Prostitution, Pawnshop, and Property: Everyday Life as a Colonized Woman in Shu-Ching Shih's City of the Queen: A Novel of Colonial Hong Kong

This article identifies and examines the place-based and protracted nature of narrating everyday life and survival under the slow violence of colonialism in Shu-Ching Shih's City of the Queen: A Novel of Colonial Hong Kong (2005), in order to argue that such a narrative style better attends to the vicissitudes of quotidian lives and human interactions, and to the particularities of time and space in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hong Kong under British rule. The novel presents the life story of Deyun Huang, who is kidnapped in China and sold into prostitution in colonial Hong Kong, where she endures colonial violence as a woman and a single mother in different physical locations—brothels, pawnshops, and, later, her own property. Historically and contextually specific, and filled with realist elements that recuperate a condition of a believable past, Shih's novel brings to life a colonial Hong Kong that is concrete rather than conceptual; in so doing, the novel offers glimpses into the interstices of empire in the material world, while avoiding themes and tendencies that often bind together character development and nation-building and thus transcend diverse lived experiences into large-scale, decontextualized allegories of colonialism. Taken as a whole, this article reads City of the Queen as a literary attempt at representing and rewriting the individual lives of the colonized in Hong Kong, along with their emotions and uneventful ebbs and flows, which are seldom mentioned in official history or considered an integral part of postcolonial consciousness and discourse.