Atlas
WEATHERHEAD BOOKS ON ASIA
WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE,
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
WEATHERHEAD BOOKS ON ASIA
Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
LITERATURE
David Der-wei Wang, Editor
Ye Zhaoyan, Nanjing 1937: A Love Story, translated by Michael Berry (2003)
Oda Makato, The Breaking Jewel, translated by Donald Keene (2003)
Han Shaogong, A Dictionary of Maqiao, translated by Julia Lovell (2003)
Takahashi Takako, Lonely Woman, translated by Maryellen Toman Mori (2004)
Chen Ran, A Private Life, translated by John Howard-Gibbon (2004)
Eileen Chang, Written on Water, translated by Andrew F. Jones (2004)
Writing Women in Modern China: The Revolutionary Years, 1936–1976, edited by Amy D. Dooling (2005)
Han Bangqing, The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai, first translated by Eileen Chang, revised and edited by Eva Hung (2005)
Loud Sparrows: Contemporary Chinese Short-Shorts, translated and edited by Aili Mu, Julie Chiu, and Howard Goldblatt (2006)
Hiratsuka Raichō, In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun, translated by Teruko Craig (2006)
Zhu Wen, I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China, translated by Julia Lovell (2007)
Kim Sowŏl, Azaleas: A Book of Poems, translated by David McCann (2007)
Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai, translated by Michael Berry with Susan Chan Egan (2008)
Ch’oe Yun, There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories by Ch’oe Yun, translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (2008)
Inoue Yasushi, The Blue Wolf: A Novel of the Life of Chinggis Khan, translated by Joshua A. Fogel (2009)
Anonymous, Courtesans and Opium: Romantic Illusions of the Fool of Yangzhou, translated by Patrick Hanan (2009)
Cao Naiqian, There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night, translated by John Balcom (2009)
Park Wan-suh, Who Ate Up All the Shinga? An Autobiographical Novel, translated by Yu Young-nan and Stephen J. Epstein (2009)
Yi T’aejun, Eastern Sentiments, translated by Janet Poole (2009)
Hwang Sunwŏn, Lost Souls: Stories, translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (2009)
Kim Sŏk-pŏm, The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost, translated by Cindy Textor (2010)
Xiaomei Chen, editor, The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama (2011)
Qian Zhongshu, Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays, edited by Christopher G. Rea, translated by Dennis T. Hu, Nathan K. Mao, Yiran Mao, Christopher G. Rea, and Philip F. Williams (2011)
HISTORY, SOCIETY, AND CULTURE
Carol Gluck, Editor
Takeuchi Yoshimi, What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, edited and translated, with an introduction, by Richard F. Calichman (2005)
Contemporary Japanese Thought, edited and translated by Richard F. Calichman (2005)
Overcoming Modernity, edited and translated by Richard F. Calichman (2008)
Natsume Sōseki, Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings, edited and translated by Michael Bourdaghs, Atsuko Ueda, and Joseph A. Murphy (2009)
Kojin Karatani, History and Repetition, edited by Seiji M. Lippit (2012)
The Archaeology of an Imaginary City
BY DUNG KAI-CHEUNG
Translated by Dung Kai-cheung, Anders Hansson, and Bonnie S. McDougall
Columbia University Press
New York
This publication has been supported by the Richard W. Weatherhead Publication Fund of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
First published as Dituji—yi ge xiangxiang de chengshi de kaoguxue by the Unitas Publishing Co., Ltd, Taipei, 1997; revised edition by Linking Publishing Co., Taipei, 2011
Copyright © 2012 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-50422-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dong, Qizhang, 1967–
[Di tu ji. English]
Atlas : the archaeology of an imaginary city / by Dung Kai-cheung ; translated by Dung Kai-Cheung, Anders Hansson, and Bonnie S. McDougall.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-231-16100-8 (cloth : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-50422-5 (electronic)
1. Hong Kong (China)—Fiction. I. Hansson, Anders, 1944-II. McDougall, Bonnie S., 1941-III. Title.
PL2936.3.O54D52813 20112
895.1'352—dc23 2011035907
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.
References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
For Nim-yan, Sun-gwo, and Torkel
Contents
PREFACE: AN ARCHAEOLOGY FOR THE FUTURE
by Dung Kai-cheung
INTRODUCTION
by Bonnie S. McDougall
PART ONE: THEORY
1. Counterplace
2. Commonplace
3. Misplace
4. Displace
5. Antiplace
6. Nonplace
7. Extraterritoriality
8. Boundary
9. Utopia
10. Supertopia
11. Subtopia
12. Transtopia
13. Multitopia
14. Unitopia
15. Omnitopia
PART TWO: THE CITY
16. Mirage: City in the Sea
17. Mirage: Towers in the Air
18. Pottinger’s Inverted Vision
19. Gordon’s Jail
20. “Plan of the City of Victoria,” 1889
21. The Four Wan and Nine Yeuk
22. The Centaur of the East
23. Scandal Point and the Military Cantonment
24. Mr. Smith’s One-Day Trip
25. The View from Government House
26. The Toad of Belcher’s Dream
27. The Return of Kwan Tai Loo
28. The Curse of Tai Ping Shan
29. War Game
PART THREE: STREETS
30. Spring Garden Lane
31. Ice House Street
32. Sugar Street
33. Tsat Tsz Mui Road
34. Canal Road East and Canal Road West
35. Aldrich Street
36. Possession Street
37. Sycamore Street
38. Tung Choi Street and Sai Yeung Choi Street
39. Sai Yee Street
40. Public Square Street
PART FOUR: SIGNS
42. The Decline of the Legend
43. The Eye of the Typhoon
44. Chek Lap Kok Airport
45. The Metonymic Spectrum
46. The Elevation of Imagination
47. Geological Discrimination
48. North-Oriented Declination
49. The Travel of Numbers
50. The Tomb of Signs
51. The Orbit of Time
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AUTHOR AND TRANSLATORS
Preface
AN ARCHAEOLOGY FOR THE FUTURE
The miracle of Hong Kong is that it has always been evolving, incorporating elements of both Chinese and foreign cultures, accommodating influxes of immigrants from the Chinese mainland in different historical periods,
and nevertheless maintaining a distinctive cultural identity. This city of immigrants is also a city of locals. Yet the founding of Hong Kong is a historical accident. Had the British not chosen to occupy the barren northern coast of the island in 1841 and set out to make it a colony, Hong Kong as we know it today would not have existed. There is no need for its present inhabitants to express gratitude for that, but we have to admit to the fact that Hong Kong was invented. It was one of the marvelous inventions in human history. Hong Kong has been a work of fiction from its very beginning.
There are enough fictitious Hong Kongs circulating around the world. It doesn’t matter so much how real or false these fictions are but how they are made up. The Hong Kong of Tai-Pan and Suzie Wong, a mixture of economic adventures, political intrigues, sexual encounters, and romances; the Hong Kong of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li kung fu fighting their way through to the international scene; the Hong Kong of John Woo’s gangster heroes shooting doublehanded and Stephen Chow’s underdog antiheroes making nonsensical jokes. And yet, in spite of these eye-catching exposures, Hong Kong remains invisible. A large part of the reality of life here is unrepresented, unrevealed, and ignored. Hong Kong’s martial arts fiction, commercial movies, and pop songs are successful in East Asia and even farther abroad, but for all the talents, insights, and creativity of its writers, Hong Kong literature attracts minimal attention—not just internationally but even in mainland China. I am not claiming that literature represents a Hong Kong more real than the movies, but it has its unique role and methods and thus yields different meanings. It is not just a different way of world-representing but also a different way of world-building, that is, creating conditions for understanding, molding, preserving, and changing the world that we live in.
It is the task of literature to make visible the invisible. (Or, as is sometimes said, to articulate the unarticulated.) Curiously, in contrast to visual art forms like film, literature has a special capacity for rendering visibility. Words are nonvisual signs and many steps removed from the actual and the visible. By virtue of this removal, however, words invoke an imaginative power that is not bound by a photographic image. Telling and writing play on the dialectic between the visible and invisible, and that is the true meaning of “making visible.” This making is no less than the work of an artisan, in whose hands a world of objects is made and an abode of dwelling is built. What is more, it is not an abode of bricks and tiles but an abode of meanings.
It was in this spirit that I wrote Atlas, a verbal collection of maps. It was written and published in 1997, in the year the colony of Hong Kong was returned by its British rulers to become a Special Administrative Region under Chinese sovereignty. Nevertheless I chose not to write directly about the event or the contemporary situation in the narrow sense. The perspective was set in an unknown future time but with a retrospective, archaeological orientation, inquiring into the origin and the long-lost past of the city. The city is supposed to have vanished, and efforts are made by scholars to re-create its history through imaginative readings of maps and documents unearthed only recently. The city is literally rebuilt by relics and fragments, casting a shadow on the question of reality and authenticity and in turn making way for the introduction of fiction into the process of history making.
The claim of history as fiction may seem far-fetched, reductive, and nihilistic, but it has a special applicability to Hong Kong. Hong Kong is often called a borrowed place in a borrowed time. It’s a colonial and therefore biased view, but it’s not because of any doctrine of national sovereignty that I reject it. This doctrine holds that Hong Kong has never been a colony, since the unequal treaties between the Qing dynasty and the United Kingdom have never been recognized by the People’s Republic of China. It also claims that the saying no longer makes sense after Hong Kong’s return to its mother country. My rejection is instead from the perspective of a person who grew up in Hong Kong in its last colonial phase and continues to live here in the post-1997 era. I and many others like me simply don’t accept this description of the place where we live. Why? It’s because we belong to the space-time that is ours. Nobody lends it to us and we don’t borrow it from anybody.
I am not arguing for any kind of essentialism, of a pure and original identity that has always been there, static, unchanging, and unchangeable. The idea of “borrowed place” and “borrowed time,” if taken positively, can also mean possibilities that have not been realized. It can liberate the borrowed from the lender and the borrower. The borrowed is the space and time, and these two make up the spatial and temporal existence of a people that is authentic and not falsifiable. Paradoxically, such authenticity and unfalsifiability can only be mapped, verified, understood, and pursued through fiction. Fiction has always been a means of identity building, and the metafiction of a society is an extended and unending bildungsroman.
This may all sound very functional, even programmatic, but it is not so. Literature always begins with self-questioning, and to write is an attempt to answer these doubts. Literary writing remains a personal matter, with no support from the outside and no collaboration with peers. Yet in writing, we are wonderfully connected in a common concern, a common care that makes us belong in the strongest possible sense. It is a new meaning offered by the phrase “personal belonging,” a near oxymoron, joining the private with the public. Atlas is a personal work, with all sorts of idiosyncratic and wild theories and interpretations, mixing with all sorts of extravagant exercises in imagination and camouflaged insertions of private experiences. Yet Atlas is also meant to be a work that belongs. It testifies to a belonging that was born a long time ago and has been growing since then, responding to but not determined by outward circumstances, whether political change, social upheaval, or economic disaster.
Belonging never closes off possibilities, it is rather the condition for possibilities. It makes possible. Space and time can never be borrowed, nor can they be returned. As one, as space and time should be, it can only belong, and can only belong to a certain people (or peoples). Belonging is always common, but it is also always multiple. That is why I would never take Atlas as a conclusion or ending of a historical period specific to Hong Kong but as the starting point for historical narratives, or histories, that open to us not only the path to the past but also the way to the future. It is in this sense that Atlas can be an archaeology for the future.
I want to thank Bonnie S. McDougall and Anders Hansson for their joint efforts in translating Atlas into English. Bonnie’s skill in rendering meanings accurately and yet at the same time flexibly is enlightening, and Anders’s eye for the precision of details is admirable. I have learned many things from them as a cotranslator and have made revisions to the original Chinese text at various places that couldn’t stand the close scrutiny of these two experienced teachers. If there are still any flaws and obscurities in the English text, the responsibility is entirely mine. I would also like to thank David Der-wei Wang, Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Harvard University, for recommending my book to Columbia University Press, as well as the press staff for their efforts in making Atlas visible to the English-speaking world.
Dung Kai-cheung
Hong Kong
June 2011
Introduction
1
Dung Kai-cheung’s Atlas has been compared to Italo Calvino’s Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities);1 the names Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, and Roland Barthes also appear in Atlas and have been cited as influences. Yet Atlas, “a verbal collection of maps,” is unique, an extraordinary assemblage of fact and fiction; of history, geography, philosophy, and politics; of imagination and wit; of fantasy and anecdote. It is a novel without a plot; there is a wide range of characters but none dominant; there is sex and violence but all offstage. The profusion of place-names in its early chapters can be daunting, as also the abstract conceptualizations toward its end; but throughout, the author’s strange ble
nd of humor and distress infuses his apparent detachment as he re-creates his city’s past and present, just as his archaeologist of the future attempts to re-create it through old maps, blueprints, and urban plans.
Dung Kai-cheung has been described as Hong Kong’s most accomplished writer. His work has been praised by the eminent literary sinologists Leo Ou-fan Lee and David Der-wei Wang and anthologized in collections of Hong Kong literature. His novels have been published in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese mainland, yet they are little known outside Hong Kong and Taiwan. It has been suggested that Hong Kong lacks the literary identity to be the subject of attention of an international reading public, yet fiction written in English, set in Hong Kong and telling Hong Kong stories, has been consistently popular beyond East Asia. As well as large numbers of crime thrillers and historical romances, there has also been a long string of commercial and critical successes, from Han Suyin’s A Many-Splendoured Thing (1952) and Richard Mason’s The World of Suzie Wong (1957; still in print) to John le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), Timothy Mo’s The Monkey King (1978), Paul Theroux’s Kowloon Tong (1997), and John Lanchester’s Fragrant Harbour (2002). These novelists are outsiders, temporarily resident in Hong Kong. Dung Kai-cheung was born in Hong Kong and has lived there all his life: his personal experience has enlivened his research into the past and given him apprehensive hopes for the future.
2
Dung Kai-cheung (in Mandarin, Dong Qizhang) was born in Hong Kong in 1967. His father had moved from China to the New Territories countryside in Hong Kong and then to Kowloon, where Kai-cheung grew up in the crowded streets of one of the world’s most densely populated areas. He received his BA and MPhil in comparative literature at the University of Hong Kong, the colony’s first and still most prominent university. He now teaches part-time in several Hong Kong universities but spends most of his time writing novels, short stories, literary criticism, and reviews.
His major works of fiction began to appear in the mid-1990s; eighteen have already been published and more are on the way. The titles of two novels acknowledge two of the writers with whom he has been compared: The Rose of the Name (1997) and Visible Cities (1998). Atlas is the first of his novels to have been translated into English and has also been translated into Japanese. Another novel, Works and Creations (2005), was adapted for the stage and successfully performed in Hong Kong in 2007. His most recent novels are Histories of Time (2007) and The Age of Learning (2010). Collections of his reviews and literary criticism, two of them coauthored with Wong Nim-yan, were published in 1996, 1997, and 1998; the most recent title is Writing in the World and for the World (2011).