Publisher's Synopsis
So far, CLC has been dealing with Chinese culture in general and contemporary Mainland authors though its ambition is much greater. I am very happy to finally be able to look beyond China proper and have a special collection of Hong Kong literature of today. As a special Chinese territory with a colonial past, Hong Kong has a character both the same as and different from that of the Chinese continent. In this collection, we shall be able to have a glimpse of Hong Kong new writing and the life and culture of Hong Kong people. Compared with our previous volumes, which largely deal with heavy themes, this one carries a much lighter tone though the business of life is no less serious. Personally I am impressed by trivialities in the stories and even in the poems but life very much lies in trivialities and literature lies largely in the details. When we travel to Hong Kong, we see a big metropolis on water with skyscrapers along the shores and narrow crowded lanes or elevated footpaths in the backstreets and we see a big city with quite interesting demographics. However, outsiders don't really know Hong Kong without knowing its people and literature. We hope this collection not only brings our readers some interesting new writings from Hong Kong but also an interesting view of Hong Kong people and their culture despite the limited scope. A small volume as it is, compiling it is no easy task. I am very thankful to four Hong Kong authors-Wu Yin-ching, Chan Hay Ching, Eric Lui Wing Kai, and Liu Waitong-for allowing their works to be translated and published, and four excellent translators-Huang Yu, Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, Audrey Heijns, and Li Bo, who live in Hong Kong or have Hong Kong experience to enable them to understand the culture and language of Hong Kong people-for their dedication to translational excellence. I am particularly indebted to Li Bo, not only for his translation, but also for initiating the idea of a Hong Kong collection and his great assistance in making that idea come true, and to Canadian author and poet Fraser Sutherland, who is always there and carefully reads everything when his help is sought. Wu Yin-ching The Tale of Fabric Street translated by Huang Yu (Heidi) The alleys have disappeared, the private histories are now blurred, but the scrolls of emotion are waiting to be measured by the ruler of memory. My grandfather died at 94. Before his departure he had been silent for three months, fasting, living on a plastic feeding tube, and leaving no word behind. News came at dawn that he was gone. He left our lives in the lightest way possible, like a piece of scribbled scratch paper fleeing from the worm-eaten window frame, quietly disappearing under the stern gaze of broad daylight, with red paint falling off in bits and pieces. He was only in his sixties when he went bankrupt. After he'd lost his money, he realized that the days when he dominated the Guangzhou textile industry were now just a dream, a dream he had been dragging around for too long. When he went bankrupt, he was only in his sixties. There is no way I can describe my grandfather in detail, as we had rarely spoken to each other. His image could only be reconstructed from the surrounding atmosphere. My grandfather had dragged through his whole life with a theatrically long tail covered in abscesses and at its end, the whole lump of blood and flesh could be neither lifted up nor severed while the infected wounds opened and closed; in acute pain he dragged through the shadows of late Qing in its last few years, through the diasporic childhood of an orphan, through the ankles moving southward during the Sino-Japanese war, and through the bloodthirsty glass during the Cultural Revolution. ...
