Description
An awardwinning journalist takes to the protestriven streets of Hong Kong to write this startling landmark account of the island citys complex past and precarious future
The story of Hong Kong has long been obscured by competing myths to Britain a barren rock with no appreciable history to China a part of Chinese soil from time immemorial that had at last returned to the ancestral fold To its inhabitants the city was a place of refuge and rebellion whose own history was so little taught that they began mythmaking their own past
When protests erupted in 2019 and were met with escalating suppression from Beijing Louisa Limraised in Hong Kong as a halfChinese halfEnglish child and now a reporter who had covered the region for a decaderealised that she was uniquely positioned to unearth Hong Kongs untold stories
Lims deeply researched and personal account is startling casting 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 who like Lim aim to put Hong Kongers at the centre 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 Konga site of disappearance and reappearance power and powerlessness loss and reclamation
Unapologetically personalThe engine for this vivid loving book is Lims insistent questioningher recognition that whatever comes next for Hong Kong will require not only fortitude but also willful acts of imagination NEW YORK TIMES
The best book about the indelible city to date Irresistibly real and emotionally authentic it shines with a shimmering light rarely seen in political narrative A truly extraordinary elegy AI WEIWEI
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