City Like Water

by Dorothy Tse

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.

Genres: Fiction, Dystopia, Literary Fiction, China, Novella, Asia, Speculative Fiction

86 pages, Paperback

Published March 12, 2026

About the author

Dorothy 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2015 Best Translated Book Award, and collects short stories from her earlier Chinese books as well as previously unpublished works.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）。

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Marcus (Lit_Laugh_Luv) · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dreamy novella that captures life in Hong Kong under the 'One Country, Two Systems' political framework, and how the liberty of Hong Kongers is being encroached on ahead of the 2047 deadline. If you have some basic understanding of the current geopolitical climate (notably the recent protests), it helps in understanding some of the references. Nonetheless, Tse's writing is abstract and subtle — there's beautiful imagery and writing on every page, but a not-so-small portion went over my head.

There's a slow erosion of reality that permeates through the novel, likely to mirror the erosion of Hong Kong's autonomy. There are references to authoritarianism, censorship, and police brutality that aren't so subtle, but also a kaleidoscope of abstract references to the rich culture and history of Hong Kong. In some ways, the novella reminded me of Space Invaders, which also chronicles the experience of a generation born into authoritarianism. The disappearance of people and cultural relics is also reminiscent of The Memory Police.

This is a story where you have to accept ambiguity and no clear answers, but the writing is absolutely stunning. Hallucinatory novels can be hit-or-miss for me, but this has just enough grounding and brevity to make it something special.

Thanks to Graywolf Press for the copy!

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[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

I didn’t dare ask questions. Nor did I trust the news to divulge any meaningful information. Why was nobody talking about the bleeding lotus roots? I searched ‘lotus root’ online, hoping to discover the truth about what was going on, only to find the term had vanished into an internet black hole.

Impressive, even if, as with Owlish, I suspect the novel's more subtle features may have eluded me.

[T Davidovsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.~

[Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a line from a film that goes: "When I die, the world will end." You might think that's just the ravings of some crazy girl, but...

No, but for real, when I die the world is definitely going to cease to exist, so for all of your sakes, you better hope I live a long and fruitful life because this matrix doesn't function without my brain here to power it. Anyway, this book is a definite trip, it feels like someone took 1984 and ran it through an Alice In Wonderland-style remix machine. Check it out if you like your Weird with a side of politics.

I suspect that all of us, each inside our own metallic creature, had sunk to the very bottom of the city's sea. Down there, outside of time, miraculous performances unfolded outside my car windows... a kid doing acrobatics on a lit-up unicycle, a middle-aged housewife walking on her hands, a man slithering on his belly in and out of lined-up cans.

[Sarah Skolaski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deeply enjoyed!! I was worried the surreal style would be off putting or hard to follow but I found it really stylistic and emotional.

I need to do more research into the Water Revolution, Umbrella Protest, the Handover of Hong Kong, and other historical lenses.

**IF YOU ARE PART OF MY BOOKCLUB DO NOT READ THIS YET I WANT TO SUGGEST IT FOR NEXT MONTH!!

[Andy Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a short novel of vignettes, some of only a couple of pages, some much longer. It concerns an unnamed narrator navigating a distorted reality, but the plot is intentionally loose, and Tse also avoids any deep characterisation.

His unreliable, dreamlike perspective echoes themes of surveillance and are an allegory for censorship. As an example, the Department of Health institutes changes in a wet market, the ‘Law,’ personified as a genderless investigator, causing fear into the narrator’s neighbours.
A man approaches the narrator on the subway. He has patched his broken neck with super glue, and asks if it will heal if he returns home. The narrator, feeling uncomfortable and reluctant to engage, returns home and helps him navigate the subway system he once knew well.

Some of the vignettes are especially powerful, with memorable and grotesque visions of the twisted reality of living under an authoritarian government.

It’s a short novel, and I actually read it twice. The first time round I didn’t get very much out of it, but the second time much more.

[Laura Garcia Moreno · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stunning. Absolutely stunning writing. Can’t give it the last star because I only understood about half of it.

[Bella Azam · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dreamlike hallucinations novella borders on surrealism and reality merged together to form an inexplicable disquiet of a story. Dorothy Tse's City Like Water translated by Natascha Bruce evokes deep sense of unease & dizziness with its beautiful yet haunting proses. This novella reads more like vignettes of an unnamed narrator on his observations of the life he faced that changing in times, the reminiscences of his past, of the grief and loss they faced as family with the disappearance of his young sister to an unknown event, the revolution and changing geopolitical climate in his home country. I read this with no knowledge of the what to expect but was pleasantly surprised by how the story takes me into this bizarre unknowns of the surrealism seen through our protagonist eyes. Its not an easy read, its deeply complex metaphorical & subtlety references to the actual real events happened throughout Hong Kong's history now that I have read other reviews and the background reference of the novella, it amazed me and made me seek more on them.

There is no plot in this novella, its an observations and vignettes of our narrator telling about the events in his life with the metaphors heavily influenced the proses from city flooded with water, his loss of his sister and the faces he kept seeing as his young sister, the resistance and protest of the housewives because of lotus roots and where his mother gets caught up in this protest and turned into statue, his father too absorbed with the new television and later became entrapped in the tv screen as background character, our narrator becomes paper art craftsman lives underground and the story goes on. Each chapter opened with a title and introduced you to the city through this fractured lens of oppression and power instability that grasped the dystopian city, the growing protest and injustice, police brutality and restriction of rights and freedoms. This novella is a maze of labyrinth to be explored, it requires a second read for sure because I felt I need fully understand the complexity of what the author want to tells you regarding Hong Kong.

Thank you to Times Reads for the review copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Oscar · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

An incredibly surreal reflection on authoritarianism and the death of culture in the wake of that.

Often feverish and rich with symbolism, I imagine it could probably benefit from a reread.

[Regan]

The 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...

[Zhou · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having only a surface-level knowledge of the Hong Kong protests, I don't think I fully understood every element in the story, but the surrealist writing was so haunting that I felt truly immersed in the dreamscape. It's packed with the most fantastical imagery with a lurking sinisterness, reminiscent of Paprika, except set in Hong Kong. Yet despite the gravity of the intended political commentary, it manages to feel so light, so floaty, as if you're just... peacefully drifting through a river of hot burning lava? How does one achieve this? I'm seriously impressed.

Anyway. I've always had an issue with Chinese translated literature sounding too "Chinese", due to the distinct nature of the language. As a child of an immigrant, Chinese was my first language, and I was only exposed to English when I went to kindergarten at age 4. I first got to know the stars in the sky as xingxing (which twinkle like liang jingjing) and the sun as taiyang, or more endearingly as taiyang gonggong, "grandpa sun". When drawing the universal corner-sun, I often adorned it with a thick moustache.

Sadly, English eventually overtook Chinese to become the default system language of my mind—but only my mind. A good number of Singaporeans grow up bilingual, and while we end up using English 90% the time in our daily lives and at work, most would agree with me that there lies a special corner in our heart only accessible through our mother tongue. In fact, the word for "thought" is 思想, written with 2 hearts (心) at the bottom. Chinese people think with their hearts. There is a certain sense of poetry in Chinese that English fails to capture—a realisation which tends to hit me after a drunken night of belting Jay Chou hits with my friends at the karaoke. "缓缓飘落的枫叶像思念"...

My issue is, this 'sense of poetry', when translated into English, is more often than not, too conspicuous for my liking. You have to be really delicate with it. It's like a freshly hatched baby bird that you have to hold in your palms very carefully. Hold it too tight, and you risk squishing its fragile wings; hold it too loose, and it might plop to its death. Time and again, the baby bird never gets to fully take flight.

This translation however has done a great job in fostering the baby bird. Baby bird is now a mighty fucking eagle. SCREEEEE! It is executed so deftly that at times I even forgot that it's originally written in another language. Just brilliant. I look forward to reading more from both Dorothy Tse and her translator Natasha Bruce.

「发现每个下雨天，城市便分裂成许多许多水洼，每一个水洼都是它的倒影。所有的倒影都是另一个倒影的倒影。我在一本书上读到一个熟悉的故事，仿佛说的就是我们那座城市的陷落。然而那明明是一个陌生的名字，它距离我原本居住的地方一万二千七百零八公里。有些悲伤事情那么相似。我在镜里看到一张似曾相识的脸。一种悲伤是另一种悲伤的倒影。」

"Every rainy day, the city breaks up into so many puddles, and every puddle contains a reflection, and every reflection is the reflection of another reflection. In a book, I read the familiar story of the downfall of our city, except the city's name is unfamiliar and it's 12,708 kilometres away from the place I used to live. Some sadnesses are so alike. In the mirror, I see a once-familiar face. One sadness reflects another kind of sadness."

[k.eela · Rating 3 out of 5]

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!

[Annie Tate Cockrum · Rating 3 out of 5]

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

[Weiling · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

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:

“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.

[Ashley T · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really impressive translation - it couldn’t have been easy to translate such an abstract/dreamy book, but it came across poetic and natural. Sometimes it was a little too conceptual for me, but always got brought back down to being a clear satire of an authoritarian government.

The Thin Day Hotel was one of the most obvious pieces of commentary and felt real to our current experiences right now. In the chapter, days have disappeared, presumably taken away by the government.

“The most infuriating part is, all these experts pop up and say, actually, fewer days means we can let go a bit, relax, because is it really such a bad thing if our years are a little lighter? But my working days haven’t shrunk, they’ve just become even more alike. There’s no difference anymore between today and any other day. When I think of those days when all I wanted to do was scream and cry my eyes out - there’s no space for that now.”

[g.m. · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Hannah Chaussee · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[SYD 이 · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Eliza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Erring between 4 stars and 5 as I came into this book thinking it was going to be one thing and it turned out to be something completely different, still extremely enjoyable to read but do wish it was a tiny bit longer. The language and writing was soooooo beautiful.

[Armen · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Axel Koch · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Evie H · Rating 4 out of 5]

fell in love with this writing style - this book is a surreal haze of unreliable memories and fantastical but sinister imagery. The surveillance city looms large which feels all too familiar

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

A series of "performance[s] of the subconscious". The narrator dream-remembers the streets (and skin and pores and echoes) of her grimy, lush city, where bodies fall incessantly to the ground. There are two "events" that give the story some shape. First, the narrator's sister vanishes (in the dream-rendition, she floats away with an umbrella a la Mary Poppins, but likely actually an act of political violence against the sister's anti-state dissent). Second, the narrator's mother joins a group of other women protesting the produce market's (the market market?) attempt to scam its customers on lotus root. Then she is disappeared, too. The narrator ultimately is left "unafflicted" with her father to "feast" and watch tv in their apartment, floundering but trying to maintain a veneer of normalcy.
Appreciated the book's surreal accounting of state-sanctified violence against protestors and the environment.
"An official letter was circulated [at the school]. None of us had the patience to read it properly. Instead, we skimmed to the reply slip at the bottom. It said: I promise that I'm happy. I promise not to kill myself." "This doesn't have to be a big deal." (18)
"Within that extinguished landscape, in the evening dark, I saw the outlines of trucks lined up on either side of the road, like enormous, comatose jungle animals. Occasionally workers would be out there unloading goods, although they seemed more like premature ghosts, come early to haunt the eventual redevelopment." (22)
In the bird-book bookshop called Desert: "The tiny space felt intimate, like a bedroom, and the people seemed proprietorial, as if this was where they lived. They had their at-home faces on." (36)
"I am infinitely grateful for how those women shaped my ideas of womanhood. When my vocal chords thickened and my voice grew deeper, I tried to find a target for my romantic ideals at school, but no silly schoolgirl could compare to the toe-clevage women. The girls in my class had more in common with ducks. Their mothers dressed them up like pretty gift boxes, yet all they did was act rude and vacant." (47)
"The clock hands were fixed in a ten o'clock smirk" (51)
"I'm not sure when the line demarcating the world within the television set began to blur. My da would just stroll across it." (59)

[Michael Doane · Rating 5 out of 5]

City Like Water by Dorothy Tse is a surreal and deeply atmospheric literary dystopia that dissolves the boundaries between memory, disappearance, and political reality. Through fragmented narrative and dreamlike imagery, the novel constructs a world where identity, family, and even physical space are unstable and constantly vanishing.

What makes this work especially powerful is its sense of haunting dislocation. The city itself feels submerged in absence, where people, relationships, and even objects fade without explanation. This creates a narrative experience that is both emotionally unsettling and intellectually provocative, forcing the reader to navigate a landscape shaped by loss and distortion.

The novel also stands out for its allegorical depth. Everyday life is transformed into surreal political and psychological commentary, where protests turn into statues, family members are absorbed into technology, and reality itself becomes fragmented. These transformations are not just fantastical elements but reflections on control, surveillance, and erasure.

Another major strength lies in the lyrical and uncanny prose. The translation preserves a sense of fluidity and dream logic that enhances the novel’s emotional impact. The writing is precise yet hallucinatory, allowing each image to linger with symbolic weight and emotional ambiguity.

Unsettling, poetic, and intellectually rich, City Like Water will appeal to readers of literary dystopia, surrealist fiction, translated literature, and experimental narratives that explore memory, disappearance, and the fragility of urban life.

[Cassidy (blurbclurb) · Rating 5 out of 5]

We can dance, but we have to be careful. Otherwise we’ll see the fishing lines attached to our fingers, and we’ll stop being able to obey the puppet-master. We’ll get wills of our own and fall over.

While City Like Water may appear to be a tale about a distant city whose fate has been engulfed by a poisoned future, it is really the story of a city that exists in colour before our eyes. On the surface, the world Tse has woven feels almost playful, filled with metaphors and meals that I recognize from my childhood, growing up in a Cantonese family. But dive below the surface and the undercurrent quickly grabs hold, thrusting you into the unsettling truth behind the police, government gifts, teachers, and a reality you thought you knew, until you are gasping for air and holding your breath to the last page. Like a hallucinatory daydream, you quickly realize that the episodic tales of City Like Water are not fiction at all, but hints at the existence of a city that has had to fight to remain a shell of itself.

City Like Water is filled with subtle (and not-so-subtle) references that quite clearly demonstrate it is about Hong Kong. While I admit that many of the references went over my head, the very real pain and strife are pervasive throughout the book.

This book has inspired me to continue to learn about the history of Hong Kong, and if you have any suggestions for materials, please let me know!

[Rach Roberts · Rating 3 out of 5]

A dream state novel fuelled by the abstract and the obscure. Some eloquently written prose with each chapter working as a vignette capturing the maudlin, dystopic and often times bizarre notions of events in the narrator's city.
Ranging from the state of a market, to the disillusioned, and definitely delusional, perspectives of the narrator, Tse fuses together some stunning and vivid imagery through beautiful metaphor, with visceral and jarring concepts that make you pause, think and then re-read the same page again.
The vignette style is probably the feature that lets this book down somewhat. Jumping around and the disconnect between scenes, though probably intended to emphasise the uncertainty and unrest of the protagonist, perhaps could have benefitted from different ordering. The feverish dreamscape was just a little bit too disconnected for total engagement with the plight of characters. By the end, the last two chapters have some stuning prose and really capitalise on the City Like Water symbolism of the title, leaving readers wanting more and a greater understanding of the whys and wherefores of who left who and the truth of the impending doom that is the underlying enigma of this book.
Sharp, confident and wholly different to a lot of other books on the market - well worth the read.

[Elena L. · Rating 3 out of 5]

[ 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 ]