The Role of the Writer and the Making of Hong Kong in Dung Kai-cheung's The History of the Adventures of Vivi and Vera

Abstract

Abstract:This paper illustrates how The History of the Adventures of Vivi and Vera reflects critically on the role of the writer and the meaning of writing Hong Kong after the 1997 handover. By challenging the relationships between writer and character, human and things, creator and creations, the novel seeks to break the binary structure of the colonizer and the colonized and advocate for a new mode of writing that is decentralized, collaborative, and forward-looking. Dung proposes to see Hong Kong not as an object of representation passively defined through looking into the past, but as a subject of creation that comes into existence through the collaborative act of imagining the future. This new mode of writing not only generates a textual "space of appearance" that encourages the collective making of "possible" Hong Kongs, but also seeks to assert Hong Kong's autonomy through the creation of spaces for self-definition.