Curiosity under censorship

Notes from: City Like Water by Dorothy Tse…

Notes from novels are my personal approach to book reviews, based on close reading of quotes and critical articles. I pull out the lines I underlined while reading and use them as jumping-off points to explore what made a book stick with me. Sometimes there’s a clear theme; other times I just follow where the quotes take me.

This Week: City Like Water, Dorothy Tse

Tse is an author from Hong Kong, and you are aware of this when reading City Like Water, but the place is never named. It could be Hong Kong. It could also be your city or mine.

The language flows poetically as it describes dirt, grime and rot. Who knew dust could be so poetic. Pretty much every page of this novella had something underlined.

I cannot say exactly what was happening at any given moment. It read like a fever dream, the narrator’s paranoia becoming your own, the line between dream and reality dissolving almost immediately. The simile in the title is probably a giveaway for that. At first you think the city has sunk and you are reading a climate novel, but then you find yourself back on land again. The narrative refuses to stabilise, which mirrors precisely the political instability it is commenting on. You can grasp the political commentary even when the literal events remain slippery. The scenes with the police were the most potent for me.

Today I want to stay with the novel’s thinking on passivity and the absence of curiosity.

“You’ve probably heard the story of Bluebeard, but I’m telling you, in real life people just aren’t that curious. Why would they be? They’re staying in this gorgeous hotel. Every day there’s another amazing banquet for them to feast on. Why would they care about the one or two rooms they’re not allowed to enter?”

In the original Bluebeard story, his wife is given access to everything except one forbidden room. The prohibition creates desire. She wants to know what is hidden there, much like the story of the Fall in the Bible. When she opens the door, violence is revealed beneath luxury and privilege.

What Tse is suggesting here is that people no longer have that impulse. If you are comfortable, if your needs are met and you are surrounded by abundance, you have little interest in what is being concealed from you. Material satisfaction dulls the pursuit of knowledge.

Given the novel’s dystopian register and its political undertones, this feels like a pointed observation about complacency. People will tolerate what is happening in the background so long as their immediate needs are satisfied. Hidden injustices, uncomfortable truths, private corridors of power from which ordinary people are excluded: none of it matters if the banquet keeps arriving.

Is Tse blaming ordinary people for this? I do not think so. She is pointing upwards. What is the role of capitalist institutions in keeping us fed and distracted precisely so we do not look at what is behind the door?

“I didn’t dare ask questions. Nor did I trust the news to divulge any meaningful information.”

There is a painful juxtaposition here. The narrator knows the information she is being given is not truthful, but she cannot seek the truth either. The word dare is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Asking a question is no longer a ordinary linguistic act but something that requires courage, something that exists under the shadow of censorship.

Curiosity and the freedom to ask questions are modes of liberty. What happens when you lose the autonomy to exercise them? You float in a kind of limbo, unable to ask and unable to believe. Neither here nor there.

“They say the main difference between a person and a thing is that the latter can only be defined by actions of the former.”

This follows directly from the above. If you cannot ask questions, you cease to be a person in any meaningful sense and become a thing. In both political and psychological terms, humans are turned into objects when institutions or individuals treat them as such: workers reduced to productivity, women reduced to bodies, colonised people reduced to resources. Once you are defined only by external actions, your inner life disappears.

There is a philosophical challenge to this, of course. Objects have intrinsic properties independent of us, and identity is never purely self made. We are relational beings, as Aristotle observed. But taken in the context of the novel, the point lands: internal life has been diminished, perhaps beyond recovery.

“My memories fracture and shift, as if viewed through a kaleidoscope.”

The kaleidoscope as a metaphor for unstable memory is not new, but Tse uses it precisely. The narrator’s memories are not simply fragmented, they are mobile, forming new arrangements, warping into different truths. It is not that the pieces have been lost but that they will not hold still.

And because memory underpins identity, a fractured memory means a fractured self. Which, in a novel about political erasure and the dissolution of the individual, feels like exactly the point.