ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the urban space of Hong Kong’s public housing via Yeung Hok-Tat’s 2002 graphic novel How Blue Was My Valley. Set in the 1970s, the graphic novel’s panoply of characters and intersecting storylines chronicle the experience of residents living in Lam Tin Housing Estate, one of the first public housing projects in the territory. Moving beyond conventional narratives of nostalgia and loss associated with urban development, this chapter analyzes the architecture of the page in comics - the creative and deliberate use of frames, gutters, and closure - to both critique urban form and foreground the reader’s interaction with the spatiality of the page so as to bring a participatory politics to urban literary studies. Specifically, this chapter explores public housing and high-density living from the point of view of the urban child, a key figure in the graphic novel. Tracing of the mobility of the urban child through the spaces of the housing estate and across the graphic novel’s pages provides insight into how children colonize and thus challenge the definition of “public” space, even as they are omitted from regulatory frameworks imposed by urban planners.
