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Indelible City by Louisa Lim
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Indelible City

Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong

Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong

By Louisa Lim

By Louisa Lim

By Louisa Lim

By Louisa Lim

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Hardcover

Apr 19, 2022 | ISBN 9780593191811

Ebook

Apr 19, 2022 | ISBN 9780593191835

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    Indelible City by Louisa Lim
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    About Indelible City

    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 obscured by competing myths: to Britain, a “barren rock” with no appreciable history before the English arrived; to China, a “borrowed place” at long last returned to the ancestral fold. Even to its own inhabitants, its distinctive origins—as a place of refuge and rebellion, of hybridity as an endlessly adaptive way of life—remained untaught and unknown. As protests erupted across the city 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 had covered the region for more than a decade—realized that she was uniquely positioned to unearth this untold story before it was too late.

    Lim’s deeply researched—and deeply personal—account casts often startling new light on key moments: the British takeover in 1842, the negotiations leading to its “return” to China in 1997, the current protests, and the future Beijing seeks to impose. Throughout, it is populated by contemporary figures who, like her, aim to put Hong Kongers at the center of their own story: guerilla calligraphers, amateur historians and archaeologists, and wending through it all, the King of Kowloon, a mentally ill trash collector, descended from royalty, whose iconic street art both embodied and inspired the unique identity Lim unforgettably conveys—Hong Kong as a place of disappearance and reappearance, power and powerlessness, loss and reclamation, silence and voice.

    About Indelible City

    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 obscured by competing myths: to Britain, a “barren rock” with no appreciable history before the English arrived; to China, a “borrowed place” at long last returned to the ancestral fold. Even to its own inhabitants, its distinctive origins—as a place of refuge and rebellion, of hybridity as an endlessly adaptive way of life—remained untaught and unknown. As protests erupted across the city 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 had covered the region for more than a decade—realized that she was uniquely positioned to unearth this untold story before it was too late.

    Lim’s deeply researched—and deeply personal—account casts often startling new light on key moments: the British takeover in 1842, the negotiations leading to its “return” to China in 1997, the current protests, and the future Beijing seeks to impose. Throughout, it is populated by contemporary figures who, like her, aim to put Hong Kongers at the center of their own story: guerilla calligraphers, amateur historians and archaeologists, and wending through it all, the King of Kowloon, a mentally ill trash collector, descended from royalty, whose iconic street art both embodied and inspired the unique identity Lim unforgettably conveys—Hong Kong as a place of disappearance and reappearance, power and powerlessness, loss and reclamation, silence and voice.

    About Louisa Lim

    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… More about Louisa Lim

    About Louisa Lim

    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… More about Louisa Lim

    Product Details

    Category: Asian World History | World Politics | Domestic Politics

    Hardcover | $28.00
    Published by Riverhead Books
    Apr 19, 2022 | 320 Pages | 6 x 9 | ISBN 9780593191811

    Category: Asian World History | World Politics | Domestic Politics

    Ebook | $14.99
    Published by Riverhead Books
    Apr 19, 2022 | 320 Pages | ISBN 9780593191835

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    Praise

    Advance praise for Indelible City:

    “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

    “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

    “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 Barmé, editor of China Heritage

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