In Kit Fan’s Diamond Hill, Buddha is an addict and the future is uncertain
- In his first novel, the poet takes inspiration from his Hong Kong childhood and the transitional days after the Sino-British Joint Declaration
- ‘I want readers to remember there was a moment when it signed off Hong Kong to China. You have to ask yourself – what happens if your mother decides to give you up?’
Diamond Hill by Kit Fan, Dialogue Books
As it happens, 2001 was the year Kit Fan left Hong Kong. He was 21, heading to Britain on a postgraduate scholarship. He became a poet, short-story writer and translator. Now he’s written his first novel. It’s called Diamond Hill.
It features a Buddhist nunnery run by a woman known as the Iron Nun, a younger nun named Quartz, Audrey Hepburn (a faded film extra who may, or may not, have had a fling with Bruce Lee back in the day), a female teenage triad called Boss and a former drug addict, referred to as Buddha.
Their tale begins in spring 1987, three years after the signing in Beijing – by the Iron Lady herself, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and Chinese premier Zhao Ziyang – of the Sino-British Joint Declaration “on the Question of Hong Kong”.