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#26: Original Highways by Roy MacGregor In this follow-up to Canoe Country, the author profiles 16 of Canada’s most important waterways. From BC’s Fraser to the St John in the Maritimes to the Arctic Mackenzie, these rivers stitched the improbably huge country together long before railways or roads

Anecdotally, it’s a motte-and-bailey approach I’ve gotten used to from the more pro-establishment people in my life, who used to claim CIA agents were handing out cash at marches and giving orders because someone in their WhatsApp group shared a grainy photo of some random gweilo near a protest site

#17: 尋秦記 Back to the Past I went into this movie without having watched the original TVB series. Whilst nostalgia was enough to make it a huge local box-office hit, I was left very unwhelmed. A few anachronistic gags landed, and the sheer absurdity of the action sequences was briefly entertaining.

Unbelievably, yes!

To say nothing of how mushroom cloud imagery continues to inspire glee amongst state media and online nationalists, 80+ years later…

Speaking of discourse I can’t believe actually happened

(Though dumber/funnier to see this gotcha used against Taiwanese, considering the deep ties between the indigenous Austronesian populations of Taiwan and Hawai’i, including their respective sovereignty movements)

Many such cases

I read this more as a demo of how pro-establishment and pro-Beijing positions have diverged, and sycophancy is the order of the day. While the SARG was agnostic, the political direction from Xi is clear — and the patriots-only legislature is happy to defy local courts to perform loyalty to the CPG.

The latter I’m fairly confident was deliberately funny. The former is where I thought the film suffered from only featuring the islands with monstrous threats they had to run from. The insistence on maintaining this dark tone was faintly ridiculous made Odysseus come off like a boring Achaean Batman

#16: 浪浪山小妖怪 Nobody The story of a ragtag band of minor monsters who impersonate the iconic 西遊記 cast, 浪浪山小妖怪 captures the zeitgeist of the 躺平 generation and the grift economy. It’s also got some great comedic moments but the ending was a letdown that failed to say anything interesting or insightful.

#25: Everyday Movement by Gigi L. Leung A tapestry of interwoven vignettes revolving around the 2019-2020 protests, Everyday Movement looks at some of the ways the movement affected different individuals and families. It does a good job of capturing the minor dramas behind the citywide upheaval.

#15: The Odyssey Needless to say, Christopher Nolan took a lot of liberties with the source material and several of these I didn’t love (no gods, overly dark, etc). But overall it was a great cinematic experience and I can appreciate the vision and creative choices even without agreeing with them.

#24: Hong Kong, Macau and the Muddy Pearl by Annabel Jackson A log of the author’s trips around the PRD, this book doesn’t have much to tell on its surface but it is an interesting relic of late 90s expat optimism, when 1C2S was sacrosanct and integration was all fun travel/business opportunities

#23: Outlaws of the Sea by Robert J. Antony A history of piracy on the south China coast that draws from recent scholarship to offer perspectives you may not have heard before, such as the social construction of piracy, the roles of Dan (Tanka) women pirates, and the diverse makeup of pirate crews.

#22: The Breath of the Gods by Simon Winchester I seem to find Winchester’s natural histories satisfying in an inverse ratio to how ambitious they are. While his Yangtze and Atlantic books form complete narratives, Pacific and this are inevitably anecdotal. That said, they’re interesting anecdotes.

Just a temporary special exhibition, sadly. There’s some interest in it travelling to Portugal but from what I hear it’s all a bit last-minute and unlikely to go through. Hopefully some of the resources will end up online, at least. The exhibitions were a sight for sore eyes after the natsec gallery

Needless to say, the National Security Exhibition Gallery is going nowhere.

Ironically, the one club not affected by this — because it and St John’s Cathedral were the only two institutions granted land in perpetuity by the British — is the Hong Kong Club. By far the most exclusive of them all, it was reserved for white British men until recently and has only 1,500 members.

Competition for use of those facilities — dining and sport — would also skyrocket. Currently, degrees of exclusivity vary wildly between clubs. Some cost over half a mil to join and have decades-long waiting lists, but others are quite accessible with dues of $500-1,000 monthly — comparable to a gym