by Jane Camens, Executive Director, APWP
SUMMER 1998, the year after the handover of Hong Kong, a Chinese translator, Martha Cheung, produced an anthology of translated short stories by Hong Kong writers.
In her foreword she wrote that local people did not recognise their home in fictional representations of it. ‘A plethora of images has been imposed and superimposed on Hong Kong – by Western writers as [well as] those from the Mainland.’
One author described Hong Kong as the gossiped-about ‘female protagonist in a pulp fiction …represented, [but with] no voice to tell her own story.’
It was time, Martha Cheung declared, for the people of Hong Kong to tell their own stories.
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