Headspace: A series in which teaching staff and students from the English Department write about a place or space they go to write, read, study or create. [Read all entries.]  [Revisit the “Ongoing” series.] [Revisit the “Interrogative” series.]

I am not sure if I have a place to write.

Most of the time, I think I am inside a place. Sometimes, I think there is a place inside me.

I keep wanting to make sense of the place with me inside: the reality starts to break with the unreality. I keep working to make sense of the place inside me: the unreality starts to build like the reality.

Sometimes, I think I understand what I am writing. Most of the time, I think I don’t.

I am not sure whether I am writing in a place or writing a place.

[Editor’s note: Charmaine’s Honours Project is The Representation of ‘Nonplace’: Dung Kai-Cheung’s Atlas: The Archeology of an Imaginary City and Xi Xi’s Marvels of a Floating City, which appropriates the idea of ‘nonplace’ (as opposed to the more common utopia, ‘no place’, or dystopia) to interpret the unconventional representations of ‘Victoria’ and the ‘floating city’ in Dung’s and Xi Xi’s texts (the former disguised as archaeological scholarship and the latter expressed in the form of surrealist fiction).]

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Chau Cheuk Man Charmaine is a graduate of the Department of English and Department of Education (Class of 2016).