Growing Up in an Age of Turbulence: The Bildungsromane of Young Hong Kong Writers in the Sixties

The stories compiled in the Hong Kong short story collection Young Writers’ Fictions (新人小說選, 1967) were selected from the magazine Chinese Student Weekly and published in book form by the Union Press, an organization funded by the USA during the Cold War. This chapter argues that the collection exemplifies how ideological control does not necessarily wholly sublimate creative freedom. Hong Kong’s social instability at that time was the all-important backdrop against which the writers pondered colonialism and nationalism with a critical eye. By borrowing the concept of the Bildungsroman, this article will contemplate Bildung from two aspects: the Bildung of the characters and that of the young city of Hong Kong.