Abstract
Hong Kong, having been a representative of modern city, mingles its unique colonial experiences with a variety of forces and strengths to assemble a multicultural characteristic, and developes a mercantile disposition under the economic pressusre in a immigration society and the influences of colony’s attention to its economy. Therefore, “Hong Kong memory” is closely linked to its characteristics. Also, Hong Kong literature is mainly based on its city experiences. The Hong Kong literature in different period, combining with its changeful city atmosphere and sensitive political situation, brings out different perspectives. What is bound with Hong Kong people, and also influences contemporary Hong Kong literature the most is “the transfer of sovereignty (1997),” also known as “the Handover” from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China. This can dates back to 1898, when Hong Kong had been leased to the UK for 99 years, and thus, causes debates when it was returned to China in 1997. The novel My City(1979), written by Hong Kong writer Xixi, mentioned that “Imagine there’s no country, above us is only our cities,” which established the tradition of Hong Kong literature. On the other hand, in 1990s, Xu Zi-Dong proposed the concept of “lossing the city,” in which dipicts the sense of crisis when the Hong Kong people awared that the subjectivity of their own city may no longer exist after the Handover. His composition centered on identity, memory, and so on. After the Handover, Hong Kong has been through the recombination of culture, and politic power. The change of the scociety influences the literature, and a whole new city imagery emerges. This paper has selected modern authors Hon Lai-Chu, Tse Hiu-Hung, Lee Wai-Yee and their published works from 1997 to 2015 as the research subject to observe how the novels depicts the change of Hong Kong society. Focusing on “space” and “oppression,” this paper discusses how the allocation of space resources fosters the oppression, how the oppression affects back to the space boundaries, and then the city imagery in the novels are created. The urban alienation suggested by Hon Lai-Chu and Tse Hiu-Hung, and the social documentation in Lee Wai-Yee’s works are respectively the two important transition in Hong Kong literature after the Handover. This research investigates how the two transitions make differences to the Hong Kong literature after 1997.