Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong

"She wasn’t born in Hong Kong, but she grew up largely there. She’s an extraordinarily talented individual. She’s another journalist who did Chinese studies as an undergraduate and then, like Brookes, worked for the BBC. She then worked for NPR. Her first book, The People’s Republic of Amnesia , was one of the Tiananmen books that I singled out when I did a Five Books interview on that topic back in 2014. It was a daringly researched, wonderfully done book, and I feel Indelible City can be described with those same terms. A key difference, though, is that this new work is much more personal. Lim is much more of a character in it and her life becomes part of the backdrop. She deals with a lot of things that sometimes are forgotten in the Hong Kong story, such as that Hong Kongers can be people with parents from different parts of the world. She talks about the experience of having that mixed parentage and how it’s seen when she’s in different parts of the world. One of the things that is special about Hong Kong is that you can be—or at least could be for a long period—fully part of the city, whatever your ethnicity, in a way that is very hard in any other parts of the PRC. The book traces a graffiti artist, the ‘King of Kowloon,’ one of these figures who’s very known within Hong Kong, with lots of stories about him, but who gets forgotten outside. She has this fascinating set of stories and reflections about him, even as the book is largely about protests of recent decades that culminated in the upheavals of 2019 and harsh repression of 2020. Lim also does a lot of self-reflection here on the role of a journalist who is so connected to the story that the line between journalist and activist is blurred. She’s part of the story. She wrote extraordinary pieces while the protests were going on in this vein, such as an FT article with the wonderful title “Hong Kong diary—’Don’t get tear-gassed, Mum!'” She co-wrote a piece with Ilaria Maria Sala, a wonderful Italian journalist (who has her own book out on Hong Kong, but it’s only in Italian, so, alas, I haven’t been able to read it, just admire its eye-catching cover). The two of them wrote a memorable commentary for the Guardian in 2019 about being journalists who were so tied to the city and cared so deeply about what was going on that it blurred the line. Journalists were also being targeted by the police during the protests at times. At times, reporters have claimed, it felt like being a war correspondent. One of the things that’s interesting about this book, and Lim’s earlier book, is that while it’s largely a journalist doing serious reporting, she brings in findings from her historical investigations. Scholars maybe will appreciate that the most, and general readers might not realize how special it is. In The People’s Republic of Amnesia she wrote about the massacre in Chengdu that took place after the one in Beijing. She brings that much less well known massacre into the story in a way that’s very powerful. In Indelible City , she does some close archival readings of newly-brought-to-light documents that have to do with the negotiations on how exactly things would work—or were supposed to work—when Hong Kong was transferred from being a British colony to being a part of the PRC. The combination of discoveries about the time around 1997 and on-the-ground reporting about 2019 is extraordinary. Thanks for asking that. As a lead-up to answering the question, I want to mention two other really good books on Hong Kong that came out this year. One had a very similar title, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir , by Karen Cheung, which is a very personal story. It has a lot of parallels to Louisa’s book in the mixing of the personal and the political, though it’s somebody of another generation and with a different perspective. The other book that’s very special is City on the Edge: Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule by Ho-fung Hung, a Hong Konger who is a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins writing here in a very accessible way. What it has in common with Louisa’s book—and Louisa’s book was the one I chose, in part because it brought together elements of both those books—is giving Hong Kong a history that is not just reducing it to the story of what colonizers did to colonized people. The tragic side of Hong Kong history is that Hong Kong’s people have undergone more than one process of colonization and never been able to control their own city, but the inspiring side of that same history is the determination and creativity local people have shown in the face of this. It’s a city that’s often thought of as defined by people in search of material comforts, or of money, but by finding a rebellious artist as a figure to focus on, Louisa brings in Hong Kong’s enduring rebellious tradition, and she, like Hung, brings up examples from earlier periods of feisty locals engaging in acts of resistance."