“The restaurant is small: it seats around fifty and serves home-style dishes, mostly for the dinner crowd. Its specialty is snake, a winter delicacy. When his uncle first opened it several years ago, Yam Kuen would stop by all the time for a late meal and occasionally join the mahjeuk table. His mother complained, saying he should know better than to impose. But as long as business was good, Uncle didn’t mind. Yam Kuen glances across the room at the only foreign customer who is by himself. “Think that gwailo’s a journalist?’
Xu Xi’s Horizon Hong Kong: Selected Stories is a powerful and intimate portrait of a city constantly redefining itself. Spanning decades of change, the collection brings together stories that explore Hong Kong’s evolution from a British colony to a global metropolis shaped by political uncertainty, migration, and shifting identities.
The writer is a Hong Kong-American known for her fiction, short stories, and essays exploring the changing nature of Hong Kong and Asia. Born in Hong Kong in 1954, she grew up in a multicultural environment before living and working in the United States. Both experiences deeply influenced her writing about people navigating multiple cultures and searching for a sense of belonging. Her work often examines the tensions between tradition and modernity, colonial history and local identity, and personal memory and social change.
In Horizon Hong Kong, Xu presents a diverse cast of characters – including locals, expatriates, and migrants – and the complicated emotions of belonging to a city that is both a home and a place in transition. Her stories explore themes of memory, displacement, family, language, and identity, revealing the personal experiences behind Hong Kong’s larger historical moments.
One of the collection’s greatest strengths is Xu Xi’s ability to portray Hong Kong in all its contradictions. The city emerges as energetic and cosmopolitan, yet also fragile and uncertain – a place where people constantly negotiate between past and future, tradition and change. Through her sharp observations and vivid storytelling, Xu transforms ordinary encounters into reflections on culture, belonging, and the forces that shape a society.
For readers interested in understanding Hong Kong beyond its skyline and financial reputation, Horizon Hong Kong offers a deeply human perspective. The collection celebrates the city’s complexity and resilience while showing how individual stories can reveal the larger historical and cultural forces that shape a place and its people. For those who have visited, lived in, or feel connected to Hong Kong, the book provides a meaningful exploration of the memories, struggles, and hopes that define the city.
