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paperback HK$190
Hong Kong University Press
More reviews by Peter Gordon
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Hong Kong Invaded! A '97 Nightmare by Gillian Bickley
Several years ago, in the early 1990s, I was asked by the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank for some assistance in Vladivostok, the main port city in Russia's Far East. "Vladivostok? What for?", was all I could stammer. It turned out that the Bank actually had a branch in Vladivostok for a few years around 1920, and that there was a picture of it hanging somewhere in the Bank's main building. They wanted to see if it was still there.
And so it was, on the second and top floor of a now rather shabby late Tsarist-era townhouse, across the street from Vladivostok's "White House", the main administrative building in the centre of town. Appropriately, the space was now occupied by "Vostok Bank", a local operation which lasted, I believe, even less time that the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank's branch 70 years earlier. Maybe the spot had bad feng shui.
Anyway, the point is that while a Russian or French invasion of Hong Kong seems entirely fantastical, we often forget that 100 or so years ago, the Far East was in many ways far more complicated than today.
My reaction to HONG KONG INVADED! A '97 NIGHTMARE was identical to the one I had when I discovered that the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank had a branch in Vladivostok. This is one of those books that makes one ask "How come I didn't know about this before?".
The jacket of the book is a bit misleading: it makes the book sound like it might be a work of fiction or a presentation of a work of fiction, but it is really an academic study of The Back Door, an anonymous 1897 pamphlet. Furthermore, The Back Door is not a novel, nor even a novella. It is, pretty much, a fictional historical account.
Cool
Don't let the academic nature of the book put you off, though: this one is "cool": The Back Door, which was also serialised in the The China Mail, was a fictionalised account of a successful Russo-Japanese invasion of Hong Kong. Author GILLIAN BICKLEY (who has done so much original work it seems unfair to refer to her as "editor") has packaged the pamphlet with copious notes, maps, period photos and, not least, absolutely marvelous illustrations by Arthur Hacker which are themselves worth the cover price.
The pamphlet was overtly political, arguing that Hong Kong was improperly defended; the similarities to this fictional account and the actual Japanese invasion in 1941 have led to the perhaps inevitable speculation that the Japanese used it in their own planning.
Neither the political history nor the titillating idea that this pamphlet was at least partially responsible for the December 1941 debacle is necessary to the enjoyment of the book. The account of the invasion brings late Victorian Hong Kong to life in a realistic, albeit brutal, way.
Gillian Bickley argues that the people are real and identifiable; presumably the portraits are accurate; they are certainly realistic. The places from Deep Water Bay (where the Russians landed) to Bowen Road are, of course, all real.
"About sunset of 23 September, after a heavy thunder-storm lasting nearly an hour, the sky cleared over Hong Kong and Lamma, and a few stars peeped after dark, though the clouds were still heavily banked to the south and westward." So begins the account of the invasion. It is passages like this which distinguish the pamphlet from being just a fictional newspaper report and which give it an intriguing verisimilitude.
Some passages will raise snickers. In the "last" meeting of the Legislative Council: "The two Chinese members spoke out in honest, straightforward fashion - 'They owed all they had to British rule and fairplay; under British rule they had lives, under British rule, if the time had come, they would die ...'". It may be that our post-Colonial consciousness detects a certain irony when none was intended in the original, but this ambiguity is part of the pamphlet's appeal.
The account is so based upon the minutiae of Hong Kong that it may not be as well appreciated (except as for its academic virtues) by those who have not lived here for a while. Except, of course, for Arthur Hacker's drawings.
Peter Gordon
28/05/2001
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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. |
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