End of an Era

Nostalgia isn't really appropriate until an era is certifiably dead and gone. Hong Kong isn't yet moribund, but it has changed considerably in the years since the handover. And for a certain class of ex-expatriates, the ones who made for the boats in 1997, Hong Kong exists only in memory.

Nonetheless, Foreign Devils: Expatriates in Hong Kong (Oxford University Press; 298 pages), an oral history by May Holdsworth, isn't all eulogy. Rather than confine herself to the classic expatsthe "merchants, ministers and mandarins," in her own phraseHoldsworth casts her net beyond the Peak and allows her subjects to...