Vancouver-born novelist Sheung-King grew up in Hong Kong. Canadian-Singaporean writer Thea Lim described his work as an examination of “the interior lives of the transnational Asian diaspora,” and his second novel, Batshit Seven, is an ode to Hong Kong, set during the 2019 protests. 

The story is told through the perspective of a disillusioned millennial returning home after living as an international student in Canada, and has an artistically innovative sentence structure, with a Woolfian stream-of-consciousness and QR codes for readers to scan as a part of the reading experience. 

Last year, the book won Sheung-King the Atwood Gibson Writer’s Trust Fiction Prize, which recognizes the best in Canadian fiction of the year. Earlier this month, on November 1, Sheung-King spoke with The Varsity at the Toronto International Festival of the Authors about his novel and its literary expositions.

The Varsity: You described your novel as a psychological profile rather than strictly autofiction. The book also reminded me of psychogeography, the analysis of urban environments through interpersonal connections. 

How do you think the differences between the psychological profiles of Toronto and Hong Kong contribute to different aspects of Glue’s evolution throughout the novel?

Sheung-King: I think when Glue left Hong Kong, he didn’t really want to go back. When he was in Canada, he studied theatre, read a lot of Marxist theory, and thought about Frantz Fanon a lot. 

Ideologically, he’s stuck because Hong Kong is a hypercapitalist finance hub by design. He can’t escape this reality, which is his raison d’être. It’s already engrained in him that he’s bound to return home, so he struggles a lot with that. 

Throughout the book, he’s realizing more and more what he’s unsatisfied about. Or rather, his physical body is realizing that, even though he isn’t able to mentally and emotionally articulate it. The book is an exploration of that disconnect.

TV: A lot of novels exploring Hong Kong’s nationalist identity tend to center around the Cantonese language, how to keep preserving it, and the politics surrounding it. I was talking with my friend about this because he speaks both Mandarin and Cantonese, and he mentioned that Canadians and Chinese Canadians veer more towards the Cantonese dialect because of the earlier settling of Cantonese immigrants in Canada. 

How do you think these immigration patterns shape nationalist identity in the diaspora?

SK: That’s an interesting question because Cantonese is being taught less and less in places other than Hong Kong, or in other cities in Southern China. Now that I teach in the region, I notice that not too many of my students are able to speak it as fluently as I did growing up. 

There’s a national homogenization of language going on. There’s a pragmatic reason for that, as a simplified language is easier to learn, which helps increase literacy rates faster. 

But the interesting thing is that the people who leave are culturally stuck in the China of the time that they left. My relatives here can’t speak Mandarin. Even my parents can’t really speak Mandarin. They can speak Cantonese fluently, and they’re able to speak English, but that’s because they didn’t really go through the changes that China has gone through. 

A similar thing goes with spaces like Chinatown. There’s certain cuisines that left China and established themselves here. The tradition is actually, because of that, preserved within the diaspora. 

This nostalgic displacement of cultural things produces a longing in everybody. You’re in Canada, in a Chinatown, eating a regional specialty, and you’re thinking to yourself, “I’ve never had this in China.” And then you’re filled with longing for this dish only because throughout your childhood, it did not exist.

TV: It’s interesting that you mention the immigrant time freeze. Glue’s mother characterizes his Canadian-born cousins as lazier than the kids raised in Hong Kong. Glue goes through a similar diasporic transformation as well, with his malaise upon returning to Hong Kong. 

Do you think the international student experience fast-tracks the traditional immigrant disconnection with home cultures?

SK: I think it’s definitely a very different experience. It also depends on the background you come from before you become an international student. 

If you’re educated, bilingual, or grew up in an English-centric environment in Hong Kong before studying abroad, you are, for almost your whole life, preparing for an exit and return. That’s very different from going to public school and then going to a different country to study.

TV: The almost being trained to leave part jumps out to me. Glue’s friend, Po, is quite resentful of Glue having access to resources that will help him leave. And I think that middle and upper-class privilege is reflected in a lot of Asian immigration to Canada, as often only wealthy people are able to immigrate. 

How do you think that shapes the modern-day orientalizing of the East?

SK: That kind of orientalizing is definitely one that’s tied with the economic status of the people who are able to come. Even international students are actually very wealthy, in order to be able to afford international student fees. 

They bring a different kind of culture because of the rapid economic growth of their home countries. They’re presenting an aesthetic of economic growth in living that kind of wealthy life. Living in China, you see the hyperconvenience of, like you can order food at any time —

TV: Within ten minutes —

SK: Within ten minutes, yeah! There’s this convenience, and ease, and materiality that you’re almost forced to enjoy because you learn from a young age that “Oh we went through so much to get to this point, you have to enjoy it.” Why else live here? And from that background, coming here to Canada, you present yourself as somebody used to that. 

Hyperconvenience is a byproduct of productivity and capitalism. It’s convenience so that people can do the most amount of work possible. So I’m also cautious of that.

TV: Do you think that middle-class upbringing and desire for constant growth in hypercapitalist societies trap immigrants in a self-orientalizing pattern?

SK: Yeah, yeah, of course. That’s why people force their kids to play the piano: there’s an upper-middle-class aesthetic to classical music. I was only recently able to enjoy classical music because I was forced to play piano. 

Within Hong Kong, if you’re able to speak fluent English, it means that you probably belong to another class of people. Or if you’re able to actually be trilingual — Mandarin, Cantonese, and English — then it says something about your class signifier.

TV: That’s fascinating because Glue is also an English as a second language (ESL) teacher. You also mention IELTS fees. How do you think that financial pressure interferes with learning the language when it’s out of necessity rather than passion?

SK: Glue thinks it’s a scam. It’s so expensive. Passing the test doesn’t necessarily mean you can do anything. 

I have a lot of friends who had to take the test. They can speak English completely fine; it’s just something about the test that they struggle with. It’s not because they’re bad at testing or that they don’t speak English. 

Because of the prevalence of English globally, these companies and institutions, of course, need to commodify that. They make up a test you have to pass in order to continue your studies. 

Glue, having gone through this system himself, hates being a part of it as an adult. He’s also dyslexic, so he hated testing. Becoming an ESL instructor is like he became what he hated most. But because he needed to maintain his life, he had no choice. He’s very trapped in this middle-classness.

TV: You mention that you wanted to mimic the modern attention economy with the QR codes. Do you think that helps the readers visualize this very specific time and context of Hong Kong?

SK: I definitely think so. The form of the novel is a product of this age of platform economics, attention economics, and algorithmic commodification. 

You see what’s in Glue’s algorithm by scanning the QR codes, right? It captures how it feels to be in this time, where attention is short, attention is split, attention is not very much on the self. That’s why it’s in a third-person narration, because Glue doesn’t know what’s happening to him. A narrator needs to tell the reader what is happening to Glue. 

There’s also this distance between event, affect, and self-awareness that exists within the novel’s perspective. There are many things that Glue could have done differently, but in this time and in this story, that’s not what happens.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.