City Like Water by Dorothy Tse

A Review

🎧 Paired Listening — Insomniac by Memo Boy & Chakra Efendi 

🌊 Acqua Alta Rating — +100 cm (boots on!) 

📖 Read during high tide in San Marco 

It's horrifying to watch a place you called home erode in slow motion until one day the map stops matching the ground it claims to show. Dorothy Tse catapults this horror across nineteen feverish chapters. An unnamed narrator tries to keep the city and their family together but everything keeps wiggling out of place. That effort itself becomes the plot. It does not require living in a city built on water, or a city heavily policed, to recognize the particular kind of sinking Tse expounds here.

The novel's genius is in how literally it treats its own metaphors. The narrator's mother joins a protest against counterfeit food and is turned, alongside the other women, into a statue by police intervention, a punishment rendered as fact rather than symbol. The father does not simply withdraw emotionally after this, he is physically absorbed into the enormous state issued television gifted to the household, visible afterward only as a silent extra in the background of a soap opera. Tse does not allow the reader any difference between the real and surreal. That refusal leads the reader to an understanding: under enough pressure, any distinction or discerning feature to orient ourselves collapses entirely.

What lingers most is the sister, who is an absence, a haunting that the narrator circles. Her disappearance is never explained and never needs to be. Tse writes loss as a texture rather than an event. The narrator admits early on that recollection here works more like a kaleidoscope than a record. The effect is spooky. Belief in the narrator's clarity fades, and then belief in anyone in the book seeing clearly fades too.

City Like Water succeeds because it never lets the reader off the hook with a stable setting to hide behind. The city is never named, which means it could be Hong Kong and it could be anywhere power has learned to rename its own violence. Tse's subject is what survives in our collective once the physical place is gone.