" TJr7 rr hat is going to happen to Hong Kong after 1997?" In the past few years, as Hong Kong's peculiar colonial fate gains international attention, this is the question I often encounter in conversations. The point of the present essay is not to attempt an answer but to argue, through a discussion· of Hong Kong and Hong Kong author Leung Ping-kwan/Liang Bingjun (penname Ya SeelYe Si), ta way of reading coloniality and colonial literature that is alternative to the perspectives that are currently available. 1997, even though it is the event that crystallizes all the crises that constitute Hong Kong as a" borrowed place, borrowed time"(Hughes), 2 is a background but not the focus here. My interest in Hong Kong, a city in which I grew up, is that it is a particular kind of passageway, which was created by the accident of history but which nonetheless persists from the nineteenth century to the present with a uniqueness and resilience that is otherwise unknown in world history. 3 Considerations of cities always seem to put their emphases on space and place. Geography, architecture, landscape, urban planning, physical remains, and topographical details occupy the students of city life. When writers look at Hong Kong spatially, they often find it unremarkable. Indeed, geographical and spatial considerations of Hong Kong have little choice other than to emphasize the smallness and insignificance of the city. Hong Kong is a barren rock at the southern tip of China; Hong Kong is overcrowded, smelly, dirty, unbearably hot and humid in the summer, and aesthetically devoid of ancient landmarks of world renown. Even those who admire the brilliance of d iff ere nee s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 5.3 (1993)