School-leaver becomes a telephone line worker
Ah Guo, just out of school in 1970s Hong Kong, takes a job with the telephone company climbing poles and laying cables across the city and outlying islands. His friend Ah Yau goes to sea.
My City
4 ideas
Naive narration makes the familiar city strange
The narrator speaks with a childlike literalness. Objects get voices, words are played with, and rules are described as if seen for the first time. This innocence exposes how odd the routines of a colonial city are: bureaucracy, crowding, rationing and consumer habits. Because nothing is taken for granted, readers see the everyday systems they normally overlook.
Belonging comes from dwelling, not origin
A place becomes 'my city' through a generation's daily life in it: working, moving house, riding ferries, waiting for water. It does not depend on ancestry, sovereignty or intending to stay. Locally born young people claim Hong Kong as home, against the older refugee view of it as a temporary stopover or a problem to be managed.
Playful optimism as a deliberate stance
The book shows real urban hardships, such as cramped housing, water shortages and routine jobs, through fragments, jokes, doodles and a buoyant tone. It does not use this lightness to deny difficulty. Instead, lightness becomes a way of surviving and caring for a place. The broken-up form matches how a dense city is actually lived: in scattered episodes rather than one grand plot.