Incarnation of the Real: Approaching the Production of the Hong Kong Literary Magazine Fleurs des Lettres (2006- )

The sublimity of factual representation requires historical investigation upon its contradictive nature: powerful as a morally recognized weapon (as Chinese leftist writers adopted to actualize and validate the Communist regime from the late 1910s to the late 1940s) but fragile as an easily side-streamed and censored ideology. While literarily recording the real in “late-capitalist” Hong Kong is encountering imbricated pressure from a tailor-made national security law (approved at the National People’s Congress on 22 May, 2020 to prevent, stop and punish acts in Hong Kong related to subversion, secession, terrorism and foreign interference), this paper sets out to study the resistive formation of a representative contemporary Hong Kong literary magazine called Fleurs des Lettres (Ji Fa 字花; 2006- ). Starting from a derivation of the spiritual source of Hong Kong literary magazines, it suggests that the responsive composition of Fleurs des Lettres follows a realist tradition and contextually practices a localized version. As a scholar and an editor, the writer of this paper will invigorate his historical and discursive analyses of its Issue 1 and Issue 81 with subjective observations.