Indelible City

Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong

Indelible City
Louisa Lim
RRP:
NZ$ 40.00
Our Price:
NZ$ 32.00
Paperback
h234 x 153mm - 320pg
3 May 2022 AU
International import eta 7-19 days
9781922458513
Out Of Stock
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An award-winning journalist and longtime Hong Konger indelibly captures the place, its people, and the untold history they are claiming, just as it is being erased. The story of Hong Kong has long been dominated by competing myths- to Britain, a ' barren rock' with no appreciable history; to China, a part of Chinese soil from time immemorial, at last returned to the ancestral fold. For decades, its history was simply not taught, especially to Hong Kongers, obscuring its origins as a place of refuge and rebellion. When protests erupted in 2019 and were met with escalating suppression from Beijing, Louisa Lim-raised in Hong Kong as a half-Chinese, half-English child, and now a reporter who has covered the region for more than a decade-realized that she was uniquely positioned to unearth Hong Kong' s untold stories. Lim' s deeply researched and personal account casts startling 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 and others who, like Lim, aim to put Hong Kongers at the center 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 Kong-a site of disappearance and reappearance, power and powerlessness, loss and reclamation.
Advance praise for Indelible City: "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 "An utterly brilliant and original ode to Hong Kong, throbbing with eccentricity and sense of place. Like Joseph Mitchell' s singular rendering of New York, Lim' s Hong Kong will be read decades from now as an indelible portrait. " -Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition, winner of the National Book Award "I absolutely loved this book. Each page is a revelation about a city whose history I thought I knew well. Lim' s exploration of Hong Kong' s identity is insightful, refreshing and entirely original. " -Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy and Eat the Buddha "I read Louisa Lim' s book slowly, haunted by memories and stymied by sorrow. An archaeological dig into the disappearing present, her fascinating and heartbreaking account reveals an indelible history hidden in plain sight, and a future that Hong Kong' s unique sensibility promises even as the world' s most powerful autocracy strives to erase it. " -Geremie Barme, editor of China Heritage
Louisa Lim is the author of The People' s Republic of Amnesia- Tiananmen Revisited, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Helen Bernstein Award. She covered China and Hong Kong for nearly two decades, as a correspondent for the BBC and NPR, and has also reported for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. Raised in Hong Kong, she now teaches at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where she lives with her two children.
Status: Indent title, imported to order
ISBN-13: 9781922458513
Published: 3 May 2022
Published In: Australia
Imprint: Text Publishing Company
Publisher: Text Publishing
Format: Paperback
Height: 234mm
Width: 153mm
Pages: 320

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