“I am watching my city vanish just a little more”: Writing Hong Kong’s Urban Disappearance in Xu Xi’s Monkey in Residence & Other Speculations

Hong Kong’s urban landscape has long been a site of erasure and reinvention, particularly in the years surrounding the 1997 handover to China. While the disappearance of once-familiar urban spaces owes less to the transfer of sovereignty than to the relentless forces of capitalist redevelopment, China’s tightening grip on Hong Kong is increasingly visible in new landmarks that assert political authority and national belonging. Despite having been a flourishing colony of the British Empire, Hong Kong remains understudied in postcolonial scholarship. Drawing on postcolonial and memory studies, this paper redresses this gap by examining Hong Kong anglophone author Xu Xi’s reflections on urban space. Through a close reading of selections from her essay collection Monkey in Residence & Other Speculations (2022), this paper explores how Xu Xi articulates anxieties concerning the city’s shift from British colony to Chinese territory. This metamorphosis into “just another Chinese city” (Xu Xi 2008, 98) leaves Hongkongers with a nostalgic reminiscence about a place many of them no longer really know. Bringing together Xu Xi’s meditations on loss, memory, and urban transformation, the paper also 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).