Mobility AND NORMALCY
We are pleased to announce that the Society for Hong Kong Studies Annual Conference 2025 on the theme “Mobility and Normalcy” will be held in person at the Chinese University of Hong Kong on 4 and 5 July 2025.
We are excited to have a diverse range of speakers from different backgrounds and disciplines who will present their research and perspectives on the theme. The upcoming two-day event will consist of 12 panels, covering a range of topics. For details of each panel, please refer to our rundown:
We cordially invite you to join us for the two action-packed days filled with engaging discussions, exciting presentations, and networking opportunities. The conference brings ideas to life and fosters the creation of connections. Complete your registration using the link provided below:
https://forms.office.com/r/mZX7vvPc4H
Keynote Speech: Narrating the Unsettled: Mobility, History, and the Literary Consciousness of Wong Bik-wan
We are also delighted to have WONG Nim Yan, Associate Professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature and Director of the Hong Kong Literature Research Centre at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, to be our keynote speaker this year. Her keynote speech is titled “Narrating the Unsettled: Mobility, History, and the Literary Consciousness of Wong Bik-wan”, and the abstract is as follows:
Wong Bik-wan’s fiction offers a sustained, genre-defying engagement with the unstable entanglements of personal memory, collective trauma, and official history. Over more than three decades, her literary practice has explored shifting geopolitical terrains and temporal dislocations. Her work ranges from the intimate devastations of foreign wars and fractured identities in Thereafter (其後) and The Tender and the Violent (溫柔與暴烈), to the peripheral history of Hong Kong women from World War II to the new millennium in The Portrait of Virtuous Women (烈女圖), the underworld life of a marginalized 60-year-old gangster in Children of Darkness (烈佬傳), and the postcolonial melancholia of Hong Kong as refracted through a decaying Macau in Doomsday Hotel (末日酒店). Her later works, including The Death of Lo Kei (盧麒之死), a speculative revisiting of the emotionally charged and fragmentary history of the 1966 Hong Kong riots, and Appendix Three (附件三), composed in the politically muted atmosphere following the enactment of the National Security Law, deepen her inquiry into power, erasure, and the historical memory of ordinary people.
This keynote argues that Wong’s fiction constructs a counter-archive of mobility. It offers an affective and historiographical map that re-narrates partitioned, repressed, and marginal histories. These narratives are grounded in transnational violence, colonial afterlives, and silenced local unrest. Situating Wong Bik-wan’s literary consciousness within the conference theme of “Mobility and Normalcy”, this presentation contends that her writing disrupts the very notion of a “normal” Hong Kong historical narrative. Her characters move through spaces marked by colonial and national violence, ideological control, and emotional exile. Through fragmented structures, hybrid forms, and strategic silences, Wong develops a literary historiography that resists resolution and remains committed to articulating the unsettled. Her work ultimately offers a mobile and insurgent mode of remembering that refuses normalization and confronts the ruptures of history directly.
Venue information
Presented in person at LT-9 (2/F) and 505 (5/F), Yasumoto International Academic Park (YIA), CUHK.
For a convenient way to reach the conference venue at the Yasumoto International Academic Park (YIA) at CUHK, we recommend taking the MTR to the University Station and exiting at A. To obtain additional assistance, please consult the following link:
https://www.ccs.cuhk.edu.hk/wp-content/uploads/YIA-direction-map.pdf
Details: https://hkstudies.org/events/annual-conference-2025/