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| INDELIBLE CITYDispossession and Defiance in Hong KongBy Louisa Lim294 pages. Riverhead Books. $28. | 《不可磨灭的香港：香港的剥夺与反抗》，林慕莲著，294页，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? | 对于一个面临难以驾驭的民众的威权政权来说，这是丑陋版本的“金发姑娘难题”：如何施加恰到好处的镇压，能平息对民主的需求，又不至于促使这些各异的声音团结起来发起反抗？ |
| 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《不可磨灭的香港》中，林慕莲描绘了在2019年中国残酷镇压民主抗议活动之后，她自己作为香港人的身份认同是如何变得如此清晰的。曾经，她对这个人口稠密的地方感到越来越疏远，这里贫富差距极大，飙升的生活成本和萎缩的房地产让“活着本身”成为一件精疲力竭的事情，即使对于像她这样“依然养尊处优”的人来说也是如此。站在抗议者的人海中，林慕莲作为记者的经历改变了这一点。她能感觉到热血涌上脸颊，喉咙中有东西要迸发出来——不是因为催泪瓦斯，虽然催泪瓦斯也很多，而是因为一股情绪的涌动：“我又重新爱上了香港。” |
| 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. | 不用说，这是一部毫无掩饰的个人故事。对于曾为BBC和NPR记者的林慕莲来说，香港的动荡让“维护我的职业中立”变得更加困难。中国政治螺丝每扭转一次，她从小就亲身体验的充满活力的城市就被挤压，她一直试图保持的新闻距离也在被挤压。在1997年英国将香港归还中国之后，这里经历了一段短暂的、渐渐消失的蜜月期，香港人认为理所当然的许多自由被削弱了。林慕莲说，当你周围的墙壁倒塌时，保持距离是不可能的。她写道：“眼睁睁地看着你的家园被毁，这种恐惧没有逃脱的出口。” |
| 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.” | 林慕莲五岁时移居香港。她的父亲是新加坡华人，母亲是英国白人，她总是“在两种文化之间徘徊，就像在两个世界之间飞来飞去的饿鬼”，她写道。她的学校传授“令人吃惊的维多利亚时代”守旧课程，更是加重了她的困境。几乎没有人提到中国，然而，虽然“书中对任何英国人的提及都是带着敬畏的语气”，她的老师们还是小心翼翼地不让英国听起来太美妙，以免激发年轻的香港人搬到那里的愿望。她写道：“我们的教育有效地使我们脱离了种族，将我们悬浮在一种旨在确保我们不会与任何地方有过于紧密认同的殖民非空间中。” |
| 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，这本书就是想恢复这种对一个地方的知觉，她通过历史的叙述解释香港被割让给英国“与其说是帝国的杰作，不如说是一次意外”。在查看英国国家档案馆的文献时，林慕莲注意到在第一次鸦片战争期间中英谈判代表交换的信件中，英国对割让香港的要求被添加到页面边缘的空白处。一位殖民地公务员后来形容香港的割让是“令相关各方都感到意外”的一件事。对于帕默斯顿勋爵来说，英国对香港的殖民占有注定是毫无益处的。“一块贫瘠的岩石，上面连房子都没有，”他写道。“它永远不会成为商贸之地。” |
| 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，它的确成为了一个商贸之地，林慕莲追溯了香港在英国控制下155年的命运。她回忆起她童年时代的殖民总督麦理浩，他是一位被称为“巨无霸”的“家长式威权主义者”。麦理浩小心翼翼地不与中国为敌，提倡行政效率和公民运动来代替民主。香港前任总督彭定康认为，中国的经济改革必然会导致政治自由化，尽管他在回归前几年采取的温和民主措施引来了北京的敌视。 |
| “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. | 平日措辞优雅的彭定康在2019年接受林慕莲采访时很直白：“不好。不好。不好。真不好。”当时她问他，他看到自己二十多年前充满希望的言论——“港人治港是不可动摇的命运”——变成了绝望的涂鸦时有何感受。 |
| 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.” | 林慕莲试问，如果香港打造一个不受英国或中国影响的身份认同可能意味着什么。她从人称“九龙皇帝”的曾灶财身上找到灵感。几十年来，曾灶财用自己的书法涂鸦装饰了城市的墙面。他的书写讲述了一个被剥夺的家庭的故事，嘲笑当局，无论当局是谁。直到2007年去世，这位“痴狂的、身心都有问题的老人”对她和其他许多人来说已经成了一盏“意想不到的明灯”——他持续不断的怨言使他在“香港政治的滚动漩涡”中卓尔不群。 |
| 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. | 香港本土主义运动的出现也提供了另一种视角——但其支持者有时会诉诸乡土论式的谩骂，其中一人把来香港的中国大陆人比作“蝗虫”。此外，林慕莲本人作为香港人的身份并没有完全符合所有本地主义者的要求。她不是在那里出生的。她是半个白人。她的广东话很糟糕。“像我这样的人属于哪里？”她问。 |
| “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.” | 《不可磨灭的香港》应该是在大流行最近一轮疫情开始前完成的，这次疫情严重伤害了香港的老年人口，后来，行政长官林郑月娥本月早些时候宣布她不会寻求连任。这本生动而充满爱意的书的动力，来自林慕莲坚持不懈的追问——她认识到，无论香港接下来发生什么，不仅需要毅力，还需要顽强的想象。“我们永远失去了昔日那座城市，以及我们昔日的自我，”她写道。“我们别无选择，只能重塑自己。” |
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