Jennifer Szalia at the NYT:
In “Indelible City,” Louisa Lim charts how her own identity as a Hong Konger had never been so clear until China’s brutal attempts to crush pro-democracy protests in 2019. She had been feeling increasingly alienated from a densely populated place where extreme inequality, soaring costs and shrinking real estate made “the very act of living” — even for “still very privileged” people like her — completely exhausting. Lim’s experience as a reporter amid a swell of protesters changed that. She could feel her face flush and her throat well up — not from the tear gas, of which there was plenty, but from a surge of emotions: “I’d fallen in love with Hong Kong all over again.”
Needless to say, this is an unapologetically personal book. For Lim, who worked as a correspondent for the BBC and NPR, the turmoil in Hong Kong made it ever harder “to safeguard my professional neutrality.”
more here.