INDELIBLE CITYDispossession and Defiance in Hong KongBy Louisa Lim294 pages. Riverhead Books. $28.

《不可磨滅的香港：香港的剝奪與反抗》，林慕蓮著，294頁，Riverhead出版社，28美元。

For an authoritarian regime facing a restive population, it’s an ugly version of the Goldilocks conundrum: How to exert just the right amount of repression to quell demands for democracy, without going so far that you provoke disparate voices to unite in solidarity and opposition?

對於一個面臨難以駕馭的民眾的威權政權來說，這是醜陋版本的「金髮姑娘難題」：如何施加恰到好處的鎮壓，能平息對民主的需求，又不至於促使這些各異的聲音團結起來發起反抗？

In “Indelible City,” Louisa Lim charts how her own identity as a Hong Konger had never been so clear until China’s brutal attempts to crush pro-democracy protests in 2019. She had been feeling increasingly alienated from a densely populated place where extreme inequality, soaring costs and shrinking real estate made “the very act of living” — even for “still very privileged” people like her — completely exhausting. Lim’s experience as a reporter amid a swell of protesters changed that. She could feel her face flush and her throat well up — not from the tear gas, of which there was plenty, but from a surge of emotions: “I’d fallen in love with Hong Kong all over again.”

在《不可磨滅的香港》中，林慕蓮描繪了在2019年中國殘酷鎮壓民主抗議活動之後，她自己作為香港人的身份認同是如何變得如此清晰的。曾經，她對這個人口稠密的地方感到越來越疏遠，這裡貧富差距極大，飆升的生活成本和萎縮的房地產讓「活著本身」成為一件精疲力竭的事情，即使對於像她這樣「依然養尊處優」的人來說也是如此。站在抗議者的人海中，林慕蓮作為記者的經歷改變了這一點。她能感覺到熱血湧上臉頰，喉嚨中有東西要迸發出來——不是因為催淚瓦斯，雖然催淚瓦斯也很多，而是因為一股情緒的涌動：「我又重新愛上了香港。」

Needless to say, this is an unapologetically personal book. For Lim, who worked as a correspondent for the BBC and NPR, the turmoil in Hong Kong made it ever harder “to safeguard my professional neutrality.” With every twist of China’s political screws, the journalistic distance she had long tried to maintain was getting squeezed alongside the vibrant city she had known firsthand since childhood. Following a brief, anticlimactic honeymoon period after 1997, when Britain returned Hong Kong to China, many of the freedoms that Hong Kongers had taken for granted have been chipped away. Distance, Lim says, is impossible when the walls are collapsing around you. “There is no escape from the horror of watching your home be destroyed,” she writes.

不用說，這是一部毫無掩飾的個人故事。對於曾為BBC和NPR記者的林慕蓮來說，香港的動盪讓「維護我的職業中立」變得更加困難。中國政治螺絲每扭轉一次，她從小就親身體驗的充滿活力的城市就被擠壓，她一直試圖保持的新聞距離也在被擠壓。在1997年英國將香港歸還中國之後，這裡經歷了一段短暫的、漸漸消失的蜜月期，香港人認為理所當然的許多自由被削弱了。林慕蓮說，當你周圍的牆壁倒塌時，保持距離是不可能的。她寫道：「眼睜睜地看著你的家園被毀，這種恐懼沒有逃脫的出口。」

Lim moved to Hong Kong when she was 5. As the child of a Chinese father from Singapore and a white mother from Britain, she was always “hovering between two cultures like the hungry ghosts flitting between two worlds,” she writes. The “startlingly Victorian” curriculum of her schooling didn’t help matters. China was barely mentioned, and even though “anything British was mentioned in awed tones,” her teachers took care not to make the United Kingdom sound too wonderful, lest it encourage in the young Hong Kongers a desire to move there. “Our education effectively deracinated us,” she writes, “suspending us in a kind of colonial non-space designed to ensure that we did not identify too closely with any place.”

林慕蓮五歲時移居香港。她的父親是新加坡華人，母親是英國白人，她總是「在兩種文化之間徘徊，就像在兩個世界之間飛來飛去的餓鬼」，她寫道。她的學校傳授「令人吃驚的維多利亞時代」守舊課程，更是加重了她的困境。幾乎沒有人提到中國，然而，雖然「書中對任何英國人的提及都是帶著敬畏的語氣」，她的老師們還是小心翼翼地不讓英國聽起來太美妙，以免激發年輕的香港人搬到那裡的願望。她寫道：「我們的教育有效地使我們脫離了種族，將我們懸浮在一種旨在確保我們不會與任何地方有過於緊密認同的殖民非空間中。」

Part of her book is an attempt to recover that sense of place, as she writes her way through history, explaining that Britain’s acquisition of Hong Kong wasn’t “so much an imperial masterstroke as an accident.” Looking at documents in the British National Archives, Lim notices that in letters exchanged between Chinese and British negotiators during the First Opium War, Britain’s demand for Hong Kong had been added in the margins. A colonial civil servant later described the cession of Hong Kong as “a surprise to all concerned.” For Lord Palmerston, Britain’s colonial possession of Hong Kong was bound to be fruitless. “A barren rock with nary a house upon it,” he wrote. “It will never be a mart for trade.”

在一定程度上，這本書就是想恢復這種對一個地方的知覺，她通過歷史的敘述解釋香港被割讓給英國「與其說是帝國的傑作，不如說是一次意外」。在查看英國國家檔案館的文獻時，林慕蓮注意到在第一次鴉片戰爭期間中英談判代表交換的信件中，英國對割讓香港的要求被添加到頁面邊緣的空白處。一位殖民地公務員後來形容香港的割讓是「令相關各方都感到意外」的一件事。對於帕默斯頓勛爵來說，英國對香港的殖民佔有註定是毫無益處的。「一塊貧瘠的岩石，上面連房子都沒有，」他寫道。「它永遠不會成為商貿之地。」

But of course it did become a mart for trade, and Lim traces Hong Kong’s fortunes under 155 years of British control. She recalls the colonial governor of her childhood, Murray MacLehose, a “paternalistic authoritarian” known as “Big Mac.” MacLehose took care not to antagonize China, promoting administrative efficiency and civic campaigns as a substitute for democracy. Hong Kong’s last governor, Christopher Patten, assumed that China’s economic reforms would necessarily lead to political liberalization, even though the moderate democratic measures he undertook in the years leading up to the handover earned him hostility from Beijing.

然而，它的確成為了一個商貿之地，林慕蓮追溯了香港在英國控制下155年的命運。她回憶起她童年時代的殖民總督麥理浩，他是一位被稱為「巨無霸」的「家長式威權主義者」。麥理浩小心翼翼地不與中國為敵，提倡行政效率和公民運動來代替民主。香港前任總督彭定康認為，中國的經濟改革必然會導致政治自由化，儘管他在回歸前幾年採取的溫和民主措施引來了北京的敵視。

“Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad,” an otherwise polished Patten said in a moment of candor, when Lim interviewed him in 2019. She had asked him how he felt when he saw his own hopeful words from more than two decades before — that it was Hong Kong’s “unshakable destiny” to be run by Hong Kongers — turned into desperate graffiti.

平日措辭優雅的彭定康在2019年接受林慕蓮採訪時很直白：「不好。不好。不好。真不好。」當時她問他，他看到自己二十多年前充滿希望的言論——「港人治港是不可動搖的命運」——變成了絕望的塗鴉時有何感受。

Lim asks what it might mean for Hong Kong to forge an identity that isn’t beholden to either Britain or China. She finds inspiration in Tsang Tsou-choi, known as the King of Kowloon, who emblazoned the surfaces of the city with his own calligraphic graffiti for decades. His brushstrokes spoke to a family tale of dispossession, deriding the authorities no matter who they were. Until his death in 2007, this “obsessive, mentally and physically challenged pensioner” had, for her and many others, become an “unlikely lodestar” — the constancy of his grievances made him stand apart from the “scrolling whirligig of Hong Kong politics.”

林慕蓮試問，如果香港打造一個不受英國或中國影響的身份認同可能意味著什麼。她從人稱「九龍皇帝」的曾灶財身上找到靈感。幾十年來，曾灶財用自己的書法塗鴉裝飾了城市的牆面。他的書寫講述了一個被剝奪的家庭的故事，嘲笑當局，無論當局是誰。直到2007年去世，這位「痴狂的、身心都有問題的老人」對她和其他許多人來說已經成了一盞「意想不到的明燈」——他持續不斷的怨言使他在「香港政治的滾動漩渦」中卓爾不群。

The emergence of a localist movement in Hong Kong provides an alternative vision, too — but its proponents resort sometimes to nativist invective, with one of them comparing Chinese mainlanders coming to Hong Kong as “locusts.” Besides, Lim’s own identity as a Hong Konger doesn’t quite check all the localist boxes. She wasn’t born there. She’s half-white. She speaks terrible Cantonese. “Where was the place for someone like me?” she asks.

香港本土主義運動的出現也提供了另一種視角——但其支持者有時會訴諸鄉土論式的謾罵，其中一人把來香港的中國大陸人比作「蝗蟲」。此外，林慕蓮本人作為香港人的身份並沒有完全符合所有本地主義者的要求。她不是在那裡出生的。她是半個白人。她的廣東話很糟糕。「像我這樣的人屬於哪裡？」她問。

“Indelible City” was presumably finished before the latest phase in the pandemic wreaked havoc on Hong Kong’s elderly population, and before its chief executive, Carrie Lam, announced earlier this month that she wouldn’t seek a second term. The engine for this vivid, loving book is Lim’s insistent questioning — her recognition that whatever comes next for Hong Kong will require not only fortitude but also willful acts of imagination. “We had lost our old city forever, and our old selves along with that,” she writes. “We had no choice but to reinvent ourselves.”

《不可磨滅的香港》應該是在大流行最近一輪疫情開始前完成的，這次疫情嚴重傷害了香港的老年人口，後來，行政長官林鄭月娥本月早些時候宣布她不會尋求連任。這本生動而充滿愛意的書的動力，來自林慕蓮堅持不懈的追問——她認識到，無論香港接下來發生什麼，不僅需要毅力，還需要頑強的想像。「我們永遠失去了昔日那座城市，以及我們昔日的自我，」她寫道。「我們別無選擇，只能重塑自己。」