The Child in Recent Anthologies of Hong Kong Literature

Abstract

Childhood and children provide poignant metaphors for Hong Kong’s existence and future, not least since the colony’s “return” to mainland China and a law of the father, in which its “young” residents lacked a say. What if we suspend a child’s relation to its parent, and instead elaborate a child’s desires in a playground of peer-like objects? In a recent prose anthology addressed to children, 給孩子的港臺散文 [Hong Kong and Taiwan Prose for Children, 2019], the editors Joseph S. M. Lau and Leung Shuk Man position Hong Kong as a site of “naive” literary history through which Hong Kong residents or sojourners write about the city-state. The “child” provides a new optic to read famous and lesser known literary texts, which I examine via object relations theory in psychoanalysis and developmental narratives in modern sinophone literary history. My examples include a child’s precocious mastery of classics (Ah Nong); an adult’s feeling of loss expressed in toys and ordinary objects (Xi Xi); a student’s language acquisition within the history of AngloChinese education and translation (Dong Qiao); riddle-like tales that include abstract paintings (Yank Wong); and a stream-of-consciousness use of classical, vernacular, and Cantonese idioms (三及第) to capture fragmented self-image (Wong Bik Wan). A Hong Kong-based theory of the child, I argue, has its own phylogenetic tree of reading and desire, apart from its evolutionary narrative within modern China’s civilizational struggle (Andrew Jones).