Indelible City

Author: Louisa Lim
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 059319182X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR 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, Hong Kong’s 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 nearly two decades—realized that she was uniquely positioned to unearth the city’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.

Indelible City

Author: Chew Yi Wei
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish International Asia Pte Ltd
ISBN: 9814794848
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 79

Book Description
The city is a place laced with the material and the immaterial, the visible and invisible. There are the migratory lines trod by our ancestors, the scent of our foodways, the flight of birds, the sigh of an old school, a demolished rooftop, an unassuming lamppost, fading tongues, empty chairs, extroverted harbours. These are the indelible marks that layer our city, that make up where we are, and who we are. Drawing together her memories growing up in Singapore and lyrical observations of the nation’s ever-changing landscape, Yi Wei creates an evocative portrait of the city and what it means to her. Beautifully rendered and delicately written, Indelible City brings you on an intimate sojourn with Yi Wei as she explores issues of home, identity and place.

Summary of Louisa Lim's Indelible City

Author: Everest Media,
Publisher: Everest Media LLC
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 35

Book Description
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The protests in Hong Kong were not just about the extradition law, but also about the city’s independence and its rule of law. The British had not given their subjects full citizenship or universal suffrage, but they had instilled in them civic values including respect for freedom, democracy, and human rights. #2 I was in Hong Kong during the Umbrella Movement, and I was amazed by the way the city was being transformed into an open-air gallery of populist ideas. These displays were called Lennon Walls, after a wall in Prague that had been painted with countercultural, anti-establishment graffiti beginning in the 1980s. #3 In China, the history of the written word dates back some 3,700 years. The first instances were pictographs known as jiaguwen, or oracle bone inscriptions, carved with a sharp instrument on tortoise shells or the shoulder blades of oxen, dating to the Shang dynasty. #4 Tsang Chau-sang was a Chinese man who was born in Guangdong province in Liantang village in Zhaoqing prefecture. He began writing in public around 1956, and was initially viewed as a crank and a vandal. But in his mind, he was an emperor.

Indelible City

Author: Louisa Lim
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593191838
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Indelible

Author: Adelia Saunders
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1632863960
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Book Description
An Indie Next Pick A masterful, "seductive" debut novel about fate, family secrets, and the stories our bodies tell (NYTBR). Magdalena has an unsettling gift. She sees the truth about people written on their skin--names, dates, details both banal and profound--and her only relief from the onslaught of information is to take off her glasses and let the world recede. Mercifully, her own skin is blank. When she meets Neil, she is intrigued to see her name on his cheek, and she is drawn into a family drama that began more than half a century before, when Neil's father, Richard, was abandoned at birth by his mother, a famous expatriate novelist. As secrets are revealed among forgotten texts in the archives of Paris, on a dusty cattle ranch in the American West, along ancient pilgrim paths, and in a run-down apartment in post-Soviet Lithuania, the novel's unforgettable characters converge--by chance, or perhaps by fate--and Magdalena's uncanny ability may be the key to their happiness.

Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World

Author: Mark L. Clifford
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250279186
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237

Book Description
A gripping history of China's deteriorating relationship with Hong Kong, and its implications for the rest of the world. For 150 years as a British colony, Hong Kong was a beacon of prosperity where people, money, and technology flowed freely, and residents enjoyed many civil liberties. In preparation for handing the territory over to China in 1997, Deng Xiaoping promised that it would remain highly autonomous for fifty years. An international treaty established a Special Administrative Region (SAR) with a far freer political system than that of Communist China—one with its own currency and government administration, a common-law legal system, and freedoms of press, speech, and religion. But as the halfway mark of the SAR’s lifespan approaches in 2022, it is clear that China has not kept its word. Universal suffrage and free elections have not been instituted, harassment and brutality have become normalized, and activists are being jailed en masse. To make matters worse, a national security law that further crimps Hong Kong’s freedoms has recently been decreed in Beijing. This tragic backslide has dire worldwide implications—as China continues to expand its global influence, Hong Kong serves as a chilling preview of how dissenters could be treated in regions that fall under the emerging superpower’s control. Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World tells the complete story of how a city once famed for protests so peaceful that toddlers joined grandparents in millions-strong rallies became a place where police have fired more than 10,000 rounds of tear gas, rubber bullets and even live ammunition at their neighbors, while pro-government hooligans attack demonstrators in the streets. A Hong Kong resident from 1992 to 2021, author Mark L. Clifford has witnessed this transformation firsthand. As a celebrated publisher and journalist, he has unrivaled access to the full range of the city’s society, from student protestors and political prisoners to aristocrats and senior government officials. A powerful and dramatic mix of history and on-the-ground reporting, this book is the definitive account of one of the most important geopolitical standoffs of our time.

The Impossible City

Author: Karen Cheung
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0593241436
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
A boldly rendered—and deeply intimate—account of Hong Kong today, from a resilient young woman whose stories explore what it means to survive in a city teeming with broken promises. “[A] pulsing debut . . . about what it means to find your place in a city as it vanishes before your eyes.”—The New York Times Book Review ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post Hong Kong is known as a place of extremes: a former colony of the United Kingdom that now exists at the margins of an ascendant China; a city rocked by mass protests, where residents rally—often in vain—against threats to their fundamental freedoms. But it is also misunderstood, and often romanticized. Drawing from her own experience reporting on the politics and culture of her hometown, as well as interviews with musicians, protesters, and writers who have watched their home transform, Karen Cheung gives us a rare insider’s view of this remarkable city at a pivotal moment—for Hong Kong and, ultimately, for herself. Born just before the handover to China in 1997, Cheung grew up questioning what version of Hong Kong she belonged to. Not quite at ease within the middle-class, cosmopolitan identity available to her at her English-speaking international school, she also resisted the conservative values of her deeply traditional, often dysfunctional family. Through vivid and character-rich stories, Cheung braids a dual narrative of her own coming of age alongside that of her generation. With heartbreaking candor, she recounts her yearslong struggle to find reliable mental health care in a city reeling from the traumatic aftermath of recent protests. Cheung also captures moments of miraculous triumph, documenting Hong Kong’s vibrant counterculture and taking us deep into its indie music and creative scenes. Inevitably, she brings us to the protests, where her understanding of what it means to belong to Hong Kong finally crystallized. An exhilarating blend of memoir and reportage, The Impossible City charts the parallel journeys of both a young woman and a city as they navigate the various, sometimes contradictory paths of coming into one’s own. LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL

Cities I've Never Lived In

Author: Sara Majka
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555979246
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Book Description
In subtle, sensuous prose, the stories in Sara Majka's debut collection explore distance in all its forms: the emotional spaces that open up between family members, friends, and lovers; the gaps that emerge between who we were and who we are; the gulf between our private and public selves. At the center of the collection is a series of stories narrated by a young American woman in the wake of a divorce; wry and shy but never less than open to the world, she recalls the places and people she has been close to, the dreams she has pursued and those she has left unfulfilled. Interspersed with these intimate first-person stories are stand-alone pieces where the tight focus on the narrator's life gives way to closely observed accounts of the lives of others. A book about belonging, and how much of yourself to give up in the pursuit of that, Cities I've Never Lived In offers stories that reveal, with great sadness and great humor, the ways we are most of all citizens of the places where we cannot be. Cities I've Never Lived In is the second book in Graywolf's collaboration with the literary magazine A Public Space.

The Arsonists' City

Author: Hala Alyan
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
ISBN: 035812655X
Category : Domestic fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 467

Book Description
"The Arsonists' City delivers all the pleasures of a good old-fashioned saga, but in Alyan's hands, one family's tale becomes the story of a nation--Lebanon and Syria, yes, but also the United States. It's the kind of book we are lucky to have."--Rumaan Alam A rich family story, a personal look at the legacy of war in the Middle East, and an indelible rendering of how we hold on to the people and places we call home The Nasr family is spread across the globe--Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. A Syrian mother, a Lebanese father, and three American children: all have lived a life of migration. Still, they've always had their ancestral home in Beirut--a constant touchstone--and the complicated, messy family love that binds them. But following his father's recent death, Idris, the family's new patriarch, has decided to sell. The decision brings the family to Beirut, where everyone unites against Idris in a fight to save the house. They all have secrets--lost loves, bitter jealousies, abandoned passions, deep-set shame--that distance has helped smother. But in a city smoldering with the legacy of war, an ongoing flow of refugees, religious tension, and political protest, those secrets ignite, imperiling the fragile ties that hold this family together. In a novel teeming with wisdom, warmth, and characters born of remarkable human insight, award-winning author Hala Alyan shows us again that "fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us" (NPR).

Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays from Singapore

Author: Esther Vincent
Publisher: Ethos Books
ISBN: 9811818479
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays from Singapore contemplates and re-centres Singapore women in the overlapping discourses of family, home, ecology and nation. For the first time, this collection of ecofeminist essays focuses on the crafts, minds, bodies and subjectivities of a diverse group of women making kin with the human and non-human world as they navigate their lives. From ruminations on caregiving, to surreal interspecies encounters, to indigenous ways of knowing, these women writers chart a new path on the map of Singapore’s literary scene, writing urgently about gender, nature, climate change, reciprocity and other critical environmental issues. In a climate-changed world where vital connections are lost, Making Kin is an essential collection that blurs boundaries between the personal and the political. It is a revolutionary approach towards intersectional environmentalism.