Then & Now | Joining the dots between Hong Kong localist Edward Leung and British novelist Stella Benson

Curiously, other links exist between Anderson – a specialist on Southeast Asia and, in particular, Indonesia – and Hong Kong’s steadily burgeoning, thoroughly politicised nativist sentiment.

He was born in 1936, in Kunming, Yunnan, where his father, James Carew O’Gorman Anderson, was a commissioner in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, which he had entered in 1914.

During a posting to Hong Kong in the 1920s, Anderson senior was joined by his first wife, the celebrated British novelist Stella Benson. A genuine cosmopolitan, and one of the few literary originals to have spent any time here, Benson had lived on the fringes of London’s Bloomsbury set before taking off to travel the world in 1920. Her personal friends included Virginia Woolf, whose sister-in-law, Bella Southorn, also lived in Hong Kong at the time, with her husband, colonial secretary W. T. Southorn. Benson was particularly close to authors Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain.

For a short while, Benson was the librarian at the Helena May Institute, in Central – unkindly referred to in those years as “the Virgin’s Retreat”. Like other talented writers, she felt marooned in Hong Kong’s snobbish colonial society.

Serious literary endeavour is not something for which either the crown colony or the special administrative region have been known, with many people who have chosen to live here more interested in claiming association with authors for reasons of status than in getting to know them or reading their books.