The beginning of Louisa Lim's Indelible City, her book on how local Hong Kong life serves in itself as a critique of British and Chinese colonial powers, opens with a lament for the local. The interviews for the book, she writes, were conducted prior to the imposition of the National Security Law in 2020, in which speech and acts criticizing either the “one country” or the “two systems” that govern Hong Kong as a Special Administrative Region would be met with harsh punitive measures. Though the law is not supposed to be applied retroactively, Lim (2022: xi) writes that the law's sweeping reach has “compelled” her to “remove some names and details from the text nevertheless, to protect those with whom I spoke.” In so doing, she worries that she is sacrificing some of the flavor of the local, that those who exercised their agency in the...
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