Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Some really, really classy restaurants, it says here, have banned patrons from photographing their meals. This anarchist got away with it a couple of weeks ago in the Michelin two-star Amber in the Mandarin Landmark in Central, the only establishment in China to make it into the World’s 50 Best Restaurants. The chef is Richard Ekkebus, of whom I had vaguely heard in an isn’t-he-a-tennis-player sort of way. World famous among serious foodies, it seems.

The cuisine describes itself as French, but I’m not sure an average Parisian or Lyonais citoyen would recognize any of the dishes here.

We began with this amuse bouche. If sculpture using green edible plant material were an artistic genre, it would be a masterpiece. The little discs, barely half an inch across and a few microns thick, are slices of apple. The tube beneath is made of cucumber and contains yogurt. (All ingredients are of course very special, coming from remote valleys in the Andes, etc.) The stuff next to it is guacamole, even though it looks like guacamole. Some nimble-fingered underling in the kitchen must have taken hours, and it’s gone in one bite. Nice: a lovely combination of crunchiness, creaminess and fresh, tangy tastes. I make a mental note to consider combining apple and cucumber more often – possibly with a bit of salty cheese? With a thick grainy bread?

When looking through the menu, my host – a Henry Tang wannabe devoted to the whole wine-collecting, golf-playing thing – had recommended the ‘Cauliflower velouté with taiyouran egg sabayon’ as the starter. Filtering out the mystery vocabulary, I was left with cauliflower and egg, which sounded OK. It all depended on what a taiyouran was. An egg-laying animal, obviously. But a special superior breed of chicken – or an exotic species of giant iguana? My host said it was Japanese. Imagining some sort of vegetable teppanyaki you could dip in soy sauce, I chose it.

Wrong. It looked quite like this and came in a similar giant wine-glass vessel, to be eaten with a spoon. The staff linger and talk you through dishes, and the waitress suggested that I stir this one before eating it; behind her smile was a grim urgency that said ‘you’ll regret it if you don’t’. Beneath the foamy surface was a black, tarry mucus with brown lumps. Then, delving deeper down, I saw raw egg yolk. I stirred thoroughly before devouring. It was lukewarm and sticky. Obviously, you’re supposed to get off in a big way on the mushy/crunchy textures and sweet/savoury flavours. I didn’t feel a desperate need to gag, exactly, but I certainly had a sense that I could do so at will, with little effort. It wasn’t… what’s the word I’m looking for? Enjoyable, that’s it. I’m showing my age here, perhaps, expecting food to be enjoyable.

(OK: velouté is a sauce based on chicken stock; Taiyouran is a Japanese brand of hyper-expensive eggs laid by chickens that are fed only secret magic herbs and have daily massages; sabayon – the foamy stuff – is a chic version of the Italian zabaglione, an egg-based desert.)

I was so disturbed by the above course that I didn’t have the presence of mind to snap a picture of it or the main event that came next. This looked like a glistening square of French caramel pudding with chopped shallots, beetroot, herbs and cranberries painstakingly arranged on top, and a dark sauce artistically drizzled around. It was in fact ‘Stew ravioli wild venison’. A big pasta shell containing slices of deer. Edible and tasty, even, but no improvement on a conventional arrangement of venison with pasta.

Recovering from the raw yolk-black mucus trauma, I pulled the trusty camera out to capture pudding: ‘Chestnut ice-cream, brown rum marinated raisins & pastry diplomat cream served as a deconstructed mille-feuille’. (Whaddya mean, ‘What’s diplomat cream?’) I was suspicious at first. It was magnificent visually – possibly the finest ever expressionist figurine crafted from dairy products and marron glacé. But where, or rather what, was the challenge? Was there shaved air-dried hedgehog loin scattered into the gaps left by the deconstruction of the mille-feuilles? Did chili-stuffed pickled garlic lurk within the cream as a tantalizing contrast to the soothing sweetness? Had Richard Ekkebus’s minions left delicate shards of specially imported broken glass in every mouthful?

No. As if to reward the victim diner for getting through the earlier courses, the restaurant served up something you would actually want more of.

Just as you add a pinch of sugar to offset lemon or vinegar, so Amber includes a dash of humour to ensure you’re not overcome by the earnest pretentiousness. For example, lollipops made of paté as a between-course nibble. My host, well-known to the staff, got a lot of bowing and scraping, but the heavily-accented French uber-attendant – straight out of central casting – seemed to sense I was a skeptic; as with other supernatural powers, Richard Ekkebus’s mystical gifts with food don’t always work in the presence of negative vibes. Trying a bit of telepathy with the Filipino and HK Chinese waitresses, I got the impression that deep down they were on my wavelength: why not just have a bowl of noodles?

You’re supposed to say the surroundings are amazing (it cost loads and the designer was someone really famous). One thing I noticed is that the artful ceiling radiates a gilded halo over the restaurant’s rich spectrum from amber to russet. I did – honest. One thing you get for your money here is space; the surface area of our table for two equalled the square footage of a whole Soho concept themed eatery.

Otherwise, this is the level at which this particular foodie declares that pretentiousness officially begins, thus perhaps revealing himself to be only a semi-foodie after all. Some of us can consider ‘sake in a cup that was also previously filled with smoke’ and ‘liver … paired with a hibiscus reduction’ without laughing out loud, some of us just can’t manage it. 

Click to hear ‘Sexy Anarchist Boy’ by Cheese on Bread!

Last week’s ultimately somber stay in the Gateway to the West melds into Hong Kong’s annual Chinese New Year suspension of normal life. Plus it’s freezing. For those who do not share living space with a huge US$45 dollar handout from Sony, it is one of those occasional opportunities to fascinate ourselves with the technological wonder of moving images on tiny electronic screens.

The higher-fidelity viewing options came in-flight – the only time I pay much attention to Hollywood’s latest releases. In one movie, the actor from The Truman Show plays a New York City-dwelling recipient of a penguin; fast-forwarding revealed that the character is soon housing dozens of the beasts in his apartment. Twenty minutes of the 12-hour journey vanish. In another film, three men commiserate with one another about their hellish bosses. I am guessing that, if I had watched more than a third of an hour of it, they would have found intriguing and entertaining ways to dispatch the tyrants.

Two things were worth viewing in full. Yet another adaptation of Jane Eyre, complete not only with all the costumes, windswept moorland and darkness you could want, but an extremely watchable, indeed mesmerizing, lady called Mia Wasikowska in the lead role. This is more post-feminism than girly love story. And Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which somehow recreates the seediness of the period more effectively than the classic late-70s made-for-TV version. (It’s all about atmosphere, which makes me wonder why cinema-world doesn’t do more Graham Greene.)

But it’s back home where things get really interesting, delving and foraging in the less-visited bits of YouTube where the picture is grainy and the sound possibly out-of-synch; people accustomed to 75-inch plasma, high-definition and 3D don’t know what they’re missing.

Behold Left Behind (seven parts), the movie of the novel of the apocalyptic belief known as dispensational premillenialism, in which the second coming of Christ is preceded by the rapture – a scenario that millions of fundamentalist Christians (let’s be blunt: Americans) believe is already underway. This has everything a bad movie should have, including cheap sets and effects, jarringly inappropriate scoring and of course corny dialogue. But what’s really riveting about it is the straight-faced portrayal of this parallel universe. After a bearded and polyglot God thwarts an Arab attack on Israel on live television, all the faithful suddenly vanish (leaving little piles of clothes on airline seats and elsewhere) and the antichrist appears in the form of a United Nations leader pushing global currency union. How many films have this?

But truth is stranger than fiction, and the Found Small Screen Experience of the Year Award must go to Adam Curtis’s It Felt Like a Kiss (2009). Curtis – a sort of adults’ version of TV journalist John Pilger – describes this work as “the story of an enchanted world that was built by American power as it became supreme … and how those living in that dream world responded to it.”

What you get here is HIV, Lee Harvey Oswald, chimps in space, attempts to cure Lou Reed of homosexuality, Saddam Hussein, a Carole King song about a girl whose boyfriend beats her, the Congo, the Manson Family, and a thousand other things from the late 50s-60s, all to a soundtrack of contemporary pop from West Side Story to the Velvet Underground. Thanks to painstaking and inspired footage/sound research and editing, you are bombarded with juxtapositions that reveal connections you had barely thought about. If you are acquainted with the subject matter, this is surely the nearest a TV documentary has come to art; for the benighted, it’s the most elaborate music video ever.

(Parts 2, 3, 5 and 6 in 10-minute segments; part 4 seems to have been swept up into the heavens, but given the stream-of-consciousness nature of the work, you can glide past it.)

Click to hear ‘He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)’ by the Crystals!

Inedible cuts of meat and a surly Afrikaner assistant manager at Japanese eatery Roka in Pacific Place bring out the exquisite best of Target founder and editor Raymonde Sacklyn’s inimitable restaurant reviewing style.  

The capital letter, ‘R’, also stands for RUBBISH! 

And that, in TARGET’s opinion, is, exactly, what one gets at ROKA Restaurant

What would Sacklyn make of the Beijing Steamed Dumpling Shop in Austin Road, Tsimshatsui? Stroll too fast, and you would go straight past it – except anyone with a modicum of alertness will automatically stop to admire the lamb pancakes in the window. They will squeeze their way in and find somewhere to sit. The place has four four-person booths and a little folding table with three stools. On my visit, an appropriately severe Hard Stare convinced the book-reading intellectual hogging an entire booth to himself to retreat to the latter.

The button mushrooms [at Ole Spanish restaurant, Ice House Street] were, clearly, sautéed, either by a Chinese or a Filipina/Filipino cook who determined not to prostitute his/her art by bowing to the requirements of Spanish cuisine …

Lastly, this had to have been the oiliest paella in the history of Spain.

From left to right here: pork and pickled cabbage dumplings (made in the corner by the Beijinger owner); two variants of lamb pancake (one with leek), lamb of course being an abhorrence to the Cantonese; and seaweed soup perched behind hot and sour soup with congealed pig’s blood, perhaps to help Hongkongers get the taste of wooly ruminant out of their mouths… 

If this restaurant [Manzo Italian Steak House, Times Squae] continues to sell half-rotten meat, even USDA Prime beef that smells and tastes as though it were fermented bean curd (腐乳), it will not last the season.

The lamb pancakes are the main reason to come to the Beijing Steamed Dumpling Shop. Generous amounts of tasty, tender meat in a fairly light pastry. Maybe half of the output goes out the door in the form of take-away. Like all good, tiny, hole-in-the-wall food places, the cheerful owner has covered a wall with photos of himself posing with hundreds of celebrities you’ve never heard of (plus the inevitable tiresome TV culinary genius who claims to have tried human meat – his picture is in every diner in the Pearl River Delta). Order recklessly enough and two ultimately very stuffed people can rack up a bill for HK$150, and leave with leftover dumplings to take back home to fry, as recommended by Mrs Owner.

Or we can follow the action-packed gastronomic trail blazed by Raymonde Sacklyn and savour not the food but the reviewing skills…

The location of The Pawn Restaurant, at Number 62, Johnston Road, Wanchai, the Hongkong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), is perfect. It faces a very large rubbish dump which abuts a concrete playground and the sounds of Wanchai, with its drunks, pimps and prostitutes lend colour to the listed building that houses The Pawn …

The risotto resembled Scottish porridge, made of rice instead of oats.

A quick break from National Regina Week for a review of The Ghost of Neil Diamond by David Milnes, apparently a former teacher at KGV or some such school. The hard-to-forget title proved its worth when I saw this in the IFC Mall branch of Dymocks last week and recalled an email strongly urging me to read it. It is, in brief, what a Hong Kong expat novel would be like if Tom Sharpe wrote it: a farce in which an innocent abroad gets himself into an appalling and ludicrous mess.

Other than the eye-catching title, the book cover does the novel no favours by omitting any meaningful blurb about the content. It helps to know that Neil Diamond is one of the uncoolest of the great Sixties-era songwriters, penning a string of major catchy hits for various artists and becoming ever-less trendy with age while still performing to his loyal and mature easy-listening audience.

Aside from serving as a refreshingly seedy setting for a bizarre romp, Hong Kong’s contribution to the story is the theme of self-reinvention. Antihero Neil Atherton is a British former folk musician pushing 50 who has come here when his wife gets a high-flying job. While he bums around singing classics like Sweet Caroline in karaoke bars, she eagerly embraces a new identity and corporate lifestyle. When he dyes his hair after grubby empresario Elbert Chan offers him a job impersonating Diamond in clubs, she kicks him out. Like his namesake standing by the side of the road troubadour-style on an album cover, Neil trudges off with his guitar from the comforts of Shatin to find cheap lodgings in Tsimshatsui.

Chan – a finely drawn shyster we’ve all met before – entices the penniless Neil with his vision of an award-winning show comprising multiple acts covering yesteryear’s major stars; a faux Petula Clark has already been lined up. But Chan is clearly an untrustworthy huckster. After a first, promising gig at the Mariners Club, disaster strikes when a genuine, highly accomplished, professional Neil Diamond impersonator of repute from Los Angeles turns up in town and tells Neil to beat it. Outrageous chaos ensues.

On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is Tom Sharpe’s output since the 1990s and 10 is his early 70s satires of South Africa, The Ghost of Neil Diamond probably comes in at around a 5 or 6 – decently crafted, unpretentious fun with a dash of black humour, and worth grabbing if you see it. It warrants extra marks for its cliché-free depiction of an unglamorous and squalid Hong Kong, exemplified by the pitiful Chan and his grubby office. The HK Tourism Board won’t be handing out copies of this book. Is there any higher praise?

Forget opium, tobacco or San Miguel, or even the Agatha Christie’s Poirot episodes various fiends have uploaded onto YouTube: the greatest addictive curse known to afflict mankind must be Amazon’s Buy with one click facility combined with its massive offering of used books from thousands of second-hand stores throughout the US. I last saw my copy of Jean Francois Revel’s Totalitarian Temptation back in the early 80s. Long out of print. Never to be seen again. But there is one – 91 cents plus US$3.99 shipping from someone in Ohio. Click. Click, click, click. This is deadly. (Yes, there’s a book on it.)

Among the books I read in 2010 stacked up at my bedside waiting to be transplanted to shelves are: Paul Johnson’s History of the Jews; Neal Stephenson’s Anathem; Steve Pincus’s 1688: The First Modern Revolution; Simon Singh’s Big Bang; Ali Allawi’s The Crisis of Islamic Civilization; Antony Beevor’s Paris After the Liberation; and on and on. In the lull before the next package from Amazon, I take a quick look at what Santa left me from Hong Kong’s Blacksmith Books and have a brief Kevin Bloody Wilson moment. These volumes aren’t really my thing. But what else is there? Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is sitting there, lying open halfway through after being started before last summer; I have all of 2011 to finish that. So here goes…

A quick glance at The Great Walk of China: Travels on foot from Shanghai to Tibet by Graham Earnshaw is a bit misleading. The author (an ex-Reuters man living in Shanghai) does not walk the route in the title in one go and has not, as of the final page, reached western Sichuan. Instead, he indulges in a sort of token, nine-to-five version of roughing it, doing the trip in stages and flying/taxiing in and out each time, including to hotels at night where necessary. But no matter. He pretty much skips this process (nor does he say who pays for this logistical extravagance, which would be interesting since the endeavour is apparently for charity) so the reader gets an impression of accompanying him on a steady uninterrupted plod, with some disjointed seasonal changes, through the rural back roads of middle China.

And very pleasant it is. At every dusty village we stop for a bottle of water and a chat with the storekeeper and hear what the locals have to say (cuts in taxes on farmers are a big hit). We are accosted by school kids who share with us their dreams for the future. We take photos of labourers planting and digging, and we make their day by helping out a bit. We hand our address out, plus invitations to visit, to a worrying number of friendly strangers. We admire the scenery on the plains and up in the mountains and valleys of the Three Gorges. We bump into the occasional outcast with a sad tale to tell. We enjoy the political slogans painted on the walls of old buildings. We run the risk of being a bit boorish by insisting on vegetarian food everywhere. And we have a bit of cheeky fun with cops who think it’s still the 1970s and ask for our IDs. Finally, turning a corner on a hillside one afternoon, we find, before we’ve even realized it, that we’ve reached page 341 and call a halt – though the great walk apparently continues/d.

In sum, an antidote to the media onslaught of modern China: after all the disasters, the new billionaires, the uprisings, the growing military might, the pollution, the corruption and the neon skyscrapers, here are the comfortingly mundane bits in between, coming across as almost exotic.

Most of us look the other way when we see children with extreme physical and mental disabilities. Some, if we are to be honest, do the same with books about them. I really did not want to read Wordjazz for Stevie: How a profoundly handicapped girl gave her father the gifts of pain and love by Jonathan Chamberlain.

The title didn’t help (wordjazz?), but maybe that’s just an excuse. You know it’s going to be icky, and I’ve never even changed a diaper for God’s sake. You know it’s going to be depressing. The author and his wife live on Cheung Chau. They have a baby. The baby, they are soon told, has Down syndrome. That comes with a hole in the heart. This needs an operation to fix. But the operation leaves the kid blind and semi-paralyzed as well. Everyone’s lives are going to be wrecked and wretched, and you’re going to catch yourself wondering why they didn’t just have an abortion, and then you’re going to feel rotten. If you’re in a really nasty mood, you might even ask why the author couldn’t just keep it to himself.

However, the book is a lot more welcoming – for want of a better word – than that. It is written in the form of a letter to the daughter who survived up to age eight before finally dying of pneumonia. It is nowhere near as mawkish as it could be. To the extent there is self-pity, it is blunt and concise. The details about doctors, hospitals and treatments, which do not always come out looking good, are dispassionate. Reflections on getting through to a child essentially trapped in a distant world are often intriguing; it comes down to touch, movement and music. If you want to be moved to tears you probably can be, but it’s not compulsory and the author shows no sign of wanting it. He celebrates the fact that the experience, which is to say Stevie’s existence, led him to found two charities that have benefited numerous lives. He discusses feelings, but he is a tough man who can get through it. As he needs to be: next thing, almost as an afterword at the end, his wife succumbs to cancer and dies, leaving him and one healthy kid.

After that, you might think that Lama of the Gobi: How Mongolia’s mystic monk spread Tibetan Buddhism in the world’s harshest desert by Michael Kohn would be light relief. But no.

Danzan Ravjaa was the fifth incarnation of Gobi Noyon Hutgat and as such he was (more or less) to 19th Century Mongolia what today’s Dalai Lama is to Tibet. By all accounts he was a character: part living God, part Robin Hood, part Omar Khayyam, knocking back fermented mare’s milk and hiding from Qing enemies in friendly yurts.

The problem is that the author knows his subject in depth, and the reader doesn’t. Certainly not this one. This is a (perhaps denser-than-average) example…

People who are really into this sort of thing rave about it, and apparently this book has sold well in California.

Is the world getting over mysterious traditions and creeds from desolate regions? One of Earnshaw’s closing comments is “I am not really very interested in Tibetan culture,” which tempted me to punch the air in delight. An introduction to the hero of Mongolian Buddhism for those of us who have never heard of him might be fascinating. But then, maybe it wouldn’t. Either way, this isn’t it. I resign myself to leaving this blank spot in my knowledge unfilled and reach with renewed eagerness to Gravity’s Rainbow.

Before I forget… It’s that time of the year when The System forces virtually all of us, in however small a way, to partake in an act of collective insanity: the purchasing of things no-one needs for people who don’t want them. Even those of us who are by nature far too cool to be sucked into such a wasteful farce often find ourselves with no choice but to get one or two bits of junk to wrap up and pass on simply because life’s too short, and it’s the course of least resistance when the alternative is being considered a leper or, even worse, causing others who gleefully succumb to the madness to lose face.

The main beneficiaries of this tortuous sacrificial ritual (that’s hard-earned cash you’re handing over) are the manufacturers of Ferrero Rocher, the spherical chocolate sweet that tells the recipient you consider him or her a total bore unworthy of even a shred of respect more than it takes to step into a 7-Eleven for 20 seconds at the last minute. (An interesting PhD thesis would involve sampling a cross-section of the million boxes of these things changing hands at Christmas to see what percentage have gone stale. My own taste-tests suggest large-scale recycling is going on.)

Other big winners from the seasonal lunacy inevitably include our local friendly landlords, renting out precious parcels of the Big Lychee’s scarce space to such contributors to human progress and happiness as Papyrus, a store in IFC Mall selling an ‘exceptional collection of social expression products from the very best resources’ – ugly and overpriced stationery, in plain English. (Presumably, this being 2010-11, people use the embossed, lavender-scented, Regent Blue Ecruwhite (‘a stunning frame for your words’) for shopping lists.

There is, however, an alternative. It is Sleeping Chinese by Bernd Hagemann – a book full of photos of PRC citizens indulging in extreme napping. Sensitive types might feel slightly dubious about this work on the grounds that it could cause offence: it contains, after all, nothing but noble sons of the Yellow Emperor being caught looking ridiculous on camera by a German. The author maintains that he took up his hobby to provide a juxtaposition to the image of the Middle Kingdom as an awakening, and even threatening, mighty superpower.

I tested it over the weekend on a Beijing native who laughed out loud throughout. It also gets a stamp of approval from the primary organ of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, which would not look kindly on anything that might hurt the feelings of the Chinese people. Maybe it is an exceptionally subtle bit of ‘soft-power’ propaganda to counteract Beijing’s recent string of foreign relations lapses from the Diaoyu-Senkakus to the Nobel Peace Prize. Even if they build an aircraft carrier, they’ll all be slumped on the flight deck, snoring.

The book doesn’t answer the question of why (let alone how) so many people in China snooze in the open during daylight hours. Were all of the photos taken during the early afternoon, post-lunch siesta that even some Hong Kong office workers still enjoy – a hangover from schooldays when it was compulsory? Is it extreme overwork? Or a complete lack of employment?

More to chew over than a tinfoil-wrapped chocolate hazelnut, at least.

It’s not every day you see ‘cannibal-chinese-starved-by-mao-ate-earth-bartered-sex-for-food’ in a URL for an article at a reputable business news website. Frank Dikotter’s Mao’s Great Famine has that sort of effect. Using previously unavailable provincial party archives as well as interviews and other sources, Dikotter attempts to assemble enough information about what happened in various parts of China from 1958 to 1962 to enable a picture of the full-scale, nationwide horror. The consensus among the anglo China fraternity (Mirsky and Fenby, for example) is that he succeeds.

Dikotter starts with the local and international political background, then the decision-making, and the implementation before getting to the gory results: a minimum of 45 million deaths (out of a population of 650 million) due mostly to starvation, but also disease, persecution, murder, accidents and suicides, plus mass-destruction of housing stock and wrecking of the natural environment.

The story starts after Mao lures opposition into the open in the ‘100 flowers’ campaign. Rather than rely on the intellectuals, he decides the muscle power of the rural masses is the best bet for dynamic economic progress. Envious of Sputnik-launching Khrushchev’s vow to surpass the USA’s economic production in 15 years, Mao declares that China will overtake Britain in the same period, notably in steel production.

The Great Leap Forward requires top-down central planning and a degree of mobilization possible only through collectivization. As ever-higher targets come down the chain of command, local officials turn much of rural China into little more than vast slave labour camps. People are stripped of possessions and land, forced away from homes to build dams, then forced back to communes to meet impossible food production targets, using disastrous agricultural methods and sacrificing their own housing materials and even hair as fertilizer. The state appropriates food and other commodities to ramp up exports as a show of economic strength – rice becomes a staple in East Germany – leaving the beaten masses to starve, often naked, by the roadside. (The book contains full, vivid details: not for those squeamish about clubbings-to-death, child-selling, the digging up of human remains for food and what happens when animal survival instincts displace the last shreds of morality.)

The economy collapses. Shaken by the eventual failure of the project and the dissent it provokes among his deputies, Mao goes back on the offensive and launches the country into 10 more years of lunacy in the form of the Cultural Revolution. Official history downplays the ‘years of difficulty’ and blames the weather and/or the USSR.

Although it is hardly the first, this book is probably one of the most damning indictments yet of Mao. This mass-killing was his doing, and he is therefore clearly a monster every bit as evil as Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot. And yet there he is today, on banknotes, on a portrait overlooking Tiananmen Square, in a glass case in his mausoleum, on T-shirts, in millions of people’s hazy nostalgic feelings and as a national icon. With its ideology mangled as it places its aristocracy atop a corporatist state, the Communist Party relies on Mao for its claim to legitimacy. China may have overtaken the UK now – by feeding people more rather than less – but the government is built on a myth, which this book exposes.

There is a local angle here. Dikotter is Chair Professor of Humanities at Hong Kong University. Hong Kong U, like many of our educational institutions, is keen on expanding over the border and forging closer links with the Mainland, where colleges and academics exist to toe political lines and serve political ends. To patriots, HKU is a disgrace for having someone on the faculty who dares write such heretical nonsense as Mao’s Great Famine. The university’s top management are apparently hoping the whole issue will vanish. Dikotter’s supporters are half-jokingly referring to the professor as Hong Kong’s best chance of having a Salman Rushdie.  It would be required reading anyway, but all this makes the book that much more essential.