“My Feets Is Tired, But My Soul Is Rested”

a talk originally delivered by Albert Wan on 28 Nov. 2021 at Hiding Place bookstore in Sai Wan, Hong Kong; the images that follow are taken from the slide show that was shown in conjunction with the Nov. 28th talk — AW



When Susi first asked me to give this talk it was at the bookshop during its last days, after I had announced that Bleak House Books would be closing for good. Susi came to the bookshop for one last visit and I was there doing bookshop stuff. She told me about her involvement with Peace Generation and how she thought it would be interesting to get the perspective of a bookseller on the subject of peace. I’m not sure I saw the connection back then and my thought actually was that Susi was feeling sorry for me about having to close the bookshop. And that was the real reason she had asked me to give this talk. 


But it turned out that she was serious, and a few weeks later both Susi and Fiona gave me a thoughtful online presentation about Peace Generation — its story, its mission, and also some of the challenges they thought Peace Generation might face in attracting an audience in Hong Kong today. I listened. I asked a few questions. And I made one or two points of my own. At the end I thanked them both for being so generous with their time and their hearts. 

That I’m here today means that I did at some point agree to give this talk. But I’m still not sure I see the connection between bookselling and peace. In fact, if you really want to know, I’m only here for the free beer. IS THERE FREE BEER? 


Before I became a bookseller, I was a lawyer. Being a lawyer taught me about the importance and the power of storytelling. I mostly handled cases involving civil rights or human rights violations. And the people who came to me for help because of these issues always had stories to tell about how and why they felt they were wronged in some way. My job as a lawyer for the clients whose cases I took up was to tell their stories for them to people who had the power and ability to make things right: an opposing attorney, a judge, a jury, a government official, or even a complete stranger. 


So I am going to start today’s talk with a story. Unlike the stories I used to tell on behalf of my clients, this one doesn’t have to do with anyone I know personally. Nor am I asking for anything in return for telling this story, except perhaps for your patience and ten minutes of your time. In other words, I hope you don’t fall asleep so early in my talk. 

The story I want to tell has to do with the text of today’s talk which is Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’. It is a story about struggle, compassion, violence, and, of course, peace.


First a bit of geographical and historical background. Birmingham, where Dr. King wrote his letter, is a city in the state of Alabama, which is in the southern part of the United States, a region some Americans might refer to as the ‘Deep South’. Alabama is one of several states in the Deep South that has a long history of racism against blacks.


In the late 1950’s, more and more black Americans and some white Americans as well, began speaking out about the troubling wave of racist policies and violence that had then become the norm in many places in the United States. What started as sporadic and discrete acts of protest by individuals and small groups eventually grew into a broad, well-organized national movement which sought to create a society in which blacks would have the same rights and freedoms that whites have always enjoyed. The movement had many supporters and leaders with Dr. King being the most famous of those individuals. 


One of the things people in the movement did to challenge and potentially overturn racist laws and policies that were on the books at that time was to organise and attend peaceful, nonviolent protests. Often these protests involved actions in which the protestors would openly yet peacefully defy laws that were not only racist on their face — for example, a law that prohibited blacks from eating at the same lunch counter as whites — but also defy laws that were racist in the way they were applied — for example when the police refuse to give a permit for a protest march claiming it is unsafe but really because they disagree with the message or politics championed by the protestors. 

In April 1963 Dr. King helped organize a large protest movement in Birmingham, Alabama, with the specific goal of forcing the city’s private businesses — its department stores, restaurants, barber shops, etc — to repeal their racist policies against blacks. At that time Birmingham was known throughout the United States as being one of the most segregated and racist cities in the country. And the grand strategy was that if Dr. King could achieve even a modest victory in Birmingham, it would go a long way toward changing the laws and cultures in other American cities. 


The campaign would consist of a series of public direct actions like marches, boycotts and other activities that hopefully would call the nation’s and also the world’s attention to Birmingham’s racist treatment of blacks. 

But Dr. King and his allies faced many challenges in Birmingham. There was Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor, the city’s notoriously powerful, arrogant, combative and racist head of public safety who controlled the police and fire departments among others. A number of Birmingham residents, some otherwise sympathetic to the civil rights cause, also disliked the fact that people like Dr. King, who did not live or work in Birmingham, were coming to their fair city to conduct potentially disruptive and violent demonstrations.


It was no surprise then that when the campaign eventually got under way in Birmingham it was met with fierce resistance by city officials and residents alike. Protestors who marched in the streets were brutally attacked by bystanders and racist thugs, while police officers either turned a blind eye or were ordered by their superiors not to respond at all to the attacks. Black protestors who peacefully insisted on service at businesses with racist policies — a tactic known as a ‘sit-in’ — were denied service and in some cases cursed at and spat upon. ‘Bull’ Connor issued orders that saw police use attack dogs and firefighters water cannons on protestors, many of them school age children. 


For Dr. King, the decisive moment in the Birmingham campaign came when city officials applied for and received a court injunction that prohibited further protests in the city. Dr. King and his trusted friend and ally Ralph David Abernathy had already planned to attend a protest march in a show of solidarity with fellow civil rights protestors when the injunction was issued. And with this new law on the books, Dr. King risked immediate arrest if he went ahead with his plan to attend the march. 


The big question was whether Dr. King would disobey the injunction by sticking to his original plan to attend the march. At first the answer seemed obvious: yes. To Dr. King, the injunction was the product of an overly compliant court perpetuating an unjust system. So in violating the injunction, Dr. King would, in effect, be furthering the cause of the civil rights movement. It would be the kind of civil disobedience that Dr. King preached about and put into practice so often during his adult life. 

But the path of civil disobedience involved a greater risk than just a few nights in jail for Dr. King.  After the court issued its injunction, news broke that the movement had run out of money with which to bail out the hundreds of protestors who were already behind bars, many of whom were arrested on spurious charges. Dr. King was one of the few people who could change that. He was famous, he was eloquent, he was by then a household name. And if anyone could raise the funds necessary to bail out the protestors it was Dr. King. But he wouldn’t be able to do any of that sitting in jail. At the same time, other protesters and allies who were not in jail waited eagerly to march with Dr. King on the streets of Birmingham which he promised them he would do.

Dr. King was, at that moment, what you would describe as a person between a rock and a hard place. If he stayed away from the march he would be seen as weak and even hypocritical. But if he marched and got arrested he wouldn’t be able to help the many protestors who went to jail on his watch. A meeting was called with 24 other civil rights leaders and allies at the famous Gaston Motel, a black-owned business and central meeting place for leaders of the Birmingham campaign. Dr. King himself recalled in his book ‘Why We Can’t Wait’ the moment when he had to decide what to do and this is what he wrote:

I sat in the midst of the deepest quiet I have ever felt, with two dozen others in the room. There comes a time in the atmosphere of leadership when a man surrounded by loyal friends and allies realizes he has come face to face with himself. I was alone in that crowded room.

I walked to another room in the back of the suite, and stood in the center of the floor. I think I was standing also at the center of all that my life had brought me to be. I thought of the twenty-four people, waiting in the room. I thought of the three hundred, waiting in prison. I thought of my Birmingham Negro community, waiting. Then my mind leaped beyond the Gaston Motel, past the city jail, past city lines and state lines, and I thought of twenty million black people who dreamed that someday they might be able to cross the Red Sea of injustice and find their way to the promised land of integration and freedom. There was no more room for doubt.

I pulled off my shirt and pants, got into work clothes and went back to the other room to tell them I had decided to go to jail.

“I don’t know what will happen; I don’t know where the money will come from. But I have to make a faith act.”

From the essay New Day in Birmingham, collected in Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King, Jr., pp. 72-73 (Signet Books 1964).

Dr. King made this decision on the morning of Good Friday and later that day he joined fifty other protestors on the streets of downtown Birmingham. They held hands, they marched, they sang. After walking seven or eight blocks Dr. King and the rest of the protestors were arrested under the orders of ‘Bull’ Connor, Birmingham’s racist chief of police. All the protestors were carted off to the Birmingham city jail, including Dr. King. And that is where Dr. King penned his famous letter. 


The story of Dr. King’s letter doesn’t end there though. Because Dr. King wasn’t just any prisoner. He was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., leader of the civil rights movement. And so ‘Bull’ Connor had to make an example out of him, and he ordered that Dr. King be placed in solitary confinement, where he would be cut off entirely from the outside world. 


If you’ve read the ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ you know that Dr. King actually wrote the letter as a response to something. This something was also a letter, but not one addressed directly to Dr. King. It was an ‘open letter’ signed by 8 Birmingham religious leaders and published the day after Dr. King was arrested as a full page ad in The Birmingham News, the city’s leading newspaper. In their open letter the religious leaders criticised the tactics and the timing of the recent demonstrations in Birmingham, organized and led in part by Dr. King himself.


Because Dr. King was in solitary confinement there was no way he would have seen this open letter. He didn’t even have access to his lawyers let alone newspapers. Someone though managed to smuggle a copy of The Birmingham News into the jail for Dr. King. Whoever this person was, he or she would end up changing the course of history. 

After Dr. King read the ‘open letter’ something clicked in him. He was like a man possessed. He had to respond. Some way, somehow. He didn’t have any writing paper. He didn’t have any books or notes to which he could refer. All he had was the smuggled newspaper and his own wits. So he started to draft a response on the newspaper itself, writing in the margins and in any blank space he could find. When he filled up the newspaper, he switched to writing on any piece of scrap paper he could find. Toilet paper, paper towels, and eventually paper scraps and a pad of paper that Clarence Jones, a lawyer for Dr. King, smuggled into the jail. 

Every single piece of paper scrap that Dr. King wrote on was in turn smuggled out of the jail, also by Jones. And they eventually ended up in the hands of two people: Wyatt Walker and Willie Pearl Mackey, both allies of Dr. King. It was Ms Mackey’s job to transcribe all of Dr. King’s paper scraps that crossed her desk, at least the ones she could read. She worked night and day, sometimes to the point of complete exhaustion, to decipher, assemble and type up what Dr. King wrote. On April 16, 1963 the letter was finally finished. Some 7,000 words, twenty-one, double-spaced, typed pages. Dr. King left the Birmingham city jail on April 20, 1963. 


Five years later, on April 4, 1968, a racist by the name of James Earl Ray armed with a high powered rifle, fired a single bullet into the head of Dr. King, killing him. Dr. King was 39 years old at the time. 


When I selected Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail as the text for this talk I didn’t know any of the story behind how the letter came about. I knew generally of the history of the civil rights movement that Dr. King helped lead, but there were many details about the movement that I had either forgotten about or just didn’t know at all until now. In re-reading the letter and piecing together the story behind it, I cannot help but think about Hong Kong, and how many people here, including myself, experienced our own version of the civil rights movement. We experienced it with our bodies. We experienced it with our minds. And we experienced it with our souls. 


I know what you all might be thinking to yourselves now, or maybe you’re whispering to your neighbor this very thought as it occurs to you: “he said ‘experienced’! But it’s not over yet!” And you might be right. Who in their right mind would think that a social movement involving millions of people can be so easily snuffed out only after a few months or perhaps a year of activity and protest? 

One of the criticisms leveled against Dr. King which he adamantly rejected and specifically responded to in his famous letter from jail, had to do with time and tactics; the criticism being that Dr. King was acting rashly and even irresponsibly in trying to force the hand of the city by taking his case to the streets instead of to more official forums like the courts. If I’m not mistaken some people made a similar criticism in relation to the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. 

If I may I would like to share with everyone some of what Dr. King wrote in response to this criticism. 

First, with respect to the criticism about tactics —

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creating the tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

from Letter From a Birmingham Jail collected in Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King Jr., pp. 78-79 (Signet Books 1964).

That was Dr. King responding to those who disagreed with his use of public protest and civil disobedience as tools for social change. 

Now here he is responding to the criticism that he was being impatient in not waiting for lawmakers or judges to act. 

I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make the real promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

from Letter From a Birmingham Jail collected in Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King Jr., pg. 86 (Signet Books 1964).

Reading and thinking about this now in the context of Hong Kong I am of the feeling that some of what Dr. King wrote in his letter might not apply to the Hong Kong of today. We must remember that during Dr. King’s time and the time of the civil rights movement, the United States was still mostly a democracy. By that I mean a country with a government whose priority was responding to and caring for its people rather than amassing and maintaining power. 

It was a time when activists did go to the courts to overturn racist laws, and sometimes won. It was a time when presidents, personally and through their use of federal resources, intervened in the affairs of state and local governments that were reluctant and unwilling to change their racist ways, even when the laws ordered them to. It was a time when lawmakers worked hand in hand with civilians to craft laws for the greater good of the nation rather than for the pocketbook of the businessman. 

And so when Dr. King wrote his letter from the city jail and called for more not less direct-action to force the kind of ‘constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth’, he was operating under two, not unrealistic assumptions: one, that the people responsible for creating this kind of tension were very much in harm’s way, AND two, that these people had allies inside the existing power structure who would be willing to enter the fray on their behalf in the event all hell broke loose. 

In Hong Kong today there are still many people who could be considered in harm’s way but I imagine that no official in a position of power would be willing to go to bat for any of them. 

Does this mean that Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail has nothing to teach those in Hong Kong who are hoping to find a peaceful resolution to what ails the city now and in the future? No. Many who read the letter will certainly see it as a political and tactical playbook for how to challenge the status quo. Much like the ‘The Power of the Powerless’, the famous essay by the late writer and first president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel. 

But also like Havel’s book, Dr. King’s letter is more than just a how-to manual. It is a document of faith, of love, of hope. It is a document that rejects the cynicism of the many who believe that the best and only kind of change is the change in one’s bank account. It is a document that would give a lawyer the courage and reason to turn over a new leaf and become a bookseller in a city he’s never lived or worked in. It is a document that can turn an otherwise ordinary bookshop into an extension of one’s home, a place of warmth and love, and one that can provide a fellow booklover and dear friend with what this person has described as ‘the best job in the world’. 


In other words, the Letter from Birmingham Jail is exactly the kind of document that Dr. King set out to write. It changed my life in the best ways, both big and small, and I think it might do the same for you. 

Saying Goodbye to Hong Kong: An Unexpected End for an Independent English Bookstore

Following tearful embraces and goodbyes, Albert ushers everyone from the bookstore at 7:45 p.m., closes the door and hangs a sign on it that reads, “Hong Kong is my home.”


by Lok-Kei SUM 沈諾基*; translated from the Chinese by Mary King BRADLEY**; cover photo by Chun-Tung LAM 林振東/ reprinted with the permission of Initium Media 端傳媒 (25 October 2021 | Hong Kong)

Every three months, Reena receives three or four books selected for her by bookshop owner Albert Wan. She belongs to the Bleak House Books subscription readers’ club. Last Christmas, Reena’s boss gave one-year memberships to five employees, including Reena.

She happened to be in the office when the first package arrived several days later, delivering what felt like all the excitement of another Christmas. “Everyone had a box, individualized [for him or her. You could see that] a lot of thought went into it,” she says.

Like the name Bleak House Books, the name for the store’s mail-order subscription service, Pickwick Club, was inspired by the works of English author Charles Dickens. 

Pickwick Club offered just three genres: mystery and suspense, general fiction, and young adult. But Reena, who works in writing and publishing, is especially fond of fiction for 8- to 12-year-olds, and so she emailed Bleak House Books to request that type of book. “I’m not very good at following the rules, so I changed them,” says Reena with a laugh.

Reena received one book from Bleak House Books, The Wild Robot, that particularly appealed to her. In this highly imaginative fantasy, a robot is shipwrecked on a remote island and becomes the adoptive mother of a goose.

Reena is full of praise for the subscription boxes from Bleak House Books, which have always contained at least one book that hit the bullseye and often included unknown titles by authors she hadn’t heard of. Even if she had gone to the bookstore herself, she says, she might not have been as equally successful at finding so many books that she enjoys.

It was almost a year before Reena first set foot in the San Po Kong bookstore, her reason for doing so its imminent closure. Albert’s decision to return to the United States with his family after the abrupt changes in Hong Kong’s political environment had left him no choice: he would have to close Hong Kong’s only remaining independent English bookstore.

“I wanted to ask them, what’s your secret? How do you know which books I want to read? Can you teach me to do the same thing for myself?” says Reena. She is losing not only books she would never otherwise encounter, but a bookseller who understands her.

Four Chances to Get It Right

Albert says that if only one person experienced a new book or author through Pickwick Club, he considers it a success. “Please keep reading, my friends,” he tells them.

Albert’s parents are Hongkongers, but he was born in the United States after they emigrated there in the 1970s. Originally a literature major, he transferred to the business college of another university, where he switched to studying finance. He realized the financial industry didn’t suit him only after he began working in the field, and it was then that he began his law studies. Afterwards, he became a defense lawyer, living, working, and adding to his family in cities such as New York and Atlanta.

When his wife, Jenny, found a teaching position in Hong Kong in 2017, Albert brought their two children to the city and started Bleak House Books as an online bookstore. After months of lugging books to markets of all sizes, Albert and his wife decided they had enough capital saved to open a brick-and-mortar store. It didn’t take long for them to find a unit on the 27th floor of an industrial building in San Po Kong.

Albert says that from the moment he saw the place, he liked both its looks and its light, and that he immediately decided to rent it—that was in October 2018. “San Po Kong … seems spacious, compared to many other places in Hong Kong,” he comments.

In good weather, summer sunlight does indeed penetrate the somewhat dirty air of this industrial neighborhood to seep into Bleak House Books, where the new and used books arranged on more than twenty bookcases exude a soothing smell. A piece of Chinese calligraphy that translates as “fine prospects” is tacked up in a corner of the window. All of these details form a magical moment in which reality and a world of books are inseparable.

It was a deliberate choice not to let the book shop become a “hoarder’s paradise,” says Albert. He hoped that readers who came to browse could sit in comfort for a while, without having to worry that a tower of books might topple onto their heads at any moment. A reading corner inside the store, designed especially for kids, features a rug and bean bag chairs.

When Reena is mentioned, store owner Albert laughs and refers to her as a “tough customer,” one who not only demands the unusual, but who also sends a message to tell him when the store has sent her books she doesn’t like. He says that there’s no real trick to selecting books for other people. It just requires a bit of time and taking note of how the other person reacts. “I figure, you have four chances to get it right, so … [laughs] if you fuck it up the first two times, you know, you’ll hear from them and you can tweak it,” he says.

Before Bleak House Books closed, Pickwick Club had approximately 20 members, which means Albert selected several hundred books for them over the course of a year. Busy at work, he had time to read only one book each month, so he saw making the selections as an opportunity to engage with new books and authors. This month he will send out this year’s fourth—and final—installment of Pickwick Club books ahead of schedule.

Tucked into the boxes is Albert’s farewell message to readers, thanking them for their faith in Bleak House Books and love of reading. In his message, he says that if only one person experienced a new book or author through Pickwick Club, he considers it a success. “Please keep reading, my friends,” he tells them.

Albert says the saddest part of leaving is that he can no longer maintain the same sincere, close relationship with his readers. For Albert, his wife, and kids, the book store is an extension of their family. It’s not uncommon to see his kids at the store, and his wife Jenny, an associate professor of humanities, also visits the store from time to time. With the addition of employees and regular customers, they are all one big family.

“I can’t say our relationship is being severed, but it is going to be more attenuated.”

Running a Bookstore Is Asking for Trouble…

“Even though we were just a stupid bookstore, [I wanted] people to come into this space and have them feel safe and at peace.”

An independent Hong Kong bookstore closing is nothing new, although Bleak House Books is a rare example of one that is closing for reasons other than financial problems. On August 29, Bleak House Books posted “The Last Memo” on social media, announcing it was about to close. “Given the state of politics in Hong Kong, Jenny and I can no longer see a life for ourselves and our children in this city,” wrote Albert.

Later, he adds that the family’s main struggle in regard to leaving Hong Kong has been choosing when, not “if.” Just as Jenny has responsibilities to her university community, Albert must ensure that the bookstore’s staff has enough time to deal with Bleak House Books closing. “It’s not any one thing, it’s everything, really, and most of it has to do with politics,” he says. 

Albert acknowledges that the United States, where they will shortly return, also has serious problems. “But at the end of the day, despite all the limitations and false fronts, there’s a type of freedom there that doesn’t exist in Hong Kong anymore.”

Although nothing the family does on a daily basis has any direct relation to politics, in “The Last Memo” Albert writes: “As George Orwell once remarked, ‘In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues.’” The bookstore hasn’t stopped doing business as a result of this, however. In its final days, box after box of new books has been delivered.

Asked if anyone had offered to take over the bookstore, Albert says, “Who the fuck wants to run a bookshop now? I mean, you’re just asking for trouble, right?” He simply hopes that one day he can hang up the Bleak House Books sign again in the United States.

Even so, he says that running Bleak House Books has been the perfect combination of physical and mental labor. From pulling a cart piled high with packages to the post office in summertime heat, to sitting at his desk and pondering how to market a book, it has all given this bookseller immeasurable satisfaction.

“I don’t regret anything, I would think that this was probably the best thing to have happened to me,” Albert says. “The bookshop has kept me going. During the toughest times during the past few years, it has given me hope.”

Bleak House Books was a clear supporter of the 2019 anti-extradition movement, stocking numerous titles on democratic movements and human rights during that period. “It felt like we had an important job to do, even though we are just a stupid bookshop, to have this space for people to come to and feel like they’re safe and at peace,” Albert says. “You felt like everything mattered a little more, even if it didn’t matter in the end, you just felt like you had to do something.”

Later, during the pandemic, Albert closed the bookstore twice. Fortunately, the mail order sales established online in the bookstore’s early days picked up at the same time, which kept Bleak House Books going. Albert describes Bleak House Books as a financially healthy and happy bookstore right up to the end. “I never thought it would be politics that would drive us to leave [Hong Kong],” says Albert. “The bookshop is more a casualty of our decision [to go].”

Sending a Book “Inside”

“This isn’t just about a book. The truth is that no one in Hong Kong is immune to what’s going on here.” Even if no one you know has gone to prison, those who have aren’t so far removed from us.

Two weeks after Bleak House Books announced it was closing, the store received a letter from a Hong Kong prison. This was when Albert first learned that a book from his personal collection, given to a reader, had made its way into the hands of Jane, serving a prison sentence for a case related to the anti-extradition movement.

That reader was Jane’s former tutor; the book, the tutor’s favorite novel, Beloved by Toni Morrison. He had given Albert’s old copy to Jane after her arrest. But because the pages contained Albert’s handwritten notes, Jane couldn’t take the book into the prison with her, to keep her company during her three-year sentence.

“I was very sad knowing that I won’t be able to visit Bleak House Books even after I got out in 2024. I wonder what Hong Kong will become after three years, better or worse,” Jane wrote in her letter. “Maybe one day, I will be able to walk into your bookshop again, in somewhere else, in another time.”

This is how a book connects Albert, who once took a college literature course in the United States, with a Hong Kong girl he has never met, who was imprisoned for a 2019 social movement. The same paperback novel touched several lives before returning to Bleak House Books as a letter.

After sharing the story, Albert repeats again and again that this is “very sad.” “It’s not just about a book. The truth is that no one in Hong Kong is immune to what’s going on here.” Even if no one you personally know has gone to prison, those who have aren’t so far removed from us.

Albert never thought he would receive a letter like this after he became a bookseller: “I used to get letters from people in jail because I was a lawyer, they needed my help.” Albert says what he could do was to write back to Jane and arrange to send her a clean copy of Beloved that would pass the prison inspection.

Recalling his days as a defense lawyer, Albert says the job taught him the power of stories and the written word. He discovered that telling a persuasive story during a trial had the power more or less to shape a person’s future. But over time, he also came to see that the American legal system was dictated by money and had an undemocratic aspect.

Albert chose to give his bookstore the same name as the book by Dickens because what the author says about the law in Bleak House agrees in many respects with Albert’s experiences. “The legal system has issues in general that make it a less than ideal vehicle for social change,” he says, and gives the example of abortion rights. U.S. law has already weighed in, but that hasn’t ended the longstanding “culture war” or attempts to restrict women’s access to abortion in many states.

“There are lots of ways to instigate social revolution. This bookshop is one of them … it’s a small store, but what we do changes this community,” says Albert.

A Safe Space Away from a Pandemic and Politics

Both women think it’s very difficult to find a good English bookstore in Hong Kong. For a city that has branded itself as a “World City,” this is truly incredible.

During Bleak House Book’s final days, many people heard the news that it was closing and came to the store for the first time. An 82-year-old retired engineer, for example, made a special trip in search of a book about Marx. Unfortunately, he was unable to find one. There were also customers like Mrs. Hui, who first discovered that Hong Kong had a book store like Bleak House Books when she read in the newspaper that it was about to close. Several people chose not to buy books, and instead left the store with old maps of Hong Kong and post cards. 

“Latecomers” included the Indian ladies Schoanna and Vedika. As kids they would frequently spend an entire afternoon together at an English bookstore, sitting on the floor to read. “So it feels really odd that we have to rack our brains to find an English bookstore, we’re really at a loss,” says Vedika. The pair finally found Bleak House Books through a friend’s recommendation. 

The large English-language bookstore chains in Hong Kong, such as Page One, have closed down one by one, leaving only the bookstores and book fairs focused primarily on Chinese books for the mainstream market. These places don’t suit Schoanna and Vedika’s needs. Schoanna, however, has always refused to buy books online or switch to e-books. “I need to see it and smell it,” she said. Only when she has it in her hands can she feel if a book is right for her.

Now, every time Schoanna returns to India or travels outside the city, she brings back a pile of English books. Vedika agrees that buying books online is more of a “procedure” and that it’s easy to be swayed by reviews. Hong Kong’s brick-and-mortar bookstores carry only the more popular English books, however, with no shelf space for new or smaller authors. Both women think it’s very difficult to find a good English bookstore in Hong Kong. For a city that has branded itself as a World City, this is truly incredible.

There are also regular customers like Major, who stop by the store every few weeks. Major, who lives in the area, describes Albert as “quite the character” and admires the storeowner’s attention to current affairs and his outspoken style on social media. “Nowadays there aren’t as many opportunities to disengage and browse through such a sea of books.”

In the past, Major has scavenged for treasure in the boxes labeled “Name Your Own Price,” unearthing masterpieces like Fahrenheit 451 and Catcher in the Rye. For him, Bleak House Books is a safe space where the pandemic and politics can’t find him for a while.

A Common Devotion

“If you’re looking for inspiration and hope for a brighter future though I have just the thing for you.”

After several weekends of the store having been crowded to capacity, the last night for Bleak House Books finally arrived on October 15th. Readers had “looted” the store over the past several days, leaving gaping holes in the store’s twenty-plus bookcases taller than a person. Second-hand paperback books usually kept in crates were moved to the shelves to fill in the gaps. “If I’d known it was going to be like this, I wouldn’t have said we’d donate whatever books were left. All the books are gone,” Albert says afterwards.

The roughly 900-square-foot space was packed with readers. Some obviously didn’t find what they had in mind, but still took a book to the counter to make one last purchase. Albert’s entire family and four shop assistants were all there. They had booked a table at a nearby restaurant, to share a meal with friends after Albert wrapped up the store closing.

Although the bookstore would no longer be in business at Halloween, the store still managed to sneak in this annual tradition. On the last day, its interior was decorated with skeletons, pumpkins, and bats. Custom candy boxes inscribed with “Bleak House Books” sat next to the counter.

When the hour set for the doors to close came at last, several dozen people remained, quietly watching the store’s owner and employees, unwilling to leave. Albert told them he had nothing else to say, and asked with a wry smile, “Why are you still here? Go home.”

No one said anything, but their answer was loud and clear.

Following a round of tearful embraces and goodbyes, Albert ushered everyone from the bookstore at 7:45, closed the door and hung a sign on it that read, “Hong Kong is my home.”

Albert and the others sat down to eat at last, an hour late.

During the interview, Albert mentions several times that he loves to write. He personally managed all of the Bleak House Books social media posts, which often took the form of diary entries about the day-to-day running of the store, or which reflected his thoughts on recent events.

If you want to find the roots of Bleak House Books, however, you might have to dig a little deeper.

On November 8, 2016, Albert posted a final article to his personal blog Invisible Man. He wrote that he would be moving abroad and closing down his law practice, and would therefore no longer be updating his blog about criminal defense and civil rights.

On the day of the U.S. presidential election, before any of the results had been released, he wrote, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned writing for this blog over the past seven years it’s that change—in perspectives, in policies, and in humanity—comes slowly if at all. Worse yet not all of that change is of the positive sort.”

It’s possible that after Albert wrote that post, he, like many others, experienced profound heartbreak over the final election results, then soon to come. But before any of that happened, he offered this piece of advice to the reader of his blog:

If you’re looking for inspiration and hope for a brighter future though I have just the thing for you. It’s the text of a speech given [at Central Park in 1944] by one of the greatest jurists to have graced the bench of the federal courts. His name is Learned Hand, and this is [how Judge Hand began his] speech, entitled ‘The Spirit of Liberty’:

‘We have gathered here to affirm a faith, a faith in a common purpose, a common conviction, a common devotion.’

It’s possible that even now, another idea is starting to take shape in Albert’s mind: an idea that involves another bookstore. A bookstore that is independent, with an edge, and awash in a good, soothing light.

***

* Sum Lok-kei is an independent journalist in Hong Kong. He is interested in politics and culture, particularly where they intersect.

** Mary King Bradley is a freelance editor and translator. Her recent translations include essays for the Hong Kong bilingual anthology Writing in Difficult Times and a series of diary essays by Law Lok-man in the Mekong Review. A personal essay is forthcoming in an English anthology, Making Space: A Collection of Writing and Art. She lives in Hong Kong.

‘I Don’t Have a Poem to Read’: My Personal Reply to Our Lovely Readers, Here and Afar

Delivered by Albert Wan at Bleak House Books in San Po Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, on 17 September 2021 for LOVE: A Reading, organized by Cha: Asian Literary Journal (https://www.asiancha.com)

Photo credit: Dawna Fung (IG: @dawna_fung)

I don’t have a poem to read. But I would like to read this short statement. It is for everyone here and everyone who can’t be here today but who have sent us messages of support or have visited the bookshop since I announced that it would be closing. I am sorry that I haven’t been able to speak or write back to you all individually. Angel, my wonderful shop manager, tells me everyone deserves a response, and she is right. So this is what I would like to say in reply. 

If there’s one thing Hong Kong has taught me during the few years I’ve lived and had the bookshop here, it is that I now know what is possible. What’s possible that is good, and what’s possible that is bad. I would like to think that this bookshop represents the former — that is, the possible of what is good. 

Even though I might be the person people think of when they think of Bleak House Books, I am not the sole reason the bookshop is what it is today. What you see here tonight and what we have all seen happen since I announced that Bleak House Books would be closing — the messages, the crowds, the tears — is a reflection of something very human and very fundamental. Some might call it love. Some might call it defiance. Some might call it art. But whatever it is exactly it is something that we created and nurtured together, as family, as friends, as a community. And it is good. We all know that, in our minds and in our hearts. And no one can ever take that away from us. No one. 

Because I promised that this would be a short statement I am afraid I will be breaking that promise if I start speaking about the possible of the bad. At least as it relates to Hong Kong of the past few years. Suffice it to say that we too know what that is and what it might be in the future. 

But just as we have been able to nurture the possible of the good together, we too must remember and face up to the possible of the bad together, wherever we might be or whatever we might end doing with our lives. 

Many people have thanked us for having the bookshop and for doing the work that we do. I can’t speak for the rest of the bookshop family, but I’ve never done it for the thanks. If anything, giving life to Bleak House Books has become my way of thanking Hong Kong for being so good to me and my family. And so if there’s anyone who should be saying ‘thank you’ it should be me. 

 好多謝大家咁多年啲支持同埋關心. 我哋永遠唔會忘記你地. 香港人加油!

Coming Up For Air: Sometimes You Want to Go Where Everybody Knows Your Name

by Albert Wan

Originally published in Ming Pao on 12 April 2019 and reprinted here in full with the permission of the publisher

I know about a magical bookshop in Hong Kong. It’s on the island-side, so you can get there easily by your preferred mode of public transportation, but the best part of the journey there is the part that takes place on foot.

If you’re going by MTR, your first instinct when you exit the station may be to melt into the crowds. Don’t do that. There is a lot to see and you’ll miss it if you play it cool and join the herd.


Once you get your bearings, find a safe spot to plant yourself so you don’t get run over and stop to look around. You will catch glimpses of both old and new Hong Kong. On one street you might see traditional Hong Kong-style cafes serving familiar Cantonese fare adjacent to their newer, sleeker cousins of varying cuisines. On another, you might find a range of specialty shops — think handkerchiefs and plastic tarps — opened in an age when it was neither hip nor optional to operate such establishments.


The streets are narrow enough so that you know they weren’t designed with the automobile age in mind. Traffic signals are few and far between. Pedestrian crossings exist by way of subtle negotiations between the driver and walker rather than by marked signs.


I hope you’re in decent shape because you’ll have to negotiate a few steep stairways to get to the bookshop. Walking is serious, often sweaty business here in Hong Kong.


Once you get past the steep climbs, you will discover that the crowds and cars and bustle have all magically disappeared. Stretching in front of you will be one of several streets, almost certainly deserted and so quiet you will be able to hear yourself think again. Rather than busy storefronts and stalls you will see street art of the edgy and not-so-edgy variety.


You are close now. Walking down these eerily quiet streets you will feel like you’re floating down a jetway to a plane that is about to take you to your favourite vacation destination.


The bookshop is nestled at the end of a dead-end pedestrian side street, tucked away in an airy but cozy corner with chairs and tables arranged nicely in front. The corner is formed by a large stone and cement wall painted in a shade of pink. The wall shores up a large park that looms over the bookshop and gives it a kind of sanctuary effect one is more likely to find in a temple or a church than at a retail space.


When you step inside the bookshop you feel like you’ve stepped inside a home and not a store. It is the home of a person who not only loves books but also loves all the little things in life; ones that we take for granted all the time.


Look straight ahead and you’ll see a nicely appointed kitchen — coffee is made fresh to order — complete with a full size refrigerator in powder blue. Look to your right and you’ll see what might best be described as the ultimate picnic spread, not of food, but books, all personally curated by the owner and carefully set out. If you’re lucky the owner might be around but even if she isn’t you will find yourself in good hands with one of the bookshop’s many readers-turned-managers.


At first glance the shop might seem small. But there’s a pocket staircase leading up to a second floor. Mount it and you will find yourself in another room lined with more books and also a sunny seating area that overlooks the street below. An idyllic spot for reading, people watching, or both.


If you haven’t already guessed, I am describing the bookshop that is Mount Zero Books in Sheung Wan. It is the kind of bookshop that perhaps Ye Olde Bookseller would have opened up had he sold books in his past life. More importantly, however, it is the kind of bookshop that makes life worth living.


Today the resident bookworms at Bleak House Books will be “taking over” Mount Zero Books for the day so that we can finally experience the magic of Mount Zero Books for ourselves. And you, Dear Reader, are cordially invited to join us so that you too can see what the fuss is all about. We promise you won’t be disappointed.

The Speech Carrie Lam Should Have Made

Last Saturday I stood before you and announced that the government would be suspending its efforts to pass the controversial extradition bill. I had hoped that this decision would temper the anger harbored by many Hong Kongers over the way the government had mishandled and in some cases ignored the objections raised by many interested parties against passage of the extradition law. I said then that rather than continue with our efforts to pass the bill, it was time to take a breather and step back to assess the situation.

On Sunday the public responded to my decision to suspend passage of the bill with still more protests. We saw Hong Kongers of all ages and from all walks of life exercise their freedoms, taking peacefully to the streets in record numbers to tell the government, and myself in particular, that they were still dissatisfied with the status quo.

I understand now that more needs to be done. Because the problem lies not simply in the extradition bill but in the differing visions of what Hong Kong will become ten, twenty years from now. For many Hong Kongers, especially among our youth, there exists a fear that the freedoms and rights they have enjoyed or have become accustomed to will be taken away from them as Hong Kong inches closer to the year when the guarantee of ‘one country, two systems’ will expire. That is a concern that this government, as the sole representative of the Hong Kong people, needs to address.

The government is not infallible. It is fundamentally a creation of human thought and human ideas. Laws that have, at one time, won the approval of the government and the public are sometimes revised or rescinded in their entirety because they lose their relevance or because they no longer reflect the values of contemporary society. So too people who were once elected or appointed to public office leave their posts because their policies and stances no longer reflect prevailing public norms. And that is as it should be in a democratic, transparent, and compassionate society like ours.

So today I announce that I will be resigning as Chief Executive. My vision of what Hong Kong should be or will be is not in line with that shared by many of my fellow Hong Kongers. And to try and push through the measures that I think are necessary to achieve this vision will only create more conflict, more bloodshed, and more hurt.

At this point in time it is appropriate and necessary for the people of Hong Kong, including our youth, to come together and to engage in a dialogue about what kind of Hong Kong they want to see in the future. It is a dialogue that will no doubt be fraught, contentious and painful. But it is one that needs to be had. Because only when we have a clear idea of the kind of Hong Kong we want will we be able to make the kinds of decisions and form the kinds of plans that we will need to realize that vision.

The spirit of Hong Kong is strong and it is just. I know that. You know that. And the world now knows that. Let us harness that spirit in unity and with mutual respect for one another as we work toward building a better, more hopeful future for Hong Kong.

BHB’s Neighborhood Talk @ Hong Kong Studies’ Inaugural Symposium (CUHK, May 11, 2019)

Thanks to Tammy and her fellow editors at Hong Kong Studies for inviting me here today, and to CUHK for hosting this wonderful event. It is a pleasure and an honor to be able to talk about my work at Bleak House Books at the first ever symposium for Hong Kong Studies.

Today is a very special day for me, not just because I get to stand before a bunch of strangers and force them to listen to me talk about myself. It also happens to be Charlie, my son’s birthday — he turns seven years old — and I’ve promised Charlie that I’d be back in time for his birthday dinner tonight. So for purely selfish reasons I will try to keep my remarks brief and to the point.  

As some of you may know I am the co-founder and owner of Bleak House Books, an English-language independent bookstore in Kowloon.

Jenny, my wife, is the other co-founder of Bleak House Books, but she has a real job as a college professor. So I have for better or worse become the face of the bookshop. To borrow from the recent testimony of Trump stooge and Steve Bannon look-alike, William Barr: Bleak House Books has become my baby.

Just like a baby has his or her moment of conception, there was a moment of conception for Bleak House Books as well. That would have been spring of 2016 when my wife and I and our 2 kids were still living in the United States. I had my own solo law practice doing criminal and civil rights work. My wife was teaching at Georgia Tech but had been offered a job at HKUST, which she accepted. So it was off to Hong Kong for the family.

I decided that rather than practice law in Hong Kong I would do something different. I didn’t know what I wanted to do next but I did have some criteria for what I wanted to get out of any such job. In my mind my next career had to be challenging, creative, and community-oriented.

Opening an independent bookstore, in the age of Amazon and Book Depository, and in a city that’s notorious for being a ‘cultural desert’ — an unfortunate and grossly inaccurate label by the way — seemed to fit the bill.

In December 2016 we moved to Hong Kong, and in February 2017 Bleak House Books was born.

At first we really just existed on paper. We had no physical space, no books, no website, and no customers. That would all change, of course, but not without a healthy dose of patience and fortitude.

You know what’s another unfortunate nickname that’s been given to Hong Kong? Capitalist paradise. It’s a paradise perhaps if you’re a capitalist with money to burn and others to do your bidding, but for regular people like myself, starting a business in Hong Kong from scratch was like taking a college entrance exam for the very first time: it was a painful, anxiety-inducing process that didn’t really make sense but you did it anyway because you had to.

For example, it took me almost an entire year to open up a business account for the bookshop at our local bank. We had to supply all sorts of information about ourselves and the bookshop to the bank before they would even look at our application. Once they started reviewing it the slightest discrepancy or question mark would cause the application to be sent to the reject pile, and we would have to start from square one again. The process was set up in such a way so that it seemed like we were asking the bank for money, when, in reality, we were trying to do the complete opposite: which was give them some of ours!

But I digress. The theme of today’s event, I am told, is the ‘neighborhood’. And my job is to talk to you all about what Bleak House Books has done to, and I quote, “build [a] creative, literary, culturally rich, safe and inclusive neighbourhood[].”

It’s humbling to think that Bleak House Books, now in only its second year of operation, might be considered a force capable of helping to build a neighborhood, let alone one that has pretensions of being ‘literary’, ‘safe’ or ‘culturally rich’. The sale of books does not a neighborhood make. And at its core, that is what we do at Bleak House Books: we sell books.

So what do we do at Bleak House Books, aside from selling books, that one might consider beneficial to the ‘neighborhood’ in a literary sense? First we support local artists and writers. We sell their works at the bookshop. We promote their causes if they have one. And we tell our readers about who these artists are and where they come from so that it might inspire others to take the plunge.

We’ve been lucky enough to have met artists and writers from all walks of life whose works run the gamut. For example, we have awesome poetry collections by Tammy Ho Lai Ming and Eddie Tay. We also have award-winning photography books and kids books created by some very talented and dedicated individuals: Agnes Ku, a sociology professor at HKUST and Ya Chin Chang, a young local artist, to name a few.

Something else we do at the bookshop is we offer our physical space to people who want to use it for events like book launches, poetry readings, and book club meetings.

After all neighborhoods need space too. Yes, they also need people and culture but without a discrete physical space you end up with the Wild West or maybe Twitter. That’s especially true for Hong Kong where there never seems to be enough land to satisfy the needs of the public. Housing, as we all know from news reports, is one of those needs. But so is art, especially when the artist is someone who is not famous, well-connected or independently wealthy.

But in today’s sensitive political climate the simple act of letting someone else use our space for an event can be fraught with difficulties and even risks.

Case in point, and we have Tammy to thank for this — thank you Tammy — Liu Xiaobo.

Last year Tammy asked if we would host an event entitled Liu Xiaobo Elegies on behalf of the literary journal Cha and PEN Hong Kong. When she asked I said yes without giving it much thought. In my mind and being from the U.S., holding an event to commemorate the death of a well-known and important human rights activist and political prisoner is natural, appropriate and uncontroversial; much as if we were to hold an event at the bookshop to commemorate the death of Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King, Jr.

Little did I know though that just hosting an event about someone who might be considered a critic of the Chinese Communist party can call into question my own political loyalties — not that I have any to speak of — and that that would somehow make me a target.

‘Don’t do it’, someone told me. ‘You’re putting yourself and your family in danger’, said another. We still held the event, of course, to a standing room only crowd, and I survived to tell the tale. But I feel like a part of me died in the process — the part of me that was taught from very early on that neighbors should be able to talk about their differences openly and that neighbors should not be afraid of each other.

Because that’s what China is to Hong Kong; right? A neighbor. Geographically. Historically. Economically. And yes even culturally.    

And if we’ve learned anything from history it is that bad things happen when neighbors stop talking to each other. I won’t get into specific examples — that’s beyond the scope of this talk and, frankly, we all know what some of them are. I will say, however, that given the present climate of fear and polarization that exists here in Hong Kong and beyond the neighborhood needs more not fewer forums for open and honest dialogue.

I’ve talked about supporting local artists and hosting events as two things we do at Bleak House Books to help create an open, inclusive and culturally rich neighborhood. Is there anything else that we do? I’m glad you asked because the answer is yes.

It may come as a surprise to some of you that our bookshop is located on the 27th floor of an office building in San Po Kong, a working-class, semi-industrial area of Kowloon, near the old Kai Tak airport. It’s a location that our past customers have described as being ‘far’, ‘out of the way’ and even ‘bizarre’.

There’s a lot of interesting history to San Po Kong though. We didn’t know much about it before we decided to open the bookshop there. But we came to learn a lot about the history of our new home from neighbors, customers and friends.

For example, did you know that San Po Kong used to be home to one of the biggest movie theatres in Hong Kong? Or that through San Po Kong flows one of few Spring-fed nullahs in Hong Kong?

As the name itself implies San Po Kong used to be just plain old “Po Kong” — the ‘San’ in San Po Kong means ‘new’ in Chinese. After World War II the Brits redeveloped Po Kong from an agricultural settlement into an industrial center, and gave it the name it has today: San Po Kong.

The area also played a central role in the riots of the 1960s. In 1967 workers at an artificial flower factory in San Po Kong clashed with their employers over poor working conditions. This dispute led to still more clashes, mostly between Communist sympathizers and the government, culminating in what would become known as the Leftist Riots of 1967.

The San Po Kong of today is very different from the San Po Kong of the 60’s. Gone are the factories, smoke stacks and the horde of workers who used to stream down Tai Yau Street, one of the main thoroughfares in San Po Kong, on their way to and from work. Today’s San Po Kong is sleeker, quieter, and, on the whole, more expensive.

Even so a lot of the San Po Kong of old remains. The buildings and the people who inhabit them are still decidedly working class. And our neighbors there are the types of folks who will, under normal circumstances, never step foot inside a bookshop, let alone one that sells vintage, English language books.

For example we have a neighbor downstairs in the building next to ours whom we call Si Fu. Si Fu is an 80 plus year old mechanic who still uses an abacus and takes cat naps inside his clients’ cars at lunch time.

Still it is important to me that our neighbors know we exist — not necessarily as purveyors of fine books — they can care less about what we do for a living — but as fellow Hong Kongers who have put down roots in their neighborhood. Because at the end of the day that to me is what a neighborhood is about: human bonds formed by a shared purpose and a common culture.

So if you see me shooting the breeze with someone on the street or having an afternoon drink at our local bar just know that I’m actually hard at work, building a stronger, more inclusive neighborhood — one bond, or maybe one drink, at a time.

Thank you all for listening to me today. I apologize if I put anyone to sleep. If you are such a person please see Tammy afterwards. She will see to it that you get a full refund of your admission fee.  

Thank you.

Everything You Can’t See in San Po Kong (A Bleak House Books/Spicy Fish Cultural Production Special Feature)

For last year’s San Po Kong Arts Festival we invited Christopher DeWolf to the bookshop to talk to festival-goers about San Po Kong and how it has been changing in the past few years, along with the rest of Hong Kong. He was such a hit that we asked Christopher to make a return visit for this year’s SPK Arts Festival but Christopher couldn’t make it. Instead, he has contributed a piece, which he wrote exclusively for the Arts Festival, in which he discusses San Po Kong’s forgotten history, what’s left of that history in today’s San Po Kong, and what might be in store for the San Po Kong of tomorrow.

Everything You Can’t See
In San Po Kong

by Christopher DeWolf

In San Po Kong, what you see is not what you get. At first, it seems interchangeable with many other parts of Hong Kong – the kind of neighbourhood that, if it were a television show, would be a generic TVB drama, the kind whose characters and plot twists you have seen countless times before.

Just look at it. There are industrial streets with hulking concrete warehouses, others with rows of working-class tong lau. Two massive housing estates rise on the neighbourhood’s fringes, one humble in appearance, with anonymous towers punctured by small windows, the other more extravagant, with a glitzy shopping mall capped by a private roof garden, above which soar high-rise blocks with large balconies and floor-to-ceiling windows. So far, so typical.

But San Po Kong is deceptive. Deep inside its industrial buildings are coffee roasters and craft brewers, painters and photographers. An exceptionally well-curated collection of books hides inside one anonymous commercial tower; the King of Soyabeans purveys Michelin-recommended Shanghai-style sticky rice rolls from the base of another. And floating around all of this is a 700-year history that shaped Hong Kong into the city it is today.

On a map, San Po Kong looks like an island. It is a tight grid of streets wedged into a kidney-shaped parcel of land that floats between the Kai Tak River on one side and the vast lands of the former Kai Tak Airport on the other. The entire neighbourhood covers less than half a square kilometre, but it is home to 24,000 people, a density that infuses its streets with a constant thrum of energy. You can walk from one end to the other in less than 10 minutes.

And yet a walk through San Po Kong reveals a richness of history and culture that should never be taken for granted. In the middle of the 14th century, a man named Ng Chung-tak settled with his family on the shores of a stream that flowed into Victoria Harbour. Ng was the patriarch of a large family that had three centuries earlier fled the northern edge of Guangdong province to escape the chaos of the collapsing Song dynasty. The family eventually splintered across Guangdong and Vietnam, but Ng Chung-tak’s branch made their way to Kowloon. In 1354, they built a temple in honour of Tin Hau in their new settlement, which eventually became known as Nga Tsin Wai.

Nga Tsin Wai is still there – in a way. After seven centuries as a walled village, it has now been mostly demolished by the Urban Renewal Authority to make way for luxury housing and a sort of heritage theme park. The area around it has changed beyond all recognition. Once a fertile plain ringed by hills, with a sandy beach along what is now Prince Edward Road East, its geography was altered in the early 20th century when a pair of entrepreneurs named Kai and Tak pooled their resources to fill in the waterfront, creating space for Hong Kong’s first airport.

If you cross the bridge from Nga Tsin Wai today, you will reach the heart of San Po Kong’s market district, where stands of fresh fruits and vegetables spill out onto concrete pavements. This development dates back only to the late 1950s, but it was long ago home to the village of Po Kong, which was settled by the Lam family some time after Nga Tsin Wai. Other nearby villages had banded together into an alliance known as the League of Seven, but Po Kong was an outlier, with its own Tin Hau temple that stood in rivalry to that of its neighbour.

For most of its history, Po Kong was a large and prosperous agricultural settlement, but its fortunes were tested by an influx of squatters in the 1930s. They built houses on Po Kong’s fields and refused to pay rent, throwing the village’s economy into chaos. Villagers blamed this misfortune on Tin Hau’s failure to provide protection, and in revenge they set her figure aflame. Po Kong’s neighbours in Nga Tsin Wai were aghast, and they were not surprised when Po Kong suffered a far greater indignity less than a decade later. After Hong Kong was invaded by the Japanese military in 1941, its new occupiers decided to expand Kai Tak Airport, wiping Po Kong off the map in a matter of weeks.

San Po Kong (“New Po Kong”) was one of the new industrial suburbs planned by the colonial British government to satisfy Hong Kong’s postwar economic boom. In 1967, a labour dispute at an artificial flower factory on Tai Yau Street mushroomed into six months of intense riots. The villagers of Nga Tsin Wai locked their gate and stood guard, ready to do battle if necessary. It seems they were still wary of Po Kong – even the new version.

Very little of this history is apparent when you walk around San Po Kong. There are no historical plaques, no acknowledgement of the centuries of history that have shaped this corner of Hong Kong. By contrast, the future of the neighbourhood is easier to divine. The former airport is now being redeveloped as a residential, commercial and entertainment district, complete with a monorail and major sports stadium. A new MTR station is under construction. And beyond that, the nearby districts of Kowloon Bay and Kwun Tong have been designated by the government as CBD2 – a new central business district.

Tai Yau Street and Tseuk Luk Street at lunchtime

You can already see how San Po Kong is changing as a result. New hotels have cropped up in the old industrial area, bringing with them tourists and the shops that cater to them. Factory buildings are being knocked down and replaced by office towers. As always, it’s easy to see the broad outline of what is happening to the neighbourhood. But the details are harder to read. It could well be that San Po Kong still has the potential to surprise.

Christopher DeWolf is a journalist who has written about cities, history, design, culture, travel, food and drink for more than 15 years. His first book, Borrowed Spaces: Life Between the Cracks of Modern Hong Kong (Penguin 2016), explores grassroots efforts to improve urban life. He is a regular contributor to South China Morning Post and Zolima CityMag. Christopher considers San Po Kong the ‘quintessential Hong Kong neighbourhood’, Pentahotel and all.

Coming Up For Air: A Very, Merry San Po Kong Christmas (December 2018)

Below is our December 2018, holiday edition of ‘Coming Up For Air’, a monthly column we write for Ming Pao’s English language section, reprinted here in its entirety with the permission of the folks at Ming Pao.

Coming Up For Air: A Very Merry, San Po Kong Christmas

by Albert Wan, Jenny Smith and Rachel Parnham
December 14, 2018

【明報專訊】What do the winter holidays mean to you? Last year at this time we were still getting things set up at our bookshop in San Po Kong. Rachel, our awesome shop manager, had just started working at Bleak House Books. We still had a lot of shelves to fill and books to price. And we had just hosted our first ever event complete with a plastic “Charlie Brown tree” from Ikea.

This year things are a bit different. Our shelves are now well-stocked with a carefully curated selection of new as well as used books. We have hosted our fair share of events from school field trips to poetry readings to book launches. And the dinky tree that we bought for last year’s inaugural event makes a return appearance, this time serving as both holiday decor and as the Bleak House Books “local interest” tree.

This year we also decided to have a little fun for the holidays. As bookshop employees we have ready access to a lot of literature written by a wide range of authors but we rarely get to write any of our own. So in what we hope will be the start of an annual holiday tradition, we are treating everyone to some home-made poetry and jingles, Bleak House Books-style!

Although each piece is penned by a different member of the Bleak House Books family, we decided not to attribute authorship to any of them. This is because the last time anyone here wrote a piece of fun, nonsensical prose, we were all a lot younger and there was, frankly, less on the line. Needless to say those days are long gone. Folks who want to know who wrote which poem will just have to engage in some guesswork. But we don’t think that will be too hard.

So without further ado we bring you A Very, Merry San Po Kong Christmas, a joint production of Bleak House Books and its three resident bookworms!

The 12 Days of Christmas (Hong Kong Edition)

On the first day of Christmas my true love sent to me|
A char siu way too salty

On the second day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Two jade rings

And a char siu way too salty
On the third day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Three hairy gourds,
Two jade rings,
And a char siu way too salty.

[By now we all know the lyrics and the song is, to be honest, a bit tedious so let’s pretend we’ve cycled through all the days and are now at day 12]

Twelve fish balls floating,
Eleven mooncakes moulding,
Ten ducks a-roasting,
Nine butchers chopping,
Eight eggs a-pickling,
Seven fish a-sunning,
Six screens a-glowing,
Five steaming baos,
Four suckling pigs,
Three hairy gourds,
Two jade rings,
And a char siu way too salty.

The Perfect Gift

The night before Christmas, lights were off at Bleak House
One creature was stirring and it was a mouse;
She scuttled through the stacks and the shelves
Half-empty, ransacked of books by the elves;
While the folk of Hong Kong were asleep catching zees
Sneaky elves placed book-shaped gifts ‘neath their trees.

Christmas at the Mall

In late November the displays appear
giant Snoopys, animatronic reindeer

peppermint, cranberry, eggnog, nut toffee
seasonal flavor shots enhance the coffee

Holiday jazz standards get piped in on a loop
Muzak more outmoded than shark fin soup

shoppers hunt crackers, tinsel & gingerbread
CFL lighting makes them look like the living dead

Vinyl cling candy canes are pressed on with care
Cheap plastic pine garlands are strewn everywhere

fake glittery snow dusts pine boughs of foam,
Santa’s toboggan is done up in chrome

Christmas at the mall is slightly off-kilter
but that can be fixed with an instagram filter

This ersatz winter wonderland is uncanny, unhealthy
But Christmas is coming so let’s take a selfie!

Available from Ming Pao via direct link here.

Bleak House Books: A Refuge from the Hustle and Bustle of Hong Kong

Since opening in January we have received our fair share of visitors from outside Hong Kong. For these folks a stop at a used bookshop is just what the doctor ordered when traveling abroad, and they usually make it a point to hit one or two used bookshops along with the more traditional travel destinations and sights. This means we have met folks from Germany, Canada, Philippines, Australia, Britain, the U.S., and other far flung places (at least in relation to Hong Kong’s geographic location), and some have even become good friends of the book shop and its staff.

Apparently our friends from abroad are not the only ones who think it is cool to visit used bookshops on holiday! Flight Network, one of the largest global travel agencies, thinks so too, and they made Bleak House Books an obligatory stop for folks visiting Hong Kong, in a recent online feature of theirs, entitled ‘72 Hours in the Exciting City of Hong Kong‘! They even featured a photo of our part-time shop dog, Ella, who, as you can probably tell, was having one of her typical ‘long’ days at the shop.

We are grateful for having been selected by Flight Network as a destination for folks visiting Hong Kong who want to take a load off and get lost in our wonderful collection of new and vintage books and comics! Who knows you might get lucky and end up sharing a bean bag chair with Ella while reading your favorite Dickens’ novel. Bleak House, perhaps?

A Tribute to Anthony Bourdain (1956-2018)

It is probably cliche by now — just a day after his tragic suicide death — to say that Anthony Bourdain was more than just a T.V. personality, and somewhat presumptious to even make that observation for folks who never knew Tony beyond the cool, witty, no bullshit persona he exuded on the screen.

But judging by the shock factor elicited by Tony’s suicide, especially among his closet friends and family members, one might venture to say that no really knew Tony. What we have to go by it seems are the bits and pieces Tony left behind during a career that saw him go from lowly line cook to budding food writer to superstar media personality.

What follows is a tribute of sorts to Tony. It is a piece, which we transcribe here in its entirety, that Tony wrote for the now defunct food journal Lucky Peach. In it Tony tackles two of his favorite subjects in life: food and film. The piece is eerily titled Dead Heads, and if you read it even a bit closely you will see that it exudes the kind of despair and morbidity that perhaps ultimately led to Tony’s demise.

If you’ve read Tony’s stuff before or even listened to him speak you will recognize instantly that the piece that follows is classic Bourdain. Astute, funny, deep, even poetic at times. To borrow from Woody Allen’s classic film Manhattan — “pithy yet degenerate”, but in a good way.

If you’ve never come across any of Tony’s stuff, well, you’re in for a treat.

RIP Tony. You will be missed but not forgotten.

(The photos that accompany this blog post are taken from footage of Tony that was shot in Hong Kong which so happens is where he filmed his last full episode of Parts Unknown.)

Dead Heads
by Anthony Bourdain
(Lucky Peach, Issue 5: Chinatown, Fall 2012)

At a kopi tiam in Geylang one night, while happily tearing the flesh, fat, and cartilage out of a shark head, a Singaporean friend told me a story. He felt his were the Chosen People, the Enlightened Ones, and that this story was particularly illustrative of exactly why. It was probably apocryphal, maybe not true at all, possibly utter bullshit. I don’t care. It’s a story I want to be true. It’s a story that SHOULD be true. As my friend told it:

Back in the day, when wealthy merchants used to travel across China in caravans, they were, from time to time, set upon by organized gangs of bandits and highwaymen. These enterprising free-market enthusiasts would ambush columns suddenly and without mercy, quickly slaughtering guards and escorts, then stripping the members of the party of any valuables before killing them. The head man, however, they always saved for last. Dragged kicking and screaming and begging for his life from his litter, forced to kneel on ground still soaked with the blood of his bearers and entourage, he would find himself at the feet of the chief bandit. The chief bandit, inevitably a fearsome-looking fellow, would offer the trembling merchant a whole cooked fish. Steamed, grilled — it didn’t matter. But it was always whole.

“Eat!” The chief bandit would command, pushing the fish in the direction of his prisoner. There would be a hush as the other bandits took a break from looting, disembowling, post-mortem violation, or any totemic preservation of remains they might be engaged in to move close to the action for what was clearly a Very Important Moment.

If the terrified merchant’s fingers or chopsticks moved straight to the fish’s head, tunneling into the cheek, perhaps, or tearing off a piece of jowl, there would be much appreciative murmuring among the Chief Bandit and his colleagues.

By choosing the multitextured, endlessly interesting mosaic of flesh buried in the fish’s head, their captive proved himself a man of wealth and taste. Clearly a man such as this possessed more wealth than what he and his caravan were currently carrying. This man would no doubt be missed by his family and his many wealthy friends, at least some of whom would likely pay a hefty ransom. The bandits would spare his life in the reasonable expectation of future gain.

If, however, the merchant chose instead to peel off a meaty hunk of boneless fillet, the bandits would jerk a cutlass across his neck immediately. This nouveau riche yuppie scum would be worth only as much as he carried in his pockets. Not worth keeping alive – much less feeding. Nobody would miss this asshole. The minute he chose fillet over head he proved himself worthless.

* * *

The tale is a fairly lurid example of a widely held principle throughout Asia and Europe — the older, smarter food world — that the head is the best part. Put a pile of shrimp or crayfish in front of a Spaniard, a Chinese, or any self-respecting Cajun for that matter, and they sure as shit will know what to do with it: suck the brains and juice and all that good stuff right outta those heads!

Chefs know, too. They know that no matter how hard they try, no matter what they do, they will NEVER create a sauce better than the hot goo that comes squirting out of a prawn’s head after a short time on a griddle. In Japan, whole restaurants are dedicated to the enjoyment of carefully grilled fish heads and collars. Fish-head curry is enjoyed and cherished by millions of Indians both within India and without. In many Portuguese restaurants, the limited number of merluzza heads are reserved in advance for VIP customers. The rest must suffer with steaks and fillets.

So what’s our problem with heads? Sure, cheeks are well-known to most urban American diners these days. Tongue has been enjoying something of a comeback. But for as long as I can remember, the appearance of a whole animal head on plate or in film has rarely been a welcome sight.

* * *

Upon our first encounter with John Huston as Noah Cross in Chinatown, we identify him as a bad guy teeming with incestuous, pederastic, murderous, evil. How do we know this? Two reasons. He keeps mispronouncing Jack’s name — referring to him not as “Mr. Gittes” but as “Mr. Gitz” — and worse, FAR worse, he’s devouring a whole, sinister-looking fish.

“I hope you don’t mind. I believe they should be served with the head,” Cross says.

“Fine,” says Jake (played by Jack Nicholson), “as long as you don’t serve chicken that way.”

The thing is just lying there the whole scene, dead eyes looking up at us. The underlying message is simple: only a monster would eat a fish with the head still on — and only an entity of previously unimagined cruelty would insist that his guest do so as well.

“You may think you know what you’re dealing with,” warns Cross, “but believe me, you don’t.” He’s talking about a massive conspiracy involving political corruption, theft of natural resources, real-estate fraud, and murder, but he could just as well be talking about that fish head. It’s scary. It’s big. It’s “ugly.” It’s the unknown.

“It’s what the DA used to tell me about Chinatown,” replies Jake, our hero and, as it turns out, the only guy in the film who doesn’t know what’s going on.

* * *

Captain Willard sits at a lavishly appointed dining table in an air-conditioned trailer somewhere in South Vietnam. He is about to receive his orders from what appears to be a superior in military intelligence and two officers of the CIA. A uniformed waiter serves lunch, and the camera lingers over a platter of head-on shrimp.

“I don’t know how you feel about this shrimp,” says the commanding officer in this early scene from Apocalypse Now, “but if you’ll eat it, you never have to prove your courage in any other way.” We know now that these men Willard is sitting with are some bad bastards, untrustworthy without a doubt, and whatever they’re asking him to do will be fundamentally dishonest and awful.

But the shrimp heads, like Chinatown‘s whole fish, also imply something more. Their black, beady, unseeing eyes, sitting at this incongruously luxurious table, are full of warning. They hint at the Great Unknown, warning that no matter what Captain Willard might have seen in the past, whatever he thinks he might know, he in fact knows nothing about what awaits him upriver, beyond the Do Lung Bridge.

* * *

Of course the portentousness of sea beasts is not limited to American films. Think of the end of La Dolce Vita. Our hero, Marcello (played by Marcello Mastroianni), has just emerged from an almost-orgy that turned into a bitter, drunken humiliation of a woman. He and his fellow partygoers stumble onto the beach in the early morning, where they happen upon a giant sea creature, dragged up by fishermen’s nets. Marcello notes the staring eyes. Moments later, a young waitress who earlier in the film served as a possible muse/angel figure calls out to him from across a narrow channel of water. Marcello can’t hear her. They attempt to communicate for a few seconds, but their words are lost in the noise of the wind and the surf. He gives up, shrugs, and returns to his shallow, pleasure-seeking entourage, none of whom really care about him. Here, the fish head is not a signifier of evil at all, but a cruel reminder of everything Marcello has turned his back on: love, self-knowledge, any kind of spiritual life.

(During the initial release of the movie, the fish was widely interpreted as a classic symbol of Christian [and pre-Christian] belief. It’s appearance, dead — along with many other “anti-religious” images in the film — was seen by some as the director’s way of suggesting that God was dead, too.)

Certainly the mysterious fish and its wide-open, lifeless eyes are a reminder and a rebuke, once again, of the Great Unknown. But in this case, they remind Marcello not only of what he doesn’t know but of what he has chosen not to know.

* * *

Perhaps the vilest calumny against head eating appeared in the wildly popular 1979 short film Fish Heads, directed by actor Bill Paxton. Debuting as a comedy interstitial featuring Barnes and Barnes on Saturday Night Live, it quickly became a stand-alone sensation, and its message of hate and barely concealed racism only reinforced then-prevalent attitudes of cultural imperialism and craniophobia.

Under an Alvin and the Chipmunks-inspired vocal track of “Fish heads, fish heads/Roly-poly fish heads/Fish heads, fish heads/Eat them up, yum,” the action exploits homeless and Asian stereotypes, finding much to laugh at in poverty and the indigenous foodways of ethnic minorities. Soon after the video hit heavy rotation on MTV, the streets were filled with would-be skinheads chanting its infectious chorus. Worse, the song was eventually covered by Duran Duran. Perhaps no single representation in the twentieth century did so much to set gastronomy back.

* * *

By the time a horse’s head famously appeared in the bed of film director Jack Woltz in The Godfather, horse meat had long since been rejected by mainstream diners in America. Granted, during the time period in which the action takes place, horse taretare was still quite popular in Europe, but it is unlikely that Don Corleone’s emissaries delivered the head as a gift for the kitchen, so much as a straightforward and gruesome warning.

In fact, in the annals of animal heads on film, I can find only one happy appearance of this most delicious and delightful body part. Only one time when the head of a creature — in this case a duck — brings enlightenment, laughter, pleasure, or joy, as it should:

In a Christmas Story, Bob Clark’s classic film of the short stories of Jean Shepherd, our adorable child protagonist Ralphie and his family have had their Christmas turkey destroyed by a pack of feral dogs owned by their unseen neighbor and archenemy Krampus. (Is it a coincidence that the name echoes the evil Santa doppelganger of Eastern European legend?)

Their original meal cruelly demolished, the family resorts to visiting an empty Chinese restaurant where they order Peking duck as a surrogate turkey. The waiter delivers the bird whole, then brings his cleaver down, loudly separating head from body. Ralphie and family shriek with delight. It is the happiest moment in the story. The family is at its most joyful, together and functional, inspired by the severed head of a humble waterfowl — a duck epiphany, if you will. An all-too-rare example.

What is it about the topmost part of what is presumably food that elicits in us such a fear, loathing and derision? Is it the eyes that we abhor? Is it the unknown we see reflected in those unmoving, unseeing lenses — symbols of all we don’t know, or can’t know?

Or is the blank stare of the fish or game bird to be avoided lest we be reminded of our complicity in the death of another living thing? Perhaps it is death itself that we seek to avoid. The eyes of our victims beckon us, mock us, suggest that we will be joining them soon.

* * * * *