Hong Kong: Migrant Lives, Landscapes, and Journeys is not a travelogue. Rather, it’s a sort of sociological look at Hong Kong expatriates’ lifestyles.

Although it features some occasionally useful looks at real people’s lives, this book is mostly a failure. The authors demonstrate very limited insight into Hong Kong life (what’s interesting is usually found in quotations from their interviewees) because they are determined to fit their data into a predetermined ideological narrative. That is, Hong Kong expatriates, especially British men (expatriate women are at least highly organized and efficient), remain postcolonial agents of oppression who may be nonplussed by their diminishing power, but who never the less are clueless when it comes to living worthwhile lives:

It is not that British lifestyle migrants lack skill. It is a matter of the social priorities embedded in where their skills are focused. Focus betrays the framework from which they operate. Their skills are focused on building connections that sustain relative advantage in global systems composed in migration. Their skills are not directed at fitting in to a Chinese city. . . . They make poor migrants in terms of the skill it takes to live in a connected way in multicultural, multiracial contexts with (social, cultural, ethnic, and racial) difference.

I can put up with a certain degree of this postmodernist nonsense if the meat of an academic study has some validity, but this book is also riddled with factual errors and misperceptions.

For example, the authors seem only vaguely aware of how the Hong Kong education system works. They state that in 1997 the Hong Kong Government forbade the schools it funds to teach English, full stop – but this is a serious misrepresentation of reality. The Government did push many schools into using Chinese rather than English as the language of instruction (i.e. for subjects such as math and science), but no school in Hong Kong ceased teaching English as a subject.

But the ideological lenses really get cloudy when the authors describe their favorite victims of oppression, i.e. Filipina domestic helpers. Let’s look at just one sentence:

The government-established income threshold required to allow households to employ foreign domestic labor is KH$15,000 (approximately US$3,000) a year.

How many gross errors of fact does this single sentence contain? First, it’s ‘HK’ dollars, not ‘KH’ dollars. Okay, that’s a typo. But 15,000 HK dollars is equal to just under 2,000 US dollars, not 3,000. That’s a big enough error. But the real whopper here is that the HK Government’s minimum salary requirement for hiring a domestic helper is stated as pay per month, not per year – that is, Hong Kong people must earn about USD2,000 per month rather than per year to qualify to hire a domestic helper. In other words, the authors seem to believe that Hong Kong people are 12 times poorer than they really are.

Finally, the authors frequently excoriate western expatriates for being unable to handle their encounters with ‘Chineseness’. But they also fail to interview any Chinese people, and there is no sense whatever of Hong Kong as a Chinese city in this tome.

Not recommended. ( )