Description
Book SynopsisUnsettling Exiles recasts identity formation in Hong Kong, demonstrating that the complexities of crossing borders shaped the city’s uneasy place in the Sinophone world. Angelina Y. Chin foregrounds the experiences of the many people who passed through Hong Kong without settling down or finding a sense of belonging.
Trade ReviewIn
Unsettling Exiles, the story of postwar Hong Kong is not simply one of socioeconomic perseverance but must also be understood in the contexts of the trauma and sense of dislocation experienced by many who had, for a variety of reasons, left China for the British colony. In so telling the story, Chin offers not only to place the experiences of many in Hong Kong in the broader context of what she refers to as the “Southern Periphery” but also to connect the challenges Hong Kong has faced since the 1997 handover to a longer history of fear, despair, and disillusionment. -- Leo K. Shin, founding convenor of the Hong Kong Studies Initiative, University of British Columbia
Bold and exquisite, this book exhumes from history a “Southern Periphery” at the doorstep of the People’s Republic of China. Nurtured by the visions and voices of forgotten exiles, refugees, and deportees falling through the cracks of conventional analytical categories—nations, borders, citizenship, and diaspora—the legacies of this unique political landscape still reverberate today. -- Ching Kwan Lee, author of
Hong Kong: Global China’s Restive FrontierDoes geography shape destiny? How have the borders of land and sea that bind Hong Kong to China shaped the fates of Hong Kongers, many of whom fled CCP authoritarianism and found no other home amid the racist legacies of decolonization and the Cold War’s political divides, which fueled Hong Kong’s insecure sovereignty. Published in the aftermath of China’s sweeping National Security Law, Chin’s nuanced study of Hong Kongers’ limited mobility and precarious immobility throbs with poignant hindsight. -- Madeline Y. Hsu, author of
The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model MinorityUnsettling Exiles introduces the Southern Periphery of the PRC: a place of permeable borders, political exiles, unwelcome migrants, unidentified corpses, idealists, grifters, and wary state apparatuses. Chin gives close and compassionate attention to people creating lives in circumstances they did not choose, all the while imagining a future China they could call home. A powerful argument that understanding the center requires acknowledging the loyalties, longings, and traumatic memories of those on the periphery. -- Gail Hershatter, University of California, Santa Cruz
In this pioneering and captivating book, Angelina Chin shows how Cold War Hong Kong became a dumping ground for Chinese refugees, deportees, and a host of other “undesirables.” Instead of finding cosmopolitanism and success, as the triumphal “Hong Kong story” goes, these exiles often faced despair and marginality. Unsettling indeed! -- John M. Carroll, author of
The Hong Kong-China Nexus: A Brief HistoryStimulating and provocative. * China Quarterly *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
A Note on Transliteration
Introduction
1. “Refugees” or “Undesirables”: The Fate of Chinese Escapees in the 1950s and 1960s
2. The Third Force and the Culture of Dissent in Hong Kong
3. Cultural Revolution at Sea: Dead Bodies and Kidnapping in the Hong Kong Sea Territories
4. The Unwanted in Limbo: Was Hong Kong a Refuge or a Dumping Ground?
5. The Three Escapees
6. Commemorating the Big Escape: The Question of Memories
Epilogue
Glossary of Chinese Characters
Notes
Bibliography
Index
