Indelible City
Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong
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3.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
An award-winning journalist and longtime Hong Konger indelibly captures the place, its people, and the untold history they are claiming, just as it is being erased.
The story of Hong Kong has long been dominated by competing myths: to Britain, a “barren rock” with no appreciable history; to China, a part of Chinese soil from time immemorial, at last returned to the ancestral fold. For decades, Hong Kong’s history was simply not taught, especially to Hong Kongers, obscuring its origins as a place of refuge and rebellion. When protests erupted in 2019 and were met with escalating suppression from Beijing, Louisa Lim—raised in Hong Kong as a half-Chinese, half-English child, and now a reporter who has covered the region for nearly two decades—realized that she was uniquely positioned to unearth the city’s untold stories.
Lim’s deeply researched and personal account casts startling new light on key moments: the British takeover in 1842, the negotiations over the 1997 return to China, and the future Beijing seeks to impose. Indelible City features guerrilla calligraphers, amateur historians and archaeologists, and others who, like Lim, aim to put Hong Kongers at the center of their own story. Wending through it all is the King of Kowloon, whose iconic street art both embodied and inspired the identity of Hong Kong—a site of disappearance and reappearance, power and powerlessness, loss and reclamation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Lim (The People's Republic of Amnesia) mixes memoir and reportage in this riveting portrait of Hong Kong. Interweaving an up-close view of recent protests against Chinese rule with evocative details about Hong Kong's colonial past, Lim contends that the 50-year term for "One Country, Two Systems"—the policy that was supposed to govern its 1997 transition from a British possession to a sovereign territory of China—has ended well ahead of schedule. She explains that Hong Kong officials were excluded in all but "an advisory capacity" from negotiations between Britain and China setting the rules for the handover, and documents how the steady erosion of freedoms led to the "Umbrella Movement" of 2014 ("an explosion of discontent, desire, and, above all, hope") and widespread anti-government protests in 2019. Lim also explores Hong Kong's multifaceted identity through profiles of residents including Tsang Tsou-choi, the "King of Kowloon," a "toothless, often shirtless, disabled trash collector" who in the 1950s began covering government property with "misshapen, childlike calligraphy" claiming the British stole his family's land: the entire Kowloon Peninsula. Conversations with protestors, many of whom were not yet born in 1997, convey their burning idealism as well as their growing sense of futility. The result is a vivid and vital contribution to postcolonial history.
