Fortune’s Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong

 

Fortune’s Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong by Vaudine England was an insightful history of Hong Kong, but not told with a primary Chinese or British colonial focus. Instead, England wrote about those who came to the port city in the middle of the nineteenth century who helped establish the community. Hong Kong wouldn’t be the place it is today without the Portuguese, Armenian, Jewish, Indian, Parsi and Malay immigrants who sought a better life. England told the stories of these immigrants and their descendants, the Eurasians, a term that had first been used as a pejorative. She went to great lengths at the beginning of the book to explain the term and to differentiate its pejorative and neutral connotations and its evolution to an elite class and a term of pride.

As Hong Kong grew, different ethnic communities flourished. They mixed in social milieux and England refuted the claims that the international community only intermingled in the marketplace:

“The result when all these varied peoples and practices collided was bound to be rough and ready. Imagine a frontier town settled by such distinct and different cultures, combining ideas and practices from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean to Malay river ports, coming up against Chinese habits and a numerically insecure but militarily strong Britain. Such freedom must have been exciting, yet there was little time to think about it, as docks had to be built, warehouses filled, and ships dispatched. As Hong Kong was settled, some British would cling desperately to a notion of a white, ordered society. But Hong Kong’s hybridity would prove irrepressible. This was perhaps no true melting pot, but rather a glorious mosaic.”

England drove home the point repeatedly that Hong Kong history has been “whitewashed”, leaving only two official and distinct histories, coming from the Chinese and British. Yet she asserts that the core community was neither entirely Chinese nor British, but a mixture of both, and more:

“Many are the histories and sweeping claims made about racial segregation in empire, asserting that the British and the Chinese had no intimate connection–yet they were sleeping together most nights.”

Hong Kong history has ignored all but the Chinese and British sides and the author wrote of dozens of families from all over the world who settled there to make their fortunes. Many of the top companies that are still in business today have roots outside of China or Great Britain. England mapped out elaborate family histories and the pages resembled Genesis chapter 5 with generation after generation of names. This was the only part of the book I found the most tedious. A family tree flow chart would have been more appropriate. If I could look at a diagram I could place the names in an easier-to-understand context. Since I am not of Chinese or Parsi descent and am unfamiliar with these nationalities’ nomenclatures, the similarity of these names was confusing and after a while my eyes glossed over all the personal names. That is my only complaint about this book: there were simply too many names to keep track of.

In the earliest days of Hong Kong’s history as a British Crown colony, settlers–overwhelmingly men–arrived from all over the world. England cited census figures to show that the the sex ratio was seriously skewed. In order to satisfy the libidos of thousands of young men, brothels were established. A generous photo insert showed the brothels along Spring Garden Lane in the 1920’s. A client could find any kind of woman he wanted: Chinese women for Chinese men; Chinese women for European men; other nationalities; all with varying degrees of sophistication. Many men led double lives, with families left back in their home countries and additional children with a Chinese wife in Hong Kong. The author was sensitive in her depictions of these women’s–and girls’–lives, often sold into sexual servitude, but also wrote of the “protected women”, who lived affluent lives as the partners of wealthy (usually western) men. There was no shame amongst those who shared their lives with protected women, and they and the women themselves mingled with high society.

England covered the period of Japanese occupation during World War II, and the efforts to evacuate Hong Kong citizens. Discriminatory policies, often contradictory and impossible to enforce with so much ethnic intermixing, enabled some people to leave the city while others had to remain. Some people of mixed race may have had more western physical features but lived, dressed and spoke Chinese, regardless of what their name was. Some people “flipped” nationalities to whatever was the more convenient at that time.

I knew hardly anything about Hong Kong before I read this book, and was unaware of its multicultural background. The author created a more accessible history brought into the present when she interviewed descendants who told their family stories, passed down through generations. England also wrote about more recent events since the colony was transferred back to PR China in 1997, and the ensuing threats to democracy.

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How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words

 

How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words by Sophia Smith Galer told the story of ten of the world’s endangered languages and the forces that are at work to eradicate them. Not all of these languages are under threat for the same reasons, and Galer documents each language’s decline by a different cause, using blunt chapter headings, such as Emigrate; Build; Occupy; Expel; Exploit, Criminalize; Shame; Sanctify; Ignore; and Remember. You get the idea: nefarious forces are at work eliminating the world’s languages.

As a student of endangered languages such as Romansch and Breton, I lapped up this book and couldn’t put it down. Neither of those two languages was profiled in the book, although Galer took frequent swipes at France’s official policy of promoting monolingualism at the expense of its own minority languages such as Breton and Basque. She was international in her scope, profiling threatened indigenous languages in Oman, California, Ecuador, Kurdistan, Ghana, and included national languages such as Ukrainian and Hebrew. The former has been under threat for over a century, in danger of being supplanted by Russian. The Occupy chapter dealt with Ukrainian. However of all the languages covered in this book, the one under the Sanctify chapter, Hebrew, is in a class of its own. After it lost its status as a living spoken language centuries ago, it was revived from being strictly a language of religion that was read and rarely spoken into the national living language of Israel and of Jews the world over.

Galer wove stories about her beloved late grandmother throughout the text. Her nonna grew up in the region of Emilia-Romagna, Italy speaking its dialët, and passed it down to her daughter. Galer, however, has only partial fluency in her ancestral native tongue, in that she understands the language but cannot speak it. This is one reason that languages die, when people emigrate and do not pass their native language to future generations. The chapter Remember honours her own dialët, which Galer states upfront will probably be extinct by the end of this century.

In terms of national minority languages, Galer makes it clear:

“A language’s health is unequivocally tied to the tolerance and encouragement of multiculturalism, and these are values that, as the far right surges globally, are increasingly under threat.”

As long as those who speak minority languages feel maligned and less privileged, they will abandon their mother tongues. The Ecuadorian language Kichwa (a national variety of Quechua) is the subject of the chapter on Shame. Ecuador has tried to generate a greater literacy among its Kichwa speakers by creating a unifying orthography that encompasses all idioms, but this endeavour to save the language distances those who already speak it. Galer provided examples of native speakers puzzling over words that they have never seen written before, and in an idiom of the language they do not speak. The creation of a literary language using pieces of various spoken idioms or even newly invented words is by no means new. As a student of the Romansch idiom Sursilvan, I am aware of the opinions of Swiss who dislike the literary hybrid known as Rumantsch Grischun (for the most part, it’s not positive).

None of the languages in these chapters has been killed off yet. Galer does write about some recent losses, such as Ubykh, and some indigenous American languages that are down to their last few or single speakers. We lose an entire world of knowledge when a language dies. In this interconnected world where people are increasingly moving to the cities, the languages of rural areas are rapidly disappearing, and the rate of decline is outpacing efforts to save them.

What’s with the Kubota-stylized front-cover font? In keeping with the theme of the dramatic word Kill in the title, the pieces taken out of the letters resemble what might happen if you splattered machine-gun fire over the cover.

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Shadows of the Republic: The Rebirth of Fascism in America and How to Defeat it for Good

Shadows of the Republic: The Rebirth of Fascism in America and How to Defeat it for Good by Omer Aziz is a review of recent American history which led to the state the country is in now. The current administration did not occur in a vacuum and Aziz went back in time to show how the 45th and then the 47th president could have come to power. Aziz maintained throughout the book that fascism in the United States is not a new phenomenon and existed for decades through various movements, yet was always simmering under the surface.

In order to understand how fascism could resurface in the United States, the author reviewed fascism in Europe, with a focus on Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany and how each man came to power. Aziz made this history accessible and the events of one hundred years ago seemed as fresh as the current state of affairs south of the border. Thus the connections between what is happening in Washington and what occurred in Italy and Germany are too close for comfort. He states it succinctly from as soon as page 2:

“In America, collective amnesia precedes collective hallucinations, and now this country lives through an authoritarian nightmare that violates the Constitution, upends centuries of norms, and controls a massive surveillance state that knows everything about us.”

Aziz was not blind to fascism on our own shores, and also looked at fascist, white supremacist and Nazi movements that existed in the US not only over a century ago, but those that lurk among us today. He looked at the origins of fascism and its connection to paganism, a link that I had discovered during my university days studying German history and culture. Fascism lays blame at any number of scapegoats, and can develop as a response to a bad economy, or feelings of disenfranchisement by others such as immigrants, or as a reaction to what we now call a woke agenda. The author looked at propaganda and how it was developed to blanket the masses with fascist ideology.

The latter part of the subtitle, How to Defeat it for Good refers to a 25-point Antifascist Playbook that Aziz lays out in the final chapter. One can actively counter fascism and undemocratic action by following the steps he outlines. A selection from this playbook includes having the courage to speak up; resist passivity; champion the free discussion of ideas; know your history; prosecute extremist organizations; work across the aisle to get big things done; and teach kids kindness.

The author often repeated dates and timelines, reminding his readers when Hitler came to power (in 1933) and that it was eleven years prior to Mussolini (in 1922). Aziz provided 22 pages of endnotes which I referred to after finishing each chapter, versus flipping to after each exponential encounter. Most of my notes were to references I later researched from the endnotes.

Shadows of the Republic is an accessible and intelligent read, bringing the past to life with stories that seem as if they could have actually happened yesterday versus a century ago. History does seem to be repeating itself and Aziz has given us the means to take action and stop it.

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The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World

The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland is the story of Rudolf Vrba, who along with Alfréd Wetzler, managed to do the unbelievable by escaping from Auschwitz in April 1944.

Freedland starting by writing about the anti-Semitism in Slovakia and the deportation of Jews to places that they believed were resettlement camps. Vrba, seventeen at the time and living under his birth name of Walter Rosenberg, knew that there was a more sinister plan behind the idea of resettling his country’s fellow Jews and devised a plan to flee to England. He was apprehended and then deported to the Majdanek death camp, then after two weeks was moved to Auschwitz.

Vrba was a fit young man and survived the flick-of-a-finger assessment that saw three-quarters of new arrivals sent immediately to the gas chambers. He described the horrors of the camp and his time there, barely surviving on the limited food while being forced to work in the gravel pits. For lack of a better word, Vrba was “promoted” to a position that was easier on the body and worked sorting the suitcases and possessions of the newest arrivals. He used his access to the money and valuables he found to curry favour with the guards. They turned a blind eye while Vrba secretly scoped out the place, all the while planning a way to escape.

The author portrayed Vrba as a master of memory, being able to recall the layout of Auschwitz and every fence and guard post. With his life at stake and no paper or pencil to draw a map, he had to rely on his memory in order to save his life. He memorized the guards’ schedules and knew when and how often they would be in certain areas. Any escape attempt had to be a successful one, for failure meant instant death.

Without the means to record facts and figures, Vrba, because he worked on the ramps which saw the arrivals of trains to Auschwitz, committed to memory the number of cars and people who disembarked. He could tell their country of origin. He could also distinguish from all the identification numbers, seen on tattoos, when they arrived.

Freedland wrote a suspenseful account of Vrba and Wetzler’s escape and their three days of hiding before they could make their breakthrough. While on the run they had to watch every step, as they were now wanted men who put anyone at risk if they tried to seek help. Fortunately some sympathetic people opened their homes and gave them food.

After the escape Vrba and Wetzler set out to tell the world about the horrors of Auschwitz. In a series of independent interviews they laid the foundation for the Vrba-Wetzler Report. Vrba was understandably manic in his urgency to get this information out in order to stop the deportations. He could not comprehend why world governments did not immediately come to the aid of Hungarian Jewry, who were being sent to Auschwitz at that time. Freedland wrote about the state of the war at that particular moment, and how much the American and British governments knew about the genocide, yet Vrba grew increasingly frustrated that no one was heeding his report’s call for help. I can imagine Vrba, knowing that he possessed the knowledge to possibly save countless thousands, running around in circles pulling his hair out, desperate for someone to do something. That is not an inaccurate description of him, for Freedland does paint a picture of a man lashing out over apparent international inaction. Vrba and Wetzler’s efforts were not in vain, for in July of 1944 two hundred thousand Jews from Budapest were saved when the Hungarian government ordered the deportations to stop.

Vrba did not live a happy life after the war. Post-traumatic stress ruined his marriage to his childhood sweetheart, and the author had a strained relationship with his two daughters, the older of whom committed suicide. He spent the rest of his life regretting that more Jews couldn’t be saved. He wasn’t satisfied that his work had saved two hundred thousand; he wanted no more Jews to die once his report was released. He had the statistics committed to memory and knew how many would perish as each new train pulled in to Auschwitz. To delay a day meant the loss of thousands, and he probably felt responsible for not being powerful or influential enough with governments to stop it.

Freedland wrote what might have blown up into a career-ending piece on how the Jewish community shunned Vrba. He wrote about the unthinkable, that Jews themselves didn’t appreciate Vrba because his media appearances were so unflattering. Every interview or TV appearance was filled with accusations against others, blaming them for inaction or complicity. What was worse, Vrba exposed Jews as well as Hungarian Jewish Councils whom he believed were collaborators with Nazi Germany, as the possible reasons that his report was not acted upon. Vrba lived as a pariah among Holocaust survivors:

“Rudolf Vrba refused to conform to what the world expects of a Holocaust survivor.
…
“Rudi knew that he was refusing to fit what he called ‘the survivor clichés manufactured for the taste of a certain type of public’: he would offer no uplifting aphorisms, reassuring his audience that, ultimately, human beings were good. He was unforgiving and he was angry. The result was to make Rudolf Vrba, for the best part of three decades, a peripheral figure even in the small world of Holocaust remembrance in Vancouver.”

The last word in the quotation above indicates that Vrba eventually moved to Canada and settled in Vancouver, and died there in 2006.

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Life on Svalbard: Finding Home on a Remote Island Near the North Pole

 

Life on Svalbard: Finding Home on a Remote Island Near the North Pole by Cecilia Blomdahl was a stunning collection of photos and stories about the author’s life in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago high above the Arctic Circle. Within its 258 pages Blomdahl tracks the sun through the calendar and orders her chapters accordingly. We start off with Polar Night, then move on to Pastel Winter, then Sunny Winter, then we have the midnight sun during Polar Day, and then the return of the setting sun ends the book with Golden Autumn. Whole text does not fill the pages with the exception of reproductions of Blomdahl’s diary entries. For the most part, the photos take precedence and the text is relegated to half a page. The pages were very thick and I always had to ensure I was not turning more than one page at a time. I was glad that the book was printed on matte paper as glossy pages would catch the glare of the light. I need to have a light shining down on each page as I read and would have had to constantly move the rather large book around to take in the beauty of the photos while avoiding the lamp’s glare.

Blomdahl’s photos of the glaciers and of her walks within them left me in awe. Sometimes openings in the ice enabled a person to walk underneath the enormous hulky cover to see what it looked like from the inside of a glacier. It looked organic, like exploring the body during an operation, yet not in red fleshy tones. While living on Svalbard she had numerous stories to tell of hearing mysterious rumbling sounds, and realized that it was caused by the thundering glaciers, sometimes heard when two were pushing against one another. Imagine the sounds of glaciers as they were moving across the North American continent millennia ago. I wonder how loud they would be as they advanced and retreated. While sitting across from the Nansen Glacier, Blomdahl wrote:

“There was a stillness that spread out across the bay, interrupted only by the eerie creaks and cracks of the thousand-year-old glacier ice. It stands as one of nature’s most breathtaking landscapes.”

I spent two days with this beautiful book, which I wouldn’t mind having on my own bookshelves. I know I could have finished it in a single sitting but with such gorgeous photos of the Svalbard landscape, the northern lights, glaciers and her dog Grim, I took my time with it. In spite of my praise I did notice a couple errors. For one, the map Blomdahl provides at the beginning of the book shows the Arctic Circle passing through Iceland and Southampton Island. It does not pass through either island, and is located to the north of each. She also misspelled Philippines as Phillipines. As a reader with a degree of low vision I could not read the text when it was white on yellow, yellow on white, or white on light blue without a viewing aid.

Blomdahl is an avid adventurer and a skilled photographer whose respect for nature will ensure that the Svalbard environment remains pristine. As she explored the archipelago she stressed the need to leave things as they were and to pick up after oneself.

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The Bullet: Stories from the Newfoundland Railway

The Bullet: Stories from the Newfoundland Railway by Robert Hunt was a collection of homey personal reminiscences of the author’s time as a teen working the summers on the Newfoundland Railway in the 1960’s. Hunt came from a family where the men were long-time employees of the railway, which crossed Newfoundland from St. John’s to Port aux Basques. Hunt’s father, brother and uncle all worked various jobs on the rails. Hunt shared not only his own but also his late father’s stories on the railroad.

The title of the book is the nickname used for the train. It was used ironically, as throughout the book Hunt related how slowly the train travelled. It used a narrow gauge which meant that not only was its speed compromised, but that it faced delays when receiving cargo from mainland trains, as the latter could not ride on the island’s tracks and the cargo had to be off- then onloaded. I had to laugh at Hunt’s remark:

“The train was called ‘the Bullet’ or ‘the Caribou’ by all who worked there and by many of the Newfoundlanders who travelled on them. People said that it was named the Bullet by the Americans because it was the slowest train they had ever ridden.”

Prior to every one of Hunt’s shifts he would visit the pharmacy across the street from the train station and pick up some snacks. He befriended the pharmacist who was none other than genuine World War One hero Sgt. Tommy Ricketts. Hunt shared his conversations with Ricketts. He always treated him with respect, calling him Mr. Ricketts and never Tommy, as his father forbade him to. Even as an adult recalling these stories from over a half century ago, Hunt maintains the utmost respect for this war hero, a Victoria Cross recipient.

Hunt wrote about railway history on the island, from the creation of the Reid and Newfoundland Railways to the amalgamation into the Canadian National Railway after Confederation. In addition to his personal stories about washing dishes all day, serving customers and exploring areas he shouldn’t, Hunt wrote chapters on the exemplary service the CNR provided and the kind men he worked with. He also wrote a chapter on the train tragedies of Newfoundland where trains derailed or sometimes collided. Thus in one chapter at least, the railway stories were not always feel-good.

When the Trans-Canada Highway officially opened in 1966 it signalled the imminent end to passenger rail service. Although 1966 was also a Come Home Year, where expat Newfoundlanders were encouraged to come back home to visit, the increase in rail passengers did not help the industry and passenger service ceased in 1969.

Hunt supplemented the book with many personal photos of his own family, plus archive shots of the former railway, its staff and railroad paraphernalia.

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The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

 

How could I resist the subject matter in The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss? Bookstores are my favourite places to shop, although I am drawn to secondhand and antiquarian shops over retail outlets. Friss covered both, as well as bookshops on wheels, sidewalk stalls and the mass murderer of all kinds of bricks-and-mortar stores: Amazon. After 312 pages of text, Friss supplied an incredible 67 pages of endnotes. Almost all of these notes provided bibliographic references only and could be ignored. Therefore the heft of the book is thinner than what appears between the covers.

We read about the first American bookstores, and those that were pioneers in their fields (though not necessarily the first) such as stores dealing exclusively with queer content, or black-focussed or feminist bookstores. Friss profiled some of the most beloved and famous bookstore owners, not all (but must) of them a bit quirky, and how each one seemed to live and breathe a life of all things books.

Bookstores have managed to survive amidst changing technologies, and I don’t believe the paper medium for reading is doomed:

“Nineteenth-century booksellers worried that public libraries would destroy them. In the twentieth century, the bogeyman was the radio, then the movies, then TV, then mass-market paperbacks, and then the superstores. In the twenty-first century, ebooks and Amazon have been the existential threats. The fear that the book business is imperiled–near death, even–has always been an industry staple.”

Yet the number of my favourite bookstores continues to shrink. On my latest visit to Helsinki, I wrote about the disappearance of one (Antikvariaatti Korkeavuori) and the downsizing of another (Akateeminen Kirjakauppa). Everything boils down to the bottom line, and as one New York vendor explained:

“Booksellers needed profits, of course, but they didn’t need much profit to keep the doors open. ‘If I wanted to make money, I’d sell herring,’ one Fourth Avenue seller claimed. It was a business and a passion.”

In the 1940’s and 50’s I would have loved browsing amidst the booksellers along New York’s Fourth Avenue, known as Book Row. One of the stores, the Strand Bookstore, is the sole survivor today, yet now located at 828 Broadway.

I liked the profile of bibliophile Burt Britton, a bookseller at the Strand:

“He also invited herds of librarians to browse in person. When they did, he didn’t hesitate to correct their pronunciation of Nabokov’s name–or their taste. ‘It’s just as easy to read something good,’ he would say, replacing the book in their hands with another. He was grumpy and charming. When one customer asked him for a book recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, adding, ‘I don’t know the name of it, and it’s got a subtitle, but I don’t know that either,’ Britton let him have it: ‘Jesus Christ! … Get outta here!’ But as the customer walked away, Britton told him exactly where to find it. (FSG had published just one book with a subtitle in the previous week.)”

The Bookshop was a delight to read which I could not put down. How I wished I could travel back in time to visit some of these stores, and I often reminisced about the favourite stores of my past, sorrowfully no longer in business or transformed into establishments I no longer recognize.

Friss employed the nominal lexicalization of the virgule, i.e. slash, throughout the book. It grew annoying after the second example. These examples occurred near the end of the book, when I realized I needed a couple citations:

“Borders began in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as a small used bookshop in 1971. It had grown tremendously by the time Kmart acquired it in 1992, at which point Kmart already owned Waldenbooks, which already owned Brentano’s. Borders-slash-Waldenbooks-slash-Brentano’s-slash-Kmart was a powerhouse.” (p. 237)

and:

“And then there was author-slash-actor-slash-playwright-slash-hiphopper Lin-Manuel Miranda.” (p.298)

In a chapter on the Aryan Book Store, which operated in Los Angeles in 1933, Friss alternated between Adolph Hitler (p. 159) and Adolf (p. 170).

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