To explain the city’s fraught present, two books look to its past.
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.
