A former senior Chinese Administrative Officer has at long last lifted another little corner of the veil of half-truths and anodyne official releases which hitherto shrouded many of the decisions and evasions under the long Hong Kong governorship of Sir Murray MacLehose. David T. K. Wong who started working life as a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant at the age of 13 before becoming a journalist, teacher, colonial bureaucrat, international businessman, and then a writer of short stories and novels is clearly a man of many parts. He has now turned his narrative skills to producing a pungent, sardonic, cerebral and revelatory insider memoir of his experiences in the upper reaches of the colonial administration during the 1970s. In doing so, he draws attention to the political, cultural and economic cross-currents that have always swirled through the uniquely paradoxical city. As a Chinese, he constantly found himself struggling with a three-horned dilemma: how to serve the people of Hong Kong, who paid his salary; the wider Chinese nation, from which he was culturally and emotionally inseparable; and the demands of the British crown, to which he had publicly sworn his allegiance. Hong Kong Confidential is a valuable contribution to the historical mosaic of a dynamic Chinese community living through turbulent times.
David T. K. Wong was born in Hong Kong and has degrees in political science and journalism from Stanford. At the ripe old age of 89, he is publicly exposing for the first time some of the shadier insider dealings in the colonial administration during the governorship of Sir Murray MacLehose. Wong is now resident in Malaysia where he is working on the next volume of his family memoirs, dealing with the goings-on in the Hong Kong commercial sector during the 1980s when he was managing director of Li & Fung, an international trading company. He is the founder of the annual David T. K. Wong Fellowship in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in the UK. His website is at http://davidtkwong.net/.
Wongs prose, spare and clean, occasionally rises to eloquence. Sometimes I found myself pausing to replay a paragraph, marvelling at how nicely he lays words down on the page. Joel McCormick, Window magazine Wong is an exceptionally fluent writer whose compelling stories cover a wide range of themes. His talent sparkles, inveigles and mesmerizes. Sylvia Tankel, Short Stories International
