Street Life Hong Kong


Book Description

Hong Kong is famous for its vibrant, busy street scene. This book introduces us to two dozen people who provide its outdoor colour. Here you will meet a flower seller, a street musician and a tram driver; a bouncer, a shoe shiner and a gas canister delivery man; a security guard and a lifeguard; a man who makes a living climbing bamboo scaffolding, and a woman who ferries visitors around the harbour on a sampan. Among the interviewees are also mainlanders, and ethnic minorities including those from the Philippines, Africa and India, reflecting the diverse ethnic makeup of today's Hong Kong. These are the working people who are always seen but rarely heard, and in this book they tell their life stories in their own words. Sharp black-and-white portraits immerse the reader in the dynamic streetscape of Hong Kong.




Streets


Book Description

In this book, Jason Wordie takes the reader on fifty tours through the urban and historic places of Hong Kong Island ranging from Central through Wan Chai, to Shau Kei Wan then to Shek O, along the south coast from Stanley to Aberdeen, completing a circuit of the Island through Pok Fu Lam, Kennedy Town to Sheung Wan. Each place is introduced with an essay that describes the area and the way it has changed, then the reader is taken on a walk around the area's streets with the important, interesting, curious and historically illuminating sites described and illustrated.




Borrowed Spaces


Book Description

Where have all the fishballs gone? From a journalist deeply attuned to the subtleties of Hong Kong life comes Borrowed Spaces, a chronicle of the ways in which the grassroots citizens of Hong Kong reshape their city to make up for the shortcomings of their bureaucratic government. Mango trees sprouting on roundabouts, fishball stalls and neon signs: these are just some of the Hong Kong icons that are casualties in the struggle to reclaim public spaces. Christopher DeWolf explores the history of Hong Kong’s urban growth through the daily tug of war between the people’s needs to express themselves and government regulations.




Golden Boy


Book Description

The last work of the internationally known, Booker-shortlisted writer is a memoir of growing up in 1950s Hong Kong.




Paper Tigress


Book Description

Rachel Cartland came to Hong Kong in 1972 as one of just two female expatriates in the colonial government's elite administrative grade. Her career was shaped by the momentous events that rocked Hong Kong during the following 34 years: corruption and the police mutiny, currency crisis, Tiananmen Square, the change of sovereignty and the devastation of SARS. This accessible memoir ranges from Government House to the infamous Walled City to the rural New Territories.




Hong Kong


Book Description

In 1997 the United Kingdom returned control of Hong Kong to China, ending the city’s status as one of the last remnants of the British Empire and initiating a new phase for it as both a modern city and a hub for global migrations. Hong Kong is a tour of the city’s postcolonial urban landscape, innovatively told through fieldwork and photography. Caroline Knowles and Douglas Harper’s point of entry into Hong Kong is the unusual position of the British expatriates who chose to remain in the city after the transition. Now a relatively insignificant presence, British migrants in Hong Kong have become intimately connected with another small minority group there: immigrants from Southeast Asia. The lives, journeys, and stories of these two groups bring to life a place where the past continues to resonate for all its residents, even as the city hurtles forward into a future marked by transience and transition. By skillfully blending ethnographic and visual approaches, Hong Kong offers a fascinating guide to a city that is at once unique in its recent history and exemplary of our globalized present.




Hong Kong Policeman


Book Description

Hong Kong in 1970 was the fastest expanding city in the world, a city that lived on three levels - the expatriates, nearly always British who lived in almost complete isolation; the vast mass of Chinese residents struggling to get by and improve their lot; and finally the criminal and corrupt underside which not only fought among itself but also affected the life of everyone else in the Crown Colony through fear and corruption. Fighting to hold this in check - and by and large succeeding - were the Hong Kong police force. At the officer level, many were British. Into this heady and dangerous mix steps a young Merseyside policeman, Chris Emmett. His account of those times brings vividly to life the crime, prostitution, drugs, triad street gangs and corruption that was an important part of the fabric of Hong Kong of those days.




Streets


Book Description

The book starts with a district familiar to all visitors -- Tsim Sha Tsui -- but then moves into the hinterland of Kowloon, taking the reader and walker far beyond the well-known streets of tourist-oriented shops and hotels. Streets: Exploring Kowloon, like its companion, Streets: Exploring Hong Kong Island, guides the reader with maps and travel information to take 45 walks throughout Kowloon, each along a specific street pointing out historically and culturally important sites, but also the curious and the intriguing.




On Asian Streets and Public Space


Book Description

The rapid urbanization of the Asian continent and transformation of its cityscapes have incited many professionals and scholars to pay urgent attention to the study of Asian streets and public spaces in the hope of recording them, learning from their complex nature, and even applying distilled principles in new environments before they disappear under the assault of rapid urban transformation. This volume presents articles focusing on four prevalent themes, namely transformation and modernity, the culture of streets, experiencing the street and finally, design and quality of streets. However, these themes inevitably overlap, pointing out again the complexity of what we call the "street" and the necessity for interdisciplinary research. Finally, adding "Asian" to "street" opens up the discussion about spaces in the Asian city, and even concepts of "Asian-ness", if indeed such a concept can be defined. Believing in the importance of understanding "Asian streets" and "streets" in general for future design and planning of our cities, this collection of essays encourages greater interest in this subject, and therefore more interdisciplinary research. Accordingly, this book should interest not only urban planners, architects and other design and building professionals, but also environmentalists, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers and historians as well as the general public.




City Between Worlds


Book Description

Hong Kong is perched on the fault line between China and the West, a Special Administrative Region of the PRC. Leo Ou-fan Lee offers an insiderÕs view of Hong Kong, capturing the history and culture that make his densely packed home city so different from its generic neighbors. The search for an indigenous Hong Kong takes Lee to the wet markets and corner bookshops of congested Mong Kok, remote fishing villages and mountainside temples, teahouses and noodle stalls, Cantonese opera and Cantopop. But he also finds the ÒrealÓ Hong Kong in a maze of interconnected shopping malls, a jungle of high-rise residential towers, and the neon glow of Chinese-owned skyscrapers in the Central Business District, where land development, global trade, capital accumulation, consumerism, and free-market competition trump every valueÑexcept family. Lee illuminates the relationship between Hong KongÕs geography and its colonial experience, revisiting colonial life on the secluded Peak, in the opium-filled godowns along the harborfront, and in crowded, plague-infested tenements. He examines, with a criticÕs eye, the ÒHong Kong storyÓ in film and fiction: romance in the bars and brothels of Wan Chai, crime in the walled city of Kowloon, ennui on the eve of the 1997 handover. Whether viewed from Tsing Yi Bridge or the deck of the Star Ferry, from Victoria Peak or Lion Rock, Hong Kong sparkles here in all its multifaceted complexity, a city forever between worlds.