Migration and Silence/Volume in Postwar Hong Kong

About the Project

From the Benenson Award, I received funding to write a 50-page work of historical fiction and collection of poems centering displacement, silence/volume, and disappearance in postwar Hong Kong. A principal setting that is explored and granted voice in my work is Rennie’s Mill, a former refugee settlement and site of colonial erasure in British Hong Kong. The settlement, an isolated enclave far out from Hong Kong’s mid-20th century city center, was designated by the British colonial government specifically for refugees who had fled Mainland China in the wake of the Chinese Civil War—out of wartime defeat, persecution, or fear of return.

I grew up in present-day Rennie’s Mill (now known by its Cantonese name, Tiu Keng Leng) and hold its little-known history close to my heart. The original refugee settlement was demolished in 1996, in advance of Hong Kong’s handover from Britain to China as a Special Administrative Region. In a geopolitical game of chess, Rennie’s Mill was razed to the ground and replaced, repurposed by the colonial government into a middle-lower income residential district (now rapidly gentrifying) where history and accountability hold no apparent place. This way, the former refugee camp would not pose a detectable, ideological threat upon Hong Kong’s reabsorption into the neocolonial Chinese state.

The funding I received from the Benenson Award allowed me to write these pieces and carry out interviews with the descendants of refugees of the Chinese Civil War in both Rennie’s Mill/Tiu Keng Leng and broader Hong Kong. Through these conversations, I was able to vicariously witness the subjugation and immobilization that this refugee community faced from both sides of the Hong Kong-China border. Specifically, to the Mainland Chinese government, they were considered dangerous, anti-government “agents” not to be allowed back into the country. To Hong Kong’s British colonial government, they were a liability and “costly nuisance” with the potential to muddy Anglo-Chinese diplomatic ties. In 1953, the colonial government even led a campaign of deliberate suppression and dispersion by restricting the enclave’s access to food, water, and essential resources, as well as enforcing heavy surveillance therewithin.

In my writing, I worked to place as much emphasis as possible on the communal struggle, self-support, mutual aid, and ultimate survival of this community, alongside the psychological sequelae of refugeehood and dual-exile.

Throughout this project, my primary aim was to humanize this history of migration and diasporic resilience, while countering the historic and colonial characterization of Chinese refugees in British Hong Kong as “parasites,” “nuisances,” “squatters,” and “inmates.” I wanted to additionally explore the weight of manufactured erasure and stifled resistance, past and present, whose consequences continue to reverberate throughout Hong Kong and its diaspora. Particularly through my poetry, I examined how similar strands of loss and fear that once drove Chinese migrants and refugees into Hong Kong in the postwar period, have been reemerging in the present under Mainland China’s tightening control over Hong Kong. Notably, the present-day suppression of our people and criminalization of free speech, elections, journalism, and assembly have spurred mass-emigration out of the territory, largely to the West.

This project is, finally, a tribute to my hometown and the cramped apartment walls, markets, mountains, tireless labor, and Junk Bay waves that raised me. My work pays homage in the highest terms to the Hong Kong people, and honors all those who have raised their voices, taken to the streets, and fought for our beloved city. It honors all of us who have toiled to keep its memory alive, who have decided history belongs with the people, who refuse to let Hong Kong’s spirit die.