In City Like Water, the Hong Kong writer Dorothy Tse depicts a hallucinatory metropolis in decline, with “some schools…abandoned completely, becoming cavernous cemeteries of public life,” and so many “cause-of-death-unknown corpses” that students are made to sign an official statement: “I promise that I’m happy. I promise not to kill myself.” The unnamed and featureless narrator, perched precariously on a rooftop, describes the residents’ discombobulation: “I couldn’t resist turning to look, and that’s when I realized the city I thought I knew had been switched for a different version of itself.” The narrative emerges as a series of phantasmagorical vignettes, in chapters whose titles largely correspond to the stages of the 2019 Hong Kong protest movement. That June more than one million people took to the streets to demonstrate against proposed extradition legislation that they believed would undermine the territory’s autonomy from Beijing. Months of unrest followed, including pitched battles between protesters throwing Molotov cocktails and authorities responding with tear gas, batons, and rubber bullets. In the ensuing crackdown, more than 10,000 people were arrested …