At City University not only will you have the opportunity to explore and express your ideas through a variety of creative mediums, but you’ll also have the chance to contribute, or indeed edit, our collection of the best undergraduate writing, in Halfway Home. Published regularly since 2011, Halfway Home is a student edited journal, featuring poetry, essay, fiction and creative non fiction from students and teachers.
13 issues have been published under the collection of Halfway Home:
Halfway Home: Tales for Hong Kong Children and Young Adults showcases the creative potential in the imaginations of the city’s younger writers. All the poems and stories in this collection were written within a ten-week creative writing seminar that wove genre and psychoanalytic theories together with a broad range of readings of such tales across diverse historical, national, and even civilizational literary and multi-media domains. The authors are chiefly Hong-Kong-born, but they include international students, and for all of them English is a second language. Despite their perhaps more-than-usual struggle to find the best words in the best order, their imaginations blaze brightly and their voices sound clear and lively in these poems and stories. The collection is the first of its kind to appear from the Department of English at the City University of Hong Kong, and also in Hong Kong itself, where collections of original English-language writing for the children and young adults have been sadly missing. My hope is that the pleasure readers discover in these pages will encourage many more such collections in which Hong Kong characters, scenes, and social imaginaries cast a brilliant light on this stunningly varied paranoma of humanity.
‘Much could be said about Hong Kong as a place and as an experience, but one major dynamic of the Hong Kong throughout recent decades has been its constant change, and the astonishing speed and pace of change – economic, social, and political – that the society has experienced in recent decades….
[The] local is highlighted in a number of the stories that visit the housing estates, noddle shops, and wet markets of Kwai Chung, Ngau Tau Kok, and Wanchai, and where, more than once, there is a visible nostalgia for places already changed, already disappeared…a remarkable collection of writing, with some truly fine pieces’
This collection takes the reader on a journey through the streets and subway tunnels, the shopping arcades and dim sum restaurants of contemporary Hong Kong. It is bursting with the sounds, smells and tastes of the city and the hopes and fears, the disappointments and everyday victories of its inhabitants. It is also bursting with the talent of these young writers, who document with incredibly clarity and honesty what it's like to live in a city that seems to be in continuous transition, that seems to always be'halfway home'. These stories and poems are indisputable proof that the future of English literary writing in Hong Kong is bright indeed.
I heard a Russian saying recently, which, roughly translated was 'The man who remembers his history is blind in one eye; but the man who does not remember history is blind in both eyes.'
These stories might shed a little light on the path we have just taken, and perhaps the path ahead.
The poems and stories in this new issue of Halfway Home once again attest to the breathtaking creativity of our students (as well as the dedication of our faculty in the English Department who have worked so hard to nurture their talent). As you read these pieces, you will wonder at the humour, intelligence, inventiveness and depth of feeling exhibited by these bright young writers.
In one of her journals, Susan Sontag wrote, “Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.” We’re reminded again of love’s puzzles in this lively new edition of Halfway Home, which brings together poems, stories, and essays that are often about unrequited (and regretfully requited) love. This collection also evokes the brokenhearted from last year’s “Occupy Central with Love and Peace,” and yet the very commitment of these young writers makes one hopeful for the future.
Halfway Home showcases the work of twenty-six young writers who have chosen various forms of expression. The contributions include non-fiction, short stories, poems, reflections and travel writing. They are as diverse as an account of an adventure into Indonesia on short notice and a musing on what it means to be in your twenties. A short story about a childhood memory sends chills down the spine. A poem evokes the sights, sounds and smells of nature. Here the prose is spare and clean, there it is rich in description. For all their diversity, these texts have this in common: they are the product of creativity brought to life by their author’s engagement and embodied by their expressive abilities. They show that for these talented writers, the future is bright.
For the homebound and restless.
Home is a relative term. It can be strange to one, comfortable to another. Home can be a familiar place, where we fall into the ebb and flow of every day, where we wash afresh to start anew. Home can be a basin of life, often hides subdued hues of emotions, nudges that cry untimely out of the blue.
In its 9th edition, Halfway Home IX houses young minds that bring this intuitive, complex relationship under the home roof, assimilating the dichotomous topics of shoes and colours into their own version of Home Kong. Wherever they may take us, these are the students with exhibited ingenuity, unlimited talent, spoken selves, their words shall deserve t host in our ever-wandering minds.
Hey there, Halfway Home IX can be your resting place. Don’t walk too fast, slow down and get your shoes laced, you’re halfway home.
A world of gratefulness is the one with poems, stories and fiction about grace by the devoted secondary school students and students at City University of Hong Kong. Despite the hustle and bustle in the city, the spirit of gratefulness can be found everywhere, including young writers who share their stories with their pens of creativity and gratitude.
Welcome to Halfway Home X, the tenth edition of Halfway Home series, from the Department of English at City University of Hong Kong.
Writing serves different purposes for different people at different times. We write to communicate, to express ourselves, to tell a story, to evoke feelings or prompt thoughts or instigate reflection. Sometimes we are motivated to write less for the intended effect on our readers and more for ourselves: by setting words on a thought or a feeling or an experience, we may understand it better.
The texts in this volume were produced at a time when the writers, along with everyone else on the planet, were encountering new experiences, and ones which were difficult to fathom, on a daily basis. Some of the contributions address the adversity head-on. Others reference it obliquely, or not at all. It is hard to imagine, though, that the pandemic did not leave its mark on each of them, regardless of whether the authors used the process of writing to work through, or to escape from, the global crisis.
Every volume of Halfway Home showcases the power of writing as an expressive tool. This volume, produced against the backdrop of the events of 2020 and 2021, demonstrates the power of writing to provide some order in a chaotic world.
Nostalgia is a powerful feeling. As time continues ticking away, sometimes we need to look back and appreciate the memories.
Welcome to Halfway Home XII, and take a dive into moments of Nostalgia.
What does it mean to begin?
Do we look at our roots? Or, perhaps, something completely new?
Every story has a beginning - and in Halfway Home XIII, these writers are here to tell theirs.