Recently, higher learning encountered an unprecedented challenge, namely the proliferation of artificial intelligence in the form of large language models, while continuing to grapple with the divide between humanities and sciences, managerialism within and anti-intellectualism outside universities, as well as attempts to align educational and scholarly practices with the current political agenda. Hong Kong, as an established educational and aspiring tech powerhouse, stands at the forefront of these precarious transformations. Therefore, such an array of issues calls for new approaches in higher education research, while their universal nature calls for practitioners of different disciplines to step up and offer their tools and expertise to education scholars. This article proposes literature as a sensitive, fast-responding source of insights on how higher education in the Sinosphere is changing under pressures such as AI, shifting views of the humanities, new managerial practices, and governmental ukases. While policy reports and institutional studies remain essential, they can be slow or somewhat insensitive to the personal lived experience of university denizens to register the whole gamut of challenges and transformations. Fiction, by contrast, can play the role of a litmus test, anticipating nascent trends and transmitting certain immediate observations of people involved with universities. The first part of this article theorizes literature's potential contributions to higher education research, while the second examines a novel Beloved Wife by Hong Kong's preeminent literary visionary Dung Kai-cheung, reading this work as a rumination on the present and future of liberal arts education and scholarship in the age of scientific progress.