4 ideas
Xi Xi traces a family, chiefly the Hua clan, and their neighbours through roughly a hundred years in Fertile Town, a renamed Hong Kong. The story runs from its small-settlement beginnings through its growth into a commercial city, and ends as the town approaches the 1997 handover.
The book tells the city's past through shops, trades, meals, neighbours and family businesses rather than governors, treaties and wars. The claim built into this choice is that a city's identity lives in accumulated daily practice. Official history misses what the people who lived there would actually recognise as their city.
Fertile Town is pictured as suspended, like a carpet in the air. It has a vivid, self-made local identity, but it is not rooted in a nation of its own, and its future is settled by powers elsewhere. The image pins down a specific political condition: a people can be fully formed culturally while having no say over which ground they will be set down on.
Renaming the city, using a fairy-tale register and breaking the century into many short numbered sections lets the novel address colonialism and handover anxiety without a direct polemic. The fragmented form mirrors how a city is remembered: as a mosaic of anecdotes, not one master narrative. The whimsical surface gives the writer room to say things a realist political novel would make contentious.