These days Chris Thrall is a successful author. But it wasn't always so. In the 1990s he left the Royal Marines to find his fortune in Hong Kong, but instead found himself homeless and hooked on crystal methamphetamine. In a downward spiral, he also began working for a triad society as a doorman in one of their nightclubs in Wan [...]
Watch this short film by Andrew Guthrie which tells the story of Paul Au: how he was smuggled into Hong Kong from wartime Vietnam in the 1970s and how he set up a second-hand vinyl record shop in Sham Shui Po, a low-rent district in north Kowloon, which is still popular today. The full story -- with lots of photos [...]
Guidebook writer David Leffman is heading back to remote parts of Guizhou province on Tuesday, to pick up the trail of William Mesny - the British-born "Mercenary Mandarin" who became a general in the Chinese army. But before he goes, he will be giving an illustrated talk about Mesny to the Royal Asiatic Society in the Centre for Visual Arts, [...]
Press Release South China Morning Blues: Stories that detail a life in 21st century China for Asians and Gweilos alike China. To the rest of the world, it is a booming, menacing powerhouse that threatens to engulf everything with its ever growing economy. To those who reside in it, it is more complex than that. As the author of a [...]
I met up with Geoffrey Emerson, Hong Kong-based historian (left), and Shun Chi Ming, director of the Hong Kong Observatory (centre), to talk about the wartime diary of Graham Heywood. Over tea at the Observatory, a beautiful Victorian building hidden away on a forested hill in the middle of Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, Geoff and CM explained how Heywood's diary [...]
"This book is a record of descendants of Baghdadi Jewish merchants who settled in the Treaty Port of Shanghai in the mid-19th century," says Maisie Meyer. "They are authentic voices, allowing us a glimpse of bygone days of privilege, and the rich diversity that made the community so vibrant. It offers infinite perspectives of personalities whose lives were shaped by [...]
We're pleased to announce that Paper Tigress, Rachel Cartland's memoir of her years in the Hong Kong government, sold out. And it's now reprinted and is back in the shops. To mark the occasion, we print below the text of a speech Rachel gave to a Hong Kong business group late last year. A Difficult Passage I was a Hong [...]
Our author Shannon Young has been interviewed on RTHK Radio 3 twice this month. Click the links below to listen online! 1. Shannon Young is a young American writer currently living in Hong Kong who writes under two names. Her travel memoir about the year she followed a man she met at a fencing club to Hong Kong, only for [...]
Even four decades after the passing of Asian martial-arts superstar Bruce Lee, his achievements still attract adoration from millions of movie fans. The biggest fan of all may be Jon Benn, who befriended the high-kicking hero while playing “the Big Boss”, a villain in Lee’s acclaimed 1972 movie The Way of the Dragon. In Remembering Bruce Lee, a tell-tale autobiography, [...]
Author Shannon Young visited the studios of RTHK Radio 3 to tell Noreen Mir about the making of her latest book, Year of Fire Dragons. Her new memoir is a wide-eyed newcomer’s account of Hong Kong wrapped up in an international long distance love story. Click here to listen online to the 10-minute interview. When she's not writing books, Shannon [...]
An American Woman’s Story of Coming of Age in Hong Kong n 2010, bookish 22-year-old Shannon follows her Eurasian boyfriend to Hong Kong, eager to forge a new love story in his hometown. But when work sends him to London a month later, Shannon embarks on a wide-eyed newcomer's journey through Hong Kong – alone. She teaches in a local [...]
If you missed Eating Smoke author Chris Thrall's "ask me anything" online question-and-answer session last week, which attracted 201 comments, you can now read through the whole discussion. Here it is on Reddit.
Look at the picture. That's our author Fred Schneiter and his children, on their arrival in Hong Kong at Chinese New Year in 1964. Fred has written a combination of cookbook and memoir that includes 70 of the best recipes he collected over his three decades roaming the China coast, with a mix of adventurous and nostalgic stories thrown in. [...]
Chitralekha Basu at the China Daily newspaper interviews our author Jason Y. Ng. Ng’s primary focus ... is evident from the pages of his last book — No City for Slow Men: Hong Kong’s Quirks and Quandaries Laid Bare (Blacksmith Books) — published earlier this year. What quirks? What quandaries? Well, for instance, he writes about losing one’s Hong Kong [...]
Our author Rachel Cartland's lunch speech at Hong Kong's Foreign Correspondents' Club a few weeks ago caused a fair amount of controversy, with an article in the next day's South China Morning Post receiving lots of comments, many of them misconstruing the message in a variety of ways. In the interest of clarity, below we print the full text of [...]
It’s official – the best hike on Hong Kong's Southside is the Dragon’s Back! That's according to Southside Magazine readers' votes. And Theadora Whittington has illustrated it in her children's book, The Dragon's Back, newly reprinted. Read more, and see more of Theadora's sketches and illustrations, on her blog.
See Paper Tigress author Rachel Cartland talking on TVB Pearl and RTHK Channel 31 tomorrow night. Time Out have written about the new Hong Kong interview show here. Here's the programme blurb: Coming up on In Conversation tomorrow: the former civil servant who yesterday said Hong Kong has "the most ridiculous political system in the world." In Conversation with Rachel [...]
Author and blogger Jason Y. Ng has a knack for making the familiar both fascinating and funny. Three years after his bestselling début Hong Kong State of Mind, the razor-sharp observer returns with No City for Slow Men: a collection of 36 essays that examine some of the pressing social, cultural and political issues facing Hong Kong. It's not the [...]