Cost: £15 per person HKS members / £25 non-members
Timings:
2.00pm: Cash Bar and Book Signings with authors
3.00pm: ‘In Conversation with the Authors’ followed by Q&A
4.00pm: Meet the Authors
5.00pm: Finish
‘In Conversation with the Authors’
Les Bird
Vaudine England
May Holdsworth
Simon Roberts
Other authors at the book signing:
Rachel Cartland
Hugh Davies
Sir Malcolm Jack
Jean O’Hara
Patricia O’Sullivan
We are delighted that the following authors have kindly accepted our invitation to join our first ‘In Conversation with the Authors’ panel event, where they will discuss their current books. There will also be ample time for questions and audience participation is encouraged!
All of the books listed below will be available for purchase and signing on the day or feel free to bring your own copies to be signed.
Les Bird: Along the Southern Boundary: A Marine Police Officer's Frontline Account of the Vietnamese Boatpeople and their Arrival in Hong Kong
We had no jurisdiction outside of Hong Kong waters. But we could see their vessels sinking in heavy seas. It was life or death, right there. We just went. Former Marine Police officer Les Bird tells of the harrowing sea journey to Hong Kong made by tens of thousands of refugees in the years that followed the end of the Vietnam War. With this previously unpublished collection of personal photographs, Bird tells the stories of these boatpeople - the young children, the father who just bought a boat to embark on a 1,000-mile journey, and the disillusioned North Vietnamese battle-hardened veterans - all searching for a new life.
Foreword by The Lord Wilson of Tillyorn, Governor of Hong Kong, 1987-1992. Click here or here for more info and to purchase the book.
Les Bird joined the Royal Hong Kong Police in 1976, and worked in the Marine Police for 21 years until June 1997.
Vaudine England: Fortune’s Bazaar – The making of Hong Kong
A timely, well-researched, and vibrant new history of Hong Kong that reveals the untold stories of the diverse peoples who have made it a multicultural world metropolis.
Hong Kong has always been many cities to many people: a seaport, a gateway to an empire, a place where fortunes can be dramatically made or lost, a place to disappear and reinvent oneself, and a mixing pot of diverse populations from literally everywhere around the globe. Here, renowned journalist Vaudine England delves into Hong Kong’s complex history and its people—diverse, multi-cultural, cosmopolitan—who have made this one-time fishing village into the world port city it is today.
Fortune’s Bazaar is the first thorough examination of the varied peoples, too often overlooked by historians, who made Hong Kong. Many of Hong Kong’s most influential figures during its first century as a city were neither British nor Chinese—they were Malay or Indian, Jewish or Armenian, Parsi or Portuguese, Eurasian or Chindian—or simply, Hong Kongers: the opium-traders who built synagogues or churches; ship-owners carrying gold-rush migrants; property tycoons; the landscape gardeners who settled Kowloon and became millionaires. Click here or here for more info and to purchase the book.
Vaudine England is a historian and a former journalist in Hong Kong and South East Asia.
May Holdsworth: Sir Robert Ho Tung - Public Figure, Private Man
A nuanced perspective on Sir Robert Ho Tung, Hong Kong philanthropist.
Sir Robert Ho Tung (1862-1956) is a compelling figure in Hong Kong history. He is regularly portrayed as the colony's greatest philanthropist and wealthiest man of his day, the first Chinese to live on the Peak, and, at the end of his life, the "Grand Old Man of Hong Kong." The illegitimate son of a Chinese mother and European father, this book shows him in all his immense variety--financial wizard, husband and lover, patriarch of a large family, loyal British subject but also, paradoxically, Chinese patriot. China's president Yuan Shikai awarded him the Order of the Excellent Crop, and King George V knighted him. May Holdsworth's thoughtful and deftly written account of his life is the first full-length biography in English. Click here for more info and to purchase the book.
May Holdsworth is a writer based in Hong Kong.
Simon Roberts: Hong Kong Beat
Sex, drugs, gambling, ghosts, drinking, rugby, overseas adventures and even some police work. Hong Kong on the edge of empire was a place teeming with triads, smugglers, Chinese immigrants and Vietnamese refugees. Simon’s memoir of his time in the Hong Kong police force from the 1970s until after the 1997 handover is a fast-paced tale of his exploits. From the murky back streets of Kowloon to the open seas in the Marine division, his shocking and hilarious tales offer an alternative look back at what life was really like on the Hong Kong beat. Click here or here for more info and to purchase the book.
Simon Roberts joined the Royal Hong Kong Police in 1979 and continued to serve in the Hong Kong Police after the handover in 1997. The author's royalties from Hong Kong Beat are being donated to the Hong Kong Police Welfare Fund.
The following HK authors will also be in attendance and will be signing their books:
Rachel Cartland: Paper Tigress – A life in Hong Kong Government
Rachel Cartland came to Hong Kong in 1972 as one of just two female expatriates in the Hong Kong Government's elite administrative grade. Before she retired in 2006, her life was shaped by the momentous events that rocked Hong Kong during those action-packed years: corruption and the police mutiny, the growth of the new towns, the currency crisis of 1983, Tiananmen Square, the change of sovereignty and the devastation of SARS. The backdrop to her story ranges from Kowloon's infamous Walled City to Government House to the rural New Territories. This book is full of humour and incident and, at the same time, an accessible account of modern Hong Kong and the forces that shaped it. Click here or here for more info and to purchase the book.
Hugh Davies CMG
Hugh Davies was born in India, educated at Cambridge, and spent 33 years in the British Diplomatic Service,much of it in East Asia, including China, Hong Kong and Singapore. Hugh’s book will be available for purchase on the day.
Chris Fraser OBE: Inside China – From the Great Leap Backward to Huawei
This memoir is written from a Chinese speaker's and insider's viewpoint stretching over fifty years of working in and around China in both a public and private capacity. The writer saw tensions and chaos on the China Hong Kong Border in the wake of the Great Leap Forward in the People's Republic and during the murderous Cultural Revolution. Experiences of intelligence gathering and intelligence work related to China are coupled with insights into Chinese culture and politics including a little known coup attempt against the Chinese Government. The writer was present at the ceremonies for the Handover of HK to China in 1997 while working at the new British Consulate General. Click here for more info and to purchase the book.
Sir Malcolm Jack: My Hong Kong
How was Hong Kong perceived and described by writers from the 1950s during the last colonial period? Was it a British city or was it Chinese? The writers show how different life was for ex-pats ensconced on the Peak and leading a glitzy lifestyle compared to refugees who came pouring into the colony from mainland China and lived in dire poverty in squatter camps. Find out if that East and West ever mingled in My Hong Kong. Click here or here for more info and to purchase the book.
Sir Malcolm Roy Jack KCB was the Clerk of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom from 2006 to 2011.
Jean O’Hara: Through the Dragon’s Gate
Jean O’Hara is now a prominent psychiatrist in London, but she grew up in a humble tenement flat in Hong Kong in the 1960s, the daughter of an Anglo-Burmese librarian (later a senior civil servant) and his Chinese wife. Her childhood was a simple one, sleeping on a straw mat in a tiny bedroom which she at first shared with both her grandmother and sister. As Jean grew up she developed a fascination for medicine and moved to the UK to attend medical school, eventually becoming a consultant psychiatrist. This book is her account of a childhood steeped in the culture of China, and first steps in a career in medicine. Central to the story is the character of Jean’s Chinese grandmother, a charismatic matriarch who gave her a rich understanding of Chinese culture and an oriental outlook which has never left her. Click here or here for more info and to purchase the book.
Patricia O’Sullivan: Women, Crime and the Courts: Hong Kong 1841-1941
Kwan Lai-chun was sick of being made to feel second-class by her husband's concubine; sick of her mother-in-law's endless carping about the money she spent; sick of the whole family really. Late one sticky, humid night something snapped in her - and she grabbed the meat chopper. Within minutes, three people were dead: the concubine with over 70 gashes, many of them to the bone. Kwan was found guilty and became the second and last woman in Hong Kong to suffer the death penalty. But behind her story, and those of the city's other female murderers, lie complex webs of relationships and jealousies, poverty and despair. Taking the first 100 years of Hong Kong's colonial history, this book unravels the lives of women - Chinese and Westerners alike - who found themselves on the wrong side of the law. Hong Kong's female prison population was a tiny fraction of that in America, but there are still plenty of tales from its women kidnappers, fraudsters, bomb-makers, thieves and cruel mistresses. Click here or here for more info and to purchase the book.
Patricia O’Sullivan is a writer and researcher on the lesser-known aspects of Hong Kongs history prior to 1941.
To register to attend, please contact communications@hkas.org.uk