Indelible City

Soon the notes were proliferating across overhead walkways and through underground tunnels, on shop windows and street signs, railings and billboards, like a swarm released into the wild, to pollinate and colonize the city. They evolved into pavement mosaics made up of scores of A4 photocopies glued end to end across the sidewalk near the government headquarters. Pedestrian walkways and underpasses quickly became impromptu galleries of dissent, with anonymous heartfelt pleas jostling for space. Often they were strategically placed. A black-and-white carpet of pictures of Chinese president Xi Jinping forced commuters to stomp on his face. Black-clad teams were deployed to paper footpaths at jogging speed, for kilometers at a time. Their assembly-line efficiency was mesmerizing to behold: an advance crew ran ahead, spraying glue, followed by a second string who threw down posters in a checkerboard pattern, black backgrounds alternating with white as they cantered past, and bringing up the rear, a final crew who used long umbrellas to tamp the posters down onto the glue as they ran. Go, Hong Kong! Some people move on, BUT NOT US. Soon the black-clad protestors had graduated to graffiti slogans spray-painted straight onto roads, highway dividers, and tram shelters. Fuck the police. Chinazi. If we burn, you fucking burn with us. Public surfaces became anonymous repositories for people's deepest and most dangerous sentiments.

The protests sprang out of the massive opposition to proposed changes to Hong Kong's extradition laws that would permit the rendition of alleged criminal suspects to China. This would put anyone, no matter their nationality, in danger of having to stand trial under a Communist Party-led legal system rife with abuse and with no presumption of innocence. The new extradition legislation would forcefully undermine the most basic tenets of Hong Kong's cherished status quo. It would endanger the city's judicial independence, its rule of law, and its status as a political refuge, the very things to which Hong Kong attributed its success. The British had not endowed their subjects with full citizenship, the right of abode in Britain, or universal suffrage, but they had inculcated them with civic values, including an almost religious respect for freedom, democracy, and human rights. And Hong Kongers were not going down without a fight.

I was transfixed by this movement building in front of my eyes, and especially by the explosion of subversive Chinese characters running riot across public space, repurposing the city into an evolving, open-air gallery of populist ideas. These displays were called Lennon Walls, after a wall in Prague that had been painted with countercultural, anti-establishment graffiti beginning in the 1980s, shortly after John Lennon's death. Hong Kong's original Lennon Wall had been established in 2014, during the pro-democracy protests of the Umbrella Movement, when people began sticking Post-it Notes on a circular concrete staircase near the government headquarters. I'd visited that wall daily, and I started doing the same this time. But it wasn't long before the Post-it Notes had leaped off the walls to become Lennon Paths, Lennon Footbridges, and Lennon Pavements, and I could no longer keep up.

In China, the history of the written word dates back some 3,700 ye

extraordinary elegy. Ai Weiwei

An utterly brilliant and original ode to Hong Kong, throbbing with eccentricity and sense of place. Like Joseph Mitchell s singular rendering of New York, Lim s Hong Kong will be read decades from now as an indelible portrait. Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition, winner of the National Book Award

I absolutely loved this book. Each page is a revelation about a city whose history I thought I knew well. Lim s exploration of Hong Kong s identity is insightful, refreshing and entirely original. Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy and Eat the Buddha

I read Louisa Lim s book slowly, haunted by memories and stymied by sorrow. An archaeological dig into the disappearing present, her fascinating and heartbreaking account reveals an indelible history hidden in plain sight, and a future that Hong Kong s unique sensibility promises even as the world s most powerful autocracy strives to erase it. Geremie Barmé, editor of China Heritage