Hong Kong Literature’s Growing Pains

Regardless of its autobiographical nature, The Impossible City is underpinned by a theoretical inquiry: “How do you write about the place you call home, in a language that is not your own?” Cheung appropriates and complicates a number of self-reflexive strategies that have been closely tracked by Sarah Brouillette, Mary Louise Pratt, and Weihsin Gui as features of the evolving postcolonial “autoethnography,” a form that differs from monophonic self-representation in that it is a multipronged collaboration wherein “colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms . . . usually addressed both to metropolitan readers and to literate sectors of the speaker’s own social group.”