Of Meat, Plant, and Soil: Multispecies Imaginations of Hong Kong

This paper analyses a materialist politics of multispecies relations in three ecocritical texts from Hong Kong: Fruit Chan’s movie Hollywood Hong Kong (2001), Dorothy Tse’s short story “Bitter Melon” (2014), and Kwai-Cheung Lo’s short story “田在市” (“Farm in the City” 2014). These three narratives express shared anxiety over political control and capitalist development in Hong Kong that damage rural ecology and minority life. Reflecting on the porosity of the body in relation to recent scholarship in multispecies studies, I discuss how these texts evoke fleshy bodies – embedded in ecologies of meat, plant, and soil – to explore a zone of undecidability between human and nonhuman species and make visible the body’s relational materiality that is always in excess of top-down political and economic codes. Shifting away from a dichotomy of domination and resistance, I discuss how these texts evoke multispecies tropes to explore the haunting disturbances and feral effects that move beyond human-nature divides, revealing the contradictory processes of capitalist modernity that are themselves patchy and environment-making. These narratives, I suggest, not only tell multispecies stories of Hong Kong’s changing locality, but also the ethical and political challenges and possibilities of actualising a more balanced ecosystem.