World

In Hong Kong, the Search for a Single Identity


INDELIBLE CITY: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong, by Louisa Lim
THE IMPOSSIBLE CITY: A Hong Kong Memoir, by Karen Cheung


The first Hong Kongers, so the myth goes, were rebels. In the fifth century a Chinese official named Lu Xun incited a rebellion against the Jin dynasty. He lost, and fled with his army to Lantau, one of Hong Kong’s islands, where they lived in caves and ate so much raw fish that, according to one popular version of the legend, they grew fish heads. Indigenous Hong Kongers, the so-called Lo Ting, are said to be these insurrectionist mermen.

In recent years, the Lo Ting have inspired television shows, artworks and plays in Hong Kong. To those who perpetuated the myth, it didn’t matter that the tale was utterly fantastical. What mattered was that the story was created by and for Hong Kongers. It was an alternative to the dominant narratives told about the city by the British and the Chinese. It was an effort by Hong Kongers to reclaim their own history.

Two new books advance that effort by centering the voices and perspectives of Hong Kongers. Louisa Lim’s “Indelible City” dismantles the received wisdom about Hong Kong’s history and replaces it with an engaging, exhaustively researched account of its long struggle for sovereignty. And in her pulsing debut memoir, “The Impossible City,” Karen Cheung writes eloquently about what it means to find your place in a city as it vanishes before your eyes. Each book sheds a different light on how longstanding forces converged to foment the sustained outpouring of anger and frustration that in 2019 shook Hong Kong to its core.

Lim, a former journalist for NPR and the BBC who was based in China for a decade, argues that “right from the very start, Hong Kong’s identity was conditional and uncertain,” as its history was written by China and Britain, the two great powers that have asserted sovereignty over Hong Kong for centuries. In China’s telling, Hong Kong was a part of China from ancient times until it was unjustly taken by British imperial aggressors with the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, which ended the first Opium War. It was the start of China’s “century of humiliation”by the West, and only with the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997 was this perceived indignity finally resolved. Now, Beijing plans to fold Hong Kong — and cities like Macau, Shenzhen, Guangzhou— into a single southern Chinese hub called “the Greater Bay Area.” Lim is well versed in the Communist Party of China’s ability to rewrite history in real time. Her first book, “The People’s Republic of Amnesia” (2014), explained the party’s efforts to suppress the legacy of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989.

China is a familiar antagonist in Western reporting on Hong Kong, but Lim reserves her sharpest criticism for the British, whose narrative of an “imaginary Hong Kong” — a “barren rock” until they arrived and transformed it into “Asia’s Global City” — “deprived Hong Kong of a precolonial history,” Lim writes, “and Hong Kongers of progenitors.” Lim, the daughter of a Singaporean Chinese father and a British mother, moved to Hong Kong at the age of 5. In school, she was taught a “startlingly Victorian” curriculum “designed to ensure that we did not identify too closely with any place.” Children did not learn the bloody means by which Britain had come to acquire Hong Kong, with the real motive of renewing its illegal opium trade in China.

Throughout this colonial history Lim sprinkles vivid details that underscore the racism and “willful disregard” with which Britain governed its last major colony. Her own relative Henry May, the governor of Hong Kong in 1912, banned Chinese people from living in the exclusive Peak neighborhood and owned a racing pony he named Yellow Skin. Drawing on a “holy grail” of archived, formerly confidential interviews from the 1980s and ’90s, Lim presents a dramatic account of how the British, while negotiating the handover, repeatedly obfuscated and withheld information from their most trusted Hong Kong advisers. These so-called Unofficials, led by S.Y. Chung, warned Margaret Thatcher in 1984 that safeguards were necessary to ensure that China adhered to its promise to leave Hong Kong’s way of life unchanged for 50 years. Lim says Thatcher secretly shared their doubts, yet still pressed on with the negotiations. The stage was set for an unraveling. Lim’s interpretation, of course, benefits from hindsight.

In this alternate narrative of Hong Kong, free of the straitjacket of state-sponsored history, Lim places the recent protests in the territory’s centuries-long history of rebellion, stretching back to when it was a flourishing salt production center in the 12th century B.C. She details recent efforts among Hong Kongers to forge a sense of shared history, from the Lo Ting mythmaking to “archival marathons,”in which volunteer researchers gather to comb as many as 8,000 pages of source material at a time, “piecing together the past.” And, Lim writes, Hong Kongers “were political animals too, who would show their dissatisfaction when their core values were threatened,” by taking to the streets. Over time, Lim writes, there emerged a Hong Kong identity grounded in a respect for hard work and perseverance (a.k.a. the “Lion Rock Spirit”) and held together by a shared Cantonese language and a growing wariness of the mainland.

But perhaps the most unlikely of heroes in Lim’s account — in fact, her inspiration for the book in the first place — is Tsang Tsou-choi, better known as the King of Kowloon. A toothless trash collector who accused the British colonialists of stealing his ancestral homeland, “the King” spent nearly six decades, from the 1950s until he died in 2007, waging a bold graffiti campaign around the island to make his claims known. In pursuing his story, Lim “discovered a multitude of Hong Kongs,” and of her own competing identities. Was she a neutral journalist or a participant? As a Eurasian who speaks only “shamefully basic” Cantonese, is she a real Hong Konger? By the end, Lim concludes she is, and that she therefore could not remain neutral. “Distance is a privilege that Hong Kongers — no matter where — cannot enjoy,” she writes. “There is no escape from the horror of watching your home be destroyed.”

In “The Impossible City,” Cheung likewise distinguishes among the multiple universes that make up modern Hong Kong. There is the “cosmopolitan city,” home to international students and expats whose idea of paradise is Lan Kwai Fong, “a bar-infested slope of drunk men and Jell-O shots,” who proudly tell people they’re from Hong Kong but are “barely able to describe the city without talking about Mong Kok or char siu rice.”

Then there’s the universe of wet markets and the waterfront, of “underground musicians in industrial buildings, anarchists who run a vegetarian restaurant, and zinemakers and poets who write in both Chinese and a bastardized English.” It is in these “quiet corners” where Cheung learned what it means to be a Hong Konger.

Her memoir spans the period between the 1997 handover and 2021, the year after new national security legislation became “a weapon for Beijing to silence dissent in Hong Kong,” as well as a “turning point for a total crackdown that soon infiltrated all aspects of life.” Cheung was reluctant to write about Hong Kong until “the walls began closing in,” and she feared if she waited too long there wouldn’t be a Hong Kong left to write about. This book, she says, is her way of remembering “the way we lived.”

Cheung was born in Shenzhen and moved to Hong Kong before the age of 1. “When I was 4,” she writes, “my small city went from being a British colony to Chinese property.” By then, her parents were separated, her mother absent, her father temperamental. Her relations with both are strained. The “only reliable presence” in Cheung’s life was her grandmother, who was fastidious about her Taoist rituals and expressed her love through food, from abalone and lettuce to steamed fish to cake rolls. Back then, Cheung didn’t yet know what it meant to be a Hong Konger. The SARS crisis and the 2003 protests against Article 23, a national security bill, are mere background noise to the familiar drama of childhood.

For a few years, Cheung attended an expensive English-language international school, hung out poolside with friends at elite country clubs and went on expensive overseas trips to highland castles. When her father, a businessman, lost his fortune, he pulled her out of that cosseted world and sent her to a conservative public school where tuition was free, Cantonese reigned, and the students came from a mix of socioeconomic backgrounds. Cheung’s former private school classmates started calling her “local”; the condescension and classism do not escape her.

Increasingly estranged from her family, Cheung moved out of her home at 18. She spent years sleeping on couches and bunk beds, living with a series of 22 different roommates in six different residences. This is to be expected in Hong Kong, where the collusion between the government and local property developers makes the cost of living prohibitively high for most: “Everywhere we look in Hong Kong, we’re confronted with the impossibilities of trying to make a home in a city where the game is rigged.” Cheung is bracingly forthright about her depression and the difficulties of navigating a public health system that is often unaffordable and inaccessible. In 2019, when Hong Kongers began taking to the streets to protest against a proposed law that would allow extraditions to mainland China, she watched as this lifelong personal battle ballooned into a citywide mental health crisis.

Despite its “impossibilities,” the city gradually became Cheung’s chosen family. She was a law student studying abroad in Scotland during the birth of the Umbrella Movement in 2014, when as many as 100,000 people camped out in the streets in an effort to force local officials and Chinese Communist Party leaders in Beijing to heed their demands for free and direct elections for Hong Kong’s top leader, the chief executive. When she returned, she overcompensated “by showing up to every protest I can manage.” In 2019, she found herself shuttling between “real” life — where she goes to work and happy hour drinks and everything appears normal — and the “other world,” the one in which she wears a hard hat and face mask to join the crowd of thousands marching as one.

Interspersed throughout this narrative are her intimate conversations with friends, fellow protesters, musicians and former classmates. There is an almost trancelike quality to her memories, of both dramatic and quiet moments: singing along with the mellifluous voice of Teresa Teng in her father’s car; a suicidal Cheung yelling down at police officers from the ledge of her building; sitting on a pier looking out “over the silhouettes of islets … balancing a cup of coffee in between my knees and staining the pages of my book with salt.”

When an ex-classmate jokes to Cheung that she is “writing a book about how much you hate international school kids,” she replies, “It’s not a whole book on that.” A lot of it is. But Cheung’s critiques ring true: of the “expats who moved to Asia to teach English or find themselves,” of foreign media and its often reductionist storytelling. But her derision for this faceless “cosmopolitan” set is so scathing, her view that affluent, apolitical people overlook the real Hong Kong so transparent, that I found myself wanting to hear more from these people themselves.

Readers won’t find those views here; Cheung does not claim to represent anyone but herself. She drops Chinese characters in the text sometimes without translation or explanation. “Maybe this isn’t the book you expected to read,” Cheung writes. That’s the point. For far too long, faraway interests have claimed to speak for Hong Kong. It’s time to let Hong Kongers, in all their multitudes, speak for themselves.


INDELIBLE CITY: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong, by Louisa Lim | 294 pp. | Riverhead Books | $28

THE IMPOSSIBLE CITY: A Hong Kong Memoir, by Karen Cheung | 320 pp. | Random House | $28.99

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