The Yellow Chair
Photo by Jelleke Vanooteghem on Unsplash In “The Yellow Chair,” first published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 2022, Madeleine Slavick returns to Hong Kong amid the coronavirus pandemic to stand in solidarity with those protesting against China’s encroachment upon the city’s autonomy.
In a meditative voice, Slavick intertwines the hope and the despair that she encounters upon her return. Different colors, literary forms, and environmental elements are juxtaposed both to catalog and to challenge the state’s violence against its people. The text mixes images in blue, symbolic of the brutal police force, with images of yellow, the color of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, and the prose sparks into poetry that reads like a code language of dissent. Hong Kong earth is offered as an antidote to the claustrophobia induced by the state’s architecture of surveillance, and the white spaces left around italicized words punctuate the inventory of loss.
“The Yellow Chair” is a hybrid text which exhibits the pliability of the essay form. Slavick has created a textual filigree of personal and political themes to register her protest against the gradual erosion of civil liberties in a city morphing into a police state.
— Raaza Jamshed for Guernica Global Spotlights
There are twenty-two of us on the plane from Auckland to Hong Kong and about 350 empty seats. I sleep across five. We depart at night and arrive at night.
I talk with one person in the boarding area, ask about my hometown. The heavyset man tells me he lives in my old neighborhood of Tai Hang — his flat is in one of the new high-rises; mine was a tong lau, a low-rise walk-up.
Yes, he assures me, the congee shop is still there.
I smile, glad I’ll be able to see the family who owns that shop, my old neighbors.
“What does it feel like to live in Hong Kong these days?”
“Oh, a mess, but it doesn’t really affect me; I am not going to overthrow the Chinese government.”
“File in order. File in order.”
It’s past midnight when the flight arrives at a near-empty airport, and our group makes its way through makeshift corridors of quarantine control, with several documentation
