Where Strange Gods Call: Harry Hervey's 1920s Hong Kong, Macau and Canton Sojourns (Blacksmith Books)

Before Fu Manchu, the Dragon Lady, the Yellow Peril, and the benign cliche of Charlie Chan, there was Harry Hervey. A young prodigy who published his first piece of pulp fiction when he was sixteen and whose stories were frequently found in Black Mask magazine after his early debut, Hervey published his first novel at the age of 22. Caravans by Night: A Romance of India was followed a year later by The Black Parrot: A Tale of the Golden Chersonese and apparently gave Hervey a financial windfall that took him to the part of the world that he had profitably imagined.

In 1923, Hervey voyages to Hong Kong where he immediately begins his search for corners of that city that would be “rich in the atmosphere of Cathay.” Fortunately for him, he has a local contact, a wealthy, cultured Hong Kong resident whom he had met in New York. Chang Yuan becomes Hervey’s guide and mentor, giving him an introduction to “a race that had always seemed inscrutable to me.” Together the two explore the “nauseous effluvia” and “fetid gloom” of Chinese opera theaters, the “gorgeous wickedness” of Macau’s gambling halls, and make the acquaintance of the “queer, impassive little dolls” who sing in restaurants as wealthy gentlemen have their suppers. “It was inevitable,” Hervey says, “that we should visit an opium house,” a place he finds “as colorless as naked lust.”

In between these forays into the parts of Hong Kong that Hervey finds “very wicked and very pleasant,” Chang Yuan delivers interminable lectures on Chinese history and politics. These are so meticulously recorded that it becomes impossible to believe they’re not the puerile thoughts of Hervey himself. This theory is almost confirmed when Hervey describes Chang as “uncommunicative,” which would preclude his monologues that take up many of the pages in his Hong Kong chapters.

Without Chang Yuan’s companionship, Hervey seems daunted by Canton, which he describes as “too stupendous and too indefinite to be sheathed in words.” He certainly doesn’t explore it with the enthralled energy shown by Constance Gordon-Cumming, forty-four years earlier. However he has a focus for this visit. Fascinated by Sun Yat Sen from childhood, he manages to gain an audience with his hero, whom he terms the Doctor of Canton, a man whose “personality submerged words.” The words recorded by Hervey speak of the threats posed by Europe and Japan and of the “militarists of the North (who) wish to Prussianize China.” The interview ends with Sun Yat Sen declaring the necessities of having only one currency and one language shared by all Chinese, which Hervey later dismisses as “splendid dreams.”

This reprint of two chapters from Hervey’s Where Strange Gods Call: Pages Out of the East seems a peculiar choice for Blacksmith Book’s new series, China Revisited. Hervey’s writing can barely qualify as travel writing, steeped as it is in his fictional fantasies and thinly veiled racism. “How pleasant I was (sic) to see soldiers who were not yellow,” he gushes when passing a group of British troopers and Chang Yuan is described as “astonishingly well educated…faintly grandiose.” Not even his childhood idol escapes the snobbery of this high school-educated product of Texas, who charitably reports Sun Yat Sen’s perfect enunciation “was not surprising, as he is a college graduate.” It escapes Hervey that even the sing-song girl who entertained him with a song in Pidgin English is bilingual, which he himself, in true American fashion, probably is not.

Perhaps when all of the choices for this series of attractive little books are published, Harry Hervey, who later became a Hollywood screenwriter largely because of his presumed knowledge of Asia, will take his place among them without making readers wondering why. Let’s hope so.~Janet Brown

Wanderings in China: Hong Kong and Canton, Christmas and New Year 1878-1879 by Constance Gordon-Cumming (Blacksmith Books)

Constance Gordon-Cumming was in her fifties when she first came to Hong Kong on Christmas Day in 1878 but her reactions to this city, and later to Canton, had the enthusiasm of a young girl who had just left home for the first time.

This was far from the case. Gordon-Cumming had been a devoted traveler for twenty years, making her first overseas voyage when she entered her thirties and sailed to visit her sister in India. From there she had gone to Ceylon, Fiji, New Zealand, and Japan before she had set her sights upon China. Although at this point she had seen enough of the world to view it with a jaded vision, this wasn’t her style. An artist who had the goal of ending “never a day without at least one careful-colored sketch,” she looked at the world with hungry eyes that took note of everything she saw.

Gordon-Cumming fell in love with Hong Kong’s “steep streets of stairs” that led past “luxurious houses encircled by “camellias and roses and scarlet poinsettias.” Bamboo groves and banyan trees, the intertwining of the city’s Chinese and Portuguese areas, the piercing blue water of the surrounding harbor—”Only think what a paradise for an artist!”

Paradise went up in flames that night when Christmas festivities were interrupted by an act of arson that threatened to consume the city. Perched above the conflagration in a Mid-Level home, Gordon-Cumming watched the fire as it destroyed Chinatown and advanced upon the affluent homes of Hong Kong’s expatriates. Ten acres of the city were devastated with 400 houses gone in a single night, an unimaginable spectacle with “a horrible sort of attraction…so awful and yet so wonderfully beautiful.”

By New Year’s Day, Hong Kong’s “social treadmill” had resumed and by January 9th a short voyage takes Gordon-Cumming to Canton. There she’s met by a “resplendent palanquin” that was fit for a mandarin but lay in wait to take her to her hostess on the Western enclave of Shamian Island. Delighted by the English social life that held sway in this community, she refuses to succumb to its charms that keeps many foreign residents of Shamian from going into the heart of Canton.

Instead Gordon-Cumming submerses herself in the city’s shops and markets, on streets with names that are “touchingly allegorical”—The Street of Refreshing Breezes, The Street of One Thousand Grandsons. She’s overwhelmed by the commerce that she finds there—flowering branches for Chinese New Year, oranges that have been peeled because the peels, used for medicine, are more valuable than the fruit, ivory carvers, tallow-chandlers, vendors that sell drinking water next to porters that transport raw sewage. (Tea drinking is the pervasive custom because the water for it has been boiled, she observes.)

From there she is taken to Canton’s riverine world where a separate city exists. Families live in domestic comfort on boats, with order preserved by “water police” who are notoriously corrupt. Crafts that hold barbershops and medical clinics serve this community, along with market boats and river-borne kitchens. Floating biers carry corpses to their final destination while other vessels hold leper colonies. Gordon-Cumming, with aplomb befitting the daughter of a British baronet, finds her way to the “flower boats” that she euphemistically describes as places where dinner parties are attended by wealthy citizens who are entertained by “singing-women.”

From Canton she travels to Macau, a place she finds “most fascinating” but so “essentially un-Chinese that I have decided to omit the letters referring to it.” This decision does quite a bit to illuminate Gordon-Cumming’s character and helps to explain the decision that ended her life of travel. A year after her time in Canton, she remained aboard a ship that evacuated its passengers when it ran aground. Refusing to leave the watercolors she had painted on the voyage, she stayed with the captain until the two of them were finally brought to safety.

Did her explorations come to an end because she was unnerved by this disaster or was she blacklisted by shipping companies because she refused to take to the lifeboats when that command was given? Somehow I doubt that this conclusion to her travels was Gordon-Cumming’s idea and I’m sure she fumed over it for the rest of her life.~Janet Brown

Black Ghosts: A Journey into the Lives of Africans in China by Noo Saro-Wiwa (Canongate)

One of the more interesting and impenetrable aspects of traveling in Hong Kong and beyond are the enclaves of African men who show up and clearly know their way around. In Kowloon’s Chungking Mansions, some are asylum seekers and many more are undocumented, there for “business.” Gordon Mathews, anthropology professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and author of Ghetto at the Center of the World (Asia by the Book, June 2012) and Globalization from Below, has taught English classes in Chungking Mansions for years and has gained the confidence of many African residents of that community. Everyone else receives a polite greeting in passing, at best.

Mathews writes about the community of Africans who live in Guangzhou and when Noo Saro-Wiwa learns about them, she goes to that city in search of them. Nigerian by birth and brought up in England, she holds a British passport and has studied at both King’s College, London and Columbia University. She has a unique position of Western privilege and an African birthright which leads her to feel confident that she will be able to discover how Africans live in the south of China.

She’s mistaken. Her attempts to penetrate a male world of men who live by their wits and without documentation are met with the usual reply of “We’re here to do business.” A few take her to dinner and to nightclubs but although she’s introduced to their friends, she still hits a wall when asking about their lives in China.

Guangzhou has neighborhoods that are largely occupied by men from Africa and Saro-Wiwa spends most of her time within these areas. She makes contact with a Nigerian fabric merchant who comes to Guangzhou for a month at a time several times a year. “I jealous these people,” he tells her with a “clenched admiration,” “What this country has and we do not have in our country is quite enormous…Enormous wealth. The US don’t even have it.”

This wealth doesn’t trickle down to the area known as “Chocolate City,” a place dominated by a massive market that is a “bazaar of garishness.” There Africans and Chinese engage in a dance of commerce that is plagued by cross-cultural misunderstandings, acrimony, and racism. Saro-Wiwa encounters the racism quickly. Although she is clearly a visitor and a woman of means, vendors turn her away when she asks for a discount. 

Despite the Chinese aversion to dark skin, there are a number of Guangzhou women who have married and started families with African men. This has created a kind of settled community, with mixed-race children and a tentative form of security. Still, she’s told, that although “no sane person will stay in Nigeria,” these men whose Chinese wives and half-Chinese children allow them permanent residency status “Every day you are being reminded of where you come from. I don’t belong here.”

Although eventually Saro-Wiwa discovers the businesses that keep the African afloat, including drug-dealing, she’s forced to flesh out her book with stories of her travels in China and facts garnered from academic research. A seasoned travel writer who works for Conde Nast Traveller, she makes her solitary explorations enticing. She falls in love with Wuhan only months before covid shuts that city down and gives a splendid account of the northern town, Pingyao, whose antiquities escaped the depredations of the Cultural Revolution. She ends up taking refuge in the more hospitable area of Hong Kong where her research gains an increasingly intimate texture. Even so, Black Ghosts ends with the knowledge that her “journey into the lives of Africans in China” doesn’t live up to its subtitle. Saro-Wiwa hasn’t even illuminated the lives of Africans in Guangzhou.~Janet Brown

The Future by Naomi Alderman (Simon & Schuster]

The Fall of Hong Kong sends young Lai Zhen to a refugee camp and on to the U.S. where she grows up to become an internet influencer whose specialty is survivalism. Martha Einkorn is a refugee from a religious cult who now works closely with an internet mogul whose mission is world domination. Lenk Sketlish is one of the three most powerful people on the planet, all of whom are determined to destroy what exists and start over from scratch.

Welcome to a world of hidden bunkers, womb-like suits constructed to provide every human need, and a special surveillance program that guarantees personal safety, even during an apocalypse. Religion, myth, and the ultimate in human greed all unite in a novel whose threads are intricate and nearly impossible to untangle. What begins as a satire with easily recognizable key characters swiftly becomes an end-of-the-world scenario. But wait! That’s only the beginning. Suddenly the book becomes a thriller, with Lai Zhen fleeing from a mysterious killer in the world’s largest shopping mall. This fades into a love story between Lai Zhen and Martha Einkorn that dissolves into a devious plan of revenge. It seems to culminate in an episode of Survivor, with four people on a deserted island that has no means of communication with whatever is left of the world. 

Naomi Alderman has an imagination that can only be described as diabolical. Drawing upon recent events--the climate crisis, the Covid pandemic, the rise of Artificial Intelligence, the overwhelming amount of wealth and power controlled by a very few people--she throws her readers into a morass of fiction that borders perilously upon fact. Not since H.G. Wells created The War of the Worlds has any writer so skillfully manipulated nightmares into what seems to be a prophesy—or reality.

“You think you can change something big about the world and it ends with destruction. Every single time….What do you call it when you can’t do anything, but you can’t do nothing?” This simple observation and desperate question are both resonant and provocative. Although even the smartest of readers may find themselves floundering in the nooks and crannies of The Future, Martha Einkorn’s words will keep them enmeshed in spite of their confusion.

This novel goes through dizzying transformations in a way that’s reminiscent of the Aurora Borealis. It shifts its enticing patterns as quickly as it abandons one character for another or jumps from narration to baffling conversations on a survivalist forum. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah comes into play as God is asked “Will you spare the city if ten good men can be found within it?” The Future inverts this question by asking “Can the world be saved if four people are sacrificed?”

It’s a well-worn cliche to say that a book is mystifying right up to its last page. The Future continues to tease and baffle its readers beyond the last sentence of its last chapter. Placed in a part of a book that is rarely looked at are two sentences that upend whatever one might believe the ending is. Alderman goes beyond a cliffhanger into what amounts to literary sadism and makes a sequel inevitable. It looks as though she’s taken notes from Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past. If so, she owes us all two more novels, sooner rather than later.~Janet Brown

Have You Eaten Yet? by Cheuk Kwan (Pegasus Books)

Cheuk Kwan has lived in six different countries and speaks at least six different languages, including several Chinese dialects. Born in Hong Kong without ever having seen the Mainland village that was his family’s home for countless generations, he is a perfect example of the 400 million members of the Chinese diaspora.  Haunted by a single question, “Are we defined by our nationality or our ethnicity,” Kwan believes every member of the Chinese diaspora has a common set of values, even if they don’t, as a Chinese Canadian journalist believes they do, “carry that invisible baggage of ancestral China on our backs.” These shared values--”the importance of family ties, a desire for Chinese culture and education, and an underlying love for Chinese food”--can be found living in family-run Chinese restaurants all over the world. To back up his belief, Kwan embarks upon a four-year quest that will take him over 124,000 miles across five continents to make a documentary series, Chinese Restaurants. (Released in 2006, this series can be seen for free on youtube.)

Have You Eaten Yet? fleshes out what Kwan compressed into fifteen separate episodes and allows him a voiced subjectivity and breadth of experience that would be out of place on television. This book is a combination of travel and cooking literature, with a large helping of history and not a single recipe in sight. 

Kwan and his camera men have Hong Kong cuisine as their benchmark and are surprised to find “dim sum to die for” in Trinidad and Tobago, “a classic Cantonese rendition” of whole tilapia in Israel, “a sublime Chinese meal” in Kenya, issuing from a kitchen staffed only by Kenyan cooks. In Mauritius he finds “authentic Hakka cuisine” and Northern Chinese cooking in South Africa. In Madagascar Madame Chan serves Cantonese dishes that are “impeccable,” even though she herself has never been to China or Hong Kong and there are no Chinese workers in her kitchen.

In the north is where Chinese cooking submits to local flavors. In Saskatchawan, a seasoned restaurateur admits his cafe serves “American Chinese food, not what Chinese people eat, right?” In the Himalayan city of Darjeeling, Kwan tactfully calls his meal “Indo-Chinese…Hakka food adapted to Indian tastes.”

Kwan finds Chinatowns in almost every place he visits but it’s Barrio Chino in Havana that seems to haunt him. Once the largest and richest Chinatown in Latin America, it’s now a tourist destination with no more than 200 inhabitants, almost all of them elderly men. But when Kwan visits the Hong Kong Association and identifies himself as “a Kwan from Gao Gong,” he is thronged by members of his clan, making him remember his grandfather saying that many men from Gao Gong went off to Cuba in the early 1900s. Suddenly, in a Chinatown that’s almost dead, Kwan feels a strong connection to a place he’s never seen. “My grandfather,” he thinks, “would feel proud of me now.”

The old men in Havana still feel they are completely Chinese. In a Brazilian restaurant that makes perfect egg tarts, the owner says “This is our home, while his son adds that he himself is more Brazilian than Chinese. In Peru a restaurant proprietor talls Kwan, “This has never been my own country,” while celebrity cookbook author Ken Hom, born in Tucson and raised in Chicago, felt instantly at home on his first trip to Hong Kong “where everything talked to me,”  but now divides his time  between the south of France and Thailand. Kwan himself insists “I have six homes: Jiujiang (Gao Gong), Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Berkeley, and Toronto. Even so his journey has taught him that he is connected most strongly with the Chinese diaspora, people who retain their Chinese heritage and yet usually find their sense of belonging all over the world. 

As for “Chinese food,” Kwan raises his eyebrows more than a trifle. This catchphrase encompasses the “eating habits of more than a billion people,” spread out over “an area four times larger than western Europe.” Can anyone say there is such a thing as “Chinese food” or that “hyphenated Chinese food” is a lesser form of cuisine, he asks. 

Have You Eaten Yet? Is enough to make us believe in the idea of one world. John Lennon would have loved this book, and so will you.~Janet Brown

Nine Dragons by Michael Connelly (Grand Central Publishing)

Harry Bosch is a detective who works for the Los Angeles Police Department. He is separated from his wife and teenage daughter who currently live in Hong Kong. Bosch is familiar with a liquor store in South L.A. called Fortune Liquors. He was given a matchbook by the owner that had a motto written inside it - “Happy is the man who finds refuge in himself”. He has kept this matchbook with him for many years. Now, the store’s owner has been murdered and he vows to catch the criminal who did it.

The victim, John Li, was also the owner of the store. The person who found him was his wife, however, she doesn’t speak English. He was joined by a detective in the AGU, the Asian Gang Unit. In the course of their investigation, the two detectives managed to link the crime with a Hong Kong triad. Apparently, an LA-based triad was collecting protection money from various businesses, including Fortune Liquors. 

The detectives also learned that Li owned another liquor shop in the valley. It was run by his son Robert Li. The family lived together in a location between both shops. The son had told Detective Bosch that he and his family had tried talking to his father about closing the shop in South L.A. and the area wasn’t safe but his father wouldn’t listen. His father wasn’t going to let anybody drive him out. 

Bosch and Chu believe they found their suspect in the killing of John Li. Bo-Jing Chang is known to be affiliated with one of the Triad groups working in L.A. and his picture is captured on the liquor store’s security camera. Bosch then receives an anonymous call telling him to back off from the investigation. Bosch and Chu believe they are on the right track but then things get personal.

Bosch is sent a video clip of his daughter. He believes her kidnapping is related to his current investigation. He takes the next plane to Hong Kong to save his daughter as his number one suspect is planning to flee the U.S. and not return. Bosch knows he has only twenty-four hours to find his daughter before the suspect walks free. 

In Hong Kong, he is helped by his ex-wife, a former FBI agent, and her Chinese friend, Sun Yee. Bosch had determined where his daughter was being held from the background on the video he was sent. He is positive that she is in a room in Kowloon.

Kowloon - which translated into English means Nine Dragons. The name was spawned from a legend. Bosch’s daughter had told him that “during one of the old dynasties the emperor was supposedly just a boy who got chased by the Mongols into the area that is now Hong Kong. He saw the eight mountain peaks that surrounded it and wanted to call the place Eight Dragons. But one of the men who guarded him reminded him that the emperor was a dragon too. So they called it Kowloon - Nine Dragons”. 

Michael Connelly’s Nine Dragons is the fourteenth book in a series that features LAPD detective Harry Bosch. The fast-paced and exciting mystery takes you from the streets of L.A. to the gritty underside of Hong Kong and Kowloon. It is a page turner that keeps you guessing until the end who actually committed the crime of killing John Li. Was it a member of the Triads? Could it have been John Li’s son? And how did they get to Bosch’s daughter so quickly? The answers to these questions may surprise you and may shock you as well. ~Ernie Hoyt

On Java Road by Lawrence Osborne (Penguin Random House UK)

Adrian Gyle hovers perilously on the edge of the old acronym, FILTH, Failed in London, Try Hong Kong, but in his case this is reversed. Although he’s lived and worked in Hong Kong since The Handover, he’s still known only as “a writer of something or other,” a self-described “excellent nonentity.” What has kept him afloat in his adopted city--and what’s kept him from returning to London as a failure-- is a bit of luck, a friendship from his university days with the son of a Hong Kong billionaire, a frivolous but loyal comrade. 

Jimmy Tang sees himself as a kind of Pygmalion, buying his old college chum the suits that will distinguish him from other journalist hacks, taking him to Hong Kong’s best restaurants, inviting him to parties where Gyle meets “useful friends.” But Hong Kong has changed over the past decades. “The disturbances”  have erupted and the divisions they have caused are jagged ones. Students, police, and Triad thugs battle it out on the streets while families like Jimmy’s, “servants of stability,” stay aloof, worrying that the revolutionaries will “spoil their paradise.”

Gyle is emotionally detached from the battles that he witnesses until he meets Jimmy’s latest girl. Rebecca To is beautiful, articulate, 23, and a rebel. From a family so closely linked to Jimmy’s own that the two of them are committing “social incest,” she comes to dinner bearing the scent of tear gas. 

Gyle, after three meetings, becomes infatuated with his friend’s girl and when she mysteriously disappears soon after she and Jimmy have broken up, he is haunted by Rebecca. Is she one of the many bodies who have shown up in Victoria Harbor? Could Jimmy’s visit to a morgue, one where a drowned girl has recently arrived, be a sign that this dead girl might be Rebecca? And who has sent an anonymous email to Gyle with details of Rebecca’s final days and of the way she died, an email that implies that Jimmy was complicit in her death?

The real mystery of On Java Road is the book itself. Is it a thriller or a tale of the supernatural? Is it an adventure steeped in class differences and political change or just a lengthy description of Hong Kong that’s been cloaked with an overlay of fiction? 

There’s a fine line between detachment and complete disinterest that Lawrence Osborne’s novel flirts with. He gives more details about the sartorial and gustatorial habits of Hong Kong’s plutocrats than he does about the revolution that’s tearing the city apart. When conversations between his characters threaten to illuminate local politics, he removes all quotation marks and gives a brief and superficial summary of reported speech. The book is rich with Gyle’s interior thoughts and observations while every other character exists in a shadow land, amorphous and allowed only brief moments of animation.

Much praised for his sense of place, Osborne excels in his evocative portrait of Hong Kong, a city that he clearly loves. His observations of its neighborhoods are vivid enough to make readers want to get on the next plane and see this beauty for themselves. Unfortunately it also gives rise to the feeling that On Java Road is a collection of lovely pieces written for a glossy travel magazine that have been grafted onto a slender novella. Although Osborne has often been compared to Graham Greene, this work is more reminiscent of the kind of short story written by W. Somerset Maugham. Appropriately enough for the season, this is a ghost story--and the ghost of a novel that never really comes to life.~Janet Brown

The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir by Karen Cheung (Random House)

Karen Cheung was four years old in 1997 when Hong Kong’s handover took place. She grew up believing that the policy of “One country, two systems” would be in place for 50 years and that Hong Kong was protected by the rule of law. The Sino-British Joint Declaration stated that Hong Kong people would administer Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s chief executive would be elected by its citizens or through local caucuses, a policy that would lead to universal suffrage and democracy. When this failed to take place, protests against a national security bill that would ban “sedition, treason, subversion, and secession,” began in 2003. From then on, Hong Kong held a thriving community of activists and dissidents.

There was much to protest, much to change: Hong Kong’s “land problem” that led to high rents, squalid housing, and government confiscation of rural villages; mental health care that was largely inaccessible even to affluent expatriates; and a disregard that bordered on intolerance for “non-conformist art.” When the protests of 2003 made Hong Kong’s chief executive withdraw the controversial national security bill and resign from office, it seemed as though change was possible. Instead the problems grew worse. 

Cheung grows up without a strong identification as a Hong Kong citizen. Until she turns 18, she is shaped by her grandmother’s Chinese customs and Taoist traditions and by the English language that she’ s steeped in at an international school for six years.  When she transfers to a public school run by Christians, where students are allowed to speak  Cantonese,  the curriculum is taught in English. After six years there, Cheung is fluent in English and the English literature that she has read compulsively convinces her that Western culture is superior. In Kowloon where 90% of the population is Chinese and English is considered “a snobbish anomaly”, she longs for a life in London or New York. When she at last goes to the island of Hong Kong and enters Hong Kong University which is “vaguely international,” she feels a step closer to the life she wants.  In 2014 she spends a semester in Glasgow and watches the Umbrella Revolution from another country, suddenly and painfully realizing her home is in Hong Kong, the place where her life is waiting. “We recognize all of its imperfections, and still refuse to walk away.”

The subtitle of The Impossible City says it’s a Hong Kong memoir and that’s exactly what it is. “This book is about the many ways a city can disappear,” Cheung says. Her own story is told merely as a fragment of life in Hong King, used as an illustration in  “documenting disappearances.” Her personal narrative gives depth to the stranglehold tycoons have on Hong Kong’s real estate, showing how extreme wealth controls everything from housing to public services. To gain an apartment in government-subsidized housing can mean a five-year wait;  instead people rent bunk-bed spaces in illegally subdivided apartments for over 400 US dollars a month. Others sleep in Japanese-inspired “space capsules”  or in “caged homes,” beds surrounded by barbed wire. SARS and a long period of political protests give rise to depression and PTSD. 

Student suicides rise by 76% in the years between 2012 and 2016. “There are only around four hundred psychiatrists in a city of over seven million people.” where a government census showed “one in seven Hong Kongers live with mental health conditions.”

“What unites Hong Kongers,” Cheung says, “is pain.” Suicidal herself, she finds a new life in the creative energy and freedom of the city’s indie music scene. Surrounded by people who live “alternate lives” in a version of Hong Kong that Cheung wants to inhabit, she finds her way to the industrial buildings of East Kowloon and begins to write about what she hears and sees there. “Music is the archive of the times,” she says. From there she begins recording other forms of archives in Still/Loud, an online magazine that focuses on Hong Kong’s culture, not its lifestyle. 

Her examination of expat and Asian American writers who dominate Hong Kong’s English-language journalism and literature, reporting and telling stories “through their lens,” is scathing. Hong Kong locals who write in English, as Cheung does,  are frequently mistaken for members of the diaspora, usually as Asian Americans, and she is told by a newspaper editor to write stories that can be understood by “a Texas grandfather.” After three of her essays are published in the New York Times, other publications ask for pieces that tell “how it feels” to live in political turmoil.  As a Hong Kong writer with English fluency, writing for “the foreign gaze,” Cheung frequently feels like “a language traitor…betraying her mother tongue.”

Protests against a new version of the 2003 anti-sedition bill in 2019 are halted by Covid. On June 30, 2020 the bill becomes law. National security police scour the city for forms of dissidence while police hotlines welcome people who will report on neighbors who breach the law. The maximum sentence for this is life imprisonment.

Although employees who work in city government offices take loyalty oaths and teachers are given “patriotic syllabi” for their classrooms, a writer on Twitter claims “It’s absolutely not that bad for the average Hong Konger…that is 99% of the population.” For Cheung and her friends, “Are you leaving?” is a frequent question. Cheung’s reply is “I’m not ready.” She’s still recording what she knows will disappear. “Hong Kong,” she says, “will be physically unchanged but there will be nobody here that remembers the place that once existed….The only ones left {will be} those who believe this is the best version of Hong Kong there could ever be.” In showing the possibility that’s been taken away, The Impossible City is a record of what’s been lost. But, Cheung says with more than a trace of irony, “We are always so attuned to loss in this city.”~Janet Brown

Fate: The Lost Decades of Uncle Chow Tung by Ian Hamilton (Spiderline, House of Anansi Press)

When Ian Hamilton decided it was time for Uncle to depart from the Ava Lee series, apparently he missed Ava’s mentor as much as his mournful readers did. Uncle was a power behind the throne, influential, omnipresent, and subtle. Ava asks no questions about his past, although she knows from seeing his friends and employees that the man she cares most about in the world came from shadowy beginnings. And although Uncle is her mainstay throughout the first six volumes of her adventures, neither she nor Uncle ever reveal the details of when they first met.

Piece by piece, in six books, Uncle comes into focus: where he lives, what he eats, what he wears, along with his loyalty to those who work for him, and his paternal love for Ava. From the very first Ava Lee novel Uncle is old but his network of influence spreads far beyond his Hong Kong home and his mind can understand--and withstand--the most devious acts that any human is able to conceive. When at last he was removed from the series, even though he left a younger counterpart to stand with Ava, it was enough to bring at least one devoted fan to tears. 

Prequels are usually books that are picked up with a healthy degree of apprehension and it could be easy to dismiss Fate as an opportunistic spin-off. That would be a mistake. Uncle is as fascinating and dominant a character when given the spotlight as he once was as a presiding genius on the sidelines. His life is chronicled in three volumes: Fate (2019), Foresight (2020), and Fortune (2021), carrying him from his swim from Shenzhen to Hong Kong, an adventure that cost him the love of his life, up to his meeting with the woman who would become his partner and his daughter in every way but biological. Unfortunately only Fate is available in the U.S. at this time, perhaps because of covid-spawned difficulties in the world of publishing.

Chow Tung arrived in Hong Kong with little more than enough clothes to keep him from being naked.. Within ten years he’s become the White Paper Fan, the accountant, money manager, and administrator of legal and business matters, for a branch of The Heaven and Earth Society. Also called the Hung society, named after the Chinese character that showed the union between heaven, earth, and man, this organization had been in existence since the 1760’s within China until Mao chased it out of its country. Now in Hong Kong, it’s known as the triads and has become a major power in all parts of that region. In the town of Fanling, Chow Tung’s swift rise to a level of management has made him an integral part of that area’s triad and, through his financial acumen, he’s made his branch a leading player in Hong Kong’s vast underworld. Because of his remarkable maturity at a young age and his professional formality, his associates have begun calling him “Uncle,” and what was first a joke soon becomes the name that replaces Chow Tung for everyone.

When the Mountain Master, or leader,  of the Fanling triad dies in what seems to be a random hit and run, Uncle has doubts about the ability of the man slated to become the next chief. Calling for an election by secret ballot--one man, one vote as was always the traditional method--he begins a subtle campaign to elect a more qualified candidate. But politics is never a straightforward enterprise and Uncle becomes challenged by the twists and turns involved. When a neighboring triad senses weakness and moves in to take over, Uncle’s administrative skills are stretched to the limit. How much violence can be exerted upon the problem without beginning a fullscale war that will cause a crackdown by the Hong Kong police? Fortunately Uncle is a skilled user of the bonds forged by guanxi, and his web already is a wide one. But as he learns, guanxi can exact an unexpected price, one that even he is reluctant to assume.

Ian Hamilton has done his homework. Anyone who reads Fate is going to come away with an assortment of facts about the Triads, Hong Kong’s racetracks, and traditional funeral etiquette. Even a detailed description of chicken feet, how to cook them and how to eat them, is provided in succulent detail, and Hong Kong history comes into play with the appearance of a Saracen, the armed and armored vehicle that Hong Kong police once used in dangerous situations. 

However it’s always Uncle who keeps every page turning at a rapid rate, revealing the events that shaped him and brought him into power. Ava Lee is a hard act to follow but Uncle has proved to be more than equal to the challenge. May Foresight and Fortune show up soon on U.S. bookshelves!~Janet Brown

Ava Lee: The Triad Years : A Series by Ian Hamilton (House of Anansi Press)

Ava Lee isn’t the kind of woman to work her way up a corporate ladder, although her skill as a forensic accountant would guarantee a swift ascent.  Her university degree has given her a marketable career but she’s more devoted to the practice of bak mei, a subtle and deadly form of martial arts that’s taught her how to kill with one of her knuckles. 

While working at a Canadian firm, Ava meets an elderly man from Hong Kong whom everyone calls Uncle. Impressed by her accounting talents, he offers her the chance to join forces with him as a “debt collector.” 

As humble as this sounds,the work actually involves the recovery of missing money--and lots of it. Uncle is only interested in jobs that involve sums of at least twenty million dollars US and his fee is 30% of what’s recovered, which in one case brought him one-third of 80 million dollars. His background is shadowy and the people he employs are rough around the edges. He needs Ava’s beauty and professional polish to get the jobs that will be most lucrative, and Ava is drawn to the variety and challenge of the work that Uncle can provide.

A deep affinity begins to take root between the septuagenarian who once swam from the coast of China to begin a new life in Hong Kong and the young Chinese Canadian woman who has a comfortable existence in Toronto but welcomes difficult jobs that come with a threat of danger. Uncle discovers that Ava can hold her own against the burliest goons that are brought to bear against her and Ava finds a smart and kindly mentor whom her distant father has failed to be. 

A woman with her own style, Ava begins each job dressed in crisp Brooks Brothers shirts, black linen slacks or pencil skirts, and conservative black pumps, enlivened by jade cufflinks, a simple gold chain that holds a small crucifix, a Cartier Tank Francaise watch, and the ivory chignon pin that has become her good luck charm. These details are far from trivial. The clothes aren’t just a uniform,  they’re armor, in good taste with a dash of luxury, but unobtrusive. When Ava’s dressed for work, nobody can guess that she’s also dressed to kill, professionally and literally. Small and slender, Ava is easily underestimated and she uses this as one of her primary weapons.

Uncle finds the jobs, through contacts from a subterranean life that Ava never asks about. She’s the one who’s the public face of their enterprise, who can gain entry to the highest levels of any world she needs to access, but who can also render an assailant helpless with one quick and strategically placed blow. Men hold no menace for Ava, nor any attraction either. She prefers women.

Her adventures become addictive and luckily there are many of them, recounted in fourteen books to date, beginning with The Water Rat of Wanchai and most recently found in The Diamond Queen of Singapore. The earliest volumes slowly unveil the world of Hong Kong’s triads, complete with a flow chart of their structure. Within that framework are detailed looks at the business of art forgery, the gambling worlds of Las Vegas and Macau, international money laundering, and the complexities of the seafood industry.  All of these settings involve sums of money that are almost unimaginably huge, a whole lot of violence, and a staggering amount of travel. Ava Lee books first class air tickets the way other people jump on a city bus. 

Hong Kong, Metro Manila, Surabaya, London, Shanghai, Las Vegas--wherever she goes, Ava’s destinations, along with the meals she has when she gets there, are described in mouthwatering detail, giving Lonely Planet guides a run for their money. A walk though one of those cities is charted carefully enough that any reader could follow in Ava’s footsteps and reach her destination--and because Ian Hamilton is such a good writer, many of them are going to want to do that.

Hamilton became an author after a long and varied career in over thirty different countries, with positions ranging from journalist to Canadian consul to international businessman whose specialty was runnning seafood companies. Obviously his journalism training in taking notes has served him well as a novelist but his talent goes way beyond that of a painstaking observer. His novels abound in descriptions that are both witty and evocative. “He looked like a garden gnome in a suit,” is the way he introduces one of his most repulsive characters and he pinpoints the prevailing odor of Southeast Asia with “The air was humid, thick with the smell of cooking oil, rotting vegetation, exhaust fumes, and garbage.” (Mmmm, I can smell it now.)

“People always do the right thing for the wrong reason,” Uncle frequently reminds Ava. It’s certainly true when it comes to this series. One book picked up to kill time in an airport is going to take the reader on a multi-volumed literary rollercoaster ride, one that’s going to give them more pleasure (and information) than they ever expected to find. Enlaced within Ava’s adventures are facts: the splendor of Surabaya’s Majapahit Hotel (“better than Raffles”), how long it takes for flunitrazepam to kick in (popularly known as roofies), who the Ndrangheta are and where they come from, the delights to be found in the Arab quarter in of Surabaya,  which kretek (Indonesian clove cigarettes) are the most expensive and the best,  the importance of an Italian collar on a well-made shirt--and all of that in a single book (The Scottish Banker of  Surabaya. Perhaps none of these tidbits are essential to know, but they open new windows into unknown corners, and that’s indisputably essential.

However these books come with a caveat. Anyone who ventures into Ava Lee’s territory will probably end up with her primary addiction--cups of Starbucks Via Instant Coffee. While her preferences for Cartier, Shanghai Tang, and five-star hotels may be out of reach for most of us, Via can be found all over the world at prices anybody can afford. Prepare to succumb to the inevitable. ~Janet Brown

Drawing on the Inside: Kowloon Walled City 1985 by Fiona Hawthorne (Blacksmith Books)

Fiona Hawthorne came to Hong Kong in the 70s when she was six. For the next eight years of her life, she roamed through the city with a freedom that finally alarmed her parents. Exploring Kowloon’s street markets was one thing but drinking San Miguel in Wanchai’s bars and coming home late at night in a taxi wasn’t the sort of adventure they wanted their daughter to have at fourteen. They took their family back to Ireland but it was too late. Fiona had Hong Kong in her blood and at twenty-two, she came back as a young artist.

Now she had the ability to satisfy a longing that had gone denied when she was a free-ranging girl. On childhood visits to her favorite market, the one so close to the Kai Tak airport that jets screamed above the heads of shoppers, almost parting their hair, she had seen a spot nearby that was forbidden territory. Naturally that appealed to Fiona.

The Kowloon Walled City had been a separate entity since the days of the British takeover. Initially left out of the original treaty that claimed Hong Kong, when it was included in the following year, it continued to exist on its own terms, under its own rules. In the 70s, it was flooded with mainland Chinese who spawned an explosion of cheap housing blocks, built without inside plumbing or elevators. Rumors that the place was run by triads and was riddled with crime made it a “no-go” area for the rest of Hong Kong. To Fiona, this community of 60,000, supported by mom and pop industries, was irresistible, “a patchwork of chaos with a strange and compelling beauty.” She was determined to go inside but she needed an introduction that would serve as her passport.

One of her old classmates had a friend who worked with drug addicts within the Walled City, a woman who approved of Fiona’s plan to explore and paint the life and surroundings of this private world. Accompanied by a former addict, Fiona spent three months there, carrying her watercolors, stacks of cheap cardboard that ordinarily formed a base for mahjong tiles, and two heavy cameras for photos and videos. The residents of the Walled City spoke Mandarin, which Fiona hadn’t mastered, but in a mixture of Cantonese and English, she managed to communicate with the people she met.  As she sketched and painted, she openly showed her work to her subjects and they encouraged her to continue. She was accepted.

Fiona was immediately frustrated by the “image of notoriety” that stigmatized the Walled City. What she found there was a place filled with hardworking people who spent their days making food, plastic flowers, shoes, clothing, in small dark spaces. She painted the dark, impenetrable wall of buildings that characterized the City, but she also showed the shafts of light that passed through the slivers of space between them and brightened a wealth of color within. Flowers bloomed on caged-in balconies and vegetable gardens flourished in vacant bits of ground. 

Her art reveal no traces of menace. Watercolor portraits show faces turned toward her in trust and her quick sketches capture moments of deep tenderness. A young couple gaze at each other, lost in love. A man and woman sit with their infant, pouring all of their attention upon the baby. Within the dark and narrow alleyways between buildings, children play and adults sit together, chatting. Fiona’s drawings, paintings, and photos show a community that’s strikingly similar to ones that still exist in Kowloon, its streets filled with traffic and pedestrians, a forest of signs looming above them; small crowded spaces where workers take a break to eat together, sharing dishes made by a shirtless man who cooks over open flames; false teeth arranged in a macabre shop window display.

When Fiona steps away from this bustling world to show its exterior, it’s a view that can easily bring on a feeling of seasickness. The buildings are jammed together, tilting against each other for support, teetering as if they’re drunk. At night, they take on a comforting look, with hundreds of windows beaming light into the darkness, each one a spot of domestic privacy.

Fiona herself appears only twice. On the book’s unjacketed cover, she shoots a video, youthful, slender, and intent upon what she’s recording. At the end of the book there she is again shrouded in darkness, her face hidden behind her massive camera and her mane of hair blazing in an errant beam of light. Less than ten years afterward, the Walled City was demolished, its space transformed into a city park. “I had no idea that I was recording a place that would someday be gone,” she says, but through her eyes and her art, that community is truthfully and skillfully memorialized.~Janet Brown

The Sun in My Eyes : Two-Wheeling East by Josie Dew (Time Warner Books)

Josie Dew is first and foremost a touring cyclist from the U.K. She is also a professional cook and the author of a number of travel essays writing about her experiences cycling around the world. She says it was her elementary school teacher who inspired her to travel. “She told such wonderful stories about distant lands. I dreamed of visiting them one day”. It was after being involved in an auto accident in her childhood which put her off from being driven in anything with four wheels.

Dew rode around the country of Japan for the first time and wrote about it in her book A Ride in the Neon Sun : A Gaijin in Japan which was published in 1999. On her initial visit, she rode from Kawasaki in Kanagawa Prefecture all the way down to Kagoshima and Okinawa Prefectures in the south. 

The Sun in My Eyes is the story of Dew’s second cycling trip around Japan. She first finds herself in Hong Kong where even she admits, “For someone who has a strong affinity for wild empty places and a keen aversion to cars, I’m not quite sure just what I was doing immersing myself in a territory of only 1000 square kilometers with a population of 6.8 million people, most of whom were crammed into a feverishly paced forest of concrete, steel and glass.”

Dew first cycles around Hong Kong and its neighboring islands before finding a ship to take her to Japan. Once she reaches Okinawa, Dew’s Japan adventure begins and she spends time traveling to some of the smaller islands located nearby such as the World Heritage designated Yakushima and Tanegashima, the island known for introducing modern firearms to Japan in 1543. It is also the site of the Tanegashima Space Center, Japan’s largest space development center. 

Dew travels northward, first by riding around the island of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands. Her travels take her to Hiroshima and Miyajima, considered one of Japan’s three scenic spots. She marvels at the sand dunes in Tottori Prefecture; she checks out the through-leg viewing of Amanohashidate, another one of the three scenic spots of Japan.  

She makes a slight change of plans due to excessive rain along the coast and takes a ferry from the port town of Maizuru to Hokkaido. She travels along the coastal roads which takes her to Reibun Island, Japan’s northernmost island. She finds the time to do a bit of hiking in Shiretoko and mountain climbing in Rausu before cycling to Hakodate and catching a ferry to Oma in Aomori Prefecture. 

From Oma, Dew cycles down the Shimokita Peninsula and continues her way southward by going through the towns of Rokkasho, home to Japan’s largest nuclear waste dump; the town of Kessenuma, which was devastated by the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Her worries about, “What if the Big One hits” seems almost prophetic, although the earthquake happened more than ten years after her journey.

Dew doesn’t just cycle around the country, she also delves into the history of the cities and sites she visits. Being a woman on her own in a foreign country, she shares some of her humorous stories communicating with the locals. One of her most common language exchanges follows below.

“You are one person?”

“Yes, I am one person?”

“Really? One person?”

“Yes, really one person.”

“Ahh, that is great. You are one person from America?”

“No, England.”

“Ahh so, desu-ka. You are indeed two person?”

“No, I am one person. I am alone. One person from England.”

If you have never been to Japan or are planning to do so in the near future, with or without a bicycle, you will find Dew’s book very informative and entertaining. Her biting wit will make you laugh, her positive mental attitude will make you want to challenge yourself as well...maybe! ~Ernie Hoyt

Hong Kong Local: Cult Recipes from the Streets that Make the City by ArChan Chan (Smith Street Books, Simon & Schuster, Australia)

The eye-popping colors and explosive graphic design on the cover of Hong Kong Local: Cult Recipes from the Streets that Make the City immediately announce this is a cookbook that breaks the sound barrier.. ArChan Chan has taken this category into a new arena that she’s steeped in unrestrained exuberance.

Born and bred in Hong Kong, Chan knows her territory and cleverly takes it from the realm of “food paradise” to a 24-hour all-you-can-eat buffet. Dividing her book into Early, Mid, and Late, Chan guides her readers through the culinary delights of a day in Hong Kong, showing how they can bring the food of that city into their own kitchens.

The recipes in Hong Kong Local aren’t the haute cuisine extravaganzas that Hong Kong feeds its high-end residents and plutocratic travelers. These dishes are street food offerings that can still to be found in the city’s dai pai dong and show up in congee shops, yum cha restaurants, and cha chaan teng. They’re uncomplicated and almost minimal, but all require the freshest ingredients and “a high level of attention and care.” 

Opening the book to Early, readers can begin their days with congee, Chinese doughnuts,and fresh soy milk. Heartier appetites are appeased with milk tea, beef noodles and sticky rice rolls while traditionalists are taken to the delights of dim sum: steamed pork ribs, dumplings, and sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves. 

Still hungry? How about a pastry? Egg tarts, pineapple buns, coconut tarts, sponge cake?  Hong Kong french toast--or soup? 

Moving on to lunch in Mid, Chan once again pays attention to appetites of varying capacities, with choices that range from snacks (bao and pork) to noodles, pepper steak, and fried rice, with mango soup, custards, and smiley cookies for dessert, washed down with a red bean crushed ice drink. This section moves along briskly; Hong Kong lunches aren’t lingering affairs--time is money, there’s shopping to be done,  business deals to close, and a number of people hovering nearby, waiting for empty  tables.

Late  slows way down with moveable feasts in the company of family and friends that can easily last for hours--and Chan’s recipes reflect that luxurious abundance. Steamed whole fish with soy and spring onion, cheesy lobster, typhoon shelter crab, oyster omelette, nine different poultry dishes that include the traditional salted baked chicken, fried morning glory with fermented bean curd--this is siu yeh, the fourth meal, and Hong Kongers make it count.

Chan charitably concludes with basic recipes and a glossary of ingredients along with where to find them, for everyone who’s not lucky enough to have a Hong Kong auntie at their disposal.

Hong Kong Local covers a lot of different bases. It’s a cookbook, a culinary guide to Hong Kong, and a godsend to people who live far from the Cantonese restaurants of America’s Chinatowns and hunger for the food they remember. And for those who know and love Hong Kong, it’s filled with neighborhood photographs that tease with their lack of captions and beckon with the welcome that this city is famous for. ArChan Chan’s recipes and Alana Dimou’s photographs provide the cheapest ticket to Hong Kong that’s ever been offered.

Chan, who left Hong Kong to perfect her culinary art in Australia, and who now is a noted chef in another food city, Singapore, is clearly homesick. Hong Kong Local is an invitation, a love letter, and a dazzling collection of burnished memories.~Janet Brown

White Ghost Girls by Alice Greenway (Black Cat/Grove Atlantic)

Hong Kong in the summer of 1967: Across the border, above the line where the New Territories meet mainland China, Red Guards rampage in their goal to purify Mao’s revolution. Hungry mainlanders plunge into the sea, hoping to swim to Hong Kong.  And only a short plane ride away from the peace and prosperity of England’s prize colony, a war rages in Vietnam.

Kate and her older sister Frankie are Americans in Hong Kong, endowed with a wild freedom that’s bred by their home country and fostered by benign neglect. Their father is a photographer for Time/Life, his lens and his attention claimed by Vietnam. Their mother is a beautiful practitioner of selective blindness, an artist whose paintings are “light, pretty, airy,” drenched in “the charm and comforts of the colonial era.” Ah Bing, the girls’ amah, is the only one to provide attempts at discipline, buttressed with Cantonese curses and epithets, but she’s old and too slow to keep up with her gwaimui, her white ghost girls.

Frankie and Kate escape to the beach, building shelters from whatever is washed up by the sea, playing Castaway, calling themselves secret sisters, Viet Cong sisters. They know they’re too old for the games they play; Kate is thirteen, Frankie is nubile--or as a friend of her father’s remarks, voluptuous. Both girls are feral and neither wants to grow up.

Then comes the day that they find a woman’s body floating in the sea, “swollen and bloated like a buoy,” a peasant who tried to swim to freedom and failed. They see students march in protest through the city streets, holding up pictures of Mao. When they accompany Ah Bing to a Kwan Yin temple on a nearby island, they run away, bump into a Red Guard demonstration in a market, and leave when they see the police are on their way. As they begin their return to the temple, the girls are accosted by two men who grab Frankie and  give Kate a bag, Lychees, she’s told, a gift for the captain of the police boat. “You no come back, you no big sister.”

Terrified, Kate ends up throwing the bag into a garbage can near the market and hears it explode as she rushes back to Frankie. Neither girl has been hurt. Both of them are changed. Kate, feeling responsible for the death and injuries incurred by the explosion, becomes secretive. Frankie, molested by her captors, has discovered her sexual power. The summer darkens and takes on a dreadful momentum that their parents fail to recognize nor even notice.

White Ghost Girls is a story of loss and grief, a love letter to a vanished home written by an exile, a eulogy for a girl who would never leave Hong Kong. Alice Greenway, who also grew up in Hong Kong during the 60s, illuminates the city with a sense of place that’s meticulous, visceral, and wistful.

“Can you give me hot rain, mould-streaked walls, a sharpness that creeps into my clothes...The smells of dried oyster, clove hair oil, tiger balm...The feverish shriek of cicadas, the cry of black-eared kites?” Kate begins her story with these questions and ends with this answer. 

…”this is all I want: a wooden stool, a bowl of rice, an army canteen, a secret comrade, the whooping cry of wild gibbons,” the summer when her Viet Cong sister left her forever.~Janet Brown

Hong Kong Holiday by Emily Hahn (Doubleday & Company, out of print)

Emily Hahn was an American writer who came to live in Shanghai in 1935.  She remained there until 1941, leaving it for Hong Kong only after she fell in love with Charles Boxer, a British Army officer. During her two years in the Crown Colony, Hahn chronicled her stay in articles for the New Yorker, which were published as the essay collection, Hong Kong Holiday.

The title is obviously a sardonic choice. What begins as a respite from the war in China takes a grim turn after the first four essays. Hahn came to Hong Kong after spending time in the “beleagured” capital of Chungking; her opening essays describe the bliss of living without air raid sirens, the pleasure of living on the Peak with her gibbons, enjoying cocktails, gossip, and the soothing ministrations of a good hairdresser. Then the Japanese bombers come to town, Boxer is wounded in a fight against the invading Imperial Army, and Hahn, who recently had given birth, begins a long battle for survival in a fallen city.

With Boxer in a prison camp, Hahn is focused upon keeping herself and her baby out of an internment center and with keeping everyone in her extended family fed as well as possible. Hong Kong becomes unnaturally silent; its people have “the drawn, false anxiety of a starving man’s face.” “I lost the energy for pity,” Hahn says, and she is ruthless in her drive to safeguard the people she loves.

But  it’s impossible for her to lose the energy for  writing. The New Yorker had hired her to be their China correspondent in 1935 and Hahn can’t afford the luxury of writer’s block. She chronicles her Hong Kong years with an offhand touch that almost disguises the hunger, the extreme cold, the fear, and the rage. 

A Eurasian friend whose husband is missing in battle says, “The Eurasian boys were the ones who fought best. Almost all of the good ones were killed...I ask myself what my husband died for.” Another tells what happened after Japanese soldiers took over the hospital where she worked. “I got away from them in the dark and hid under a cot. The other girls had to go with them.” She tells the story over and over until Hahn realizes the truth and tells her “If a thing isn’t in your mind, don’t you see, it never happened.”

With a mixture of understanding and deep contempt, Hahn tells stories of the Hong Kong collaborators. She herself benefits from teaching English to members of the Kempeitai, whom she terms the Japanese Gestapo, and those students supply her with necessities of life: bags of rice, flour, wheat. When her daughter reaches her first birthday, a Japanese soldier brings a tin filled with sugar for Carola’s birthday cake.

Hahn shows how war creeps in almost imperceptibly before it explosively announces its arrival, illustrates how determination and ingenuity are more valuable than gold in an occupied city, and reveals the core of spun steel that still exists within Hong Kong’s glittering and privileged exterior. Hong Kong Holiday, 73 years after it was first published, is a testament to the strength of the Region and an assertion of its ability to remain alive. ~Janet Brown

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin (Little Brown)

This is a fairy tale inspired by the author's travels through Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China. The hero of our story is a young girl named Minli. She lives in a small house with her mother and father in the shadow of a large mountain. All the villagers call it Fruitless Mountain because nothing grows on it and no animals or birds make their home there. Minli's family is very poor, as are most of the villagers.  

Although Minli is a child, she is always smiling and ready for adventure. The villagers thinks her name (which means quick thinking) is well suited to her. Sometimes her mother thinks it suits her too well. What makes Minli happiest is hearing her father tell her stories of far away lands, of magic and dragons, of imagined worlds where anything is possible. One of her favorite stories that she likes to have her father tell is how Fruitless Mountain got its name. Minli loves this story and always asks her father what could be done about the barren state of the mountain to which her father always answers, “That is a question you will have to ask the Old Man of the Moon.”

Minli believes her father's story and asks him where she can find the Old Man of the Moon. He tells her that it’s been said he lives on the top of Never-Ending Mountain. Then Minli has a great thought. She tells her father that if she could find the Old Man of the Moon, she could ask him how to change the family's fortune. This time the mother scolds the father for putting such ridiculous thoughts in their daughter's head.

The next day is not an ordinary day. A goldfish seller walks through town calling out “Goldfish. Bring good fortune into your home.” Minli asks the man how a goldfish can bring good fortune to which the man replies, “Don't you know? Goldfish means plenty of gold. Having a bowl of goldfish means your house will be full of gold and jade.” Minli has two copper coins given to her when she was a baby and without another thought, runs back home and offers them to the goldfish man. He only takes one coin and gives Minli a bowl with a goldfish in it. When she brings it home, her mother is not pleased, saying it’s just another mouth to feed.

Minli thinks about what her mother said and sneaks out at night to set the fish free. She sighs just like her mother and says out loud if she can only go to Never-Ending Mountain, then she would be able to ask the Old Man of the Moon how to change her family’s fortune. As she is about to head home, the fish speaks  and says it can show her the way to Never-Ending Mountain.

This is how Minli's true adventure begins – starting with a talking goldfish, then meeting a dragon that can't fly, and having to solve riddles to find her way to Never-Ending Mountain where she can ask the Old Man of the Moon her question. Will she get there? Will her family's fortune change? Are there really talking goldfish and dragons? Only one way to find out--finish reading the story!~Ernie Hoyt

Swimming in Hong Kong by Stephanie Han (Willow Spring Books)

In a skillful and ambitious short story collection, Stephanie Han proves that grouping people as “Asian” is an artificial and lazy way of blurring distinctive  cultures that have only a continent in common. Han, with roots in Hawaii that go back for more than a century, bypasses her heritage in Swimming in Hong Kong; the ten stories that comprise her book have settings that range from Seoul to Nantucket, told in the voices of Hong Kong scrap collectors, a Korean-American journalist waiting for her husband in the bar of an exclusive club that aspires to colonial grandeur, a KoreaTown manicurist who abandoned her young child when she left Seoul to work in the U.S., an aging Hong Kong swimmer who helps an African-American expatriate gain confidence in the water and in her life. She explores the sexual Orientalism of Western men and the feelings of the women who succumb to that particular fetish, skewers the ways of WASP preppies on the Eastern seaboard, and examines the difficulties of being a Korean-American girl with “the freedom of pocket money and an American life awaiting” at the end of time spent with her grandparents in Seoul.

Han illuminates these different worlds and voices with language that is vivid and crisp, descriptions that are precise and evocative. Her characters blaze with the heat of their common humanity, while clearly showing the cultural divides that yawn between each of them. If these people were ever brought together in one room, language would be the least of their differences. It’s a tribute to Stephanie Han’s talent that they convincingly populate the pages of her extraordinary debut. Their well-told stories, whether they take on the form of an insightful vignette as in “Hong Kong Rebound” or the shape and scope of a novella as in “The Body Politic, 1982”, make Swimming in Hong Kong a book to own and Han a writer to watch.~Janet Brown

Good Chinese Wife by Susan Blumberg-Kason

The best travel literature is written by people who live in a country, submit to its culture, and love it—warts and all. Susan Blumberg-Kason in her new memoir, Good Chinese Wife, does all of that and much more. She traveled to China, moved to Hong Kong, and fell in love with a man from a small Chinese town. And reader, she married him--and lived to tell the tale.

Few women of her time were as freshly-minted as Susan was when she went off to graduate school in pre-handover Hong Kong. Her geographic travels had probably almost filled up a passport—with a mother who worked for an airlines, Susan could, and did, hop on a plane and go anywhere she liked. An adventurous teenager, she had been to mainland China more than once, was attracted to what she saw in that newly-opened country—and she became downright besotted with Hong Kong.

And yet, in her early twenties, by the time Susan came to live in that city, she had been involved with only one serious boyfriend. With the freedom that came from living far from home, in a new country, she embarked on a couple of fleeting affairs. Then she met Cai.

He was handsome, sophisticated, an older man. Susan was a Mandarin-speaking American girl, eager and sparkling. Within a very short time, this unlikely couple fell in love, became engaged, and were married. Cai spoke English, Susan was fluent in Mandarin, but neither had the skill to plumb the other’s character as thoroughly as either of them should have. When Cai spent his wedding night in a luxurious Kowloon hotel watching porn films on pay-per-view TV, Susan didn’t ask him why. When Susan was devastated that there was no time to go to an English-language bookstore when the couple had a brief stop in Shanghai, Cai didn’t bother to discover the reason that his bride was so upset. Then there was the question of “Japanese Father,” a professor who loomed large in Cai’s regard and cast a sinister shadow on the life of the young couple from the very beginning of their marriage. In a burst of true saintliness, Susan kept her misgivings about this man to herself, even when he provided Cai with a gigantic and mysterious sum of money.

When Cai and Susan moved to San Francisco and bought a house, his parents soon followed, bringing their culture with them—and of course, Japanese Father showed up for a visit. By then, there was a baby, and Susan became a young mother as well as the primary bread-winner for her extended family.

In so many ways, this story is a heart-breaker—and yet, like the best memoirs, it takes its readers on a journey. Susan Blumberg-Kason skillfully avoids any melodramatic tinge as she unfolds her novelistic history. She shows how it was to live in Hong Kong before it became semi-autonomous, what it is to be part of a rural Chinese household, and the innermost intricacies of a very complicated marriage.

Racing through her pages, moaning in sympathy at one moment and feeling envious in the next paragraph, readers of Good Chinese Wife have to keep one thing in mind: Don’t forget to exhale during the many moments that this splendid book takes your breath away. ~Janet Brown

Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong by Gordon Mathews (University of Chicago Press)

Seventeen stories, three-tower blocks rising from a massive plinth, owned by 920 share-holders, containing a transient population of at least 129 different nationalities who come looking for a cheap place to sleep in the middle of Kowloon’s Golden Mile—this is Chungking Mansions. Avoided by local Hong Kong Chinese, immortalized by Wong Kar-wai in his art-house movie Chungking Express, occasionally used as a setting for Western mystery writers (most recently Michael Connelly and Jo Nesbo), this is more a town than it is a building, housing a community of what Gordon Mathews terms “low-end globalism.”

An American anthropologist who has lived in Hong Kong since 1994, Mathews became drawn to Chungking Mansions in 1983 when he stayed there while traveling. In 2006 he began his project to discover the building’s “role in globalization” and its “significance in the world.” No ivory-tower denizen, Mathews spent “one or more nights a week” in Chungking Mansions guesthouses  as well as “every available moment” for a period of three and a half years. The result of his research is true to his subject and is amazingly readable—his book sparkles with life that is rarely found in an offering from an academic press.

Mathews knows his territory and shares it generously. Chungking Mansion’s history, from an upscale apartment building to a center for “Western hippies and backpackers” to a business center for entrepreneurs from all over the planet is well laid out and the often mysterious details of its present incarnation are carefully explained. Travelers who have wondered about the evening crowds of Africans at the nearby 7/11 or the function of the middle-aged sari-clad women who cluster in the same area during the day will find their curiosity satisfied in these pages. (Unfortunately, to protect the unlicensed premises, Mathews fails to divulge where the elusive African restaurants are in the upper floors of Chungking Mansions.)

People have learned to trust Gordon Mathews and he safeguards that trust by giving pseudonyms to the people who have granted him candid interviews. “I was born here in Hong Kong—I am a Hong Kong person,” a Sikh shop owner says, “I feel like an outsider…but when I enter this building..I feel like I’m home. All countries can enter here. Outside is difficult, but Chungking Mansions is home!”

And all countries do enter here—represented by people who come to do business, along with a number of asylum-speakers. Chungking Mansions is a world-center for inexpensive mobile phones that are made in China and transported to Africa in carry-on luggage, as many as 700 phones per trip, bringing ‘an average profit of US $500 per trip.” Clothing manufactured in mainland China, tires from used cars, DVD players, computer accessories—luggage carts heaped higher than a man’s head are wheeled out of Chungking Mansions regularly. Gold and gems come in from Africa—one man would arrive with a full set of gold dentures and leave with sparkling white ones. These are not poor men and women, except by Hong Kong standards, which are high enough to make many visitors feel poor. Most of the traders who fill Chungking’s elevators are middle-class and higher in their home countries and most of them use English as a common language.

Aside from being an intriguing portrait of a fascinating corner of the world, Mathew’s book challenges accepted definitions of globalization. Multi-national corporations are in some ways being supplanted by cheap knock-offs traded by entrepreneurial individuals. Only a minority of the world’s population can afford Nokia; the rest will happily accept Noklia, if the price is right—and it usually is. “Low-end globalization,” Mathews says, “is not the world’s past; it is, in at least some respects, the world’s future.”

“I predict,” he continues, “that what Chungking Mansions is today, much more of the world will be tomorrow.” And that prediction, at least as Gordon Mathews’ book portrays it, is one to look forward to.~Janet Brown

John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow by Karen Fang (Hong Kong University Press)

As I was walking to work the other day, I couldn’t help but notice the poster for a forthcoming film that would soon be shown at my local theater, a Korean remake of a John Woo classic –A Better Tomorrow.  Sometime in the mid to late 80s, a friend introduced me to the world of Hong Kong cinema.  This was long before John Woo or Chow Yun Fat became popular in the United States, back when the only opportunity to see Hong Kong films was at small independent theaters that would have Hong Kong film festivals from time to time.  This particular film was probably my first exposure to Hong Kong action movies and after one viewing I was hooked.

But this book isn’t just a film review, it is a critical analysis of the New Hong Kong Cinema and its impact on the film industry at home and abroad.   It explains its rise along with the globalization of film, which both occurred over the same period between the mid 80s and late 90s.

Before this movie was released, John Woo was known as a director of romantic comedies while Chow Yun Fat had the lead role in some movies but was known mostly for the TV soap operas he appeared in.   However, with the release of this film, it became one of the highest-grossing the year of its release and shot John Woo and Chow Yun Fat to superstar fame.  This film also sparked a new genre – the action/crime film, or yingxiong pian which translates to a “hero” movie, which the West described as “heroic bloodshed”.

For those of you unfamiliar with the movie, the plot centers around three main characters – Sung Ji-Ho played by Ti Lung, Mark Gor, or Brother Mark, played by Chow Yun Fat, and Kit played by Leslie Cheung (a very popular pop idol at the time).  Sung Ji-Ho is a successful criminal who built his empire upon counterfeiting.  Brother Mark is his loyal partner.  Kit is Ho’s younger brother who is a cadet in the police academy and does not know that his older brother is involved in criminal activities. On a business trip to Taipei, Ho is framed for a crime he didn’t commit. He eludes the police, however, in order to protect his younger brother and Mark, he decides to turn himself in but insists that a rookie member of his gang, Shing, should escape.  The following day Mark makes a trip to Taipei to avenge Ho and kills most of those responsible but is shot and crippled in the leg.

Ho spends the next three years in prison with hardly any contact with Kit or Mark.  Kit, who learns of his brother’s criminal activities, trains even harder with the police force.  When Ho is released and tries to reach out to Kit by telling his younger brother that he has gone straight, Kit shuns him.  However, Mark is overjoyed at being reunited with his friend and suggests taking revenge on Shing, whom they have discovered was the one who betrayed them.  They plan to do this by exposing Shing to the police and to help Kit advance in his career and to prove that Ho has indeed gone straight.

Everything goes as planned but comes at a really high cost.  Mark is killed but before he dies, he chastises Kit for not recognizing the love Ho has for him.  In the end, Kit goes against police regulations and lets his brother kill Shing.  Ho wants to do right by his younger brother so he handcuffs himself to Kit and returns to police custody.

Getting back to the core of the book, Fang describes the different ways in which the film was received by its home audience and its global prominence as well.  In Hong Kong when the film was first released in 1986, it became a record-breaking blockbuster.  The original title in Mandarin is Yingxiong bense or in Cantonese Yinghuhng bunsik which translates to True Colors of Valor or The Essence of Heroes, suggesting that the plot is about chivalry, family ties, loyalty, and honor.  However, with the international English title of A Better Tomorrow,the foreign press suggested that the movie was politically influenced by Hong Kong’s forthcoming return to China.

However, I’m not one for analyzing movies in minute detail.  If it entertains me, then the movie has served its purpose.  After watching this film, I found myself becoming biased, feeling as if these yingxiong pian films made Hollywood action movies seem like Disney productions.  If this film excites you as much as it did me, you will find yourself becoming a fan of John Woo’s other Hong Kong action films which also star Chow Yun Fat such as Hard Boiled, The Killer, and Bullet in the Head.

I may have to make a trip to my local DVD rental store to watch these all over again.  And of course I look forward to seeing the Korean remake as well.~Ernie Hoyt