City Like Water

The city you grew up in is gone, as if sunk to the bottom of the ocean. So much has vanished with it-classmates, teachers, counterfeit watches, the erotic toe cleavage that used to lead the way down secret passages. Yet you still catch snatches of conversation lingering in the air and glimpse sun-dazzled residents retreating into dark crevices. People seem to keep disappearing. Your mother joins in a housewives' protest, each woman waving the fake, bloody lotus roots they were sold until police helicopters unleash a glittery spray that turns them into statues. Then it's just you and your father at home, until he is quietly absorbed into the enormous new TV gifted by the government, and you spot him doing tai chi or picking through leftovers in the background of soap operas. And didn't you once have a little sister, before she flew away in her school uniform? As the police go undercover and transform your neighborhood into a violent labyrinth you can no longer navigate, where does this leave you? Lucid, nightmarish, and indelible, City Like Water is a wondrous and pointed message in a bottle from a city not so different from your own.

Dorothy Tse is a Hong Konger writer and the author of Owlish, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, and Snow and Shadow, which was long-listed for the Best Translated Book Award. She has received the Hong Kong Book Prize, the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature, and Taiwan's Unitas New Fiction Writers' Award. She is the cofounder of the literary journal Fleurs des Lettres. Natascha Bruce translates fiction from Chinese. Her recent work includes Owlish by Dorothy Tse, Mystery Train by Can Xue, and Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong. After several years in Hong Kong, she now lives in Amsterdam.