Introduction

If Hong Kong were easy to simplify, this would have simplified things. Who is a ‘native’ resident? Or, to put the question another way, who is a ‘Hong Kong people’, a common second-language error here that raises interesting and rather profound questions when one unpacks the meaning underneath the Chinglish. Can people other than Cantonese-speaking Chinese fit the definition? Questions like these, as they have played out in the courts and the media, have led to shouting in the streets. And without the editors explicitly naming identity as a focus of this book (it is, after all, a fiction anthology, not a collection of essays in one of the social sciences), identity manifested as a theme in every story we accepted and quite a few that we did not.