'Hong Kong Story' has always been an euphemism of 'Hong Kong's history' in enunciating the characteristic of local history. In the colonization era, Hong Kong history was indeed a colonial history because started from the very early period, the historical archives were written by either the missionaries or aristocracies, which laden with dominant European discourse....[ Read more ]

'Hong Kong Story' has always been an euphemism of 'Hong Kong's history' in enunciating the characteristic of local history. In the colonization era, Hong Kong history was indeed a colonial history because started from the very early period, the historical archives were written by either the missionaries or aristocracies, which laden with dominant European discourse.

The changes in the political and cultural environment because of the 1997 Handover had invoked a blatant identity searching process among Hong Kong writers. After Hong Kong has entered into the post-transitional period, local writers started to re-investigate the history of Hong Kong. The reappropriation of history is the common theme shared by Shi Shu Ching's Hong Kong Trilogy and Dung Kai Cheung's 'The Rise and Fall of Wing Sing Street' and The Atlas: The Archeology of an Imaginary City.

The thesis argues that through constant re-narrating Hong Kong history in writing Hong Kong story, not only points to a recognized need in Hong Kong culture to search for a new identity, a new self-consciousness that can claim a different history than what has been instituted in the past colonial discourse and the appropriation of the PRC national discourse at the turn of 1997, but also gives the writer themselves a chance to construct a differentiated and unique identity; because retrieving history in writing fictions is the indispensable for any conception of self or subjectivity.