DUNG Kai-cheung is a type of author that only colonial Hong Kong would produce.
A star student across the board, he chose to focus on the academic study of literature, winning a place to study a BA and MA at the exclusive Hong Kong University, first in classical Chinese literature and then in comparative literature.
At the beginning of his career, Dung’s work was academic to a fault. Experiments in form and obscure foreign literary references abound.
The Double Body (雙身) (1997) was an atypical early work with a clear plot that was easy to follow: a visitor from Hong Kong experienced an unexplained body switch from man to woman, and had to navigate the daily life and the dating world from the perspective of a straight woman. There was no politics of gender (this was the late 90s): just a simple re-imagination of gender from a first-person perspective.
Works such as Atlas (地圖集) (1997) are more typical of this period. Written in the dry, serious tone of an archaeological reference text, it is essentially inaccessible to the casual reader. One has to think very hard to work out when Dung was being serious and when he was just making things up for fun, and there is no plot to link everything together.
Who would read Dung? The Chinese-speaking cultural scene in colonial Hong Kong was dominated by commercialized classical Chinese culture: one thinks of Cantonese Opera (粵曲), of Jin Yong (金庸), of James Wong(黃霑). On one extreme, there were die-hard traditionalists (Zhanquan Chen 陳湛銓 and the classical poets). On the other extreme, there were also sci-fi writers Ni Kuang (倪匡) or highly experimental lyricists (think Wyman Wong 黃偉文) drawing on popular Western culture.
But to my knowledge, there were few (if any) other Chinese writers who write for readers with an assumed familiarity and appreciation of “high” modern literature (e.g. figures like T S Elliott, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino).
It is therefore unsurprising that Dung’s work won many prestigious awards in the Mainland and Taiwan, but simply didn’t sell. In fact, by his own account, the sales were so low he could hardly support himself and had to be depend economically on his partner (who taught literature at university). This must have weighed on his mind as he witnessed unprecedented prosperity and upward social mobility among his generation of the Hong Kong Chinese elite.
From 2005 to 2010, Dung published 3 volumes of massive, well-received (but ultimately abandoned) trilogy of novels (自然史三部曲).
In the first installment (天工開物·栩栩如真), there are parallel narratives between (1) the story of a family as they experience the changes from imperial Chinese rule to Hong Kong just prior to the handover, structured through inventions of different periods (radio; telephone/telegram; lathe; TV etc) and (2) an imaginary world where objects such as scissors take on their own personalities, roles, and romantic plots.
This ought to be compelling reading, but again the entry barriers were too high for a most of the Hong Kong reading public. Ditto the second and (first, only published half) of the third instalment, which took the experiments even further.
If Dung had stopped there, I would likely not have read any more of his works other than Double Body (雙身) (1997).
But he did not stop there. From 2016 onwards, Dung changed tracks (on his own account) to write in a way that is more accessible and that could have wider appeal. The trilogy of natural history (精神史三部曲) (2016-2018) addresses topical and relevant topics of meditation, romantic obsessions mediated through social media and AI: well before ChatGPT made AI cool again.
Posthuman Comedy (2020) continues in this vein. The narrative starts in a realistic setting: the narrator, a Cybernetics Professor from a humble Hong Kong background (think 一平 from 鍾曉陽，遺恨傳奇) is hired for his research expertise by the Nanyang University in Singapore. Soon he finds himself in intricate university politics (competing teams seeking his talent to build human-like intelligence), which (in a small compact city like Singapore) soon spills well beyond academia.
The setting naturally permits Dung (and the reader) to indulge in long discussions on Cybernetics and Kant’s three Critiques (!), as he strings everything together with a fast-paced plot complete with James Bond-style car chases and romantic encounters. It is the kind of novel where casual readers can skip/skim the philosophy and just enjoy it for the sake of the action.
More recently, Dung has turned his attention to blockchain technology and an attempt to switch to a self-publishing model. In one engaging experiment (on Substack), he writes in the persona of three young women characters from earlier novels, posting “diaries” of their daily lives complete with emojis, mid-journey AI images and live links to the music / Japanese anime clips that the character refers to.
To my mind, this is entirely the right turn for Dung to make. Both classical Chinese culture and the idea of the University have lost much of their cultural cache to most Hong Kongers’ minds. As with much of the rest of the world, the limelight now falls on the tech giants: the elephants in the room who can transform (and/or wreak havoc) on our daily lives.
Dung’s latest experiments not only bring the possibility of attracting wider attention (which he richly deserves). It is also a natural development from the long-standing themes of integrating reflections on technology with both Western and Chinese high cultures in a unique Hong Kong context.