Hong Kong lovers come together in Soho, London, and appreciate new book with Sai Kung links

^{A section of the audience at St. Anne’s}

“A barren rock with nary a house upon it”. So grumbled the British Foreign Secretary in the House of Commons in 1841 when he found his envoy had seized a somewhat nondescript offshore island for the Crown. We roll our eyes now, but he (Palmerston) had a point. It is Hong Kong’s people, and Hong Kong’s people alone, who have been drawn to that barren rock, framed by its superb harbour, and made Hong Kong the remarkable place it is.

A new book compiled by two such “Hongkongers”, New Zealanders Roger Medcalf and Rod Olsen, encapsulates this point exactly. “Tales from a Barren Rock” comprises 36 tales of what has made Hong Kong “tick” in the minds and hearts of people who have lived there, and loved the place, for all its rocky barrenness.

Having contributed two chapters myself, on life in Colonial “Government House”, and on the Airport Authority’s attempts to build an airport the size of Heathrow next to a dolphin breeding area, it was with some trepidation (and of course the obligatory complication of a rail strike) that I put my name down to take some copies along to the Hong Kong Society’s annual book fair in central London on 9 May. The Society was founded in London by “the hongs” (i.e. British companies trading in Hong Kong) 50 years ago to help families of taipans returning to the UK retain some links with each other and of course with Hong Kong itself, in those days still a very long flight or sea voyage away.

I need not have worried. The room at St Anne’s Church in Soho was packed with ex-Hongkongers–retired expatriate civil servants and police, business people who had traded both sides of the China-Hong Kong border, Hong Kong Chinese either based in or visiting the UK, and in many cases their friends, partners or offspring. Those presenting their books were a similar “broad church”—a retired senior policeman and ex-Olympic yachtsman; an expatriate businessman and wine-maker in eastern China; a couple producing glorious high quality children’s books in China based on classic Chinese tales; the son of a remarkable Chinese lady adopted by a Briton and educated in Shanghai, interned in wartime Hong Kong and later employed by the UN in Geneva.

^{The meeting was held at St. Ann’s Soho in London}

We talked books. And Hong Kong. And other places near Hong Kong. And books again. I had only brought six copies with me, and sold them all in 10 minutes. I could have sold 30, and so have a list of names I am now busy posting copies to!

And then what do all good Hongkongers do? We talked food. And then decamped to nearby Chinatown for an excellent Chinese meal in a packed noisy room organised by the Hong Kong Society.

For a few hours St Anne’s Church in Soho and the Imperial China Restaurant in Lisle St were “Hong Kong”, in an atmosphere created by many books like “Tales”, telling of their authors’ own rich experiences of life in Hong Kong and East Asia. But above all the noise and stories, the one thing that joined everyone together was a love of Hong Kong, which one never loses, no matter how far one has travelled.

A book launching party in Hong Kong for “Tales From a Barren Rock” will be held at Enoteca Restaurant, Quarry Bay, on 25 May from 2:00 to 4:00 pm.