Fiction After Protest: Hong Kong, Memory, and Translation in Everyday Movement

Join the Center for Asia Pacific Studies for a conversation with author Gigi Leung and translator Jennifer Feeley about Leung’s book, Everyday Movement. 

In Everyday Movement, Leung turns the aftermath of the 2019 Hong Kong protests into fiction, tracing how 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 carrying on. 

Together, Leung and Feeley will explore the responsibility of carrying Hong Kong stories across languages, the challenges of translating Cantonese-inflected Chinese into English, and the role of fiction in preserving memory when public narratives are contested or suppressed.

Speaker Bios:

Gigi Leung 
Writer & Author of Everyday Movement
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.

Jennifer Feeley 
Literary Translator & Translator of Everyday Movement
Jennifer Feeley is an award-winning translator of Chinese literature. Her recent translations include 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; Lau Yee-Wa’ Tongueless; 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. Feeley is 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.