In Review: Dorothy Tse's 'City Like Water'

By Sharon Chau

The challenge facing Hong Kong writers today is not simply the tightening of speech but the quiet

disappearance of the city around them. Everyday life continues, yet something essential has slipped

away, leaving the sense of a place being slowly rewritten. In City Like Water, Dorothy Tse’s third

book to be translated into English, she turns this vanishing into art, exploring what stories endure

when a city begins to lose its own reflection.

The setting is an unnamed metropolis, but there are nevertheless thinly-veiled allusions to Hong

Kong: the language Cantonese, the 666 police reporting hotline (999 in Hong Kong), the television

channel TVB Jade, references to empress Tin Hau and warrior god Che Kung from Chinese folk

religion—the list goes on. Where Owlish retreats into the fictional city of ‘Nevers’, City Like Water

shows no hesitation in putting Hong Kong front and centre in the plot.

Tse’s deliberate specificity makes the book a treasure trove of nostalgic references; those who grew

up in the city would surely recognise the ‘meat-red plastic bags’ tied to the blades of fans to scare off

flies and the old uncle ‘slicing up cow entrails, the rich smack of his cleaver opening a glistening,

fragmented world’. Such evocative imagery is testament to Tse’s ability to capture the immediacy of

home with so few words and such taut prose, and to Natascha Bruce’s brilliantly rendered

translations.

If the novella has a villain, it is the police. They go undercover and collude with corrupt charlatans

selling fake lotus roots, break up protests with tear gas and stinging blue jets of liquid, and ultimately

turn the neighbourhood into a violent, unrecognisable labyrinth. When the narrator’s mother joins a

housewives’ protest, the police disperse a stream of glittering powder from a helicopter, transforming

the women into ‘shimmering bronze statues’ who promptly disappear. The narrator’s harrowing

description of police violence—‘I felt a searing pain through my body, as if every inch of skin had

been set on fire’—could very well have been lifted verbatim from witness testimonies on the 2014 or

2019 protests. One would also be forgiven for expecting this scathing commentary from an essay

rather than a novella: ‘[The police] needed only the smallest encouragement to start playing around

with their pistols, instantly obsessed with winning their invented game.’

But Tse never allows despair to wholly consume the narrative. There are flashes of black humour in

her description of the police, sardonically nicknamed the ‘po-po’. Of their use of the subway system

as a ‘shiny new toy’ to subjugate citizens, she writes, ‘the subway employees trapped in this

underworld probably never imagined that they would find themselves stand-in babysitters, placating

fussing po-po mouths with juice boxes in place of breast milk’. Such bitingly sarcastic and genuinely

funny imagery provides fleeting moments of respite from the serious and, at times, absurdist storyline.

Tse’s use of humour is a kind of resistance, withholding respect in the face of authority.

If the police are villains, then they are merely the puppets of a far more powerful and sinister force:

the state. The book is replete with political violence, first disorientingly realistic, then increasingly

absurdist. Early on, the narrator ‘silently [copies] out history textbooks that reflected nothing of

history’, listens to a news story on a loop of depressed teachers jumping to death, and witnesses

classmates vanish from school. An official letter with only a signature box and no option to check

yes/no states, ‘I promise that I’m happy. I promise not to kill myself’. After the housewives’ protests,

the narrator searches the phrase ‘lotus root’ online only to realise that ‘the term had vanished into an

internet black hole’, very much akin to the so-called Great Firewall of China. Tse traces out the

contours of an eerily prophetic, censored world where the state manufactures consent and disciplines

the boundaries of collective memory.

The most pointed allusion to Hong Kong’s political reality comes in a plotline about Desert, an

absurdist bookshop where birds go to roost and gradually transform into books. After a wave of

protests, the bookshop completely closes down. The narrator only hears later that the owner, the man

with the birds, was missing for days, and was now on the state-gifted TV making an official apology

that sounds oddly rehearsed. Part of this scene is eerily reminiscent of Hong Kong’s infamous

Causeway Bay Book disappearances, which sent shockwaves through the city. Back in 2015, five

staff members of this bookshop selling highly politically sensitive publications went missing and were

detained in China; one of the men reappeared a few months later in what was widely regarded as a

forced confessional video. The parallels here are striking. They make clear that the very existence of

literary spaces poses a challenge to authoritarian power because books safeguard the truths that

political regimes cannot fully control.

Yet the most memorable of such scenes is a Murakami-esque dreamscape of disappearing hotel floors

and disappearing days in the year. When probed on this, a girl in the hotel lift says,

‘In real life people just aren’t that curious. Why would they be? They’re staying in this

gorgeous hotel. Every day there’s another amazing banquet for them to feast on. Why would

they care about the one or two rooms they’re not allowed to enter?’

It is easy to feel Tse’s anger and indignation at the wilful ignorance of the populace here. Indeed, a

common argument for why governments are able to continue repressing its people is due to the

people’s own acquiescence; they are so bribed by material riches they turn a blind eye to political

oppression. In this view, passivity is not neutral, and instead, becomes a form of collaboration that

allows the state to extend its reach without ever raising its voice. The novella exposes how regimes,

including China and Hong Kong, rely on precisely this dynamic, weaponising prosperity to dull

political imagination and redirect dissent into private life.

Stylistically, Tse’s writing is taut, detached, and bordering on disinterested. Nicky Harman, who

translated Tse’s Snow and Shadow, notes that her writing has ‘no superfluous repetition’ and ‘a total

absence of sentimentality’. In City Like Water, bloodied ears fall off in the street, and panicked

individuals would grab two random ones ‘regardless of colour or size’ and rush them to hospital. As

customers innocuously chewed their noodles at a restaurant, ‘their mouths slowly elongated into

snouts, and their teeth spilled fang-like over the edges of their lips’, with their arms becoming

forelegs. Such grotesque metamorphoses are rife in Tse’s absurdist world. The reader is lulled into a

false sense of security with a realistic depiction of mundane family life or political protests, only to

have this overturned with viscerally surreal imagery. One interpretation is that the cool, distanced

narration amplifies the absurdist violence around it; the lack of sentimentality creates a suspended

tension, as if the characters have normalised the grotesque, a condition that mirrors how authoritarian

contexts slowly recalibrate a society’s sense of the intolerable. Another possibility is that this reflects

the psychic numbing produced by prolonged political pressure. The flatness becomes part of the

novel’s social diagnosis, as people survive by shrinking their emotional bandwidth which is mirrored

by the prose.

This oscillation between realism and surrealism is not merely stylistic whimsy, but increasingly a

political necessity. Surrealism occupies a special place in Hong Kong writing. Writing for the

University of Iowa, Tse characterises Hong Kongers as ‘hovering among languages’ (Cantonese,

Mandarin, other Chinese dialects, English), and goes on to say, ‘[for Hong Kong writers, written

Chinese] is a language of distance and requires meditation… Hong Kong’s literature has a tradition of

resistance to the language of daily life… writing itself is an active rejection of utilitarian society and

mundane everyday life’. Herein lies the answer to how one writes about and makes sense of a city

where free speech is being curtailed, and where overtly political statements can be seen as conspiring

to subvert state power. Tse’s surrealism is an act of imaginative defiance, a tactical reframing of

reality itself, and a way of speaking the unspeakable when direct articulation is no longer safe.

In the eponymous final chapter, the book concludes with the city’s disappearance: ‘Every so often,

news gets out that some trace of our city has been rediscovered.’ If Owlish charted a descent into

oblivion, City Like Water reads as both autopsy and post-mortem. Its narrator wakes, only to find his

city already extinguished. With wit, fury, and astonishing inventiveness, Tse has again delivered a

clear-eyed parable of state power and political violence, fusing satirical realism with terrifyingly lucid

surrealism, fiction masquerading as fact.

SHARON CHAU has finally left Oxford.

Art by Lizzie Stevens