Hong Kong Noir (Akashic Noir Series)

Hong Kong Noir cannot be read quickly. You have to keep putting it down after every story and breathe in. This is because of the very rich, evocative and powerful storytelling. There are 14 stories in this collection, and as you know, 14 is unlucky in Chinese because it sounds like sut sei (must die). The readers' expectation is that this collection is a decadent box of chocolates - dark, bitter and ominous, as noir should be.I have always been a fan of noir fiction. I like it so much I wrote a noir novel. The key features of classic noir are: gritty, believable yet unbelievable characters, sparse prose, underlying terror or horror, a sense of the macabre, black humour and moral trajectories of the hero/antihero. You do not know quite what is good or evil and yet you care. The twist is coming. You want to be there when it comes because nothing is what it seems. The questions always raised are what happens to the bitter, flawed, stupid or bad? Or are they actually naive, perfect, clever and good? These 14 stories have been divided into 4 parts. Thematically, these correspond to the big themes in Chinese culture. Hungry Ghosts and Troubled Spirits, Obedience and Respect, Family Matters, Death and Thereafter. It is cyclical and symbolic of life itself - from ghosts to death. Jason Ng's Ghost of Yulan Past kicks off the stories, where a young man is obsessed with the promise of a ghost encounter in a temple. In Xu Xi's TST, "wandering, exhausted, famished ghosts with no hope of rest" are the spirits of dead whores who need to become women and not "pigs to be hosed down and sold". "You Deserve More" by Tiffany Hawk, set in the expatville of Lan Kwai Fong, was a moving story about an unhappy American wife of a successful businessman, who revisits Hong Kong and looks up her Chinese ex-lover, and the devastating consequences of the rendezvous. Christina Liang's fabulous "A View to Die For" reminds me of the woman-who-has-it-all character type: professional and successful Chinese career woman educated in the West but comes back to work in Asia. A seemingly powerless mom and housewife next door sees this epitome of the successful woman as a betrayal of the sisterhood, robbing her child's innocence and therefore hers. Rhiannon Jenkins Tsang's "One Marriage, Two People" set in a tiny flat in Ma On Shan raises the cultural conflicts of the handover, the fear and entrapment of two worlds - the effete, bourgeois colonial one and the modern Chinese pragmatic, even harsh, way of life. Incidentally in the introduction this story had the title "One Country, Two People". Fourteen by Carmen Suen is an utterly gripping and heartwrenching story of the escape of friendship. Two girls become friends in the Wah Ming House of the Wah Fu estate in tiny council flats in poverty, the older girl being in a single parent family. Lit "Fun was as much a luxury as privacy. When you're poor, you learn to live without both."At times heartwarming and at others, stomach churning, Hong Kong Noir is shadowy, thoughtful anthology, a visceral tour de force of the murky alleyways of Hong Kong's past and present.

found it interesting that Hong Kong means so many different things to so many different people. I loved it.

For starters I’d say a more apt title for this collection of tales set in Hong Kong than the redundant “Noir” would have been the upbeat “Hong Kong Fantasy” or “Hong Kong Rhapsody” or the like, only to drag the reader ironically down to the gritty reality the city has always represented. You don’t need to end your Hong Kong story on a “dark note” (as the editors instructed the participating authors) when that’s already the character of the place.Co-editor Jason Y. Ng starts things off with the subtly wrought “Ghost of Yulan Past,” but the bulk of the collection is firmly grounded in the plausible, despite ample servings of the macabre: the cop whose member is sliced off by his prostitute-lover which opens James Tam’s “Phoenix Moon,” the tourists dismembered in a horror costume shop in Shannon Young’s “Blood on the Steps,” or the distraught 12-year old girl in Carmen Suen’s “Fourteen,” who doesn’t realize she’s already dead after she drowns while drugged.My favorites don’t have much to do with horror or noir proper but are simply well-told psychological thrillers condensed into short-story format, involving ordinary couples and an inexorable explosion of pent-up rage. In Tiffany Hawk’s “You Deserve More,” a husband colludes with his wife’s lover in the most shocking manner to humiliate her. In Christina Liang’s “A View to Die For,” a woman impulsively sleeps with her best friend’s son, with more shocking consequences.On a whole a satisfying collection, though it’s too bad co-editor Susan Blumberg-Kason didn’t herself contribute a story, as her spooky memoir Good Chinese Wife could itself be described as noir writ large, if we understand the term to include the perverting and twisting of the most conventional human relationships by destructive impulses.

The stories are quite entertaining and give me some new insight in Hong Kong. For example, I like going to Cheung Chau to enjoy the sea view and a small beach, but I never knew people go to the island especially to commit suicide by burning charcoal in their rented room or house. Who knew.

Great book and service!