In Dorothy Tse’s City Like Water the location is never named. Anonymous, mutable, it slips from normal into nightmare, strangeness signalled from the opening lines: ‘In the place I used to live, my rusty top bunk rocked like a boat. Night after night, it carried me off towards a secret crevice.’
This is a novel written out of sorrow and anger: the pain of recalling sweeter times. It’s not the boy narrator who is unreliable; it’s the city itself. When, in Invisible Cities, Italo Calvinodescribed Marco Polo’s travels, he named 55 settings – each delineating an aspect of Venice. Tse has acknowledged Calvino as a major influence, and the locus of City Like Water, in all its bewildering manifestations, its beauty and squalor, can only be her own city – Hong Kong.
To the boy it has become a predator with gleaming fangs, ‘nipping at the nerves of my memory’. In the everyday city, frangipani trees blossom, cafés serve egg pastries and children attend school. But unnoticed, things are changing. The narrator tries to recall how the destruction began. Was there a single point of force or a gradual erosion? ‘Who would have guessed that, of all things, it would be a lotus root that snapped us out of our stupor?’
When his mother finds a fake lotus root in the soup, she marches off to challenge the stall holder, to be confronted by new faces and strange products on sale. Other mothers join her, seeking culinary justice and encountering bureaucratic hostility. When they persist, a hovering helicopter releases a shower of glittering dust, turning the protesting women into bronze statues. Later, the boy sees his mother and the others on television described as violent criminals.
All around him is flux and transformation. One day his little sister opens an umbrella and floats out of reach. Now it’s just him and his father. There are reports of people throwing themselves from rooftops. A huge TV set arrives in their flat and gradually his father becomes part of the non-stop soap opera, absorbed into its scenery. A flock of birds invades a bookshop and settles on the shelves, becoming books, feathers smoothed into pages. Apartment blocks droop and grow tentacles. Entire hotel floors vanish. Time collapses.
City Like Water is a rollercoaster of mind-blowing improbability, but beneath the fantastic lies the gritty reality of post-handover Hong Kong: the hardening of authority, the brutality of police crackdown. A chronicle of vanishing freedom. The picturesque umbrella protests make perfect sense. An open umbrella protects eyes and face from pepper spray, tear gas and toxic jets that burn the skin. In both worlds people disappear.
The seductive beauty of Tse’s writing has won her awards, and is perceptively captured by Natascha Bruce, who also translated Tse’s much praised first novel, Owlish. Dazzling imagery carries the narrative – and the city itself – far out to sea, as Kafka and Borges, old masters of the surreal and avuncular figures, look on approvingly from the shore.
Comments