Book Talk.
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
1:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Bunche Hall 10383
What happens after a protest movement enters the everyday? How do political rupture, surveillance, fear, migration, and grief reshape ordinary relationships—between parents and children, lovers, friends, teachers, students, and strangers?
In Everyday Movement, Hong Kong writer Gigi Leung Lee-Chi turns the aftermath of the 2019 Hong Kong protests into fiction, tracing how historical crisis enters domestic life, private memory, language, and the body. Rather than presenting protest only through scenes of public confrontation, the stories attend to what remains afterward: suspicion, silence, displacement, anger, tenderness, and the difficulty of continuing to live.
This event will bring together author Gigi Leung Lee-Chi and translator Jennifer Feeley for a conversation on fiction, translation, and the responsibility of carrying Hong Kong stories across languages. Possible topics include protest literature, the relationship between Hong Kong and Taiwanese literary contexts, the challenges of translating Cantonese-inflected Chinese into English, and the role of fiction in preserving memory when public narratives are contested or suppressed.
Everyday Movement is a novel by Hong Kong writer Gigi Leung Lee-Chi, translated into English by Jennifer Feeley and published by Riverhead Books. Set in and around the aftermath of the Hong Kong protests, the collection explores how authoritarian pressure, migration, political disappointment, and collective trauma enter the most intimate spaces of daily life.
Rather than offering a single heroic account of resistance, the book follows multiple characters as they struggle with fear, loyalty, exhaustion, anger, and memory. Through fragmented perspectives and ordinary scenes, Everyday Movement asks what it means to live after a movement, and what fiction can preserve when history itself becomes unstable.
About the Author:
Gigi Leung is a novelist and poet from Hong Kong who now lives in Taipei. She is the author of The Melancholy of Trees and Everyday Movement, both originally written and published in Chinese. The English edition of Everyday Movement, translated by Jennifer Feeley, was published by Riverhead Books in February 2026. Her work has received major literary honors, including the Golden Tripod Award for Literature and the TSMC Literary Award, and was also a finalist for the Taipei Literary Award.
About the Translator:
Jennifer Feeley is the award-winning translator of Gigi L. Leung’s Everyday Movement; Xi Xi’s Mourning a Breast, Not Written Words: Selected Poetry of Xi Xi, and Carnival of Animals: Xi Xi’s Animal Poems; Tongueless by Lau Yee-Wa; Chen Jiatong’s White Fox series; and Wong Yi’s Cantonese chamber opera libretto Women Like Us. She is currently working on a new translation of Xi Xi’s My City, along with Gigi L. Leung’s The Melancholy of Trees. The recipient of the 2017 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship, she holds a PhD from Yale University.
Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies