Sunset At Lion Rock

Love and loss share the same root in Sunset at Lion Rock. The narrator’s passionate, searching voice takes us through the tug-of-war of a biracial and multicultural Hong Kong native, as he navigates the pain of understanding family decisions alongside his home city’s complex history, as well as finding resolution, acceptance, and peace.

---Flora Qian, New York City, USA, author of South of the Yangtze, winner of the Proverse Prize 2022

Matthew Wong Foreman’s debut novel is an ambitious, epistolary sprawl that chronicles, protests and scrambles what a “Hong Kong novel” ought to be.  Sunset at Lion Rock is a fabulous beast of a book.  Ostensibly the saga of Eric, a Eurasian boy who looks English like Dad, lives Chinese with Mami in her multi-generational, extended-family matriarchal household where all the men have disappeared, and who must hack his way through a traumatic boyhood as an overly philosophical albeit gifted outsider in every Hong Kong world he stumbles into and fails in, whose only consolation is “talking” to his missing uncle Mikey whom he’s never really known in “letters” that unpack all his frustrations, confusions, self-loathing in a screech to the universe.  Add to that the Sisyphean yoke of pious Buddhist beliefs imposed by his mother and grandmother. His real story finally explodes on the page after one summer of an enforced stay in Buddhist camp at Lion Rock Temple from which he escapes with Eddie, sending him on a morality quest about existence, as well as racial, linguistic and gender identity. Eric’s story is in part about the missing men in his life that unfolds as a self-styled rebellion against his fate.   A notably rewarding read from an obvious talent. 

---Xu Xi 許素細 author of That Man in Our Lives, This Fish is Fowl, Monkey in Residence and Other Speculations.

Wong Foreman’s partly fictionalized novel is also a memoir. How else to reflexively sustain so much genuine suffering, passion, and sympathy in an encyclopedic work opening with a family tree and spanning—through fragments, mirages, and flashbacks—through skiving and scars and scandals—four generations? Like 2021’s Diamond Hill by Kit Fan, another debut novel where the first-person notionally Buddhist narrator too recognizes that “one does not devote oneself seriously to any religion without being damaged,” Wong Foreman masterfully entwines Cantonese into his English-language Hong Kong novel.

Critically at home in Cantonese and English, the author of Sunset at Lion Rock consequently repairs a disjunction that Hongkongers like me cannot address. Wong Foreman dwells within two oft-divergent worlds: Canto Hong Kong and Anglo Hong Kong. He’s not relegated to occupy but one of two parallel sociolinguistic tracks. As such, again like the deservedly fêted Kit Fan, Wong Foreman introduces English readers to another dimension, another metaphysic, another Hong Kong. Wong Foreman’s Hong Kong, our Hong Kong, is complexly nuanced, is existentially problematic, is much more real and multi-prismed than the English language can manage to imagine and construct. A flawed place, an ingenious place, a borrowed place, a tragic place, a magic place—an all too human, all too spirited, emporium of the past gasping through the present: Wong Foreman’s Hong Kong.

---Jason S Polley

Assoc Prof, English

Academy of Language and Culture, FASS

Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong