Atlas

by Kai-cheung Dung

  Dung Kai-cheung has won literary awards in Taiwan and Hong Kong, including the Unitas Fiction Writing Award for New Writers (1994), the United Daily News Literary Award for the Novel (1995), and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council Literary Award for New Writers (1997). Works and Creations received wide critical acclaim and was ranked among the best ten in the Annual Book Awards (2005) of the two major literary supplements in Taiwan (Unitas Daily and China Times Daily). It also won the Adjudicators’ Award, The Dream of Red Chamber Award: The World’s Distinguished Novel in Chinese, Hong Kong Baptist University in 2006. Histories of Time won the same award in 2008. He received the Award for Best Artist 2007/2008 (literary arts) by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. In 2009 he spent several months in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Their reputation in Hong Kong and Taiwan firmly established, his works are now being published in mainland China and Japan.

  Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City (in Mandarin, Dituji: Yi ge xiangxiang de chengshi de kaoguxue) was first published in Taipei by the Unitas Publishing Company in 1997; a revised version appeared in 2011. It is a fictional account of the City of Victoria (Hong Kong), a legendary city that has disappeared, written from the perspective of future archaeologists who reconstruct the form and facts about the city through imaginative readings of maps and other historical documents. It has fifty-one short chapters grouped into four parts: “Theory,” “The City,” “Streets,” and “Signs.” Each chapter is a mixture of fact and fiction, narrative and description. The novel poses questions about the representation of a place and its history through a visual medium that is supposedly scientific and technical: maps. It is about the invention of a city through mapping and its reinvention through map reading. The author takes a distanced view of Hong Kong’s colonized past and its sinicized present, employing a range of writing styles to rearrange the two in a fragmented narrative. Interspersed throughout are moments of lyrical recollections of individual experience.

  The opening of part 1 may seem intimidating from its title “Theory” to its long list of real and imaginary place-names in the first chapter: even some of the actual place-names are hardly familiar to long-term Hong Kong residents. Nevertheless, the chapter titles, which initially seem ponderously Foucauldian, starting with “Counterplace” and continuing to “Commonplace,” hint at playfulness in “Misplace” and “Displace” and end up as mythic with the final six variations, “Utopia,” “Supertopia,” “Subtopia,” “Transtopia,” “Multitopia,” “Unitopia,” and “Omnitopia.” The names of Calvino, Eco, Barthes, and Borges in the main text and notes also suggest that a fictional world is being created.

  In part 1 we are introduced to a first-person narrator to whom is attributed a wistfulness about the past, especially about old maps and other documents that demonstrate the actuality and fictiveness of the past. Our narrator is a dreamer and historian: “I have been searching for the entrance to the land of nonbeing in old maps endowed with ancient charm and wisdom…. There is only one place that is forever beyond the reach of our knowledge: the entrance to the land of the Peach Blossom Spring” (Peach Blossom Spring is China’s hidden paradise on earth that only a blessed traveler could chance upon).

  He writes also of the political significance of maps and mapmakers: “There is no actually existing entity that serves as evidence of boundaries between districts or countries. Therefore, we can say that the boundary is a fictional exercise of power.” Our final glimpse of the narrator in part 1 reveals him as a philosopher with aspirations to the divine:

  Unconsciously we have always yearned to be one with God. A map is no longer a utilitarian instrument but an epistemological translation of our knowledge of the world. The translated text will ultimately replace the limited vision of our individual selves, becoming a panoramic virtual space in our psyche and spirit, unfolding within our minds a total map that stretches into infinity. In this way we transcend ourselves and lose ourselves, for we are everywhere and nowhere.

  Yet our narrator is never far from reality: “The ineffable bliss we experience [in reading maps] is similar to the effect produced by examining the floor plans of real estate sales brochures.” Readers who stumbled in chapter 1 may in hindsight appreciate the changes of tone throughout part 1 that alternately baffle, inform, and amuse.

  Part 2, “The City,” introduces a more dramatic note, its first two chapters presenting an image of the city as a mirage. The narrative notes its disappearance and inquires into means of establishing its previous existence:

  The remaining maps of Victoria, which vary in quality but abound in quantity, are no guarantee of the city’s existence. On the contrary, they throw doubt on its stability and actuality. Reading them is like tracing a lover’s inner topography. Under those oscillating, ambiguous, indefinite, and yet suggestive expressions, the map reader’s knowledge and imagination are led into a meandering narrative, out of which is woven a novel full of prejudice, jealousy, misunderstanding, perplexity, anxiety, and ecstasy.

  Some of part 2 is based on the memoirs of early governors describing their attempts to order Hong Kong’s existence as a prosperous, well-governed city. A note records that “British cartography was first-class in the world in the nineteenth century, and many naval officers and colonial officials had advanced map-drawing skills.” Other early visitors who left descriptions of early Hong Kong include a shipwrecked Japanese sailor, said to have been there in 1845. As the narrator comments, “Implausible passages in the text may be due to Kino’s blurred memory or the result of the investigators’ fertile imaginations.”

  The narrator recedes from personal intervention in part 2, but Barthes and Borges are present in name and in the narrator’s thoughts:

  A “plan” is a plane figure but also a design, a present visualization of future form. On the one hand it does not yet exist and is unreal, but on the other hand it is being designed and will be constructed. A plan is thus a kind of fiction, and the meaning of this fiction is inseparable from the design and blueprint.

  Prompts such as these encourage readers to doubt the reality of these accounts. One of the most engaging is in chapter 24, on Mr. Smith’s one-day trip to the colony. Smith is an Englishman who visited Victoria for a day in August 1907. While his wife went to a hairdresser’s (after several stormy days at sea), Smith took a stroll around town: mailing a letter home at the post office, buying books about Hong Kong in Kelly & Walsh, and buying seasickness medicine and whiskey from Watson & Co. The same shops are not necessarily in the same places, but the cityscape is recognizable; there appears to be no evidence for Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s visit.

  Even more curiously, chapter 25 contrasts the view from Government House as described by the tenth governor (1887–1891), Sir William Des Voeux, and its last (1992–1997), Chris Patten, the only difference being that the latter’s words are not written but “alleged” remarks addressed by Patten to one of the gardeners…. At this point, almost halfway through the novel, even the most trusting reader is bound to start questioning every account appearing so far and throughout the rest of the book. Other bizarre events follow. In chapter 26, a monstrous toad rising from the harbor is seen in a dream and sketched by Captain Edward Belcher, although his sketch is lost.2 The plague described in chapter 28 that caused thousands of deaths in the area around what is now Blake Garden was real, but not necessarily the parrots belonging to an English couple who perished, leaving the parrots to flourish in the giant banyan trees, or the investigators who more than a century later “suddenly hit upon the bright idea that generations of Blake Garden parrots might have passed down authentic vocalizations from the past. They went to Blake Garden with audio equipment to interview the birds’ descendants, as if recording oral history.”

  A darker note is left to the last chapter. A military map of Victoria, designed by the British but with a Japanese text and frequently cited as evidence of Japan’s ambitions in East Asia during World War II, is claimed by a Japanese histo
rian to be no more than a war game popular in the middle of the twentieth century, not unlike the computer games that emerged toward the end of the century. In contrast, a Japanese novelist claims that an idle drawing he made as a child turned out many years later to be an accurate sketch of Victoria: “It was only in the 1960s that I learned that there was such a place as Victoria, and to my surprise the map of that city happened to coincide with the one that the lonely and introspective child had inadvertently made up in his utter boredom.”

  Published separately in translation, some of the chapters in part 3, “Streets,” have been described as essays, but like the rest of the book, they form part of the author’s fictional vision of Hong Kong. Each chapter gives a documented account of a street or neighborhood in Hong Kong—except that some, perhaps many, of the sources are imaginary. “Spring Garden Lane,” for example, tells the story of a Mr. and Mrs. Parker, who are killed by bandits while walking in the hills above Happy Valley and whose son is then taken to England for his education; the son returns, marries into a local Chinese family, and spends the remainder of his life in Hong Kong. This biographical sketch is not obviously fictional, but the reader may conclude otherwise.

  The narrator remains largely impersonal in part 3, recognizing folly in the foreigners’ ways without being judgmental. In “Ice House Street” he relates how ice was imported for the benefit of the nineteenth-century colonists and concludes with a link to the current use of one of the street’s old buildings as a venue for theater performances, serving the postcolonialists’ cultural aspirations. The Cantonese confusion of “ice” with “snow” gives rise to a fantasy of a colonial ice cellar where nostalgic Englishmen and their wives suffering from the summer’s heat would go underground to enjoy the ritual of afternoon tea in front of a fire.

  Interaction between locals and colonialists outside of regulations can be fatal. In chapter 36, a government sanitation officer, forsaking the red-light district for foreigners in Lyndhurst Terrace, visits the Chinese brothels in Shui Hang Hau, where he falls madly in love with a local prostitute named Butterfly. When he dies in a fall one morning after spending the night with her, it is said that his demise was caused by his “possession” by the spirit of Butterfly’s late father. Almost as ominous are the authorities’ attempts to recover local traditions: as described in chapter 37, an area near Mong Kok known as Poetry, Song, and Dance that had degenerated under colonial rule into a red-light district was revived when the authorities replanted the street with bauhinia trees. Bauhinia is the city’s emblematic flower, yet the tree is a sterile hybrid.

  Chapter 38 relates administrative consternation with a street having one name in summer and another in winter: “If you sent a letter to Tung Choi Street in the summertime but wrote the name Sai Yeung Choi Street by mistake, it might be winter before it got delivered.” The solution, to create two streets, only led to further muddle. Chapter 40 depicts an impossible geometry in a public square resembling an M. C. Escher painting, much studied by “the psychoanalytic school of cartography.” The final chapter, “Cedar Street,” performs a different kind of acrobatic feat by describing a book about maps by “a minor writer of the late twentieth century”:

  In this unsystematic and unclassifiable collection of map reading, and with a complete disregard for reality, the author read in between the dotted lines and colored spots strewn freely across the page all sorts of public and private nightmares, memories, longings, and speculations.

  In part 4, “Signs,” the narrator reconstructs twentieth-century Hong Kong through maps, blueprints, and humdrum relics of a lost civilization. It begins with “The Decline of the Legend” (the word “legend” remaining ambiguous):

  However, as legends developed, not only did they fail to expand the possibility of signs as a form of language; on the contrary, they turned into a limitation. To serve their instrumental purpose more efficiently, legends became uniform, compulsory supplements without any imaginative power to speak of. The language of maps became rigid. There was nothing in existence more arid than maps, which were reduced to games in the exercise of power, whether in regard to knowledge, economics, or politics. It is only when individual ways of reading legends return that we can again read legends as tales of marvels.

  Among these tales of marvels is the difference between global economic and climatological readings of a map of 1985 and the study of “postgeology (representing the peak of agitation for indigenous cultural exploration)” at the University of Hong Kong. Science fiction has political undertones, such as the plan to evacuate Hong Kong by constructing a mobile “airport” at Chek Lap Kok “to cope with major catastrophes such as nuclear accidents, earthquakes, epidemics, or alien invasions.” A group of tourists from the future explore a completely reconstructed city, shopping at Cat Street in Central for “replicas of heritage objects from the city’s past: for example, broken plastic and metal toys, moldy faded martial arts novels with missing pages and pornographic magazines, nonfunctioning transistor radios, electric fans and typewriters, corroded copper kettles, tarnished silver ornaments, makeup cases made of rotten wood, out-of-date calendars, pocket watches that had stopped, and tattered and torn maps,” returning to their hotel loaded with purchases. A transport timetable shows passengers on trains leaving the mainland border for the city as time travelers.

  There is little overt challenge to the central Chinese government in Atlas, and there are writers all over China who are writing with similar affection about their own local histories. The difference in Dung Kai-cheung’s case is that the colonial past is not demonized, and the play of his imagination is not confined by uneasy glances at the censor, whether linguistic, social, or political. This openness is subversive in a way that political censorship cannot control but that the authorities cannot support.

  Dung Kai-cheung’s Atlas and Calvino’s Invisible Cities both consist of short chapters and combine urban fables with abstract fancies on the nature of the city. The differences are just as obvious: Atlas is free of orientalist imagery, for instance. In Invisible Cities one fantasy follows relentlessly after the other, and only the changing relationship between the power-obsessed emperor and the sex-obsessed traveler sustains the narrative interest; in Atlas the fantasies are extensions of the real and therefore endlessly intriguing. Whether or not Dung Kai-cheung consciously adopted Invisible Cities as a model, the comparison suggests that unfamiliar local references are not always a deterrent to nonlocal readers. The majority of Calvino’s readers read Invisible Cities in translation, but neither his Italian-speaking nor his English-speaking readers would be familiar with the topography of Yuan-dynasty Peking. Localism, in this case, has not been a barrier to international appeal.

  3

  I have discussed at length elsewhere the difficulties that Hong Kong Chinese writers have found in reaching audiences outside Hong Kong, whether in Chinese in China or in translation abroad.3 One factor in the international inattention to Hong Kong literature by local writers may be Hong Kong’s linguistic multiplicity. Most academic studies and journalistic reviews focus either on its English-language works or on its Chinese-language works, each appearing thinner without the other. There is also a widespread belief, going beyond cultural circles, that in regarding itself as the hub of Asia, Hong Kong is merely delusional: it is and only ever has been a border town, on the periphery of empire (British, Chinese) and not at anyone’s center. The concept of “borrowed time, borrowed place,” described and rejected by Dung Kai-cheung in his preface, may be another factor in the lack of attention outside East Asia given to Hong Kong writers and artists. It can of course be argued that Hong Kong still has an expiry date—it used to be 1997 but is now 2047, when its political and legal system is to give way to mainland rules. Hong Kong still has a giant next door: it is less threatening but also much more powerful than it used to be. Is Hong Kong a place with its own past and future, worthy of a literary culture created by its own people? Is its interest to the world outside no more than
its exotic setting, or its frank commercial appeal as a place where anything can be bought and sold?

  Hong Kong’s population includes devoted readers: in contrast to Taiwan, bilingual bookshops are everywhere and packed with browsers, and the sixty-six branches of the Hong Kong Public Libraries are well stocked with titles in Chinese and English and well patronized. A city of six million Cantonese may lack the numbers to make publishing local fiction profitable (most of Dung Kai-cheung’s novels have been published in Taipei), but there is a potential audience of Cantonese speakers in southern China larger than the audiences of native readers in several European countries. Nevertheless, Dung Kai-cheung’s occasional use of Cantonese expressions, his identity as a Hong Kong writer, and his preferred locality of Hong Kong discourage mainland readers preoccupied with the highlights and controversies at the center of China’s elite culture.

  Even setting aside language politics, why would anyone apart from Hong Kong Chinese want to read and study Hong Kong literature in Chinese? Is it worth translating, adapting or otherwise rewriting to bring to the attention of readers in the rest of China and the world? Must it be accepted in China before the rest of the world takes notice? Or is international recognition the prerequisite for gaining respect in China? In truth, none of the factors mentioned earlier (and none of these questions) may in the end count for much: a small handful of writers is sometimes enough to transform the image of small countries in the literary world. Dung Kai-cheung and his fellow writers are just now part of that transformation.