Hong Kong has many faces: international financial hub, home of martial arts movies and Canto-pop, intercultural melting pot, former Crown colony and today, Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China. When the United Kingdom transferred sovereignty over Hong Kong to China on 1 July 1997, the event not only ended 156 years of British rule, but it also opened a new chapter of cultural, linguistic and political exploration. Twenty years later, Penguin Random House launches the Hong Kong Specials series. Seven literary and intellectual voices from Hong Kong take stock of the city as it is today, a city that has undergone an era of unforeseeable transition and is now in the midst of reconstructing its own identity.
Dear Hong Kong by Xu Xi is a memoir from one of Hong Kong’s leading literary figures. Xu Xi now splits her time between Hong Kong and New York, and in Dear Hong Kong, as so many others arrive to try their luck in her native city, she bids farewell to the place she has called home for as long as she can remember. Xu Xi is an acclaimed novelist, short story writer and author of creative non-fiction. She addresses issues of the Chinese family, diaspora and contemporary transnational life in her work.
City of Protest From the turbulent 1960s until today, Hong Kong has been a city of civil disobedience. The wave of protests climaxed in the Umbrella Movement in 2014. What emerges from these very public disruptions is a unique Hong Kong identity, one shaped neither by Britian nor China. An exploration of the historical and social stimuli and implications of civil disobedience, City of Protest offers a compelling look at the often fraught relationship between politics and belonging, and a city's struggle to assert itself. The author Antony Dapiran is a a leading corporate finance lawyer in the Greater China area, and a frequent commentator on Chinese business and legal matters.
