are diverse and plural in their implications. This process of searching is sometimes tinged with a sense of melancholia while at other times it is more violently or dramatically expressed.

As one of the most transient cities in the world, it is not surprising that the idea of home is an on-going preoccupation in Hong Kong literature and artistic production. The writers in this issue have addressed this theme in various ways and often from the perspective of returning or through the lens of memory. Yet, as we consider the many possibilities of how home is imagined, interrogated, and constructed, questions emerge about how Hong Kong is viewed from the outside and through history. As two decades have elapsed since 1997, it is perhaps timely that readers in Britain engage, or re-engage, with Hong Kong, particularly as Britain forges a new direction for itself outside of the European Union as a champion of free trade. That said, an ongoing unwillingness in Britain to fully confront its imperial legacies reveals itself in relation to these issues. Rather than continuing to engage, after Britain left Hong Kong, it returned inward and revelled in what Paul Gilroy has pertinently termed ‘postimperial melancholia’. This lack of confronting Britain’s and Hong Kong's global connectedness and relationship – which leads to a form of invisibility in Britain's cultural landscape – is also something we are trying to redress through this special issue.

In the mainstream press, Hong Kong is dramatically, even tragically, represented as being embroiled in an epic struggle against an infinitely larger foe in the form of the Chinese Communist Party. Hong Kong is depicted as a castaway, an odd remnant of the British Empire, left to fight for itself. To us, this seems a distorted view and only part of the story of Hong Kong. Instead, upon closer reading, there are many other stories, some of which are deeply introspective and sometimes contradictory in terms of locating or understanding ‘Hong Kong identity’. We hope that this issue will open a window into these important debates and concerns.

We gratefully acknowledge the support from the Department of English at City University of Hong Kong and the Department of English and Film at the University of Exeter, UK for facilitating editorial meetings in London and Hong Kong, as well as a roundtable symposium entitled ‘Writing Hong Kong post-1997’ held at City University of Hong Kong in September 2016. Partial editorial support for this issue was funded by a Hong Kong General Research Fund grant (GRF project number 11612715). We would also like to thank writers and contributors for their generous support. Special thanks are due to Yeung Hok Tak for generously allowing us to use the image from How Blue Was My Valley⟪錦鏽藍田⟫, p. 49 for the cover.