What this book doesn’t reveal about itself is that it’s about Hong Kong, though here, the entire city is depicted as a dystopian dreamscape. Hong Kong is not mentioned explicitly, and the blurb keeps things vague, so if you’re a stupid American like me, then the only way to figure it out is to Wikipedia the culturally specific terms that are sprinkled throughout the narrative. (Even before reading, I suggest looking up the 831 incidents and the umbrella movement).

You don’t actually have to know that City Like Water is about Hong Kong to enjoy it. It can be about any dystopian city. The narrator is both nostalgic for and critical of some bygone era that perhaps never truly existed at all, and while Hong Kong occupies the unique geopolitical space for exploring these conflicting responses to change and the passing of time, Dorothy Tse also does an excellent job of portraying just how universal these feelings can be. Knowledge of Hong Kong is not strictly necessary to appreciate this stunning and disorienting piece of writing about any place in the world where reality becomes both debatable and a matter of life or death.

The political undertones are unmistakable, but certain aspects of the narrative still must be kept unspoken. As a result, the book relies heavily on metaphors that continuously accumulate, fragment, and transform. The surreal, dissociative, and sometimes sinister imagery here is extraordinary. The opening metaphor of a bunk bed as a boat immediately establishes a sense of precarious transit, and that unmoored feeling never leaves. There’s a profound sense of exile throughout the novel, even in claustrophobic spaces, where no movement can occur. The narrator clearly has a flexible and fraught relationship with time, space, history, and truth. To reflect how memory is uncontrollable, the prose style is associative, fractured, hallucinatory, ambiguous, and unreliable. Repeated references are made to people who might not be real -- most notably, a younger sister who haunts the narrative. There’s antagonists working behind the scenes to gaslight everyone, forcing people to consent to the normalization of pain and misery, but this villain’s face is unstable. It is usually the state, but there are also critiques in here of consumer culture, academic institutions, the stigmatization of suicide, the entertainment industry, and more. Sometimes the horrors become grounded in something concrete and hyper specific (like in one section about a protest in response to a scam involving lotus roots), allowing characters’ rage to become targeted. Other times, things are nebulous.

Despite the heavy focus on grief, trauma, suicide, political precarity, and economic instability, City Like Water is not an entirely hopeless book. If there’s a plot at all amidst the fever dream of paranoid imagery, it’s definitely one about making sense of encounters with state sanctioned violence. When things get bleak, the book sometimes shows a willingness to deconstruct its own pessimism, relentlessly attempting to witness and document things that are in the process of being erased. The narrator doesn’t always acknowledge the signs of hope, at least not explicitly, but readers should. A lot of the book is about how the imagination has the power to obscure inconvenient truths, making the status quo more palatable to those who would otherwise want to resist it. However, at the same time, I couldn’t help but continue to believe that human imagination should also give people the power to think up a better status quo, and there’s a sense that underneath the rigid, surveilled, and censored surface of the city, something (or someone) is still dreaming without limit.