Musings: Reading Hong Kong, China, and the World by Leo Lee Ou-fan East Slope Publishing
This interesting book comprises book reviews and opinion pieces on local culture that author Leo Lee Ou-fan, professor emeritus of Chinese Literature at Harvard University and a prolific local cultural critic, contributed to the short-lived local cultural magazine Muse.
The essays fit loosely into four categories, which the author has adopted as chapter titles: 'In Search of a Hong Kong Mythology', 'Chinese Cosmopolitans', 'Reading the World', and 'Reflections on My Column-Writing'.
Suffice to say that the essays are all engagingly written in Lee's characteristic style - endearingly idiomatic English that occasionally betrays his Chinese identity. My only reservation about the book lies in its inclusion of an exchange between the author and a reader, which seems a tad trivial.
Lee's target audience are 'those with a bilingual or English background who are generally interested in reading books and are concerned with cultural matters'.
Indeed, certain references and subjects may strike readers unfamiliar with Hong Kong culture as opaque and irrelevant (for instance, the review of the Chinese opus Postcolonial Affairs of Food and the Heart by local writer Ya Si (the pen-name of Lingnan University professor Leung Ping-Kwan). Given Lee's depiction of the city's reading culture, prospects of the book's readership appear slim. But should they be?