Five books Hong Kong museum curator couldn’t live without: Tina Pang’s must-reads for a desert island

Top picks for the former curator of the Hong Kong University Museum include a story of fraternal twins in India, a personal account of the first world war, and a biography of a British aristocrat and sinologist in Peking

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Hong Kong museum curator Tina Pang’s five books for a desert island include an Indian novel, a Chinese book of short stories, a biography and accounts of war and travel.

Published: 1:31pm, 21 Jul 2018Updated: 1:31pm, 21 Jul 2018

Tina Pang was born and raised in the English city of Bristol. She studied Chinese language and art and archaeology at SOAS, University of London and cultural anthropology at St Hilda’s College, Oxford University. After a stint working at a commercial art gallery in New York, she moved to Hong Kong in 1999 to serve as curator of the Hong Kong University Museum.

Since 2014, she has been curator of Hong Kong visual culture at M+, the future museum of visual culture under construction in the West Kowloon Cultural District.

Here are the five books she would take to a desert island, in her own words.

The God of Small Things

by Arundhati Roy, 1997

I read this soon after I moved to Hong Kong in 1999. It’s an amazing book for anyone who loves language. It’s the story of fraternal twins in India and opens with the death of their cousin, who has come to visit from Britain. Thus begins the mystery – what happened to her? The story unfolds from there and explores how the twins make sense of the people and the world around them.