The Little Red Podcast · Graeme Smith and Louisa Lim

The Centre of the Vortex: Survivors' Notes from Hong Kong Writers

November 8, 2024·41 min·3 clips

What does it mean for Hong Kong to write itself in its own language, three decades after cultural critic Ray Chow first posed the question?

Four years on, language is where the pressure shows. Louisa Lin begins with Ray Chow's 1992 question about whether Hong Kong can write itself in its own language, then asks what that question sounds like after the national security legislation. The tone is careful, almost clipped. Writers now deal with censorship and publication trouble; some have left for Taiwan, the UK, the US, and elsewhere so they can write more freely, though distance brings its own problems. The guests make that split feel less abstract. Lau Yi-Hua enters through Tongueless, a psychological horror story that won the 2024 Penn Translate Awards. Gigi Leung Lee Chee speaks as a younger reader looking at the same pressure from inside the classroom. The conversation keeps circling adaptation. Lau describes pre-2019 Hong Kong people as capable, fast at making money and solving problems, but shaky on who they are. Survival sounds useful until it starts eating the self. She does not offer a clean answer. She wants readers to ask whether the environment can change, instead of asking people to keep bending until they disappear. Gigi recognizes the problem right away. In university literature, she saw 40 or 50 of 80 or 90 students were immigrants from China. Language becomes both institutional and painfully personal. Students whose mother tongue was not Cantonese could fit Mandarin teaching in Hong Kong schools more easily, and Chinese literature could look like a steadier path. Gigi calls herself marginal. That lands because Cantonese here is not just a style. It is a place to stand. The final note is modest but sharp. Gigi praises a book by Wong Bik Wan written in a Cantonese tone and style, and says Hong Kong has long sold Cantonese short as a written language. The episode ends with no victory lap: just the question of whether surviving is enough when identity has already been asked to move aside.

As heard by us

A clear, literary conversation on Cantonese, censorship, migration, and the cost of adapting under political pressure.

The Little Red Podcast turns the question of Hong Kong writing in its own language into a sharp cultural and political conversation. Louisa Lin frames Cantonese as a live pressure point after the national security law, with writers facing censorship, publication difficulties,…

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Why you'd press play

For a close look at how Hong Kong writers keep speaking under pressure.

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