Writing Back to the Empire[s]? Britain and the PRC in Xu Xi’s Literary Representation of “decolonized-recolonized” Hong Kong

Over the past decades, Hong Kong has been shaped by political, social, and cultural crises that have turned the city into a site of prolonged uncertainty. These crises originate in the tension between British colonial rule and the gradual restoration of Chinese sovereignty and unfold across a series of key moments in Hong Kong’s history, including the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration announcing the end of colonial rule, the 1997 Handover to the People’s Republic of China, and the subsequent tightening of political control through increasingly restrictive regulations. In the face of these events, literature in Hong Kong has become a space for articulating the affective consequences of political repression. The works of Hong Kong anglophone writer Xu Xi are particularly relevant in this regard as the author resists assimilation into both British colonial narratives and Chinese nationalism. Through a close reading of selected passages from her essay collections, Evanescent Isles: From My-City Village (2008) and Monkey in Residence & Other Speculations (2022) and her collection of stories, Insignificance: Hong Kong Stories (2018), this paper explores how Xu Xi articulates anxieties surrounding the city’s imperial past and its shift from British colony to Chinese SAR. This metamorphosis into “just another Chinese city” (Xu Xi 2008, 98) leaves Hongkongers with a nostalgic reminiscence of their own city. Bringing together Xu Xi’s reflections on loss and memory, this paper confronts Hong Kong’s uncertain future, returning to one of Xu Xi’s most urgent questions: “will Hong Kong belong to our future, the way it belongs to our past?” (2022, 15).