Book review: Reading Hong Kong, Reading Ourselves
Reading Hong Kong is a collection of essays by 14 visiting academics, mostly American, each commenting on Hong Kong through the lens of his or her academic discipline.
edited by Janel Curry, Paul Hanstedt
CUHK Press
Reading Hong Kong is a collection of essays by 14 visiting academics, mostly American, each commenting on Hong Kong through the lens of his or her academic discipline.
The first article is a hilarious piece on eating in Hong Kong by nutritional scientist Hedley Freake. Ostensibly a series of Gweilo-eats-funny-food vignettes, his knack for humorous, self-effacing storytelling saves him from punch-line clichés. He goes Freudian early, identifying his childhood breastfeeding as the source of his love of food. He gets serious mileage out of describing a lunch of reproductive organ stew, which you should read for its tactile description of what a pig's testicle tastes like.
One of the "heavier" articles is a piece on the inner meaning of Hong Kong "street behaviour" by sociology professor David Jaffee, who clearly has had a miserable time here. This is basically a rant on why no-one approached him on the street and cried out, "So, where y'all from!" Hong Kong street culture is one of "uncivil indifference", with fairly controversial conclusions about the impact of Confucian philosophy on the man in the street.
Four excellent articles arm you with juicy details about the hot topic du jour: the merits of a Chinese vs an American education. One contains gory war stories about the quarter-billion-dollar "shadow" underworld of Hong Kong's tutoring industry. In another, the dean of the University of Michigan touches the void of a nervous breakdown after she invites her class to stand up and share their ideas. Dead silence ensues as 50 graduate students stare at her as if she has two heads.
Next, an English professor has an amusing stream of consciousness piece about teaching other teachers. At the end he remains, as he was in the beginning, lost in translation. David Pong, a native of Hong Kong transplanted to the University of Delaware, steals the show with an aside about getting into the tony St Paul's College on his father's connections, which could (and should) be the subject of an entire volume on its own.