Seeing Others: Ethics of Ghost Narrative in Sinophone Hong Kong Literature

Abstract

Inspired by the Sinophone discourse on translocality, this paper analyzes Mak Shu Kin's novella “Slow and Long Night” ( Manman changye, 2019), Tse Hiu-Hung's short story “The Umbrellaless Ghost” ( Wu zhe gui, 2015), and Tse's novella “The City of Dissipating Streams” ( Shi shui liu cheng, 2020). We analyze how ghosts in Mak's text become symbolic of the characters trying to survive in a translocal context, while in Tse's work, they express the significance of a community through différance and magical realism. We argue that these texts represent a new generation of Hong Kong writers who, through Hong Kong's Sinophone “situatedness,” resort to ghost narratives to respond to an ethical commitment to the Other and a sense of community, thus enabling Hong Kong literature studies to move beyond the framework of “déjà disparu” or “anti-incorporation.”