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City Like Water
The city you grew up in is gone, as if sunk to the bottom of the ocean. So much has vanished with it—classmates, teachers, counterfeit watches, the erotic toe cleavage that used to lead the way down secret passages. Yet you still catch snatches of conversation lingering in the air and glimpse sun-dazzled residents retreating into dark crevices.
People seem to keep disappearing. Your mother joins in a housewives’ protest, each woman waving the fake, bloody lotus roots they were sold until police helicopters unleash a glittery spray that turns them into statues. Then it’s just you and your father at home, until he is quietly absorbed into the enormous new TV gifted by the government, and you spot him doing tai chi or picking through leftovers in the background of soap operas. And didn’t you once have a little sister, before she flew away in her school uniform? As the police go undercover and transform your neighborhood into a violent labyrinth you can no longer navigate, where does this leave you?
Lucid, nightmarish, and indelible, City Like Water is a wondrous and pointed message in a bottle from a city not so different from your own.
People seem to keep disappearing. Your mother joins in a housewives’ protest, each woman waving the fake, bloody lotus roots they were sold until police helicopters unleash a glittery spray that turns them into statues. Then it’s just you and your father at home, until he is quietly absorbed into the enormous new TV gifted by the government, and you spot him doing tai chi or picking through leftovers in the background of soap operas. And didn’t you once have a little sister, before she flew away in her school uniform? As the police go undercover and transform your neighborhood into a violent labyrinth you can no longer navigate, where does this leave you?
Lucid, nightmarish, and indelible, City Like Water is a wondrous and pointed message in a bottle from a city not so different from your own.
83 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 3, 2026
23 people are currently reading
920 people want to read
About the author
Dorothy Tse
16 books40 followersDorothy Tse Hiu-hung (謝曉虹) is the author of four short story collections in Chinese, including So Black (《好黑》, 2005) and A Dictionary of Two Cities (《雙城辭典》, 2013). Translations of her short fiction have appeared in The Guardian, Paper Republic, The Margins (AAWW) and Anomaly. Her English-language collection Snow and Shadow (2014, trans. Nicky Harman), was longlisted for the University of Rochester’s 2015 Best Translated Book Award, and collects short stories from her earlier Chinese books as well as previously unpublished works.
A recipient of the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature and Taiwan’s Unitas New Fiction Writers’ Award, Tse also attended The University of Iowa's International Writing Program in 2011. She is a co-founder of the Hong Kong literary magazine Fleurs des lettres, and currently teaches literature and writing at Hong Kong Baptist University.
一九七七年生。
似乎一直在香港生活，但其實只是在有限的幾條街道上重複地走來走去，與固定的朋友互通消息，以及看各種虛幻的新聞。九七年開始寫作，作品收入大陸、台灣及香港等地之小說及散文選集，於○三年出版《好黑》（香港，青文）。
A recipient of the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature and Taiwan’s Unitas New Fiction Writers’ Award, Tse also attended The University of Iowa's International Writing Program in 2011. She is a co-founder of the Hong Kong literary magazine Fleurs des lettres, and currently teaches literature and writing at Hong Kong Baptist University.
一九七七年生。
似乎一直在香港生活，但其實只是在有限的幾條街道上重複地走來走去，與固定的朋友互通消息，以及看各種虛幻的新聞。九七年開始寫作，作品收入大陸、台灣及香港等地之小說及散文選集，於○三年出版《好黑》（香港，青文）。
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 44 reviews
March 14, 2026
A strikingly-inventive portrayal of resistance and the rise of an authoritarian regime, Dorothy Tse’s novella proffers an oblique account of aspects of Hong Kong’s history revolving around the 2019 pro-democracy protests or ‘Water Revolution.’ The protests’ name invokes lines spoken by iconic, martial artist Bruce Lee stressing the need to become as water when faced with a powerful opponent; fluid, organic, evolving in response to changing circumstances – just as water adapts to different containers. Tse’s also in conversation here with acclaimed Hong Kong author Xi Xi, notably her 1980s short story “The Floating City” (浮城). Xi Xi’s story* consists of vignettes about Hong Kong life, each prompted by a Magritte painting, a strategy partly inspired by Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Following Xi Xi, Tse builds on a prominent, magical realist strand in Hong Kong fiction. In Tse’s haunting piece the mundane mingles with the improbable or the marvellous. In keeping with Tse’s reputation, her novella’s deliberately disorientating, close to hallucinatory at times. Fragmented, episodic, sometimes arrestingly lyrical, it’s narrated by a Hong Konger. A young man apparently living with his parents, a family grappling with the disappearance of his younger sister. But there’s something unsettling, almost otherworldly about this unnamed narrator, he wanders the city streets like a restless revenant during Ghost Month.
The narrator records seemingly disparate observations about what’s happening around him, sometimes retreating into memory. The overwhelming sense of loss and longing projected by the narrator frequently made me feel as if this was some kind of mourning diary. The narrator’s Hong Kong is in flux, a place where all that was solid is rapidly melting away. But each of his surreal chronicles contains thinly-veiled allusions to reality. A former teacher who jumped off a tall building recalls the controversial death of Lam Lai-tong in 2019 as well as a spate of similar suicides attributed to increasingly harsh management. Hawkers moved away from corners close to the narrator’s apartment echo the ongoing erasure of once-familiar street scenes, locations then gobbled up by luxury developers. Events witnessed in a bookshop suggest the infamous Causeway Bay disappearances. It’s clear this is a city in which nothing and nobody is safe. The threat’s highlighted by the narrator’s surreal encounter with a bloodied man travelling on the MTR - a richly-inventive reworking of the 831 Incident or Prince Edward Station attack. This bewildered, resolutely middle-class professional is unable to leave the train, struggling with the realisation that even he’s no longer insulated from growing police brutality. The narrator gradually constructs a portrait of a city overrun by sleepwalkers unaware they’re drifting into a nightmare. At night the narrator watches as they appear at their windows howling into the distance - echoing Lu Xun and the ten o’clock ‘scream’ protests, a potent symbol of the call for Hong Kongers to wake and confront encroaching menace.
Tse deftly weaves together a fertile array of images and ongoing influences. Sections like “Toe Cleavage Sirens” recall Bruno Schulz, others lean towards Kafka. Recurring references to birds connect to the concept of Hong Kongers as ‘bird-citizens’; cockroaches the HK police’s failed attempts to smear protestors; umbrellas summon those used to fend off noxious gases used by security forces as well as the earlier 2014 uprisings; police spray bright blue water jets like the ones dyed to mark out protestors for later arrest. Elements related to Hong Kong’s cultural heritage surface repeatedly: the narrator watches Cantonese ‘Jane Bond’ films; the smell of egg tarts wafts from a nearby bakery; scattered throughout are traces of Cantonese slang used in coded messages between protestors; a phantasmagorical gathering during which the narrator fashions paper objects akin to sacred offerings resembles a traditional funeral feast. Water abounds: from the waters through which the narrator’s grandparents reached the city to the waters that seem to be slowly seeping over the narrator to those which may yield the bodies of the vanished – like that of schoolgirl Chan Yin-lam. Overall, this is an incredibly imaginative piece of writing which beautifully captures the atmosphere of Hong Kong; a tremendously evocative depiction of a society in the midst of enormous upheaval and those who fought for its freedom. Although I wish the stories originally published alongside this had been translated too. Translator Natascha Bruce.
*An English-language translation of Xi Xi's story's available online via the China Heritage site
The narrator records seemingly disparate observations about what’s happening around him, sometimes retreating into memory. The overwhelming sense of loss and longing projected by the narrator frequently made me feel as if this was some kind of mourning diary. The narrator’s Hong Kong is in flux, a place where all that was solid is rapidly melting away. But each of his surreal chronicles contains thinly-veiled allusions to reality. A former teacher who jumped off a tall building recalls the controversial death of Lam Lai-tong in 2019 as well as a spate of similar suicides attributed to increasingly harsh management. Hawkers moved away from corners close to the narrator’s apartment echo the ongoing erasure of once-familiar street scenes, locations then gobbled up by luxury developers. Events witnessed in a bookshop suggest the infamous Causeway Bay disappearances. It’s clear this is a city in which nothing and nobody is safe. The threat’s highlighted by the narrator’s surreal encounter with a bloodied man travelling on the MTR - a richly-inventive reworking of the 831 Incident or Prince Edward Station attack. This bewildered, resolutely middle-class professional is unable to leave the train, struggling with the realisation that even he’s no longer insulated from growing police brutality. The narrator gradually constructs a portrait of a city overrun by sleepwalkers unaware they’re drifting into a nightmare. At night the narrator watches as they appear at their windows howling into the distance - echoing Lu Xun and the ten o’clock ‘scream’ protests, a potent symbol of the call for Hong Kongers to wake and confront encroaching menace.
Tse deftly weaves together a fertile array of images and ongoing influences. Sections like “Toe Cleavage Sirens” recall Bruno Schulz, others lean towards Kafka. Recurring references to birds connect to the concept of Hong Kongers as ‘bird-citizens’; cockroaches the HK police’s failed attempts to smear protestors; umbrellas summon those used to fend off noxious gases used by security forces as well as the earlier 2014 uprisings; police spray bright blue water jets like the ones dyed to mark out protestors for later arrest. Elements related to Hong Kong’s cultural heritage surface repeatedly: the narrator watches Cantonese ‘Jane Bond’ films; the smell of egg tarts wafts from a nearby bakery; scattered throughout are traces of Cantonese slang used in coded messages between protestors; a phantasmagorical gathering during which the narrator fashions paper objects akin to sacred offerings resembles a traditional funeral feast. Water abounds: from the waters through which the narrator’s grandparents reached the city to the waters that seem to be slowly seeping over the narrator to those which may yield the bodies of the vanished – like that of schoolgirl Chan Yin-lam. Overall, this is an incredibly imaginative piece of writing which beautifully captures the atmosphere of Hong Kong; a tremendously evocative depiction of a society in the midst of enormous upheaval and those who fought for its freedom. Although I wish the stories originally published alongside this had been translated too. Translator Natascha Bruce.
*An English-language translation of Xi Xi's story's available online via the China Heritage site
November 19, 2025
What this book doesn’t reveal about itself is that it’s about Hong Kong, though here, it's depicted as a dystopian dreamscape. Hong Kong is not mentioned explicitly, and the blurb keeps things vague, so if you’re a stupid American like me, then the only way to figure it out is to Wikipedia the culturally specific terms that are sprinkled throughout the narrative. (Even before reading, I suggest looking up the 831 incident, the 721 incident, and the umbrella movement).
You don’t actually have to know that City Like Water is about Hong Kong to enjoy it. It can be about any dystopian city. The narrator is both nostalgic for and critical of some bygone era that perhaps never truly existed at all, and Hong Kong occupies the unique geopolitical space for exploring conflicting reactions to change, but Dorothy Tse also does an excellent job of portraying just how universal these feelings can be. It’s a stunning and disorienting piece of writing about any place where reality becomes both debatable and a matter of life or death.
The political undertones are unmistakable, but certain aspects of the narrative still must be kept unspoken. As a result, the book relies heavily on metaphors that continuously accumulate, fragment, and transform. The surreal, dissociative, and sometimes sinister imagery here is extraordinary. The opening metaphor of a bunk bed as a boat immediately establishes a sense of precarious transit, and that unmoored feeling never leaves. There’s a profound sense of exile throughout the novel, even in claustrophobic spaces, where no movement can occur. The narrator clearly has a flexible and fraught relationship with time, space, history, and truth. To reflect how memory is uncontrollable, the prose style is associative, fractured, hallucinatory, ambiguous, and unreliable. Repeated references are made to people who might not be real — most notably, a younger sister who haunts the narrative. There’s antagonists working behind the scenes to gaslight everyone, forcing people to consent to the normalization of pain and misery, but this villain’s face is unstable. It is usually the state, but there are also critiques in here of consumer culture, academic institutions, the stigmatization of suicide, the entertainment industry, and more. Sometimes the horrors become grounded in something concrete and hyper specific (like in one section about a protest in response to a scam involving lotus roots), allowing characters’ rage to become targeted. Other times, things are nebulous.
Despite the heavy focus on grief, trauma, suicide, political precarity, and economic instability, City Like Water is not an entirely hopeless book. If there’s a plot at all amidst the fever dream of paranoid imagery, it’s definitely one about making sense of encounters with state sanctioned violence. When things get bleak, the book sometimes shows a willingness to deconstruct its own pessimism, relentlessly attempting to witness and document things that are in the process of being erased. The narrator doesn’t always acknowledge the signs of hope, at least not explicitly, but readers should. A lot of the book is about how the imagination has the power to obscure inconvenient truths, making the status quo more palatable to those who would otherwise want to resist it. However, at the same time, I couldn’t help but continue to believe that imagination should also have the power to think up a better status quo. There’s a sense that underneath the rigid, surveilled, and censored surface of the city, there’s still something that (or someone who) dreams without limit.
~Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a Digital ARC. All opinions are my own.~
You don’t actually have to know that City Like Water is about Hong Kong to enjoy it. It can be about any dystopian city. The narrator is both nostalgic for and critical of some bygone era that perhaps never truly existed at all, and Hong Kong occupies the unique geopolitical space for exploring conflicting reactions to change, but Dorothy Tse also does an excellent job of portraying just how universal these feelings can be. It’s a stunning and disorienting piece of writing about any place where reality becomes both debatable and a matter of life or death.
The political undertones are unmistakable, but certain aspects of the narrative still must be kept unspoken. As a result, the book relies heavily on metaphors that continuously accumulate, fragment, and transform. The surreal, dissociative, and sometimes sinister imagery here is extraordinary. The opening metaphor of a bunk bed as a boat immediately establishes a sense of precarious transit, and that unmoored feeling never leaves. There’s a profound sense of exile throughout the novel, even in claustrophobic spaces, where no movement can occur. The narrator clearly has a flexible and fraught relationship with time, space, history, and truth. To reflect how memory is uncontrollable, the prose style is associative, fractured, hallucinatory, ambiguous, and unreliable. Repeated references are made to people who might not be real — most notably, a younger sister who haunts the narrative. There’s antagonists working behind the scenes to gaslight everyone, forcing people to consent to the normalization of pain and misery, but this villain’s face is unstable. It is usually the state, but there are also critiques in here of consumer culture, academic institutions, the stigmatization of suicide, the entertainment industry, and more. Sometimes the horrors become grounded in something concrete and hyper specific (like in one section about a protest in response to a scam involving lotus roots), allowing characters’ rage to become targeted. Other times, things are nebulous.
Despite the heavy focus on grief, trauma, suicide, political precarity, and economic instability, City Like Water is not an entirely hopeless book. If there’s a plot at all amidst the fever dream of paranoid imagery, it’s definitely one about making sense of encounters with state sanctioned violence. When things get bleak, the book sometimes shows a willingness to deconstruct its own pessimism, relentlessly attempting to witness and document things that are in the process of being erased. The narrator doesn’t always acknowledge the signs of hope, at least not explicitly, but readers should. A lot of the book is about how the imagination has the power to obscure inconvenient truths, making the status quo more palatable to those who would otherwise want to resist it. However, at the same time, I couldn’t help but continue to believe that imagination should also have the power to think up a better status quo. There’s a sense that underneath the rigid, surveilled, and censored surface of the city, there’s still something that (or someone who) dreams without limit.
~Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a Digital ARC. All opinions are my own.~
March 30, 2026
Stunning. Absolutely stunning writing. Can’t give it the last star because I only understood about half of it.
March 31, 2026
He looked totally wretched. ‘I thought I knew the map like the back of my hand, but I keep missing my stop.’ I wanted to pretend I’d arrived at mine and get off the train, but my body refused to move from my seat. ‘What station are you looking for?’ ‘831. Station 831.’ He looked down at the floor, embarrassed. ‘Didn’t anyone else hear? Our train got stuck at 831.’
City Like Water (2026) is translated by Natascha Bruce from a 2020 original by Dorothy Tse (謝曉虹) and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK and Graywolf Press in the US.
The original novella, 逝水流城, was actually included in a short story collection, the longest of the six pieces there, entitled, 無遮鬼 (meaning something like Uncovered Ghosts), as discussed at the Words Without Borders review.
The same author/translator/publishers brought us Owlish
Like Owlish, City Like Water is set in a fictionalised version of Hong Kong, but where Owlish went for the absurd (verging on icky) and rather clunky analogies, City Like Water is more surreal and subtle, and the better for it.
City Like Water is told in a series of short episodic chapters, the first In a Dark Green Boat, which tackles the theme of the unmooring of the narrator's city from her memories of it's industrial past, given it's increasingly Kafkesque future:
My own memory is a mess. A ravenous, never-tidied storeroom, constantly in motion. A chaotic sea. But the tides of my sea must follow some kind of rule, some subliminal rhythm, because some things sink forever beneath the waves while others keep bobbing to the surface. Among them, an old drawing of mine: the city’s metal become one with its living flesh, genitalia melded and thrust into the air, like a giant black peony in full bloom.
In this memory, I’m still in primary school. All afternoon, the sun has been lying on the classroom floor like a snoozing dog – fluffy, gentle, well-behaved, but jerked awake every so often by Peggy the English teacher with the perm, the one we call Piggy, clacking up and down in her high heels. As she approaches my desk, reality drifts back to me on a cloud of rose perfume. First come the pointy tips of her shoes and then, through her flesh-toned stockings, the creases between her squished-in toes.
A single line of that mysterious toe cleavage is almost enough to win me over.
‘Your drawing is very futuristic,’ says Piggy.
‘It’s not about the future,’ I reply. ‘It’s about the past.’
There are allusions to the protects, and government crackdowns, of 2019, some relatively direct (the train that stops at 831 in the quote above) or references to umbrellas:
I remember one summer when all the beaten- up old umbrellas on our street vanished overnight. I remember the patter of the rain against our ears, and how I rested my cheek in my hand and watched motionless water form a dividing line inside a glass. I remember I hadn’t yet realized that those silent, weary- limbed umbrellas, hidden in a drawer, in a cupboard full of junk, had long since been girding their limbs, sharpening their spikes.
but others more poetic, particularly the recurrent symbol of lotus roots, a major set piece in an otherwise dreamy narrative a protest by housewives at a wet market, where, protesting against the sale of fake/inferior lotus roots, they create and then try to protect humanoid figures:
When the women suddenly leaped to their feet, I braced myself, sure the delivery men would turn ferocious and fight them. But they didn’t: they stepped back wordlessly to allow them more space. The women began to arrange lotus roots on the ground, moving them about as though piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, until several human figures began to take shape. One, two, three. We all saw them: three skinny teens who’d just started secondary school.
I'm unsure of the specific symbolism, although aware of an ancient idiom from a Tan Dynasty poem - 藕斷絲連 - when the lotus root is broken, it is still connected by threads - and there is in the novel a strong connection of the lotus root to domestic connections and traditions.
And later, as parts of the city seem to vanish around her, notably floors in a hotel, the narrator searches for the term lotus root online, only to find it has vanished.
Impressive, even if, as with Owlish, I suspect the novel's more subtle features may have eluded me.
City Like Water (2026) is translated by Natascha Bruce from a 2020 original by Dorothy Tse (謝曉虹) and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK and Graywolf Press in the US.
The original novella, 逝水流城, was actually included in a short story collection, the longest of the six pieces there, entitled, 無遮鬼 (meaning something like Uncovered Ghosts), as discussed at the Words Without Borders review.
The same author/translator/publishers brought us Owlish
Like Owlish, City Like Water is set in a fictionalised version of Hong Kong, but where Owlish went for the absurd (verging on icky) and rather clunky analogies, City Like Water is more surreal and subtle, and the better for it.
City Like Water is told in a series of short episodic chapters, the first In a Dark Green Boat, which tackles the theme of the unmooring of the narrator's city from her memories of it's industrial past, given it's increasingly Kafkesque future:
My own memory is a mess. A ravenous, never-tidied storeroom, constantly in motion. A chaotic sea. But the tides of my sea must follow some kind of rule, some subliminal rhythm, because some things sink forever beneath the waves while others keep bobbing to the surface. Among them, an old drawing of mine: the city’s metal become one with its living flesh, genitalia melded and thrust into the air, like a giant black peony in full bloom.
In this memory, I’m still in primary school. All afternoon, the sun has been lying on the classroom floor like a snoozing dog – fluffy, gentle, well-behaved, but jerked awake every so often by Peggy the English teacher with the perm, the one we call Piggy, clacking up and down in her high heels. As she approaches my desk, reality drifts back to me on a cloud of rose perfume. First come the pointy tips of her shoes and then, through her flesh-toned stockings, the creases between her squished-in toes.
A single line of that mysterious toe cleavage is almost enough to win me over.
‘Your drawing is very futuristic,’ says Piggy.
‘It’s not about the future,’ I reply. ‘It’s about the past.’
There are allusions to the protects, and government crackdowns, of 2019, some relatively direct (the train that stops at 831 in the quote above) or references to umbrellas:
I remember one summer when all the beaten- up old umbrellas on our street vanished overnight. I remember the patter of the rain against our ears, and how I rested my cheek in my hand and watched motionless water form a dividing line inside a glass. I remember I hadn’t yet realized that those silent, weary- limbed umbrellas, hidden in a drawer, in a cupboard full of junk, had long since been girding their limbs, sharpening their spikes.
but others more poetic, particularly the recurrent symbol of lotus roots, a major set piece in an otherwise dreamy narrative a protest by housewives at a wet market, where, protesting against the sale of fake/inferior lotus roots, they create and then try to protect humanoid figures:
When the women suddenly leaped to their feet, I braced myself, sure the delivery men would turn ferocious and fight them. But they didn’t: they stepped back wordlessly to allow them more space. The women began to arrange lotus roots on the ground, moving them about as though piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, until several human figures began to take shape. One, two, three. We all saw them: three skinny teens who’d just started secondary school.
I'm unsure of the specific symbolism, although aware of an ancient idiom from a Tan Dynasty poem - 藕斷絲連 - when the lotus root is broken, it is still connected by threads - and there is in the novel a strong connection of the lotus root to domestic connections and traditions.
And later, as parts of the city seem to vanish around her, notably floors in a hotel, the narrator searches for the term lotus root online, only to find it has vanished.
Impressive, even if, as with Owlish, I suspect the novel's more subtle features may have eluded me.
Read
March 19, 2026The otherworldly, kaleidoscopic portrait Tse paints of the city is built on the identities of its myriad inhabitants, and thus is permeated with nostalgia, admiration, and grief. Although the metropolis remains formally unnamed, references to Hong Kong—particularly the protests and political unrest of its recent past—are frequent and indisputable. Still, Tse sticks with no grounded, clear, or singular narrative. The city’s namelessness is the key to readers’ experience of it; we’re forced to grapple with the tension between its sheer impossibility and its undeniable realness. Tse’s is a tale of survival and transformation amid tyranny, and about the necessity of carrying with you what has been lost.
Full review on the Asymptote Journal blog: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog...
Full review on the Asymptote Journal blog: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog...
February 26, 2026
3.5⭐
A deeply unsettling fever dream of a novella. Tse tackles real life political trauma with a conceptual, nightmarishly dystopian and dreamlike landscape. Tse (and Bruce) deploy sweeping metaphors of a life - and city - sinking and liquifying. City Like Water is a succinct book that demands attention, occasionally requiring a flip back to a previous page to process what Tse is communicating, but it was always worth the clarification. Surrealist and alarming but definitely a worthy addition to the Fitzcarraldo archive!
A deeply unsettling fever dream of a novella. Tse tackles real life political trauma with a conceptual, nightmarishly dystopian and dreamlike landscape. Tse (and Bruce) deploy sweeping metaphors of a life - and city - sinking and liquifying. City Like Water is a succinct book that demands attention, occasionally requiring a flip back to a previous page to process what Tse is communicating, but it was always worth the clarification. Surrealist and alarming but definitely a worthy addition to the Fitzcarraldo archive!
Want to read
November 3, 2025There have been so many dystopian novels about the world flooding lately, and I couldn't possibly imagine why! :)
October 31, 2025
A strange fever dream with moments of (semi) clarity and moments that feel completely out of another world. Sometimes tongue in cheek, often freaky as hell (scary?), always ACAB. Very unique and different! Thank you to Graywolf for the galley and look out for City Like Water on 3/3/26.
3.5
3.5
March 27, 2026
Hong Kong, post-Umbrella Movement (circa 2014), wilters. The archipelago seems ever more like a batch of floating leaves in rough waters, as political pressure from the mainland in the north presses on. Once a political safe haven that the mainland dissents sought shelter in, today’s Hong Kong can only reminisce about the olden days of autonomy.
“The legend of our city’s golden age becomes stronger with every retelling: the people who arrived fleeing the North were the engines that powered the transformation . . . We were stowaways inside a dark green boat, cramped up and holding our breaths, perpetually waiting to reach land.”
In 2019, a co-opted Hong Kong government introduced the Extradition Bill that would allow suspects to be sent to mainland China for trial. Fears of increased Beijing control, erosion of judicial independence, and what seemed an inevitable turn to a police city-state spread across the archipelago, as if sinking it under water. The abrupt undemocratic departure from where the city seemed to be headed to in the 1980s-90s spurred city-wide protests, to which both Hong Kong and Beijing responded with violent suppression, mass arrest, intensified surveillance, disappearance, and undercover police. But where horror of the present and future arises, nostalgia arrives too. Memory of the giant low-flying aircrafts descending to the now-demolished Kai Tak Airport echoes in the wreckage of the once magnificent Jumbo Floating Restaurant in the southern Aberdeen harbor.
Living this post-protest dystopic ruin, Dorothy Tse describes the bizarre continuity of everyday life in concise, connected vignettes coded in metaphors of everyday objects and surrealist depiction. The coding of what are otherwise straightforward acts of democratic resistance transforms the street into a stage where the “acts” become choreographed movements of bodies that dance the absurd dance to call out the true absurdity: authoritarianism.
A group of housewives, including the unnamed narrator’s mother, was angered by the sale of fake lotus roots at the wet market. The vegetable phonetically and graphically symbolizes uninterrupted abundance, longevity, and prosperity. But what was tradition and continuity is now ruptured. The women, unarmed and harmless, trying to bring food to their humble families, now became characterized as domestic rioters who had to be arrested, jailed, and put on TV to make public apology. The “ten o’clock chorus” consisted of sleepwalkers who “leaned outside, screamed at the sky, then quickly retracted their head and slammed the window closed.” It is a thinly veiled portrayal of Hong Kong’s “Million Scream” initiative in 2019 where residents shouted slogans from their apartment windows nightly at 10 p.m. to circumvent immediate policing. “To Eight Thirty-One” is an apparent reference to the police attack at Prince Edward Station on August 31, 2019.
“The Law [that] Comes at Night” unmistakenly points to the Extradition Bill. “[U]p close, the Law’s poorly applied make-up was enough to raise suspicions — whatever the cause, in the ensuing frenzy, the skin was ripped off the Law’s face to reveal the face of an elderly neighbour. But nobody even had time to be angry with him because, beneath his face, there was yet another.” Beneath the broken facade of the Hong Kong government sits Beijing. The enforcement of the national security law broke the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration (Deng-Thatcher agreement), treating the treaty as “history” rather than a binding guarantee of Hong Kong’s 50-year autonomy from its handover in 1997 to 2047.
Generations were hit differently by the social and political unrest. The seemingly apolitical young generation that had immersed itself in consumerist culture shocked the city with its political rage. After tear gas and rubber bullets, they had to treat their burning wounds and grapple with what they had lost and what they still have to lose. Families broken by the tumultuous state violence fear of talking and remembering their lost ones. As the narrator recalled, the day “the beaten-up old umbrellas on our street vanished,” he watched his younger sister — whom his parents insisted to be his hallucination — “open the umbrella and fly out the bus window” with infinite admiration and sorrow. Imagination of not, for the generation that was coming of age in the late 2010s, the vanished sister flew away with both the city’s past and its future.
“The legend of our city’s golden age becomes stronger with every retelling: the people who arrived fleeing the North were the engines that powered the transformation . . . We were stowaways inside a dark green boat, cramped up and holding our breaths, perpetually waiting to reach land.”
In 2019, a co-opted Hong Kong government introduced the Extradition Bill that would allow suspects to be sent to mainland China for trial. Fears of increased Beijing control, erosion of judicial independence, and what seemed an inevitable turn to a police city-state spread across the archipelago, as if sinking it under water. The abrupt undemocratic departure from where the city seemed to be headed to in the 1980s-90s spurred city-wide protests, to which both Hong Kong and Beijing responded with violent suppression, mass arrest, intensified surveillance, disappearance, and undercover police. But where horror of the present and future arises, nostalgia arrives too. Memory of the giant low-flying aircrafts descending to the now-demolished Kai Tak Airport echoes in the wreckage of the once magnificent Jumbo Floating Restaurant in the southern Aberdeen harbor.
Living this post-protest dystopic ruin, Dorothy Tse describes the bizarre continuity of everyday life in concise, connected vignettes coded in metaphors of everyday objects and surrealist depiction. The coding of what are otherwise straightforward acts of democratic resistance transforms the street into a stage where the “acts” become choreographed movements of bodies that dance the absurd dance to call out the true absurdity: authoritarianism.
A group of housewives, including the unnamed narrator’s mother, was angered by the sale of fake lotus roots at the wet market. The vegetable phonetically and graphically symbolizes uninterrupted abundance, longevity, and prosperity. But what was tradition and continuity is now ruptured. The women, unarmed and harmless, trying to bring food to their humble families, now became characterized as domestic rioters who had to be arrested, jailed, and put on TV to make public apology. The “ten o’clock chorus” consisted of sleepwalkers who “leaned outside, screamed at the sky, then quickly retracted their head and slammed the window closed.” It is a thinly veiled portrayal of Hong Kong’s “Million Scream” initiative in 2019 where residents shouted slogans from their apartment windows nightly at 10 p.m. to circumvent immediate policing. “To Eight Thirty-One” is an apparent reference to the police attack at Prince Edward Station on August 31, 2019.
“The Law [that] Comes at Night” unmistakenly points to the Extradition Bill. “[U]p close, the Law’s poorly applied make-up was enough to raise suspicions — whatever the cause, in the ensuing frenzy, the skin was ripped off the Law’s face to reveal the face of an elderly neighbour. But nobody even had time to be angry with him because, beneath his face, there was yet another.” Beneath the broken facade of the Hong Kong government sits Beijing. The enforcement of the national security law broke the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration (Deng-Thatcher agreement), treating the treaty as “history” rather than a binding guarantee of Hong Kong’s 50-year autonomy from its handover in 1997 to 2047.
Generations were hit differently by the social and political unrest. The seemingly apolitical young generation that had immersed itself in consumerist culture shocked the city with its political rage. After tear gas and rubber bullets, they had to treat their burning wounds and grapple with what they had lost and what they still have to lose. Families broken by the tumultuous state violence fear of talking and remembering their lost ones. As the narrator recalled, the day “the beaten-up old umbrellas on our street vanished,” he watched his younger sister — whom his parents insisted to be his hallucination — “open the umbrella and fly out the bus window” with infinite admiration and sorrow. Imagination of not, for the generation that was coming of age in the late 2010s, the vanished sister flew away with both the city’s past and its future.
March 14, 2026
City Like Water by Dorothy Tse – ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
A hallucinatory novel about an unnamed protagonist wandering through an unnamed city—one that, in its atmosphere and density, strongly brought Hong Kong to my mind.
In this disquieting world, nothing feels entirely solid. Objects are fluid and often metaphorical, and an uneasiness permeates the entire book. Even the narrator himself is unreliable, as he admits:
Each chapter reveals a series of strange and unsettling occurrences, many of which carry a dreamlike quality, as if the narrator were drifting through a fever dream: ears falling off people’s heads, a group of mothers—including his own—protesting after discovering they have been sold fake lotus roots, and the lingering presence of a sister who feels almost ghostlike.
Beneath these surreal episodes, a quiet tension seems to be brewing. The atmosphere suggests something political, though the novel never states this directly. Instead, it leaves room for multiple interpretations, inviting the reader to reflect on the symbolism and hidden meanings within its strange world.
For me, this ambiguity was part of the book’s charm. Its unsettling imagery and fluid logic create a haunting reading experience, one that lingers long after the final page.
A hallucinatory novel about an unnamed protagonist wandering through an unnamed city—one that, in its atmosphere and density, strongly brought Hong Kong to my mind.
In this disquieting world, nothing feels entirely solid. Objects are fluid and often metaphorical, and an uneasiness permeates the entire book. Even the narrator himself is unreliable, as he admits:
“My own memory is a mess. A ravenous, never-tidied storeroom, constantly in motion. A chaotic sea. But the tides of my sea must follow some kind of rule, some subliminal rhythm, because some things sink forever beneath the waves while others keep bobbing to the surface.”
Each chapter reveals a series of strange and unsettling occurrences, many of which carry a dreamlike quality, as if the narrator were drifting through a fever dream: ears falling off people’s heads, a group of mothers—including his own—protesting after discovering they have been sold fake lotus roots, and the lingering presence of a sister who feels almost ghostlike.
Beneath these surreal episodes, a quiet tension seems to be brewing. The atmosphere suggests something political, though the novel never states this directly. Instead, it leaves room for multiple interpretations, inviting the reader to reflect on the symbolism and hidden meanings within its strange world.
For me, this ambiguity was part of the book’s charm. Its unsettling imagery and fluid logic create a haunting reading experience, one that lingers long after the final page.
February 26, 2026
Tse is an author from Hong Kong, and you're aware of this setting when reading City Like Water, but the place is never named. It could be Hong Kong but the universality of themes in this novel could mean it's your city or mine.
The language flows poetically as it describes dirt, grime and rot. Who knew dust could be so poetic? Pretty much every page of this novella had words and sentences underlined.
I can't say exactly what was happening in this novel. It was like a fever dream — you're consumed by the narrator's paranoia, caught in a real blurring between dream and reality. The simile in the title probably should be a giveaway for that! At first you think the city has sunken and it's a climate novel, but then you find yourself on land again. The narrative refuses to stabilise, which mirrors the political instability it's commenting on. You can grasp at and understand the political commentary at play even when the literal events remain slippery. I found the scenes with the police the most potent.
At its core I read this as a novel concerned with memory and consciousness.
The language flows poetically as it describes dirt, grime and rot. Who knew dust could be so poetic? Pretty much every page of this novella had words and sentences underlined.
I can't say exactly what was happening in this novel. It was like a fever dream — you're consumed by the narrator's paranoia, caught in a real blurring between dream and reality. The simile in the title probably should be a giveaway for that! At first you think the city has sunken and it's a climate novel, but then you find yourself on land again. The narrative refuses to stabilise, which mirrors the political instability it's commenting on. You can grasp at and understand the political commentary at play even when the literal events remain slippery. I found the scenes with the police the most potent.
At its core I read this as a novel concerned with memory and consciousness.
March 10, 2026
Wow - what a weird and unexpected book. I received this book from Graywolf Press, and I’m so glad I did. It was strange and avant-garde, but still surprisingly relatable. Imagine highlights of the weirder Black Mirror episodes playing back to back. Or if you’ve been to a MeowWolf, reading this is similar to the experience of walking into different rooms, not knowing what you’re going to see. Obviously unreal, but why? It was intriguing and confusing in the best way.
If you’re a fan of “I who have never known men,” “Bunny” or even “Animal Farm” I think you’ll love this.
If you’re a fan of “I who have never known men,” “Bunny” or even “Animal Farm” I think you’ll love this.
March 30, 2026
This book is so active and eerie and feels like I’m watching something mutate sentence by sentence. There’s a strong line of resistance and memory and writing as a tool to hold onto the places that change overnight or in an instant. I’m definitely not well-versed enough in Hong Kong’s landscape to place this story within that but I’ll look into it + this story is enjoyable regardless.
April 1, 2026
Sometimes you think the third of the month is over and the fourth will surely come next. Then you wake up and the date on the newspaper hasn’t changed, and you realize today is still yesterday.
March 16, 2026
I really appreciate what this is doing, attempting to put the ineffable repeat traumas suffered by the Cantonese population, most recently in the violently repressed 2019-2020 protests, into words through abstract, poetic surrealism, but by the time I began starting to make sense of the metaphors and hallucinatory childlike visions that Tse was expressing herself through, the book was already over.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
My thanks to NetGalley and Graywolf Press for an advance copy of this novella dealing with a city, long familiar to the narrator, is altered by government actions, a disappearing populous, technology created to lull the masses, and a sense of confusion that seems to fill every cracked sidewalk, every action, and every thought.
Over the last few years I find myself upon waking from sleep wondering how the world has changed. What is something that I am so sure happened, that turned out to be fake? What inalienable right has vanished? What has changed in the rule of law? Even what simple courtesys have fallen to the wayside. Since the turn of the century I have noticed an erosion of what we as people are allowed. Information and control have become big money, so this erosion has become the size of ice breaking off the Antarctic shelf. Modern life is like being trapped in both sides of hourglass. The sand is always shifting under one, while that same sand pounds down on top of one, making the simple act of breathing tough. And living a normal life harder. Media is no help, either they kowtow to the new ant overlords, as on the Simpsons, or continue to make police shows that serve more as propaganda than in reflections of society. Publishing is always a few years behind so books dealing with COVID still come out of new release boxes, something everyone else has coughingly moved on from. That's why this book seemed so real, a novella about a city undergoing a ruin of rights, citizenship and new oppression. By a writer who experienced this first-hand. City Like Water is a novella written by Dorothy Tse translated by Natascha Bruce and tells of a city that was once so familiar to the narrator, but now has become some different, something wrong, loaded with missing people, and oppressors on every corner.
An unnamed narrator begins with stories of their parents coming to the city, fleeing problems in the country. They do well, and have moved up in city, happy to be there. The narrator begins to notice things slowly changing as the city moves from being a free area, to one controlled by a larger government. Strange people are coning in. Things that once worked, suddenly don't. Food at the markets is hidden for others. The narrator also remember once having a sister, why else would the narrator sleep on the top bunk in their bedroom, something no one else acknowledges. The narrator's mother protests the purchase of fake lotus plants, something a group of mothers find wrong. Their protest scares those in power so much, they are sprayed with glitter, trapped in steel walls and taken away. Hotels are suddenly missing first rooms, than floors. The narrator's father is given a TV so large it takes up a room, to keep the people in line and quiet as the city changes. As things get worse, the narrator wonders what is changing the world around them, or is the narrator being changed in ways they don't see.
A novella that captures the moment we find ourselves in, written about a time of trouble and dissent that the author was a part of. The city is unnamed, by careful reading will show terms that can be linked to the protests in Hong Kong, when the Chinese government tried to assimilate the city back into the fold. Tse is an excellent writer, capturing the loss, the confusion, the wondering at what is going on, as well as giving practical advice. Going out with goggles, and saran wrap on exposed skin, to hinder the police efforts of keeping the peace. The police, the government, even the people around the narrator do not come across well. As it should be. The book has a removed feeling, but a feeling that is common to most of the people I know. Of being lost in a place that seemed familiar. Though translated I found it really well done, with a narrative that might seem a tad confusing, but one that makes a reader keep going. Hoping for good news, hoping for a game plan that can be used today.
A short but powerful novella, one that really spoke to me quite a bit, and one that I won't forget. A book I will recommend, but a book that I acknowledge is not for everyone. This might change though. For those who want their fiction to have a bite, with a bit of the surreal.
Over the last few years I find myself upon waking from sleep wondering how the world has changed. What is something that I am so sure happened, that turned out to be fake? What inalienable right has vanished? What has changed in the rule of law? Even what simple courtesys have fallen to the wayside. Since the turn of the century I have noticed an erosion of what we as people are allowed. Information and control have become big money, so this erosion has become the size of ice breaking off the Antarctic shelf. Modern life is like being trapped in both sides of hourglass. The sand is always shifting under one, while that same sand pounds down on top of one, making the simple act of breathing tough. And living a normal life harder. Media is no help, either they kowtow to the new ant overlords, as on the Simpsons, or continue to make police shows that serve more as propaganda than in reflections of society. Publishing is always a few years behind so books dealing with COVID still come out of new release boxes, something everyone else has coughingly moved on from. That's why this book seemed so real, a novella about a city undergoing a ruin of rights, citizenship and new oppression. By a writer who experienced this first-hand. City Like Water is a novella written by Dorothy Tse translated by Natascha Bruce and tells of a city that was once so familiar to the narrator, but now has become some different, something wrong, loaded with missing people, and oppressors on every corner.
An unnamed narrator begins with stories of their parents coming to the city, fleeing problems in the country. They do well, and have moved up in city, happy to be there. The narrator begins to notice things slowly changing as the city moves from being a free area, to one controlled by a larger government. Strange people are coning in. Things that once worked, suddenly don't. Food at the markets is hidden for others. The narrator also remember once having a sister, why else would the narrator sleep on the top bunk in their bedroom, something no one else acknowledges. The narrator's mother protests the purchase of fake lotus plants, something a group of mothers find wrong. Their protest scares those in power so much, they are sprayed with glitter, trapped in steel walls and taken away. Hotels are suddenly missing first rooms, than floors. The narrator's father is given a TV so large it takes up a room, to keep the people in line and quiet as the city changes. As things get worse, the narrator wonders what is changing the world around them, or is the narrator being changed in ways they don't see.
A novella that captures the moment we find ourselves in, written about a time of trouble and dissent that the author was a part of. The city is unnamed, by careful reading will show terms that can be linked to the protests in Hong Kong, when the Chinese government tried to assimilate the city back into the fold. Tse is an excellent writer, capturing the loss, the confusion, the wondering at what is going on, as well as giving practical advice. Going out with goggles, and saran wrap on exposed skin, to hinder the police efforts of keeping the peace. The police, the government, even the people around the narrator do not come across well. As it should be. The book has a removed feeling, but a feeling that is common to most of the people I know. Of being lost in a place that seemed familiar. Though translated I found it really well done, with a narrative that might seem a tad confusing, but one that makes a reader keep going. Hoping for good news, hoping for a game plan that can be used today.
A short but powerful novella, one that really spoke to me quite a bit, and one that I won't forget. A book I will recommend, but a book that I acknowledge is not for everyone. This might change though. For those who want their fiction to have a bite, with a bit of the surreal.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
[ 3.5/5 stars ]
CITY LIKE WATER (tr. Natascha Bruce) is a dystopian world in which people seem to keep disappearing. When the future melts into the past, one relies on own's memory as the reality of transformation invades one's space. Lucid yet hallucinatory, nebulous yet concrete, there are jolts of incisive chaos to show a (dystopian) future that might not be too far from our own.
With a metaphorical and lyrical prose that tangibly manifests the fracture and surreal vibes, what's the real history? Like the title, this book is formless and rampant - I must say that Tse's works (also OWLISH) aren't for everyone and it's undoubtedly that Tse's (unspoken) message is way deeper than I could grasp. In less than 100 pages, even though most of it went over my head, each word feels covered with purpose that allows one to interpret oneself. It's about Hong Kong but it can be any place. Political and fever dream, it's better to buddy read and/or reread.
[ I received an ARC from the publisher - Graywolf Press . All opinions are my own ]
CITY LIKE WATER (tr. Natascha Bruce) is a dystopian world in which people seem to keep disappearing. When the future melts into the past, one relies on own's memory as the reality of transformation invades one's space. Lucid yet hallucinatory, nebulous yet concrete, there are jolts of incisive chaos to show a (dystopian) future that might not be too far from our own.
With a metaphorical and lyrical prose that tangibly manifests the fracture and surreal vibes, what's the real history? Like the title, this book is formless and rampant - I must say that Tse's works (also OWLISH) aren't for everyone and it's undoubtedly that Tse's (unspoken) message is way deeper than I could grasp. In less than 100 pages, even though most of it went over my head, each word feels covered with purpose that allows one to interpret oneself. It's about Hong Kong but it can be any place. Political and fever dream, it's better to buddy read and/or reread.
[ I received an ARC from the publisher - Graywolf Press . All opinions are my own ]
March 8, 2026
This book feels like a fever dream. From the very beginning you’re following the main characters imaginative explanations of complex topics. They use outlandish metaphors to handle topics like loss, police brutality, and government corruption. Their home city is constantly changing as they age and the story follows them from grade school until they’re a full grown adult. The best word I can use to describe this book is obscure. It reminded me a bit of a less childish version of The Phantom Toll Booth where things just don’t make sense if you take them at face value. My theory after finishing the book is that the main character is actually deceased and caught between worlds watching things play out in earth in a dream like state without being able to change any of the outcomes. This is entirely just an interpretation but the letter from the little sister towards the end about pour main characters disappearance is what really made me think into the possibility.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 24, 2026
This is your warning if you don’t want spoilers.
The writing in this novella is as absolutely beautiful as it is haunting. I see a lot of reviews calling it a fever dream, which comes close to describing it. But that is not simply an aesthetic choice. Rather, it is a precursor to the twist in the second to last chapter: the narrator is dead and wandering the city. A city whose “death” predates the character’s.
Each section is littered with references to specific, real life atrocities suffered by protestors and citizens of Hong Kong at the hands of the government and its police. The character mourns the city even in his memories of childhood when he draws the industrial version of it in which the people who lived there could thrive and live with dignity.
The unnamed narrator loses each family member in fantastical ways which feel symbolic of the way that families around the city are being unraveled by the politics imposed on them. The sections can be read that way: as symbolic as surrealist. But then the reader reaches the section of the story where the narrator enters an underground version of the city with paper offerings intended for the dead which he initially believes are real. The second to last chapter with a letter from his sister chronicling what happened to the family after the night he left home and did not return is a chilling and contextualizes the rest of the novella.
The text is rich enough with symbolism, references, and double meaning to justify another read (or few). It succeeds in being not only a beautifully written piece of literature when taken from its context, but also a powerful work of protest literature.
The writing in this novella is as absolutely beautiful as it is haunting. I see a lot of reviews calling it a fever dream, which comes close to describing it. But that is not simply an aesthetic choice. Rather, it is a precursor to the twist in the second to last chapter: the narrator is dead and wandering the city. A city whose “death” predates the character’s.
Each section is littered with references to specific, real life atrocities suffered by protestors and citizens of Hong Kong at the hands of the government and its police. The character mourns the city even in his memories of childhood when he draws the industrial version of it in which the people who lived there could thrive and live with dignity.
The unnamed narrator loses each family member in fantastical ways which feel symbolic of the way that families around the city are being unraveled by the politics imposed on them. The sections can be read that way: as symbolic as surrealist. But then the reader reaches the section of the story where the narrator enters an underground version of the city with paper offerings intended for the dead which he initially believes are real. The second to last chapter with a letter from his sister chronicling what happened to the family after the night he left home and did not return is a chilling and contextualizes the rest of the novella.
The text is rich enough with symbolism, references, and double meaning to justify another read (or few). It succeeds in being not only a beautifully written piece of literature when taken from its context, but also a powerful work of protest literature.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
City Like Water is a dystopian fever dream of novella that painstakingly has such real parallels to the world we are currently living in. This book was incredibly unsettling, slightly uncanny and yet, completely bingeable (I read this in one sitting at the library and that was such a great way to consume it!) I feel like this was written to be engaged with, to think critically of, to recognise in all of its hallucinations how to a core, it is holding up a mirror to society.
My main negative would be that I wish this was longer. With it being only 86 pages I found it fairly difficult to resonate with the protagonist and the slight 'short story' approach to the narrative took me out of the book on occasion. With that being said though the last few chapters were OUTSTANDING, my favourites being: 'The Thin Day Hotel', 'Island on my Thigh' and 'Horns Under the Door'. I endlessly adore Fitzcarraldo editions and their approach to publishing experimental, eye opinion and politically engaged novels!
My main negative would be that I wish this was longer. With it being only 86 pages I found it fairly difficult to resonate with the protagonist and the slight 'short story' approach to the narrative took me out of the book on occasion. With that being said though the last few chapters were OUTSTANDING, my favourites being: 'The Thin Day Hotel', 'Island on my Thigh' and 'Horns Under the Door'. I endlessly adore Fitzcarraldo editions and their approach to publishing experimental, eye opinion and politically engaged novels!
Review of advance copy
Was lucky to find an advance review copy of this book on the community bookshelf in Haggerston station - I read it in a night. So devastating & so beautiful, it’s the most abstract/poetic prose that I’ve been able to easily follow (I guess it helps that it’s so short), you have the feeling that each chapter is a short story of its own, but they all fit together like puzzle pieces too - full of extremely beautiful and poignant images with politics pulsing through them. Very comforting to read something that tries to hold onto life affirming moments even as reality disintegrates around us, as people are consistently ‘disappeared’, time breaks down & spaces become sealed off. Will be rereading for sure.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Much like Dorothy Tse’s “Owlish” this novel was surreal and impossible to keep a hold of. Similar to her first novel, this one is about Hong Kong and its history. There is a loose narrative, but its episodes are very bizarre and leave you with a lot to chew on (not unlike the undercooked lotus root in one of the vignettes).
It was disjointed, disorienting and evocative. The novel paints a picture of an explosive political situation, life in a surveillance state, and a longing for a home that no longer exists. While it’s a sobering vision of what life can look like as a country falls to totalitarianism, it is also an absurd, humorous book that highlights the humanity of those who live under such a regime.
Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.
It was disjointed, disorienting and evocative. The novel paints a picture of an explosive political situation, life in a surveillance state, and a longing for a home that no longer exists. While it’s a sobering vision of what life can look like as a country falls to totalitarianism, it is also an absurd, humorous book that highlights the humanity of those who live under such a regime.
Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.
February 19, 2026
City like water by Dorothy Tse feels like a bad acid trip. This is one of those books that I will read over and over again and still pick up on things that I missed before. From my understanding of this acid trip, the police are puppets to the state that is trying to control everyone and everything. The narrator has a difficult time remembering what’s real and what’s fake because of everything that has vanished and the manipulated memories of reality. Teachers jumping to their death, protestors disappearing, bookshops closing. “In real life people just aren’t that curious. Why would they be? They’re staying in this gorgeous hotel. Every day there’s another amazing banquet for them to feast on. Why would
they care about the one or two rooms they’re not allowed to enter?”
they care about the one or two rooms they’re not allowed to enter?”
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
*Thanks to Fitzcarraldo for sending this to me*
Going by the synopsis, (as I always do) I was very intrigued by the premise. However, I found myself once again disappointed by the contemporary.
It seems to be on trend for contemporary authors to write a series of vignettes instead of a novel / novella or short stories. And while the book is well-written and poetic the execution fell short.
The story follows a city that has since sunk to the bottom of the ocean. There are fake lotus roots and pig tails.
My favourite vignette is titled ‘Black Bean Pig Tail Stew’. But I can’t help thinking that had these been extended into interconnected short stories—the book would have been improved by a country mile.
Quote: “(3) The pig’s tail giggling in my soup.”
Going by the synopsis, (as I always do) I was very intrigued by the premise. However, I found myself once again disappointed by the contemporary.
It seems to be on trend for contemporary authors to write a series of vignettes instead of a novel / novella or short stories. And while the book is well-written and poetic the execution fell short.
The story follows a city that has since sunk to the bottom of the ocean. There are fake lotus roots and pig tails.
My favourite vignette is titled ‘Black Bean Pig Tail Stew’. But I can’t help thinking that had these been extended into interconnected short stories—the book would have been improved by a country mile.
Quote: “(3) The pig’s tail giggling in my soup.”
Review of advance copy
Это сложное произведение, не очень понятное русскоязычному читателю. Я бы сказала, что это исследование коллективной памяти и опыта жителей Гонконга, сталкивающихся с изменениями и потерей прошлого. Они теряют политическую (и физическую) независимость – и тут важным становится сохранение культуры и индивидуальности.
Книга состоит из коротких глав-воспоминаний, в которых не уверена даже рассказчица. Всё сюрреалистично, местами нелепо, местами страшно. Произведение, ��ожалуй, хорошее, но полностью мне лично "чужое".
С другой стороны, я полезла гуглить про исторические события, ставшие триггером для написания романа, получила новые знания :)
Книга состоит из коротких глав-воспоминаний, в которых не уверена даже рассказчица. Всё сюрреалистично, местами нелепо, местами страшно. Произведение, ��ожалуй, хорошее, но полностью мне лично "чужое".
С другой стороны, я полезла гуглить про исторические события, ставшие триггером для написания романа, получила новые знания :)
March 30, 2026
Like Owlish there is an uncomfortable almost ugliness lurking beneath the surface here, glossed over, or perhaps heightened, by a playful absurdity. Underwritten by a political subtext centring the 2019 Hong Kong protests Tse’s writing is much more overtly referential here but no less impactful. The translation feels really good too, with the clinical dancing of prose mirroring the ordered yet surreal narrative. It does feel very much a novella that’d sit better in a short story collection but it’s still a compellingly hazy and discomforting portrait of a city sinking in violence and moral corruption.
March 9, 2026
4.5 Stars.
Tse's Hong Kong is Calvino's Venice harbouring a cancer at its heart, as the state slowly corrodes the map amd people of home. She writes these incredible, fleeting vignettes of the city and each oversized focus bloats the landscape with a mythic quality. Like in Invisible Cities, these odd constituent parts struggle to fit easily around each other. However, Tse's thin story carefully stitches these pieces together and offers a human reaction against the encroaching dehuman state.
Tse's Hong Kong is Calvino's Venice harbouring a cancer at its heart, as the state slowly corrodes the map amd people of home. She writes these incredible, fleeting vignettes of the city and each oversized focus bloats the landscape with a mythic quality. Like in Invisible Cities, these odd constituent parts struggle to fit easily around each other. However, Tse's thin story carefully stitches these pieces together and offers a human reaction against the encroaching dehuman state.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
For such a short book/novella, this was quite an unsettling read. In between dream like and nightmarish, where water is just insidious. The unnamed narrator has various experiences with water, missing relatives and bloody lotus roots. I couldn't put this down, despite my unease.
I received an arc from the publisher but all opinions are my own.
I received an arc from the publisher but all opinions are my own.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
thank you sage from macmillan for the advanced copy! being inside dorothy tse’s mind is the best thing i have ever experienced. from owlish to city like water, she creates such unique, dystopian stories that dive deeper into the political state of hong kong. please anyone read her books :3
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Trippy, bizarre, dystopian... I mean, read the publisher's description and you'll know if this strange little book is right for you. Even if plenty of it went over my head, it still gave me a lot to reflect on. Dorothy Tse's prose is vivid and disturbing and really sinks its teeth into you.
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