The Kowloon English Club


Book Description

What do you do when you have failed to find the meaning of life in India, your money has dried up, your girlfriend has gone, and prospects at home are limited? Go further east! Meet Joe Walsh, a backpacker who finds adventure and misadventure in 1990s Hong Kong. With the city at a crossroads, Joe faces an equally uncertain future. And as the pressures of abject living conditions mount, he finds himself hounded by an enigmatic Chinese woman with a disturbing secret.




Kowloon Tong


Book Description

In this “moody thriller,” a family business is targeted for takeover as control of Hong Kong shifts from the British to the Chinese (The New York Times). Ninety-nine years of colonial rule are ending as the British prepare to hand over Hong Kong to China. Betty Mullard and her son, Bunt, have lived here for years, mostly keeping apart from their foreign surroundings, except for some indulgence in the local food, or in Bunt’s case, the local girls. The handover is not a concern for them—until the mysterious Mr. Hung from the mainland offers them a large sum for their family business. They refuse. But they fail to realize that Mr. Hung is unlike the other Chinese people they’ve known: he will accept no refusals. When a young female employee whom Bunt has been dating vanishes, he is forced to make important decisions for the first time in his life—but his good intentions are pitted against the will of Mr. Hung, and the threat of the ultimate betrayal. “A compact, provocative gem of a novel” (The Boston Globe), from an award-winning author acclaimed for both his fiction and his travel memoirs—including Deep South, The Great Railway Bazaar, and The Mosquito Coast—Kowloon Tong was praised by Bette Bao Lord in The Washington Post Book World as “a taut, illuminating story that transcends its timely subject.”




The Kowloon Kid


Book Description

From the author of Travels with My Angst and Any Guru Will Do, a vivid, nostalgic, and funny memoir of growing up in Hong Kong in the 1960s. Phil Brown's life begins in small town Australia — Maitland, NSW to be precise — but in 1963 his father Ted hankers to return to the Hong Kong of his childhood and to cash in on a construction boom in the burgeoning colony. Then under British rule, the world of Hong Kong is a truly fascinating place for gweilos or foreigners, both a colonial outpost and a region redolent with all the exoticism and contradictions of the Far East. The Brown’s home, in the garden suburb of Kowloon Tong, buzzes with characters: the family's amah, Ah Moy, frequent visitors such as the inscrutable Mr Lai, the spy-like Tony Parr, and family members such as Uncle Cyril. Not to mention the kid from across the road, Michael Hutchence.




Indelible City


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.




The Kowloon Kid


Book Description




Kowloon Tong


Book Description

As British rule ends, threatening things begin to happen to Betty Mullard and her son, Bunt, in Hong Kong when they refuse to sell the family business to a sinister man from mainland China. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.




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.




Identity and Theatre Translation in Hong Kong


Book Description

In this book, Shelby Chan examines the relationship between theatre translation and identity construction against the sociocultural background that has led to the popularity of translated theatre in Hong Kong. A statistical analysis of the development of translated theatre is presented, establishing a correlation between its popularity and major socio-political trends. When the idea of home, often assumed to be the basis for identity, becomes blurred for historical, political and sociocultural reasons, people may come to feel "homeless" and compelled to look for alternative means to develop the Self. In theatre translation, Hongkongers have found a source of inspiration to nurture their identity and expand their "home" territory. By exploring the translation strategies of various theatre practitioners in Hong Kong, the book also analyses a number of foreign plays and their stage renditions. The focus is not only on the textual and discursive transfers but also on the different ways in which the people of Hong Kong perceive their identity in the performances.




Working in Asia


Book Description




Promoting All-Round Education for Girls


Book Description

Promoting All-Round Education for Girls presents the history of Heep Yunn School, one of the oldest girls’ schools in Hong Kong. Amalgamated from two British mission schools founded in the 1880s for destitute girls and daughters of Christian parents, and renamed Heep Yunn School in 1936, the institution has witnessed and responded to the dramatic changes of Hong Kong over the years. By the time of the outbreak of the Second World War, Heep Yunn had expanded to offer a full Chinese middle school course for girls based upon Christian principles of all-round education. The school expanded rapidly after the war and became a bilingual institution to meet the demand for English language education. Eventually English would become the primary medium of instruction soon after the introduction of nine-year universal education in 1978. Heep Yunn strives to provide a full-fledged all-round education in the midst of political and education reforms. The school opted to switch its status from a government-aided school to a direct subsidy scheme school in the early 2010s so as to retain a larger degree of autonomy. This history of Heep Yunn School documents the concerted efforts of the school council, staff, students, alumnae, and parents to achieve the evolving visions of Christian education for girls as Hong Kong grew from a colonial trading port to a global financial centre in the twenty-first century. ‘Promoting All-Round Education for Girls convincingly charts the shifting purposes and practices of girls’ education in Hong Kong. The text moves seamlessly between the history of the school and the wider context of Hong Kong’s history. Patricia P. K. Chiu illustrates how the school’s educational policy evolved according to the wider strategies and shifts that relate models of femininity and nation-building.’ —Joyce Goodman, University of Winchester ‘This solidly-referenced work provides a balanced and detailed outlook on the unique, evolving features of education in Hong Kong. It shows the effects on Heep Yunn School of major historical changes in education policy and how the school has contributed to the education of girls in Hong Kong in periods of dramatic challenge like the Sino-Japanese War and the disturbances of the late 1960s.’ —Ruth Hayhoe, University of Toronto