Name: Indelible City
ISBN: 9781922458513

Louisa Lim

An award-winning journalist takes to the protest-riven streets of Hong Kong to write this startling landmark account of the island city’s complex past and precarious future.

Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong

Indelible City

Beautifully written story of Hong Kong’s fight for identity and independence. 

Karolina

Nick Gracilla

"We have no choice but to reinvent ourselves." 

_Indelible City_ is an immersive, captivating story. For thousands of years Hong Kong was a rocky fisherman's island. Then in the mid 1800s it becomes a British colony through the spoils of the Opium Wars and gunboat diplomacy; and then again in 1997, handed back to China in fulfilment of agreements penned a hundred years prior, and then again in 2020 or so, absorbed into China with the disolution of its political parties and erasure of its independence. 

Throughout this history, though, the identity of Hong Kongers themselves has been conditional, in-between, and uncertain. Hong Kongers were never part of the negotiations during the British occupation and colonization; they were equally not part of the negotiations for the colony's return. Hong Kongers were uniquely in-between. Neither British citizens nor mainland Chinese, their unique Cantonnese language is nearly incomprehensible to mainland Mandrain speakers, and their freedom-loving, non-conforming culture flourished in the space between the great powers. 

Lim seems the perfect writer to capture this sense of cultural identity and in-betweenness: Raised in HK and half English, half Chinese, she's a journalist, a researcher, a teacher, protester, and a Hong Konger at heart. She tells the story through the work of the "King of Kowloon," a prolific graffiti artist who claimed ancestoral ownership over the lands, and made more than 55,000+ rough calligraphy works across the city, always on public property. His work captures something of the essence of what Kong Kong was: fantastic, prolific, rebellious, and, sadly, disempowered. 

As his work fades away, so does the freedoms, independence, and rights of Hong Kongers. The promises of 1997 -- "One Country, Two Systems" -- were dismantled by China piece by piece, gradually "peeled away like a meat slicer." Lim documents the dashed hopes of the Umbrella protest movements, initially enormous and peaceful marches that gave way to entrenched positions, tear gas, and violence. The book ends in the current day, where COVID restrictions are used by China to silence protests or gatherings, and the creation and imposition of "the correct history" is in full progress, with books removed from libraries, teachers jailed, and new "correct histories" taught in schools. 

Very highly recommended.

Indelible City Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong

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