“I watched, helpless”: Xu Xi’s Literary Representation of Hong Kong’s Vanishing Spaces

Hong Kong is a city haunted by the memory of what has vanished. Beneath the spectacle of its skyscrapers and neon lights, traces of the past move quietly through its streets: the echoes of British colonialism linger in contemporary architecture and once-familiar neighbourhoods are gradually replaced by new commercial and infrastructural projects and absorbed into broader processes of political and cultural integration with the PRC (Tsang 2015). Unlike many former colonies of the British Empire that reject colonial rule in favour of a pre-colonial identity, Hong Kong represents a postcolonial anomaly. In light of recent waves of political pressure from Beijing, the colonial past may be recalled with nostalgia rather than with outright resistance (Wong 2010). This paper explores Xu Xi’s literary representation of postcolonial Hong Kong’s urban spaces, shaped by the spectres of British colonialism, the violence of post-handover urbanisation, and the pressures of Chinese nationalism. It investigates how everyday spaces are haunted by the past even as they are constantly reconfigured and propelled towards an unpredictable future. Through close reading of selected passages from Xu Xi’s collection of essays Evanescent Isles: From My City-Village (2008), I argue that Xu Xi constructs a literary archive, tracing the disappearance of familiar colonial landmarks and the emotional residue they leave behind. Drawing on Svetlana Boym’s distinction between ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’ nostalgia and Mario Panico's 'spaces of nostalgia', I contend that Xu Xi articulates nostalgia as a form of resistance, a means of confronting colonial memory and reclaiming a sense of belonging and identity within a rapidly vanishing urban landscape.