The Hong Kong Letter
Author :
Publisher : Michael Burke
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 33,61 MB
Release :
Category :
ISBN : 1907179178
The Hong Kong Letters
Author : Gill Shaddick
Publisher : Australian Scholarly Publishing
Page : 293 pages
File Size : 16,15 MB
Release : 2019-03-29
Category : Travel
ISBN : 1925801632
Book Description
In the late sixties when the Beatles are top of the charts and Twiggy is hitting the catwalk, Gill embarks on a life-changing journey to Hong Kong. Mao’s revolution is at its height. Vietnam has become America’s longest war with no end in sight. But it’s at an ad agency under insane direction where Gill finds her battles and learns to stand her ground. In this spirited memoir, where Mad Men meets Han Suyin’s A Many-Splendoured Thing, Gill recreates a Hong Kong of the imagination. Attractive and naïve, wined and dined by Hong Kong’s elite, she gravitates towards camaraderie outside the world of advertising and money, and adventure follows. A weekend sail goes awry when a yacht with her on board strays into the waters of Communist China. A full-scale sea and air search mounted from Hong Kong can find no trace. Yet Gill is very much alive. With her friends, she is reciting from Mao’s Little Red Book with no idea what fate awaits her or how long she will be held. The Hong Kong Letters is part memoir, part travelogue. Gill introduces us to characters that fiction couldn’t have invented any better and transports the reader to another time and place, a reminder that anyone can fit the experiences of a lifetime into two short years.
My Dearest Martha: The Life and Letters of Eliza Hillier
Author : Andrew Hillier
Publisher : City University of HK Press
Page : 508 pages
File Size : 46,63 MB
Release : 2021-07-01
Category : History
ISBN : 962937577X
Book Description
“For this brief moment, the two sisters could be ‘together in heart and affection’, and through such letters bridge the distance of empire.” We often learn about the commerce, diplomacy, and military campaigns of the British empire without reference to the intimate side of life in these times—the development of self, the position of women, and the importance of family. In this book, the story of empire, so often told from a man’s perspective, is given a unique vantage point through Eliza Hillier’s letters to her younger sister, Martha. Written largely from Hong Kong, Shanghai, England, and Siam, the letters allow us to become a member of her family and follow the daily tribulations associated with the life of a young British woman in the port cities of Asia. We are thus able to share Eliza’s experiences as she leaves home to embark on married life, starts and raises a family, grieves at the abrupt and tragic loss of her husband, Charles Batten Hillier, and then sets about re-building her life. At once a reflection on the daily components of empire, an entertaining narrative of familial relationships, and the story of one woman’s inner feelings, My Dearest Martha guides us through the vagaries of life for a family who were very much a part of imperial careering and missionary circles in East and Southeast Asia. The letters are complemented by images and commentary from the author, a descendant of Eliza, providing context and depth, which together give us a fuller picture of British colonial life in the mid-1800s from a perspective that will resonate with readers around the world.
The Impossible City
Author : Karen Cheung
Publisher : Random House
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 32,38 MB
Release : 2022-02-15
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0593241436
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
Letters Across the Sea
Author : Genevieve Graham
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 24,33 MB
Release : 2021-04-27
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1982156635
Book Description
Inspired by a little-known chapter of World War II history, a young Protestant girl and her Jewish neighbour are caught up in the terrible wave of hate sweeping the globe on the eve of war in this powerful love story that’s perfect for fans of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. If you’re reading this letter, that means I’m dead. I had obviously hoped to see you again, to explain in person, but fate had other plans. 1933 At eighteen years old, Molly Ryan dreams of becoming a journalist, but instead she spends her days working any job she can to help her family through the Depression crippling her city. The one bright spot in her life is watching baseball with her best friend, Hannah Dreyfus, and sneaking glances at Hannah’s handsome older brother, Max. But as the summer unfolds, more and more of Hitler’s hateful ideas cross the sea and “Swastika Clubs” and “No Jews Allowed” signs spring up around Toronto, a city already simmering with mass unemployment, protests, and unrest. When tensions between the Irish and Jewish communities erupt in a riot one smouldering day in August, Molly and Max are caught in the middle, with devastating consequences for both their families. 1939 Six years later, the Depression has eased and Molly is a reporter at her local paper. But a new war is on the horizon, putting everyone she cares about most in peril. As letters trickle in from overseas, Molly is forced to confront what happened all those years ago, but is it too late to make things right? From the desperate streets of Toronto to the embattled shores of Hong Kong, Letters Across the Sea is a poignant novel about the enduring power of love to cross dangerous divides even in the darkest of times—from the #1 bestselling author of The Forgotten Home Child.
Deacon King Kong (Oprah's Book Club)
Author : James McBride
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 385 pages
File Size : 34,56 MB
Release : 2020-03-03
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 073521672X
Book Description
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction Winner of the Gotham Book Prize One of Barack Obama's "Favorite Books of the Year" Oprah's Book Club Pick Named one of the Top Ten Books of the Year by the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly and TIME Magazine A Washington Post Notable Novel From the author of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird, and the bestselling modern classic The Color of Water, comes one of the most celebrated novels of the year. In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and, in front of everybody, shoots the project’s drug dealer at point-blank range. The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of Deacon King Kong, James McBride’s funny, moving novel and his first since his National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird. In Deacon King Kong, McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbors, the local cops assigned to investigate, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighborhood’s Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself. As the story deepens, it becomes clear that the lives of the characters—caught in the tumultuous swirl of 1960s New York—overlap in unexpected ways. When the truth does emerge, McBride shows us that not all secrets are meant to be hidden, that the best way to grow is to face change without fear, and that the seeds of love lie in hope and compassion. Bringing to these pages both his masterly storytelling skills and his abiding faith in humanity, James McBride has written a novel every bit as involving as The Good Lord Bird and as emotionally honest as The Color of Water. Told with insight and wit, Deacon King Kong demonstrates that love and faith live in all of us.
Letters Home
Author : Jennifer Wong
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 24,64 MB
Release : 2020
Category : subject heading
ISBN : 9781911027874
Book Description
Letters Home, Jennifer Wong's remarkable and vivid third collection of poems, unravels the complexities of being between nations, languages and cultures. Travelling across multiple borders of history and place, these poems examine what it means to be returning home, and whether it is a return to a location, a country or to a shared dream or language. "There are poems of homesickness, nostalgia, but also humour, hope and optimism - all depicted in Wong's distinctive, intelligent style... This is a remarkable collection, which makes a new and bold contribution to the genre of diaspora literature." - Hannah Lowe "Jennifer Wong's voice is captivating, compassionate, her poems full of insight, as she questions the complex relationship between culture and identity and what it means to leave a place to become defined by another." - Rebecca Goss
The Letters of the Republic
Author : Michael Warner
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 32,40 MB
Release : 2009-06-01
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN : 9780674044883
Book Description
The subject of Michael Warner's book is the rise of a nation. America, he shows, became a nation by developing a new kind of reading public, where one becomes a citizen by taking one's place as writer or reader. At heart, the United States is a republic of letters, and its birth can be dated from changes in the culture of printing in the early eighteenth century. The new and widespread use of print media transformed the relations between people and power in a way that set in motion the republican structure of government we have inherited. Examining books, pamphlets, and circulars, he merges theory and concrete analysis to provide a multilayered view of American cultural development.
Dear Hong Kong
Author : Xu Xi
Publisher : Penguin Group Australia
Page : 117 pages
File Size : 47,64 MB
Release : 2017-07-01
Category : History
ISBN : 1760143987
Book Description
Xu Xi’s body of work witnesses her turbulent love affair with her home-city of Hong Kong. In this probing memoir, she unravels her recently finalised decision to leave the city for good. She critiques a Hong Kong that has, in her eyes, lost its way. And yet, it is only out of the city’s enduring presence in her life, both in the form of memory and periodic homecomings, that she has carved out a personal and literary identity. Dear Hong Kong is a profound reflection on the life of Hong Kong, personified and interrogated by one of its most lucid writers.
The Japan Daily Mail
Author :
Publisher :
Page : 756 pages
File Size : 45,34 MB
Release : 1895
Category :
ISBN :
