INDELIBLE CITY

The latest eye-opening journalistic account of the ongoing tumult in Hong Kong.

Journalist Lim, the author of The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, examines the unrest in terms of dominion, possession, and defiance. “The issue of belonging,” she writes, “has always been a complicated one for me, as a half-English, half-Chinese person who was born in England but brought up in Hong Kong.” Now living and teaching in Melbourne, Lim writes, “my position on the sidelines liberates me to write more openly than others” about the vibrant, defiant spirit of the citizens, especially since the passage of the China-enforced National Security Law. The author’s determined, methodical chronicle captures her growing unease and complex thoughts about joining the ranks of the activists and dissidents. “Overnight,” she writes, “a mostly free society had become an authoritarian one.” With the freedom of the press (and the internet) severely restricted, police are targeting reporters. Lim returns often to the tragic life and exceptional work of Tsang Tsou-choi (1921-2007), a once-homeless Hong Kong artist. Nicknamed “the King of Kowloon,” he would use “misshapen, childlike calligraphy” to create graffiti asserting his grievance that he had been robbed of his ancestral land, and he became famous as a personification of Hong Kong citizens’ sense of dispossession after the handover by Britain in 1997. Throughout this smooth mixture of reportage and memoir, Lim ably captures the increasingly malignant actions by the Communist Party, which have become more alarming by the day. “The days and nights,” she writes, “were melding into a single livestream of tear gas, deployed with horrifying and mesmerizing beauty….By the end of 2019, the police had fired sixteen thousand rounds of tear gas, violating both their own guidelines and the Chemical Weapons Convention.” This book is a good complement to Karen Cheung’s The Impossible City.

An affecting portrayal of the spirited nature of Hong Kong and the many challenges it faces.