Women Who Travel Podcast: Telling Hong Kong’s Story, Despite the Consequences

Speaker 3: Free Hong Kong!

Protesters: Free Hong Kong!

Speaker 3: Free Hong Kong!

Protesters: Free Hong Kong! Whoo!

LA: We’re going to chat about uncovering the real Hong Kong and how to discover it as a traveler. You know, you grew up in Hong Kong, you live in Melbourne. How often do you go back to Hong Kong right now?

LL: I can’t go back to Hong Kong since the book came out. So, you know, even when I was writing that book, I was always erasing it in the knowledge that this book would make it hard for me to go back to the city that I was writing about, the city that I think of as my hometown. In many ways the book, it was a love letter, it was a farewell letter, it was a, [laughs] a pretty hard book to write.

LA: How certain were you that you were going to just… that the book was more important than being able to return again, like that’s a really difficult decision to make.

LL: I mean, well, I started writing the book a long time ago. I’m a pretty slow writer and it took me eight years to write this book. And I never, obviously, [laughs] meant it to be that long. And of course, when I started, you know, it was a really low risk project.

LA: Well, I was gonna say, eight years ago, that’s a very different time in Hong Kong’s recent history.

LL: That’s right. And I never imagined that, you know, there would be any consequences. My children, um, said to me, “Oh, mom, mom, we really love Hong Kong, you know, don’t say anything bad. You know, we [laughs] we want to be able to go back.” And I was like, “Of course, it’ll be fine. You know, Hong Kong’s completely different, you know, none of that applies.” And then, of course, everything changed.

LA: Your dad is Chinese, your mom is British and she was maybe responsible for you really starting to get hooked on history.

LL: That’s exactly right. Um, my mother, um, is British and she, uh, she actually, she went to Cambridge and studied history, and she became a [laughs] Latin teacher. We moved to Hong Kong when I was five and, you know, she taught Latin, but she retired when she was 60. And she had always wanted a cultural heritage guidebook to Hong Kong, and she couldn’t find one. So when she, uh, retired, she decided that she would write her own, which she promised would be a little pamphlet about a graveyard. I hated it. It was really boring, because we were always spending our weekends going to look at things that I just thought were really dull. But I think my mother sewed in me the seeds of this book very early on.