A contextual introduction

It is doubtful that any of the creative writers whose work appears, or is discussed, in this special issue ever set out to be the object of “Hong Kong studies”. Rather it is the passage of time and wider historical and geopolitical changes that have in large part defined them. But, whether the writers be first or second generation diasporic writers, whether they still write out of Hong Kong itself or from elsewhere, their existence is a product of British colonialism. Theirs is also part of a longer story of displacement stretching back to the mid-nineteenth-century “Opium Wars".