The Moon Represents My Heart, the debut novel of Thai-Chinese author Pim Wangtechawat, is not an ordinary book. Let’s say from the very beginning that it is not a recommended read for those who wish to dip into a conventional plot: here, everything is poetic, but nothing is linear.
From the very first page we find ourselves following a family of time travellers, surnamed Wang, but we cannot truly follow them to the end of their adventures. Some of them get totally lost in time, never to be seen again, at least not by their contemporaries. And the stories of everyone else populating this inventive novel whirl around the way in which time and space mean something completely different to them than it does to most of us.
Time travel is addictive and bewitching. Those who experience it in this novel discover the impossibility of fully reuniting with their pre-time-travel selves, and, to an extent, with anybody else around them who is not endowed with the gift of skipping from one decade to another. But one thing that does unite both the Wangs and most of those they live with, and which sets this book apart from other time-travelling stories, is Hong Kong. The people we encounter on these pages are four generations, across two family lines, that constantly merge into each other, as each generation has the power to revisit the past (albeit mostly limited to the 20th century) and see themselves, their parents and their grandparents at different stages of their lives.
The space in which this happens shifts from the dark corridors and pulsing humanity of the Kowloon Walled City, to the diasporic lives of the families’ descendants, some of whom have moved to London while carrying deep within themselves the Walled City, Hong Kong, Cantonese, southern Chinese foodways and a sense of the history that has shaped their hometown.
The eternal Walled City
It is quite remarkable to see how deeply the Walled City has remained anchored in Hong Kong’s imagination. More than 30 years after it was demolished, there are still stories narrated by those who experienced the Walled City, photographs created by people who visited it, and reconstructions like those found in the horror game Welcome to Kowloon and in the recent box office hit Twilight of the Warriors.
In Wangtechawat’s novel, the Walled City acts as a unifying theme that ties together all the protagonists that inhabit the book through different time periods. And it acts as a metaphor for everything that lies hidden in the past of any family – a universe as complex, multiple and chaotic as the Walled City was. Whether we are following the adventures of Mary and Yan, their grandchildren Lily and Joshua, their great-grandchildren Tommy and Eva, or the generation in between of Carol and Henry, the past is a force that pulls them in and spits them out transfigured.
It may not have been necessarily true for those who lived in the Walled City themselves, but the vision most of us today have of that overcrowded, extra-legal space is probably close to this description: people were pulled into the Walled City in search of cheap lodgings and a job, or to run away from the law, or would be trapped in by drug addiction, and emerge from it with a different worldview and the staunch determination of getting themselves to a better place.
A soundtrack by Teresa Tang
Wangtechawat, who was born in Thailand to a Thai mother and a Chinese father, grew up with an unusual familiarity with the Walled City thanks to her father, who worked there for a few years helping heroin addicts kick their habit. But her book is also a fantastic exploration of family lore. Even if she doesn’t explicitly say which stories come from tales she has heard around the family table and which ones are a product of her own imagination, as we read in the dedication of The Moon Represents My Heart the book is “for my father and grandfathers, who gifted me this story, and for my mother and grandmothers, who gave me its wings.” Time traveling, in this context, is akin to flying, or, at times, falling.
The book’s title is taken from one of Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng Li-chun’s most famous songs, “The Chinese Nightingale,” an impossibly romantic and catchy love ballad recorded in 1977. The song is still one of the most popular in the Chinese-speaking world. (Teng’s untimely death in Thailand in 1995, at the age of 42, has made her into an eternal star, one who remains forever young in the eyes of her numerous fans.) It acts as a sort of musical background to the novel, providing yet another common thread that links these disparate lives – much as it does for the whole Chinese diaspora. In 2010, a bronze statue of Teng was unveiled in 2010 in Hong Kong, and another In Shanghai, while a whole park in Taiwan is dedicated to Teng. Even the Paris suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine has a rue Teresa Teng, named in 2022.
“The inclusion of Teresa Teng’s music came from one of my core childhood memories: listening to music in the car with my parents as we take my grandparents to dinner,” writes Wangtechawat by email. “Teresa was a singer whose music every generation of my family knew and loved, from myself to my father, to my grandfather.”
A book’s title is never accidental, and in this case it also links the author’s background in a Chinese-Thai diasporic family to the tragic fate of Teng, who died in the country where Wangtechawat was born. “One of the most rewarding things that have come out of this title is getting the chance to meet readers from all around the world who are part of the Chinese diaspora, telling me how much they love this song and sharing specific memories they’ve shared with family members,” writes Wangtechawat. “Like, “This was my father’s favourite song,” or “I just did karaoke with my mum to this song.” I find it so beautiful that no matter where we are in the world, or where we’ve been raised, this song — and by extension, Teresa’s music — is a cultural connecting point that brings us all together.”
A Netflix adaptation
Our imagination may soon be given a hand by Netflix and Chinese-British actor Gemma Chan (made into a household name by her lead role in Crazy Rich Asians), as the novel has been optioned for a cinematic adaptation with Chan as both actor and producer, which may give us a chance to see yet another incarnation of the fabled Walled City.
But for now, the notion of time, a turbulent past made of constant migrations, the musical score of Teresa Teng, the Walled City, and the impossibility of severing family ties, even after death separate us: all of this makes Wangtechawat’s novel a particularly unusual, yet fitting, Hong Kong book. It leads the reader to its last page with a stubborn desire to narrate and uncover the poetic in every moment, while refusing to provide clear answers – those are for us to imagine.
Meet Pim Wangtechawat at the Hong kong International Literary Festival .