Crafting an Imaginary World of Her Own: A Conversation with Hong Kong Author Wong Yi

Abstract

This conversation between Hong Kong author Wong Yi and literary translator Jennifer Feeley took place over email during the winter of 2023 and early 2024 and was conducted in English. It encompasses a range of topics, several of which are drawn from Feeley’s own experiences and observations in translating Wong’s work and from their joint participation in events during the fall of 2023. Wong recalls the origins of her literary career, highlighting significant milestones such as her four short story collections and her adaptation of Xi Xi’s fiction into a Cantonese chamber opera libretto. She also explains how Hong Kong’s rich history serves as a muse for her writing about the present day, discussing distinctive aspects of her work, including the importance of the Cantonese language. Finally, Wong reflects on her fall 2023 residency at the University of Iowa International Writing Program, noting the role that translation has played in her work reaching a wider readership, and shares the future directions of her writing.

Jennifer Feeley: What inspired you to begin writing?

Wong Yi: I was introduced to creative writing through after-school creative writing classes in Chinese when I was twelve. At the time, it was extremely rare for secondary schools in Hong Kong to offer such classes, so I was very lucky. The talented Hong Kong writers that led these classes, including prominent novelist Dung Kai-cheung, gave us interesting creative writing exercises and a wide range of texts to read. Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka, Kenzaburō Ōe, Xi Xi, Liu Yichang, and Ye Si (Leung Ping-kwan) were some of the names on the reading list. I fell in love with literature and storytelling instantly, and I enrolled in every class available each year. Through writing, I found a voice to create an imaginary world of my own, free from limitations of the outside world. I didn’t have a lot of friends in school and often felt isolated and misunderstood by my peers––a quiet, nerdy girl who was more familiar with books than with the latest videogames or popular culture references was bound to be considered weird. Writing allowed me to sort through my complex and quirky thoughts, and express them to a then imaginary yet understanding reader in a gentle, creative way.

Jennifer Feeley: You began writing the stories that would be compiled into your first book, News Stories, when you were seventeen, and the actual book was published when you were nineteen. How did this opportunity to publish your work at such a young age come about?

Poets, novelists, essayists, and journalists writing about Hong Kong showed me what the world looked like to them, what certain events in the news meant to them personally or in a theoretical framework, which great movies or artwork were too important to be ignorant about.

Wong Yi: I’d become fascinated by Hong Kong literature in my creative writing classes, and started reading the works of many young Hong Kong writers beyond the scope of my assigned reading lists. Poets, novelists, essayists, and journalists writing about Hong Kong showed me what the world looked like to them, what certain events in the news meant to them personally or in a theoretical framework, which great movies or artwork were too important to be ignorant about. Most importantly, they did so using a sort of language familiar and accessible to me, as I grew up in the same city as these authors and spoke the same mother tongue. Through reading, I learned to write about the world as I saw it using a kind of Chinese unique to Hong Kongers.

I started attending panel discussions and readings hosted by these Hong Kong writers, and became friends with some of the panelists and members of the audience. I showed these friends drafts of my writings in the hopes of receiving feedback about my work. After a couple of years, one of the writers contacted me with an invitation from the chief editor of Sunday Mingpao to write for their column of short stories inspired by news events. My friend told me that the editor initially invited him to write for the column, but his story was sent back, and he thought I should give it a try instead. I was a bit nervous: Sunday Mingpao is a very prestigious arts and culture insert in one of the most prominent newspapers in Hong Kong. Their standards are very high, and I was then only an unknown teenager on summer holiday without many accolades. Could I really be good enough for this, when there were so many other writers more talented and established than I was? But then, what did I have to lose if I were to give it a shot? I had nothing better to do than to sit around waiting for my Cert Level exam results anyway, so I agreed to have a go at writing a short story inspired by an event chosen by the editor. The story was accepted for publication at first try, and the author bio that the editors drafted for me simply read: “Wong Yi, senior secondary school student.”

Jennifer Feeley: And that one story evolved into a column, which eventually turned into a book.

Wong Yi: From there, I continued to write for the column every week, producing short stories inspired by different news stories that the editor and I found interesting. It could’ve been something as mundane as teenage students stirring up controversy by kissing in public while wearing their school uniforms, or something heavier, such as a deadly fire in Kowloon or a terrorist attack overseas. When school resumed after the holidays, I developed a writing routine alongside my A-levels preparations: I’d spend days reading newspapers and listening to news reports as research, get up at 3a.m. on Friday to write on the family computer, take a shower and change into my school uniform at 7a.m., make it to school at 8am, proofread my story and send it off on the classroom computer at lunch, catch up on sleep during math class in the afternoon, and then repeat the process after the story was published on Sunday. I kept it up for over a year despite my teachers’ concern about whether I would have enough energy to prepare for my public exams properly alongside my weekly publication. My exam results turned out more than fine, and soon after getting into university, all of the stories from the column were collected into my first book, News Stories. I cried all the way home carrying my authors’ copies home on the bus: it felt unreal that everything came together in the end.

Jennifer Feeley: And this was just the beginning. Your second book, Patched Up, is much more personal, and was inspired by your experiences working with orphans in mainland China. How did you navigate the ethics of writing about members of an underprivileged community?

Wong Yi: When I wrote Patched Up, the ethical concerns I had to navigate were mostly about consent and privacy. I was one of the able-bodied adults working as live-in interns in the orphanage, interacting and bonding with the children every day. They looked up to us, were eager to please us, and confided in us things that were extremely personal. Yet we were destined to only be short-term visitors in their lives and were required to depart after two months. I wanted to write about all of the things I felt during my encounter with these unique souls, but I did not believe that it would be ethical for me to ask for their consent in this type of power dynamic. Besides, from my observation, most of the children were not capable of giving that kind of consent due to limitations in their cognitive abilities. I wouldn’t have felt comfortable writing about them directly even if they had told me it was ok to do so.

News Stories (2010) by Wong YI.

Ways To Love In A Crowded City (2021) by Wong YI.

My approach was to write about what the children taught me as human beings, instead of who they were as unique individuals. I made sure that nothing I wrote would allow any of the children I worked with to be identifiable in any way: I never gave their real names or any identifiable characteristics, never posted any of their photos, and never gave a straight answer when journalists interviewing me about the book asked me where the orphanage was exactly located. Instead of writing about the children’s actual life stories, I distilled personality traits that stood out in each child and placed them in completely different characters that lived outside the orphanage. I took keywords and issues that inspired me in my internship and found relevant experiences in “normal” people’s everyday lives for further exploration. By avoiding direct descriptions of the children, I could focus on portraying diversity in human emotions and personalities that were more universal, and at the same time protect the precious children’s privacy.

Jennifer Feeley: Like Xi Xi, you’re skilled at describing the world around you with a child-like awe. Your third short story collection, The Four Seasons of Lam Yip, adopts the perspective of a ten-year-old boy to highlight various issues concerning urbanization in Hong Kong. Tell us a bit about the character of Lam Yip, and why you wanted to write about the city through a child’s eyes.

Wong Yi: Lam Yip is a ten-year-old boy who looks at the world with a uniquely imaginative lens. In his eyes, a pizzeria is a circus with dough-tossing performances, and a real estate agent’s office is an exhibition of numbers. He lives with his mother Mrs. Lam, who works in an upscale supermarket, cleaning and packaging fresh produce. Lam Yip likes his mother very much and is fascinated by elements of nature in the city, like trees and birds, but is incredibly germophobic when it comes to things like soil on raw potatoes and bird poop. He invents his own explanations for the way things are, and likes to ponder questions that only children would take seriously: Is the polar bear in Coca-Cola ads the breadwinner of the family? Do shop cats receive retirement benefits and days off just like human employees do? A lot of the stories defamiliarize the city and its relationship with nature so that we can examine them from a fresh perspective––why is soil considered unclean when it comprises the ground we stand on? Why are accessories made with real rabbit fur cheaper than those made with faux fur? Why are some animals better protected by law than others?

Lam Yip allows me to question if there are other possibilities to any established condition, and imagine life as being different than that as we know it. Through Lam Yip’s eyes, I can see the world outside of adults’ rules, logic, and knowledge systems, running as far as possible in the other direction, yet still remain grounded enough in reality so that Lam Yip will not be misunderstood as painfully ignorant or simply insane. He also lets me have a lot of fun being humorous and childish; a lot of times literature deals with heavy, “serious” topics that weigh on us every day in real life, and spending time with Lam Yip often feels like much needed respite.

Jennifer Feeley: One of the stories from this collection, “Lam Yip’s Amulet,” is included in this issue, and it encapsulates so much of what I adore about this character––his close bond with his mother, his sensitivity to the world around him, the charming way he views his surroundings. It also reveals just how much of a germaphobe he is.

Wong Yi: When I wrote “Lam Yip’s Amulet,” I was trying to capture a collective sense of germaphobia and obsession with cleanliness shared by many Hong Kong people who, like me, have undergone a few city-wide or even world-wide public health crises such as SARS, swine flu, and bird flu, among others. Certain details in the story, such as plastic sheets covering the elevator buttons, serve as constant reminder of the history and collective trauma of these pandemics, and remain to this day. I think it’s something special, as I don’t really see that in other places in the world, so I wanted to write a story about this often-overlooked detail of our daily life in a city touched by many illnesses.

The Four Seasons of Lam Yip (2019) by Wong Yi

The part about Mrs. Lam cleaning and wrapping root vegetables is also speaks to the sense of “cleanliness” that is quite unique to Hong Kong. We make a distinction between wet markets and supermarkets: sometimes, people prefer not to go to the wet market because it’s all wet and “raw” and things are not “cleaned” and packaged, plus wet markets were once where all the live chickens were confiscated from because of the bird flu. Produce sold in wet markets feels more alive though, with items like live fish gutted to order, unpackaged eggs, parts of pigs and cows reminding you that they were once animals instead of merely a piece of protein for cooking. There is a lot of contradiction in that distinction of how our food is sold. From the very beginning, I knew that Lam Yip’s fear of germs would cause him trouble, given his mother’s job is to clean and package vegetables: I wanted to take the opportunity to explore and unpack that in “Lam Yip’s Amulet,” explain to readers Mrs. Lam’s and Lam Yip’s unique way of understanding her job, and show how Lam Yip finds peace with it. Their logic is always so special, and that’s what makes them so adorable as characters.

Jennifer Feeley: You adapted two of Xi Xi’s short stories, “A Woman Like Me” and “The Cold,” into the Cantonese chamber opera libretto Women Like Us for the Hong Kong Arts Festival. Why did you pick these two works? In what ways do the stories of Woman and Fish resonate with each other?

Wong Yi: These two stories by Xi Xi are her most famous pieces contemplating how romance and love may fit into young women’s lives. “A Woman Like Me” features a mortician (“Woman”) who is afraid that her boyfriend will leave her once she tells him the truth about what she does for a living. “The Cold” follows Fish’s journey from getting married to a husband she doesn’t love—despite falling for an old friend Chu after her engagement—to finding the strength to leave her comfortable married life in search of happiness. It was actually composer Daniel Lo’s idea to put the two stories together, which I thought was brilliant. “A Woman Like Me” and “The Cold” were published only one month apart from each other, and many readers and scholars read the two stories as a pair that explores women’s life choices in the face of love and societal pressure. For me, the two stories deal with how external voices affect the women’s opinions of themselves, and question whether love and romantic relationships must take priority over other dimensions of a woman’s life, such as having a meaningful (yet tabooed) career and being happy on her own.

Jennifer Feeley: What new layers do you think your libretto adds to Xi Xi’s original works?

Wong Yi: In our chamber opera Women Like Us, the two women meet at challenging points in their love lives. Woman is nervously waiting for her boyfriend, Hsia, to come visit her workplace and discover the truth about her job, and Fish is wanting to meet her old boyfriend Chu (Woman’s brother) again after getting married so she can apologize to him. The two women share their heartache and concerns, and inspire each other to move forward and be true to themselves. I believe that in transforming Xi Xi’s original stories into the opera form, Women Like Us reminds us all that taboos and stereotypes around death and single women past a certain age are still very much alive and powerful, although they might manifest in different and more subtle ways than they did in 1982, when the stories were originally published. Operas often deal with timeless, universal topics about the human experience, and I think it is the perfect form for an adaptation of Xi Xi’s stories.

Jennifer Feeley: Women Like Us is your first work for the stage. How is writing an opera libretto different from writing fiction for print?

Wong Yi: Writing an opera libretto is very different from writing for the page, as the libretto is perceived not by reading, but by hearing the musicians sing at a pace much slower than that of most songs in other traditions. Every single word takes up more time to evoke diverse emotions and concepts, in a manner similar to poetry. Every sound in the text must be carefully designed for, as Cantonese is a tonal language and a slightly off tone can completely change the meaning of the word. The writing process is highly collaborative, with the libretto being written before the score is composed, followed by many rounds of rewriting and adjustment. Yet, as a whole, the opera is a form where the music propels the storyline and takes priority over other elements, thus requiring a high level of collaboration and respect between the librettist and the composer. I’m very glad that Daniel and I shared very similar visions for the project and worked together wonderfully. As the first chamber opera written in Cantonese inspired by Hong Kong literature, I believe Women Like Us is an important addition to the extremely small corpus of Cantonese chamber operas.

Jennifer Feeley: As you note above, Women Like Us reflects on how love and romance affect the two women’s trajectories, questioning the role of fate. Your latest collection of stories, Ways to Love in a Crowded City, depicts how Hong Kong’s physical space, cultural attitudes, unique circumstances, and various events impact its residents’ romantic lives. What is it about love that makes it such a good lens for exploring these aspects of the city?

Wong Yi: Albert Camus wrote in The Plague that “Perhaps the easiest way of making a town’s acquaintance is to ascertain how the people in it work, how they love, and how they die.” To me, love is a very personal and therefore honest angle to assess whether the people of a certain place are actually living happy lives. Does everyone get to see their loved ones as much as they can given the work culture? Is it easy for couples to set up their own love nests given the property prices? Do queer people or those who are single feel victimized by the values around love and romance in society? The answers to these questions reveal conditions of life in the city, as well as provide space for storytelling about love in a crowded city.

Fiction has always been a way for me to understand the world and how humans behave in different conditions. In Ways to Love in a Crowded City, I placed different fictional characters in obstacle courses made up of different characteristics of life in Hong Kong and various challenges in romance. How these characters respond to the obstacles I placed between them and their lovers resulted in a collection of very interesting stories that inform us about how Hong Kongers adapt to the unique physical space and culture of Hong Kong, and what love could look like in its infinite possibilities.

Jennifer Feeley: “Overseas Bride” is one of my favorite stories from Ways to Love, and it has resonated with readers in very moving ways. While it explores the complexities of emigration, particularly leaving behind one’s language, it’s very much a story that celebrates the Cantonese language.

Wong Yi: “Overseas Bride” is my love letter to Cantonese in all its glory, humor, and even some of its vulgarity. A lot of Hong Kong people have emigrated in recent years to places that do not use Cantonese the way we do in Hong Kong, and imagining these people being forced to live outside their mother tongue on a daily basis always makes me sad. I wanted to write a gentle but devastating story that celebrates the language, even the parts of it associated with not so desirable things, such as a chauvinistic expression about “porking the bride” on the wedding night and relatives boasting their achievements. I think that’s what love really is, loving both the good and the bad. The place we grew up in and the language we speak as our mother tongue are so hard to walk away from. The trauma captured in this story coupled with the intense love of the narrator towards their lover and their hometown makes this story so heartbreaking.

Jennifer Feeley: The Cantonese language is an integral part of both your life and your work. Why is it so important for you to include Cantonese in your writing? How do you decide whether to use Cantonese or standard written Chinese?

Jennifer Feeley and Wong Yi after the reading at the Prairie Lights Bookstore

Wong Yi: Most of my works are written in standard written Chinese, with varying amounts of Cantonese, and sometimes even English, mixed in as required by the tone and texture of the piece. When I was a student, I was taught to avoid using any Cantonese in my compositions, as it was an offense that would be penalized by the examiner. Yet, in the poems and prose I read by Hong Kong writers, Cantonese added an extra layer of flavor and conveyed meanings that were otherwise inaccessible. There are many different Chineses used by different people, and the characters’ unique word choices help give the piece a sense of place. An example would be how characters from different Chinese-speaking communities may call their wives: in Hong Kong, a husband usually refers to his wife as lou5po4 老婆,¹ yet in Northern China, he might call her xífù 媳婦. To say that a Hong Kong man slept with his xífù 媳婦 instead of lou5po4老婆 would turn the mundane story into a horrifying tale of incest, as the word xífù 媳婦 is only used to refer to daughters-in-law in the Hong Kong context. I like to make sure the texture of my words fit in comfortably with the background of my characters, and if the text calls for it, I wouldn’t shy away from using Cantonese. Sometimes, I would even deliberately use Cantonese for more emotionally charged moments, such as arguments, jokes, complaints, and terms of endearment. Standard written Chinese tends to feel more elegant and calmer (as Cantonese speakers only encounter that form of grammar and vocabulary in reading, not when speaking in their everyday lives), but at moments of great anger and joy, Cantonese feels more direct and authentic.

Jennifer Feeley: Ways to Love is your first book published in Taiwan, while your earlier books were published in Hong Kong. Have you noticed any differences publishing in the Taiwanese market, especially given the use of Cantonese (and to a certain extent, English) in your writing?

Wong Yi: It made me realize just how much Cantonese and English I use in my writing! The mixed use of language is extremely normal for an average Hong Kong person, to the point where a game I played with my Hong Kong friends to stop using any English as we spoke in Cantonese failed within ten minutes because everyone lost track of how many times we broke the rules. However, this is not the case when Taiwanese people speak and write, and it could pose a challenge for readers in Taiwan and other Chinese-speaking markets to understand what I am writing about. My Unitas editor and I decided to preserve all of the Cantonese and English used in Ways to Love, and help readers by putting in footnotes throughout the book. We ended up inserting over a hundred footnotes, which was something I didn’t have to do for my first three books published in Hong Kong. Different publishers in Taiwan approach Hong Kong authors’ use of Cantonese differently: some would change the words to their equivalent in standard written Chinese, and some would put a note in the front of the book saying that word choices were left as-is to reflect the background of the author, and no footnotes were inserted. I quite like having footnotes in Ways to Love to help readers outside of Hong Kong understand the language and cultural references.

Jennifer Feeley: Speaking of things that are distinctive about Hong Kong, one of your recent projects is a series of stories about the territory’s history. Can you tell us more about it?

Wong Yi: I used to think that history was incredibly boring and irrelevant to me, until I realized that knowledge about the history of Hong Kong could help me unlock references in poems and short stories that I love. A friend who teaches Hong Kong history at a university also inspired me to read Hong Kong literature as primary texts in the study of history, where the writer’s interpretation of how life used to be can be considered a form of historical record of facts, experiences, personal biases, and imaginations. Also, I was born and raised in Sai Wan, one of the oldest parts of modern Hong Kong. The school buildings and streets I see every day are all filled with stories from the past that bleed into our everyday life. I could easily order a pizza next to rumored execution grounds during the Japanese occupation, and bring it home along a historical coastline that no longer exists due to land reclamation. The more I read about the history of the area, the more inspired I am to write about the present while looking back at the past.

Beginning with stories about historical monuments in Sai Wan and branching out to other districts, I have been working on a project tentatively called “Past Present Tense” for a few years now. It is a series of short stories set in the present day, in which I juxtapose the history of certain locations with characters occupying the same physical space to observe their actions now. For example, Shek Tong Tsui, now a residential area and a prestigious school district, used to be a famous red-light district. How would a young girl working there as a tutor feel about intimacy, knowing that a sexually active young woman might still be stigmatized in the present day? Or, how would a ghost that had seen the deadly plague in Tai Ping Shan over a hundred years ago respond to her descendants keeping guinea pigs as pets during the COVID-19 pandemic? How would knowledge about the past affect the way people now understand the neighborhood they live in?

In recent years, Hong Kong readers and publishers have been quite interested in narratives of Hong Kong history, as well as observations about the city and things that make Hong Kong a unique place in the world. Conducting research about history, going out to see the monuments as they are today, and inventing new and unique ways to incorporate history into fiction has been such a demanding yet rewarding experience. I look forward to publishing a collection of such stories very soon after I finish writing the last few stories I have lined up.

Jennifer Feeley: Most of your works were originally published in columns. What impact does writing for columns have on your writing process?

Wong Yi: Many great writers (especially writers of short stories) in Hong Kong have had columns in newspapers and magazines, but not every writer likes to be placed within the constraints of columns and forced to write according to a set schedule and word count. For me, I actually quite enjoy the challenges that come with columns. Columns always have a set word limit that I must adhere to, so I am trained to be able to evoke complex ideas in very few words, and to know which details to keep and which to let go so that I don’t overload the piece. I’ve also become used to writing quickly and consistently producing output for an extended period of time, having an instinct of knowing when the story is ready to be sent off, and looking for ways to most effectively conduct research within the short amount of time available between each issue.

Some of the habits I’ve developed from writing for columns have turned out to be very important tools that I carry with me when I work on other projects. I am now always keeping lists of possible topics whenever something interesting pops up in my head, so I won’t have to worry about running out of material when it comes time to sit down and write. I like for my columns to have a consistent theme but diverse styles and plots between individual pieces, so I challenge myself to always look for new perspectives and new ways to tell stories whenever I write. This has taught me to become more observant about the world I live in, and more imaginative about the world I create: coming up with new experiments in form and content has almost become a fun game for me.

Jennifer Feeley: How do you approach character development and world-building?

Wong Yi: I’ve noticed that I pay a lot more attention to the inner lives of characters more than their outward appearances. Sometimes my characters only appear as voices, without any descriptions of what they look like. At times when you ask me about the gender of some of these characters while you’re translating, I’m reminded of how Chinese is often not gendered like English, and how I sometimes didn’t even put in obvious gender markers. I guess that is because I write a lot of short stories for columns, so details about the characters’ choice of clothing, their physical build, and hair color, etc. only make it into the limited word count if they significantly add to the character. In a way, that is also how I approach people in real life: personality, values, choices, and what circumstances have shaped a person’s belief system are more important information in telling us who they are.

As for worldbuilding, I mostly write stories based in reality, so I do a lot of reading and Googling to gather facts and actual lived experiences to help me construct a believable, more or less factually accurate world. Old newspapers in the public library archives have turned out to be an incredibly fun way of understanding Hong Kong in the past. I also visit locations I want to write about as much as I can, get a sense of the space by physically spending time there, and ask friends about experiences I’ve never had to understand the community my characters come from. I got a tan just from taking walks and visiting the historical monuments I wanted to write about in my Hong Kong history stories.

Jennifer Feeley: How would you characterize your writing? Are there any central messages or themes you hope readers take away from your work?

Wong Yi: To me, writing is an incredibly fun thing to do, like a toy that has infinite ways to be played with. I enjoy finding new ways of using words and forms of narrative, of collaborating with different artists, and of communicating with the world through my work. I like to think that my writing is about letting readers see there is more than one possibility to anything. People can be more complex than they appear. History may have more than one interpretation. “Truth” can come in plural. Things that “should” be might not always be that way. What is “worth” writing about also has more than one answer. I pay attention to a lot of things that people often overlook, like the whimsical and imaginative in the sanitized and rational city, the gentle and loving souls in a world full of chaos and hurt. I don’t like to lecture or scream about anything in my work. I want to create a space for people to explore and see things for themselves.

Jennifer Feeley: You recently spent three months as a writer in residence at the University of Iowa International Writing Program. How has this experience inspired your writing?

Wong Yi: It was a dream come true to participate in the International Writing Program’s fall residency––a lot of the Hong Kong writers I look up to have been writers in residence in the program, so it was really an honor to be able to be a part of that legacy. The invitation to participate came at a time when I wanted to try new things and challenge myself with new approaches to writing. I have been writing and publishing short stories for over fifteen years, and while I still enjoy writing short stories very much, I felt ready to do more experiments in other forms such as essays, texts for performance with music, and longer forms of fiction.

The IWP brought together thirty-four international writers in Iowa City for eleven weeks, each with their own unique style and approach to their work. During the residency, I attended a lot of the classes and readings led by the writers, read a lot more poetry, and paid a lot of attention to how people from different backgrounds live and speak. The exposure to new people, places, and experiences showed me many more possibilities of how to be a human in the world, and the atmosphere of cultural exchange and literary experimentation in the residency gave me courage to be even more experimental than I used to be with my work. I am excited to start new projects after coming back, and I can’t wait to see what the results will look like.

I also got to spend some time with you at the translation workshop at the University of Iowa, and at the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) conference shortly after the residency concluded. I am very lucky to have you as my translator for a lot of the works I’m proud of, and the translations you produced have allowed me to connect with readers in ways I never thought possible. Someone in Iowa came up to me for a hug after my reading of “Overseas Bride,” and told me that the story spoke of the same heartbreak they felt as immigrants to the US forced to leave behind their mother tongue and everything that their language meant to them. When we read the story at the ALTA conference, it was also very well received by the audience at the bilingual reading. It is only through translation that readers from other languages are able to understand my story written in Chinese, and seeing readers from all over the world resonate with my work was one of the highlights of my visit to America. These experiences made me realize just how unique and important Hong Kong literature is in the world, but also how underserved Hong Kong Literature is in translation. I hope that more translations can be made available so that readers from everywhere can get to see everything Hong Kong literature has to offer.

Jennifer Feeley: Are there any genres or topics you haven’t written about yet but hope to explore in the future?

Wong Yi: I have been wanting to write stories about ghosts. I am not religious, but I know that human beings have long been living with imaginations and stories about ghosts, monsters, and other mythological beings in every culture and historical period. Those stories are all so imaginative, and offer us an alternative world completely different from that of our everyday lives. In the past few years, I have been writing stories inspired by Hong Kong’s history, and before I knew it, ghosts started appearing in my stories as characters. They behave in extremely human ways, despite having supernatural characteristics: they might be creative writing teachers in schools who can walk through walls, or ancestors who like to gossip about their great-grandchildren with other ghosts when paper offerings in the shape of COVID vaccines arrive in the afterworld. I wonder what would happen if I were to dive deeper into this, bringing more mythological beings into the familiar lives of the living without necessarily writing about ghosts in a scary or spooky way.

Jennifer Feeley: What can readers expect from you in the near future?

Wong Yi: I am writing more stories inspired by the history of Hong Kong, and hopefully they will be collected into a book very soon. I have also been involved in a collaboration among the Swiss writers collective AJAR and three fellow Hong Kong novelists, Lawrence Pun, Tong Yui, and Dorothy Tse, where we are writing a novel collectively as a team. Writing as a collective is something very new to us on the Hong Kong side of the project, but it’s turned out to be incredibly inspiring, and I’ve learned so much from the writers from AJAR about character development, world-building, and communicating with fellow writers about a work-in-progress. We hope the book will be published in 2025 in French and Chinese.

Of course, I would love to see more of my work brought into translation. It is always fun for me to work with you on translating my stories, and I really hope that we would be able to find a way to put out a book soon. Some of my stories have been translated into French by Lucie Modde, which was how I got to meet with Swiss-French writer Karine Yoakim Pasquier from AJAR and begin our collaborative writing project. I hope that more translations would take me to more new places like that.

I’m also working on some new texts for performance with music with composer Daniel Lo, again in Cantonese. He is a very talented artist who takes inspiration from Hong Kong literature, which then then transforms into beautiful music performances. We have worked together on two projects so far, including the aforementioned Women Like Us, and I can’t wait to show the world our third product.

Jennifer Feeley: What advice would you give to emerging authors?

Wong Yi: Make sure you have a lot of fun, and take good care of yourself because writing is hard and lonely work that can cause a lot of physical and emotional pain. It also helps to think of writing as a lifelong journey where the prize is participation itself, rather than a quick footrace with set times to announce winners and losers at a certain destination. It is always tempting to compare yourself to others, and to wonder how your work measures up or whether it fits into certain people’s expectations. Know that your unique voice is inherently worthwhile, and that it’s ok to take breaks or take things slow. Surround yourself with good people, for they are some of the best things that could come from the adventure.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Feeley

Jennifer Feeley is the translator of Not Written Words: Selected Poetry of Xi Xi, Carnival of Animals: Xi Xi’s Animal Poems, the White Fox series by Chen Jiatong, and Wong Yi’s chamber opera libretto Women Like Us. Her forthcoming translations include Tongueless by Lau Yee-Wa and Mourning a Breast and My City by Xi Xi. She is the recipient of the 2017 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship.

Notes

1 This transliteration follows Jyutping, the romanization system for Cantonese developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong in 1993.