When I was a child, my mom used to have me write short stories like I was training for a marathon, running endless miles around the figurative track.

Here is how it went: she would tell me to go write something, I would run off with some paper, and return with a sloppy fable about talking bears, to which she would give some vague praise and prompt me to go write another. I’m still not quite sure if her intent was to help me become a better writer, or to get me to stop pestering her for 15 minute intervals. It was probably both, but it’s something that I remain grateful for. Though that manuscript of Aesop knock-offs is now lost to time.

I’ve been deemed a “writer” for my whole life. It’s the first thing I mention when people ask me to “tell them a little bit about myself.” It’s the crux of my identity, but to be honest, I’ve never been completely assured of its meaning. A writer is not something you can finish becoming, like a runner practicing to win that one race. It’s also not something you can evaluate very easily skill-wise. I can’t track my speed or agility, and I can never really be sure if I am a “good writer.” Sure, I got high accolades from my parents and my teachers, but it was practically their jobs to be encouraging. So, really, how can you ever tell if what you’re putting down is worth anything? This question built an imprisoning sort of headspace that I caged myself into for much of my existence as a writer. I was constantly wondering the value of my work, and if it amounted at all to what the people around me were creating. Everything I made felt too derived, too underdeveloped, too forgettable.

I don’t know when exactly I started letting go of this (frankly, quite ridiculous) mentality, but I can say that my Introduction to Poetry Writing class I took two semesters ago certainly helped swing the door open. I was deeply enamored with this class; the opportunity to write poetry for critique from a group of fellow writers was incredibly valuable to me. I spent months crafting long-form narrative poems, inspired by the fairytale essence of Wilde’s The Star-Child, and brought them to class eager for feedback. But in the middle of that excitement, I felt that familiar fear crawling back: is what I’m writing good enough? Then, one of the other students in my class brought in his own narrative poem, similar in style to mine, and immediately, my brain broke out in questions like hives: Are our poems too similar? Is his better? Does mine amount to his at all?

On the last day of class, I got my answer in a way that humbled me. My professor told us about how he hoped we’d never see writing, or creating art, as a competition, and how it isn’t about being successful. As he was saying this, I almost felt embarrassed, because duh. The best part about writing is putting human experience into words, and somewhere along the line, all my anxiety had led me to have forgotten this; I had forgotten how much I enjoy just the act of writing itself, of running in laps around my mom with my fables. As long as I enjoyed the process, and if I was proud of my result, then really, that’s all that should matter. Not anyone else’s approval or anyone else’s work.

I can’t say that this epiphany has forever changed me. I still freak out over whether my metaphors are too clichéd, and I still sometimes panic over whether my work will be seen as “good” by others. But I’ve learned to stop letting those worries overtake the process, and to allow myself to enjoy what has always been one of my favorite parts of myself. So I’ll continue to write, and whether or not I’m eventually called a “good writer,” I’ll hopefully be proud of what I’ve created, and that will be enough.

Dia Manoj (she/her) is a lover of reading, writing, and coding. She is a junior at The University of Tennessee, double majoring in Computer Science and English with a concentration in Creative Writing. She has developed several software projects, including an iOS app, and loves finding ways to combine her passion for storytelling and technology. She explores this fusion through her self-built writing website, diamanoj.com. Outside of her creative endeavors, she enjoys London fogs, vampires, and pestering her loved ones. 

Looking at Hong Kong, what do you see? A city of neon lights and nightlife, one of the “Four Asian Tigers,” a place with over a century of history marked by colonial rule and war, or the birthplace of so-called Chinese culture and cinema? A jumble of terms has woven a dazzling cage around Hong Kong with language. In Xu Xi’s new book Horizon Hong Kong: Selected Stories (Gaudy Boy, 2026), she invites us to step beyond the confines of language and stereotypes, setting out from Hong Kong’s horizon to discover the real Hong Kong. This horizon does not draw on vast historical, geopolitical, or anthropological contexts; it begins with the world of real individuals, continually shifting according to who is looking, remembering, leaving, returning, or speaking–all to pose one ultimate question: Who are we, and where do we come from?

Published in 2026, Horizon Hong Kong is a collection of 22 short stories by Xu Xi, selected from five of her earlier collections. Echoing Xu Xi’s identity as an Indonesian Chinese raised in Hong Kong and writing in English, the book moves across colonial Hong Kong, the 1997 Handover, post-handover life, migration, and speculative futures, shifting major historical events toward the edges of the frame and letting private memory, family conflict, labor, desire, and loss occupy the center.

Xu Xi’s most persistent intervention is a change of scale: events that appear “historical” in retrospect are experienced by her characters through much smaller, personal dramas. Set against the 1966 Star Ferry protests, “Democracy” follows sixteen-year-old Patricia Chow through a contentious Girl Guides election, letting a schoolgirl vote echo the city’s larger uncertainties about representation and majority rule. In the story, the majority’s choice is emotional, personal, but legitimate, redefining the flat identification of “democracy.” Similarly, “Insignificant Moments in the History of Hong Kong” places the 1997 Handover of Hong Kong beside Lam Yam Kuen’s memories of his family; the fireworks marking the transfer of sovereignty occupy less narrative space than family memory, food, work, and the image of a rabbit on the moon. Interestingly, Patricia teaches 1997 in a seminar named “Significant Moments in the History of Hong Kong,” while Yam Kuen’s story is named “Insignificant Moments.” Together, they question “significant” and “history,” hollow words that appear at the horizon of the world but not at the horizon of individuals. Regimes still argue over how to write that history, but those who lived through it are captured in these “insignificant” moments, where a simple label for a piece of land was transformed into a real experience imbued with human warmth.

Horizon Hong Kong also interprets grand historical events through the eyes of the individual. Seen through nine-year-old Ai-Lin, the story “Chung King Mansion” turns Tsimshatsui and the history of the Vietnam War into a landscape of sailors, languages, family tensions, and half-understood adult sexuality. Ai-Lin is fascinated with an orange-haired sex worker but soon gives up when she encounters that woman without makeup, carrying groceries; she realizes the glamorous “lady” she imagined is no more than a girl herself. The power of her perspective lies in the gap between what she sees and what she understands; history reaches her before she possesses the language to call it history. Xu Xi employs concrete detail, those battleships, sailors’ uniforms, dyed hair, and translations between Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, to preserve Hong Kong beyond historical exposition as a sensory memory.

The final question Xu Xi addresses is how Hong Kongers view their history from their own horizon. “The 15th Annual Anniversary” follows Christopher Woo into a reunion with elite schoolmates whose successful lives contrast sharply with his own; the evening celebrates political and social succession, but Christopher’s thoughts return to the years he spent caring for his mother, turning a public anniversary into an account of private obligation, class decline, and grief. As Xu Xi writes, “It was succession, this life of the elite.” (225) Closing the collection, “TST” gives the final word to the ghost of a former bar girl from Tsimshatsu’s Seven Sisters Club, whose violent death was falsely recorded, representing a marginalized life never accepted into public history. As her world disappears, she continues telling the stories of women like herself. Storytelling does not merely supplement history; for some lives, it is the only history available.

Xu Xi’s writing technique also makes this book a richly layered reading experience. She employs a child narrator, second person, an unreliable narrator, and even a dead person, presenting a wide range of perspectives. No single voice can represent Hong Kong, so Xu Xi constantly shifts narrators, genres, registers, and settings. Hong Kong always resembles a horizon, constantly shifting, politically renamed, distanced by migration, and brought back by memory. It is never a fixed homeland nor merely a victim of colonialism or postcolonialism but is composed of many people who are contradictory and cannot even represent one another. 

Reading this book as someone who is also from Asia, uses Chinese but works in English, Horizon Hong Kong helped me reconstruct a complete and authentic picture of Hong Kong, allowing me to truly see the people behind its vast history. It also enabled me to find an answer about selfhood amidst the complexities of history, personal memory, and marginalized narratives. This is a book of portraits as inclusive and multifaceted as a prism; in its pages, you can see both Hong Kong and yourself.

“Listen, it’s never too late. Just listen.” (281)

Ziyi Zhong (she/her) is a Sundress editorial intern with a BA from McGill University and an MA from the University of Alberta, both in East Asian Studies. With a background spanning Asia and Canada, she is interested in identity, belonging, and the ways literature helps us understand ourselves and one another. For her, reading and writing have long been tools of inquiry and repair, turning difficult experience into meaning, and of connecting with others who are searching, in words, for a light of their own.