Placelessness and the Unhomely: Spatial Displacement in P.K. Leung's Postcolonial Poetry

This essay examines how P.K. Leung’s postcolonial poetry represents Hong Kong as a space of placelessness and unhomeliness under colonial and postcolonial conditions. Focusing on “Old Colonial Building” and “Looking for the Landlord Uncle Jin Shui in a Valley,” the essay analyzes how Leung constructs displacement across two interconnected spatial scales: the public cityscape and the private home.

Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, as well as critical ideas of placelessness and the architectural uncanny, the essay argues that colonial power reshapes Hong Kong’s urban environment into a space of hierarchy, surveillance, and estrangement. In “Old Colonial Building,” the colonial rotunda, hollow corridors, blocked places, and ordinary streets reveal a vertical structure of power that separates official architecture from local lived experience. Through imagery, enjambment, and spatial descent, the poem critiques the colonial city as a landscape where belonging becomes fragmented and unstable.

The essay then turns to “Looking for the Landlord Uncle Jin Shui in a Valley” to explore displacement at the domestic level. Here, abandoned homes, locked doors, broken furniture, and overgrown landscapes transform the family house into an unhomely space. Rather than offering intimacy or rootedness, the home becomes a site of absence, decay, and alienation. By reading these two poems together, the essay shows that Leung’s poetry presents Hong Kong’s postcolonial condition as a crisis of belonging that extends from public architecture to private memory. Ultimately, the essay argues that “home” becomes impossible when both the city and the domestic sphere are shaped by colonial rupture, modernization, and spatial dislocation.