Flying Felt

Flying Felt is a representative novel by the Hong Kong writer Xi Xi, first published in 1996 and winner of the third World Chinese Literature Award (2005), organized by Sin Chew Daily. Set in the fictional seaside town of Fat Land, the novel uses the rise and fall of three generations of the Fa family as its thread to unfold the century-long history of everyday life in a city: the Fa family of Shun Kee, who deal in Dutch water; the Yip family, who run a rosewood shop; the elderly Chen couple, who sell lotus-seed tea; the Axe Party men, who fight fires and disasters for their neighbors; and a cat that dips its tail into a fish tank to fish—together they form a finely detailed and warmly humane picture of street life. The most famous passage in the book is when Fa Li Ba Ba discovers in the attic an old carpet whose fringe moves of its own accord—it turns out to be a flying felt, and one must let it out to fly often or one's mood will suffer. So at midnight he leads the sleepwalking Fa Yan Yan onto the flying felt, and they skim over the countless lights of Fat Land. On the map, Fat Land is as small as a doormat at the gate of a great nation, yet a doormat can also fly, and a flying felt may not be unable to turn back into a doormat. With a tone as innocent and curious as a fairy tale, and a technique that interweaves magical realism with realism, Xi Xi dilutes heavy history into geography, custom, and human feeling, earning the description "an encyclopedic Hong Kong, a fairy-tale Hong Kong." Nearly five hundred pages long, the book was issued in simplified Chinese in 2016 in the Guangxi Normal University Press "Imaginist · Xi Xi Works" series.