Indelible City

 Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong by Louisa Lim, 319 pages.

Hong Kong's conflicting colonial pasts has led to a pattern of intentional story building that has largely buried the city's true history. It was in England's best interest to portray the region as a "barren rock" to justify their possession and development of the area. Meanwhile, it's more advantageous to the Chinese government to present Hong Kong as having always been unified with China, to justify its reintegration. Journalist Louisa Lim, who grew up and reported in Hong Kong, attempts to sort through these competing myths to arrive not only at the history of the city, but also it's identity. This search for identity also carries her through to the present, where the city is attempting to operate under "one country, two systems" after it's return to China, and failing so spectacularly that large scale protest movements made international news. 

Lim's background as a journalist is very clear throughout this book. She interviews former colonial officials, art curators, amateur historians and archaeologists, and local artists of all stripes in an attempt to find the spirit of Hong Kong. Centrally woven through the whole narrative is the King of Kowloon, a controversial street artist who claimed ancestral possession of Hong Kong and surrounding territories, and who for many became a key symbol of Hong Kong itself. Lim paints a picture of a people who have been regularly, in fact nearly constantly, erased from their own history and excluded from making decisions about their own lives and governance; and have nonetheless managed to maintain a very unique identity and strong protest culture. I found this history to be both accessible and thorough, which can be a difficult line to walk, and I definitely came away feeling like I learned quite a lot.