This article examines the category of "ancestral homeland" through its use on columbaria niche covers in Hong Kong. By analyzing data from over 2,500 niche covers at three public columbaria in Hong Kong, as well as from focus groups conducted among people who visit columbaria over the Qing Ming holiday, we depict the variety of ways in which people interpret their identities through the category of ancestral homeland, and suggest the manner in which the relationship between the idea of an ancestral homeland and various social identities in Hong Kong are evolving.

This article presents a historical and literary analysis of a seminal work in Hong Kong literature, The Drunkard, by the iconic and versatile writer Liu Yichang (1918–2018). It begins by investigating how Liu’s diasporic dislocation informed his fusion of stylistic elements, linking existential crisis to the emergence of hybrid literary forms in Cold War Hong Kong. It also considers the impact of Cold War cultural influences—British colonial, American, and Chinese—on Hong Kong’s literary landscape and their role in enabling Liu’s experimental hybridity. Furthermore, it examines the ways in which diverse traditions, including European modernism, Shanghai Neo-Sensationalism, Classical Chinese literature, and Nanyang multiculturalism, are manifested in The Drunkard through specific formal devices rather than as mere cultural references. Finally, the article addresses how Liu’s editorial practices contributed to an engagement with modernism, shaping his creative output and the evolution of Hong Kong modernist literature. It argues that both the creation and content of The Drunkard exemplify a form of “hybrid modernism”—a distinctive cultural response to the complexities of modernity and coloniality in Cold War Hong Kong.

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.

This article focuses on interrogating the significance of the English translation of Hong Kong Sinophone writer Dung Kai-cheung’s 董啟章 Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City (henceforth abbreviated as Atlas), published by Columbia University Press in 2012, in particular the role of translation in shaping the reception and circulation of Dung Kai-cheung’s works on a global scale. This article focuses less on engaging in close inter-textual analysis of Dung’s works predicated upon the interrogation of the source text and its translation, but instead tries to foreground the intricate and complex process of translation by situating it as a transnational transfer, in particular paying attention to the power dynamics between different linguistic communities and the symbolic capital of English. Moreover, this article seeks to shed light on future research directions by situating Atlas as symptomatic of a wider trend: how the proliferation of English translations over the past decade helps to “expand the visibility of Hong Kong literature” (Mattison 152).

This article explores the affective logics of aphasia caused by the standardization of English and Chinese in post-Handover Hong Kong. It offers a close study of Lau Yee-wa’s 2019 novel Satjyu (Tongueless), which features the intertwined demises of a pair of schoolteachers who are disenfranchised by a mandatory change to their subject’s medium of instruction. I argue that the affects of aphasia circulating within this text illustrate a structure of feeling in Hong Kong that I term “cruel optimisation.” My framework employs Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism and Sianne Ngai’s ugly feelings as points of departure in order to trace the affective resonances between schoolteachers treading water in the stretched-out present of the neoliberal, nation-building project of “Hong Kong.” Cruel optimisation reconfigures these concepts to account for the critical role of the standardized languages of English and Chinese in shaping the sense of deficiency and disempowerment underlying the affective atmosphere and social time of post-Handover Hong Kong. Ultimately, cruel optimisation structures and perpetuates an attachment to a language-based fantasy of upward mobility that neither state nor self can fulfil.