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Paul Clinton Corrigan talks with Sonia Leung about her defiant memoir.

Sonia Leung, The Girl Who Dreamed: A Hong Kong Memoir of Triumph Against the Odds (Blacksmith Books, 2024), 294pp.

On the face of it, the title of Sonia Leung’s new book suggests that her dreams were something like aspirations – something that she was able to achieve despite the barriers that she encountered in the first few decades of her life. In addition to such ‘aspiration’, though, another face of her dreams can be understood by looking at the familial relationships of the word itself and how its DNA mutated during the violent Norse invasions of Britain. Even if taking place outside of the strict etymologies of the terms, there is an interesting relationship to explore between the modern English word ‘dream’ (traum in standard German) and ‘trauma’ – which Leung also weaves into her memoir. Here, then, the shape of the narrative structure that makes The Girl Who Dreamed such a compelling read: a double helix of trauma and aspiration, linked by base pairs of lived experience and metacognitive reflection.

Skipping the table of contents, I dove into the first chapter of the memoir in the same way that I would a novel. My intention was to allow for surprise in the same way that Leung had in her narrative – for none can say in advance what experiences their life has in store for them. At times I found myself wondering how she had endured such struggles, and at other times I was encouraged by the sheer boldness of her actions. Her poetic instincts come through in many sections of the book where her flair for description and her connections with classical literature are on display. With its carefully crafted prose and its themes of perseverance, gender inequality, sexual violence, alienation, economic deprivation, and ultimately triumph, Leung has made an important contribution to the Hong Kong story. In May, we sat down to talk about her new book.

Paul Clinton Corrigan: Where and when did the idea for the book come from?

Sonia Leung: In 2014, when I learned from Xu Xi about the MFA programme at City University of Hong Kong, I wrote the first twenty pages of this book. I submitted some of the excerpts to US and UK literary journals and got six of them published. The team at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival loved my book and pushed to have it published during the festival, and we did, on the ninth of March [2024].

PCC: Can you talk a bit about this theme of ‘living through fiction’, which seems so prevalent in your work?

SL: The title of the book, The Girl Who Dreamed, the ‘dream’ comes from the book The Dream of the Red Chamber. You identify with different characters, and also with popular or romantic books like Outside the Window or the song The Olive Tree. So being in your narrow, sorrowful world, these novels, this fiction, these songs, they invite you [to] a different place where possibilities exist. It’s not just your outer world you explore and pursue, but also internally your heart and your mind so that you can accept diversity and possibility. As Walt Whitman says, ‘I contain multitudes.’ You are part of something bigger than your current world trying to suppress you. There’s the other side that you can go to. Books saved me.

PCC: Can you talk about persona and which memoirs you feel might have influenced you, not just in terms of voice, but also the content you wanted to select and include in the book?

SL: There are two ‘I’s in the memoir: the ‘I’ at that time, when you were young, maybe thirteen, and the ‘I’ of you the writer now, maybe thirty. There is the voice of writing, a point of view, the persona. The book has two voices: the young one tells what happens and the older one reflects on why this incident means something to you.

For example, I wrote about when I was five or six years old, we had this Moon Festival. So, there is the younger one telling you where I was, and the older one telling you what it meant. It meant that my family seems to be in perfect harmony, and that was my dream, to be seen and so pure and right and harmonious with my family and environment and knowing where I belong.

After reading Wild Swans by Jung Chang, I got the idea that Chinese women’s lives matter. Before her book, there were really not many books from Chinese women writing about Chinese women’s lives. So, her book really showed me, and the world, that it matters, that we matter. Her book was the first to tell that, yes, we should tell our stories, too. Our stories have value.

I also read Because I remember terror, Father, I remember you by Sue William Silverman. Her father raped her for over ten years. Her memoir, as much horror as it has, is beautifully written. It’s very poetic. And so from there I got the idea that I don’t need to write about horrible stuff horribly. I can render it artistically so that people can endure it and read it and understand what it was like to be like us, broken people trying to piece it together.

And then the other memoir, of course, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou. Again, it’s poetically written and well-received. Wild Swans, as much as it’s well-received, is more horizontal, only one level. I wanted to develop further and really dig into my psyche. A memoir delves deeper into the psyche, goes to the dark places, helps people see what it’s like, and then come out a bit wiser. I hope not sympathy, but empathy, will come out from the reading.

PCC: In Chinese literature there is this reverence towards nature and what it tells us about the human condition as well. I see all of these natural references in your work.

SL: What state of emotion you are in reflects on what you see. The same blue sky – what you see and what I see, when I feel happy or sad, then we see it differently. When you write about that, you also reflect your internal world. That’s why there’s this scene where I was in the construction site under the moon – the ‘Moon in a Dog’s Eyes’ chapter. The writer needed to show people the world of the ‘unspoken’ fifteen-year-old girl, how she felt but couldn’t tell. So, the writer showed people what was in the construction site, what she saw, the cigarette butts, the broken things in there. That particular scene is to show you the external world in order to show you the internal world of the girl.

PCC: Can you talk about some of the struggles depicted in the memoir and how you hoped to articulate them in your book?

SL: I think the big question for a memoir to work is “How did I become me?” So, I reconstruct things.

Let’s tackle the elephant in the room. The sexual assault scene is very violent and also detailed. It is a difficult read but I really wanted to bring the reader there and understand what it was like to be dehumanized. I wanted people to visualize it because when you can see it, it matters more to you than the words itself. I wrote it so that the victim has a voice. By voicing it, I take the narrative back, so that, yes, I feel empowered. And so I want – I hope – other victims to read it to know that they can also voice it.

As Maya Angelou writes, the biggest tragedy is that you cannot tell others what you suffered. When you have a cancer, you need to go and see a doctor. But a lot of people think that ‘Oh, the depression, the post-traumatic trauma. That happens so often, just live with it.’ I think the first step is to know that you are not alone. And when you know that you are not alone, you gradually will gain power and just like me, I’m writing it and you’re reading it and we are there together.

I also wrote about the difficult family scenes, as an impoverished immigrant family. The Hong Kong story never really includes [that]. I’m from Mainland China, and struggled through, impoverished, and our parents lost their privileged jobs in order for us to have more opportunity. Yes, we are economic immigrants but still it doesn’t mean that we need to suffer alone and quietly. Our voices matter and I think that this story also needs to be told. I wanted to bring you there.

PCC: Can you talk about some of those unique aspects as an immigrant essentially from one part of China to another part of China and how that’s contributing something new to the memoir genre?

SL: Back in the ’80s we were still the British colony of Hong Kong. I mention in my book that there was this hierarchy in Hong Kong where the white Westerners – the British were on the top – then the Eurasians, then maybe Cantonese immigrants, then the rest of the Mainland Chinese immigrants, and the Filipinos, Indonesians, and the poor of South Asian countries. With this kind of hierarchical structure, when I first arrived, I think I experienced more discrimination from the locals, from the Cantonese people, because we didn’t speak Cantonese, we spoke Hokkien. Even these days, Cantonese people ask me, ‘You are not local, are you?’ It’s that obvious. So, I think language discriminates. That was my firsthand difficulty rather than colonial, etc.

Because I’m a woman and not a Westerner or foreigner, I did not get the proper office space, even though I was in a managerial position like the man before me. I had to sit with the other clerical workers and secretaries.

PCC: How [else] is your memoir contributing something unique to the memoir genre?

SL: Many critics frequently belittle the entire genre of memoir, especially books by women, by labelling memoirs as ‘confessional’. I wanted to redeem the notion of ‘confession’ for everyone who went through hard times and wished to write about them candidly.

I want to speak to the fact that ‘confessional’ is courageous. It’s not laying everything out there and seeking sympathy. You confess. You go to the depths of your pain. A lot of people would call it a ‘misery memoir.’ Why is it that some middle-aged people talk about how empty their life is, why is it that can be in the literary world as literature but why someone from a lower class, and talking about the difficulty they went through – then it’s a ‘commiseration memoir’? You know, it’s so unfair, the whole thing. I want to say that, yes, I went through this sexual assault brutally but it didn’t stop me. I still needed to heal myself, in part through the books that I mentioned before. I wanted the world to know that our story matters, this is worth telling. It is OK for you to voice your hardship and to articulate it into an art. So, The Girl Who Dreamed is a love letter that came from my heart. It is my love song to the marginalized people, the wounded souls, and everyone who cares.

Paul Clinton Corrigan lives in Hong Kong. He has taught undergraduates and research students at the same university for more than 25 years, where he also provides faculty development. He has published in the areas of teaching, literature, and writing, and is an associate editor of Asian ESP Journal.

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