Gweilo: Memories of a Hong Kong Childhood

Martin Booth arrived in Hong Kong in 1952 as a seven-year-old following his father's colonial posting, and spent his years in the colony largely unsupervised, exploring Central's hawker lanes, the tram routes across the Island, and the hillside villages that sat barely a street away from the expat compounds. This memoir records the city at a specific moment — pre-television, pre-air-conditioning, pre-the mass construction that would fill in the harbor — when a child could lose himself in a place still organized around its Chinese rhythms.