Why Sheung-King, the 2024 Writers' Trust Fiction prize winner, keeps coming back to transnational stories
As a former international student from China living in Canada, Sheung-King is no stranger to the feelings of isolation and displacement his characters go through. Add on the weight of social and political unrest of the past 50 years in Hong Kong and you have the winning novel of the 2024 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, Batshit Seven.
In Batshit Seven, Glen "Glue" Wu has a general apathy toward his return to Hong Kong from Toronto. As a lacklustre, weed smoking, hungover ESL teacher, Glue watches passively as Hong Kong falls into conflict around him. He cares only for his sister, who is trying to marry rich, and for both an on-and-off-again relationship and the memory of a Canadian connection now lost. Government control hardens, thrusting Glue into a journey that ultimately ends in violence.
Sheung-King's first novel, You Are Eating an Orange. You are Naked., was a finalist for multiple awards, including the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award. It was also longlisted for Canada Reads 2021. Sheung-King splits his time between Canada and China.
Sheung-King spoke to The Next Chapter 's Ryan B. Patrick earlier this year about being from and writing about Hong Kong in fiction.
The book mindfully and carefully explores life in Hong Kong and at the legacy of the British occupation. Why did you want to write about and around this time?
It's right before COVID and as a millennial who's returning to Hong Kong, having been overseas all this time, one might be disoriented thrown into this situation when there's some change happening. There's so much news coming out every day but as a Hong Kongese person living abroad, you have this kind of detachment towards the place, but you still want to connect.
How does his identity fit in this place, in all this chaos? - Sheung-King
Parts of your identity are always needing to shift because you're not really a local person anymore, having been an international student, but you're also not not belonging to another place.
So a lot of the things that are happening around that time really pushes Glue into thinking about how does he find a place here? How does his identity fit in this place, in all this chaos?
What's the meaning behind the book title?
The number seven is referencing July. The first of July is when the British handed over Hong Kong and then Hong Kong from that point on entered something called the 50 year plan where it has its own sovereignty, but it's also part of Greater China. So I'm referencing that number a lot throughout. [It's] this idea of living in a place where there's a deadline, it expires, there's only 50 years for it to be what it is.
So this search for identity parallels that of Glue's as he returns to Hong Kong as well.
[It's] this idea of living in a place where there's a deadline. - Sheung-King
Why is [the transnational] experience such a rich place for writing fiction?
I haven't read too many books international students and I haven't read too many Canadian books about international students. And those are people who are in my community, those are my friends when I was living in Canada. When you're preparing yourself as an international school student, you're preparing yourself to not be in the place where you're studying.
You're preparing yourself to go elsewhere and then once you go elsewhere, you're preparing yourself to come back or preparing yourself to stay. This kind of mobility is quite interesting to me because most of my friends growing up are also like that and I noticed that there are many similarities, but life is also very precarious.
Even though he's moping through life and he's despondent, he's no slouch in the intellectual department. He has these very insightful thoughts about the post-colonial condition, thinking about philosophy, thinking about colonization and decolonization. What's his take on the whole situation here?
There's a sense of a connective amnesia that he feels in Hong Kong because it's so focused on finance and everyday life is very corporate. He doesn't have access to any artsy communities. He lives in the suburbs alone in an island in his childhood home. And all of this is the doing of all of the larger governments that were in charge of Hong Kong and Glue is aware that Hong Kong is designed to be a place like this.
Why he longs for Canada is not only because of somebody he misses, but also back then he was more intellectually engaged, he was an activist. He had a better connection with his sister and they would go to protests together. He actually remembers a lot of his training and Marxism and decolonial theory, but it's slowly going away when he becomes more and more consumed by the kind of market forces that are used to create these empires.
It's set around the Hong Kong protests and Glue's mind state is unraveling. Without giving too much away, why should we empathize with what he's going through towards the end of the book?
I think in the end, Glue succumbs to all the pressure. He breaks and a lot of his ideals are falling apart and he becomes in a way lost again. But he finds himself in this place and I think a lot of people who are going through so much change in this part of Asia might, might also feel that there's nothing much else that you could do but do whatever you need to survive in this place that's designed to let you to survive.
I was hanging with some friends who were visiting from Canada who I've met there and they feel like they have the pressure to enjoy all the progress and the economic growth.
They actually feel like they need to live a more materialist consumerist lifestyle because the state presents itself as having done so much so that we can live like this and I think that really affected Glue towards the end of the book where he is exhausted and succumbs to being one of the the returnees, people who returned from foreign countries to work.
Ultimately, this book is an ode of sorts to Hong Kong and the transnational experience. What are some of the joys of living in Hong Kong for these characters?
They love the food, food is a big part of the culture and the scenes with the family, the bonds that they make over food. I think Glue does enjoy his neighborhood and in the suburbs next to the airport, there's something really romantic about this place. It's old and new at the same time, it has a distance from the financial districts, but it's also a lot more diverse than other suburbs.
There's something really romantic about this place. - Sheung-King
Glue does like the local life there. He likes the moments when he gets to play pick up basketball, he likes that he gets to run around in the humidity and sweat and to a certain degree he also loves running in the rain and laughing to himself. And all of these affects are coming from a genuine love for the place, the little things that like might not matter to a lot of the other people.
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