LITERATURE IN THE WORST/BEST OF TIME
Do Hong Kong writers necessarily have to write about Hong Kong? And if they do, what kind of a Hong Kong is it that they write about?
Whereas Tong Yui ironically adapts a traditional Chinese fairy tale to a very specific place and context in Hong Kong, Page Fung’s fragmented narration takes the oppressive presence of Hong Kong into every corner of the pandemic-ridden world.
In this event, Tong Yui and Page Fung will each read a short passage from their work, followed by a German translation by Kathrin Bode and Joern Grundmann. Afterwards we hope to engage the audience in a lively discussion.
Guestspeakers:
© Page Fung
Page Fung is from Hong Kong and lives in Taiwan. His first collection of short stories, Smoky Streets (Yingai 煙街), was published earlier this year in Taiwan. He has already won several literary awards. Presently he is a Master student in Taiwanese literature at National Tsinghua University. He is also the editor of the House of Hong Kong Literature’s online publishing platform P-articles as well as of the magazine Formless. Personal webpage:
pagefung.com
©Tong Yui
Christophe Tong Yui received his PhD in Chinese (Comparative Literature) from Fudan University in Shanghai and got his MA in Comparative Literature and BA in French Literature from Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III). He is one of the winners of The 1st Young Writers’ Debut Competition and his novel Footnotes was awarded the Prize in Novel by The 10th Hong Kong Biennial Awards for Chinese Literature in 2009.
Christophe is also a French-Chinese translator. His translation Colporteur «行腳商» was published by East China Normal University Press in Shanghai in 2010. Tong has taught for Creative Writing and Film Art programme at The Open University of Hong Kong and Language Centre at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University.
Moderators:
© Kathrin Bode
Kathrin Bode studied the Chinese language in Bonn, Germany and Wuhan, Hubei-province. She has previously worked as a German teacher in the Universities of Bonn and Cologne as well as from 2015 to 2019 at University of Foreign Studies in Tianjin. In 2020 she started teaching at Baptist University in Hong Kong. She has translated short stories of the Chinese writer Ye Shengtao and Zhou Daxin from Chinese into German. Recently she translated poems by Lin Bai. She is presently working on a collection of short stories from Feng Jicai. Having come across writers from Hong Kong only a short time ago, she is very much intrigued by the dynamic and creativity of this circle. With this event and the translation of writers from Hong Kong she hopes to make Hong Kong Literature known to a broader German speaking audience.
© Joern Peter Grundmann
Joern Peter Grundmann holds a B.A. degree in Asian Studies from the University of Bonn, an M.A. from the Department of Chinese Literature at National Taiwan University, as well as a Ph.D. in Chinese Studies from the University of Edinburgh. He currently works as a postdoctoral research-fellow at the Jao Tsung-I Academy of Sinology, HKBU. His field of research comprises early Chinese philology as well as pre-imperial intellectual and conceptual history. Despite his focus on the beginnings of the Chinese intellectual tradition he has recently re-discovered his initial interest in contemporary sinophone literature. Together with Kathrin Bode, he currently works on a volume of most recent short stories from Hong Kong in German translation. His first literary translations, a selection of four episodes from Dorothy Tses novella City in flux of the bygone (逝水流城) are bound to appear in the seventy-first issue of Hefte für Ostasiatische Literatur .
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