57 © The Author(s) 2019 K.-C. Lo, J. Yeung (eds.), Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6685-7_4 CHAPTER 4 Recognition, Reinhabitation, and Recreation: Engaging Nature in Hong Kong Literature Enoch Yee-Lok Tam In discussions about the early works in Hong Kong literature that engage the idea of nature, most critics celebrate the reimagination of the “lost homeland” through depictions of nature by the southbound writers of the 1950s and 1960s. These are the generation of writers who, after the estab- lishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, fed mainland China to Hong Kong to escape the communist rule and to search for political security. Their removal from their homeland has engendered in them a sense of alienation in their lives in Hong Kong. 1 They depicted the beauty of pastoral countryside in the north (to Hong Kong) as compensation for their loss on the one hand, and to counteract what they considered deca- dence in the way of life in Hong Kong. 2 Writers such as Li Huiying, Li Kuang, Yi Junzuo, and Sima Changfeng have all depicted nature in two similar ways in order to express their sense of spatial and cultural displacement, and to show their nostalgia for their homeland: frst, nature being a hostile entity; second, nature as an agent of invocation of pastoral beauty. The frst image of nature functions as a trope for the destructive E. Y.-L. Tam (*) Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong e-mail: enochtam@hkbu.edu.hk