Hongkong seems very quiet, but outsiders do not know whether the Chinese who live here are comfortable or not.

Men communicate their thoughts and feelings through writing, yet most Chinese nowadays are still unable to express themselves this way. This is not our fault, for our written language is a fearful legacy left us by our forebears.

— Lu Xun

Because the default browser is still Google Chrome and because the VPN has to be on for you to read most of the things you think you need to read, you must identify which of the nine blurry little squares contains a boat in order to prove you’re not a robot. To whom are you not a robot? You identify the images that contain ships. You know the difference between a ship and a boat. You are not a robot. You identify the images that contain bridges, then the ones that contain bushes, and then you turn your VPN off and on again to see if the page will load. It doesn’t. You’ve forgotten what you were trying to load, which makes you want to access it even more. You switch your VPN’s location from Hong Kong to Santa Monica, the recommended setting, but it still doesn’t work, so you change it to Tokyo, Toronto, Seoul, Vancouver. You set it to Alsace, and just as it finally works, your doorbell rings. You get up from the couch, where you’ve been lying with the laptop pressed against your chest and your chin tucked into your neck, and open the door to a man in a blue windbreaker and a blue helmet with a white Alipay logo on the top. He hands you a white plastic bag that holds a plastic box of rice noodles, separated from the hot soup by a transparent plastic compartmentalizer. Though you always request that the restaurant not give you disposable utensils, you still receive a pair of chopsticks and a white plastic spoon. Now you find disposable utensils too convenient, and you almost never use your dishwasher. Almost always, you use the chopsticks, so you have a stack of disposable white spoons inside one of the drawers in your kitchen. You remember asking a friend about this. You wonder if she’s still your friend, because one day she stopped talking to you, and you stopped talking to her, sensing she was avoiding you. It has been a month, and maybe you stopped caring whether she’s still a friend or not. But the rice noodles reminded you of the time you pointed out that restaurants give you utensils even though you ask them not to. She assures you that your preferences don’t matter, that the option is there because the government tells tech companies to include such options (#slacktivism).¹ And that it’s better for restaurants to give you utensils regardless because in cases where you click the no-utensils button, which is green, by mistake and you actually don’t have utensils, you won’t be able to eat the noodles. You’d blame the restaurant for not giving you utensils, and because you won’t get to eat the noodles, you won’t know how good they are, and you won’t order noodles from them again.

You’ve been in China, in Shenzhen, for four months, out of quarantine for three, and you haven’t written anything since you’ve arrived, even though you are a writer and are here to teach writing. The job title on your contract is “Creative Writing Coach.” Your apartment is too big, with too many rooms, and it’s a little too expensive. You have almost nothing in your kitchen; you either eat out or order takeout. You’re coming down with a cold. It’s 2021, and Huawei’s CFO, Meng Wanzhou, has just returned to China, landing in Shenzhen from Vancouver. When she arrives, her name and slogans of welcome are projected on all the skyscrapers in Futian, in red. You get a Google notification: Justin Trudeau has just been re-elected. Your VPN is working.

“You’ve come too late,” the real-estate agent tells you. There are very few apartments available in the area, and you believe her. Now, you live alone in this oversized apartment. Across from you lives a co-worker—a mother whose son also attends the school you teach at. One morning, she greets you in the elevator, telling you she recognizes you, even though you’re wearing a mask, because of your curly hair. You’re running late, but so is she, and so is her son. She’s smiling, and her son has a yellow toy car with him. In the elevator, your leg becomes a highway for the car to speed across before it reveals itself to be a Transformer as it approaches your crotch.

Later, one of your students asks if you think a certain male anime character with silver hair, a giant sword, and a cape is attractive. You say yes, and another student comments on your response to the first student, saying she finds Transformers attractive. This makes you think, though you try to repress it, of a French movie that recently came out. You don’t recall the director’s name, but she made a movie about two sisters who are cannibals, and the younger one accidentally cuts off the older one’s finger, smells it, licks it, and eventually eats it. You later find out the director’s name is Julia Ducournau, and her latest movie, Titane, is about people sexually attracted to cars. You try to find it online but can’t.

It is sometimes hard to find movies in China. You see Dune in the cinema, which you think is more about colonialism than sand. But you still haven’t seen Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which you suppose is about a Chinese American played by a Chinese Canadian actor who used to play a Korean Canadian on a Canadian TV show. The show was cancelled. Shang-Chi is also about orientalism and banned in China because, in the comics, Shang-Chi’s father isn’t Tony Leung but Fu Manchu.

In the basement of a cathedral in London, you see a monument to the man responsible for the Second Opium War paired with writings from a Hong Kongese historian trained at Oxford—writings about how she told the story of the war to her children. Sir Harry Smith Parkes “helped to persuade Parliament to approve the Second Opium War. . . . When Britain won this war, it was able to trade . . . opium in China, and expanded its rule in Hong Kong.” Her children put clay models into the empty triangular space at the top of the sculpture to “connect the memorial with my family’s origins in Guangzhou and Hong Kong. On each side are garlands of poppy heads, which are the raw ingredients of opium. In the middle, the ‘sampan’ boat symbolizes Hong Kong’s harbour, and how a small fishing village became a centre for British trade.”

It is Lunar New Year. It is 2025. You will not be spending it with your family in Hong Kong because you’ve been away for so long, and it is too much to spend two Lunar New Years in a row at home with family. You are trying to write again. You are working with an artist, a painter, who, when she was studying in the U.K., experimented with shades of gold and silver. Metallic lines reach toward the edges of her paintings, threading through abstracted images of death, nuclear-disaster sites, mummified corpses, tombs, cathedrals, and this cathedral was one of the early references she used. You notice gold and silver lines on the ceiling, on the walls, and you remember that last year, when you spent Lunar New Year with your family in Hong Kong, the first in almost fifteen years, your mother was happy. It was the first new year without your grandmother, who, during COVID, passed away, and your mother cried while saying grace at the dinner table, making everybody hold hands in front of the steaming hot turnip cakes, rice cakes, pudding, and chicken—all the food seared to different shades of yellow. The food looked almost golden.

When you were in quarantine in 2021 you wrote about not wanting to return home to Hong Kong. It was one of the last things you wrote before you stopped. You spent almost a month alone in a hotel in the suburbs of Shanghai, eating lukewarm rice from plastic boxes wrapped in plastic bags, and you had cold steamed fish and choked on a small bone when you ate leftovers at four in the morning because you were jetlagged after arriving from Canada. This is what you wrote:

They didn’t bring democracy. The Brits brought Christianity and opium when they came to Hong Kong. At some point in his life, my Confucian father became a Christian. Astronaut children visit Hong Kong in the summers. On Sunday mornings, my father knocks on my door. Continuously, he knocks on my door. I tell him to stop. I’m awake. He leaves for church without saying a word to me. On the table, there is takeout from Café de Coral, a Cantonese fast-food chain downstairs. It is humid and hot, and the takeout container is made of polystyrene foam. The bread inside is wet and soggy. He is now away from the house, but his silence is also pressure. I must eat the food quickly. When I finish eating, I must make my way to the subway station. I must be at church.

In Toronto, a year before you move to China, you tell a friend, a good friend, that you feel like leaving Canada after graduate school, that you just finished a first draft of your second novel and want to take a rest from thinking about writing, at least for a little while, that you want a change of scenery, that COVID has made your adjunct lecturing job even more unstable, and that you want, for a little while, to have a stable income. He tells you to take his position at a private school in Shenzhen. He must leave because of some complications with his visa. Many people have the same problem, he tells you, but he never thought he would be one of them since he and his husband have been in the country for more than ten years. They will probably never come back, he says, and you will likely get the job because his departure will be abrupt, and the school will need to confirm his replacement before the beginning of the next academic year.

Reasons for resting from thinking about writing:

1. Your writing was stolen. Before you left for China, your partner told you that, two years prior, she stole your short story collection, your undergraduate thesis, and submitted it as her own to complete a double major: one in creative writing, the other in something else. At the time you learned of it, you were finishing the first draft of your second novel, and you would edit it over the next few years, but you were repelled by the thought of starting something new.

2. The borders are closed. You see Hong Kong on the other side of the bridge but can’t get there.

3. When she told you she stole your writing, she stroked your arm very slowly, barely touching it, sending chills through your bones. You were drunk, sitting at the bar, and when she stroked your arm again, the same arm, your left arm, for the second time, she didn’t look at you.

4. She was never comfortable looking you in the eyes.

5. When she stroked your arm the third time, you closed your eyes. You were saddened and a little aroused by this touch before moving your arm away.

6. The next morning, you didn’t talk about it. The morning after, you didn’t talk about it. The morning after that, you didn’t talk about it. For another three to four years, you saw each other but still you didn’t talk about it.

7. When you graduated with a master’s degree in creative writing, she was at your graduation.

8. When you quarantined for twenty-one days alone in Shanghai, where you initially landed, you were learning about China by watching Chinese TikTok trends.² Five months later, alone in a café in a residential neighbourhood in Shenzhen, surrounded by corporate art in an open square where children play, you witness a kid behind you yell “Death to America!” while running around with his arms spread wide, pretending to be a fighter jet. The kid’s grandmother laughs.

9. You don’t remember exactly how she phrased it, how she told you that she stole your writing. But you remember that she didn’t expect forgiveness. She never said sorry, only thank you. “Thank you for putting up with my bullshit” is what you remember her telling you.

10. You see the words “Numbness is the greatest hidden disease; joblessness is the beginning of all problems” written in bright red Chinese characters on the wall of the construction site next to the station.

11. When you finally asked her why she did it, why she stole your thesis, she told you it was because you were good at writing. In that moment, you felt like telling her you loved her.

12. For more than a year, every forty-eight hours, you are required to receive a COVID test at a government site or at the hospital, or else you’ll be quarantined at home.

13. A building under lockdown in Ürümqi, in Xinjiang, catches fire. There are rumours that the firefighters struggle to enter the area because COVID measures require barriers to be placed at the entrance. There are also rumours that government officials put chains on residents’ doors, quarantining people by force. At least ten people are killed.

14. Protests break out against the lockdown measures, and Kris Wu, a Chinese Canadian rapper who was part of EXO, a South Korean boy band, is convicted of two counts of rape and will be imprisoned for thirteen years before being deported to Canada, where he’s a citizen. “At least he knows the date when he can leave the country, lol,” one comment on Weibo reads. “The rest of us have no idea when the borders will reopen.” Some say the news about Kris Wu came out the same day the protests began so as to divert people’s attention.

15. In line to get a COVID test is a student of yours. He hires people to do his homework, and you know this as a fact. He’s tall, has flawless, pale skin, and wears Louis Vuitton sneakers. His father is a real-estate tycoon currently under house arrest for tax fraud. A guard shouts at you to put your mask on properly. Another guard shouts at you to show him your health code on your phone, which takes a few seconds to load because you have your VPN on. The guard shouts at you again to stand aside so others can pass. There’s a speaker next to the line repeating the phrase “If you have a yellow code, please visit Nanshan Hospital.” When your code finally loads, your student turns around. “Have a good night, sir,” he says, bowing his head slightly. He walks away. You see the English words Handsome and Meaningless printed in glittery silver and gold on the back of his hoodie.

16. To test you for COVID, the nurse inserts a swab into your nostrils, which tickles the bottom of your brain.

17. It feels colder than it is when it’s humid, like your insides are touching the weather. It felt the same, you remember, when she told you that she stole your thesis, and stroked your arm.

Reasons for censorship: It’s easier to prevent problems than to solve them later. It’s common practice to anticipate problems. It’s common practice to make rules to prevent problems because the problems those rules cause can be anticipated.

You learn that the twelve-year-old boy you interviewed and admitted to the school attempted to shove his fingers up another kid’s asshole during gym class. You didn’t see this happen. You have no experience teaching high school. You think about the student shoving his fingers up another boy’s ass as you take a shit. You’re on a Japanese toilet that warms your butt cheeks and flushes automatically. There are two washrooms in your apartment. The other one has a regular toilet. This boy you admitted, the one who assaulted another student, also told a teacher that on September 18, he placed the Japanese flag on the floor and stepped on it. On his first day at school, when asked to draw a map of China, he included Vietnam. Your colleague stopped him when he tried to expand the Chinese border to include all of Mongolia. When the other students asked him why his map looked different, he started talking about how the borders needed to expand, and the other students became afraid, thinking that soon there would be a war to conquer more territory, put pressure on the Japanese, and fight the Americans. You later learn from this student’s parents that he learned all of this from TikTok and Bilibili.

It’s strange living in a three-bedroom apartment alone. Maybe you’ll have kids. Maybe you’ll start cooking. Maybe you’ll buy a cat. Maybe Pedagogy of the Oppressed will be useless for international schoolteachers teaching rich kids. If you give them tests all the time, maybe fewer of them will play on their phones. Maybe none of it will work. Maybe you’ll turn off your VPN and start browsing for things you think you need on Taobao. Maybe you don’t even want to be a teacher. Maybe the article you’re trying to load is from The New York Times, which is blocked. But maybe it won’t matter that you won’t be able to access the article. Maybe not too many people around you will be able to read it either. Maybe the noise—the screeching sound of a subway train slowing down as it reaches the station below your apartment—will make you want to have sushi. Maybe the noise will make you want to die.

Your fingers are still trying to access the article. You pick blurry images from a new set, selecting ones that show fire hydrants. Another train passes by. Maybe you actually like the sound of metal scraping against metal. You think about sitting on your grandmother’s balcony in Kowloon, Hong Kong, in the early 2000s, with the constant noise of cars, minibuses, doubledecker buses, trains, people, and buildings. There are too many buildings too close together, always under construction. You enjoy sitting there, watching the subway pass between the gaps in the old buildings, unable to distinguish one noise from another. You were twelve or thirteen or eight but now you’re an adult, a Hong Kongese Chinese Canadian adult, working in Shenzhen, thinking about Hong Kong, remembering the time when your grandfather passed away when you were eight or thirteen or twelve, and your grandmother moved to the same private apartment complex as your parents, near the Hong Kong International Airport, where there was less noise. You hear the sound of planes but don’t see them.

People you know from Toronto are organizing an exhibition, a collaboration between the art councils of South Korea and Canada. They ask if you will participate, and you agree, and the artist who paints lines through abstracted images of death performs with you. It happens in a church, or what used to be a church but is now an arts space, in Seoul, in South Korea, at the end of 2024.

The performance:

1. You have in front of you an overhead projector.

2. You will write when your performance partner feels that an hour has passed. 

3. Your performance partner will begin the performance by laying bricks on the floor to create a sandbox and climbing a ladder to adjust a light that shines on the sand to represent time.

4. The floor will be cold. The two of you will be, for most of the performance, barefoot

What we usually call time is a social construction, linear and accelerated. But in this performance, time is only approximated; only her body’s feeling of time matters. Each “hour,” you compose a piece of writing that will be projected onto the wall. Throughout the night of the performance, the two of you are not allowed to communicate. Nor do you have access to devices that tell time. Acts of adjusting the light and composing a piece of writing based on its position will be repeated five times over.

One of the first things you write:

Nostalgia performs no labour.

But each brick becomes heavier than the last.

Your body repels itself upward by pressing time against the ground.

In 2021, I forgot to cry when I was in quarantine in my apartment, watching on my phone as Grandmother passed away.

A brick is only a little lighter than a phone.

Now I forget the clothes Grandmother used to wear.

Crying is a closet for beautiful clothes.

Between each feeling of an hour, the two of you rested.

Because resting should be performed.

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SHEUNG-KING is the author of You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. and Batshit Seven.