In Chan Koonchung’s dystopian science fiction novel The Fat Years, set in China in 2013, the whole month of Feburary 2011 has disappeared from people’s memory. In reality, the month that is closest to being spirited away is the month of June 1989 when the Communist Party of China (CPC) commanded a crackdown on the pro-democracy student protests in Tiananmen Square. Since then,
Can writers help an injured society to heal? Did Ōe Kenzaburō, who traveled to Hiroshima in 1963 to interview survivors of the dropping of the atomic bomb on that city eighteen years earlier, and then published a moving book called Hiroshima Notes, help his compatriots to recover? Did Primo Levi, with his several books on the Holocaust, from the shocking Survival in Auschwitz
When Hong Kong reverted to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, expectations were high in Beijing and among the pro-mainland forces in Hong Kong that identification with the Chinese nation would slowly but surely strengthen among the local population, especially among the younger generations, eventually solving the problem of Hong Kong’s full integration into China. Once the colonial
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