Margins
Hong Kong 20/20 book cover
Hong Kong 20/20
Reflections on a borrowed place
Eddie Tay, Mishi Saran, Xu Xi, and more
2017
First Published
3.95
Average Rating
400
Number of Pages

The handover in 1997 saw Hong Kong’s smooth transition from colonial to Communist rule under the auspices of the ‘one country, two systems’ framework. But twenty years on, the real impact of the sovereignty change is just starting to register: the city’s near-total economic integration with the mainland, a massive influx of Chinese visitors, simmering cross-border tensions and a rapid erosion of freedoms. Believing that we are stronger and louder together, PEN Hong Kong invited some of Hong Kong’s most prominent literary and creative minds to reflect on the city’s post-colonial development, in a definitive compendium of essays, poems, fiction and artwork that marks this historical milestone. Michael Braga · Mary-Jean Chan · Jennifer S. Cheng · Kris Cheng · Chow Hon Fai · Larry Feign · Harry Harrison · Gérard Henry · Louise Ho · Oscar Ho Hing Kay · Tammy Ho Lai-Ming · Sarah Howe · Law Lok Man, Louise · Arthur Leung · Leung Ping-Kwan · Louisa Lim · Shirley Geok-lin Lim · Lui Wing Kai, Eric · William Nee · Jason Y. Ng · Margaret Ng · Timothy O’Leary · Michael O’Sullivan · Ilaria Maria Sala · Mishi Saran · Shahilla Shariff · Shen Jian · So Mei Chi · Tang Siu Wa · Eddie Tay · Chip Tsao · Stephen Vines · Marco Wan · Wawa · Kate Whitehead · Joshua Wong · Nicholas Wong · Xu Xi · Marco Yan · Chris Yeung · Douglas Young With forewords by Timothy Garton Ash and Kevin Lau Chun-to.

Avg Rating
3.95
Number of Ratings
20
5 STARS
40%
4 STARS
25%
3 STARS
30%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
5%
goodreads

Authors

Mishi Saran
Author · 3 books
Mishi Saran’s first novel, The Other Side of Light, (HarperCollins India, 2012) was shortlisted for the 2013 Commonwealth Book Prize. Her first book, a travelogue, Chasing the Monk’s Shadow: A Journey in the Footsteps of Xuanzang, (Penguin, 2005) was shortlisted for the 2006 Hutch Crossword Book Award and long-listed for the Lettres Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage. Her journalism has appeared in international media like the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, South China Morning Post Her essays have appeared in LARB and Quartz. She is working on a novel set in 1930s’ Shanghai. Saran was born in India and has lived in six other countries. She majored in Chinese Studies at Wellesley College and moved back to Hong Kong in 2014 after eight years in Shanghai.
Xu Xi
Xu Xi
Author · 7 books

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. XU XI is the author’s pinyin* short form name which is also her byline, but she is most assuredly not the following beings with the same pinyin name: a Chinese painter & sculptor; the author of tomes about acupuncture; a nationalist or a dissident-in-exile of any nation-state; a reality TV show host in some special economic zone or on YouTube; an Academic in any Intellectual Discipline, real or imagined, as capitalized by Pooh or some other friendly wild thing. She has however had three legal English names (as well as several best left unnamed of dubious legal quality) and strives assiduously not to acquire any others. However, she really is the author of thirteen books, including five novels, six collections of short fiction & essays and most recently Insignificance: Hong Kong Stories, released June 15, 2018 by Signal 8 Press; the memoir Dear Hong Kong: An Elegy for a City (2017), as part of Penguin's Hong Kong series for the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to China. She is also editor of four anthologies of Hong Kong writing in English. Forthcoming from Nebraska Univeristy Press in March 2019 is an essay collection This Fish Is Fowl. A former Indonesian national, born and raised in Hong Kong, she eventually morphed into a U.S. citizen at the age of 33, having washed onto that distant shore across from Lady Liberty. These days, she splits time between New York and Asia (her sights set on the land of her former nationality, Indonesia) and still mourns the loss of her beloved writing retreat in Seacliff, on the South Island of New Zealand, where she hovered, joyously, for seven years. *pinyin = transliteration for Mandarin Chinese or Putonghua (P), the official language of China although Xu is far more fluent in Cantonese (C), that being the people’s language of her birth city, Hong Kong.

Larry Feign
Larry Feign
Author · 3 books

Larry Feign is an award-winning artist and writer who has worked in Honolulu, Hollywood, London, and currently in Hong Kong. Feign’s work has appeared in Time, The Economist, the New York Times, The Atlantic, and other publications around the world. He also directed animated cartoons for Disney Television and Cartoon Network. He is a MacDowell Fellow and three-time recipient of Amnesty International Human Rights Press Awards. He has published numerous books of humor, cartoons, and serious historical fiction, as well as a best-selling children’s book series under under the pen name MD Whalen. He lives walking distance from notorious pirate haunts in a small island village with his wife, their two dogs, and the occasional uninvited python.

Tammy Ho Lai-Ming
Author · 2 books
Tammy Ho Lai-Ming is a Hong Kong-born writer currently based in London, UK. She edited Hong Kong U Writing: An Anthology (2006) and coedited Love & Lust (Chameleon Press Ltd., 2008). She is also an assistant poetry editor of Sotto Voce and a founding coeditor of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (http://www.asiancha.com), the first Hong Kong online literary journal. More at http://www.sighming.com
Joshua Wong
Author · 2 books

See also 黃之鋒 Joshua Wong Chi-fung is a Hong Kong student activist and politician. He has been named by TIME, Fortune, Prospect and Forbes as one of the world's most influential leaders. In 2018 he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his leading role in the Umbrella Movement. He is Secretary-General of Demosistō, a pro-democracy organization which he founded in 2016 that advocates for self-determination for Hong Kong. Joshua came onto the political scene in 2011 aged 14, when he founded Scholarism and successfully protested against the enforcement of Chinese National Education in Hong Kong. He has been arrested numerous times for his protesting and activism and has served over 100 days in jail. He has been the subject of two documentaries, including the Netflix original, Joshua: Teenager vs Superpower.

Nicholas Wong
Nicholas Wong
Author · 3 books
Nicholas Wong is the author of Besiege Me (Noemi Press, 2021), and Crevasse (Kaya Press, 2015), the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. He is also the recipient of the Australian Book Review’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize. His poem has been longlisted for the University of Canberra Vice Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize in 2019. Wong has contributed writing to the radio composition project “One of the Two Stories, Or Both” at the Manchester International Festival 2017, and the catalogue of the exhibition “One Hand Clapping” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. He teaches at the Education University of Hong Kong.
Louisa Lim
Louisa Lim
Author · 3 books

Louisa Lim found her path into journalism after graduating with a degree in Modern Chinese studies from Leeds University in England. She worked as an editor, polisher, and translator at a state-run publishing company in China, a job that helped her strengthen her Chinese. Simultaneously, she began writing for a magazine and soon realized her talents fit perfectly with journalism. In 1995, Lim moved to Hong Kong and worked at the Eastern Express newspaper until its demise six months later and then for TVB Pearl, the local television station. Eventually Lim joined the BBC, working first for five years at the World Service in London, and then as a correspondent at the BBC in Beijing for almost three years. Lim opened NPR's Shanghai bureau in February 2006, but she's reported for NPR from up Tibetan glaciers and down the shaft of a Shaanxi coalmine. She made a very rare reporting trip to North Korea, covered illegal abortions in Guangxi province, and worked on the major multimedia series on religion in China "New Believers: A Religious Revolution in China." Lim has been part of NPR teams who multiple awards, including the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, a Peabody and two Edward R. Murrow awards, for their coverage of the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 and the Beijing Olympics. She's been honored in the Human Rights Press Awards, as well as winning prizes for her multimedia work. Currently attending the University of Michigan as a Knight-Wallace Fellow, Lim will return to her regular role as NPR's Beijing Correspondent before the end of 2014.

Harry Harrison
Harry Harrison
Author · 101 books

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. Harry Harrison (born Henry Maxwell Dempsey) was an American science fiction author best known for his character the The Stainless Steel Rat and the novel Make Room! Make Room! (1966), the basis for the film Soylent Green (1973). He was also (with Brian W. Aldiss) co-president of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group. Excerpted from Wikipedia.

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