The Hong Kong Letters
The Hong Kong Letters

Author: Gill Shaddick

Publisher: Australian Scholarly Publishing

Published: 2019-03-29

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1925801632

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In the late sixties when the Beatles are top of the charts and Twiggy is hitting the catwalk, Gill embarks on a life-changing journey to Hong Kong. Mao’s revolution is at its height. Vietnam has become America’s longest war with no end in sight. But it’s at an ad agency under insane direction where Gill finds her battles and learns to stand her ground. In this spirited memoir, where Mad Men meets Han Suyin’s A Many-Splendoured Thing, Gill recreates a Hong Kong of the imagination. Attractive and naïve, wined and dined by Hong Kong’s elite, she gravitates towards camaraderie outside the world of advertising and money, and adventure follows. A weekend sail goes awry when a yacht with her on board strays into the waters of Communist China. A full-scale sea and air search mounted from Hong Kong can find no trace. Yet Gill is very much alive. With her friends, she is reciting from Mao’s Little Red Book with no idea what fate awaits her or how long she will be held. The Hong Kong Letters is part memoir, part travelogue. Gill introduces us to characters that fiction couldn’t have invented any better and transports the reader to another time and place, a reminder that anyone can fit the experiences of a lifetime into two short years.

My Dearest Martha: The Life and Letters of Eliza Hillier
My Dearest Martha: The Life and Letters of Eliza Hillier

Author: Andrew Hillier

Publisher: City University of HK Press

Published: 2021-07-01

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 962937577X

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“For this brief moment, the two sisters could be ‘together in heart and affection’, and through such letters bridge the distance of empire.” We often learn about the commerce, diplomacy, and military campaigns of the British empire without reference to the intimate side of life in these times—the development of self, the position of women, and the importance of family. In this book, the story of empire, so often told from a man’s perspective, is given a unique vantage point through Eliza Hillier’s letters to her younger sister, Martha. Written largely from Hong Kong, Shanghai, England, and Siam, the letters allow us to become a member of her family and follow the daily tribulations associated with the life of a young British woman in the port cities of Asia. We are thus able to share Eliza’s experiences as she leaves home to embark on married life, starts and raises a family, grieves at the abrupt and tragic loss of her husband, Charles Batten Hillier, and then sets about re-building her life. At once a reflection on the daily components of empire, an entertaining narrative of familial relationships, and the story of one woman’s inner feelings, My Dearest Martha guides us through the vagaries of life for a family who were very much a part of imperial careering and missionary circles in East and Southeast Asia. The letters are complemented by images and commentary from the author, a descendant of Eliza, providing context and depth, which together give us a fuller picture of British colonial life in the mid-1800s from a perspective that will resonate with readers around the world.

Letters Across the Sea
Letters Across the Sea

Author: Genevieve Graham

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-04-27

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 1982156635

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Inspired by a little-known chapter of World War II history, a young Protestant girl and her Jewish neighbour are caught up in the terrible wave of hate sweeping the globe on the eve of war in this powerful love story that’s perfect for fans of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. If you’re reading this letter, that means I’m dead. I had obviously hoped to see you again, to explain in person, but fate had other plans. 1933 At eighteen years old, Molly Ryan dreams of becoming a journalist, but instead she spends her days working any job she can to help her family through the Depression crippling her city. The one bright spot in her life is watching baseball with her best friend, Hannah Dreyfus, and sneaking glances at Hannah’s handsome older brother, Max. But as the summer unfolds, more and more of Hitler’s hateful ideas cross the sea and “Swastika Clubs” and “No Jews Allowed” signs spring up around Toronto, a city already simmering with mass unemployment, protests, and unrest. When tensions between the Irish and Jewish communities erupt in a riot one smouldering day in August, Molly and Max are caught in the middle, with devastating consequences for both their families. 1939 Six years later, the Depression has eased and Molly is a reporter at her local paper. But a new war is on the horizon, putting everyone she cares about most in peril. As letters trickle in from overseas, Molly is forced to confront what happened all those years ago, but is it too late to make things right? From the desperate streets of Toronto to the embattled shores of Hong Kong, Letters Across the Sea is a poignant novel about the enduring power of love to cross dangerous divides even in the darkest of times—from the #1 bestselling author of The Forgotten Home Child.

The Letters of the Republic
The Letters of the Republic

Author: Michael Warner

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-01

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780674044883

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The subject of Michael Warner's book is the rise of a nation. America, he shows, became a nation by developing a new kind of reading public, where one becomes a citizen by taking one's place as writer or reader. At heart, the United States is a republic of letters, and its birth can be dated from changes in the culture of printing in the early eighteenth century. The new and widespread use of print media transformed the relations between people and power in a way that set in motion the republican structure of government we have inherited. Examining books, pamphlets, and circulars, he merges theory and concrete analysis to provide a multilayered view of American cultural development.

The Taking of Hong Kong
The Taking of Hong Kong

Author: Susanna Hoe

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-11

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1136822496

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Relations between Britain and China have, for over 150 years, been inextricably bound up with the taking of Hong Kong Island on 26 January 1841. The man responsible, Britain's plenipotentiary Captain Charles Elliot, was recalled by his government in disgrace and has been vilified ever since by China. This book describes the taking of Hong Kong from Elliot's point of view for the first time '- through the personal letters of himself and his wife Clara '- and shows a man of intelligence, conscience and humanitarian instincts. The book gives new insights into Sino-British relations of the period. Because these are now being re-assessed both historically and for the future, revelations about Elliot's role, intentions and analysis are significant and could make an important difference to our understanding of the dynamics of these relations. On a different level, the book explores how Charles the private man, with his wife by his side, experienced events, rather than how Elliot the public figure reported them to the British government. The work is therefore of great historiographical interest.

Letters Home
Letters Home

Author: Jennifer Wong

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781911027874

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Letters Home, Jennifer Wong's remarkable and vivid third collection of poems, unravels the complexities of being between nations, languages and cultures. Travelling across multiple borders of history and place, these poems examine what it means to be returning home, and whether it is a return to a location, a country or to a shared dream or language. "There are poems of homesickness, nostalgia, but also humour, hope and optimism - all depicted in Wong's distinctive, intelligent style... This is a remarkable collection, which makes a new and bold contribution to the genre of diaspora literature." - Hannah Lowe "Jennifer Wong's voice is captivating, compassionate, her poems full of insight, as she questions the complex relationship between culture and identity and what it means to leave a place to become defined by another." - Rebecca Goss

The Ferrante Letters
The Ferrante Letters

Author: Sarah Chihaya

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2020-01-07

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 023155088X

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Like few other works of contemporary literature, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels found an audience of passionate and engaged readers around the world. Inspired by Ferrante’s intense depiction of female friendship and women’s intellectual lives, four critics embarked upon a project that was both work and play: to create a series of epistolary readings of the Neapolitan Quartet that also develops new ways of reading and thinking together. In a series of intertwined, original, and daring readings of Ferrante’s work and her fictional world, Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Juno Jill Richards strike a tone at once critical and personal, achieving a way of talking about literature that falls between the seminar and the book club. Their letters make visible the slow, fractured, and creative accretion of ideas that underwrites all literary criticism and also illuminate the authors’ lives outside the academy. The Ferrante Letters offers an improvisational, collaborative, and cumulative model for reading and writing with others, proposing a new method the authors call collective criticism. A book for fans of Ferrante and for literary scholars seeking fresh modes of intellectual exchange, The Ferrante Letters offers incisive criticism, insouciant riffs, and the pleasure of giving oneself over to an extended conversation about fiction with friends.

Fixing Inequality in Hong Kong
Fixing Inequality in Hong Kong

Author: Yue Chim Richard Wong

Publisher: Hong Kong University Press

Published: 2017-02-01

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 9888390678

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When discussing inequality and poverty in Hong Kong, scholars and politicians often focus on the failures of government policy and push for an increase in social welfare. Richard Wong argues in Fixing Inequality in Hong Kong that universal retirement support, minimum wage, and standard hours of work are of limited effect in shrinking the inequality gap. By comparing Hong Kong with Singapore, he points out that Hong Kong needs a new and long-term strategy on human resource policy. He recommends more investment in education, focusing on early education and immigration policy reforms to attract highly educated and skilled people to join the workforce. In analyzing what causes inequality, this book ties disparate issues together into a coherent framework, such as Hong Kong’s aging population, lack of investment in human capital, and family breakdowns. Rising divorce rates among low-income households have worsened the housing shortage, driving rents and property prices upwards. Housing problems have created a bigger gap between those who own housing and have the ability to invest in their children’s human capital and those who cannot, thus adversely impacting intergenerational upward mobility. This is the third of Richard Wong’s collections of articles on society and economy in Hong Kong. Diversity and Occasional Anarchy and Hong Kong Land for Hong Kong People, published by Hong Kong University Press in 2013 and 2015 respectively, discuss growing economic and social contradictions in Hong Kong and current housing problems and their solutions.

Moon
Moon

Author: Jennifer S. Cheng

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781939460158

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"Mixing fable and fact, extraordinary and ordinary, Jennifer S. Cheng's hybrid collection Moon: letters, maps, poems draws on various Chinese mythologies about women, particularly that of Chang'E (the Lady in the Moon), uncovering the shadow stories of our myths--with the belief that there is always an underbelly. Moon explores bewilderment and shelter, destruction and construction, unthreading as it rethreads, shedding as it collects."--Page [4] of cover.