Liu Yichang

(né Liu Tongyi)

b. 1918, Shanghai

Writer

Liu studied at Saint John’s University in Shanghai. He is a writer, editor and translator, who has published novels and short stories, as well as essays and articles in newspapers and magazines. He began his career as a journalist in Chongqing during WWII. He moved to Hong Kong in 1948. In 1985, he founded Hong Kong Literature (Xianggang wenxue), a monthly magazine in which he acted as director until his retirement in 2000. His best-known novel, The Drunkard (Jiutu, 1963), describes the quest of a man, half writer half journalist, to come to terms with Hong Kong’s complex and moving reality.

This, and many other stories written by him, are evocative of the speedy, noisy, impersonal but also challenging and open place that Hong Kong is, revealing the coexistence of many worlds, and expressing confusion between past and present, Chinese and Western culture, even things and spirits, as in Bust-up (Chaojia, 1980). His role in introducing Western literature and art in Hong Kong Literature, and before that in other magazines, has been essential to Hong Kong culture. The movie In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar-wai is based on his Intersection (Duidao, 1972).

Further reading

Liu, Yichang (1995). ‘The Cockroach’. Trans. D.E.Pollard. In D.E.Pollard (trans.) The Cockroach and Other Stories. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Larson, Wendy (1993). ‘Liu Yichang’s Jiutu: Literature, Gender, and Fantasy in Contemporary Hong Kong’. Modern Chinese Literature 7.1:89–104.

ANNIE CURIEN