This essay investigates two fictions by Hong Kong writer Leung Ping-kwan. The early work, Paper Cuts (1982), was written in the late 1970s, while the later work, Postcolonial Affairs of Food and the Heart (2011), was composed around the turn of the millennium. The question of Hong Kong identity has always been a focal point in Leung Ping-kwan’s work. Therefore, this paper focuses on the author’s perspectives and reflections on identity crisis in these two novels. In Paper Cuts, the exploration of incommensurability has been analyzed as a colonial cultural predicament in the Cold War context to understand Leung Ping-kwan’s perspective at the time. The two female protagonists exhibit a schizophrenic double consciousness, serving as an allegory for the social landscape that reveals the communication barriers among colonial subjects. Furthermore, it is emphasized that reading incommensurability must prioritize its constituting conditions, where the linguistic complexity, the colonial order, and the Cold War structure overly determine this incommensurability. When interpreting Postcolonial Affairs of Food and the Heart, it is argued that the vernacular cosmopolitanism presented in the text as a solution to the identity crisis addressed in the earlier work, with its formal and thematic representation. It reads Leung’s food writing in terms of the dialectic of appetite and digestion, which involves an excessive description of the world and local cuisine, implying the inclusivity and hybridity embedded in Hong Kong culture and daily life.
Dahai ZHANG (Sat,) studied this question.