City like Water by Dorothy Tse
Chinese fiction
Original title – 《 逝水流城》 (pronounced Shi Shui Liu Cheng)
Translator – Natascha Bruce
Source – Subscription book
I didn’t get to read the debut novel from the Hong Kong writer Dorothy Tse. It was one of those books that was everywhere when it came out, as Fitzcarraldo books often are, especially the novellas like this and Owlish. Tse has been the editor of the magazine Fleur des lettres and has said she is a fan of writers such as Lewis Carroll, Kafka, Orwell, Hoffmann, and Carter. I can see all of these in this book; there is a mix of the real and surreal in her writing. There is also a sense of lost places, lost times, and lost family in the book. The book is also about her home, without ever mentioning it, since the place is now gone.
Waving her steaming root like a sword, my mum marched out of our building towards the wet market.
She wanted justice from the offending vegetable vendor. But which of them would have dared deceive such a customer? The rules of the wet market were strict.
Strict yet invisible to the untrained eye; the opposite of the piles of gleaming melons that had been carefully laid out for the whole world to see. The Department of Health had organized a clean-up of the formerly unruly street hawkers, rearranging them inside a purpose-built, mustard yellow municipal services building, but this orderly appearance did nothing to change the relationship between the vendors and their customers. Spotlights were adjusted, and water spritzed onto withering vegetables to plump them up and make them seem more alive, while the best produce was held back, reserved in the shadows behind the stands for discerning shoppers like my mum – an old hand at the market game, respected by all the other housewives.The fake Lotus root being sold and how her mother protests about it
The book is made up of a number of vignettes that are like an ode to both past and present, the memories and the surreal nature of now and the past. From a place that isn’t there, there is a sense you are drifting into the back streets that are now gone, into family properties, as we see a mother arrested, as there is a shock at fake Lotus roots being sold as real. A father that has been given a huge TV by the state and is now more absorbed in watching that than in his own family. Teachers suddenly gone. Protesters turned into statues. This is a dark vision of a world that has changed, a place that seems almost moving as the book goes on, a place where rights are gone.
My dad kept to the same routine as always. He spent long hours every day glued to soap operas on the television. He was always in bed before ten o’clock and up again at dawn, when he would go to our pathetically small neighbourhood park and stand in the shade of its only tree, a large banyan, where he would open his arms wide and move through a tai chi sequence. My mum’s disappearance had revealed meteoric craters in our lives, and my dad seemed to be silently and systematically attempting to fill them. I was angry that there were no more leaks in our apartment. When had all the holes been stopped up? Every evening, the dining table unfolded at the same time as always. The difference was that now my dad was trying to recreate dishes from memory, and his food had a plastic taste that I found impossible to swallow.
The father caught up in the tv all the time
I said I could see a lot of the writers she had referenced in this book; Kafka, for example. There is a sense of being lost in a system at times, a government that changes from day to day. The book is made up of lots of short vignettes. Lewis Carroll: there is a surreal nature to this: people turning to statues, places changing. Orwell: there is a sense of Big Brother in this book, although it is never mentioned as Hong Kong; it is a veiled critic on her counrty. But since she wrote the book, could this not be Portland or any city in the US where ICE and rights and regime influence on people is rife? If you like short books that will have you thinking for days afterwards that tackle current issues, housing, the right to voice opinions, the right to real food, all of these are events that are still happening. Loss, as well as loss of place and life, is always there, like the ghost of the past she once knew, just behind the prose at times. I must admit, this has climbed high on my list of favourite books from China. I hope she writes something longer at some point. I still want an epic that captures the madness of everyday life in these epic Chinese cities.
