An author, a cat, and life (and death) in a half eclipsed city.

In this collection of essays, Hong Kong novelist Hon Lai Chu writes about life in an age of pandemic and growing political oppression. After Hong Kong’s massive protests against the government’s ongoing violating human rights in 2019, the outbreak of pandemic in 2020 followed by the passing of a more severe Hong Kong National Security Law and the imprisoning of many opposition leaders, all continuously threatens to quiet down the city’s urge for democracy.

For a book about life in a circumstances of political oppression and modern tyranny, Half Eclipse is untypical for its deep speculation. Life in quarantine, daily experience of shrinking civil rights, hearing about suspicious judicial sentencing and even unnatural deaths without explanations, makes Hon Lai Chu embark on a journey of deep thoughts. She writes about life and death, hope and despair, she often spots on the most trivial signs of violence and cruelty that tend to be overlooked or concealed in order to give way to efficiency. Her observation of tyranny is from the smallest things.

In the midst of everyday happenings of unfair trial and unnatural deaths, her life goes on. She lives a simple life with a cat named Ginkgo (白果). Being highly sensitive to what the political authority and capitalist economy are trying to impose, she keeps her distance, saves her energy, protects herself from fear. She writes about how she takes care of everyday life, watering plants, tasting food, feeling the midday warmth, keep feeling, and building her own sense of certainty, while living in a city where safety and certainty is being lost. Her journey is first of all an inward one, speculating on herself, tacking her own fear, unraveling past memories of anger and lost, before it turns outwards, to resonate with universal humanity.

As the Taiwanese author and literature professor Yan Shuxia (言叔夏) says, “The difficulty and rarity about Half Eclipse is that, being in the face of ‘tyranny’, she looks first back inward to gaze at her own ‘self’, before gazing at ‘others’.” “Both Darkness under the Sun and Half Eclipse, in their diary-like style, seem to be dressing directly ‘live on the site,’ but what they are actually dealing with, is the multiple layers of relationships between a person and Time, between a person and History, and between a person and “this moment” that they are currently in.” Philosophy scholar Liu Canglong (劉滄龍) also comments, “Literature written in diary style is often full of private emotions and self-exposures, however, the personal feelings in Darkness under the Sun not only have a great public significance, but also full in power of description.”

Hon Lai Chu is born in Hong Kong. An acclaimed novelist, she was awarded Artist of the Year 2018 by Hong Kong Arts Development Awards. Started writing in her teens, she is now author of twelve books. In 2020 her diary-style non-fiction work Darkness under the Sun won TiBE grand award, the book is widely read by Chinese readers across Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, Malaysia and worldwide. Half Eclipse, published in 2021, also receives great reviews and resonate deeply with its readers. In an age when we may all be closer than we knew to abyss and chaos, when peace and certainty can be lost to violence and oppression at any moment, Half Eclipse is the story of us all.